It seems like having policies that make people want to vote for Democrats would deliver more immediate and lasting results than allowing American conditions to continue deteriorating and hoping our opponents receive the blame.

Oof, I just watched it, and I can immediately see why it was effective. Yeah, “Willie Horton,” is a good comparison.

YUP. She ran a campaign that was focused on middle-class ideas, but very low on working-class ideas. If you’re struggling to buy groceries, starting a small business is as unattainable as purchasing a yacht, no matter what kind of tax credit you’re offered. I didn’t see the ad you’re talking about, but I got that exact feeling when I heard she was campaigning with Liz Cheney.

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right, and I think that’s why he’s been so effective at winning over people who have gone to Trump. We can argue over whether or not the political class would ever let him have been the nominee, much less allowed hid agenda to pass, but I think his policies are very clear to everyone: higher minimum wages, higher taxes on billionaires, Medicare for everybody. People find that much easier to understand how that will improve their life tomorrow instead of a small business tax credit program.

Yeah, that’s certainly how I feel.

The only reflection I am able to accomplish is to look at the GOP and say “Worse, tho”.

OK, but so far, that hasn’t been a very effective electoral strategy. I think we should try something else.

Well, I would disagree with a lot of that. The average voter may not understand policy nuance, but it’s not just vibes based. Trump made a case for being anti-war. He won the first Republican primary in no small part by being the only person on stage to say that the Iraq War was a mistake. He promised to bring the troops home from Afghanistan and then set a withdrawal date (and then changed it several times, and eventually set it to after his term ended so that Biden would get all the bad optics). I think Trump is a manipulative liar, but his supporters have concrete examples of things he’s said and done that make them think he’s anti-war.

The economy was the number one issue for voters, and I don’t think voters’ reaction was vibes based either. Democrats almost always improve working class conditions more than the Republicans, but look at what happened during the Biden administration; inflation went way up, the interest rates went way up, and what the best jobs market for workers in the last 40 years got nuked. People might not understand why that happened, but they know what happened.

From where I’m sitting, the solution is to go so big that voters can’t misinterprete where you stand. Biden and Harris could have gone after the price gouging that was responsible for so much of the inflation during their administration, but instead, it was a footnote on the campaign. They could have come up with some kind of endgame for Ukraine other than, “send them as many weapons as they need indefinitely.” They should have taken a more confrontational stance with Netanyahu, since he was actively sabotaging the peace process while holding out for a Trump administration.

But again, let’s just say I’m entirely wrong: voters are idiots, they understand nothing, and their decisions are based entirely on vibes, not reality. The question remains the same; what do we do? Because right now, the strategy seems to be offering them incremental, technocratic solutions, then insulting them when they don’t understand how they’re better than Republican lies. And it doesn’t seem to be working.

Saying they’re the party of complacency isn’t really accurate. Obama may not have started any new wars (although there’s an argument to be made that his operations in Somalia represented a new, unsanctioned war front), but he didn’t get us out of Afghanistan, kept joint military operations going in Iraq, and created a massive, unaccountable robot assassination program that killed thousands of people, including U.S. citizens. That’s wasn’t an act of complacency, it was expansion.

To me, the difference in Democrats’ and Republicans’ positions on military use can be best summerize by how Obama and Trump reported drone deaths. Obama reclassified every adult male in a target zone as an enemy combatant so that he could artificially lower the number of civilian casualties. Trump just stopped reporting the numbers. One is obviously better than the other, but I wouldn’t call either anti-war.

But let’s say you’re right; the Democrats are mostly anti-war, but they’re too complacent with the status quo, and Trump voters are all idiots who can’t tell the difference. What are we gonna do about it? 51% of the electorate went to Trump. Are the Democrats going to stand up to the military industrial complex to make their anti-war stance so clear even an idiot could see it? Or are they just gonna lose forever?

I mean, yeah, this guy is wrong for thinking Trump will keep us out of wars, and the idea that you would vote for someone you think it like Hitler to stop new wars is both contradictory and morally reprehensible. But I’ve heard this take before (well, except the Hitler part, that’s bat-shit insane) and it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party. That’s a big shift that’s occurred in my lifetime, and it’s worth examining.

Those are the three branches of the U.S. government, but in this context, they mean the three institutions required to pass legislation; a bill must go through both the House and the Senate and then be signed by the President to become a law. If Democrats had taken one of those institutions, they could have slowed the Republicans’ agenda…

Yup. Call your Senators and tell them you have no faith in the party leadership, and that Chuck Shcumer cannot continue as Senate Minority Leader. If they’re up for reelection in the next two years, tell them you’re happy to support a primary challenger if it’s the only way to get change.

Weird that whenever you give this spcheil, you always leave out the part where Hillary’s campaign secretly took over the party in 2015 while she was a candidate in the DNC’s supposedly fair and unbiased primary:

When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party…When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

…OK, I’m fairly sure I understood…most of that. Thanks for the alternative perspective. I’ve generally only heard the negatives from people who’ve had their pensions replaced by 401Ks, so I guess it’s good to know what people see as the positives.

I will give Biden credit for trying. I expect him to pull an Obama and pivot to centrist policy the second he got into office, but he really tried to pass all the progressive things he ran it. He was just incredibly ineffective at it and basically wound up with a pretty standard (though very large) infrastructure bill that he wanted everyone to pretend was a huge progressive victory.

Huh, I didn’t think about how the 401K is transferable, but it makes sense that it’s a plus; it’s how everyone wishes health insurance worked. But does it matter if you move companies if your next employer offers a similar pension? Wouldn’t that mean you just had two smaller monthly payments vs. one larger one? And weren’t pensions protected from bankruptcy by Employee Retirement Income Security Act? I thought it was because of that Act that companies justified phasing out their pensions for 401Ks.

Sorry for all the questions. Pensions are sort of an artifact of a lost time for folks my age, but most folks that I know that are my parents’ age seem to prefer the stability of their pensions to 401Ks.

A) 3 random, disconnected positions are not a lurch to the left, they’re just…3 random policies.

B) She abandoned her Medicare for All position before the end of her 2020 run for something less progressive.

C) None of these happened after 2020, how is any of it evidence that they went too far left in 2024?

Anyway, I’m gonna stop replying now. It’s a waste of my time, and I’m starting to feel like I’m punching down.

You think they went left? Are you drunk? Are you doing a bit? Did you forget the /s? If you legitimately think she went left, you’re probably the only person on the planet that thinks so:

New York Times: Harris to Court Moderates With a Onetime Right-Wing Provocateur

Wall Street Journal: Kamala Harris, with Liz Cheney, Courts Moderates in Pennsylvania

Politico: Harris is courting moderate Republicans.

The AP: Trump targets hardcore partisans, Harris goes after moderates

What, in God’s name, makes you think this campaign was more left-leaning than 2020?

Oh my god, you’re right! I should have said, “They’re not gaining with moderates and, in fact, are losing moderate support in many crucial elections, especially when they weaken their message to try to be more appealing to them!” What an idiot I am for using concise language that anyone with half a brain would understand.

Anyway, since I’m also a pedantic twat, I looked it up, and it turns out a lot of leftists did show up in 2020! Looks like your assertion that, “The left doesn’t show up to vote,” is false as well. Looks like you got some proofreading to do! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, no shit, that’s literally in my comment! Maybe try rereading it and getting back to me.