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Republicans have a vision. Democrats have a list of policy proposals. Average people can grok the vision but since they read at a 6th grade level they don't grok the policy proposals.
Democrats need to stop acting like nerds if they want more people to like them.
But I was told it was just that our policy proposals weren't left enough?
Unironically, you're right. Most voters don't vote based on any kind of coherent ideology. They vote on feels.
God help us all.
If the policy proposals were far left enough they'd start to look a helluva lot more like a vision.
Ha. There is that.
(I wasn't sure whether to edit my comment or reply to your first post, so I'm putting this here)
As for people voting on feels: I think that's always been the case for most people. Most people are of average intelligence, with an average education and average interest in politics. They're gonna vote based on vibes, so you have to get the vibes right or the average person won't vote for you.
And you can't fake vibes by having a bunch of celebrities around.
Clinton 1 and Obama were our last successful Dem candidates. You need a charismatic candidate with a consistent message that speaks to everyone if you want to win the popularity contest. Gore, Clinton 2 and Harris failed on both of those counts. Biden won only because of pandemic and government abuse/mismanagement backlash, he would have lost to Trump in other circumstances.
I want a country where everyone pays less for healthcare. If it can be done for seniors, why not everyone else?
I want a country where everyone's private medical decisions remain between them and their doctor, without being cleared by your local, state, or federal representative or by a judge.
I want a country where everyone who works, pays taxes, and does not commit violent crime or property theft can stay and keep working without having to look over their shoulder.
I want a country where if you work full time, you can afford your rent/mortgage, put food on the table, start a family, and still be able to retire.
There's a vision. Apparently all of these things have become radically progressive leftist positions and are attacked as such by the media and conservatives alike.
See, the problem with all of these ideas is that they’re at odds with the billionaires’ vision that you slave away in servitude to them, while their imaginary worth line goes up to infinity.
It’s really nothing more complex than that. And, as soon as the non-billionaire conservatives—your neighbors, your coworkers, the people you pass by every day—wake up and understand that they’re covered by that vision, too, the sooner things get better for all of us.
How the fuck do democrats win here then? After the Harris/Dump debate i feel like there was a lot of conjecture about how Harris didnt talk about policy enough. How do you get away with talking about policy but not "sounding like a nerd" to uneducated voters? See I think this is more about the average voter not being educated enough to understand the issues and the policies potential nominees have pertaining to them, or how their lives would be affected depending who/what they vote for.
Start offering policies that help average people. Run on medicare for all. Run on forcing pharmaceutical companies lowering drug prices. Run on building new factories to create solar panels, geothermal equipment, and wind turbines. Run on creating affordable housing and ending corporate landlords. Run on campaign finance reform with a promise of ending political ads that everyone hates.
The Democrats problem is tha they won't do any of that because their donors dont want it. But as long as the DNC values their donorsore than their voters, they will continue to lose elections.
Republicans also like to defund public schools and or encourage people to go to religious private schools. That way they’re either too dumb to vote for policies, or too indoctrinated to vote for the candidate that isn’t promising Christian nationalism.
How about do basic stuff that people understand ...
... like tax the hell out of billionaires and use the money on people in the country.
... stop financing overseas wars and use that free money on people in the country
.... then just keep repeating and blasting everyone that all the money the government is collecting from rich idiots and not spending on war is being spent on everyone ...... rinse, repeat 10,000 times.
Yep. And there's precedent for this. (Even though with this Supreme Court precedent counts for jack shit...)
Every time Bernie got asked a question he'd turn it around to mentioning the top 1% and how they're fucking us over. And people liked him for it. I had MAGA hat folks tell me they liked him because of it back in 2016.
Great. Glad to see that we're learning nothing here. If I wasn't pushed into despair by the election results, seeing progressives respond this way to the loss might push me over the edge.
We are a bigoted country, no doubt. But, our working class is struggling. People are inherently good, inherently bad, brilliant, dumb, and all sorts of combinations of those. Material conditions, messaging, and framing all work together in bringing out these different sides of ourselves both at the societal and individual level.
Responding to this loss with "the only way to win is to be racist" is basically just giving up and saying the fascists are right. If we decide to roll over and die because we're too chickenshit to fight, too cynical to have any imagination, and too self-pitying to even lift a finger, the most vulnerable of us (which includes me) will perish.
We HAVE to be better than this.
These aren't progressives. These are liberals. These are the same people who, when they were told 8 years ago that economic anxiety made voters turn to Trump, mocked them, saying, "Oh, I guess the economy made them racist!"
Yeah, racism and misogyny played a huge role in this election, but people don't vote for a guy who promises to burn everything down when they're doing well. I'd have thought this time, given that the Democrats lost ground with both black and Latino voters, they might finally have to acknowledge that their failures are due to more than just bigotry. I'm starting to doubt that, though...
Responding to this loss with “the only way to win is to be racist” is basically just giving up and saying the fascists are right.
And the joke is that Dems will still lose on these terms, because they are already branded the Woke party. Might as well try and out-racist the KKK as the GOP. It's not a race Dems are in a position to win. All they can do is shed even more of their base to Jill Stein and Uncommitted.
I understand the poster may be very emotional because of the election. Yet, This strikes me as incredibly reductive.
I think she lost because, she represents the continuation of the current administration. People want to break from the status quo, even if that means harming society to do it.
The dems need a left wing populist, asap.
The problem is the Democrats are scared to push back hard, they try to move to the right to capture moderate voters, and then lose 10x as many voters to the left who don't care enough to vote because the Democrats are trying to make concessions with absolute lunatics.
The DNC seems like it just doesn't have a spine. Doesn't matter now, it's all fucked and it's too late.
She didn't? I believe that's exactly what she came across as when she said she wouldn't do anything different if she were to call the shots instead of Biden and also reminded everyone she signed off on most of his decisions. Sure, she lost votes because of sexism as well, but instead of fresh air she chose to bring stale coffin smell to the fart battle and lost to the stink Trump was all too happy to discharge. And that coffin did smell of a old white dude, let me tell you.
That being said, for such a gigantic loss against someone as obnoxious as Trump, there had to be a lot of factors in play. Sexism and stagnation of the party being just a tip of the iceberg.
Yeah let's blame white supremacy and ignore the fact that the democratic candidate lost FOURTEEN MILLION voters this election cycle.
Harris is missing 10 million votes that Biden got in 2020. It looks like many of those 10 million were suburban men who didn't vote Trump, just sat on the couch. misogyny is a viable explanation for this because otherwise you'll have to explain why Biden set the left on fire, or why Biden was so inspirational to men.
She lost the scrote vote, simple as that.
Some of it is 100% misogyny, I think some of it is also that 4 years ago the country was literally on fire in a lot of places and Trump was obviously to blame for a lot of it, so it didn't matter so much to apathetic voters if Biden's messaging was weak. Kamala may have won then too, though misogyny would have made it closer. Now the country is much more stable but still not great, but Democrats are in charge and therefore obviously to blame, so people who largely haven't been affected negatively by the Republicans (e.g. men, especially non-desperately-poor white men), are apathetic again
The only messaging problem was taking the momentum of the debate and shitting on it with the right-wing heelturn the moment the Cheneys said "never Trump".
Democrats continuing to insist they need to get more racist instead of appealing to their base.
The problem with Kamala Harris's messaging was that she didn't have millions of Xitter bots scaring people into voting for her.
She did try her darnedest too, though.