Fair enough. I mean I would definitely say it's true that Starmer has moved rightwards since he was elected as Labour leader, but I guess I would consider him now being somewhere in the centre. People on the right would say he's far-left I bet. "Two-tier Keir" and all that.
WestBromwich
joined 4 months ago
Maybe in some countries they wouldn't refer to Labour as centre-left, but I think the majority of Brits would agree with Labour being called centre-left.
Starmer would probably like to introduce more left-wing policies, like when he said a couple of years ago that he wanted to abolish university tuition fees, but Corbyn's election losses seemed to lead Starmer to believe that he needed to be more centrist in order to successfully replace the Tories.
Anyway I think most people in Britain and around the world would refer to Labour as a centre-left party even if they disagree with Labour's policies.
The reason I think Labour are centre-left is because I think most people would think of them that way. I'm not trying to defend them or anything like that, I didn't even vote this year. I just think that's how most people would refer to them.
Maybe left and right are relative terms and Labour are centre-left within the context of British politics... but maybe this is the wrong community for me to say things like that.
I think in any country you have to appeal to undecided voters in the centre in order to win an election. So yes maybe the Dems shouldn't appeal to "the right" but they probably need to appeal to the centre.
I think centrism can win elections though. In my country, the UK, elections are usually won by whichever party captures the centre ground. Keir Starmer won in the UK this year by being centrist. Previously David Cameron and Tony Blair were pretty centrist, and both won multiple elections.
I guess ideally Biden should never have run for a second term, and they could have had proper primaries.
Fair points. Biden won enough men in 2020 though. Maybe Kamala was just seen as too leftist or too focused on women's issues or something... I'm not saying she was those things, but maybe some people saw her that way.
Fair. Maybe voters cared about personalities though. And they thought Kamala was partly responsible for rising prices under Biden's term, so maybe they weren't as bothered by other policy areas.
True. Maybe Harris should have focused more on working class endorsements, union endorsements, etc. I dunno.
About the same number of people voted for Trump in the last two elections (about 74 million people) while the Democrat vote went down from 81 million to 69 million. So maybe some people around the political centre (independent voters, etc) felt Harris wasn't compelling enough.
I dunno really I'm just guessing. The Democrats will probably have a lot of data and exit polls telling them which demographics they need to do better with.