I legitimately did not believe it was possible for this to happen. There’s always a hateful minority but I believe people as a whole are good. How did this happen?
a lot of bad people working together
I’ll be very interested to see the objective agreed upon postmordem and what can be done (if anything) to save the patient going forward. This is pretty damning confirmation that the humans are not okay, Trump is like the virus government guy from the Matrix
Money. Donors. Ad campaigns etc.
An outsider perspective of someone who cares a lot about US politics mostly because of Ukraine war:
Turns out actively insulting potential voters rather than giving a positive plan for the future doesn’t work very well. Somehow in the last months Harris managed to be even more racist and sexist than Trump, which is amazing.
Add to all of that complete denial about real economic problems most middle class people are facing, even going so far to say the country is doing well economically.
As I said, my personal concern is 1. Ukraine, 2. global state of LGBT rights. EU needs to step up it’s military game by a lot. But I completely understand why Harris lost. Her domestic policy is a complete failure.
Its a Good Thing Trump didn’t insult ANYBODY during his campaign and Promised his voters Economic Hardship!
Uh… Harris’s goal wasn’t to convince voters she was better than Trump. That much was obvious, and also not nearly enough to win her the election.
I don’t get what you mean by Harris being more racist and sexist, but I agree that the campaign failed to change perception of failure despite how much they succeeded.
Somehow in the last months Harris managed to be even more racist and sexist than Trump, which is amazing.
What the actual fuck are you talking about?
The Harris campaign sent a constant message that gender and race are the most important thing about a person and must determine their status in society.
For example black and latino people were told they must vote for Harris because of their race, women were told they must vote because of their gender. And insulted by Harris supporters if they showed any doubt.Lemmy crowd is extreme in that regard. A lot of people here don’t even see the problem with that train of thought.
No, the Harris campaign pointed out that Trump would continue the racist and sexist policies from his first term again. She wasn’t saying women should vote for her because they are women. She said people should vote for her to peotect women’s rights.
The whole ‘you don’t hsve to let your husband know how you voted’ was a logical response to conservatives making women afraid their husbands would know who they voted for.
The whole ‘you don’t hsve to let your husband know how you voted’ was a logical response to conservatives making women afraid their husbands would know who they voted for.
“your husband is secretly your enemy, lie to him”
I like to believe that most people at least like their spouse. And now you have a campaign trying to convince you your husband is an enemy. I understand it was aimed only towards those in abusive relationships, but it didn’t sound like that. Tone deaf at the very least.What reason would a woman have to lie about who they voted for other than because of an overbearing/abusive husband?
“How do you run a country where you’re walking around saying, ‘Wives should lie to their husbands. Husbands should lie to their wives’,” Gingrich said on Thursday evening’s episode of Hannity.
I had a short convo with a check out girl at Staples the day before election day. She saw my “I voted” sticker on my phone and started talking about how she was voting trump after work today because “we can’t give the white house to Biden again” She looked confused when I told her Biden wasn’t even running. The DNC fucked us. They waited too long to replace him and some people didn’t even know Harris was an option. They tried to prop up a corpse and then changed at the last minute. I voted for Harris but I knew she didn’t stand a chance.
Biden’s vanity thinking he was the only one who could beat Trump costed us dearly.
There should have been a primary. It sucks to say, but the misogyny in this country is strong. So is its stupidity. How can people think that guy is better for the economy? All his plans are about sugar high measures with disastrous consequences for the country’s future.
they think trump is better for the economy because Biden got fucked with the pandemic inflation fallout.
How do these people not see any news? Like, at all?
It amazes me how people can be so unaware of anything going on.
When all you have time to do is work and sleep, this is the result (as intended).
Well she did have a decent chance judging by results. It’s not like it was a crushing victory.
How is it not a crushing victory? Trump won the popular vote and either won or is leading in all swing states. He fucking wiped the floor with the DNC.
California is still counting. Not sure he won the popular vote.
I love how if Harris won everyone was ready to have the results drawn out with days of bullshit… And then Trump is called the winner overnight and it’s just accepted.
The thing is that the party conceding here actually trusts the election process. And Trump most definitely won the electoral college.
Even if he ends up losing the popular vote eventually, it doesn’t really matter. The system is rigged and has always been rigged in favour of land over people.
