What got people to vote for Biden but not Harris? A dire need. Not voting for Biden meant that Trump stayed in office. Even though the stakes were the same, too many people sat on the couch thinking it was going to happen again and they didn’t have to go.
Negative. That the democratic candidate had a vagina and breasts is why ten million people sat home.
I think it’s a result of the “divide and conquer” game the republicans played. Stichwort Israel and Palestine.
I’ve heard the following arguments, I’m ordering them in the way I think they effect an election.
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Elon musk buyout and the AI lockdown of social media, and banning of tiktok have all had the effect to fracture democratic/leftist messaging (fault: dems, biden, musk, reddit, people who stayed on x. Affected groups: young people, people who are hard to reach with ads)
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The primary election is basically undivertable campaign time for democrats. The lack of primary campaigns and debates means harris had less time to build support and a base (fault biden, affected groups: everyone).
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Lack of economic excitement around policies and a shutdown of effective messaging on price gouging in favor of saying a former president will surely destroy the country this time. (fault Harris, donors effect, likely low turnout on younger people)
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Lack of demographic excitement around key policies. Latinos: Immigration. Muslims: Israel. (fault biden/harris, effect low turnout in key groups)
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Wasteful campaign spending on republicans: Courting Liz Cheney and buying ads to woo republicans at best wasted money and at worst is a giveaway to telecoms who immediately donated it to republicans(fault Harris, effect waste)
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Covid provided a boost in 2020 that no longer exists
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Mail in voting helped some people vote in 2020. I would say this a tossup however because I do think republicans are able to abuse flaws in mail in systems.
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Harris is a woman. I don’t buy this one because nonvoters seem disengaged rather than hostile.
8 should be way higher. You can be sexist and not like Trump, and not vote because of it. I’d also add high on that list: rampant and nonstop right wing propoganda in all media formats (news, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc.) with no equivalent left leaning alternative. It should come as no surprise that young men are leaning right when casual mysogony and racism flood the content they watch, even when the content itself isn’t strictly political.
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Biden would not have won if we weren’t also in the middle of the greatest global pandemic in a century that the incumbent Trump administration was handling terribly.
What about Joe Biden made him sufficiently left while Kamala Harris wasn’t?
-Joe Biden wasn’t campaigning to finish building Trump’s wall. Or saying that actually it was a good idea to build the wall and the only problems were just that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for it and that he didn’t finish the job.
-Joe Biden wasn’t campaigning on being pro-fracking. And bragging about how he was the tie breaking vote for the IRA, which leased new land for fracking. (I understand there was more to this act, but Harris points to it as a way to show she supports fracking)
-At the time the genocide in Gaza hadn’t ramped up and gotten as much publicity as has now, so we didn’t get to hear Joe Biden’s stance on it.
-Joe Biden wasn’t calling to ensure America has the “strongest most lethal fighting force in the world”.
-Joe Biden didn’t align himself with the Cheneys.
You see that 10 million more Democrats voted for Biden, but stayed home for Harris and you believe the problem is with the people and not the candidate? Now granted, racism and sexism played a role in this for sure. But to attribute that much of a difference just to that? Most of the people that are deeply racist and sexist are already voting for Trump because he supports those ideas. And from what I’ve seen, the Republican voters stayed pretty consistent from last election. It was mainly a dip in Democratic voters. If the problem is with the voters and not just that Harris was an incredibly weak candidate, then why do you believe that many more people voted last election?
Because Biden was to the left of Harris, and Gaza wasn’t a big issue? Like yeah, the people who didn’t vote did so because of Harris’ move to the right
you, sir, were divided an conquered.
This whole Election is a perfect case study of divide and conquer.
Biden followed Trump so it was fresh in everyone’s minds how awful he was
deleted by creator
Seriously what did you expect after 4 years of genocide joe?
More importantly I can’t believe libs are still vote shaming (about “commies” lmao) a week after their garbage candidate got blown out.
Never going to learn.
I don’t mean to offend you, but you were divided and conquered.
The Republicans found a topic to divide you on. The left-wing coalition collapsed (while the right wing consolidated) and you were conquered.
