Just because you’re not aware of something, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. There wetr plenty of people in the media who said the same thing. Hell, you can go through my post history and see how many times I said, “seems like she needs to shift her stance on Gaza,” or, “why the fuck is she campaigning with Liz Cheney?” before the election.

I don’t know what to tell you man, you need to get people excited to go vote for you, otherwise they don’t show up. It’s election 101. Harris didn’t do that for her base, so she fucking lost. You can bitch about voters all you want, but it’s not gonna change reality, so maybe that time would be better spent figuring out why they didn’t show up. Again, I’d start with the fact that she ignored her base for the fucking Cheneys.

The problem is they are better off, the economy is better, but how do you get people to see it, believe it?

The thing is they’re not. Yes, inflation is down, but that doesn’t mean that prices are going down. It means that the rate increase goes down. So if you were living paycheck to paycheck in 2019, you are doing objectively worse in 2024.

This isn’t new either. Over the last 30 years, the middle class has collapsed, the cost of living has gone up, the bottom of the manufacturing industry has fallen out, and wages have remained stagnant. Sometimes when Democrats have power, things get marginally better, but it’s more accurate to say that things get worse more slowly. Donald Trump promises radical change, and the Democrats don’t. They can no longer survive on this impotent half-measures like subsidies for small business loans. They need something radical, like a New Deal, if they ever want to win again.

Yes, and to be fair, i think his failure wasn’t due to a lack of desire. Biden is an institutionalist, past the point of logic and reason. My understanding is that they can procedurally remove the filibuster without a super majority at the beginning of each session, but he failed to consider eliminating it until late in his presidency. He also still refuses to entertain expanding the court; I know he couldn’t do it, but if they had any sense at all, they’d be running on it. He has to much, “respect,” for these institutions to do anything to change them, even as they crumble in the face of fascism.

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.

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.

There was literally only one serious opponent, and his name was Dean Phillips. He couldn’t get ballot access in all 50 states, and the Democrats drove him out of politics afterward.

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

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.

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.

And if you’re a politician and people don’t vote for you, you have no one but yourself to blame. I wish Harris hadn’t run a dogshit campaign, but she did, and I’m not gonna blame voters because she was bad at her job.

Yeah, and your comment is a great example of the Democrats 2024 outreach strategy: a smug, self-righteous attitude that failed to get you any votes.

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.

I was about to downvote until I saw the community.

Oh, Harris was actually popular? That’s good! When’s the inauguration?

Astounding but not unexpected.

I mean, realistically, they’d adopt leftist talking points and then abandon them after they won, like they did in 2008.

Tim Kaine. A pro-Wall Street centrist.

I don’t think you can point to one specific thing that got Biden elected. Covid mismanagement was a huge part of it, but student debt relief and other progressive proposals that Bernie pushed the campaign into played a big part as well. Even with Covid, I think there’s a good chance that Biden would have lost if he’d run the same kind of centrist campaign that Harris and Clinton ran.