You're in this picture whether you like it or not.
you're going to be in this photo, you just don't know it yet.
Don't worry, as an actual lefty I already know. You're the one who'd push me into the cart.
How can I push you when I'm in the cart with you?
Are we, the Democratic party out of touch?
No, it's the electorate's fault!
Nobody is arguing the DNC isn't out of touch.
however the electorate isn't much better. Cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Nice try on the strawman though, better than some.
I am not here to argue. I will not engage beyond this post no matter what is said in response because I don't want to fight.
What matters is policy. Real hard on the ground policy that real normal people can feel and see where they live.
When some wonk gets on MSNBC with a spreadsheet hooting about how much better things are with grocery prices or housing costs, that doesn't mean anything to someone who's begging for extra shifts at work so they can make rent. Those are aggregates and averages. If the 200k-500k bracket is doing better while the 13k-45k bracket isnt, the numbers still went up. That looks better in the data. But the people at the bottom are still suffering just as much as ever. They don't feel or see any improvement because there wasn't any. Not for them.
The health and performance of the stock market only matters to those on the bottom when it crashes and suddenly they're paying more for everything. At no other point does it impact them in the slightest. Those record profits aren't reinvested, they're not used to reduce the strain on consumers. Its gobbled up by a few dozen shareholders. It benefits nobody else. And if an executive or CEO has the slightest semblance of a soul and wants to help consumers they're voted out because the only responsibility is to those few dozen shareholders.
Healthcare. The ACA was a grand achievement. They took Romneycare national. Round of applause for all involved. But its still cheaper to do some form of Universal Healthcare. That would be the easiest win in history. And everyone would feel it immediately. It would help 100,000,000 people immediately. People who have been putting off medical treatment for half their lives because of the extortionist expense would immediately seek treatment. They would seek preventative treatment and raise the overall health across the country. Obesity rates drop, drug use plummets, etc.
Marijuana. Literally every person I know and interact with in my daily life uses it. Do you know the number one reason I've heard from all of them? Pain management. Again, another easy win that is supported by everyone except the ghouls who were alive when it was called "The Devil's Lettuce" and propagandized into believing its this terrible thing.
Hard Policy that people can feel and see in their daily lives. You can still court the comfortable liberals who care about the stock market and all that. They'll be fine no matter who is in office. If they need an abortion it's a weekend vacay to Zurich or somewhere. But you're never going to hold any meaningful power again without hard policy. Because for decades now the republicans have cornered the market on grievance politics and reaction. To break through that you need something real. No more vibes based nonsense. It will not work.
What strawman? When is it appropriate to hold DNC leadership accountable for losing the election, again?
I voted for her. The Democrats are still at fault.
Yep, fuck the non voters for their ignorance, fuck the Dems for being a lesser evil in the first place.
Ah yes, a perfect example of what OP was talking about. Good work finding it so we can point and laugh at the people that keep looking for someone to blame for their own choices.
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.
Doesn’t make that person wrong. If you need to be properly reached to keep yourself from voting for sweet potato Hitler, I’m sorry but you only have yourself to blame
Did the commenter say they voted for Trump?
The people who voted for Trump over Kamala are not the leftists on lemmy. I've actually only seen one or two people say that they're going to vote for Trump for some leftist reason. The majority of people said they would vote for her anyway, and a minority of people said they were abstaining.
You sound really foolish mischaracterizing your opponents. The democratic party failed. Kamala Harris failed. There was no sabotage. She campaigned a conservative platform of military, border control, unwavering support for Israel and said she was going to maintain the status quo. When asked what she would do differently from Biden her gut response was "nothing". It was a spectacular failure and highlights every single way that the democratic party has entirely lost touch with reality.
Cost of living has tripled in the last 4 years. Now try telling white working class straight people who weren't living paycheck to paycheck 4 years ago that you're going to do everything the same as the guy that came before you. The same guy who broke up the rail workers strikes. No, us trying to explain fascism or project 2025 to them did literally nothing. They don't understand it and don't care. They know that their financial situation got worse and that the democratic candidate said they wouldn't change anything. That's all they understood. They don't know what's fact or what's fiction, and they think Trump is a brilliant businessman. It doesn't matter that he's not if they all think he is.
