Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won
March 18, 2025 4:53 AM Subscribe

Ezra Klein speaks to Democratic pollster David Shor about what voter data reveals about the 2024 election. NYTimes (ungated), YouTube

On ethnicity:

Ezra Klein: "Where do we begin?"

David Shor: "In 2016, Democrats received 81 percent of the Hispanic moderate vote, while in 2024 they received 58 percent. That’s only 6 percent more than the 52 percent of white moderates that they received in 2024. The main story here is just a continuation of the trends that we saw four years ago. Throughout the entire Trump campaign, we’ve observed this racial depolarization."

On GOTV:

Klein: "How does that sit with you — the idea that Democrats didn’t lose to Trump, they lost to the couch?"

Shor: "It’s just not empirically correct, I would say."

On gender:

Klein: "I feel like the story you’re implying you believe here is that this polarization among young men and women is driven by young men who were in high school and online during Covid."

Shor: "We’re in the midst of a big cultural change that I think people are really underestimating. [...] If you look at zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them."

On messaging:

Klein: "If I’m reading this chart correctly, when Democrats attack Trump for cutting or wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security, his disapproval increases by 2.5 points. If they attack him for letting Elon slash budgets, hurting Americans and putting privacy at risk, that hurts him by 2.2 points. Passing a one-party power grab to cut government services without compromise, that’s 2.1 points. These all look about the same, and none of them creates a very big shift."

Shor: "Can you just think about this scenario for a second: Can you imagine stopping a Trump voter on the street and you say 70 words to them and then there’s a 2.5 percent chance they changed their mind? I think that’s incredible and a big deal."

posted by dmh (182 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite

If I let myself think about this for more than half a second I become incandescent with rage, because the mass media has had the power all along to inform the masses (* it's in the name) exactly about what Trump was, is, does, and wants, and they did not, because they are controlled by the same people who want the US to be a white christo-fascist oligarchy.

The NYT telling democrats that this (gestures outwards) is their fault because they didn't personally engage with republicans is apocalyptic levels of bullshit, and this is not how I wanted to start my morning.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:00 AM on March 18 [131 favorites]

What struck me about the interview and the chart looking at what people rate Republicans and Dems as best at, is that low info voters are killing this country. People think the Republicans are better at the economy and debt? When consistently they're worse? People mostly don't pay attention and get their news from Fox? That's a tough fight to win and requires much better messaging than the Dems have managed.

The Dems lost the propaganda war and took away the message that they just need to be more like what the propagandists want. That's not working for most people tho (even if they're convinced it is). Howard Dean, Sanders, AOC, Murphy and others show that if you stand for something and fight everywhere, the Dems can win because the best of the Dems policy helps more people.

I don't know why they've been scared to say so for 25 years now (since Gore ran away from Clinton's economic success), but at this point I only assume that the fix is in because this kind of consistent incompetence in the face of even greater incompetence is unreal.

And, yeah, I'm tired of the Republican party being given good faith and treated as if they don't repeatedly lie and obstruct to get what they want.
posted by kokaku at 5:09 AM on March 18 [63 favorites]

Oh please, not this again.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:09 AM on March 18 [34 favorites]

☝️ Seriously. Oh NYT, please let us know how we have done wrong, it was us not you
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:11 AM on March 18 [68 favorites]

Also, it absolutely pisses me off that the Dems are tagged with social matters (i despise the term "culture wars") being a problem when basically they're playing defense badly against an unrelenting attack by Republicans who are using these things masterfully to divide and conquer.

Back to my low info voter comment... the number of people who think that Dems defending trans people is why they're struggling is depressing and shows just how good the Republicans are at misdirection.
posted by kokaku at 5:15 AM on March 18 [25 favorites]

Another interview with Shor from Vox.

Key takeaways

Democrats lost the most ground with politically disengaged voters, immigrants, and young people.
If every registered voter had turned out, Democrats would have lost by more.
TikTok appears to make its users more Republican.
Nonwhite moderates and conservatives are voting more like their white counterparts.
The gender gap among young voters was historically massive in 2024.
Democrats lost voters’ trust on the economy and cost-of-living.
Democrats’ most effective message in 2024 was an economically populist one.
Donald Trump is leaning into the most unpopular parts of his agenda.
Democratic constituencies are much more vulnerable than Republican ones to AI-induced unemployment.

posted by 1970s Antihero at 5:21 AM on March 18 [29 favorites]

Back to my low info voter comment... the number of people who think that Dems defending trans people is why they're struggling is depressing and shows just how good the Republicans are at misdirection.

It helps when you have a mass media that is now owned by folks who massively benefit from Republican rule and they are desperately trying to shake off the "liberal bias" tag.
posted by NoMich at 5:21 AM on March 18 [11 favorites]

He basically says right at the start that "high-information" voters are "weird." That's to say, people who actually understand what the fuck is going on. So it's clear that you have to make a pitch that appeals to people who do not know what the fuck is going on. That's not to say that they're stupid; many of them are probably just too preoccupied with matters of survival to read deeply about politics, and what time they do have to devote to non-essential study they'll probably put toward things that are fun, like sports and entertainment. It's an enormous mistake to condescend to those people, or to presume they will be swayed only by an appeal to their worst nature. Unfortunately I think the democrats are a long way off from grasping any of that.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:27 AM on March 18 [51 favorites]

I've been thinking a lot about the Chris Hedges argument that what we have just seen wasn't the victory of Republicans over Democrats, so much as of oligarchs over corporatists.

