- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
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Yeah, no. Let’s hold the media accountable. For treating Trump like a serious candidate in the first place and giving him all the air time, the jester that he is. For harping on every single thing the Dem candidate did wrong while apologizing and making excuses for Orange Julius at every turn. Going on and on about Biden’s age and then never bringing up age again once Biden dropped out of the race. Let’s hold the oligarchs accountable for doing their best to stifle free speech, welcoming Russian and GOP astroturfing of the internet, and the last hundred years of slowly breaking down our democracy so they can have more money when they already have so much more than enough. No it’s all the Dems fault 🙄
If you want to blame someone for making Trump a serious candidate, blame Democrats:
So to take [Jeb] Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.
“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.
“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
Ted Cruz
Donald Trump
Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428
yeah but also let’s not forget that the DNC has funded far right extremest candidates in the past thinking that they could get an easy win. that didn’t pan out
They did that this year too! It’s not just something they’ve done in the past. They gave millions of dollars to far-right candidates in the primaries, hoping that the candidate would knock the serious contender out of the race, and then they could beat the far-right candidate in the final election. It’s devious, and apparently sometimes effective, but does raise a lot of questions and kind of overshadows this whole “we only take the high road” image they’ve tried to cultivate.
You seem to be suggesting that the American public are fools who were tricked, rather than the Democratic party being genuinely unpopular.
The Democrats were in power for 4 years and accomplished almost nothing while the lives of ordinary people got worse. They never forgave student loads, they didn’t legalize weed, the 2k stimulus check was cut to 1.4k, they never raised the minimum wage, they never rolled back abortion bans, they continued putting kids in cages, they backed a genocide, and inflation was worse than it’s been in a long time. And this campaign their whole message was “what are you going to do, vote trump?”.
The republicans didn’t gain any votes this election, the democrats just lost millions.
The Democratic Party clearly does have a lot of work to do. They lost because over 10 million people stayed home.
But let’s not pretend that the fools who were tricked aren’t a humongous issue. Trump had about the same level of support despite literally everything that happened on every single day between November 2020 and November 2024.
Both things very much can be, and very much are, factors. And maybe it also falls on the democrats to try to reach the tricked fools, but probably not until after they convince the non-trumpers to get off their asses first.
The Democrats were in power for 4 years and accomplished almost nothing while the lives of ordinary people got worse.
As much as I don’t like the dems, this is too harsh on Biden. Biden inherited a weak economy from Trump, which saw worldwide inflation. That inflation is now back down to normal levels. Biden also repeatedly forgave tranches of student loans, started the process to declassify marijuana, tried to increase minimum wage but was blocked by DINOs, did roll back several abortion bans and managed to constitutionally protect the right to abortion in several states.
Biden wasn’t close to perfect. He wasn’t hard enough on Netanyahu, opting to express frustrations with him privately rather than through policy, because being pro-Israel is a popular view in the US. And he started claiming victory once inflation was back down, but well before people were compensated for their loss in purchasing power.
Biden was an OK president. Better than Trump anyway. But their election strategy was terrible and they really should have focused on what they could offer the working class rather than focus on what Trump would offer.
Biden wasn’t close to perfect. He wasn’t hard enough on Netanyahu, opting to express frustrations with him privately rather than through policy, because being pro-Israel is a popular view in the US.
Biden circumvented Congress and violated standing law to fund a genocide. The bare minimum was not aiding Israel in any way, and he did not even entertain that.
Setting aside that Israel’s ongoing genocide isn’t actually popular, say it was for the sake of argument. That still doesn’t mean you support it. You may have to actually do your job as a politician and shape public opinion on an important matter, or even do the right thing despite it potentially harming your career. Again, bare minimum stuff.
If you try to accomplish things and fail, you by definition didn’t accomplish things. He failed to browbeat, negotiate, and ultimately legislate. He was a weak president who failed to use the bully pulpit. There are always obstructions and difficulties- his job was to overcome them. If part of the reason he failed was due to members of his own party, that’s more damning, not less. Of his leadership, and the leadership of the DNC.
It’s not leading the local softball team, it’s leading the moat powerful country in the world. We can and should expect better.
IMO most of what was going on with inflation going up and down was because of Jerome Powell anyway, it’s not like either Trump or Biden have a problem with him. The only candidate in recent memory to even acknowledge rising wealth inequality as an issue was Bernie Sanders. Resolving the country’s financial problems with endless corporate welfare is just the standard bipartisan consensus.
I remember journalists writing formal apology letters in 2016 for the reasons you just mentioned. Then they went and did the exact same thing again. I knew we were in trouble as soon as that started again. What’s more disheartening than that to me though, is that apparently a huge swath of Americans don’t have the capacity to think about anything beyond what they’re shown on TV.
The items you bring up are outside the control of the DNC and its members. How can the DNC change media ownership or block Russian astroturfing?