The DNC failed. Stop trying to defend them for God's sake. How are they ever going to actually pose a challenge to far right populism or fascism if you relentlessly defend them from all criticism?
Harris ran a perfect campaign. If she was running as a (pre-Trump) republican. However, we know that:
It's Harris and the Democrats. Should people have voted? Yes. Is it understandable why people didn't want to vote for the person telling them that she'll be a good republican and support a genocide? Also yes.
You're only providing half of the argument. The other half of the argument is the fact that if you didn't support her, then you supported a fascist dictatorship.
And what happened? We got a fascist dictatorship!
Let's preface with the fact I voted for Harris, and understand where you're coming from with lesser evil voting.
But the other half of your argument is that with the way that Harris was tacking to the right to try to gain moderate voters, the choice was between voting between fascism now and fascism later down the line.
But if we vote for fascism later then we have time to distance ourselves from fascism.
By sitting at home happy that you did your job and 'defeated' fascism, until the next election where your choice is again fascism now and fascism a little less later down the line?
As the Dems keep drifting further and further right. At what point do you put your foot down and demand actual progressive policies? And how do you get those demands to actually be listened to when the party knows you'll vote for them because "at least we're not as bad as the other guys. What choice do you have?" Supporting her is a message to the Democratic party that their strategy of slowly becoming more conservative wins elections. And this is the reason that I was very conflicted about voting for her, but just held my nose and did it for the greater good.
I didn't realize a wealth tax, 25k credit for first time home buyers, support for legalized cannabis, support for trans people, etc were Republican policies.
Are there more things on my progressive checklist? Yes, definitely. Universal healthcare, for one.
Part of being an adult is not being able to get everything you want when you want it.
Part of politics in the US is understanding that some of those things that Harris supported which resulted in a candidate that was not far left enough to get progressives off the couch, are too far left for other voters.
I don't envy whoever is picking up the pieces at the DNC and trying to determine what the precise amount of leftism is that will get those 10-15 million leftists off the couch without alienating the 60-70 million that did show up.
This is especially true for the Palestine issue. How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate? Even if it was 10 million, there would still have been more who would sit this one out or vote Trump, because they'd believe the bullshit that the Palestinians are all terrorists. I truly wish it wasn't the case, but I fear the post-911 Islamophobia and the imperialist attitudes about support for Israel would have cost a pro-Palestine candidate more votes than they would have gained.
Way more than two options here.
I voted for Harris, and I encouraged others to as well. And I think the Democratic leadership royally fucked up here.
The polls kinda sucked in the end, and I think one reason is that folks were embarrassed to admit they were voting for Trump. That to me says that they voted for him not because he's a racist sexist pig, but in spite of this.
But the polls did afaik get that the economy was hugely important. And the Democrats failed here both in current policy (groceries got more expensive over the course of Biden's term), and in proposed policy messaging. No one cares about home buyer credits if you can't afford groceries. (And no, I don't think Trump has a plan to lower prices aside from shady back room deals that will ultimately cost us big
but voters want something new...)
To be clear, I voted for Biden, I voted for Harris, and I'm pretty scared about the future. But the Democrats need to learn something from this or it's same story in four years. Maybe the lesson is "we can't count on the left in this country to vote for us by default," and maybe the lesson is, "for the love of God raise hell if the cost of living goes up, and do it in a way that appeals to the lowest common denominator."
I keep hearing about grocery prices, but no one has any explanation of what Biden was supposed to do about it that he wasn't already doing, or how Trump will handle it better.
If putting a Republican administration in place that will bend over for corporations causes lower grocery prices, doesn't that just prove that corporate greed was the main driver all along? Why can't people who voted Trump for these reasons understand that?
If voters keep voting like this, corporations are just going to purposely raise prices whenever someone they don't like is in power, and the sheep will just fall for it and we'll never be able to hold these corporations accountable.
