100% spot on, although I will say this; it's not that Democrats are too scared of casting stones within their party. It's that they're too terrified of displaying behavior that would displease donors. They're happy to throw Jamaal Bowman or Rashida Tlaib under the bus if AIPAC is displeased. They'll sideline AOC if her rhetoric makes one of their, "good," billionaires nervous. They've been trying to find a balance between making their wealthy benefactors and their working class base happy for years now, and they still haven't figured out that those goals are antithetical.
pjwestin
joined 1 year ago
I think it's not fucking magic, Pug. There was far more negative campaigning coming from the hundreds of millions spent by the Trump campaign. There was even more money spent by Harris to negatively campaign against Trump, for all the good it did. But leftists complaining online threw the election? Everyone needs to shut up and smile, because if they criticize the Democrats too loudly they'll collapse? Is that where we're at?
Seriously Pug? You think that Muslims watching their people get ethnically cleansed aren't powerless? You think college students getting beaten by cops and accused of antisemitism for protesting a genocide aren't the powerless? You think people exercising the tiniest amount of control they have over their democracy by withholding their vote means their not the powerless ones? How many groups are willing to scapegoat before you start holding people with actual institutional power accountable?
You're right, Pug, a billion dollars in direct spending was derailed by people pointing out the bad things they were seeing. It definitely wasn't the bad things that cost her the election, just the people acknowledging that the bad things existed and suggesting she do something different. I forgot, if you're in a car with someone who is about to drive or a cliff, the best thing you can do is remain quiet; you wouldn't want to distract the driver with your negativity. Once again, Pug, your brilliant insights have saved the day.
...So you agree advocating against Harris was a mistake? The thing that everyone else said would be a mistake?
What the ever loving fuck are you talking about? You think when I said the powerful, i meant Muslims and anti-war protesters who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Harris? Or working-class voters who decided Harris' shitty economic plan wasn't worth standing in a poll line? And I guess you must have thought the powerless were the people who spent over a billion dollars campaigning with Mark Cuban? Is that how broken your brain is?
"Yes, you voted for her, but you vocally criticized her. You're not allowed to speak out against the party like that." Do you fucking hear yourself yet? Do you still not understand why people call you Blue MAGA?
You're underselling it. They had Bernie Sanders help them write an economically-populist platform in 2020. For all of Biden's many, many faults, he saw which way the wind was blowing in 2020 and leaned into it. Then, in 2024, they decided it was safe to move back to a middle-class centric, moderate economic message, and boy, was that a bad idea.
I VOTED FOR HER. But thanks for ignoring every substantive argument made about how the Dems fucked this up. It's super fun seeing people like you learn nothing from these defeats! Can't wait to watch this happen again in 2028 because you guys refuse to hold Democrats accountable for campaigns designed to appeal donors and consultants instead of voters! Keep enabling them, it's going great!
If we're going to start blaming people who let Trump win, let's start with Joe Biden, who was too stubborn to drop out before the 2024 primary. Then, let's move on to his aides, who kept his declining cognitive abilities from the public. Then let's move on to any Democratic Party members who met with Biden before the 2024 election and were aware of his diminished capacity. Then let's move on to the members of the DNC who decided to protect Biden from real primary challengers (they drove Dean Phillips out of politics for trying to run, by the way), despite the fact that 60% of Democrats wanted a different candidate.
Once we're done blaming those people, let's move on to blaming Harris, who did nothing to distance herself from Biden on Gaza despite knowing that it was polling very poorly with a base she needed to motivate. Then let's blame her for adopting a flacid, middle-class oriented economic policy and abandoning the economic populism that worked in 2020. Let's also blame Harris' top strategists, Jen O'Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter, who ran the same strategy of trying to flip moderate Republicans that lost in 2020.
Anyway, once we've held all those people accountable for letting Trump win, then maybe we can see if there's any blame left for protesting leftists or apathetic working-class voters. And before you ask, yes, I voted for Harris. I just don't hold the powerless accountable for the powerfuls' mistakes.
The democratic presidential campaign in 16 and 24 amounted to: you should vote for us because the other guy sucks...It didn't work in '16, there was ZERO reason to think it would work in '24, but fuck it, we can always blame the voters.
It wasn't just the same strategy. It was a lot of the same people who worked on Hillary's campaign, as well a bunch of Obama flunkies pushing the, "demographics are destiny," narrative that keeps convincing the party they can safely ignore the working class and focus on, "moderate," Republicans. A bunch or them went on Pod Save America to explain what happened with the Harris Campaign, and (Spoiler Alert) turns out they did everything right, the campaign was great, and everything that went wrong was someone else's fault.
Anyway, I'm sure the OP is right, and the protest voters are why she lost. It's definitely not the fault of the Democratic Party elites who keep re-hiring the same strategist despite their catastrophic failures. I'm gonna get a head start on making memes blaming the left for Hillary's 2028 loss to Trump because no one learns anything and we live in hell.
You understand that things change over time, right? Silicone Valley tech giants like Facebook had an extremely cozy relationship with Obama, and they've been heavily involved with Democratic politics for years.
Now they're pivoting right; Zuckerberg didn't donate to Harris this year, even though he'd donated $400 million to Democrats the previous election cycle, and he's now adopting Trump's, "anti-woke," bullshit. Musk, who made a killing on Obama's electric vehicle subsidies, is now doing Nazi salutes at Trump's inauguration.
A lot of this has to do with how social media algorithms are driving people down right-wing conspiracy rabbit holes. Democrats blame a lot of their losses since 2016 on, "fake news," and online misinformation, and have begun demanding small amounts of accountability from tech giants. In response, the tech industry has been slowly moving rightward over the last eight years, and now seem to fully embrace Trump.
So, yes, California is basically owned by tech oligarchs, and it is also mostly run by Democrats. Until very recently, those two groups weren't at odds, and now that they are, we are just beginning to see what that conflict will mean for California and the rest of the country.
Yeah, this, "Won't someone think of the minorities!?!?" shit would carry more weight if minority groups weren't also abandoning the Democrats. Latino support for the Democratic ticket dropped 8 points between 2020 and 2024. Muslim support dropped 49%. Black support for Harris dropped as well, even if it was mostly among men. And I'm just going by exit polls; I'm not even counting the people who stopped showing up.
Maybe you can start parsing out which minority groups have the most power, and then start blaming them too. That might let you scapegoat someone else a little longer, so you postpone holding the people with actual power accountable a little bit longer.