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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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politics
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Biden got the most votes of any presidential candidate ever and you're telling me about democratic electability vs leftists who have gotten a maximum of like two percent of the popular vote?
If you were arguing in good faith you wouldn't use a statistic that is deliberately misleading due to not being adjusted for population growth. You're also moving the goalposts; we were talking about progressives running on the Democratic party ticket and you're bringing up vote percentages for third parties, after we've already established that we have an entrenched two-party system that makes third parties unviable.
FYI they never do
It means that Biden got more votes than Trump did for his second term even though population increased in those four years so it is not a misleading statistic.
I'm talking about current events not presidents from a hundred years ago.
Trump winning in 2024 with fewer votes than Biden got in 2020 does not support the argument that moderate Dems are more electable. In fact, it demonstrates a considerable dysfunction in the electability of moderate Democrats because it means that voters abandoned the party en masse in favor of not voting at all. Trump didn't gain voters, the moderate Democrats lost them. If you want to be electable from now onwards you would be beyond foolish to emulate Biden or Harris.
Trump gained votes:
2020: 74,223,975 votes.
2024: 77,302,580 votes.
Cool, thank you for the correction. He gained some votes, but not as many as the Democrats lost. Dem voters largely didn't switch parties, they stayed home. Do you disagree?
Unfortunately a lot of democrats and leftists still can't get past the idea of a women especially a woman of color being president.
If Biden had not stepped back he probably would have lost some votes but still would have won.
We'll move on to discussing why millions who voted in 2020 didn't in 2024 only after you concede the electability argument. It just wouldn't make sense to talk about what exactly made moderate dems unelectable if you're unwilling to accept that that's the case.
The moderate dems barely lost in 2024 but progressives haven't even been a rounding error in an election in the last sixty presidential cycles.
Moderate dems aren't unelectable and Biden showed that.
FDR (a progressive and the most re-elected and longest serving US president) was first elected 23 presidential cycles ago, and there have only been 59 presidential cycles since the country's founding. He was far from perfect, but his progressive economic policy and creation of the New Deal coalition to combat the great depression made him the most popular president in US history. You're welcome to dismiss it as a fluke or insist again that it was too long ago to be relevant but denying that it even happened doesn't help your position.