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Presidential candidates raised $1.6 billion and spent over $1.3 billion
Fundraising is the goal of an election. Not the presidency.
Even this analysis doesn't capture the real problem.
Asserting that the DNC "fails to learn" implies that they have some goal they're not meeting.
They don't.
Their goal is to rake in as much corporate soft money as possible, and by that standard, this past election was a resounding success. And nothing else, including winning elections, matters to them.
So they're not really "failing" at anything. In fact they're succeeding nicely. It's just that they're succeeding at being corrupt, self-serving and deceitful.
"Unfortunately," Geevarghese lamented, "Democratic leadership is failing disastrously to meet this urgent mandate. Ahead of tonight's forum, the DNC is actively working to silence rank-and-file Democratic activists and base voters calling for a ban on dark money in primaries and the rejection of corporate funding. In a last-minute move, they shut the event off from the public and even deliberately shared the wrong address for where grassroots supporters are allowed to gather."
How can anyone defend the DNC at this point?
How can anyone defend the DNC at this point?
I know you're not new to lemmy.
lol true ✌️
When people are struggling economically, they’re looking for a change candidate. Running on everyone being better off than their actual bank statements and credit card bills say was always a shit strategy. Cozying up to Liz Cheney and her lot was secondary to that.
This is exactly it. It's white Trump wins. Why people are willing to overlook all of his craziness- because his platform is one of radical change. He may be crazy and he may be full of shit but at least he is talking about change. And when you're hurting and you see the entire country hurting and you see nobody in charge giving a fuck, or worse telling you this is how it's supposed to be, you want radical change.
Essentially: the status quo of the past 30 years is dead (and its never coming back), some people just haven't realized it yet.
Problem is, the status quo of the last 20 to 30 years is significantly different than the status quo shortly before that. Income inequality is through the roof. The middle class is stagnant. There's much less upward mobility than there previously was. And for the majority of the people, that are on the lower half of the income spectrum, costs have gone up and up and up and wages have not. For 15 to 20 years people kind of dealt with it because standard of living was pretty decent before that. But you can only squeeze so much blood out of the turnip. People see boomers who were able to have a house and a family on one average 40hr/week income and they say what the hell we now have both partners working full-time and we can barely afford ourselves let alone a kid. That's why make America great again is such a great slogan, because it invokes those days when the American dream was still alive.
I would say Republicans are much more responsible for the extraction of the nation's wealth, but Democrats happily sat by and fiddled while Rome burned and were eager participants in the extreme offshoring of all American manufacturing type work in the '90s and 2000s. There was a ridiculous idea that this would somehow make life better for Americans, that everybody would get retrained to do computers or something like that, and we would become a nation 'better than' having to build our own stuff. Obviously that didn't work out.
Come to today, and while Democrats I think have better policies for the average worker, none of their messaging addresses the major systemic problems that need to be fixed.
Obama's did. Hope, change, yes we can. That was what the country needed. He won on a platform of radical change. Unfortunately he turned out to be a moderate change president but I think he generally did a decent job.
What was Hillary's platform? The only thing a lot of people learned about her is that she's too stupid to hire decent IT people who use encryption, and that she has a private and public position on things, in other words don't tell the plebs what you really think cuz they won't vote for you.
Then you have Kamala, magically frocked by some DNC elites to sit in the big chair, who ran a pretty boring campaign that seemed to, like Hillary's, be based on 'I'm not Trump so of course I'm going to win'. Obviously that wasn't good enough.
If the DNC wants to start winning the White House, they need to clean their own house. Get rid of all the status quo dinosaurs like Pelosi and reform the party into one of the people. Find someone like Bernie and put him in charge. Ditch wedge issues like gun control that only cost votes. And make a party platform that focuses on the common man. Not just the blue man, every man. Then you win elections.
Very hard to identify the end of an empire while your living in it.
Quite true. Especially since we don't seem to study history anymore. Forget world history, we barely seem to remember our own history past 6 months ago.
The democrats are very good at fighting a change inside their own party. They're very bad at fighting republicans on the national stage. Case in point, voter suppression in the last election, the stolen election of Gore v. Bush in 2000 (Gore had majority in Florida in the end, did you hear CNN reporting about it?)
The Dem base has been fully bought out by corporate interests. They are "controlled opposition" in every sense. A vestigial remnant of their 1940s peak that mostly exists to rein in the excesses of the prior conservative leadership (although, one could argue even FDR ultimately filled that role).
(Gore had majority in Florida in the end, did you hear CNN reporting about it?)
The degree to which Florida has been fumbled by Dems for the last 30 years cannot be overstated.
The democrats are very good at fighting a change inside their own party.
The democrats are only good at fighting a change inside their own party.
They've got that one job down.
Dems do not care to "learn". They do not want to help you. They do not want to undermine the capitalist empire. They aren't hapless, they just don't work for you.
You know how ACAB? Because a good cop will quickly get checked to doing bad cop things out of fear, or they leave (willingly or in a body bag).
I'm starting to think that with politics. You go in with the dreams of change. Then you see the bloat and bullshit. You try to pass a bill to make sure that all kids have the right to free food, and some fuck face screams at you and doxxes your family on Rogan and now you got death threats.
