Harris’ campaign shows exactly why Harris’ campaign failed.
It is true that she didn’t have enough time to put together a viable platform, but if Biden had dropped out early enough for her to develop a viable campaign and platform, that would have meant a primary, and it’s doubtful she would have won that primary.
Even if she had won that primary, it’s still doubtful that she would have assembled a viable platform and campaign. The political cliques she was aligned with were diametrically opposed to the kind of policies that would have made a viable platform.
A break from neoliberal politics was necessary. But basically all of the institutional pressure for Biden to drop out came from neoliberal diehards who were pissed at him for deviating from that line slightly, the age thing was mainly just an acceptable cover story for the insiders. Haris got her chance by appealing to those groups and thus she was never going to challenge those interests.
Oh she never in 100 years would have won a primary. She was like rank 8 of 10 in the 2020 primaries, people do not like her
I voted for her but don’t like her.
Primarily, because of her stance on prison labor which is just slavery with extra steps.
Yeah, I voted for her too, as I would have voted for Biden or for a fucking Funko doll over Trump.
The voting public didn’t care about her, but she had good connections with relevant instructional actors. That’s why she was relevant. People like trump will keep winning until the Democratic Party, as a political institution, cuts those neoliberal actors out of the coalition. If the party doesn’t, democracy will fail in America, or they will be replaced by some new party, or both.
People complaining about voters not choosing her over trump, or people not being motivated by voting for her, are just feeding in to that dark future. The only way out is standing up and demanding better candidates, refusing to accept the lesser of two evils.
Imagine not being able to beat Hitler in an election
Imagine not voting for the black lady because she has to prove herself worthy while a criminal senile pedophile can go on insane demented rants for a year and win by default.
There’s a lot of cope happening in America, and everyone is pointing fingers, but the fact is 2/3 of the electorate either voted for fascism or didn’t bother to vote against it.
But go ahead and blame everyone and everything other than the fact that American culture is fundamentally rotten and most people either want fascism or at least don’t care about whether it happens.
Well that’s a gross over-simplification. It certainly wasn’t her and the DNC’s long history of clearly ignoring the needs of the people who want to vote for them while regularly reaching for “moderate” votes. It definitely wasn’t her disconnection from Walz while hanging out with Liz Cheney for a significant amount of time.
People don’t see her as any form of significant opposition to the far-right but they do see opposing the DNC as something worth doing and I’ve come around to supporting them there. It is not their fault that the Republicans won, anyoderately sane and intelligent people would have laughed him into oblivion but the US threw tens of millions of people at Trump.
Ehhhh I think it will come out the election results were mostly faked or influenced in an illegal way. I don’t think people voted this way. But Trump had allies with voting machines.
Harris ran on a campaign of “everything is fine, status quo as usual.”
If you’re drowning in the ocean and you see two life boats, one is rowing away from you saying “you’re not drowning, everything is fine” and the other has a guy reaching his hand out that you have personally seen sink 5 other live boats he was on, you’re still going to swim towards the guy holding his hand out.
One person seemed to at least acknowledge that a lot of people were barely surviving, and maybe, maybe try his time, he would actually help which was better odds than the person who made it clear they definately wouldn’t.
Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg, who ran as a left wing centrist. And at the time they were fighting against a bloc of left wingers and a small group of communists. Sound familiar?
Hindenburg, who ran as a left wing centrist.
There wasn’t anything “left-wing” about Hindenburg. He ran on maintaining the status quo - a status quo that was a rapidly deteriorating depression with very high unemployment. He represented business interests and was never going to do any of the major reforms that would’ve been necessary to save the republic (if anything could).
The social democrats decided to throw unconditional support to these centrist parties for the sake of stability. They didn’t seem to have any actual understanding of why conditions were deteriorating, why extremism was rising, or what needed to be done in order to address it - all they could ever think to do was support the bourgeoisie in order to buy time - in order to sleepwalk into fascism.
Naturally, as Hindenburg represented bourgeois interests, he was always going to side with the far-right against the left, if he had to choose. And, since conditions were declining with no plan to actually fix anything, he was always going to end up in the position of having to choose.
I would say that there are similarities, though, yes.
So she threw intentionally for Israel. Checks out.
Kamala is so out of touch it’s outrageous. If you take things at face value and Kamala says “I wouldn’t do anything different from Biden” and you have Trump saying “Biden destroyed the USA” it seems to reason that voting for Kamala means you want more fails.
Of course, things are usually more nuanced than this, but do you think the average American voter is extremely savvy? If anything, the future of the country is determined by quips and sound bites.
Here’s a clue: if you need to hire “influence experts” to figure out how to “outreach” to younger voters, you’re out of touch. For several categories of voter, it seems that they are valued for what they pick in the voting booth instead of any kind of actual consideration.
Trump’s rhetoric and puffery makes some people believe he has their back. Kamala’s pitch seems to boil down to “I’m not that other guy”, which historically doesn’t get you very far.
It was frustrating to watch the election more or less be handed to Donald Trump, because the only segment of society the Democrats seemed to appeal to was the large corporations that hand over large amounts of donation money. The plight of the average citizen was nowhere near the top list of concerns.
you have Trump saying “Biden destroyed the USA” it seems to reason that voting for Kamala means you want more fails.
