this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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I remember in the weeks following the announcement that Biden would step down and endorse Harris people dug into her voting record and revealed that she was one of the furthest left-leaning members of the Senate, up there with Sanders and Warren.
Now that she's lost the election all of a sudden so-called "progressives" are claiming she lost because she was basically a Republican.
The GOP's strategy was clearly to promote voter apathy and drive down turnout for people more likely to vote Harris, and it worked. Trump finally won the popular vote- and he did so with about 6 million fewer votes than what Biden got in 2020.
Far too many progressive, and maybe even moderate Dems and independents, really believed all the nonsense. "Both sides are the same", "you're vote doesn't matter", "there's no way Trump can win", "Bidenomics is totally what caused the global inflation and we are just going to ignore that post-pandemic inflation in the US was the lowest of any developed economy", "she's a cop", etc. Heck, maybe there is even some misogynist or racism on the left that may have hurt Harris. And now instead of just trying to dig out way out of decades of neoliberalism we're just escalating to fascism.
I blame everyone. The GOP and Trump of course. The billionaires (the loud ones like Musk and Bezos, but also the quieter ones like Thiel and the Walton family). Russia of course. The spineless politicians and government officials who refused to put Trump behind bars. The DNC for the shenanigans they've been pulling with primaries for the past several elections and for planning to run a walking corpse in 2024 instead of setting up a real successor to Biden. All of the people who voted for Trump and the other Republicans. All of the left-leaning folk who didn't turn out for Harris. The decades of the GOP undermining democracy (really starting with pardoning Nixon, the whole Regan administration, the hanging chads in 2000, Mitch McConnell taking over the courts, etc).
The only comfort I have is that I know I did my part and voted.
She was one of the furthest left Senators. Then she ran to the right as hard as possible during her short campaign. She took progressives and leftists for granted and lost.
I keep seeing that claimed everywhere. I'll admit that I make an effort NOT to consume political ads (or ads in general really) but I don't remember anything right-leaning from Harris outside of supporting the status quo for Israel and Palestine.
I did hear ads on the radio in stores supporting making billionaires pay their fair share and lowering taxes for the working class. Ads attacking Trump for giving tax breaks to billionaires and wanting to cut Medicare and social security benefits. Ads supporting pro-choice and attacking Republicans for wanting to ban abortion. It's possible that there were ads for different demographics, but the same radio station was also airing right-wing ads with incredible amounts of transphobia- dead naming and misgendering individuals and claiming they were criminals coming for your children.
It's entirely possible I missed something because there's just way too much election content for one person to read, but I really have no clue where the narrative of the right turn is coming from.
The Democratic party has adopted the majority of detestable border polices from Trump's 2016 campaign.
In 2016 there were appeals to voters to have compassion for the DACA cohort, but now the only discussion is about being tough on the border (and ignore human rights treaties about asylum claims at the same time).
Admittedly, they didn't engage in family separation or forced sterilization like the Trump administration, but they shifted hard right on immigration, like many other developed countries in the last few years.