It does a far better job of explaining the actions of Democratic Party leadership than Klein's take, for my money.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:31 AM on March 18 [53 favorites]

The best version of the election argument was Hasan Piker's Pod Save America video interview. The problem is not young people, racial groups, or that the Democrats aren't Republican enough.
posted by ftrtts at 5:36 AM on March 18 [8 favorites]

~~Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won~~

The NYT and Other Media Need to Face Their Responsibility for Trump Winning

FTFY
posted by tommasz at 5:44 AM on March 18 [51 favorites]

surely this time we can figure out which group of voters we can blame enough to fix the world
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:44 AM on March 18 [10 favorites]

Every time I read that people trust Republicans more on economic matters, I just want to move to fuckin' Norway. Tax-cut-and-spend Republicans explode the deficit every time they're in office and Democrats have to fix it. And they're spending on shit that doesn't help anyone but the wealthy!

Yet somehow they're the party of fiscal responsibility, just as their lineup of pedos, weirdos and philanderers are somehow the party of family values.
posted by skullhead at 5:46 AM on March 18 [41 favorites]

The best version of the election argument was Hasan Piker's Pod Save America video interview . The problem is not young people, racial groups, or that the Democrats aren't Republican enough.

Please save me the trouble of listening to a podcast and tell me what the problem WAS, according to them. Thanks.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:52 AM on March 18 [23 favorites]

Please save me the trouble of listening to a podcast and tell me what the problem WAS, according to them. Thanks.

Thank you! I can either listen to a podcast or I can do the shit that I need to do just to make it through the day.
posted by NoMich at 6:09 AM on March 18 [14 favorites]

Harris lost because incumbent parties across the developed world were punished by voters for Covid inflation. Any analysis that ignores that isn't worth the electricity to read it.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:10 AM on March 18 [23 favorites]

Inflation is mentioned 23 times in the linked article.
posted by Klipspringer at 6:16 AM on March 18 [9 favorites]

The Vox interview is a little better than the NYT interview and therein Shor makes the point very firmly that the election was decided by voters who are loosely engaged with politics and that inflation was by far their greatest concern. As I have said before, Harris’s lack of serious engagement with inflation was her most inexplicable failure at a policy level.
posted by MattD at 6:21 AM on March 18 [14 favorites]

I found this an interesting read, so thanks for posting.
posted by wittgenstein at 6:21 AM on March 18 [7 favorites]

They're working so hard to convince us that it's our own fault and we definitely weren't stabbed in the back by oligarchs that it kind of makes you wonder if we were stabbed in the back by oligarchs...
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:27 AM on March 18 [13 favorites]

But that's crazy talk. Only Republicans get caught up in conspiracy theories about elite powerbrokers conspiring to manipulate both the media and implant agents within the deep state to cement their power grab. We shouldn't stoop to their level.

(/sarcasm)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:32 AM on March 18 [8 favorites]

The party that lost had every opportunity to get brutally punitive on corporate greed. Or on Israel’s genocide. And both parties were identical in their commitment to not improving either. As much as the all-encompassing ignorance of the electorate leaves me convinced this country cannot be salvaged, the bipartisan capitulation to Capital and eliminationist regimes before the election leaves me convinced that an informed electorate would likely produce the same outcome.

Show people something worth voting for, rather than always against, then we’ll talk.
posted by Ryvar at 6:33 AM on March 18 [14 favorites]

Maybe, just maybe, the massive disinformation campaign, funded by dark money, utilizing geographically pinpointed psychographic information is working? Is that a story?
posted by zerobyproxy at 6:39 AM on March 18 [29 favorites]

The party that lost had every opportunity to get brutally punitive on corporate greed.

That absolutely would have worked and I wish they would have done that, but a lot of us have a hard time seeing just how slavishly dependent the upper management of the party is on catering to rich donors, because they firmly believe it's the only way to be electorally competitive—that they cannot fathom being competitive on small donations and volunteers and not doing giant pointless legacy media buys.

Or on Israel’s genocide.

That would have resulted in a titanic landslide for Trump instead of the really very narrow victory he actually won. People who prioritize this issue feel very strongly about it, but they're a very small slice of the population, and they're roughly evenly divided. Harris would have lost as many votes as she'd gain among that slice of the population, and most of the rest of voters have been trained to view Israel as civilized and Palestinians as barbarians and/or think of I/P as a trivial issue in comparison to the kitchen-table issues that really move voters. The ads would write themselves.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:44 AM on March 18 [11 favorites]

Democrats lost the most ground with politically disengaged voters, immigrants, and young people.

And yet there are people here blaming the mainstream media for not being critical enough of Trump. I doubt there were more than a few dozen people in the country who, after reading a bunch of Maggie Haberman articles and watching Wolf Blitzer for hours, said to themselves, "Well, that Trump guy doesn't seem too bad, I guess I'll vote for him."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:45 AM on March 18 [9 favorites]

That would have resulted in a titanic landslide for Trump instead of the really very narrow victory he actually won.

Not this again. Stop apologizing for genocide.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:48 AM on March 18 [14 favorites]

Wasting four years shaking our fists at the media barons and the algorithms is a great way of getting fucked even harder in 2028. They will still be there, and you have to find a way to win anyway.
posted by Klipspringer at 7:01 AM on March 18 [11 favorites]

Shor: This is the thing I am the most shocked by in the last four years — that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.

Later commentary suggests social media is to blame. It seems that when people present their best self with no bad side, perhaps flexing some material wealth and healthy radiance in the process, then presto. It's why so many influencers record their videos in front of makeup mirrors and in nice cars and living rooms. Same basic formula as selling any membership or product, but cloaked in a plausible reality. No factual messaging required for identification to tale hold, just drink koolaid and find happiness.
posted by Brian B. at 7:03 AM on March 18 [4 favorites]

Not this again. Stop apologizing for genocide.

I'm not apologizing. It's just math. She would have gained essentially zero net voters among the small slice of the population who prioritizes the issue, and lost an awful lot among the rest of the population who prioritizes other issues. I'm sorry if that bothers you.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:04 AM on March 18 [25 favorites]

They're working so hard to convince us that it's our own fault

It is our own fault.