I mean, Harris and the Dems didn’t even try, like seriously. Getting Beyonce and all the other celebrities our fellow moronic Americans already see as members of the illuminati is not trying, it’s literally the opposite
I mean, they spent $50m+ in fuckin Ohio! We lost fuckin Georgia while they were jerking off Cheney’s and trying to convince white folks in the suburbs not to be who they are
It’s legit insane to see the party straightup abandon working class demographics. Then again, this is the same party that now literally spends millions of dollars each primary on getting votes for Republican politicians
I was excited when Biden dropped out and Harris got this huge surge as the new young, not actively deteriorating candidate, then more excited when she announced Tim Walz and got a mid western, blue collar surge, and cautiously optimistic when everyone was briefly focusing on how anti-democratic and un-American Project 2025 was, but then started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
It feels like Obama successfully ran a campaign of Hope and Change, and since then Democrats repeatedly campaign on maintaining the status quo and just not letting it slide too much further. And while it’s possible to win an election on the basis of ‘I’m at least somewhat competent’, it might not be in the US when so much of the population sees how fundamentally broken wealth inequality is at baseline.
Not discounting anything you wrote here, but it still entertains me when people call the 60 year old Kamala Harris young.
Fuck I would not have guessed that. She looks 10-20 years younger than that
Especially when next to Walz who is, I think, a year younger.
Black don’t crack, she genuinely looks youthful and it really helps that she can speak full sentences and thoughts without issues and/or changing topic like Biden or Trump
In contrast to Biden and Trump she looks 40.
I genuinely thought she was Gen X like my parents. She was a spring chicken compared to the other side.
Compared to Trump and Biden she’s a baby.
started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.
That surge when she started was all her campaign. The news and dis/info sources were all caught flat-footed.
They cast around for a few weeks testing what stories would “drive engagement”. Scandals? No. VP pick, like - Who’s it gonna be? No. Did she take any of the demented rapist’s baiting? Nope. Dang.
At the end, they settled on those, and that’s why it seemed different. They (corporate news, mostly) had finally wrested a narrative out of the campaign the campaign didn’t disagree with.
It was thin, a little schlocky, but either true or based on the campaigns ads, so - that got stamped on the campaign, and that’s why you remember that specific set of themes.
Maintaining the status quo is conservatism.
By definition that’s not what the left wants.
They tried everything except giving Dem voters what they want…
Which is what exactly? So many captain hindsights here.
How about some actual progressive policy? Not sure how people like you manage to play ignorance for this long.
You’re being hard headed if you want everyone you argue with in the comments to list exactly what they were looking for. How about you go into chat gpt and ask "what are some progressive policies that Democratic voters want that aren’t being reflected by the DNC and you’ll get exactly what you’re facetiously asking us
Let me be more clear: the votes aren’t there. You would like to believe that you as a progressive who is frustrated with Dems for not being progressive enough is a large enough constituency. I would like that to be the case as well. Unfortunately, almost all progressives voted on Kamala (and on HRC before that), and it’s just not enough.
Are you fucking kidding? Because Biden 2020 was a progressive platform and Harris 2024 was a centrist one. They weren’t even remotely similar. Biden may be a centrist, but he’s very pro-labor, and he could see how important the progressive base was that election, so he literally sat down with Sanders and hammered out a platform that they could get behind. And while I’ve got a lot of problems with Joe Biden, he actually was very committed to that platform. He really wanted BBB to get through and he kept trying to find ways to abolish student debt.
Harris, on the other hand, had a handful of disparate, vaguely left policy positions, like the first-time homebuyer’s credit and legalizing pot, but her campaign was mainly centered on economic opportunity for the middle class. She also committed wholeheartedly to the most right-wing polices of the Biden administration, like arming Israel and cracking down on the border. But worst of all, she made bipartisanship and Republican consensus a huge part of her campaign, promising to add Republicans to her cabinet , campaigning with Liz Cheney, and even praising Dick Fucking Cheney.
TL;DR, Biden campaigned like Obama in 2008, Harris Campaigned like Hillary in 2016. And the results were the same.
