She had a huge surge in media popularity, but how many of the eventual sit-out voters would still have sat out from day 1, we'll never know.
Either way, the DNC has to go, because their choice to back Biden and delay everything until the last possible moment created this entire situation in the first place.
Ooph that's rough... :(
So until failed neoliberalism stops failing, we have to keep supporting it? Seems a little backwards. If mediocre neoliberalism was beating fascism, I'd be more okay with getting behind it.
Why keep supporting the losers and thinking they'll miraculously turn into winners?
After Biden dropped out, I was cheerleading for Harris. I didn't like her policies, but she had much better chances than Biden, and it seemed like she understood what pitfalls to avoid.
Didn't matter. The DNC doesn't understand what is needed to win. They're still running a playbook from 1996. They think the undecideds are in between them and the GOP, when in actuality they're to the Left.
Instead, the DNC has now absorbed a bunch of "never Trumper" repubs who clearly aren't willing to vote for a woman, but will let a geriatric white guy eke out a win if you promise not to do the social justice.
I think the DNC being a "big tent" party has allowed it to accept a large number of very questionable supporters, who for instance won't vote for women, and who think that Cop City and broken windows policing is totally fine akshually, and whose jaws don't drop when someone says to "send social workers into the homes" of black parents...
Ultimately, we probably will never know exactly which demo(s) sat out, and everyone will end up just interpreting their own side as the right path forwards. Depressing stuff.
I did, absolutely. I'm much more suspicious of the older, more Centrist people who told me they didn't think America was "ready to elect a woman". I suspect that most of them really meant they weren't ready, and sat out.
I wish I could at least believe it was about principles, but my gut tells me otherwise. This gap looks too similar to Hillary's in 2016.
If there's a ~20% drop in your voters every time a woman is up for election, you've got a problem.
My nephew is trans, with an openly hostile anti-trans father (my POS Trumper brother, who luckily does not live with his kids), and lives in a swing state that went red last night. Very worried for him and every other trans person in this shit hole.
I'm also pissed off that, based on the numbers we're seeing, this is the second time that Democrat voters across the country have sat out rather than elect a woman. Honestly, I shouldn't even be surprised anymore.
Stay strong, everyone, things are gonna get rough.
15+ million Democrats sat out compared to voting for Biden. I suspect this was less about Harris not being progressive enough, and more about sexism.
I repeatedly heard Democrats tell me they didn't think America was going to elect a woman president, and it looks like what they meant was they wouldn't elect one.
The genius of these tactics is that these campaigns aren't making anyone racist, they're just giving people an opportunity to feel safe showing it. Conservatives long to return to a time when they could just be like, "yeah, if you're in this town after sundown and you're not white, we're gonna hang you" (which it's important to note, was still a thing as recently as the 1980s).
Since they can't do that quite as openly now, they look to any kind of news reports they can to use our American sense of "justice" (meaning retributive, where we tend to collectively dehumanize criminals) to shield them expressing racist views. When those reports aren't there, they just make them up.
Given that there are plenty of pro-consumerism schlocky books (if not the majority, being that most are just entertainment-targeted consumer goods), and plenty of highly educational non-book texts, this doesn't really mean anything.
I'm always interested to see exactly what is included and excluded from their definition of reading. On average, most adults actually read more today that we did in the 90s, if you're purely talking words of text consumed. Are graphic novels being included in these stats? Short stories? Social media threads? Most people even watch videos/tv/movies with subtitles they read now, which was not something that was an option before.
The actual article text never says the word "book" once, but I strongly suspect that is all that's being counted.
Not to take away from the importance of voting Harris today (or hopefully, prior to today), but this:
We can eventually have that conversation as a nation, but in the '90s, when I lived in Germany, it was still considered gauche to be proud to be German. Is that the 50 years you want going forward here?
feels out of touch. It's already gauche in most progressive circles to be proud to be American (What are you proud of? The settler-colonialism? The Imperialism? The choice to back genocide? The still-haven't-abolished-slavery-ism?). Lots of us know that this supposed "eventual" conversation will never actually come. We're never going to get the country to move to RCV or abolish the electoral college, if we forever stick to the parties who directly benefit from the status quo.
Vote Harris today if you can, people, because it's too late for anything else this cycle, but we have to stop this spiraling descent rightwards by adhering to a party that would rather lose Leftists than "Centrists". As people who care about social justice and progressive politics, we should be abhorred that our platform is palatable enough to Dick The-Fucking-War-Criminal Cheney to get his endorsement.
For every person claiming that we'll eventually totally have the conversation about the party platform, there's another Centrist Democrat who is saying, "No, actually, the party doesn't need to move leftwards... It's always been a lesser of 2 evils choice... Don't let perfect be the enemy of good by drawing hard lines like not supporting genocide...".
Republicans unshackled themselves from their Centrist arm of "respectable" anti-social-justice goons to fully embrace their white supremacism in the open, and those goons have now taken up residence in the Democratic Party in response.
If we're just fundamentally unwilling to consider unshackling ourselves from them, we're never going to stop the rightward-shift happening now. We didn't move Leftwards in the 60s because our politicians led us there, people protested and rioted and made people uncomfortable until they acquiesced and got off their asses. And unless Citizen's United gets overturned, that route isn't going to work within the Democratic Party, because the police are now powerful enough to keep protesters from actually making politicians feel uncomfortable enough to choose their constituents over their corporate donors.
At the risk of not be(e)ing kind, unless you can give me a timeframe for when "eventually" is, you are part of the problem, providing cover and excuses for our rightward shift as a country.
We got Bush instead of Gore because of 700 votes for Nader in Florida.
No, Gore likely had more votes (if they had performed a statewide recount). We had Bush (and Cheney the now-Democrat) because SCOTUS stepped in to stop the recounts, and the Democratic Party chose to "keep the peace" instead of fighting it. Just like they will every time.
Honestly, I'd love to see a month-long pause on discussing the presidential race itself.
State-level stuff, ballot measures, etc, no problem, but IMO there's not going to be any productive discussion of the presidential race right now; there's still too little information, too many emotions, etc.
That aside, (because that's not the kind of thing that should happen without the community agreeing to it) I know that I'm probably part of the problem because Politics is where I tend to comment the most, and I'm going to stick to discussions of what to do next rather than wasting any more energy on litigating what went wrong at this point.
I have my suspicions about what happened, but that's all they are as of right now, same as anyone else. But I do know for sure that I'm pissed off, and I know that I'm not going to be able to keep it from affecting how I engage with people if we get into an argument.
I'm just glad we all have this community, because it's definitely an anchor-point for me right now (and thank you, mods, for all your work maintaining it).