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I have problems with people who abstained. The hard thing is, how do you change voter behavior?
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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Give them something to vote for. You can write articles of many paragraphs to analyze the course of the election, but in the end it boils down to this: The DNC pissed off too many of their voters and offered nothing in return.
Exactly this! You can't just "lesser of two evils" your way through life as you slide towards hell. "Lesser of two evils" isn't a choice, it's a hostage situation.
I had some vote blue no matter who nitwit yelling at me the other day about this. i asked them what are we supposed to do when 2028 is Mitt Romney (D) vs Trump (R). They said you vote Romney.
People who voter shame others when both parties have crossed their personal morals are the reason the Democats don’t ever run on anything substative. They have forgotten they have to earn votes. They’re not owed.
And they have forgotten that when they lose, real people suffer deeply for it. The democrats sin of apathy is often worse than the republican sin of cruelty. At least the republicans are honest about how they want to screw over the country.
Here is Chomsky explaining why yes, that is the more logical choice
https://chomsky.info/an-eight-point-brief-for-lev-lesser-evil-voting/
I had some nitwit self-described Chomsky-anarchist the other day who sounded a lot like you, went real quite after I shared that.
The lesser of the two evils didn't go after the bigger evil, offered nothing, said the economy was doing great as people suffered higher rent and groceries, and then wondered why people listened to the lying devil saying that they would fix their problems.
They don't want to offer solutions, they want votes.
Choosing the bigger evil ain't the way out of it though. Unless you are an accelerationist that believes things have to get worse before it can get better.
You can’t get out of a hostage situation by making out with either of the two bank robbers.
no one is making out, but you if it's life or death you would listen to their demands until help arrives/opportunities arise.
This 'logic' (and metaphors are not logic) is why help isn't coming.
This. We saw the energy and joy when Biden dropped out, and it was reflected by Harris almost matching Obama’s small donor numbers. Hope. Change. They were simple campaign slogans, but people coming out of the Bush era wanted to believe, and had a candidate to believe in.
It’s a damning indictment that my most genuine electoral engagement, in my entire adult life, was voting “Uncommitted” in the 2024 Democratic primary. That was my most enthusiastic, “I 100% support this” vote ever, because almost every other time has been against something/one, or accepting lesser. From ballot initiatives, Senate races, down to the local comptroller chair.
Contrast that to my vote for Kamala in the general afterwards. It’s so unbelievably hollow to say “our democracy is strong” when the choice is always ‘well they’re better than them’.
Yeah. No matter how I look at it, this seems to be the only real solution that would have helped.
Gaza was bombed into a parking lot under the Biden admin. Harris was going to continue Biden's policies. Liberals are just mad because now the policies Trump is implementing affects them. They never cared about Palestinians.
The DNC platform was free medicine, money out of politics, and taxing the rich.
If they could have resurrected a Unicorn live on stage and it could have magically cured cancer in the radius as thanks: people would still be shitting on them all over the internet.
Money out of politics? From the DNC? Do you seriously believe this? When was the last time Hardis talked about this in her campaign?
They voted on campaign finance caps and limitations in 1995 and 2002 which passed and was sued by Citizens United in 2007 when 5 republican leaning SCOTUS judges struck it down as unconstitutional, and the DNC tried to pass more campaign finance laws recently with HR 1 For the People Act in 2019 and 2021 and again as Freedom to Vote Act in 2021 and 2023.
So yes, the DNC have actively attempted to pass campaign finances for over 20 years. That's a core part of their platform.
Admittedly I didn't know that, but also where was any of that in their 2024 platform? When was the last time Harris included getting money out of politics in her campaign speeches?
The Democratic platform is really quite leftwing. It contains things like increasing the minimum wage, getting money out of politics etc etc. The problem is in how they run campaigns. The role of consultants is far too big, and this lets the GOP set the agenda.
Example: The GOP talks about the border constantly->media reports on the border-> voters in focus groups report caring deeply about the border->Dems campaign on the border (arguably their weakest point).
If Kamala had campaigned heavily on healthcare (say expanding Medicare), she could have shifted part of the focus away from the border and towards healthcare (the GOPs weakest point), which shifts the momentum.
