Bertuccio
“Vote for my shitty policies or the other guy will have shittier policies” is not a platform.
The point of a democratic republic is that elected officials enact the policies those who elect them want. If you don’t offer to enact those policies you don’t get elected.
Yes, non-voters were stupid to not vote for the lesser evil, but the Harris campaign violated the very basis of democracy and thought they could simply use Trump to bully people into voting for them.
Imagine a system where a fascist Boogeyman is held up every election and people reliably vote against them without regard for who they vote for. The other party could put up whatever shitty candidate they wanted whether they espouse the views of the population or not.
Not only is that not at all a fucking democracy, it was the documented strategy of the Democratic party! Except it doesn’t fucking work, which they should have learned in 2016.
The Biden campaign offered something, notably student loan forgiveness, but both Clinton and Harris’s campaigns relied on the dumbfuck Pied Piper strategy that they would offer nothing to the voters other than being not-Trump.
That’s a dumb fucking strategy because there are fewer people that will vote Democrat as the lesser evil than will vote Republican just because Republican. They have to court people with policies they actually want.
And the absolute crazy thing is they tried this in 2016 and it failed, yet somehow had the balls to try again when it mattered more.
They didn’t lead to the apathy - they pointed out the existing apathy would cost Dems the election. It’s like saying the person who said you need to wear a seatbelt caused the wreck.
You’re exactly right about people being excited for Trump and lukewarm on Harris, but that’s entirely on the Democrats for picking the platform and strategy that lost to Trump in 2016.
Harris had a notable and surprising lead when they announced Biden was out - then they changed nothing else. People didn’t just not like the candidate, they didn’t like the policies. They only changed the candidate and thought Trump was a big enough cudgel to bully people into voting even though that demonstrably doesn’t work.
Yeah. I think it was the biggest issue and was easily solvable, but the campaign was a fuck up through and through.
Across Biden and Harris they kept trying to steal a sliver of the conservative vote instead of just taking from the huge infrequent voter slice. They didn’t do anything to try to get that slice to vote for them, they just threatened them with Trump if they didn’t get out to vote.
The Harris campaign turned out great initially.
They fucked it up immediately by saying they weren’t going to be any different from Biden on Gaza and that was one of the wedge topics that had been created about Biden.
Rather than compromise with the electorate to get people out to vote, they tried to use Trump to bully voters out of the house saying he’d be worse.