823
I was gonna title this "And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice" and then write "Stuck inside of America with the fascism blues again" here, but I'm not sure if that comes off like gloating and that's honestly the last thing I want to do this morning.
Everyone from Sanders to Dick fucking Cheney endorsed Harris. Anyone who was paying any attention and wasn't a literal fascist voted for her. The direction of the swing seems irrelevant.
The swing fell short because it's not so much about direction than strength. Macron in 2017 ran the most "hard center" presidential campaign imaginable. Difference is it worked, not because his centrist program was particularly novel but in large part because he is a very charismatic figure and managed to create a voting base of hopefuls for himself. The same can broadly be argued about Obama (whose first act as president was to essentially absolve the previous administration and Wall St of their many sins in case anyone forgot how moderate he was).
Harris ran on a platform of... "I'm not him". Which to any reasonable person is an obvious "yeah OK", but unfortunately most Americans are apathetic cretins who will refuse to move their asses to a polling station if the guy on the telly doesn't promise them a blowie at the voting booth. And the Democrat establishment is simultaneously too big to fail and incapable of producing an actually charismatic leader.
Well, all that and the obvious election interference from Musk, Putin, and the ontological inability of traditional media not to platform literal fascists.
Which was incredibly stupid considering how popular he is.
I mean, she did try other things as well and that characterization is a bit reductive. More correctly I think we can say that "she's not him" is the only thing the Sanders->Cheney spectrum could ever agree on and nothing else she did "stuck". Sanders wasn't happy about the pro-israel stuff and Cheney probably wasn't happy about the "tax the rich" stuff.
Choosing one clear ideology and sticking to it might sound great to the progressives on here (and to people like Hasan), but I don't have the hubris to think she or anyone within the Democratic party establishment actually had the charisma to pull that off either (maybe Michele Obama but she didn't wanna do it so that's the end of that plan). Especially considering Harris had like 4 months to pull a campaign together and did not have any previous popular good will to rely on.
4 months is very short and no matter how right you play your cards a lot of voters will not know anything about you other than "she's not Him". Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose (not that she did everything right but I think a postmortem will need to look back way further than that at Biden and Hillary and those who supported them).
She had an entire platform, but when I was actively trying to review it, I was constantly presented with Trump's name & face on the Democrat's website. That's really poorly thought out.
“How did you vote on your California ballot with several highly contentious ballot measures, Madam Vice President”
“I will not speak on this 5 days before the election.”
Leftists have been telling all the libs exactly what this path would lead to.
Looks like liberals ushered in a fascist regime, again. Funny how that always happens.
I think this very thing led to the 2010 tea party wave election that fucked us for a decade and a similar thing has happened here, except it was the seeming inability of the Biden administration to hold Trump and his supporters accountable and not going after corporations making record profits during an inflationary crisis ("So how would you recommend they have done that?" Great question, I will let you know when I have a good answer).
e;
This absolutely played a huge roll (also, voter suppressing laws passed by GOP governments), but I don't know how to change any of that without having a Democratic party that consistently wins elections first
The FBI apparently learned some lessons on how to deal with Russian interference since 2016 and made some arrests this time around. Way too little too late though, and in January Trump's cronies will take over and that'll be that. Other countries should take notes though and start being much harsher on Russian trolls and their puppets. Unfortunately Von Der Layen recently fired the guy who was prosecuting Musk over Twitter so I'm not too confident anyone in power learned their lesson. Which is mind-boggling because russian-backed far-right parties are a meaningful electoral threat to people like Von Der Layen.