Of course, things are usually more nuanced than this, but do you think the average American voter is extremely savvy?
Sorry, but your opinion is foolish. If your “average unsavvy American voter” was going to vote against Biden just because Trump said he destroyed America, they weren’t going to vote for Kamala no matter what she said.
What’s your point? People that don’t like Biden don’t like Kamala either? I agree.
Well stop being right wing democrat
It’s so frustrating that conservatives get to vote for a candidate who shares their morals.
I am so sick of being told the problem is me not holding my nose hard enough.
I have high hopes but exceedingly low expectations that the new chair of the DNC will support democratic socialist candidates.
We didn’t need a memoir to tell us what a fuck up she was
Harris adviser says VP ran ‘flawless’ campaign
“I would posit she ran a pretty flawless campaign, and she did all the steps that [were] required to be successful,” she added. “And I think – obviously, we did not win, but I do think we hit all the marks.”
…
Nix, Harris’ campaign manager, also attributed Trump’s decision not to participate in any debate following the ABC News presidential debate on Sept. 10 as detrimental to the Harris campaign’s strategy of presenting the choice between Trump and Harris clearly to voters several times.
“I think that was hard for us to then get the attention that we would have liked to,” Nix said.
Well, there you have it. Perfect campaign. No notes. Just wish Trump had been willing to debate, because we all know the problem Harris had was getting her face out there.
Time of death:
This right here is when she lost me for sure.
So this is why you supported Trump (by not voting against him)? Wouldn’t it still be so much better than what you have now?
Votes aren’t wishes. The electoral college is a thing. Many states are locked down for one side or the other and it really doesn’t matter who any individual votes for. In fact, being from Connecticut, I’ve voted for a third party for decades because I feel like it’s the only way for my vote for president to potentially have an impact. Unless you know this person lives in a swing state you’re being really ignorant by throwing out those kinds of accusations.
I begrudgingly voted for her anyway
Because that’s the sane thing to do.
If you think Trump is worse than Harris but didn’t vote for Harris then you deserve the stupid bed you helped make us all sleep in. 🤷
Edit:
Always happy to get the overnight downvotes from the euro brigade. The true experts of US electoral politics. Thanks guys!
I’ve only seen this phenomenon on Lemmy where it’s a hard stance all or nothing about every hot topic. Also, I think many here are privileged people. After all, it’s not the Lemmy user’s families being abducted at immigration hearings or whose kids are losing their only meal option because Republicans ended school lunches. So they yap all day about the genocide in Gaza, don’t bother to vote and the cycle repeats. Because in the end, they personally are not affected
Why did you vote for someone even worse than Trump? If Kamala had won, someone even worse than Trump would have got the Republican nomination in 2028. And they would have easily beat Kamala then. She wouldn’t have done anything to alter the conditions that lead to Trump. And now at least Republicans are likely to lose in 2028 (dooming about the end to elections aside.) And more critically, we actually have a shot at getting in Democrats that might actually be able to do something about fighting fascism.
You didn’t vote to fight fascism. You just voted for even worse fascism four years down the line.
Article was a great read. This part really resonated with me.
It may seem petty to use this incident, but it does illustrate Harris’s expectation that the world should conform to her needs. Towels on the far side of the room? Someone else must fetch them. A slot as the Democrat presidential candidate that party leaders conveniently made sure would be uncontested by anyone else, a massively well-funded campaign that raked in over a billion dollars and the support of celebrities like Oprah and Beyoncé, a popular vice presidential candidate, a huge boost in the polls as soon as she stepped into the campaign… and, yet, somehow, her loss is still anyone’s fault but her own. Why are my towels on the other side of the room? Who will fetch them for me?
It really did feel that way in hindsight. That we all were just supposed to conform to her and not the other way around.
I remember Hacks on Tap talking about how their contacts were frustrated that Harris wasn’t out doing more national television interviews and that she wasn’t really putting herself out there. This feels like another example of the towel in the bathroom.
So… the Dem strategy was… run an insufferable, stuffy, haughty narcissist to counter a more bombastic, less classy, insufferable narcissist…???
I was never a big fan, but I was passionate about supporting her from the moment Biden stammered through that debate until this moment in her DNC speech: https://youtube.com/shorts/-UQliWnKnqY
This was the moment when she did the heel turn away from all the clever, momentum building moves that assembled a surprisingly left-friendly coalition. Everything after this was punching left and she lost as a result.
I still think Biden’s refusal to let go of the reins until way way too late is what doomed her primarily. As VP, she had to hold and defend Biden’s exact policies and positions, even the unpopular ones, while he was running. By the time he finally quit, she was basically stuck inside the rotting corpse of his campaign, having painted herself into a corner on every issue.
Whats the word for when you don’t really fully like someone, so you don’t vote for them, thereby giving the edge to the other guy, who you don’t like even more?
It’s called “right wing stupidity” and we should be calling out these worthless dumbfucks wherever we can. Although we should be clear that it does not seem like those particular brainless fools made enough of a difference.
Spine? Conviction?
