• Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    No, she lost because she was black and a woman. People always underestimate just how racist and sexist the US is. Don’t fall into this trap.

    • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Women won senate races in three of the swing states she lost and a Hispanic man won a fourth. It’s hard to imagine an explanation more out of line with actual evidence.

    • teslekova@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      The polls say otherwise. She was leading after her announcement, when she was still talking about healthcare reform, economic justice, taxing the rich, etc. For about three weeks.

      Then she talked to her business rep corpo brother, and shifted gear to espousing pro-corporate policy, defending the wealthy, calling leftists Bernie bros, etc, and fell behind.

      I agree that Palestine made little difference, btw. It cost her around half a million votes, but she lost by three times that. That’s looking at state by state, too.

      She lost because she turned herself into Biden 2, instead of what people wanted her to be, which was Obama (until he became President. He lied very well, then governed well enough that we forgave him for being friends with the corps).

    • SuiXi3D@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      A THIRD of people, only slightly smaller than the third that voted for Trump, voted for Harris based on the fact that she WASN’T TRUMP. Another third didn’t vote because they felt her stance on Israel wasn’t enough to offset that she wasn’t Trump. I don’t feel it had anything to do with her race or gender.

      • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Everyone looks at the third that didn’t vote as if it would magically change everything. But even if they did vote it wouldn’t change the outcome all that much. It’s like everyone just ignores the Law of Large Numbers.

    • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      Yeah, that’s not true.

      But if it was, then you need to be asking why, in an election they claimed was existential, the Democratic Party anointed a black woman to run as their candidate against Trump.

      Because that’s the conclusion of the excuse you’re making - that the Democrats can only nominate men, or they’re choosing to lose.

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        No no, that’s the trap of their narrative. “The Democrats are always just bending over backwards trying to promote minority candidates even when the deck is stacked against them, because they’re just such true believers in progressive ideals.”

        The reality is, by playing up the “progressiveness” of a candidate’s inherent characteristics, they can be quietly used as a vehicle for conservative policies that make their donors happy. This is a strategy that’s very played out around the world, even Pakistan once had their own version of Margaret Thatcher, and Japan just go theirs recently.

        From the perspective that progressive politics are completely off the table, picking a minority candidate was a tactically reasonable choice. A candidate’s race and gender are about the only “concessions” they could give to the left, while courting their donors.

        But the problem with that is that second-wave feminism, the kind that tends to see Thatcherites as a win, never caught on in the US like it did in the UK, and third-wave, which is more popular these days, accounts for that failure and focuses more on systemic issues and policy than individual leaders.

        But any strategy that might work to get progressives to bend the knee to neoliberalism will be tried again and again, and if it fails they’ll just chalk it up to sexism or whatever other bullshit.

      • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        You don’t think they chose to to loose? No matter how you look at it seems they made a poor choice in retrospect. Anyway, I didn’t say a black woman couldn’t win or that a smart choice would be to pick the candidate based on race or gender. I do think that no poll will ever show the laten state of racism in the US though and that this sadly probably hurt Kamela and helped Trump. There’s a reason politicians in the US hardly ever even talk about a platform anymore. Most people vibe vote from a very uneducated position and didn’t know shit about her thoughts on Isreal.

    • Zombie-Mantis@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It’s possible that it she was a white man, and absolutely nothing else was different, that she very well might have just barely eeked out a victory. That’s still a failure. It should have been a blowout. It was a failure of a campaign, racism and sexism against the candidate by the general public was a component, but the least relevant one.

      • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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        2 days ago

        Exactly. People forget that Biden in 2020 under performed polls, and it’s pretty clear that absent COVID he would have lost.

      • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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        2 days ago

        Yeah. Her argument was that she was Joe Biden, but younger and more diverse. But Joe Biden was LOSING. Even before his debate performance. And he only barely won in 2020, which also should have been a blowout.

        It’s not the blackness or the femaleness, it’s doubling down on shitty uninspiring politics. An old white male Joe Biden was going to lose even worse than the middle aged black female Joe Biden.

      • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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        2 days ago

        I agree, even if Biden was 20 years younger I think he would have won. If he was 20 years younger and female and Indian he would have lost just as Harris did.

        It was definitely policy that hindered them, but also the sexism and racism.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      No, she lost because she was black and a woman.

      “Kamala Harris ran the perfect campaign, she was just stabbed in the back!”

    • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      You couldn’t mention her name around here without a bandwagon of “She’s the literal genocide queen and a vote for her is a vote to murder Palestinian children.”

      • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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        2 days ago

        I mean, she did support the genocide. Which murdered tens of thousands of Palestinian children. What is your point?

        • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Thank you for illustrating my point. And I’m sure you feel like Trump is doing a fantastic job with human rights, at home and abroad (when he comes up for air while gargling Bibi’s balls, of course).

          • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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            2 days ago

            And I’m sure you feel like Trump is doing a fantastic job with human rights

            Why don’t you just go have a nice tea party with the little strawman you’ve created?

            The only thing Trump is doing a great job at is destroying the US. Whether that’s good or not, debatable.

      • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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        2 days ago

        Since you mentioned the name, I did notice quite obviously the disrespect everyone had toward Kamala Harris in the news and online comments simply due what they called her.

        Almost everywhere, it was quite common for people to refer to her as Kamala and not Harris.

        I suspect it was either due to her being a woman, or due to her being Indian (Kamala sounds a lot more foreign than Harris).

        It was always “Kamala vs Trump” never Harris vs Trump or Kamala vs Donald.

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          Almost everywhere, it was quite common for people to refer to her as Kamala and not Harris.

          Because that’s the more unique and thus memorable part of her name. Just like “Bernie” is more memorable than “Sanders”.

          It wasn’t a sign of disrespect, sexism, or othering to call Bernie by his first name, and it wasn’t in the case of Kamala Harris either.

          Anyone who says otherwise is likely grasping at straws to explain away the fact that it was mostly her policy positions and allegiance to Biden, corporations, and Israel over the people she was SUPPOSED to represent that lost her the election rather than bigotry.

        • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          That sounds exactly like something those Sandersbros would do, they’re basically indistinguishable from r/TheTrump.

      • Enkrod@feddit.org
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        2 days ago

        But “around here” is representative of what? 5% of voters? 16% of democratic voters max? Let’s not pretend Lemmy users represent a sizable number of democratic voters.