Voters (including nonvoters-by-choice) are real humans who have actual agency. Voters are the ones who decide the outcome of the election. Yes, there are other forces at work, but voters are collectively the decider here. The decision is on them. Because they made it.

Blaming the media or a campaign or a party is like blaming big social forces for you getting mugged or raped or having your wages stolen. Yes, of course economic precarity and racism are a thing. Of course institutionalized misogyny is a thing. Of course capitalism is a thing. But ultimately whose fault was that? It was the fault of the person, in the middle of that larger system, who decided of their own real free will and actual no-shit volition and agency to do it to you.

It was always trivially obvious that Trump 2 would be an amoral, disgusting disaster of a presidency and we collectively picked him anyway. That's on us.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:09 AM on March 18 [22 favorites]

Well, she lost either way. So there may not be much profit in speculating how much worse she would have lost if she had displayed moral courage. Anyway, as far as the "dark money" and "algorithm" concerns go, this is sort of what Shor is talking about. Because those efforts went into making sure low-information voters saw content they would actually engage with -- brief ads, Facebook reels, etc. In other words, stuff that you don't have to spend an hour reading or watching to make sense of. It seems clear that the democrats need a lot of things, but one of those things is a person who understands how advertising works.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:10 AM on March 18 [10 favorites]

Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won

Another garbage NYT take and what I'd say has been said before. Given how this article reflects the "liberal" media's narrative, I predict the 2028 story will be "Newsome wouldn't have lost if AOC had dropped out of the primary sooner and stop pushing the Texmo camps issue."
posted by AlSweigart at 7:11 AM on March 18 [14 favorites]

If a major part of Trump's support came from low information voters, the cause can't be the New York Times.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:25 AM on March 18 [17 favorites]

"It’s always a little bit weird for somebody who is a self-described conservative to vote for Democrats, who are quite a liberal party now."'

LOL

Ezra is telling us much more about himself than about the Democratic party.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:34 AM on March 18 [11 favorites]

Always a great sign when over half the comments obviously didn't read the article, and those comments get the most favorites.
posted by coffeecat at 7:42 AM on March 18 [18 favorites]

Voters (including nonvoters-by-choice) are real humans who have actual agency. Voters are the ones who decide the outcome of the election. Yes, there are other forces at work, but voters are collectively the decider here. The decision is on them. Because they made it.

Exactly. People keep talking about how white people got "tricked" into voting for Trump 2 but 94% of Black women voted for Kamala.

So either Black women are just way fucking smarter in aggregate than everyone else or a third of the white electorate are really fucking racist and another third are indifferent to it.

“¿Por Qué No Los Dos?”
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:44 AM on March 18 [15 favorites]

So either Black women are just way fucking smarter in aggregate than everyone else...

More self-aware for sure. They know they are marginalized in every aspect and aren't in denial about it, like most white women are, who voted for Trump.
posted by Brian B. at 7:50 AM on March 18 [10 favorites]

I think it's important to be able to talk about what the Democratic Party did wrong, and why it seems currently incapable of winning an election against the most clearly unqualified presidential candidate in modern US history.

That's a different discussion than what Democrats, as individuals, did wrong or failed to do.

This article seems to be the former, not the latter—nobody is saying that you, Joe Democratic Voter, did anything wrong but not personally going out and engaging with Trump-leaning voters in the parking lot of the Super Walmart in Sodomy County, OH. That's dumb.

But the Democratic Party is a multi-million-dollar organization with teams of pollsters, statisticians, political scientists, media buyers, and who knows what else—they should be good at this. It's like their one fucking job. And it's infuriating that the Party—the organization, not the voters—keep getting caught with their proverbial pants down, election after election.

Why is it that Trump was able to win, not once but twice? Why did he lose to Biden but not Harris? Is it just that Harris is a black woman and Biden was an old, white man? Or was it something else? How did a white supremacist pick up more of the Hispanic vote as he got more obviously racist? I don't know, and I'm not necessarily convinced that Ezra Klein knows, but I sure as fuck hope somebody inside the Party knows.

I hate the idea that we can't criticize the Democratic Party without Democratic voters getting immediately defensive about their own conduct, because the Party as an organization doesn't seem to be exactly excelling at its job.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:53 AM on March 18 [40 favorites]

One thing I took out of this was that Latino men swung harder to the right over the past eight years , despite Trump’s vocal anti migration policies. A week or so ago there was a NYT article about Mexican immigrants who voted for Trump and who are personally or have family members now facing possible deportation . Their reasoning for voting for Trump was that they want to curb VENEZUALIAN immigration because those people are cutting into their work and enitlements.
posted by waving at 7:55 AM on March 18 [6 favorites]

because the mass media has had the power all along to inform the masses (* it's in the name) exactly about what Trump was, is, does, and wants, and they did not,

For the love of God, Democrats/liberals have got to get over this shit.

This is a safety blanket. Trump voters weren't tricked. They weren't hoodwinked by a lack of reporting on Trump. They knew "exactly...what Trump was, is, does, and wants" and they voted for him because they wanted it too. What your'e saying isn't even sane. It's no secret what Trump says or does, and it's widely reported on. Quit crying and face the reality that a lot of people saw what Trump was selling and bought it.

I know the idea that everyone actually really wants and supports what you do but have been lead astray is comforting but it's just not true, and you will continue to lose until you accept this basic fact of the world.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:57 AM on March 18 [30 favorites]

To be fair, almost everything anyone knows about the Democratic party has been filtered through a mass media that is strongly motivated to make them look like chumps so inept they can't even wipe their asses, much less run a country. Like, Biden's administration did a lot of great shit. Did most people hear about it? No. They were hearing about how old and feeble the guy was, how much he drooled and drawled and stumbled. I feel like if the media had said "look at this old guy, he's frail, sure, but still kicking ass, trying to make the country better, check out all the great stuff his team done this week" it might just have put the democrats in a better light. no?
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:00 AM on March 18 [25 favorites]

As I have said before, Harris’s lack of serious engagement with inflation was her most inexplicable failure at a policy level.
MattD

I'll go one further: Harris and the Dems absolutely, abysmally fucked up their messaging on the economy.