Yeah, I was told by a certain someone that the election would be rigged and stolen. For months. Where are the angry mobs marching down the streets?
We the people have no power to challenge results. If the DNC is just going to accept it, then that’s on them, and it really shows how easily defeated they are.
Because of how the demographics are. The electoral college favors Republicans, and the popular vote favors Democrats.
A Democratic victory is expected to involve urban votes in typically contentious states, and urban votes take longer to count due to higher volume and more voters per polling location.
If the Republican candidate is getting enough votes from the quick to count low population density areas to win, it unfortunately means that the slow to count areas don’t really matter in terms of what the outcome is.
the fact that it’s even close is still disturbing.
The DNC has a lot of problems and blame to absorb, but at some point we have to look at the electorate. You don’t have to read the Sunday newspaper or be politically active to know who is running for president. She had two months to step outside and listen/read almost anything.
She is an ignorant, zero information voter, who is likely just regurgitating what she heard her father or boyfriend say months ago. This is the problem. America is now dominated by zombies with no critical thinking skills who crave being brainwashed by their mobile phones.
I hate to be so negative, but I simply don’t see a way out of it. The masses are being controlled more effectively than ever before and I don’t see what systemic change could magically appear to change our trajectory.
Yep. Trump has a fuckin merch line. Tiny little billboards reminding people every day.
The easy answer is, money. Lots of it. With the deregulation of financial crimes (let’s see how badly the IRS gets gutted now), it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. But it will be necessary to invest heavily in the next midterm and presidential election to ensure JD Vance doesn’t automatically win.
And it will only get worse with Trump and conservatives trying to end public education.
How do you think the electorate becomes this way? It’s not because of some innate failure of humans. It’s because of the massive alienation that has systematically occurred over the past 50+ years (and really since WW2) as a result of deliberate policies that have decimated communities, destroyed public education, massively widened the wage gap, ruined the housing market, and is wiping out the environment. Among many other things
Policies that are frequently pushed by Republicans, but sometimes supported and often not repudiated properly by Democrats.
Cause he’s awesome
Top 10 Tell me you’re a bigot without saying so.
Top ten loser over here
You dropped your
/s
There are lots of reasons this happened. Fascism is very popular (as a whole we are not good), voter suppression is functioning as planned, destabilizing education from preschool to university makes people more susceptible to fear mongers and racism, vast amounts of corporate and wealthy influence on elections who favor the party of deregulation, the DNC shifting right instead of left, etc etc etc.
Also social media sequestering people in cozy filter bubbles that distort reality.
Social media, or more precisely, algorithms designed to create ever growing engagement by feeding into confirmation bias and only showing you stuff you like, have destroyed the ability of critical thinking in a majority of people.
This doesn’t only apply to the right spectrum either, as evidenced by all the “hopium” articles here and on r/politics that were trying to construct a blue win or even a blue wave when all polls pointed to a Trump advantage. I had fallen into that trap myself. And everybody was also smugly making fun of the articles in r/conservative predicting the same thing for Trump. Well, turns out they were right.
Less “fascism is popular” and more “people are so desperate for SOMEBODY actually promising change that they’ll vote for anyone offering it, no matter if it’s good or bad.”
Status quo politics is pretty much dead in the water and arguably has been since 2016. People don’t want “I’ll keep everything on a steady course,” they want someone who sounds like they’re going to take charge, and Trump provided that.
We’ve been seeing a see-saw effect for awhile, where without incumbency, the party last holding the Presidency loses. This reflects a general, vague dissatisfaction with the status quo, mostly felt at the emotional level instead of intellectually reasoned. The world is too complicated for the average person to really figure out, and they don’t like that. While you can distract yourself from this in innumerable ways, or paper over it with something like religion, it’ll surface when it comes time to consider new leadership.
Then, in addition to the various issues people will discuss, I think being a woman hurt Harris somewhat with latinos, where the culture prizes a more Trumpian machismo.
Yeah, misogyny def played a part, but to be fair: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Sheinbaum
Yeah there is a ton of analysis to be done, but I really think the average undecided voter looks at the one choice they have and basically just asks themselves “am I doing ok right now?” If yes, they stay the course. If no, they pull the lever and flip to the other guy.
