Electoral-vote made the point that it was turnout that did the Democrats in this cycle. “Trump collected 62 million votes in 2016, grew that to 74 million in 2020, and will check in at a bit less than 74 million this year. In other words, to the extent that he won new voters over this year, they were offset by voters who jumped ship… On the other hand, Hillary Clinton collected 66 million votes in 2016, Joe Biden got 81 million in 2020, and this year, Kamala Harris is going to end up with about 68 million. ‘Where did all those Biden voters go?’ is a question that will haunt Democratic operatives, not to mention political commentators, for months or years.”
Two historians, Leah Wright Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and Moshik Tempkin, author of Warriors, Rebels, & Saints, are publicly saying exactly what the Democratic establishment does not want to hear— the party should have listened to Bernie and paid attention to his issues agenda. Sophie Clark reported that when he ran for president— but actually when he rn for mayor, Congress and Senate as well— he focused “on addressing economic struggles and inequality.” Call me crazy, but isn’t that what the Democratic Party stands for— or used to when he was the majority party for decades?
“The economy, and inflation in particular, was crucial for voters this election,” wrote Clark, “and in the run-up many polls showed that Trump was considered a better economic candidate than Harris. Exit polls showed that the majority of working-class voters backed Trump, who also overperformed among Hispanic voters. Rigueur said, ‘One of the things that Bernie Sanders has been saying since at least 2014 has been about how the Democratic party, if it wants to keep these coalitions, needs to talk about bread-and-butter issues. It needs to talk about politics.’ Rigueur said that it's not that ‘cultural politics don't matter,’ but that both areas need to be a part of the Democrats' platform. Historian Moshik Tempkin… echoed Rigueur's view, writing on Twitter, “My most disturbing memory from the 2020 primary is when Bernie Sanders won Nevada, California, and every other state with large numbers of Latino voters, and the Democratic Party’s response was to spit in their face and tell them that they didn't matter, only South Carolina did.”
Others expressed similar views in favor of Sanders' policies.
A clip of journalist Medhi Hasan saying Democrats need “their own Joe Rogan” given the podcast host's high-profile endorsement of Trump also went viral on Twitter when reporter Ryan Grim pointed out that Rogan had endorsed Sanders in 2020.
Podcast host Krystal Ball said that Sanders was able to speak to the communities who do not appear to have connected with Harris in a post that received 58,000 likes.
Actor John Cusack also weighed in, saying Sanders “was always the way to beat back fascism.”
…Sanders himself has also said he doesn't think the Democrats did enough this election.
In a statement on the election results he wrote: "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.
"First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well," he added.
Professional Democrats have a target for their ire now. They’ve always feared Bernie’s ideas— but now he’s coming close to criticizing them. “Stay awake” were Thursday’s words of wisdom from Garrett Graff. He felt he had woken up in an “America meaner and more vindictive than one I imagine I live in, an America less committed to democracy at home and less committed to good and freedom in the world beyond, a more selfish America that cared less about its neighbors than I had been taught, an America more full of anger and resentment than hope and aspiration… Donald Trump’s victory is so striking, so broad, and so deep— touching every corner of the country, his support improving across virtually every demographic— that it should remove any second-guessing from Democrats about their candidate, Harris’s strategy, or even the core politics of the Biden administration. Picking Josh Shapiro as veep wouldn’t have mattered; handling Gaza differently wouldn’t have made a difference; giving a few more interviews to mainstream news outlets wouldn’t have changed a thing. The economy was, by any objective measurement, as strong and robust as it could be, the Democrats outraised and out-organized the GOP, and none of that mattered a lick.”
Clear-eyed: “An angry America made a conscious, resounding, national choice for a different path on Tuesday. It was a total rejection not just of Democrats but of this century’s governing establishment— this campaign, of course, allied not just Harris, Biden, Obama, and the Clintons but also the Cheneys and the Bushes. America delivered a resounding message that this century’s status quo wasn’t working for middle-class (white) (male) Americans, that the priorities of the three other presidents this century didn’t deliver the results (white) (male) voters cared about. Eight years ago, Trump had offered a chance to stick it to the Establishment Elite; this time, he promised he’d burn the Establishment Elite down.”