I remember towards the end of the election there was this bizarre spate of messaging along the lines of "actually the economy is doing great, morons". Regular people don't give a shit about aggregate macro indicators being good, they care that rent and food and their everyday life are getting more and more expensive. Is all of this a fair thing to judge a President on? No, but if you're trying to win elections and voters are telling you they're worried about affording food pointing to graphs showing a slowing of inflation rates and positive trends in overall real wage growth isn't going to do shit and in fact will come across as out of touch and condescending.

You do actually have to try to win elections. If you lose it is actually your fault. The idea that it's the voters who failed you by not seeing the obvious truth and falling in line is poisonous.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:07 AM on March 18 [30 favorites]

They knew "exactly...what Trump was, is, does, and wants" and they voted for him because they wanted it too. What your'e saying isn't even sane. It's no secret what Trump says or does, and it's widely reported on. Quit crying and face the reality that a lot of people saw what Trump was selling and bought it.

Exactly. It'd be fucking hilarious with all the FAFO going on right now except we're busy crashing the agricultural economy and I'm terrified for how fucking politically illiterate this country is.

I saw a video of a farmer who's 80 grand in debt at the moment because the government reneged on his contract because of the payments freeze and he has no way out without seriously crippling his economic future. He blamed "getting in bed with the government". He was utterly unable to comprehend that the assholes he voted to put in government were the ones that were screwing him. And they did the matinee performance of this exact schtick back in 2016 but no, he still wanted to go back for more.

So not only do the oligarchs and plutocrats get to crash public services, they're also using that failure to sow even more discord within the electorate about the ability of government to even stick to its word, little alone do good things. They don't know the nuts and bolts of how all this grant stuff works because it is really complicated. They just know they got screwed and nobody is helping them, even though they put the people who sabotaged their livelihoods there in the first place.

America is so fucking cooked. If the white people are pissed now, wait until the empire declines and loses its hegemony. It's fucking Nero but with nukes.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:10 AM on March 18 [14 favorites]

I was struck by the paradoxical idea that Klein articulates as "people want an angry moderate". Shor resolves this by noting that highly educated moderates differ from low socioeconomic-status moderates. Highly educated moderates have a coherent centrist worldview that informs their moderate positions across a range of issues, whereas low socioeconomic-status moderates don't have that coherent worldview. Instead they're very extreme on some issues and very conservative on others, making them moderates only on average.

This suggests that politicians don't need to neuter themselves to capture the moderate vote. They don't need to be dull or wonkish or exhaustively degreed and credentialed. On the contrary there seems to be a huge appetite for a candidate with fiery affect and some signature crazy policies (Deport Musk To Mars!), with an otherwise mostly conventional (ie. good governance) platform.
posted by dmh at 8:13 AM on March 18 [25 favorites]

Democrats didn't fuck up - Americans are just hateful awful people who super duper like racism and super duper will never, ever vote for a woman. It's that simple. It's the misogyny and racism, y'all, it's that simple.

This is such a perfect example of the willful liberal blindness I was talking about that I had to wonder if I unconsciously created a sockpuppet account to agree with myself.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:16 AM on March 18 [19 favorites]

Please save me the trouble of listening to a podcast and tell me what the problem WAS, according to them. Thanks.

Since you asked, Hasan argues the Democrats don't have a meaningful campaign strategy to channel the anger that most Americans feel in response to the state of the country— 600,000 people sleeping outside in the wealthiest nation on earth, 60% of Americans don't have a $400 emergency fund, the entire concept of medical bankruptcy. The Republicans have a vision that matches the scale of our problems. They promise to fix it all. It's lies, of course— they just blame the poor, the immigrants, trans people— but it's an audacious vision. They campaign year-round on it. They are very good at harnessing that anger.

The Democrats only campaign on many key issues when they need your money. Biden campaigned on the public option, but everyone knew it wasn't real and he never brought it up again. They called Trump racist when he built the wall and then promised to finish it themselves. They have a technocratic, third-way neoliberal approach (with sprinkles of anti-billionaire populism) that constantly discounts having any sort of vision for the party. Instead of universal programs that capture the votes of every interest group, they means-test everything which is bad policy and bad politics. With respect to the Democrats' economic policies, he uses the analogy of chucking a homeless person two cents— you may have improved their material wealth by a substantial percentage, but they will still be angry because it's not nearly enough.

But that's not why the interview is worth watching.

The most convincing argument in the interview is not anything Hasan says. It's how Jon Lovett responds. Every time Hasan makes a bold statement, Lovett sighs, rolls his eyes, talks over him to explain some minor difference, insists that the Democratic party platform can be fixed with a tweak here, a tweak there. When Hasan tells him the administration should have investigated Joe Manchin's conflicts of interest, Lovett responds condescendingly, "So you want the president to politicise these agencies and use them to go after people?"