The same happened with many other topics. The campaign talked about the economy (whatever that means, but somehow voters associate this with GOP), rather than raising minimum wages or building homes (a strength of Dems). Climate change was never even mentioned throughout the campaign.
Dems have to find a way to lead the conversation, rather than follow a conversation set by the GOP or they will never win.
The DNC platform in general has a lot of leftwing policy yes. However, they're very... noncommittal about it. The party leadership is a bunch of geriatric centrists who only pass some progressive policy among an ocean of status quo centrism. However, that part alone is... fine. It's not good, but not really a big problem. The big problem is how they sideline their leftwing platform whenever there's an opportunity where they think they can do that without being flayed by voters, such as in this election. I'll paste my reply to the other guy here.
Part of this is bad campaigning, yes, but it's also undeniable that they actively attempted to shift to the right in this election. They didn't campaign on progressive economic policy because, if they did, they'd find themselves obliged to make good on at least some of those promises, which would piss off their donors. I mean remember the "nothing really comes to mind comment"? Talking about the wrong things is one thing, but when asked about the right things the Democrats gave very wrong answers.
I think they focused too much on emotions and cowboys in their advertisements as well, but it's not like they never stated their intentions. People just don't talk about this stuff in social media, these days, and thats sadly exactly where most people hear about politics in general.
The reason I'm asking is that the Harris campaign progressively dropped or watered down its promises throughout the campaign. For example the wealth tax promise started out good (I don't remember how much) and ended up as an unfulfilled Biden-era promise. Statements or promises from the early part of the campaign, let alone from before the campaign, don't reflect the choice voters had at the ballot box. One example would be the DNC going from rejecting the border wall to promising to build it.
The US Tax Laws dont expire until 2026.
Trump and the GOP wrote the last round in his previous term and we gave him the power to write this next round as well.
The fact is despite all of the great bills passed under Biden and all the great things the regulatory bodies did by going after big businesses, we gave them a neutered congress that couldnt even pick a senate majority without VP Tiebreaker, much less clear the 60 votes needed to bypass filibuster.
"DNC gave me nothing in return so I'll let the US slide out of democracy"
Smart. Those pissed off voters? Fuck them.
I think they offered more than most people see on social media. Their messaging isn't great and I've seen a lot more left-leaning youtube channels talk about them but not outside of that.
Then again, I'm also not American so I don't know.
Lastly, the non-voters are as much to blame in my opinion. If you didn't know you should have voted, that's on you.
That's sorta the problem with the Harris/Walz campaign, and why I'm thinking this was malice rather than stupidity. Their policy on their website and a lot of the early rhetoric was very progressive, which led to Harris getting the highest single day of donations and the largest number of small donations the DNC has ever seen.
After the money had poured in from all us poors, including my $20, the campaign started shifting its message further and further rightward to appeal to more and more corporate donors, all the while still asking progressives for more money. Eventually, the speeches being given stopped matching the previously posted policy platform at all, and we started to get the absolute insane shit like Obama telling black men to fall in line.
Giving subisidies to green energy companies and improving the GDP doesn't tangibly improve people's lives in 4 years and that's what people wanted.
It also takes longer than 4 years to rebound everyone out of the spiral Trump left the nation in. I think messaging around realistic goals and checkpoints could go a very long way to allowing people to understand no President is going to save everyone in a single term, or probably in 2 terms, especially if they have a crater to climb out of just to start at zero. Real change is a long term goal, it would take multiple administrations working towards a goal.
Americans are not educated enough to understand any of that.
They're hurting finantially, so they get mad and vote out the incumbent.
Democrats push policy like the avg american went to their ivy league schools.
It's not even really that, it's just that home loans of like 10,000 to people who have made rent for the past 2 years and have a salary of over 80,000 but not over 200,000 and own a small business and own at least 2 cats but not over 3 cats and have a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry, isn't very enticing or hopeful policy. Neither is campaigning with liz cheney when like 200,000 people are being killed with US bombs.
The problem is that they made big promises in the early Harris campaign, then continuously abandoned them and watered them down until the campaign became a shadow of its former self. Equally problematic is that they continued to shift to the right and adopt policies that are unpopular with their base. I mean remember the border wall? And of course let's not ignore the elephant in the room that was Gaza.