Do you even remember 2020? Nobody fucking wanted Biden. He was never progressive. He was literally mocked for telling donors “Nothing will fundamentally change.” People turned out because of how much they hated Trump.
That actually occurred in 2019, not 2020. After Bernie nearly stomped him in the primary, he made a hard pivot to the left in 2020. As I said, he’s a centrist, but he actually does have a strong history of pro-union activism, which made him a fairly credible (though imperfect) messenger for a populous platform.
It’s almost unfathomable how many people failed to show up to vote, if they disliked Trump that much in 2020. What has Trump done to gather support or apathy about this in so many people?
It was more that Kamala did nothing to get them off the couch.
Biden at least promised student loan forgiveness and did try. It was a shit attempt but credit where it’s due he tried and ended up being able to at least forgive a bunch of public service loans. Kamala promised, what? Help to buy a house? Ok sure. Because we can totally afford that with the cost of groceries today.
Maybe we underestimated how much Covid forced/gave everyone time to pay attention to politics. Or perhaps people saw Trump dodge accountability at every turn and disillusionment in the system bred apathy. It could also be online manipulation pushing Gaza as making Harris/Biden just as bad as Trump. Probably all of the above.
I get that but 15 mil people is a lot. Needs looking into imho.
Agreed. There’s a tiny paranoid voice in the back of my head saying that with Trump every accusation is a confession and he made a lot of election fraud accusations.
Trump didn’t do that, Putin did.
So why didn’t he in 2020?
I bet a lot of people saw this as Hillary all over again
I sure did. I was genuinely hopeful when Biden stepped down, and when they announced Walz, I actually got excited. Then they started to try and reach moderate Republicans more and more, and I slowly realized they were doing it again. I felt like I was going insane watching them repeat the strategy that caused them to lose to the same guy in 2016.
Harris hired a lot of Clinton’s advisors.
We really need to purge the democratic advisors of their jobs if the dems ever wanna win again. They suck.
Silver lining, Trump may actually lock them up.
From what I understand, Hillary basically took over this campaign from behind the scenes.
Wait, seriously? She’s a fucking disease
I remember seeing that picture and thinking to myself “what the fuck is Hillary doing there”
So did Hillary sabotage Kamela so she wouldn’t have to see the coveted title of “First Female President” go to someone else, or is she a god damn moron who thought the same tactic of fucking over the left to appeal to die-hard Republicans ignoring that Republicans vote for Republicans
I would probably guess mostly column B
The meme demanded, pjwestin delivered.
I do what I can. If the question had been asked in good faith, I might have even been nice about it.
Don’t forget that Biden was the first president to walk a picket line. No other president had ever done that in America’s history. That single action won over the UAW.
Then, Biden fought back against the railroad corporations and won a contract for workers that includes PTO and other basic labor necessities.
Then, Biden reduced fentanyl overdoses, something that no president has done in like 30-40 years.
Couple this with BBB and IRA, you have a much more progressive president than what people give water to it.
Well, I don’t want to give him too much credit. Biden is and always has been a centrist. He has a mixed history on Civil Rights (cause he’s 120 years old), he has a pretty pro-bank history, he’s supported some anti-consumer stuff (like the anti-bankruptcy laws), and he even helped put Clarence Thomas on the bench. And that’s not even touching on his administration, where Gaza and the border will probably be his lasting legacy. But, two things that he’s always been pretty consistent on were unions and infrastructure, and he read the room in 2020 and leaned heavily into those things.
Oh I agree. He likely made all of those concessions because 1) he wanted to rally the base following the 2020 primaries, and 2) to stick it to the establishment Dems. Seems like Biden has grown to be quite the grumpy old man to those in the party.
I agree with you in Gaza and the border. Biden has shown no backbone to Netanyahu, and his administration introduced a border bill that echoed a lot of Trump’s sentiments.
On the whole, it’s hard to make the call on whether Biden or Harris would have been better to run against Trump, but all that matters now is that we continue the message that establishment Democrats got us here by chasing centrism instead of progress. We need to root out a lot of people who actually do the politicking in the party because if those people aren’t out, we’re doomed to make the same mistakes.
