• Psychodelic@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    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

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      27 days ago

      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.

      • rigatti@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        Not discounting anything you wrote here, but it still entertains me when people call the 60 year old Kamala Harris young.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        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.

      • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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        26 days ago

        Maintaining the status quo is conservatism.

        By definition that’s not what the left wants.

        • rishado@lemmy.world
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          25 days ago

          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

          • Eatspancakes84@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            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.

  • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    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.

    • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      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.

      • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        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.

      • Akasazh@feddit.nl
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        27 days ago

        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?

        • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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          26 days ago

          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.

        • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
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          26 days ago

          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.

            • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
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              26 days ago

              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.

      • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        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.

        • Kalysta@lemm.ee
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          26 days ago

          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.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        27 days ago

        From what I understand, Hillary basically took over this campaign from behind the scenes.

      • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        I do what I can. If the question had been asked in good faith, I might have even been nice about it.

    • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      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.

      • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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        27 days ago

        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.

        • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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          27 days ago

          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.