Focus on actually helping out the working class and you’ll get all the votes you need. Until then, throwing out a few progressive scraps has stopped working because people are sick of the bullshit rainbow capitalism.
This podcast is very relevant:
To be entirely honest, I don’t think that would work. I wish it were true she lost because all the real leftists stayed home or voted for trump in protest, but that’s obviously not true. She lost because this country is racist and sexist.
Actual leftists have no power over anything and are very small in number, that’s why she ran a more conservative campaign in the first place. But, it didn’t work. Despite doing everything in her power to not look like a leftist, everyone still labeled her as a radical leftist because she’s a black woman. That is why she lost.
It’s not about actual leftists; leftist policy is where you naturally get when you do things for the people. And both people like politicians who do things for them and hate politicians who don’t. Democrats think they can get people to show up by doing nothing and they simply can’t. I can’t find it now but I saw an article around here that shows how as the election came closer Harris dropped anti-establishment rhetoric such as taxing wealth and combating price gouging and defined her platform by being a conservative, not being Trump and that idiotic border wall. Coincidentally, as she did that support for her dropped.
Unless you have some evidence, please don’t go blaming it on leftists. That’s just establishment bullshit. Leftists have been shown to be the most consistently reliable voters in the country with more engagement than even Bible thumping nationalists. Engagement (including voting) is lowest at the middle of the political spectrum, which is exactly where anyone who thought about it for two seconds would expect it to be.
The establishment always bitched about leftists going third party (Although the Libertarians hurt Republicans far more than the Greens hurt Democrats) but that was clearly not a real factor this time, so now they insist that leftists went to Trump. No matter what, it always must be the fault of the left, not the precious “centrists” they love so much.
Step one in fixing this broken down wreck of a party is to stop buying their bullshit excuses. They lost because they didn’t do enough for the American people, and because they weren’t loud enough about what they did do. If they bragged about helping unions then they might piss off their corporate sponsors and they won’t get to go on tour after leaving office and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for 45 minute speeches.
Actual leftists have no power over anything and are very small in number, that’s why she ran a more conservative campaign in the first place. But, it didn’t work. Despite doing everything in her power to not look like a leftist, everyone still labeled her as a radical leftist because she’s a black woman. That is why she lost.
My initial reaction to reading this was visceral, but in rereading I think you need to expound a bit about who you mean. I do not agree, but I can see why you think that.
What I find more useful and interesting is trying to figure out who it is that didn’t vote and how we can move them from the disenfranchised existence they are in. There are a lot of them, many are urban which means they likely lean left. So a GOTV that actually got even 75% voter turnout out would give the right a stomping.
Why that failed is worth understanding.
Compared with 2020, about 20 million prior Dem voters stayed home. Care to try again l
Gosh, if only they had landed that George W Bush endorsement things would have been different, I’m sure. The party relies on essentially blackmailing their base while pursuing 1% of Republican voters who don’t vote for them anyways, over and over.
He also attributed Trump’s win to broader failures in Democratic Party messaging
Again and again the Dems only think about their messaging. The American people are fucking sick of messaging. We want action.
It is about action, but also messaging. Democrat are shit at bragging about their accomplishments for working Americans because they don’t want to offend corporate interests and wealthy donors.
Politics are all about the interdependence of action and messaging. If you don’t run on powerful messaging then, even if elected, you aren’t going to have the ability to take significant action. If you don’t take significant action, then it’s a whole lot harder to create effective messaging. You can’t have one without the other.
Any progressive that somehow managed to run the gauntlet and become president would find themselves in conflict with both Republicans and Democrats in congress. The only way to break that log jam would be a massive populist uprising. The only way to get that is with powerful messaging.
Maybe if they just lean a little farther right. I’m sure it’ll work this time!
‘We should’ve done more podcasts’
I think it’s important to highlight the importance of primary elections here. Unlike most other countries, the process of choosing who a party nominates to stand for election is entirely controlled by voters in the USA through primary elections.
The Democratic Party loses because the Republican Party nominates populists that people are excited to vote for. If the Democrats want to win, they need to do the same—nominate people that voters are actually enthusiastic about.
Primary elections have historically rubbish turnout. If progressives, social democrats, and socialists want their candidates to be nominated, they should be starting information campaigns to get their fellow left-wing Democrats to vote in primary elections.
True enough but the DNC is absolutely not innocent here with how they like to fuck around in their primaries.
Of course that’s true, but the rules surrounding superdelegates and other tomfoolery wasn’t enough to make a difference in any recent presidential primary. 2024 was an anomaly but it seemed pretty likely Kamala would have won the nomination regardless (this is not an excuse to not hold a primary).
The rules for primaries to legislative or local offices are actually completely clean and fair, at least as far as I can tell.
The way we run our primaries is an absolute joke. The presidential race is over months before half the country has even had a chance to vote. That gives the establishment every opportunity to manipulate media coverage to boost their preferred candidate.