Hasan Piker put it well the other day. If this were a game of sports, underperformers would be benched pretty aggressively. If this were a job, underperformers would be put on a performance plan (hopefully) or fired straight up.
There are people consulting Democrats that have failed time and again since 2016, hell even 2008. They need OUT.
all that matters now is that we continue the message that establishment Democrats got us here by chasing centrism instead of progress. We need to root out a lot of people who actually do the politicking in the party because if those people aren’t out, we’re doomed to make the same mistakes.
100% this. On Monday, I’m calling my state and federal representatives and telling them DNC chair Jamie Harrison needs to go. Then I’m gonna start looking for movements that will primary anyone who still thinks incrementalism and centrism are a path forward. From now on, Medicare for All and UBI need to be the bare minimum standard for anyone that wants a D in front of their name.
remember earlier this year when leftists were saying biden never did anything and that he was too old, and started refusing to vote for him and calling for him to drop out, and he did?
remember the six months following that when leftists were complaining that the person they got biden to drop out for wasn’t good enough and how they weren’t going to vote for her?
and now that trump won suddenly leftists are singing biden’s praises and blaming trump’s win on the DNC picking a shit candidate?
I honestly have no clue how you constructed your conception of “leftists”.
Leftists != Tankies != Blue MAGA/Anon != Progressives
Biden did great things while in office. However, the Left has the liberty to continue pushing the current administration to go farther and implement more policies in line with their ideals. This is a force that counters the Right.
Biden did not go far enough on Gaza, and neither did Kamala. The same goes for corporations like those in the Oil & Gas sector that raised their prices following oil demobilization during COVID, as well as those that kept their prices high even years after like those producing consumer goods. Could have gone farther.
When the existing administration makes no concessions to those in the base that voted for that administration but not as their first choice, they have the right to criticize and call out the administration’s failure to represent them.
All of this would be fixed, or at least alleviated if we abandoned our political duopoly in favor of an electoral and congressional system that allowed for more diversity in government. Ranked choice seems to be taking off in many states.
Oh, and Kamala was great at the beginning. She took over for Biden, then chose Tim Walz. But then her administration attached itself to Biden, the person that spawned her campaign since the Democratic base utterly rejected him following the debate, and then went after the Right in hope of gaining more votes, taking their own base for granted.
Now that we have the full scope of Kamala’s campaign, she ran on much more conservative values than Biden did in his campaign leading up to the 2020 election.
This nuance is not something you’ll see in the mainstream media, perhaps not even on Lemmy. But this is the realm that hopefully progressives like me and some Leftists operate in.
Your mindset is honestly the same that many ignorant people share regarding science and the scientific method. Things can be true for different reasons and at different times.
i’m not debating any of that. i’m just kind of mad at leftists for being mad at the DNC for doing exactly what they told them to do.
Everyone is still pissed about inflation, and her answer to what she would do better was ‘nothing’.
Everything else is just noise around the edges.
Because people pissed at inflation are fucking stupid. Inflation is down. They aren’t pissed at greedy corporations, which have been the problem the entire fucking time.
You know you’ve heard people say inflation hasn’t stopped because prices are still high. Like they’re going to magically get better prices when inflation stops.
Yeah it’s stupid, welcome to America.
Actually they’re not wrong, wages were not increased to keep up with inflation so stopping it alone wasn’t enough.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q#0 Real wages are up since Covid was dealt with. That’s simple factual reality.
The perception of course, is that everything is worse. Because prices did go up, and they’re staying there. Which just means the economy didn’t collapse and cause mass unemployment.
I think the problem is that inflation does not impact the poorest population the same:
The CPI weighting is based on an average consumer, the poorest people will have more sensibility to price change for things like food or rent.
Rent and food prices increase in total by 20-25% in 4 years. If you were already tight at the beginning of the Biden presidency, you’re now have a high chance of being homeless.
Seen hundreds of lemmy comments arguing exactly that.
The sad thing is that there are a thousand ways to attack prices, or even just give sound bites that the public can run with. But almost all of them would upset neoliberal billionaires, so they can never be spoken.
