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Tim Walz says he and Harris were too ‘safe’ during 2024 presidential campaign
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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That is just one of many many reasons the Democrats lost, too many to count or even list in this post. You might want to also update the platform to not gobble the balls of the billionaires and corporate class. Abolish the electoral college, gerrymandering (though there were efforts on this front; poorly executed), lobbying, and Super PACs. Should've expanded the Supreme Court or instituted term limits.
Basically put in any effort whatsoever to show they wanted to prevent the loss of democracy and they didn't do it. At least SAY things that would prevent genocide in Gaza, even if you don't mean it. Start playing by the same rules as the Republicans and there could have been a chance.
It's too late for any of that now.
Dems never had the super majority to abolish the electoral college, gerrymandering or the other things you mentioned.
Even if its not possible, campaign like its the goal. Tell us what you'd do with full approval from everyone and people might get motivated enough to vote to make that happen.
There was never the votes to give women the right to vote either, but it eventually got passed after a good solid fight.
Plenty of people were arguing back then that "there arent the votes to make this happen" and "we should only focus on very small incremental wins".
Blaming dems for not doing something they can’t do is not the same as what you’re describing.
They cant fight? they cant play politics? No hard ball? No applying pressure? No speeches, lawsuits, threats? Those are all thing republicans seem to use, but the dems just..."cant"? Give me a break.
They can vote. If they do not have enough dems to vote they have to reach across the aisle to get votes from conservatives.
Conservatives will not help without getting something in return.
What you’re saying is dems should give conservatives concessions which will then be used as a talking point to blame dems more.
That’s what “fighting” means in this context.
only to the unimaginative. Or those that want excuses to do nothing. Consent can be steered and manufactured. If the centrists had any ideology at all they'd be pursuing the right things, not lounging about doing absolutely nothing.
What do the dems do lately that would make anyone vote for them? Do they profess to stand for.. much of anything, besides Israels right to take land and exterminate the civilians on it? Tell me one thing they have made a strong stand on?
It’s a vote. You can’t win a vote with feelings or vibes or a “can do attitude”.
It requires votes.
This is a good example of whats wrong with the centrists. You dont even seem to know what I'm talking about, or else you're just repeatedly denying it and pretending not to know. Its a microcosm of the Democrats floundering and failure right now.
This is what’s wrong with leftists. They never win any elections because they don’t understand the importance of voting.
Dems lose by 2 million votes in 2024 because of leftists getting tricked into not voting over Gaza.
Leftists respond by acting like it’s some big defeat and dems need to start taking campaign advice from leftists that cannot win elections.
On the other hand Trump loses by 3x as many votes in 2020 and comes back to win the next election by doubling down on his strategy.
If Trump had leftists trying to tell him how to campaign he would’ve lost in 2016 and 2024.
Seems obvious you cant win without the leftists though can you. Maybe you disloyal centrists should have considered that from the start. Now you're sitting in the wilderness with us trying to act all smug and high handed and lecture people? Who do you think you are? You hold the reins of a party that is now a complete laughingstock. You've shat the bed so epicly that I'd be embarrased to comment if I were you. Your reputation for vacuous incompetence and corruption is tied to you like a stone around your ankles. And yet you loudmouthedly swagger around like you're proud of what you have accomplished. After you enabled a genocide and lost to a geriatric fascist clown, no less. Your lack of self awareness and failure to learn a single thing in losing is truly amazing.
Except dems have been winning without leftists. Dems have also lost because of leftists like in 2024.
That is how leftists ratchet governments to the right. By losing elections for themselves and anyone that parties with them. Then attacking the dems that gave them a chance.
So dems cater to actual voters that show up and vote and have nuanced, diverse ideologies in the middle of the spectrum.
Instead of working with leftists that screech “genocide Joe” until Trump gets elected.
The electoral college is not a problem, it’s a great system. Winner takes all is the actual problem.
They’re both problems.
No they’re not. Abolishing the Electoral college removes yet another barrier to populism and it could have unintended far reaching consequences down the line. I know MAGA is already a populist movement, but it can be so much worse. Just because the popular vote will get you what you want now doesn’t mean that it won’t hurt you in the future. Much like we’ve seen the damage that the reckless expansion of presidential power has done. The founding fathers created a good system and bipartisan politics have corrupted it, it’s restoration should be top priority.
The system works if used as intended. Winner takes all is not using it as intended, just like electors voting in the same way as the voters mindlessly is not using it as intended. Yes it’s elitist. Current state of affairs prove that the founding fathers were correct in their beliefs.
The system your beloved founders created wasn't just "the person with the most votes gets the whole state" because there were no votes for president at all! It was entirely up to the political elites in each state to decide who to support between two nominees who were also not voted on because primaries were not a thing and were again picked by party elites in smoke-filled rooms based on corrupt deals with no democratic input. And even in the cases where people could vote, women and slaves were of course excluded from the process entirely.
Unless you're either a billionaire or a high-ranking member of a major political party, your beliefs are directly opposed to your own interests. "Populism" guess what, you are part of that population, your voice and your interests are the ones being suppressed when "populism" is suppressed. You're shooting yourself in the foot.
But really it just seems like "populism" is just a meme in your head. If you want proportional representation instead of winner-takes-all, you're supporting "populism." The alternative to "populism" is the suppression of democracy by a political elite. The "winner-takes-all" system is already considerably more "populist" and democratic than what the founders set up.