The way every single establishment candidate dropped out and endorsed Biden (who was near last place) on the same day was ridiculously transparent. I’ll also go to my grave with absolute certainty that Warren stayed in because the establishment got to her. I don’t know if it was a carrot, a stick, or both, but they kept her in the race as a spoiler. Warren completely dropped her campaign but refused to drop out for almost another month.
We should be up in arms about the Democratic primary process, not calling them “clean and fair”. Everyone should vote on the same day, we should have ranked choice style voting, and debates shouldn’t all be run by corporate media. That’s the minimum we should accept.
As for the superdelegates, they are the perfect demonstration of how our of touch and clueless the party establishment is. It doesn’t even occur to them that if they ever were to override the will of their voters that it would sink the party for a generation or more. There is no world in which they could do that then win the general.
I didn’t say the national presidential primaries were clean and fair. I said that local primaries are. And that is true.
Regardless, nothing you said changes the fact that when it came down to actual votes in the primary, those who voted in the Democratic primary seemed to prefer moderate neoliberals over social democrats and progressives in 2016 and 2020.
All this complaining about the primary process amounts to useless hand-writhing because no amount of calling for reform or argumentation is going to change the system. Calling for people to be “up in arms” is a useless activity because being angry by itself means nothing. If you want change, you need power. If you want power, you need to get it by playing within the rules of the current system.
So vote in the damn primaries to get the party to nominate progressives and tell your mates to do the same. Start or sign ballot initiatives to move to nonpartisan blanket primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Putin won with actual votes too.
Exit polls in the 2020 primary showed that voter’s had really only one issue that drove their vote, and that was electability. Corporate media absolutely pounded out the message that Bernie was less competitive with Trump than more establishment candidates. That was disinformation because Bernie and Biden performed almost identically in polls against Trump. Bernie was the clear favorite when it came to platform and policy.
Getting people actively engaged or “up in arms” is how you win elections, including primaries. That is a lesson the establishment understands when facing off against progressives, but consistently fails at in general elections, at least since 2008. It’s not a waste of anything to get people energized, even on a losing issue.
Quit fucking lecturing progressives on the need to vote. Progressives vote more consistently than any other group in the US political spectrum. You are just furthering establishment disinformation. They want people to think progressives are flaky and unreliable so they can continue to win the electability argument in primaries. Progressives don’t just vote. They make up almost the entirety of the grass-roots Democratic ground game, and the vast majority of individual donors.
Progressives vote more consistently than any other group in the US political spectrum.
If that’s true, then that means that they’re losing primaries despite being disproportionately represented. You’re just saying that progressives losing primaries is more than fair. If progressive are the most consistent voters, and they still lose, then they’re just not popular.
It is true. See this Pew study.
Did you even read what I just wrote? Exit polls said that Bernie was the candidate that voters would most like to see in the presidency but, for most voters, electability was an overriding concern for pretty obvious reasons. Bernie and Biden performed almost identically against Trump in polls, but that’s not what voters believed. News coverage was relentless in telling voters that Bernie was “too radical” to win in the general, so that’s what most voters believed.
the process of choosing who a party nominates to stand for election is entirely controlled by voters in the USA through primary elections.
Courts have ruled consistantly that the political parties, which are private institutions, have control over all aspects of the primary process. Political parties are private tyrannies that put their agenda above the will of voters.
How it works on paper and how it works in reality are two different concepts.
Yes, the Party can nominate whoever it wants by fiat, but… do their own self-established rules (which they do follow) allow them to do that? Do you really think that’s how it works in reality?
This is like saying “the NFL is a private organisation and can declare any team they want to be the winner of the Super Bowl without paying attention to the result of the games”. Yes, that’s technically legally true but that’s not how it actually works in reality.
I’m not suggesting the party nominates a candidate by fiat, that would be a ridiculous PR blunder. I’m saying they achieve that same outcome, but by a thousand slightly more subtle means.
For just one example, when I was volunteering for local progressive candidates, they all struggled to find vendors to print their flyers, signs, etc. Why? Because the Democratic Party has a policy that any vendor who works with a primary challenger will be banned from future business with the party. This policy has been shown to be selectively applied to progressive challengers.
But it certainly happens at the top level too. Look at how Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then chair of the Democratic party, changed the rules multiple times to explicitly benefit Hillary over Bernie in 2016. Or how, in 2020 after Bernie won Iowa, all of the centrist candidates dropped out and endorsed Biden.
I hear a lot about the corruption of the democrats that blocked Bernie and I can see the toll it’s taken on America. How can we fight back? I am willing to donate or protest the dnc picking another neolib but I’m not sure what to do.
If they’re staying on the couch and not voting, they’re not voters.
Calling them “their voters” also misrepresents things and highlights part of the problem