They think it’ll be like gas prices. They go up, but the “right guy” will make them come back down, ignoring the fact that that only happens with commodities like oil. Once a company raises prices, they rarely bring them back down. Tha6s called deflation, and it’s not good.
Well, we kind of need deflation to happen because the alternative is rising wages and that’s not fucking happening.
We need to do what Harris had stated, and go after all these companies price gouging like we are still in the middle of the COVID pandemic. And that is now only going to get worse with a con man in office set on making himself, his companies, and his friends (which is anyone that says nice things to him) as rich as possible by extracting what remains of the working class. They are going to weaken/dismantle unions, and likely start mass death/slave labor camps for the poor.
He is also going to use his new position of power to pass laws to shield crypto scammers, and use his new crypto platform to undermine the US dollar and try and force more people to his crypto grift run by some of the worse humans around. And use his NFT/crypto stuff to openly except bribes to sell off the US to the highest bidder so when his dementia gets bad enough they put JD in charge he can live out the rest of his days being fed liquid cheese burgers on a golden spoon.
I imagine Vance goes in around the two year mark so he can have three terms.
Not sure JD would get any additional terms, the cult might want to install either Jr. or Eric and start a “royalty” line of succession. And hope that Ivanka enjoys the hellscape she helped usher in for her daughter, and women everywhere.
Deflation just means everyone is already starving. Deflation isn’t the start of a process, it’s the result of massive failure. Just like inflation doesn’t happen the second money is printed, it has to circulate before price inflation is a thing.
What we need are labor groups, and taxes on companies who use government benefits as part of their wage calculation.
In short, never try to make prices go down, instead make wages go up, and make competition control prices.
Deflation isn’t the start of a process, it’s the result of massive failure
We’ve already had a massive failure. The economy doing great and yet everyone’s broke? Such a blatant lie! Time to acknowledge and lower prices to end food waste.
Everyone is broke, but still buying everything in the economy? Sorry, time to acknowledge the reality that life is just hard. Deflation happens after it gets really bad.
We live in a nation of people that are a mix of uneducated and propagandized. If the party messaging doesn’t take that into account, that fault lies with them in addition to the voters.
It’s not enough that the rate of inflation is slowing. The problem is that wages aren’t going up to match inflation. When people are working two jobs and still living paycheck to paycheck, do you think it means anything to them to tell them that “um ackshually, inflation is down 0.4% from last year!”?
This kind of disconnect is exactly why we aren’t reaching voters.
California voted to not raise minimum wage, too.
Also they kept prison slave labor.
Come on now don’t bring up that in one of the “left most” and most populous state in the union that people are actually pretty non leftist, it might contradict some of their feel based arguments.
America is not full of progressives. I don’t know why people here can never be convinced otherwise.
America is not full of progressives.
No it is not and I’ll toss another example on there -
Gay marriage was only legalized nation wide by a bunch of unelected judges, and the second most-recent Democratic president “evolved” on the issue less than a decade ago.
US postures as the world’s defender of LGBT rights when it’s “bringing democracy” places, but it’s not great at doing that internally.
America is a country that lies to itself. It claims we need to make female super heroes flat chested to combat sexism, but then turn around and laugh at the idea of a female president so hard they’re willing to give Hitler a second chance.
Wages have outpaced inflation recently. Things have generally been heading in the right direction since the pandemic but it came too late and the masses are mostly ignorant or misinformed so the data is irrelevant to them. Its about how people feel as you point out, there’s not a rational argument against feelings, people feel how they feel. One side has become very good at taping into those feelings, the other side is talking about data and no one gives a shit unless the data validates what they feel.
Don’t lie to me.
People who rent got hit twice as hard by inflation, I know I’m paying a significantly higher portion of my paycheck in rent vs 4 years ago.
The raw material cost increases which provide the cover/excuse for price gouging are the result of two different things the Harris/Biden admin participated in and had no real path towards solving.
One is the fact that the vast majority of ocean shipping is going around Africa rather than the red sea, due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza that the Biden admin has been bypassing Congress to continue arming.