The press is motivated both by its oligarchic owners and also by popularity. We can’t change the former (certainly whole out of power), but we can make policy and targeting changes that make Democrats popular, and it follows that what the news reports will change.
The items you bring up are outside the control of the DNC and its members.
My point, exactly.
Looks like the headline is just clickbait anyways, author doesn’t make any suggestions to hold anybody accountable. I’ve got a plan: lets get as many primary voters as we do general election voters.
Uh, how are you going to get primary voters when there’s no primary?
The one silver lining here is that there will be a primary in 2028. And in 2026.
Get ready now. If you’re in a closed primary state, you need to register as a democrat to participate. If you don’t like voting for the lesser evil, getting off your ass and voting in every primary is the bare minimum you can do. You can do more by phone banking, volunteering, and educating your peers in real time as shit spirals in tangible ways over the next 2 years.
Biden in 2020 pledged to be a one-term president so there could be an open primary in 2024. The argument was beating Trump was more important than any given policy.
So he got that. And then decided to run again and the DNC essentially skipped their primaries. So that silver lining for 2026 and 2028 should be compared with the argument in 2020 being ‘wait to primary in 2024’.
I’ve been doing this shit since Bush. Things have gotten worse due to bootlicker apologia and you’re in for a longer haul than 2 years.
Do your caucuses and primaries, sure. Local politics are important. But also point out the massive and consistent failings of party leadership and call for their removal. The DNC has to go. We have to have radical policies instead of tepid incrementalism.
No thanks, Dems have proven they don’t care about primaries. They don’t care about the working class. They don’t care about solving problems or even preventing fascism.
So they’re a failure of a party, one that has no democratic route to being fixed.
Vote third party. Down ballot, up ballot, everywhere. People forget we had fptp and a similar duopoly when the Republican party was invented, that broke the duopoly and formed a new one. It’s not an excuse.
The Democrat campaign had a billion fucking dollars
Trump plans to do this already, apparently. They did this to themselves.
No, we really don’t. We have to blame the people voting for trump or being apathetic about not voting. Throw in some Russian trolling, some Meta and X bullshit and we get a pretty shitty stew. Oh yeah, and the sexists and racists too.
A party that can’t win has no value.
The party’s job is to articulate a platform that appeals to apathetic voters.
The party’s job is to articulate a platform that energizes a large enough part of the population to vote them in.
If a party advances positions that can’t win elections, then the party has failed in its primary purpose.
Wow, I bet you’re fun at a football game. Who did you vote for?
You’re discussing politics, he’s contributing. This isn’t a football game and you have a fragile ego.
He’s saying that if you lose, you’re a loser. No one, absolutely no one, wins all the time. We won with Biden, an older white father figure. We won with a black man for 8 years.
It’s not a fucking game, you little shit.
I voted for Harris. I’m a progressive who has voted a straight blue ticket in every election.
That doesn’t change reality. I’ve donated thousands of dollars to this party and it is incapable of winning. A political party that can’t win, can’t make policy. That’s not me being a sour bastard, that’s just reality and also me being a sour bastard.
How fun I am or not doesn’t change the fact that this party has been on a losing streak for decades.
As the republicans have embraced less and less popular policy positions they’ve also won more governorships, state houses, the senate, the house, the White House, the Supreme Court. Even when democrats do manage to pull together a win they cobble it together with blue dogs and then use that fact to excuse not making progress.
The cornerstone piece of legislation we’ve gotten from them in my lifetime has been the ACA. And sure it’s better than what we had, but it’s literally romneycare. The best piece of legislation we can point to from our party was literally workshopped by the heritage foundation.
The thing I’m getting tired of is losing. Then being told, we lost because the voters voted wrong. Next time they should vote better even though the party is going to do everything the same way, money please!
The thing I’m getting tired of is losing.
Biden won and so did Obama, a black man. How quickly we forget?
All of you shitting on the DNC and saying it’s all their fault, what would you do differently?
It is their fault. As for what to do different? Easy. The next time they have a lot of grassroots energy behind a populist (like Bernie), they should try NOT completely ratfucking them to protect their corporate overlords.
Bernie wasn’t even trying for it this time? I mean what would you do different this time, lol.
I’m talking big picture. The working class has been clearly pissed about the economy for a long time and the DNC left that void for Trump to fill because they don’t actually want progressive economic change. So I see all of this as the inevitable repercussions of the DNC’s major fuck up in 2016 (and 2020) - when they made it very clear they would do everything they could to prevent a true progressive from winning.
As for this last election in particular: they could have tried to pressure Biden to drop out much earlier, actually hold a proper primary, and lean into their base instead of trying to court the middle-right like they always do.
Classic
The job of the party and the candidate is to win. They failed. It is not the voters job to cause the party to win, it is the party’s job to cause the voters to vote.