The most telling moment was when Hasan is pleading with him at the very end:

Hasan Piker: I want to be regime-pilled. I want to champion the social-democratic regime. I want to make Olof Palme look like a fucking revisionist right-wing reactionary. That's what I want.
Jon Lovett: Okay.
Piker: I want trains.
Lovett: I want trains.
Piker: I want better public transit.
Lovett: Better transit.
Piker: I want socialised housing.
Lovett: ...okay.
Piker: But see? You're stopping there.
Lovett: I don't know, but, but, what do you mean? Ugh, we can't get into. We can't get into it. We've gone so long. I am for building millions upon millions of houses everywhere. That's what I'm for.
Piker: ...yeah. But no public-private partnership. Build it with federal publicly funded employees and build it as a mechanism to claw back the insane housing market prices, to lower them by force.
Lovett: ...okay.
Piker: That's what I think.
Lovett: Alright.
Piker: I think if you said that, a lot of Americans would be like, "I like that idea."
Lovett: I think if a Democratic politician got up there and said, "We are going to have a national jobs program to employ millions of Americans building millions of houses," that would be very popular ...I agree.
Piker: ...yeah.
Lovett: ...okay.

posted by ftrtts at 8:21 AM on March 18 [50 favorites]

We can and will continue to argue about what the winning message would have been. And I'm sure there actually were better messages to get across to the voting public. (I agree they botched it on the economy, for starters). But to me this is the key takeaway of the article:

The question Democrats face, when you look at how badly they lost less politically engaged voters, is: How do you change the views of voters you don’t really have a good way to reach?

Yes, that’s 100 percent right. I just want to stress that this is a new problem.
This problem didn’t exist four years ago.

The problem is that there is no true mass media anymore. There are liberal/moderate channels, and conservative channels, and people follow the one that they agree with more. And as a former newspaper reporter, it kills me, but it's true -- mainstream media just doesn't have anywhere near the same impact we once had. It's social media that won this election for Trump, as kittens for breakfast, Kadin2048 and others have noted. (We mocked Musk for losing zillions on the Twitter takeover, but he got just what he wanted.)

Misogyny is real, racism is real, and "screw you, I got mine" is real. But until the liberal/progressive figures out how to counter this and actually get their message in front of eyeballs, no matter how much more moral and ethical and true and compelling the message is, it won't matter.
posted by martin q blank at 8:22 AM on March 18 [23 favorites]

I don't consider myself a liberal - but you do you. If you think Americans aren't misogynistic and racist I dunno what to tell you. If you think patriarchal cultures aren't extra misogynistic then I extra don't know what to tell you.

There will never be a female leader in the States, ever. Regardless of what policies she may espouse.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 8:23 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

You do actually have to try to win elections. If you lose it is actually your fault. The idea that it's the voters who failed you by not seeing the obvious truth and falling in line is poisonous.

Then why do Black people (especially Black women) show up every fucking time and carry the country forward kicking and screaming despite the Democratic Party being so bad at what they do?

Why do a few million votes always evaporate when the Democratic Party run a woman?

California couldn't even abolish the 13th amendment slavery loophole. Prop 6, an amendment with nobody registered against it in the voter guide. Nobody promoted it. No money was spent against it. It went down in flames by over 6 points. In supposedly blue California. The media brainwashed those people? No. A lot of the electorate, even supposed liberals, are really fucking shitty people who are probably perfectly pleasant and personable towards people normally but sadistic in that booth.

I don't like neoliberals and their third way policy but I also hate racists and fascists more. Unless we supposed "good" white people confront and deal with the fact that America still has the stain of its original sin of its white male patriarchal origins soaked through the social fabric we're not going to make progress. Racists and sexists don't feel shame anymore. Their attitude to Trump 2.0 was "WE'RE BACK BABY!". The R-word surges in usage unabated. The plain fact is 50% of people are below the median shittiness on the shittiness normal distribution and now they feel emboldened to flex their political muscle because everyone was too busy dithering about how Democrats weren't perfect on their pet cause célèbre.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:24 AM on March 18 [12 favorites]

Misogyny is real, racism is real, and "screw you, I got mine" is real. But until the liberal/progressive figures out how to counter this and actually get their message in front of eyeballs, no matter how much more moral and ethical and true and compelling the message is, it won't matter.

This is a white electorate that filled in public pools with concrete when forced to share with Black people.

How do they counter that?
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:26 AM on March 18 [7 favorites]

I didn't think the article was of much value personally. The pollster is supposedly a big democratic poll research sponsor - but they chalk up all the actual voter shifts as 'needs more research'. So they didn't catch them on the front (before the election) and they have no idea why the happened post election. Great. So how can you meet the title and idea of the article ("Why Trump won") if the company you hired to give you data on that has data, but no results.

So really, you all's speculation is as good as any answers they have.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:27 AM on March 18 [4 favorites]

What the Pet Rock said. There is no counter to the deeply entrenched mindsets of a large majority of this country. If the Dems had run a white dude - he would have won, again, regardless of message.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 8:28 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

It does seem like going through Covid restrictions, including the sense of institutional failure, in combination with highly propagandistic social media platforms led to a significant rightward swing among young men.

There are are a couple serious issues here.

First, it is impossible to disaggregate the effect of anything from the social media filter that largely defines low-information voters' impressions. Second, social media algorithms are a black box. It's not that no one knows what's happening there, it's that the controlling interests who do know (including PRC/Tik-Tok) are all broadly sympathetic with authoritarian corruption being the dominant form of social organization in the United States and worldwide. The upshot here is that the Democratic Party faces a hostile media environment far outside the bounds of anything ever seen. Period. Full stop. No one has ever dealt with this before, and no one knows how to effectively fight it.

To complicate things further, the Democratic Party is both gerontocratic and patrician. Party leadership could not possibly be more out of touch with these dynamics if they tried, and that's before you get to the fact that they simply do not want to win on the issues in a way that the base would understand.

We are likely in for a generation in the wilderness, and will not emerge with a real political opposition until a new gravity well forms outside of the auspices of the Democratic Party. Social activism is still potentially useful, but paying any attention to what the Democratic Party does at this point is probably wasted energy.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 8:32 AM on March 18 [15 favorites]

What the Pet Rock said. There is no counter to the deeply entrenched mindsets of a large majority of this country. If the Dems had run a white dude - he would have won, again, regardless of message.