The bad economy killed them. Kamala breathed some life into the campaign but it wasn’t enough. Is the bad economy their fault? Not really, inflation is bad worldwide post-COVID. But when people can’t feed their families, they blame the people above and use the only tool they have to punish them: cutting off their nose to spite their face.
The real question is, where are all the Democrat voters who didn’t show up, that did show up for Biden? I think a combination of deep rooted misogyny, racism, and a weak message watered down to cater to “centrist” Republicans really hurt them.
The Democrats tend to focus on the undecided voter. They shouldn’t, because those people are basically just motivated by their personal good fortune at that exact time. They should focus on the occasional voter, because that’s who wins them elections.
I somewhat agree, though I’ll point out people were doing quite well at the end of Clinton and Obama’s presidencies. They flipped to the other party anyway.
I wonder how the Joe Rogan bros who voted for this guy will like it when Project 2025 makes porn illegal. I bet 99% of the dipshits don’t even know that is a thing.
The average lifespan is like 70-80+ years. All the shitheads have plenty of time to pass down their hatred and humans tend to be tribal so easily willing to accept propaganda that blames ‘others’.
The old trope about the racist uncle is relatable because of how many racist people there are.
The system is what it does, and what it does is decay in to fascism.
Welcome to the system. Everyone’s a victim. Doesn’t matter. Black or white, it hates you all. Here inside the system, violence is a symptom, fighting for what’s right, but somehow everyone is wrong.
Thomas MacDonald (born September 21, 1988) is a Canadian rapper and singer. He is known for his anti-establishment subject matter in his music, in which he also criticizes “woke” culture, herd behavior and groupthink. In 2024, he emerged as a figurehead of “MAGA rap”, a Trumpist subgenre of hip hop.
They all decay to fascism, if you haven’t noticed.
Liz Cheney will save the day! Let’s see if Jimmy Carter can vote us out of fascism in 4 years! No, no, Muslims-Americans, shut up… The soon-to-be ex-VP is talking.
Because of uninformed voting. Doesn’t matter now. There won’t be another one.
Anyone blaming anything other than the Kamala campaign are dead wrong. She ran the worst campaign you could run with the billion dollars and initial support she was gifted.
The election was hers to lose and she spent her last days campaigning doing sketches on SNL, and Waltz going on AOC streams and Jason Bateman podcasts.
They had infinitely more resources and 0 strategy other than get traditional celebrity endorsements. It is simply the campaign’s fault.
She ran the worst campaign you could run with the billion dollars and initial support she was gifted.
Biden’s was worse
It’s still Kamala’s fault she lost, but she wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
Relentless conservative propaganda made it a close race and Harris blew it by cozying up to Republicans and using kids gloves with Trump.
I think Harris played it better than anyone had so far with handling Trump. I think her fatal mistep was believing there were hordes of rightwing never trumpers who could be swayed. She had so much momentum when she first stepped in and people thought she’d be further left than Biden, she pivoted further right than him and probably got less votes. Being a POC woman certainly didn’t help either.
She had so much momentum when she first stepped in and people thought she’d be further left than Biden, she pivoted further right than him and probably got less votes.
This is exactly how I saw the campaign go, and how my enthusiasm died when she got buddy buddy with Cheney. By the time I voted it was solidly back to ‘against Republicans’ instead of having any hope that the Dems had learned anything.
I don’t have the energy to try and sway people to do the right thing, but voting is easy enough that I’ll probably keep doing that. I should probably just stop paying attention to Dem campaigns though because it sure makes taking the time to vote for them harder each decade. Republicans trashing the country should be enough of a reminder.
I think attacking Trump’s rhetoric is not a winning strategy. People are fatigued by it and it just falls onto deaf ears.
Also people are dumb and selfish. If you talk about democracy, they don’t care and/or understand what it means. All they care about is money in the wallet.
What proof do you have that cozying up to Republicans hurt her.
How did she handle Trump with kid gloves?
What proof do you have that cozying up to Republicans hurt her.
No proof, just the obvious fact that cozying up to your enemies is generally a negative. How is propping up Liz Cheney going to encourage voters who oppose Republicans?
How did she handle Trump with kid gloves?
