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- cross-posted to:
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Summary
In the 2024 election, Democrats excelled with highly engaged voters but lost ground with less-engaged voters, particularly younger, working-class, and non-college-educated individuals.
Vice President Kamala Harris won among voters who closely follow politics by 5 points but trailed Donald Trump by 14 points among less-engaged voters.
Democratic strategists highlighted failures in outreach, reliance on narrow data models, and ineffective messaging.
Critics noted the party’s brand is often defined by extreme voices, while Republicans capitalized on dissatisfaction with the economy and national direction, resonating with everyday frustrations.
Highly engaged voters are invested and take the time to understand policy and nuance. Generally this is not the case. All the others are just trying to get through the day. So you cannot win them over with policy and nuances.
You need to show big, bold initiative and follow through.
The Democratic party could not even prosecute a guy who tried to murder Congress. So the thinking goes - Why the fuck would someone vote for them when they do fuck all?
Hell if someone tried to murder you and you just gave up and went about your way, no one would trust you to do anything of substance. That is the problem with the Democratic party today.
The “thinking” was instead to vote for the guy who tried to murder Congress?
The point of this article is that Trump was elected by those who did very little thinking at all.
They just didn’t vote at all, which is kinda the same thing but there’s nuance to it even still.
They did focus groups this past summer about at what point people would stop voting for Trump based on his felonies. The overwhelming answer was if he received a custodial sentence. The double delay signaled to voters that these felonies weren’t actually that bad.
Similarly the non action on the Jan 6 case also signaled to voters that it wasn’t a big deal. So they didn’t feel like they were voting for the guy who tried to murder Congress.
No, it’s that voters respond more to actions than words.
Democrats doomed themselves with the pro-democracy message in 2024. They shouldn’t even have mentioned Trump’s threat to democracy. It simply made them look unhinged to low-information voters. By the time the 2024 election came around, Biden’s own actions made running on the democracy angle nonviable.
The fatal flaw in Democrats’ messaging is that they ran on Trump as an enemy of democracy in 2016, 2020, and 2024. They ran on it, and yet, they did nothing about it.
Trump should have been hauled before a military tribunal and charged with treason on day one of Biden’s presidency. Any SCOTUS justices that tried to carve out special provisions for him should have been hauled in front of the same tribunal and been charged as accomplices. Every single person remotely involved with the conspiracy, including seating members of Congress, should be rotting in Gitmo right now. They all should have been sent to jail or the gallows within 100 days of Biden taking office.
THAT is how you respond to a threat to democracy. You do what you have to do, purge who you have to purge, and let history be your judge. Damn the consequences. Do some MAGA traitors want to start a riot in protest? Fine, send in the military to put them down. Do what you need to do and cut the rot out of the body politic.
You can’t just SAY something is a threat to democracy. You need to get off your ass and actually DO something about it. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had pro-Confederate newspapers shut down, and that was just the start of it.
When democracy is threatened, sometimes you need to run roughshod over a lot of democratic norms, lest the enemies of democracy get away with it and try again. They only need to win once, you need to win every time. Which means that when someone does actually try to overthrow democracy, you need to come down like the hammer of God upon them. You need to respond with such overwhelming force that people are lining up at the door to strike a plea deal for a mere decade in prison. Realistically, when things get this bad, you need to be prepared to sentence thousands of people to decades in prison based on rapid trials in kangaroo courts if necessary. When thousands of people become so far gone that they think overthrowing a democracy is an acceptable option, the only real way to resolve that is to start handing out life and capital sentences like candy.
What did Biden actually do? He appointed an attorney general who sat on the Trump case for two years and only started an investigation when shamed into it by the House. And then Trump just ran out the clock. Garland prosecuted a bunch of the low-level people who physically stormed the capital, but he made sure all the actual high-level ring leaders escaped unpunished.
Biden didn’t have a spine. He showed, through his actions, that he really didn’t consider Trump a serious threat to democracy. And if the sitting president of the United States doesn’t consider someone a threat, why would you expect disengaged voters to do so?
My only hope is that if Trump’s promised Reign of Terror does occur, that he starts with all the leading figures of Biden’s Justice Department. While whatever mistreatment they receive will be for things that weren’t actually wrong, at least they will be indirectly punished for their actual crimes - failing to defend this nation’s democracy. If Biden and Garland end up themselves sitting in prison on some Trumped-up charge, well I’ll have zero sympathy for them. They will simply be serving their sentence for their cowardly failure to defend American democracy. If anyone is to feel the boot of a new autocracy, let them be the first. They are the ones that created it.
Hmm yes, to save the democracy one must absolutely kill the democracy. We just have to suspend certain rights and liberties until “the enemy within” is rooted out.
Certainly not fascism.
Fascism is when you fight fascism
I see you went to the Bến Tre school of saving democracy.
No thanks to hauling Supreme Court justices before a military tribunal because you don’t like the way they ruled. I wish we had expedited the cases against Trump, but I don’t want a bunch of leftists suspending democratic principles just long enough to make sure their political opponents are weakened. We’ve seen that ploy before, and it doesn’t end with freedom.
They’re not wrong about Lincoln, but they’re forgetting Lincoln had an actual civil war.
It was never the Democrats job to do that. It was congress’s. Democrats did try. And they absolutely could have done better in many areas. I’m not defending them on that. But we need to also recognize that a large portion of Congress was flattered and extremely impressed that Trump was able to sic so many people on them. That they had no choice but to eagerly and gladly defend him while sucking up for him. Conservatives love an authoritarian. And without a few conservatives. Democrats were and never did accomplish much of anything.