There is a counter. By my rough estimate the electorate is 1/3 racist, 1/3 not racist, 1/3 indifferent. What will fix this is every person who's "not racist" to become actively and militantly anti-racist. To tell racist people they aren't fucking welcome. To force that 1/3 of the electorate of indifference to pick a side or be left behind. If we get outnumbered? We fight outnumbered. Black people have been doing it for generations. It's our turn to step up.

But we white people always shy away from the job because we hate conflict. We're often not willing to fight the fight lest we rock the boat. We go back to Thanksgivings and Christmases and ignore the racist uncle or grit our teeth and bit our tongues because we don't want our mothers to get all upset at the arguing at what's supposed to be a family holiday of togetherness. We go to events and parties with our friends and do the same thing with some racist asshole because we don't want to be "that person" (with the "who's too woke" being implied). We just let them run away with the narrative and their gish gallops in the public sphere.

No more. No fucking more. We need to treat racism like a fucking disease that needs to be tested for and those affected isolated until it is cured. They need to be told they will not benefit from society if they refuse to act peacefully within it. Progressive/Liberal leaders can't do that for us. No matter how inept we want to think of them or how inept they actually are. If we want to see the change every single one of us have to do the work and have the courage to confront and battle racism, sexism, misogyny, wherever it shows up.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:37 AM on March 18 [11 favorites]

f you think Americans aren't misogynistic and racist I dunno what to tell you. If you think patriarchal cultures aren't extra misogynistic then I extra don't know what to tell you.
Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq.

This is part of the safety blanket:

"The Democrats don't have a meaningful campaign strategy to channel the anger that most Americans feel in response to the state of the country."

"Racism and misogyny!"

"Voters don't feel the Dems have an answer to their fears about cost of living."

"Racism and misogyny!"

"But the Democrats don't follow through even on what little they promise, losing the trust of voters."

"Racism and misogyny!"

"But"

"Racism and misogyny!"

Of course racism and misogyny exist and are a problem. But they have become a shield used to deflect any criticism or question of what could be done to actually win.

because everyone was too busy dithering about how Democrats weren't perfect on their pet cause célèbre.
Your Childhood Pet Rock

That people's real concerns about their dire economic circumstances are characterized this way is all I need to know.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:41 AM on March 18 [18 favorites]

That people's real concerns about their dire economic circumstances are characterized this way is all I need to know.

And yet Black people keep showing up again and again against fascists and their compadres wanting to tear society down for profit despite being the group that has the socioeconomic group that has the worst dire economic circumstances in the country.

A lot of white people know Trump is never going to make things better. It was never about the price of eggs. Don't get me wrong, Democrats never seem to help as much as we need or want them to but at least the ship was pointed in vaguely the right direction.

If anything people seem to innately realize there's very little hope of fighting capital. It seems almost insurmountable in the ongoing class war. But the coping mechanism for a whole lot of white people is to elect shitty people who will at least punish others and then cry crocodile tears when their own faces get eaten. Or they like when a "team" that they can feel a part of by their immutable characteristics lets them feel like they got a "win" even while they lose everything else they had. Or to just withdraw and pick no choice because they can't endorse a lesser evil and it won't really affect them as much.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:47 AM on March 18 [6 favorites]

I appreciate that you believe that folks have better natures that can be appealed to, Star. I really do.

I don't have your faith.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 8:50 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]

If the Dems had run a white dude - he would have won, again, regardless of message.

Maybe -- and I thought so too, right after the election -- but now I don't think so. Because the Trump machine would have used those media channels to eviscerate the white dude as some form of Satan who was coming for what mattered to them.

If the Democrats/whatever can't surpass the right-wing messaging, it comes down to what Your Childhood Pet Rock is saying -- for "every person who's "not racist" to become actively and militantly anti-racist." (I'd add" misogynist" to that.) But I'm not sure which is more likely or feasible.
posted by martin q blank at 8:51 AM on March 18 [4 favorites]

I recently read a book called All Better Now by Neal Shusterman, in which a new coronavirus pandemic labeled "Crown Royale" actually makes people happy, at peace, accepting, everyone gets along and helps each other and has no desire for violence any more.. I loved this book. I recommend this book, for me it was like a delightful fantasy. (Though I note that the rich people who don't catch the virus are freaked out about losing their ambition and try to eliminate catching it.)

Honestly, it seems like sexism, racism, and above all else, "IT'S DIFFERENT FROM ME! I MUST KILL IT!!!!!" is embedded in the human genome, and literally the only way to solve the problem is to genetically fix THAT. I don't think I'll ever see a woman as president here. If I were to give birth tomorrow, I don't think my great-granddaughter would see a female president in our lifetime either. Anyone different from straight large cisgender white male is "different" and the urge to "kill it" is forever strong in some people. Some folks get over that and yet, we can see how a lot have not/cannot/would not ever. And that has become a huge tide that overwhelmingly won across the world now.

I don't know how to fight it, nobody does. Too bad "genetically engineer a happiness virus" isn't an option.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:56 AM on March 18 [2 favorites]

If you're rooting for people to change -- if you're saying the democrats do nothing any different and just wait for the world to come around to their way of thinking -- I think we're in for a pretty bad time.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:56 AM on March 18 [10 favorites]

The video came in my feed this morning, but i thought it was too long, so thanks dmh for posting and making me watch it after all. I thought it was really interesting, and liked that Shor kept comparing to other countries, because it's increasingly clear that countries/regions that are most at risk of falling into fascism are those where education is underfunded and unequally distributed, rather than news.

