What did Democrats do wrong?

[Graham2001]

Another attempt at a post election wash up this time from a writer on Substack. Interestingly this is suggesting that Trump did way better with minorities than he had any right to expect.

Most scholars and journalists are on the blue line of political charts. Consequently, whenever analysts want to explain something they view as “bad,” they tend to focus exclusively on the red line people – and they explain the aforementioned “bad” outcomes in terms of deficits (ignorance, lack of cognitive sophistication, lack of empathy) or pathologies (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, authoritarianism) that purportedly hold among “those people” who have the “wrong” political lean.

https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyard-of-bad-election-narratives

 

[Myriad]

You asked what Democrats had planned to appeal to Trump voters. Most Trump voters believe in conspiracy theories. Your question can’t be addressed until mine is.

You're still presupposing a premise that conspiracy theory believers will not vote for a Democrat candidate unless they stop believing in conspiracy theories. Which you've provided no justification for and is contradicted by centuries of American politics.

 

[theprestige]

Is anyone suggesting running on this?

This stuff is so disingenuous.

The "I'm not touching you" theory of winning elections. The problem for Democrats isn't whether they run on it, but that everyone knows how they really feel. At this point they'd have to run against it. Not - as you are doing - try to pretend Americans haven't noticed, so it's safe to stick with it.

 

[Graham2001]

An archived NYT article on what went wrong...

Let me ask you a few questions:

If the Democrats nominated a woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among female voters than the guy who ran in her place four years before?

If the Democrats nominated a Black woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among Black voters than the white candidate who ran in her place four years before?

If the Republicans nominated a guy who ran on mass deportation and consistently said horrible things about Latino immigrants, would you expect him to do worse among Latino voters over time?

If the Democrats nominated a vibrant Black woman who was the subject of a million brat memes, would you expect her to do better among young voters than the old white guy who ran before her?

If you said yes to any of these questions, as I would have a month ago, you have some major rethinking to do, because all of these expectations were wrong.

Opinion | Why We Got It So Wrong - The New York Times

archived 15 Nov 2024 13:05:32 UTC

archive.md

 

[Brainster]

An archived NYT article on what went wrong...

Opinion | Why We Got It So Wrong - The New York Times

archived 15 Nov 2024 13:05:32 UTC

archive.md

This part of the article strikes me as more significant:

In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters.
She did manage to outperform Biden among two groups: affluent people and white voters, especially white men. If there is one sentence that captures the surprising results of this election, it is this one from the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi: “Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle.”

Certainly doesn't fit in with the "Trump is a white supremacist" theme heard hereabouts.

 

[dirtywick]

his own statements and actions and the people he involves himself with reveal much more about how he feels about minorities than a shift in voting patterns.

 

[Solitaire]

That it's an example of Democrats falling in line instead of falling in love, and that contradicts Solitaire's claim that this is the pattern for Republicans rather than Democrats.

It's not really a claim, more of an aphorism. The absence of roughly ten million democratic party members, who voted in the primaries but didn't in the main election, I would guess either they didn't like being cut out of the process of electing their candidate, or other reasons. I hope an outside organization interviews them and reports back their findings.

 

[thaiboxerken]

The Harris campaign did nothing wrong. This election was won because of a media infrastructure purchased and built by conservatives which includes all traditional and social mediums.

 

[mumblethrax]

The "I'm not touching you" theory of winning elections. The problem for Democrats isn't whether they run on it, but that everyone knows how they really feel. At this point they'd have to run against it. Not - as you are doing - try to pretend Americans haven't noticed, so it's safe to stick with it.

If this were true, things like the "basket of deplorables" comment would have no effect on voters, since they already know. It's not like rank-and-file Democrats hadn't already made it clear what they thought of people who voted for Bush in 2004.

But it did have an effect, so it follows that it isn't true.

 

[johnny karate]

You're still presupposing a premise that conspiracy theory believers will not vote for a Democrat candidate unless they stop believing in conspiracy theories. Which you've provided no justification for and is contradicted by centuries of American politics.

Please cite the historical precedent in which millions of people who believed in a conspiracy theory that tells them a political party stole an election we’re convinced to stop believing in that conspiracy theory and then vote for that political party.

 

[TellyKNeasuss]

Voters who voted on inflation were not voting on campaign messaging

I totally agree. Anyone who listened to Trump's campaign messaging would know that his proposed policies are highly likely to make inflation worse.

 

[johnny karate]

This part of the article strikes me as more significant:


Certainly doesn't fit in with the "Trump is a white supremacist" theme heard hereabouts.

I see the usual suspects are dusting off the old “I have black friends” racism defense. An oldie but a goodie.

Would like me to provide cites to Trump’s direct ties with white supremacists? Because I’m happy to do it.

 

[d4m10n]

Is anyone suggesting running on this?

