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This is not untrue, but it's also not a meaningful path forward.
Is it really that 15 million uninspired people are "okay with racism"? Even if we take that at face value, okay? How do we inspire them, then? Losing is not an option for us.
They are uncaring about such issues.
I hate to break it to you, man, but most people barely care about politics at all. Politics is that annoying thing they have to deal with once every Thanksgiving when uncle Remus won't shut up about the border.
It would be really nice if they did care, but they don't. You either work around this problem, or you lose indefinitely.
Listen, i was vocal, i talked about voting a lot, about how i fucking hate the democrats, but they are the only way to avert a major disaster, and after i finished voting and told my friend group, i had one go “I’m not even registered to vote, lol” and “it’s not that big of a deal, we did a trump presidency last time, nothing changed” “both sides are blowing this out of proportion” and i lost my shit. I don’t know how you reach these people, maybe it’s time to start backing the leopard instead.
Part of the reason that people don't believe much happened under Trump is that the DNC is terrible about telling them.
What motivates the right? Non-stop, 24-7, talk news radio propaganda about how badly the woke democrats are fucking everything up, about how your son is gay because of flouride in your water.
What motivates the left?
I mean that, sincerely. It can't be our sense of righteous civic duty; as you just said, people don't care. We don't have a story. Biden passed the Stop Inflation Act? Okay. What even is that?
You should ask those same people, I'm not saying it'll be every single one of them, but ask them if they liked Bernie Sanders. It's not impossible to reach these people, most of them anyway, they just need something to latch on to.
The Democratic party has an unstable coalition at its very core because many people (in their coalition even) believe in white supremacy, have homophobic/transphobic tendencies, or believe in the subjugation of women. They have run consistently after Reagan with a center-right economic platform, but a more left-wing social/cultural platform. When people were marginalized enough by the capital class by their identities this worked as a voting block.
Now everyone has gotten comfortable enough -- because many of the systemic barriers that repressed them have been removed -- to believe the superficial lies that Trump isn't racist, or sexist, or <> and it doesn't motivate them enough to vote anymore.
So do the Republicans, evangelical christians want a police state that subjugates people, while libertarians want barely any state at all. Project 2025 is a messy mishmash of conflicting policy ideas exactly because of this.
Trump was successful in distancing himself from endorsing any of the conflicting points in the Republican base, Harris went into pleasing the neoliberals hard while very visibly shunning progressives and socialists. The result can be seen by all.
The point is, Trump ran a better campaign in a political sense than Harris, inasmuch he didn't distance himself from part of his electorate as Harris did.
I understand that's the narrative but the reality is that socialism is a nothing, nowhere movement in this country and progressivism is as well. There are not millions upon millions of people who will vote for a candidate that passes the purity tests that online leftists apply daily.
Ultimately, I think the only way out of this hole in this country is a giant labor movement again. That's what sorts the people into categories for policies. Do you work or do you own a company for a living? The owners and the "tolerant" billionaires need to be jettisoned from the coalition. But there's a problem there that has prevented them from doing that up until now and it's that giant piles of money have been necessary to win previous elections. The tolerant billionaires and millionaires were the ones providing that funding.
I personally think that Republican propaganda could be much less effective if people were aligned with unions that were actually making a difference in their lives. Nowadays, so few people belong to a union that they're largely irrelevant.
But it was a bloody battle last time, and I'm not sure it'll be any easier this time.
But we need an answer. Not from you specifically, of course, but we die if we don't.
Think about this for a moment:
Did they? Like, have you spoken to them? Your average voter is not even half as politically plugged in as you or I am.
Getting people to begrudgingly vote for someone they don't believe represents any fundamental change to the problems they're dealing with is, unfortunately, just not that exciting. And if you don't have excitement, how do you get the message to spread? If someone isn't excited about cleaning up their dirty city, are you really surprised it never happens?
If you're refusing to pick fights with republicans, refusing to point out their obstructionism to the good you're working for, refusing to acknowledge any of the problems people have had with your previous candidates---I can shit talk Obama and Bill Clinton, but the DNC is not capable of it, which might even explain why they're so quiet about Trump's connections to Epstein; then how can you represent anything new?
Tim Walz's Weird campaign was a massive step in the right direction, there was energy then, and the DNC muzzled him as soon as they were able to. How can you be excited about the fight against republicans when DNC leadership are barely excited about it themselves?
I'm sorry for the rant, I really didn't mean to write a wall of text. I'm just saying, it's true that our people should have taken their medicine, they should have voted, but the reason so many didn't has to be systemic. It's not because they wanted Trump; if they did, they would have gone and voted for him. There is a rot at the heart of our current efforts that needs to be cut out before it consumes us completely.
I'm not abdicating racism or sexism as part of the problem. But if you're just going to capitulate to it, god, we may as well run 20 more white men. I think that if America is capable of electing Obama on the promise of hope and change, they can elect Kamala.
If the DNC is going to put up a candidate that must deal with racism and sexism, wouldn't the message be like ten times as important? But what was there?
"What would you do differently than Biden?"
"Hm, nothing really comes to mind."
People didn't like Biden, so how was this meant to inspire anyone? I don't reckon many people actually saw that specific interview, but this is the attitude the DNC gives us every. single. time. It's always scraps and morsels.
You realize, if those 10 million people had come out for Kamala and we had beaten Trump just barely, I'm still not satisfied with that. What I thought we had on election night was a coin flip, not the blowout that happened. A coin flip. Against a fascist.
Nah. The missing votes compared to 2020 that everyone is harking on about wouldn't have changed the election results thanks to the electoral college. Harris would have won pop vote, but Trump still would have won the election. Nevermind the fact that you can't know all those missing votes would have been for Harris.
Stop looking for someone else to blame when the only culprits responsible for Trump winning are the ones that voted for him.
I'm not refuting that Harris got fewer votes overall across the country, but the turnout in the key swing states was actually overall better for Harris in 2024 than it was for Biden in 2020. You wanna talk about "the math proves it" then you need to look at the swing states.
Nah, how about not making flimsy excuses for apathy and it's consequences.
If you didn't vote for Harris, you are complicit in whatever Trump's administration does the next 4 years, and we're not going to let you hide from your culpability. Regardless of whatever BS you come up with to justify your decision after the fact.
You're hurting them with facts.
No excuse to not vote. They stfu during the election, they most certainly should stfu now and for the next four years.
There was nobody for them to vote for. That's absolutely the fault of the dems.
..with a Cheney*
So some people felt they had no one to vote for.
This has nothing to do with her gender. In fact, I just said 'a Cheney.' Dick Cheney also supported Kamala and that made people want to vote for her even less than Liz did. The fact that Kamala's positions are so far to the right that known war hawk Dick Cheney threw his support behind her is a BAD thing for a lot of left wing voters.
We weren't talking about people who voted for Trump instead of Kamala. We are talking about 15 million people who didn't show up because there was no one running that supported their values.
Cheney didn't endorse Harris because of policy. It was more in line with orcs saying "even we can't get behind this Sauron guy." The fact you're regurgitating that propaganda says you've fallen for it, or were a vector to spread it.