She didn’t call him ‘convicted felon Donald Trump’. She didn’t ask him how he was looking forward to his sentencing. She didn’t ask him if he wasn’t going to let him grab her by the pussy just because he was famous. She didn’t point out that he stared at the sun during an eclipse. She didn’t point out that he nominated three SCOTUS judges that overturned Roe v Wade despite claiming he supported it. She didn’t blatantly call out his lies directly, she didn’t point out that he couldn’t focus on the topic and sounds like the sundowning jackass that he is.
She took the high road, as Dems tend to do, and not be direct and clear in their criticism of Republicans. They just softball disagreement instead of stating “That is a lie and you know it.”
Imagine being insane enough to type this out when Trump’s campaign is “they’re eating the pets.”
This is a complete deflection from the primary point: Kamala ran a campaign that would have done well in 2012. Not 2024. She had no strategy, and in fact did everything she could to not differentiate or excite despite ample historical examples from Obama to Trump on how to do so.
Are you listening to yourself? Trump is crazy/senile. Many of the people that support him know this, but will continue to support him because he appoints the ® judges they want. He could be the craziest person on the planet, but his supporters just won’t care as long he can be relied upon to deliver the courts.
A month ago, I though Harris had a good chance at winning. But as we got closer to election day, ads, headlines, and commentators focused more and more on how bad Trump is, rather than what she stands for or promises. That’s why she lost. No one was going to change the minds of any Trump voters. She needed to get undecided/swing/unmotivated voters to vote FOR her, rather than vote against Trump. “We’re not going back”? Fine, I don’t want that either, but instead of repeating that over and over, how about you remind people what it means for a Harris administration to move us forward? You can’t do that because you’re keeping us in bed with Israel and people are concerned about the implications from that? Yeah, she was going to lose to the “pet-eating” douche.
Say whatever you want about Trump and his supporters, and sure, there’s plenty to disagree with. But, they had someone they were voting FOR, and that means more than being scared of the alternative.
Weird because I’m pretty sure only Trump voters are responsible for electing Trump.
He got effectively the same amount of votes as 2020.
She got 10-12MM LESS than Biden in 2020.
They simply failed while Trump went sideways.
It is not safe to assume that if 12 million more people voted, they all would have voted for Kamala.
It is safe to say that if 70 million fewer people voted for Trump, Trump doesn’t win.
Regardless of how many people did or didn’t vote for Harris, or Stein, or RFK, or whoever, that doesn’t change the fact that 70 million Americans saw Trump and decided “yes, more of that please”.
Not to mention that GOP has taken Senate and likely to hold House. This is speaking to the wants of the average American voter. They spoke loud. They want this.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but what could she have done better?
I never expected that Trump had a chance, but this is the first time he’s won the popular vote too. Something really turned people off of Harris, and I’m curious what it was.
but what could she have done better?
She could’ve ran policies popular with her base instead of ignoring it and cozying up to Republicans. She could’ve made real campaign promises instead of just repeating “I’m not Trump” ad infinitum. She could’ve, you know, actually campaigned instead of repeating the mistakes of 2016.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/08/politics/kamala-harris-key-issues-dg/
Hardly I’m not Trump ad infinitum. Not her fault you can’t be bothered to listen.
I don’t agree that she had no platform other than I’m not Trump, but she certainly shifted right as the race went on and lost more and more support as she did it
So I read the article and… Uh… Not convinced. Her platform was vague “nothing will fundamentally change” slop. I mean Biden’s term did have many good initiatives that it would be nice to keep, but yeah this ain’t it.
However, she has not provided many details on her plans,
We call that in plain English “not making promises”. I mean hell she couldn’t even commit to keeping Lina Khan.
What policies would have been better to promote?
I felt that Trump had fewer campaign promises and just as much “Kamala bad”, and it didn’t stop him from winning.
Trump has never been able policies; Trump is a culture war candidate who says what his voters want to hear. Comparing him to dem candidates is a mistake.
No, they obviously play by different rules. But they’re in and we’re out, and we need to figure out why or it’s going to stay that way.
She was 2 minorities at the same time.
She aligned herself with (1) the most unpopular republican vice president and warmonger of our generation, (2) did not distance herself from an unpopular president, (3) did not on any level run a non-traditional media campaign all while watching the Trump campaign triple down on it.
