If only they had compromised more and reached across the aisle harder. That will surely fix it next time.
“meet me in the middle”, says the unjust man.
you take a step towards him. he takes a step back.
“meet me in the middle”, says the unjust man.
It’s obvious that Liz Cheney wasn’t enough. Next time we must revive Henry Kissenger to get his endorsement. Surely that’ll win the moderates
It is also time for the Democratic Party to genuinely embrace progressive policies. It is evident that not many people were enthusiastic about Harris’s moderate campaign policies.
It was time in 2016. Biden barely won in 2020 and somehow Dems took that as a mandate to be even more conservative. At this point I have no idea how progressive ideas ever get implemented.
I’ve heard so many contradictory explanations today. And thought more still. I guess the idea that Kamala and/or Biden and/or Democrats in general didn’t engage enough with media (didn’t sit to be interviewed by Joe Rogan or whatever) is as good a theory as any. But I don’t think anyone knows WTF just happened.
I am 35.
My entire lifetime, the way Dems run presidential campaigns, the way they push the message is heavily, heavily reliant on mainstream legacy media outfits talking about and repeating their announcements and rallies.
Meanwhile, the Republicans do the same… but they also control the vast majority of talk radio stations, and since the internet came into wide use, the number of popular internet figures with overt right wing tendencies just vastly, vaaaastly outstrips similar figures on the left, in terms of viewership and funding.
Basically, the Dems still think that dying legacy media, with fewer and fewer readers/viewers, that increasingly has to sell out by running more bombastic, shocking news, and/or cowtowing to the whims of their corpo owners…
… they still think that this nearly dead legacy media will give them the same treatment as in the 70s, when there were only 3 fucking TV news channels and newspapers op eds were far more influential.
They should have learned that they needed a real way of pushing their message after 2015/16.
Trump dominated the media without paying anything for it simply by being bombastic and saying insane shit.
That should have set off a whole bunch of alarm bells that … Dems can’t rely on news stations giving roughly equal air time to them.
But it did not.
The Republicans, through their various think tanks and foundations, funded the hell out of every one willing to repeat their message on any medium for 35 years.
Dems have never had anything like this, even though the average Republican thinks George Soros is doing something like that.
Now, combine all of the above with another trend the Republicans have manifested into reality over 35 years:
Public Education has been decimated. The average American now has critical reading comprehension skills roughly equivalent to a 6th or 7th grader.
So even if huge numbers of people were still reading Op-Eds in papers… they would not understand any moderately complex discussions of policies, or history, or economics or anything anyway.
… And this is all just a critique of how the Democrats have been at distributing their messages.
The actual content of those messages is an entirely different failure.
So what’s the solution? What should the Democrats have done? Pay Mark Zuckerberg to run left wing propaganda? Prop up a bunch of am radio talk shows?
I don’t have answers, but it’s hard to imagine what specifically they did wrong. This might have been inevitable, maybe they screwed this country up to the point where there is no winning move.
I mean… basically yes?
They could prop up AM radio talk shows.
Thom (sp?) Hartmann and Sam Seder are … basically the only two left wing, ‘big name’ radio talk shows that still even exist post the 00’s.
They exist almost entirely off of small individual donations…
Do the same thing for left wing youtubers/twitch streamers.
Almost all left wing people like that with any name recognition are doing it without any big name donors, as opposed to the Republicans who have a myriad network of wealthy donors basically bankrolling them.
… and that would just be mirroring the Republican strategy.
Maybe they could actually innovate too?
But yeah, this would be like … 30 years too late.
What did the Dems do wrong?
Be unimaginably complacent by placing their faith in the integrity of norms and institutions that the Republicans have very obviously been trying to destroy for about 20 years.
Its the primary problem of being a liberal.
You just assume the rules and norms you follow apply to everyone.
It is not part if their worldview that those rules and norms can be destroyed by cleverly manipulating them against themselves.
What should they do now?
Pff, I dunno, its too late, we have now arrived at fascism.
I’ve been saying this (along with actually shift your platform to the left instead of to the right) to every mainline, Obama will save us all and everything is fixed now, standard liberal Democrat for almost 20 years.
They have all acted like I am a hyperbolic delusional nutjob when I explain that the status quo trajectory will sooner than later lead the country further and further to the right untill we end up with corporate theocratic fascism.
Well now we have that.
Its… kinda like the climate, or preventative medicine and a base healthy lifestyle vs checking into the ER as an overweight smoker who broke their leg from the pain of trying to pass a kidney stone.
Fixing the mess is orders of magnitude more costly and difficult than preventing it.
A major problem is also that progressive messages are complex, and don’t offer easy answers. They require that people engage, and put in a great deal of effort… that will mostly not bear fruit for them, or their children, or their children’s children… but will help over time.
But people are exhausted. And sick of waiting for things to get better… so they fall prey to the easy answers. Which is what the far-right offers. Easy answers and excuses for why everyone else is at fault.
Part of the problem is that people only want the easy answers. Which is not an easy fix. It requires convincing them of the lie of easy answers.
But Kamala went on The View and played the opening act for a Beyonce concert! She did everything right
I genuinely beleive that Joe Rogan alone will be responsible for at least a million votes getting mobilized
Even if she did she would have gave the same pre planned long form answers she gave on her fox interview.
The social media clips of her telling off the interviewer for interrupting never included the question she was asked for a reason.
She gave dodgy politician answers and expected republicans and third party voters to go for that.
I was also very confused why they thought they could scold people into voting for her too. Barrack and his wife did it, and so did kamala. Insulting people who might have issues voting for you seems like the opposite way to gain their vote.
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain the strategy there.
lol
Isn’t this how every other authoritarian regime on the planet operates? Control all the main media sources, promote only the main messages and propaganda that you want people to see and listen to, repeat it all endlessly, repeat it everywhere, fund it so that this media machine has all the resources it needs to maintain everyone’s attention all the time.
Then when someone on the outside looks in … everyone inside will think they are weird because they exist in their own reality.
How did I escape? Or did I? I’m probably just a tool of the machine that causes good Christian people to huddle back into their safe space otherwise I’ll give them trans.
Why did we even want liberalism to be mainstream (other than to ease the suffering)? These people don’t deserve to be free of the fairty tales that bind them and make them attack their own person hood. I feel for you, the future disaffected youth of America. This might be grim and will probably get me a ban but instead of making punk rock music, do us all a favor and smother your parents in their sleep.
Unless anyone here has spent time on other social media platforms that are unfiltered you really don’t have a clue what a cesspool of troll farm propaganda that has been pouring out for the last several months.
And it all stopped last night.
Non-stop made-up bullshit blaming Harris for the last four years for some completely undefined fault, high fuel prices even though they’re down, grocery prices, inflation, cost of housing, etc. etc. Just a steady sewer pipe drain of dreck for months. I bet Putin got his money’s worth.
dnc had spent 1.6 billion on ads vs a billion by trump, so we don’t get to make that excuse.
there was plenty of pro-harris spam on insta, reddit and even my linkedin feed.
we are again not accepting that dnc is a corporate entity fooling us. they support lgbt, abortion etc because it cost their donors nothing. ask them to compromise on inflation, housing or even genocide and we are told “stfu, do you want to get trump elected ?”
they don’t care about america, bernie said it best here
“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not,”
edit: source on media spend https://digiday.com/media-buying/presidential-ads-mark-a-divide-as-both-candidates-spend-big-in-battleground-states/