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 🙄
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Democrat campaign had a billion fucking dollars
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
You’re not wrong, but the DNC pushing relatively right-wing corpo candidates is just as much at fault as the media. When will the DNC actually listen to the base? Same thing happened when they disregarded votes for Bernie Sanders.
I don’t necessarily disagree, I caucused for Bernie, but I understand why they were trying to poach those falling off the republican party. When the country has swung so far to the right we don’t get a left and right party anymore, we get the slide into fascism and maintain the status quo parties. At least until we can get ranked choice voting. Defeating Fascism was supposed to be a step back towards the left, but some leftists couldn’t handle not getting everything they wanted right away, so instead we get to slide into fascism.
How much did that courting the right help the DNC? Zilch.
Case in point. In so many red states, the popular vote went to trump, but the proposals to enshrined abortion in law passed.
You’re making the same mistake the Ds did - there are far more people who want an anti-imperialist, for-the-people, medicare-for-all party. Instead their stuck with a fascist party and a party so shitty it’s trying to tail the fascist party.
Except you would never get republicans falling off, or rather those numbers are extremely small. So now you get a situation where a large part of your voterbase goes “ewwww” when you tall about “the Wall”. And you lose votes from progressives. Remember - Trump got the same amount of votes he did in 2016. Dems lost like 6 milion of them.
You don’t “step back towards the left” by promising right wing policies. Especially comming off of a 4 year period of a democrat being the president. You don’t talk about your opponent “having good ideas”.
A correct move to the left would involve a “Biden is Biden, that old grandpa, he does stuff that I, the hip new gal in town will change!”. It would involve an immediate hard stance on Gaza. It would involve a shitload of other leftwing policies. Instead you got the “status quo” as you put it which obviously sucks and people don’t like it. You can promise anything you want during the lead up to the election. Don’t promise republican shit though because why would people vote for a “republican with no sugar”.
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.
Behind the Bastards did a good one two-parter recently on liberal media which helped the rise of the NSDAP party, and how that compares with US politics today. Even Jewish owned newspapers identified more with elites than Jewish commoners, and so were happy to underreport the violence and hate rhetoric of the National Socialist German Workers Party, even when they were literally gunning down communists and labor unionists.
The media agencies do not identify with the common public even today, which is why we still rely on blogs and curators, and have to cross reference news stories to see what the common reported facts are, and if they’re consistent from different primary sources. This process is a necessary artifact from the George W. Bush administration and the international war on terror, which was already a foray by the US into fascist rhetoric and autocracy. From then it’s been Secret Hitlers all the way down.
So this is to say this is totally on brand for the media. And as the election has now shown us (hindsight being 20/20) this is totally on brand for the US public.
Orange Julius
Also known as the Mandarin Chief XD
Trump plans to do this already, apparently. They did this to themselves.
All you morons who didn’t vote or voted third party are to blame. Why does the left party have to jump hoops for your votes when the other candidate is a legal fascist? You guys are idiots
This argument here, folks. This is neoliberalism fighting against its inevitable end. If the democrats can’t put forward a coherent plan for the future outside of “the other people are worse, but we have to keep them around as friends.” I voted blue and wish others did as well, but we can’t force them to vote or vote for who we want. It is the job of the political class to earn votes, and sadly, the dems just didn’t pull out the win, and we are all worse for it
The fuck is with al the stupid buzzwords? Just regurgitating garbage.
Just speaking the truth, friend. We won’t make it out of this without a drastic change and a plan. Trying to blame a bunch of powerless people won’t do anything and certainly isn’t productive.
… Buzzwords? It’s just clear text. look, if you have trouble reading it I’m sorry, we’re not going to dumb if down for you; learn to read better than a third grade level.
That’s like a business saying the public caused them to fail because the public wouldn’t buy their shit products. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.
It’s a failure on multiple levels. We’d do history a disservice if we don’t examine them all and look for ways to fix them.
Voter disillusionment is a thing, and the Democrats failed to properly engage enough voters. The worsening economic situation the Democrats failed to do enough about created an environment known to foster nationalist and supremacist ideologies.
Disinformation campaigns make it worse. All the “vote third party” spoiler advocates and “don’t vote for genocide” anti-electionists didn’t help. The electorate system making third parties spoilers in the first place hamstrung actual democratic representation. The corporate controlled media bias and refusal to call the fash out for what they are legitimised them.
Free Speech apologists defended the right to spew anti-democratic rhetorics. The “high road” numbskulls left the field to the dirty, but effective tactics of those willing to sacrifice all decency for power. A failure to clearly and understandably communicate the intention of complex proposals favoured the simple, emotionally appealing talking points of the right.
Yes, the voters bear blame too: Republican voters for actively enabling fascism, complacent non-/third-party-voters for failing to effectively and strategically oppose them (moral opposition is good and right, but it doesn’t win wars - strategy and cohesion do). But only attacking the symptoms of a fucked up accumulation of problems doesn’t solve the root causes.
Yeah! Why should political parties have to earn your vote in a democracy? Democracy is when you are coerced into voting by a party rather than the party earning your vote by doing things you want.
Because democrats aren’t the left party and moved even further right in this election
It’s both. Both groups should act as though the other is as much of an unreasonable jackass as they tend to be
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?
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.
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.
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.
Classic
