Headquarters, the "new Gen-Z led progressive content hub," is taking over Kamala Harris's "Kamala HQ" account and has already made one change after online backlash.The news was announced by former Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee yesterday, in partnership with People For the A...
Perhaps it’s both? Democrats certainly failed to get fence sitters to vote, but lots of people actively chose (and are still choosing) Trump. Look at the young male Black and Latino demographics. They didn’t just sit out a Democrat vote, they actively chose Trump. The Dems may be reasonably accused of failing to activate the leftist voters who sat it out/voted third party, but Trump is STILL sitting at 35%+ approval. Americans DID choose Trump. Trump is a symptom of the disease, not the cause. They love ICE abducting people. They love tariffs. They love him attempting to bully Canada, Mexico and Europe.
It’s easy to lose sight of this on Lemmy which is pretty far left of the current Overton window, but enough normies actively support what’s going on. It may be a minority of Americans, but between MAGA core and undecideds, it’s very foolish to say America did not choose Trump actively. The leftist no vote/undecided demographic the Dems lost was far smaller than the MAGA and MAGA curious.
People aren’t that simple.
Some are. But not 35%.
When people look at their life and the world they’re in and see it’s all fucked, they want somone to do something about it. Trump points to immigrants, saying it’s their fault everything’s fucked, and he’ll do whatever it takesto fix it. While Harris and the Democrats say most things are fine. In a crisis, people will vote for anyone who promises to do something, when there’s nobody else offering a counter proposal.
If the Democrats had a decent candidate who was willing acknowledge how bad things are, and to truly talk about how to fix things for the average person. It would be stunning how small Trumps polling would get.
I’m not going to say Biden was perfect, but many of the “investments” Trump is using as proof of victory came as a direct result of Biden policies like the inflation reduction act, chips act, etc. He inherited inflation directly as a result of Trump abandoning “project lightspeed” and choosing to let COVID run wild, which triggered free money which triggered severe inflation, which is why people were pissed off. By 2024, prices were still elevated but inflation itself was under control. Kamala ran on “we beat inflation, and its all uphill from here” (they did, and their policies are continuing to benefit Americans), and Trump ran on “I’ll reduce prices to what they were pre-COVID” (deflation is usually bad). Lina Khan was actually pursuing antitrust suits for the first time in this millennium, and the department of labor was generally siding with unions. I think the reality is that Democratic party PR is absolute shit. The main pressure of inflation was under control late in Biden admin, and Trump sold the voterbase a myth with directly lower prices.
I get what you’re saying about people being desperate, but the reality is that real wage growth was higher under Biden than Trump 1 and they chose Trump 2 anyways.
Real wage growth was still negligible under Biden.
People don’t notice low single diget percentage changes.
But that’s not even important. Biden, Harris, the Democrats generally, were shit at selling to the public all the good things he did. They couldn’t point their finger at a real problem and explain how they’d solve it, because the real problem is their donors.
The best thing he did was appoint Lina Khan. And Harris was dogged by the donor class during the campaign to get rid of her. That’s the problem.
I agree with most of that but not all. People don’t notice single digit, but it’s still meaningful when you’re talking real wage growth. Wages grew faster than inflation, even if only by single-digit. The reality was overruled by the fact that post COVID inflation had raised prices. The Democrat plan was to maintain positive, compounding real wage growth.
Biden identified falling industrial output and employment and enacted subsidies via CHIPS etc al which resulted in real shovels in real dirt building semiconductor plants in upstate NY, new construction of wind and solar plants, etc. Biden identified high pharmaceutical prices and enacted the first ever group negotiated purchasing rates for 10 drugs with more on the way for his 2nd term. Anticompetitive practices, Lina Khan. Crimes against the state, Jack Smith. Historically low violent crime rates, a successful opioid addiction policy seeing massively falling OD rates…
He and Kamala had two practical failures in Merrick Garland and Palestinian policy. The rest was an optical nightmare, and I’m not sure where the failure was but I’m not sure it was with “the donors”. Kamala spent a shitload more money than Trump and somehow all anyone ever heard was “Killer Kamala” and “but she laughs weird”. Whatever caused that, I think is the ultimate failure of the party.