The topic of the thread is how one party can do better, but it's a bit of a struggle to say how "voters are stupid" ought to fit in to a well-reasoned answer to that question. If not sloganeering, maybe something else?

 

[Myriad]

I see the usual suspects are dusting off the old “I have black friends” racism defense. An oldie but a goodie.

Would like me to provide cites to Trump’s direct ties with white supremacists? Because I’m happy to do it.

"What did Democrats do wrong? Please don't suggest any answers; that's racist."

 

[johnny karate]

The topic of the thread is how one party can do better, but it's a bit of a struggle to say how "voters are stupid" ought to fit in to a well-reasoned answer to that question. If not sloganeering, maybe something else?

“Trump voters are stupid” is a refutation of the premise that Democrats did something wrong.

 

[mumblethrax]

The topic of the thread is how one party can do better, but it's a bit of a struggle to say how "voters are stupid" ought to fit in to a well-reasoned answer to that question. If not sloganeering, maybe something else?

First, it should be said that the person you were responding to did not say "voters are stupid." They were pretty clearly saying "People who voted for Trump are stupid." And it's true, that's a stupid thing to do. You didn't bother trying to refute the reasons given for why this was a stupid thing to do, so I don't think you fundamentally disagree.

Second, this has clear implications on what Democrats did wrong. They relied on voters to not do stupid things. Next time, they shouldn't make that error. They'll probably need to run someone who can connect with voters on a more tribal basis. In earlier decades, Democrats routinely ran Southern Christian white guys who weren't beltway insiders--not because that was particularly representative of the party, but because it was a way to connect with that demographic and run an outsider campaign. For the past several elections, they've run people more closely associated with the coastal elite and the Washington establishment. Democrats should probably be looking for a Jimmy Carter-like figure. Someone like Hillary Scholten might be good (she has impeccable liberal bona fides, she flipped a midwestern seat held by Republicans for 50 years in 2022, won by over ten points this year despite her state going for Trump, gives off a strong normcore image, and was retaliated against by Biden allies for being among the first to call for him to stop down, which allows her to distance herself from an unpopular administration.)

Of course, next time Trump will not be running, assuming the basic institutions of our democracy aren't swept away in the next four years. Whether or not the GOP elects to run a similar shambling mound of human frailty will also matter. To a significant degree, people are talking about stuff that's at the margins. As has already been pointed out, the mood this year was anti-incumbent, across the world. As I understand it, every election since the pandemic has ousted the incumbent party, the first time that's happened since WWII. No incumbent party has ever won with the index of consumer sentiment as low as it currently is. This stuff matters way more than who is stupid, or who is a meanie-pants for saying so.

 

[johnny karate]

"What did Democrats do wrong? Please don't suggest any answers; that's racist."

This doesn’t follow from my post or the post I was responding to. Was this response maybe meant for another thread?

 

[Random]

The Harris campaign did nothing wrong. This election was won because of a media infrastructure purchased and built by conservatives which includes all traditional and social mediums.

This. Kamala Harris didn't lose the election. The FOX News version of Kamala Harris lost the election.

It can be difficult for us here on a politics form to take a step back and realize that most people are not interested in politics leaving them open to voting against their own interests. They are not stupid (well, not all of them at least), they just don't spend several hours a week following politics in great detail. They don't have the time or energy, and when they do, they probably don't do anything more complicated than turning on their TV and going along with whatever the talking heads are saying.

This is the target audience of right-wing media.

The left-wing has not found a good counter to it, even as the right-wing mediaverse gets bigger each year. The mainstream media is locked into the "both-sides" model, and even that is inherently slanted as they are usually talking about both sides of whatever the right-wing media is talking about.

Efforts to fund left-wing media empires have consistent funding issues (Air America forever!). Rich conservatives might be willing to lose lots of money funding right-wing media brands because they know that they can get a lot more money through tax cuts and deregulation if the message gets received. Rich Liberals have to be willing to lose money funding left-wing media brands in order to get more regulation and tax increases.

There is a strong Liberal presence on the internet, but a strong Conservative presence as well, and the siloing effect means that people don't hear opposing messages unless they go looking.

Failure to find a counter to the right-wing noise machine is probably the single biggest "mistake" Democrats have made. The next biggest would be running Bill Clinton's neoliberal "Triangulation" play over and over again for the last thirty years, but that is a whole other discussion...

 

[d4m10n]

Anyone who listened to Trump's campaign messaging would know that his proposed policies are highly likely to make inflation worse.

Could one political party have done better at messaging this vital and highly relevant fact?

 

[dirtywick]

sure, anything is possible. although it didn't seem to bother any trump voters that his economic policy positions range from nonsensical and contradictory to plain old bad. so can you craft a message about economic policy to appeal to voters that don't care at all about economic policy?
sure, anything is possible.