Whatever it is, the important takeaway is if future campaigns take the same approach, they’re liable to get the same results.
I am not trying to be political or upset anybody of either side. I blame Joe Biden for this, before you judge or get upset or disagree with me–just wait. I believe this is particularly the reason she lost. She was left only from July to November to figure out her platform, determine a potential running mate, and come up with ideas.
Usually they start campaigning around the midterms leaving nearly 2 years. She only had 4-5 months to prepare. She had limited amount of time to prepare her political campaign, to figure out her agenda how to get her message out there to everybody. Wait for time for people to hear it. They were not sure of her policies, they thought she was just an extension of Joe Biden because she didn’t have time.
This is just one factor. She did a very excellent job for the few months she had left. She could have done a better job if Joe Biden had not ran a second term.
Then it upset people that Democrats didn’t hold an open primary. She would have still won most likely, but for the younger generation and others. It was a turn off, they said it was a form of tyranny. (Of course it wasn’t. Even Republican party in 2020 cancelled primaries in some states)
Then you had states cleaning up the ‘voting rolls’ people didn’t realize they were unregistered, and ran out of time to register again. In a lot of states, I don’t believe you can register on the day you vote. I might be wrong though.
No she is rightfully to blame. Her platform was “Nothing will change” and “Israel has a right to defend itself”. If she would have not said those 2 things she would have won.
She refused to appear in unscripted events. People point to Trump’s podcast appearances as the reason he won, but in my opinion it’s closer to the truth to say that Kamala refusing to appear unless everything was closely controlled is what really cost her.
Some of that may also be that the secret service doesn’t allow for to much non “closely controlled” environments. Not sure exactly how that works, but I assume you have to let them know where you are going to be in advance and they figure out who is going to be there and set perimeter and everything else, which if you are nervous I imagine you fall into a “I should prepare for this interview” having hours/possibly days to do so.
She was left only from July to November to figure out her platform, determine a potential running mate, and come up with ideas.
She didn’t have too little time. She had too much time. She could have won if Biden had died a week before the election, and she had to take over last minute. The peak of her popularity was right when she got the candidacy. And it was all downhill from there. The more voters got to know her, the less they liked her. If she had had more time, it would have been much worse.
She was a deeply unlikable candidate that ran dead last in the primary she ran in. She was chosen by Biden as VP precisely because she was seen as unelectable and thus not a serious rival for Biden’s position.
Low key racism and American idiots who pretended that the black lady was worse than trump and stayed home
Enough of America is racist, sexist or lazy enough to not vote for Harris and it got us in the position we are in now.
Ahh yes. This tired, losing canard.
America will vote for immigrants. It will vote for women. It will vote for black people. It will vote to defend trans people.
It doesn’t want to vote for apologists to corporatism.
Its very clear.
It’ll also vote for Trump who is King Capitalism.
What alternative did you provide them?
You do understand that your approach to rhetoric is fundamental to why Democrats lost and Trump won?
I’ve told you before that the reason Trump won is because people voted for him and others decided not to vote.
others decided not to vote
And why is that?
Because they didn’t give a shit if Trump won and did everything he said he would do.
As he is doing now.
Or, and this might be completely revolutionary towards your thinking…
Maybe how you approach politics is harmful and supports rightwing movements.
Race and gender had absolutely nothing to do with it. Democrat voters as a whole was trying to tell the party they are tired of old white rich men making decisions for them, she did absolutely nothing to differentiate herself from those old rich white men. Voters by and large said we have a red line and that red line is genocide but she continued anyway. His administration went on day after day after day telling us that the economy is good, we are not struggling when we could see in our day-to-day lives that yes we are struggling. The only message that sends is that they are not listening to us.
The DNC fucked around and found out
Lugging Cheney around was a wtf move.
Then why did America end up voting the polar opposite of everything you say they stand for then?
Because there’s a vast and well supported propaganda ecosystem on the right keeping their enthusiasm for kicking the shit outta the queers up.
Elections are won by getting your voters excited to vote for you. Republicans did, Democrats didn’t.
Democrats have told voters for generations there are only 2 choices to vote for. They exercised another right, abstain. If the party thought trump was a serious threat they would have primaried the senile guy that refused to step down
They exercised another right, abstain.
They should have voted and left the Presidential race empty on their ballots. All those down-ballotnstate and local races could have really made an impact. And strategists only care about the policy issues of likely voters.
Most people I’ve encountered that refused to vote for Biden or Harris voted downline
Glad to hear it. If I’m reading this correctly, only 13 districts nationwide split for Trump with Democratic candidates down-ballot. So to me that suggests far more people who refused to vote for Harris simply refused to vote outright.
Number of times a candidate has run against or in place of the incumbent and failed miserably before Harris: 3
…And succeeded: 0
Number of times a candidate has run against or in place of the incumbent and failed miserably after Harris: 4
It was a terribly weak position, but she foolishly believed in the American people to pick the best of two bad options.
She was misguided.
Bill Maher did a bit, just before taking a break in his show where he discussed future news that would happen while on break. He said Biden would drop out, and then he looked at the top contenders. He really crushed Harris, saying she would never be president.
