Let me ask you, did voting for Biden actually help?
It had been stalled. If we were able to stall long enough for Trump to kick the bucket, I would have called that a win
One of the reasons Kamala failed was that her central message was crippled from the start. Her main campaign plank was that Trump was a threat to democracy. The problem with this was that Biden didn’t treat him like a threat to democracy.
Trump should have been arrested on day one of Biden’s term. He should have been rapidly tried in a military tribunal, had the book thrown at him, and quickly been convicted. And SCOTUS justices that dared to try to intervene should have been charged as accomplices tried with similar swiftness.
Biden didn’t do that. He appointed a Republican to lead the DOJ. That Republican then sat on his ass for two years, then began a slow investigation, only for Trump to eventually run out the clock.
Biden did not treat Trump like a threat to democracy. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus the last time there was a similarly-scaled threat to democracy. Lincoln ruled like a dictator during the Civil War. He had pro-Southern newspapers, in the North, censored and shut down. He actually showed what you need to do to a true threat to democracy.
True threats to democracy require bold and sometimes quite draconian response. It’s an emergency, democracy is on the line, and drastic action is required.
If you DON’T act with that kind of haste, you show that you don’t actually feel democracy is being threatened that much. Biden proved that he really didn’t believe his own rhetoric. Biden in his heart really doesn’t believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, as he certainly didn’t act like he thought he is.
This is why Kamala’s central campaign message fell flat on his face. There is ZERO reason an incumbent should ever be able to run on a platform of “my opponent tried to steal the last election.” If you’re the incumbent, it was YOUR responsibility to protect the republic from threats against it. If your opponent is truly a threat to the republic, why weren’t they locked up or sent to the gallows a long time ago?
That was the central problem of Kamala’s core message. If someone tries to violently overthrow the government, you are supposed to send the military after them and turn them into a fine mist or turn the justice department on them and see them hanged for treason. You’re not supposed to just let them off the hook and then bitch to the electorate that they’re dangerous and can’t be trusted. And if someone is a true threat to the republic, you shouldn’t even let the Supreme Court get in your way.
Why vote when you can just leave it to the idiots?
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 keep reading all this finger pointing from people that actively spoke against voting for Harris.
I think that’s just your confirmation bias talking
Maybe those who didn’t vote shouldn’t be allowed to complain.
I’ll tell all the convicts, LGBTQ children and… every non-US citizen who’s going to suffer through another Trump term.
Be realistic. I’m being critical of eligible citizens who chose not to vote.
Excellent job modeling both gaslighting and a strawman in the same pointless criticism, btw.
I voted for Walz.
Dems suck at winning elections because for 40 years now their strategy has been a losing one of “try being Republican-light.” They’re too corrupted by corporate bribes to right the ship, hopefully it sinks into a sea of conservative ignorance and an actual leftist party can rise from the ashes.
The more right the US shifts, the more it will be controlled by money over masses. Unless by “rise from the ashes” you actually expect a successful overthrow of the US government by a people’s revolution which is pretty laughable in this polarized nation.
They’re too corrupted by corporate bribes to right the ship, hopefully it sinks into a sea of conservative ignorance and an actual leftist party can rise from the ashes.
And you know what’s really sad about this? They don’t even have to be! Kamala massively outspent Trump. One thing the DNC refuses to learn is that there is such a thing as saturation in campaign messaging. Past a point, past a certain number of commercials, flyers, mailer, door-hangers, text messages, and on and on? At some point it just stops working. At some point you just start annoying people. Hillary massively outspent Trump in 2016, and Kamala massively outspent Trump in 2024. It didn’t matter. Most of those dollars were completely wasted showing ads to voters that were already completely over-saturated with ads.
Maybe you need corporate money for the type of wasteful campaign Kamala ran, but it’s not like she didn’t also raise millions and millions in individual donations. Even in the era of big money politics, it is entirely possible to bring in enough small donations to run a presidential campaign. All that corporate money that Kamala sold her soul for was ultimately spent preaching to the choir or trying to reach the unreachable.
No your just going to go further right as a country and all the special leftist that stayed home we’ll cry how did this happen.
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.
lets teach through parable.
A drifter has been walking through a desert for five days without water. if he doesn’t get water in the next hour he will die. he happens upon a small oasis.
the drifter rushes to find water and all he sees is:
- a small murky puddle covered in muck and grime
- a bucket of watery shit
- a camel
- a dried out corpse
he looks at his options and is debating which would be better. he starts to move towards the puddle to drink from it when suddenly the camel begins to relieve itself.
he stops to consider drinking the urine.
you are the drifter. the shit bucket is trump. the puddle is kamala. the piss is stein. the corpse is the abstained voter.
which would you have chosen?
The choice is obvious, we eat the sand in hopes it will quench our thirst. Thats basically what we did.
A murky pond of still water might not be a good choice no matter how thirsty you are. The bacteria in it could kill you. If you’re thirsty and lost at sea, I hope you won’t drink the salt water. That’s the issue with the insistance that people should vote for Harris “to stop trump”. It’s short sighted and does nothing to address the long-term problem of, election after election, being presented two shitty options and told it’s critical that you eat shit instead of voting for the person that will actually fight for your values. Sorry the Democrats keep refusing to learn this lesson, but they are just as much to blame for Trump’s victory as the people who voted for him.
Out of your options above, the camel might actually be the safest option. You’ll at least get some hydration out of it if you don’t cook it to shit.
If you’re an hour away from dying from thirst, then a murky pond of water filled with bacteria, is better than a bucket of shit or camel piss.
bacteria may kill you in days. But you will die of thirst in one hour.
You completely missed the entire point of the exercise. If I make it any dumber, I’ll have to write it in crayon.
You were so close though. Go enjoy your cup of sand.
You’ll jump through any hoop to say the voters should have drank more piss instead of saying the piss should have cleaned itself up
I don’t just mean Gaza, I mean democratic candidates need to find a way to excite rural voters by giving them an actual path to financial stability
Your parable doesn’t even make sense, the election wasn’t lost by educated people refusing to drink piss, it was won by republicans by getting uneducated voters to happily eat shit thinking it’ll give them super powers. (I mean educated on the issues like “what is a tarrif”)
Don’t get pissed dude.
you’re not supposed to drink the camel piss. Hell, you weren’t even supposed to drink the bucket of shit!
You should have drank the pond scum. Would have at least bought you a few days until you get some help for dysentery.
But you decided to eat the sand. You poor dumb bastard, now you’re drier than turkey jerky.
You’re in this picture whether you like it or not.
Don’t worry, as an actual lefty I already know. You’re the one who’d push me into the cart.