What I am trying to say is, it doesn’t matter whose job it was. People vote for a leader. It was up to the leaders to make it happen. That happened to be the president. It’s nothing more complex than that.
No, it fucking wasn’t Congress’ job – at least, not just Congress’ job. It was the DOJ’s job. And guess who appoints the motherfucking Attorney General?
Wow starting off contradicting yourself. It’s an interesting argument Style. Not sure how it’s going to work though.
All right so I’m not going to defend Merrick garland. I wish that he had done better too. Unfortunately he is kind of what you want. Someone who will try to stay out of the way and seem impartial at least. We’re going to see first hand what having a blindly ideological and engaged Department of Justice will look like and why it’s a bad thing very soon.
That said Merrick Garland did not appoint the judge that sabotaged the case. Merrick Garland and the Democrats did not appoint the Supreme Court Justices who sabotaged the case. And it’s neither the executive branch or a political party’s place to act as a balance or check to the whole f****** judicial branch of government. Even with that whole checks and balances crap is b*******. It was the congress’s job. The Congress which Democrats never solidly controlled in any meaningful sense unfortunately. Especially due to Senators Manchin and the sinema.
There are plenty of actual things to blame Democrats for. That they didn’t put on the sort of performative play that we would have liked to have seen is way at the bottom of the list.
The primary way the case was “sabotaged” was by granting long delays to credulously consider every bullshit motion Trump made, which ultimately resulted in Trump successfully running out the clock until he could gain power again and kill it for good.
And guess what: that was only successful ENTIRELY BECAUSE Merrick motherfucking Garland DIDN’T EVEN OPEN A GODDAMNED INVESTIGATION UNTIL A FULL YEAR AFTER THE COUP ATTEMPT, DIDN’T APPOINT SPECIAL COUNSEL UNTIL 11 MONTHS AFTER THAT, AND DIDN’T GET AN INDICTMENT UNTIL HALFWAY THROUGH 2023!!!
The fix was in from the very beginning, and it was precisely when Biden appointed a Republican stooge to slow-walk the whole godforsaken thing!
The chief executive of the US has been a Democrat for 4 years, and it was absolutely their responsibility to prosecute (or ensure prosecution happens to) anyone that broke the law, or to at least protect the country. The norm has been for Presidents to maintain a firewall between themselves and prosecutorial decisions, but that’s not constitutionally mandated as far as I can tell.
It’s a norm because prosecution is both an executive and judicial function. It straddles both branches and you want it to be neutral in exercising prosecutorial discretion. When the chief executive steps in to direct prosecution, it has a strong tendency to become political and lead away from democracy.
Seems like the same happens when we cling to that norm too closely, as well.
To be clear I’m just talking about federal prosecutors. State and local tend to be political and, as a result, that tends to be where you see way more corruption. Ironically, it’s also why state AGs will have policies that are entirely different from the governor’s: they’re a separate political office.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, per se. In theory it is good to keep that distance between the executive and the prosecutorial decisions. But I hold that view in the same way that I hold the view that war is bad. Sometimes it is necessary when you’re given no other choice. Not to belabor the point, but this man is a danger not only to marginalized groups, but to American society and the world at large. The constitution imbues the presidency with the authority and power to take action and if this wasn’t the time to use the power afforded to it, then I don’t know man…
The correct solution for an outlier event is to set up a proper Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The U.S. still thinks it’s above that, but it’s not. A TRC would have worked after 1/6 because it was an inherently partisan event. You cannot have it be bipartisan for the same reason the Nazis didn’t get to be judges at Nuremberg and neither Shining Path nor the former government officials in Peru got to sit on their TRC. The group that perpetrated the violence shouldn’t get to adjudicate it.
They could. They chose not to.
Yup
At this point I consider it amaizng that Biden didn’t make a big show of straight up pardoning him to “let the nation heal”
We’ve got to leave this “We go high, they go low” bullshit back in the Obama days
It makes one wonder if there really was a plot to murder Congress or if, perhaps, the Democrats were engaged in hyperbole.
I agree that the democrats needed a big bold message, but this is a strange metaphor. If someone tried to murder you and you just went about your way, people would… Vote for the murderer, I guess?
They didn’t vote for Trump; they simply stayed home.
They did focus groups this past summer about at what point people would stop voting for Trump based on his felonies. The overwhelming answer was if he received a custodial sentence. The double delay signaled to voters that these felonies weren’t actually that bad.
Similarly the non action on the Jan 6 case also signaled to voters that it wasn’t a big deal. So they didn’t feel like they were voting for the guy who tried to murder Congress.
That is how the godfather works.
There’s no room for nuance, but you absolutely can win them over with policy, it just has to be policy that helps them get through the day. Everyone experiences the stress of not knowing how much your healthcare will cost, and getting hit with a massive bill anyway. “Free healthcare” instead of complicated subsidies for insurance that nobody really understands.
Progressive policy tend to win even in states where the dems ate shit..
I gave you and upvote because you came to the debate. Please don’t down vote people who want to talk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People love the policy and hate the person. Call it dumb, stupid whatever you want, but that is the reality. The centrists better realise this quickly.
Do you really think they’re just ignorant and not malicious?
When a centrist looks at a universal program like free healthcare or free college that has popular support, and then promotes a version which provides less help to fewer people and will be easily removed by the opposition, and then lies about it being more practical and popular despite receiving just as much opposition from republicans, it betrays that preventing progress is a higher priority than winning elections or helping people.