The actual true answer is that it’s only her fault given the opportunity, but she in fact should never have been given the opportunity—Biden should have prepared to be a one term president and give years of lead time for a competent candidate to challenge the very obvious and inevitable campaign Trump ran.
Trump vote totals is sideways. Hers went down 12MM from 2020.
I live in a red state and vote blue. Trump is bad for the country. But the silver lining is that the Dems are now forced to have self reflection that they refused to have four years ago, and hopefully field a legitimately viable candidate in 2028.
She could have held to her no-fracking stance, broke with Biden over Gaza, not promised to build a border wall, or not promised to put a Republican in the cabinet. Any one of these might have made the difference
It’s wild to me that when she realized she had to somewhat distance herself from Biden she chose to say she’d have a republican in her cabinet. Not something about helping the working class more, or not supplying and funding a genocide that’s incredibly unpopular with what should be her base.
Stuff like that along with “having the most lethal military” and campaigning with Cheney alienated leftists, student, and Muslim voters which all could have been easy wins.
Economically people don’t feel better under Biden than they did 4 years ago which while the inflation largely isn’t his fault she still needed to meaningfully project she would be different than him to get working class voters and she didn’t effectively do that since she wasn’t pushing a populist message.
She clearly doesn’t know how to campaign well (pretty sure I heard she had Clinton staffers giving advice to her campaign lol) but that shouldn’t be a surprise since she was the first candidate to drop out of the 2020 primary.
Both sides used regime whores of hollycreep variety.
Political whores cant hold office for longer them a term is indicative of general dissatisfaction of the population but there is no third choice so they can just vote other guy.
But yeah DNC komissars are brain dead entire kamala debucle shoes that they learned nothing from 2016. Brain dead boomers are out of touch. Zealots have on politics subs are useful clowns but that usseful haha
This will probably be an unpopular take, but this my best guess at why Trump won.
On the election coverage I was watching (ABC), the biggest point they kept coming back to were questions of if people thought that the economy is better now vs when Trump was in office, and if people feel like they’re better or worse off financially that they were during Trump years. If I remember right, the poll data they showed had twice as many people say that things were worse economy/financially then they were during Trump era, vs people who thought things were better financially now.
I know that matches with my personal experience, I live in a rural area, and my company primarily does work for other small businesses. The Trump years had a huge amount of negative news, but my business grew a lot over those years. In comparison, the last 4 years have been very stagnant in growth. We’ve picked up some new clients, but many of the small businesses we did business with have closed down or had to sell to new owners. I wouldn’t say our business is doing worse, but everything costs more and our company profit/wages haven’t kept up. And I know it’s worse for a lot other businesses, at least from seeing how many I’ve seen go out of business.
A lot of the economic troubles came from Covid, so it’s not fair to place them all on the Biden administration. But I think a lot of the country is unhappy financially right now, and they think Trump has a better chance of changing that. I’m guessing a lot of the “undecided voters” that decided the election picked the option they thought would help them financially over all other considerations.
People also have the memory of a fucking brain dead goldfish, and don’t even have the mental capacity to realize that Trump’s tax plan is what we are currently under, and have been under, since Biden took office.
I suspect US economy is in a much worse state than it’s obvious just looking at the numbers. Most of my contact with Americans is with relatively well-off people working in the tech industry. And even they are feeling serious financial constraints. I can’t imagine how the rest is doing.
“I’m unhappy, financially so I’m going to vote for the felon, racist, sexist, fascist” still doesn’t add up.
What does add up is that enough of the American people didn’t know or fully understand just how much of a racist, sexist, fascist and total scumbag Trump really is. Or they heard about his misdeeds and absolutely abhorrent statements/views but didn’t believe it; “fake news”.
They had all the time in the world to just pay attention or ya know, just look shit up but they didn’t do those things. Now those very same people are going to be surprised AF that their friends and family are being rounded up, arrested, detained, and/or deported. They’ll say they had no idea that Trump planned to do that or that “they didn’t think he’d actually do it.”
They suck. There’s no excuse at this point. Just like the article suggests.
Then there’s his actual supporters who like the awful things he says and nod in agreement. If anything, this election has revealed that your Republican neighbors absolutely are horrible human beings. Again: If someone is still a Republican at this point they’re saying to the world that they’re in tacit agreement with these things. They share the same values as the Republican party and Trump is the Republican party platform at this point.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
