The democrats blew it by believing Americans were educated. Now they have ZERO POWER. They don't control the executive branch, they don't control the legislative branch, and they don't control the judicial branch. I'm not sure WTF you expect Democrats to do now. It's not like Americans don't have access to a plethora of history books informing them exactly how this will play out. Too bad they don't read.
The Democrats blew it by being unresponsive to their voters' material demands and instead doubling down on hollow NGO speak. They preferred to run issue-free "vibes" campaigns.
The same business-industrial class captures them as the Republicans. Neither party is genuinely going to organize around class or material needs.
The real threat to America or Americans isn't a single man. It's the superstructure that enabled him.
In other words: "Wer hat uns verraten? The Democratic Party."
> The Democrats blew it by being unresponsive to their voters' material demands
The margin is so close that one can name any of a dozen reasons why they blew it and be totally correct.
The Democrats blew it by no cravenly violating norms like refusing to seat a supreme court justice because it was too close to an election.
But they weren't unresponsive to the actual needs of their voters. Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history, but in this Republican-led post-factual world facts don't matter. The blame for that rests solely on US citizens. They've allowed themselves to be lulled into the fantasy that the party will continue on and on regardless of reality. Well, the party is over.
> But they weren't unresponsive to the actual needs of their voters.
Medicare for all? A cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?
Gaza was not a need of the vast majority of their voters, whatever a handful of college kids who are utterly incapable of understanding basic international politics think of themselves.
Neither is Bernie’s idiotic version of Medicare for all, in spite of it being a fun bumper sticker.
Y’all have gotta give up the TikTok bullshit and read some books.
Voters don't respond to long-term policy wins or economic data.
They respond to the perception of their material conditions, and the rise in inflation of the last few years has resulted in regime change all over the world.
Liberals are only just now beginning to realize this, but it remains to be seen if they'll learn at a scale that matters.
I was a Biden voter, but he was a weak and deeply disappointing president who exercised awful judgment on multiple occasions: running for re-election at his advanced age, not sacking Lloyd Austin for either the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal or going on cancer leave without telling anyone, not taking the lead on ending the COVID emergency (Colorado's Jared Polis was ahead of the White House on that), having so little control over White House interns that they released open letters against official Biden Israel policy, failing to take inflation seriously, etc.
Republicans are awful, but Democrats don't seem to want to do any better than "at least we're not them." It shouldn't be any surprise that Trump has (had?) real appeal over feckless national Democrats.
> Biden was one of the most successful presidents in US history
Biden? If that man was actually the one leading the country over the last 2+ years, I’ll eat your hat. All that is coming out now from multiple sources in the administration seem to indicate he hasn’t been capable of making many decisions for quite a while now.
Can you give a few of the specific "multiple sources" you mention?
I see posters on HN trot this out, but I'm yet to see any evidence of this. Can you point to a couple of reliable news sources reporting on this so I can read more for myself?
There are two books that literally have dropped in the last 2 weeks and the authors have been doing a lot of media about them. One is called “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” another is called “Uncharted: How Trump beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History”. Both of these books quote anecdotes from Biden admin insiders and dem politicians about the challenges they saw and experienced.
DNC fundraiser Lindi Li has been all over the podcasts and news (back in November a lot) talking about the challenges she saw.
I’m not sure what you consider “reliable news sources” but I have seen this topic and these authors, and Lindi Li on network, cable, and new media news sources across the spectrum.
It's always interesting when you see a new meme emerging from the rightwing information wormhole into the open internet. This week's must be "NGO" used as some type of slur.
Anyway, the economy was rocking under Biden, we had the largest investments in manufacturing in decades (the advanced kind, not mud production), record low unemployment, stonks going up, etc.
Inflation is pretty much the only issue that mattered, which was a global phenomenon that America navigated better than anyone else, and there's almost nothing to say about it. Well, you can lie and say that you'll reduce prices on day one, despite having no mechanism to do so, which I suppose is the real takeaway: Dems should blatantly lie more.
The terms NGO-speak or PMC didn't come from some "rightwing information wormhole."
These are very real ideas and concepts that average people internally and instinctively revile: they are no longer people but "human resources."
Oooookay
?
Ok.
They totally did. Sorry but no one but rightwing information wormhole seen NGO as something nefarious in principle. It is just laundering far right bullshit again.
So anyone critical of the Gates Foundation for distorting public health priorities through his NGO slush-funds is participating in "far right bullshit" again?
This is demagoguery.
It has zero to do with material demands. Those lost the elections. What won them was conservatives stroking fears about trans, women and such. Talking about material demands is just repeating past mistakes.
Actual economical or other results have nothing to do with anything. It was not about that. Democrats thinking them being objectively better for economy might do something is what looses the elections.
The only reason those evergreen moral panics worked is the radio silence from the Biden and Harris campaigns on what concrete things they would do differently if given the chance at another term.
Instead, voters were told they were better off than ever, and there was some astroturfed panic about "Project 2025."
> Astroturfed Panic
Oh, please, if this isn't you just saying the quite part out loud.
They are enacting Project 2025. Significant portions are already done, for God's sake! Don't pretend like it's some Boogeyman made up thing!
"If Americans were educated and could read they would vote Democrat..."
EXACTLY the thinking that won Trump the election. Reduce legitimate concerns to the deplorable desires of the unwashed masses.
We need another "Why Trump won?" postmortem, as it seems people haven't learned yet.
We're still having to explain to adults that tariffs are, in fact, a consumer tax. We're not bringing crayons to the meeting for ourselves here.