Two is the cutting off of Russian oil, which resulted in ballooning costs in Europe.
Like it or not, Harris did not provide any answers on these two fronts that looked anything like a change in policy.
Easy to say inflation is down while others are feeling it with their wallet. Biden did nothing to fight price gouging
He made an attempt. If you expect overnight results, make sure you do a shit ton of shrooms so you can live in a different reality.
Enjoy Trump’s tariffs because that is somehow his answer to inflation.
I voted for Kamala, I’m under no illusion that Trump will motherfuck the economy just like he did in his previous administration. But the idiots that voted for him have the memory of a goldfish. They will still find a way to blame democrats and minorities…that’s when the real fun will begin.
Because fixing inflation means jacking up interest rates and cutting government spending. And no-one wants that.
People are too stupid to understand inflation and too stupid to understand how it’s combated.
Literally Covid. People thoght they were going to die.
I actually don’t think so. Like I speak with Republicans that are very dismissive of covid still, despite having family members die to it. If people were bothered by his covid response, they would continue to be bothered by the fact Trump shit the covid response. Instead it seems voters think everything was fine during his term (completely uninformed or unaware of the fact that he was impeached twice, raped women, a good friend and neighbor of Epstein, and tried to overthrow the government)
The apathy maybe comes from how Harris was hand picked (because it was so last minute that Biden dropped off) vs us having an actual primary with several democrats.
Republicans aren’t the ones who didn’t turn out, idk what this has to do with what they think about Trumps covid response. If you want to know why 10 million more democratic voters turned out last time covids gonna play a large factor.
So covid but not fascist plundering and terrorism. Huh.
Stupid fuckers.
And BLM was already out on the streets.
Bernie.
Bernie was what got us to vote for Biden. Biden formed a comittee with Bernie and actually adopted a bunch of his ideas. That’s what got the left to vote for Biden.
That and all of us were reeling from the economy after coronavirus.
Meanwhile Harris told the left to fuck off with your Palestinians are human nonsense and tried to get the Liz Cheney constituency (that doesn’t exist).
Because we did vote for Biden and he was useless at preventing the spread of fascism in states, and then Harris’s responses to how she would handle any of it, which was effectively “I will do nothing.” The Democrats made the left apathetic to the electoral system by refusing to appeal to them and instead the democrats focused on trying to sway republicans and moved further right. The Democrats did the worst thing they could have done and made people apathetic and hopeless.
Useless at preventing fascism… So decided to sit it out and give DT another go. Bold strategy. Let’s see how it works out.
Like playing Russian roulette with five live rounds.
You can keep bitching about how its everyone else’s fault why we are in the situation we are in. You aren’t the people I see at the antifascist rallies, or out on the street trying to organize grassroots systems to protect our queer community, or doing anything. Yall are the type of people who start and stop at the voting booth. Too busy shilling politicians who refuse to do what the people want to do anything that actually helps people. Don’t accuse people who voted third party or didn’t vote for the situation we are in, cause you don’t know that they do nothing. They very well could be doing more than you to make a difference.
Lol
Da, comrade
The elections over dipshit, and putins dog won. Why would they still pay their troll farms when the deal has been sealed?
Ever think people looked online and saw behavior such as yours and felt they didn’t want to be involved with people like you?
It ain’t “the commies”.
And he won by an incredibly tiny margin in a handful of states to win, literally no one was “set on fire” for Biden
Progressive policy is popular with the politically disengaged as well as others who are politically engaged
When the ones who are engaged try to warn people someone is a bad candidate and isn’t left enough to motivate the politically disengaged, we magically go back to Salem and you all start blaming us for being able to see the logical conclusion of your dumbass plans.
Run another candidate in 2028 that’s significantly to the right of the Dem voter base and the same shit will happen again.
That’s not a threat, it’s basic logic.
It might not be the candidate you want, but isn’t stopping republican more important than you getting exactly what you want?
Obama ran a progressive campaign and was charismatic…
Why not try that again since moderates over retirement age keeps failing?
Kamala might be like three years younger than Obama now, but he entered the White house 16 years ago
