If you couldn’t find one single thing on your ballot to vote for in this election, then you’re never going to vote, for any reason.
This is why elections famously always have the same amount of turnout.
Objection
joined 6 months ago
And I really dislike the implication that voters should be expected to change to meet the campaigns that politicians want to run as opposed to politicians changing their campaigns based around what the voters want.
The blame should always go upwards, but instead it's always pointed downward.
Yeah, they're just passing the buck to the people responsible for winning votes who made every decision about how to run the campaign that lost.
That's sarcasm, by the way. I know how thick you people can be, so I thought I’d just point that out.
If I hate the game, and the players are the ones with the power to change the rules of the game and choose not to, where does that leave me?
Right, and I suppose I'm supposed to interpret that number as being completely unaffected by the specific woman who was running for president.
By the way, funny you should mention that it "dropped by 9 points" without mentioning the actual numbers. Only 30% said that they weren't ready for a woman president. The vast majority of that 30% is going to vote Republican even if you run the straightest whitest malest person you can find.
Of course, as always, "The Democratic Party cannot fail, it can only be failed." Never point the finger upwards, only ever downward. Their loss cannot possibly have anything to do with their strategies, the voters are always the ones to blame. This refusal to self-criticize is exactly what caused the Democrats to repeat the same blunders that caused Trump to win in 2016. Get your head out of the sand.
I understand what you're saying, what I'm saying is that it's wrong, makes little sense, and is almost completely baseless.
Right, but this is literally the same election we're talking about, in the same states that she needed to win, that two women got elected. If the majority of voters are willing to vote for a woman for senate, then it's pretty ridiculous to suggest that they're specifically only opposed to a woman being president. There is not a significant voter bloc that is specifically opposed to a woman being president but is fine with women in any other position.
Your speculation is not "fact." Clinton and Harris are a grand total of two data points that you're using to draw this conclusion, and they were both deeply flawed candidates. Blaming their gender is just a deflection from their actual faults and strategic blunders, of which there were many.
That's completely false. Tammy Baldwin won in WI, Elissa Slotkin won in MI. It's completely incoherent to blame the fact that she's a woman.
Harris' message did not resonate with people struggling to pay their bills. She completely attached herself to the policies of the Biden administration and the broader status quo.
Regardless of whatever skills he may have, material conditions are the primary reason for his relevance and success. This is generally how the world works. People say the same thing about Hitler, that he was so charismatic that he just hoodwinked the German people, but it was really the declining material conditions that allowed him to come to power. Trump is merely a symptom of a larger disease, and even when he's gone the disease will remain, the conditions that created him will still be there waiting for another person to take advantage of the same things in the same ways.
It's not that simple. Sure, he's conning people, but it's not because he's particularly clever or skilled. He's simply offering them an image that's different from the establishment Democrats (and establishment Republicans, for that matter) who they despise. Of course, the right-wing propaganda machine plays a role, but the people themselves do a lot of the work towards inventing explanations for how he's on their side. They believe in him because they want to believe in him, and they want to believe in him because he presents himself as an alternative to a failing system.
Not surprised. The Harris campaign ran on the status quo, which many people are dissatisfied with, and pivoted to the right on various policy, when the people who like right-wing policies already have a party catering just to them - and that can come at the cost of alienating their own base or fracturing the coalition. For instance, many Latinos trend conservative in their values, but they voted Dem in the past because of all the "Build the wall" stuff. But then the Democrats said, "Trump's just using it to posture, we're the ones who are actually going to build the wall," and they lost a bunch of Latinos and didn't win over Republicans.
Promoting the Dick Cheney endorsement was an obvious unforced error, not even Republicans like him. Honestly a lot of their attempts to "reach across the aisle" seem more like patting themselves on the back for being "reasonable" than genuine attempts to understand and appeal to actual human beings. Like, generally, I think it's a better strategy to accept that most of them are unreachable and focus on mobilizing your base, but if you are going to commit to that approach and make it the whole backbone of your campaign, then you actually have to understand who you're trying to reach and how they think and why they do the things they do. Like, there are genuine ideological rifts on the right that are exploitable, like nationalism vs libertarianism, but Cheney and Bush tried to do something that both sides of that hate and it was a colossal failure, so bringing him on board just papers over those disagreements and makes it easier for them to consolidate around Trump.
A major problem that liberals have is that they're attached to this idea of "reasonableness" where the best ideas will just naturally win out in the marketplace of ideas, and when the world doesn't actually work like that they just can't accept it. The right isn't reasonable, they are (at least sometimes) proud of not being reasonable, because reason is the tool of the educated elite. And that actually almost makes a weird kind of sense, it's like, imagine arguing that the earth is flat against a five year old - you could probably "win," right? You have way more information in your repertoire and more experience with debate than they do, so you could selectively pick-and-choose things to support your point. So imagine being that five year old, having the sense that the adult is taking you for a ride, but knowing that you can't debate or reason well enough to win on their terms. That's the kind of psychology that we're dealing with.
There are three ways you can respond to that situation. Either you say, "OK, these people are crazy and unreachable, let's focus on mobilizing our own base," or you say, "OK, we can work with that, we just have to go beyond reason and try to build trust or reach them on an emotional level," (good luck with that, since that emotional level includes absolutely despising establishment career politicians, along with a substantial number of people who make up the dem coalition), or, lastly, you can keep trying to reason with them, and you will lose. Like, you could legitimate run a candidate who policy-wise is to the right of the Republican candidate on every issue and right-wingers still wouldn't vote for them if they looked and sounded like a typical Democrat. You just have to wrap your head around that concept.
What a ridiculous takeaway. They moved right and lost, but somehow this shows that moving right was the correct decision? That's nonsense, it shows the exact opposite.
The Cheneys do not represent any substantial constituency. Virtually nobody likes them, right or left. Kamala went chasing after the mythical "moderate republican swing voter," and they told her go fuck yourself the way they always do, and in the meantime she neglected her actual base which meant less enthusiasm and mobilization.
The democrats have tried this shit over and over. The people who like right-wing politics already have a party catering to them that they're happy with. How many times does this strategy have to result in abject failure before you start to question it?