The fight for progress in America is always hard. It has never been easy. And it has never been linear. King’s civil rights battles were, in many respects, the battles to right the wrongs of Reconstruction a full center earlier and to push America closer to the promises of equality and justice it had long deferred. The fight for progress is often disillusioning, rosy and respected only in retrospect.
It’s a fight we’re still in today. And clearly one we will continue to fight for my entire life.
It’s also clear to me today anew how long and hard the fight will be. And how outmatched we still are.
It’s easy to forget how promising and full of Obama-era hope the future looked at the time Donald Trump entered the presidential race for the first time in 2015. In the two weeks after his golden escalator ride, we saw gay marriage embraced by the Supreme Court, the White House lit in a rainbow flag, the Confederate flag brought down from the South Carolina capitol at the urging of the Republican governor, a transgender Olympic decathlete (Caitlyn Jenner) appear on the cover of Vanity Fair, and the Pentagon end its ban on transgender troops. I thought then that we were on the verge of a different, better moment, one that more perfectly achieved the American dream and promise of freedom and equality for all. I was wrong.
…We have not adjusted to just how much the online torrent of ignorance and slop has destroyed our ability to civil conversations, inform voters, and educate citizens. And, particularly, Democrats and the mainstream traditional press failed to understand and reckon with just how much better Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk understood the power of modern social media.
Biden, Harris, and the Democrats in the end couldn’t overcome the international trend of anti-incumbent anger over inflation and immigration that has swamped government after government this year. I believe much of that blame, in our case, stems from the toxic information environment, a venomous and noxious world, full of isolated cul-de-sacs, that undermines facts, reinforces stereotypes, and remixes and reduces all viewpoints to the same base level. (We can’t seriously be having a conversation about removing flouride from water in 2024, can we?!) As just one example: President Trump received none of the blame for mismanaging Covid, and President Biden received none of the credit his policies deserved for righting the economy he inherited. For the third time in my lifetime, a Democratic president who fixed an economy broken by his Republican predecessor will now hand that roaring economy over to a Republican.
We must figure out how to confront and improve the information environment, to get Americans the facts they need to make informed choices, if we want any path forward as a democracy.
The final lines of [Jonathan] Eig’s book are a quote of King’s, a line that haunted me and inspired me anew Wednesday morning when I got up: “Our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change.”
Obama-era hope
really? just because his slogan was "hope and change" or something? 4 years of being buried by slick willie's crash belied it. His next slogan was "yes we can", but 4 years later the actual lesson "no we can't" was what was hammered home.
It may just be that, finally, after 60 years of this shit... "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
Just what we (do not) need. MGP centrist-splains to the rest of us where the Party went wrong:
A WA red-district conqueror wants fellow Democrats to look in the mirror [NYT]
"For two years, U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from a rural, red district in Washington state, has been criticizing her party for being too dismissive of working-class voters.
That message appears to have helped Gluesenkamp Perez, long considered perhaps the most vulnerable Democrat in the House, defy the odds in this week’s election. ...
Gluesenkamp Perez, 36, who owns an auto shop now run by her husband, has angered progressives for sometimes crossing party lines, like when she voted with Republicans to repeal President Joe Biden’s student…
The `enemy within' the Democratic Party is in fact the leadership of the party.
Reading the rants from Jamie Harrison, Tom Suozzi, Jim Messina, Phillipe Reines and
all the brave anonymous sources for chattering class post mortems,
their hatred of what used to be the party's base is palpable.
Just STFU - we've got this.
Except they don't.
Looking at my campaign contributions for the last few cycles,
very few of the candidates I donated to were successful.
Sometimes they were just weak, sometimes they were overwhelmed by a tsunami
of AIPAC or crypto $$$, but sometimes they were deep-sixed by the DCCC or DSCC.
Until there is a wholesale replacement of the party leadership, there is no
realistic hope…
"We must figure out how to confront and improve the information environment, to get Americans the facts they need to make informed choices, if we want any path forward as a democracy." Before you can do that you have to figure out a way to make Americans care more about facts than about their outrage. Good Luck. If facts payed the bills, both social and mainstream media would serve them. And the bend toward sensationalism isn't new, it's just worse. Yellow journalism probably started with the printing press. But now that the responsibility for truth has been moved from the publisher who makes the money, to the user they make their money from, there is no incentive to be the adu…