By the way, the "bipartisan politics" that "corrupted" the "good system" emerged immediately, before the ink was even dry on the constitution. It was an inevitable result of the system that the founders created and they didn't understand that because they had nonsense ideas that politics could be "nonpartisan," a process of people randomly coming up with different ideas through reason as opposed to competing socioeconomic groups asserting their material interests. But immediately one party emerged representing the southern slaveowners and another representing the northern capitalists, because that's how politics works. You can even see this in the constitution itself, things like the Three-fifths Compromise which was blatantly a political compromise and not reflective of some transcendent truth.
Even if you were to argue that some of the founders had good ideas, it's absolute nonsense to suggest that they all did, especially, you know, the ones who supported slavery as a precondition of signing off on the project and insisted on provisions to grant slavers more power and to bar congress from making any laws about it for a specified period and wanted to suppress "populism" out of fear that it could lead to the slaves being freed. Your reverence for them is both completely irrational and against your own interests.
I defend them because for all their moral failings they did design a system that is more resilient than any other to autocracy. We could have extended participation to all without destroying that system, and Trump would have never happened. Or if he had he would not have had the power to do the things he’s doing now. But every president takes a little bit more, and you don’t say anything if they belong to your party but cry bloody murder when the other one does it. And then when you’re back in power do you ask your lawmakers to stop the power grab? No, why would you, you like what’s being done. And that’s how we get here.
But I digress, you wrote all of that and never refuted the fact that the electoral college does in fact work. Land might not vote but states need equal say regardless of the population they have. If New York and California decide all elections, how soon until the other states start to secede because their votes count for nothing?
States have strong individual cultural and administrative identities and unless you erase that, there’s no way you can abolish the electoral college without also destroying such a thing as the United Staes of America.
Just do the following mental excercise: Texas and Florida are the two fastest growing states at the moment. Let’s say they remain red and manage to get a bigger population than all the blue cities combined (because of all the space they have) and now because of them every election a Republican president wins. Would you be ok with that? If not then you have to be in favor of the electoral college.
So you disagree with the idea of "one person, one vote," then? Absolutely ridiculous. People living in densely populated areas have just as much ability to think and arrive at a diversity of opinion as rural people do, if anything, moreso because they're more likely to encounter a range of views. This also doesn't account for minority enclaves, the various Chinatowns and similar, that can exist in cities, or the more diverse populations in general. The electoral college disproportionately favors white people.
That's a terrible argument. If that happened, perhaps I would be in favor of the electoral college for purely pragmatic reasons, very reluctantly. If I'm operating on ruthless, unprincipled pragmatism (the only reason I would ever, even hypothetically, consider supporting the electoral college), then obviously, in the present situation where the electoral college is disadvantageous to me, then I should oppose it.
During the Civil War, Lincoln temporarily suspended certain civil liberties due to the existential threat the south posed - and it was probably necessary and the right call. But just because I might support suspending certain liberties in extreme situations, facing a true, existential threat, it doesn't mean I "have to" be in favor of suspending them on some kind of principle.
Obviously, all else being equal, it's better for everyone to get an equal say. You can conjure up a situation with a horrible population and a benevolent monarch keeping them in line and argue that in that hypothetical monarchy is superior to democracy, but that in no way proves it in the general case or as a principle. In the same way, when you conjure up a situation where the electoral college is keeping an evil population in line, that in no way proves that the electoral college is better than democracy.
In the context of presidential elections? I guess I do. The US is supposed to be a country of countries, so governors should be decided by popular vote as they are the ones who will have the most direct effect on the lives of people. The president was originally intended mostly to oversee big picture stuff that affected all of the states, and as such all the states needed to have equal say in the president. Which is why the states elect the presidents via the electoral college.
Of course the problem is, once more, that the executive branch and the federal government have expanded their power so much that their policies have more effect than original intended over the daily lives of people and understandably people would like to be able to influence that. So for me there’s really only two solutions: we walk back things to their original intent or we might as well start an entirely new system because ours is not designed to work with all this added power.
The reason I agree with the usually right wing idea of restoring the original power structures is that I have seen enough evidence to believe that strong state sovereignty is the best way to go. It’s a very good foil to authoritarianism because power is concentrated at the lower levels. Right now if Trump and Co. manage to completely take over, they will still have a hard time doing everything they want because States have tools to defend themselves against the federal government. But it’s also a “freer” system as it also allows people to move from state to state and choose the one that most aligns with their views instead of a singular vision being imposed from the top down.
There's a reason that the country abandoned that approach, despite virtually everyone being ideologically committed to it: it doesn't work in practice. Time and time again in this country's history, people tried the decentralized, weak federal government but then we faced crises that could only be solved with a stronger and more centralized federal government. Whether it was the Articles of Confederation being unable to pay soldiers from the Revolution, or states seceding and starting a war because the elites felt their interests were going to be threatened someday if they didn't, or the Great Depression - despite being the "face" of big government, FDR was actually quite restrained in the New Deal and tried at times to roll parts of it back (resulting in harm to the economy), and it was only WWII that gave an excuse to do the kind of government spending necessary to recover - or desegregation, where the federal government had to deploy troops to force schools to integrate. Your approach was tried again and again and it failed again and again, and the reason we don't have it anymore is that it's fundamentally dysfunctional.
You can't just decide what the best policy is through pure reason, you have to look at what's been tried and what happened. Like, point me at any point in the country's history where the problem was not enough state's rights and a too powerful federal government as opposed to the opposite.
The founding fathers created a good system and bipartisan politics have corrupted itOnly when compared to monarchy, or the Soviet Union.
It was always going to be corrupted, and if you think the electoral college will ever prevent a demogoge from taking power, I have a bridge to sell you on Pluto.