Since I teach at a technical university, I've met a lot of young men during the last decade, and I could really see how COVID hurt them in a completely different way than it hurt young women. But I could also see how the university helped them find a way back. I'm proud of the white guy who used his privilege to ask for a more inclusive curriculum, and just happy for those who found new real life friends and opened themselves to the world after lockdown ended, including applying for exchange semesters or even taking a masters degree abroad. But not everyone can or should attend university. So it made me really happy when I met a young man last summer who had actually dropped out of our equivalent of high school in a small town but was so well educated and articulate that he was proposing solutions to loneliness and against the toxic male culture that is so widespread now. (Yes, his parents were proud).

We have often discussed here on the blue how Republicans have been working the long game. Getting in on the school boards and the dog catcher positions and slowly working up to their current domination. Those school boards are really important. When I went to American schools abroad around 1970, they were incredible and very progressive. Now there are banned books some places.

I'm well aware that most of the fascist leaders are well educated and you know, we've all met those guys. But they can only dominate in a culture that lets them do it.

Like, jenfullmoon, Canada is another large North American nation and there is clearly not the same admiration for bullies up there. So it's not a genetic trait. It's a learned behaviour. And it can be unlearned.
posted by mumimor at 9:00 AM on March 18 [12 favorites]

"The Democrats don't have a meaningful campaign strategy to channel the anger that most Americans feel in response to the state of the country."

I haven't seen it mentioned much, or at all, post election - but it felt to me at the time like the whole "politics of joy" would have been just infuriating to a lot of people actually hurting. Anger first. Joy after you win.

I imagine they had some polling that said Trump was too angry and this was the anti-message, but in my view a mistake to go with the "teach the world to sing" joy message in a time of such crisis.
posted by Rumple at 9:10 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

I appreciate that you believe that folks have better natures that can be appealed to, Star. I really do.

I don't care about people's better natures. I think this is a major flaw in liberal thinking, that you need people to truly believe in their hearts and become good people first and then that will lead them to doing the right thing politically. I don't care about that worthless bullshit, I care how you can get them to support and vote in the real world.

And, as is the point of this post, it is an objective, demonstrable fact that people's support and votes can change. Not the Republican base who would never vote Dem no matter what, but modern elections are decided by swing voters. They exist, they can be appealed to, they can be won and they can be lost. Just shrugging your shoulders and declaring you won't even try helps nothing.

To do this you don't need to appeal to people's better natures, you need to convince them they will be better off with you in actual, material ways. Their costs of living will go down, they will receive material help, they will live better with you in charge. The Republicans sell a load of lies that they will do this but the Dems counter those lies with either nothing or technocratic triangulated messaging that doesn't move anyone.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:12 AM on March 18 [17 favorites]

it's infuriating that the Party—the organization, not the voters—keep getting caught with their proverbial pants down, election after election.

Their pants aren't down: they're doing it on purpose. It's because the Party has a huge swath of economically progressive policy ideas that are or would be popular as hell among the working class voters they've lost: higher minimum wages, universal healthcare, something to subsidize caring for children, unionization, better working conditions (seemingly little things like scheduling shifts, that are largely irrelevant to white-collar workers), etc. But the Party absolutely cannot bring those things up, because they go against the wishes of their donor class. So in order to separate themselves from the Republicans, they go much wider on socially progressive issues than those blue-collar folks are generally comfortable with. And lose.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:18 AM on March 18 [15 favorites]

they means-test everything which is bad policy and bad politics.

Do we have any actual evidence of this? It seems suspiciously like something that left-leaning people want to be true, but I suspect pretty strongly—and I think there is evidence that shows—that non-means-tested entitlement programs would be a total disaster, to the point of non-viability, in the US.

Because if there's one thing the electorate finds intolerable, it's "freeloaders". The very concept of someone, somewhere—especially someone working-class or lower, i.e. their economic competition in the zero-sum game of modern capitalism—getting a free boost is enough to get significant numbers of Americans frothing mad.

We wouldn't have food stamps if it wasn't means-tested, because the second the low-information shithead voters got wind of someone, somewhere, who they think is undeserving using them to buy a nice cut of steak or multi-ply toilet paper or brand name diapers or whatever, they would burn the whole fucking thing to the ground out of pure spite. It would be swimming pools full of concrete all over again.

Just as one recent example, take Biden's attempt at student loan forgiveness: although 55% of Democrats may have supported Biden's swing at forgiveness, only 18% of independents and 9% of Republicans did. That's not a unifying issue that you can win elections with; it's a partisan issue—it's "red meat" for the base, at best.

It shouldn't have taken a genius to predict that: US higher education is an almost perfect zero-sum status game. Average people don't take out loans or forgo vacations to send their kids to Directional State because of a love of learning-for-learning's-sake: they do it because it's a good investment, a way to get a leg up over other people in the job market. If you make college degrees more easily attainable, the market value of having one as a differentiator suffers.

Housing is also practically a zero-sum game, given the lack of new construction in desirable areas. Forgiving some recent grad's loans means they can, in theory, save for a larger down payment that much faster than someone who graduated years ago and had to suffer through the full repayment schedule. That reads as criminally unfair to a lot of Americans, and as far as I can tell, the Democrats never had a coherent response to that (aside from "you're a bad person and you should feel bad for thinking that way, shame on you", which I suspect has never changed anyone's mind on anything, ever).

But if you add in some degree of means-testing so that only apparently "deserving" people get the handout, then it becomes politically viable. Which is why (despite some shitty changes), even the Trump Administration can't get rid of the PSLF program. It's politically untouchable precisely because it requires potential forgivees to basically opt out of the private sector hiring pool for 10 years. And that means that the shitheel bloc doesn't get their Y-fronts in nearly as much of a twist over it. (Hell, even Trump characterizes his changes as "restoring" the PSLF, rather than attacking it. They know their audience.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:22 AM on March 18 [4 favorites]

So either Black women are just way fucking smarter in aggregate than everyone else...

