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This is not untrue, but it's also not a meaningful path forward.
Is it really that 15 million uninspired people are "okay with racism"? Even if we take that at face value, okay? How do we inspire them, then? Losing is not an option for us.
They are uncaring about such issues.
I hate to break it to you, man, but most people barely care about politics at all. Politics is that annoying thing they have to deal with once every Thanksgiving when uncle Remus won't shut up about the border.
It would be really nice if they did care, but they don't. You either work around this problem, or you lose indefinitely.
Listen, i was vocal, i talked about voting a lot, about how i fucking hate the democrats, but they are the only way to avert a major disaster, and after i finished voting and told my friend group, i had one go “I’m not even registered to vote, lol” and “it’s not that big of a deal, we did a trump presidency last time, nothing changed” “both sides are blowing this out of proportion” and i lost my shit. I don’t know how you reach these people, maybe it’s time to start backing the leopard instead.
Part of the reason that people don't believe much happened under Trump is that the DNC is terrible about telling them.
What motivates the right? Non-stop, 24-7, talk news radio propaganda about how badly the woke democrats are fucking everything up, about how your son is gay because of flouride in your water.
What motivates the left?
I mean that, sincerely. It can't be our sense of righteous civic duty; as you just said, people don't care. We don't have a story. Biden passed the Stop Inflation Act? Okay. What even is that?
You should ask those same people, I'm not saying it'll be every single one of them, but ask them if they liked Bernie Sanders. It's not impossible to reach these people, most of them anyway, they just need something to latch on to.
The Democratic party has an unstable coalition at its very core because many people (in their coalition even) believe in white supremacy, have homophobic/transphobic tendencies, or believe in the subjugation of women. They have run consistently after Reagan with a center-right economic platform, but a more left-wing social/cultural platform. When people were marginalized enough by the capital class by their identities this worked as a voting block.
Now everyone has gotten comfortable enough -- because many of the systemic barriers that repressed them have been removed -- to believe the superficial lies that Trump isn't racist, or sexist, or <> and it doesn't motivate them enough to vote anymore.
So do the Republicans, evangelical christians want a police state that subjugates people, while libertarians want barely any state at all. Project 2025 is a messy mishmash of conflicting policy ideas exactly because of this.
Trump was successful in distancing himself from endorsing any of the conflicting points in the Republican base, Harris went into pleasing the neoliberals hard while very visibly shunning progressives and socialists. The result can be seen by all.
The point is, Trump ran a better campaign in a political sense than Harris, inasmuch he didn't distance himself from part of his electorate as Harris did.
I understand that's the narrative but the reality is that socialism is a nothing, nowhere movement in this country and progressivism is as well. There are not millions upon millions of people who will vote for a candidate that passes the purity tests that online leftists apply daily.
Ultimately, I think the only way out of this hole in this country is a giant labor movement again. That's what sorts the people into categories for policies. Do you work or do you own a company for a living? The owners and the "tolerant" billionaires need to be jettisoned from the coalition. But there's a problem there that has prevented them from doing that up until now and it's that giant piles of money have been necessary to win previous elections. The tolerant billionaires and millionaires were the ones providing that funding.
I personally think that Republican propaganda could be much less effective if people were aligned with unions that were actually making a difference in their lives. Nowadays, so few people belong to a union that they're largely irrelevant.
But it was a bloody battle last time, and I'm not sure it'll be any easier this time.
Never claimed to have an answer for it.
But denying truth just because it's inconvenient or we don't have an answer for it doesn't change the fact that it's the truth.
But we need an answer. Not from you specifically, of course, but we die if we don't.
Think about this for a moment:
Did they? Like, have you spoken to them? Your average voter is not even half as politically plugged in as you or I am.
Getting people to begrudgingly vote for someone they don't believe represents any fundamental change to the problems they're dealing with is, unfortunately, just not that exciting. And if you don't have excitement, how do you get the message to spread? If someone isn't excited about cleaning up their dirty city, are you really surprised it never happens?
If you're refusing to pick fights with republicans, refusing to point out their obstructionism to the good you're working for, refusing to acknowledge any of the problems people have had with your previous candidates---I can shit talk Obama and Bill Clinton, but the DNC is not capable of it, which might even explain why they're so quiet about Trump's connections to Epstein; then how can you represent anything new?
Tim Walz's Weird campaign was a massive step in the right direction, there was energy then, and the DNC muzzled him as soon as they were able to. How can you be excited about the fight against republicans when DNC leadership are barely excited about it themselves?
I'm sorry for the rant, I really didn't mean to write a wall of text. I'm just saying, it's true that our people should have taken their medicine, they should have voted, but the reason so many didn't has to be systemic. It's not because they wanted Trump; if they did, they would have gone and voted for him. There is a rot at the heart of our current efforts that needs to be cut out before it consumes us completely.
Obviously not every single one of them. And I do agree -- your argument has merit and isn't entirely wrong. In Pre-Trump days, it was pretty easy to be completely oblivious to politics. I was. Couldn't have cared less, because neither side was really doing anything to impact my life. But then came Trump. And the Trump Hate Machine. And the mainstream media. All cramming Trump down everyone's throats 24/7/365. After 9 years of that, it is impossible to convince me that even the lowest-information voter doesn't have at least some opinion of Trump. I refuse to believe that there is somewhere in this country where people are completely oblivious to Trump and he has had no real impact on their lives. And if this magical paradise exists, I want to move there tomorrow.
10 million former Biden voters, which means not low-information voters, but voters that knew the stakes, chose to stay home. That's just math. And almost every single excuse that has been bandied about quickly falls apart when held up to an even minimal amount of scrutiny. And listen to the excuses that we're getting from our own base:
"We'd have won if we put up Bernie." -- So in other words, you really don't have a problem with an old white guy. Or the policies. So if they don't have a problem with policies or the old white guy, what makes Kamala Harris different? Hmmm......I wonder.
"She campaigned with Liz Cheney!" -- But what about the dozens of male Republicans that also endorsed her? Cheney -- the woman who sacrificed her career and position in the GOP to stand up to Trump -- is the problem. Again.....wonder what makes her different. This mystery may never be solved!
You are right in that we have to figure out and address why so many Democrats stayed home. But this means also acknowledging all of the reasons for the loss, including the politically incorrect and inconvenient ones. And one of those facts is that a significant portion of the Democrat base is not willing to vote for a woman or another Black person as President. We have put up women twice -- and they both lost to Trump, who rose to power largely on the backs of those who were pissed that we put a black person in office the first time. This is the inconvenient truth we have to face, and it may be racist and political suicide to say publicly, but mark my words : The message will not matter. If the Democrats put up another minority in 2028, they will lose and lose hard. The american public is just not willing to do that again.
I'm not abdicating racism or sexism as part of the problem. But if you're just going to capitulate to it, god, we may as well run 20 more white men. I think that if America is capable of electing Obama on the promise of hope and change, they can elect Kamala.
If the DNC is going to put up a candidate that must deal with racism and sexism, wouldn't the message be like ten times as important? But what was there?
"What would you do differently than Biden?"
"Hm, nothing really comes to mind."
People didn't like Biden, so how was this meant to inspire anyone? I don't reckon many people actually saw that specific interview, but this is the attitude the DNC gives us every. single. time. It's always scraps and morsels.
You realize, if those 10 million people had come out for Kamala and we had beaten Trump just barely, I'm still not satisfied with that. What I thought we had on election night was a coin flip, not the blowout that happened. A coin flip. Against a fascist.