Two things can be true at once.
Everyone who didn't vote, voted third party or for Trump, or encouraged others to do the same, supported fascism coming into power in this country.
Harris failed her country when it needed her, specifically, most; and the Dem leadership in general failed the country grotesquely in the same manner.
Why are y'all so scared of blaming the people in power who failed reaching voters?
why are y'all scared of taking responsibility for allowing a Nazi to gain power when you decided to not vote?
the DNC is out of touch with voters.
that doesn't absolve the electorate from failing to rally behind a candidate that was the best choice to stop a NAZI REGIME from taking power.
if you didn't vote, or voted 3rd party, you're no better than magats.
why are y’all scared of taking responsibility for allowing a Nazi to gain power when you decided to not vote
I voted for Kamala but I still blame the DNC
the issue is two fold
a) they played games with democracy, further accelerating the erosion of whatever little faith remains in our democracy institutions. there should have been a primary, not the underhanded switcharoo we got to witness where for the first time in US history since primaries were a thing.. we had a presidential candidate nominated without a single vote
b) while voters are struggling and going through a period of profound insecurity - not only financially but in a very real social sense - they offer more of the same. neoliberal status quo. people are desperate for change and the DNC offers them nothing.
you blame the voters but you do not want to put an ounce of blame on the party that would rather lose an election than offer meaningful change
How's that tactic of browbeating and blaming voters working out for ya?
Ah, yes. All of you *checks notes* 4.5 million eligible lemmy users who abstained should be ashamed of themselves. /s
I keep reading all this finger pointing from people that actively spoke against voting for Harris.
Maybe those who ~~didn’t vote~~ abstained shouldn’t be allowed to complain.
I think it was both playing chicken against each other. Dem leadership refused to listen to "progressives", I E.: things that most Americans wanted, and the voters refused to vote until the Dems listened to them.
So they crashed into each other and now the country is going to burn down.
If these last 10 years have taught me anything, it's that most Americans are not progressives.
They don't identify that way but most Americans are in favor of progressive policies when asked
Yes you should have voted for Kamala and yes it's the Democrats at fault. Both are true.
I voted for Kamala..
It's the Democrats fault.
Yup. They fucked us royally and I'm sort of waiting to see if people organize around this. The DNC needs to go. They've known about Trump since 16 and this is the campaign they run? They're trying to elect him at this point, I don't know what else to think.
Democrats: here's a rock and two nickels
Republicans: here's everything you've ever wanted and all the libertarian shit you used to jerk off to.
Liberals after the election: how did we lose??
"I can't just run on not being the other guy? I actually have to articulate a platform and get people to like me???"
Give and Take. It doesn't matter. You aren't selling shit if you aren't offering what the people want. They wanted a rock to throw in a glass house and Trump promised to be that rock, not the Democrats. Yet, they will never learn this lesson.
There’s a perverse bunch here on lemmy that are blaming the Democrat Party for their failure to vote. They justify it by essentially saying that because they weren’t catered to (being further left than centrist platform Harris ran) that it’s the democrat’s fault we got trump. That’s some republican-level victim shit. “We did the opposite of what we should and things didn’t get better!”
No, motherfucker, you sat this one out in a battleground state so we got a fascist and that’s better than Harris? WTF kind of logic is that?
Oh we're not even waiting until 2028 to start up the infighting again. How fun. At least we'll have something to discuss while in line for the showers.
They're both right. If you didn't vote for Harris, you were incredibly misguided. But it's not my job to get Harris elected, it's the DNC's.
It may cost a lot of lives, but at least you got your moral high ground. Must be nice having the mental age of a 5yo and be content.
The left: Infighting is why Kamala lost!
Also the left: In this essay I will detail every faction of the left that is guilty of infighting, and why they are wrong...
It's amazing how we get convinced to fight each other. The reason the orange felon got elected is that people voted for him. They are at fault that he got elected. Stop bickering amongst each other and call out those who would incite you to do so!
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