I don't have an answer.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Pretty much. I think that the higher you go politically, the more that good people are filtered out by the system.
Biden won the previous election (barely) because Trump's incompetence was on full display and people were angry about it. It'll happen again, but unfortunately, elections are pretty much done in the USA. Between fuckery and intimidation, we're unlikely to see a 'fair' election until a major revolution occurs in the USA.
The party is dead until they figure out a way to even the media landscape. Harris was a very good candidate with a good campaign relative to the binary alternative option.
But it doesn't matter because Republicans control the narrative on everything and it doesn't help that Democrats blow at messaging and recognizing the all-out war we're in.
People knew what Harris was selling, at least the people who could be persuading to vote Democrat. The DNC's absolute failure at communication is definitely a problem, but the catastrophic loss they suffered this election can't be explained by that alone. Many people, with full knowledge of what a Trump administration would mean, sat out of this election. People who would volunteer in democrat campaigns either sat out or voted for Harris quietly. The DNC's biggest "failure" (they didn't fail at enriching their corporate donors, so to them it's a success) is relying too much on being the less shitty shit sandwich.
I'd actually argue people didn't know what Harris was selling. There was a very well written and well thought out policy platform written up on their campaign's website, but none of that reached all the Americans who refuse to read anything. The campaign trail was very focused on how Donald Trump was a threat to democracy, but they refused to really draw attention to the Nazi iconography and truly terrifying promises Trump was making. In fact, an awful lot of the campaign trail was backing Israel, promising a more secure boarder, lying about how great the economy was, and promising to reach across the isle to work with the mythical "good Republican."
And, to give the average American the benefit of the doubt, I don't think many of them knew the potential dangers of a Trump re-election. I think a lot of people saw the weakly worded Democrat warnings as typical political mud-slinging. Both sides were calling each other the devil incarnate, and both sides refused to back up their claims, so it's hard to be surprised that Americans just saw it as noise. I think most of them are just scared they won't make it through the year, like my friends and I are, and got suckered in by the orange man telling them that everything sucks and he'll make it better.
In fact, an awful lot of the campaign trail was backing Israel, promising a more secure boarder, lying about how great the economy was, and promising to reach across the isle to work with the mythical "good Republican."
That's what I was referring to by "what Harris was selling". She did have well-thought out policy on her website, but she abandoned or watered down said policy whenever her corporate donors requested a "clarification". One example is her promise to instate a wealth tax, which she continued to water down throughout her campaign until she ended up with an unfulfilled promise from Biden's campaign.
I can't seem to find it when I try to look for it, but I saw around here after the election a statistical analysis of Harris's campaign trail that found that she, as election day came closer, progressively stopped using phrases related to progressive economic policy such as "unions", "wealth tax" or "housing crisis" and used words related to democracy and Trump such as "democracy" and "rule of law". Harris started out as a genuinely promising candidate if you ignored her attitude towards Muslim Americans (which would turn out to be her undoing), and as the campaign progressed turned further and further into a right of center corporate stooge until she became Kamala "border wall" Harris and lost all seven swing states to Trump.
The enthusiasm of the first week of her campaign announcement was through the roof, and I will never forgive the DNC (and her, to be fair; she capitulated) for knee-capping it.
I noticed that as well. Her campaign went from electric excitement to, well, I don't know quite what I'd call it. Resignation maybe? It reminded me a lot of the Hillary campaign by the end, and I continually got the impression that Kamala wasn't really in the driver's seat for her campaign. Here's the moment that I started getting nervous, and someone in the campaign should have started smashing the panic button: Obama lecturing down to black men for not supporting Kamala enough.
HUGE yikes moment when you start finger-wagging a group that's supposed to be your base for not supporting you enough. Obama's a smart dude, so I really have no idea wtf he thought he was doing here, and no idea why anyone ever thought staging and publishing this was a good thing to do. This should have been a red flag visible from space in so many ways.
Can we split the party now or are we gonna keep supporting a bunch of grifters
In order to split the party we need a strong group to gather around in opposition to the established liberal party. And unfortunately the trademarked Progressive Party™ is owned by insane people that no one wants to have anything to do with. So another name needs to be thought up.
Labour? The Worker's Party? The People's Party? The Raving Loony Nutbag Party?
Not really good excuses but I'm sure it's the excuses they are using to justify changing nothing
Wait. Do progressives seriously think that going fascist lite wasn’t the right thing to do in this last election? What the fuck are they smoking.
According to that guy I follow on Facebook the air in American cities has higher concentrations of the poisonous chemicals O2 and H2O, and that's why they refuse to accept the Truth brought to us by Trump and supply-side Jesus.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Wait, are you trying to say the Democrats are out of touch with what the American public wants and needs, and as a consequence, may not perform as well in the upcoming elections? Gee, if only they had any warning signs.
It should be seen as extra sad that as the GOP fails in any number of areas while having a fairly strong hold on the government, that the DNC can barely do anything. Years of corruption and cronyism have taken their toll and as an institution, they have forgotten what it even takes to get elected. Just being "not Trump" is no longer enough to get voted in. They better do some pretty rapid self-improvement if they even want to remain a viable party much longer.
No war but _____ war?