More self-aware for sure. They know they are marginalized in every aspect and aren't in denial about it, like

paraphrasing a friend -- I wouldn't call everyone (who isn't a fascist-racist-hateful troll) that voted for Trump stupid. But I would call them culturally stupid. For whatever reason, they're getting played, they're so dis-informed and incapable of grasping it, that yeah, they've got the cultural IQ of an eight year old (sorry, eight-year-olds).

But don't call them stupid. The guy that fixes my old car probably voted for Trump and no way is he stupid. He's a fucking genius when it comes to figuring out how that complicated contraption works. But try to get it through to him that Trump is a many times convicted felon, a liar and catastrophically terrible businessman ... and the guy just glazes over.
posted by philip-random at 9:22 AM on March 18 [7 favorites]

Harris ran, if not the ideal version of economic populism / "popularism" that David Shor might have wanted, the closest thing anyone's ever seen to it in modern history, bankrolled and largely led by people affiliated with Shor's own Future Forward PAC. Harris still lost, and yet here is Shor saying if only they'd turned down the "woke" dial below zero and lied about how bad inflation was the way Trump did, they might have won. Is there any more perfect textbook example of The Consultant Con than this?
posted by tonycpsu at 9:26 AM on March 18 [10 favorites]

I'm not apologizing. It's just math. She would have gained essentially zero net voters among the small slice of the population who prioritizes the issue, and lost an awful lot among the rest of the population who prioritizes other issues

If the argument is “Americans can only defeat Trump if they support genocide” then Americans deserve what they get.
posted by iamck at 9:31 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

The reason why the Democrats lost — and I hate to admit it — is because Trump won, and the reason Trump won is because he is a relentless and power-hungry demagogue unrestrained by rules or norms or honor or love. Reasonable, rational explanations for his win in terms of messaging, or the economy, or the media, or racism, or misogyny, have their merit, but also fail to capture Trump's singular quality: he is full of passionate intensity, the best the worst has to offer. Like the Scorpion in the story he loves to talk about so much, he will say and do whatever it takes just to stab the Frog to death. Everything he touches is diminished somehow; the Presidency itself a Dignity Wraith.
posted by dmh at 9:31 AM on March 18 [10 favorites]

Canada is another large North American nation and there is clearly not the same admiration for bullies up there. So it's not a genetic trait. It's a learned behaviour. And it can be unlearned.

This is both wrong and deeply patronizing. Ontarians just handed more power to a party led by a big, dumb criminal bully and just two months ago Canadians as a whole were ready to hand Parliament over to a party led by a nasty, odious little creep. It took the threat of invasion by our neighbour and historical ally to change that certainty (now it's merely a tossup).
posted by wanderlost at 9:32 AM on March 18 [15 favorites]

It shouldn't have taken a genius to predict that: US higher education is an almost perfect zero-sum status game. Average people don't take out loans or forgo vacations to send their kids to Directional State because of a love of learning-for-learning's-sake: they do it because it's a good investment, a way to get a leg up over other people in the job market. If you make college degrees more easily attainable, the market value of having one as a differentiator suffers.

The first part of that is true, but the second part is extremely untrue. "the market value of having one as a differentiator suffers". The job market is not fixed, all jobs are not created equal. This is something Trump doesn't get.

The US is a high knowledge economy, not the only one but it is one of them. If that means fewer people work in manufacturing and more work in knowledge-based services and we have to outsource some thing and import other stuff, that's good for our total economic output.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:34 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

Everyone hears what they want to hear. The Latinos who voted for Trump heard he was going to deport those other Latinos, the bad ones, not them. The racists heard he was going to stop diversity, equity and inclusion and put white men back on top of the hierarchy. The black men heard he was going to elevate Men, full stop. The religious heard he was going to support making the US an unabashedly Christian country. The socially conservative heard he was going to ban men from women's sports. Stock market enthusiasts heard he was going to deregulate and cut interest rates and they'd make a lot of money. Low information voters heard he'd bring the economy back to what it was in 2019. And on and on and on.

Above all, the messaging around Biden was universally negative. The supreme court & Republican congressmen blocked any Biden policy that would have helped him look good and effective in the short term (student loan forgiveness, bipartisan border bill) while allowing bills that would benefit voters in the next term (chips act, infrastructure bill) to go through. And Dems didn't counter that, not just in election season but throughout the entire presidency, with all of the things he did that helped average people.

I teach in a low-information environment, before the election all any of those kids were talking about was how much they hated Biden (and Kamala ran as an extension of Biden) and the trans issues. It was up to the teachers to explain what tariffs are and how many people would be deported if Trump won. We have a great teaching staff, I think we got through to a lot of teenagers.

But the micro messaging. The social media micro targeting. That is the core issue. Twitter and Cambridge Analytics won the election for Trump.
posted by subdee at 9:35 AM on March 18 [37 favorites]

To do this you don't need to appeal to people's better natures, you need to convince them they will be better off with you in actual, material ways.

I'm in the "it was racism and misogyny" crowd, but I don't see how it's incompatible with this idea. I completely agree. You have to give voters something more attractive than punishing women and people of colour. But nothing is going to be more attractive than that punishment until...I don't even know. So in the meanwhile, run white, male candidates.
posted by kitcat at 9:36 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]

Trump's margin of victory was narrow enough that pretty much everyone here is correct in their assessments. Bottom line: Dems didn't get the vote out.
posted by philip-random at 9:53 AM on March 18 [4 favorites]

To do this you don't need to appeal to people's better natures, you need to convince them they will be better off with you in actual, material ways.

Again, do we have any evidence that this is actually true, versus something that people who are already convinced of the wisdom of those programs want to be true? Because I read that and I want to believe it. I want to believe it so damn bad it hurts. But that's dangerous, because I'm not sure it's true, or at least it may not be true of a segment of the electorate that you can't win national elections without.

I think Democratic strategists need to consider the null hypothesis, which is that there are a non-trivial number of voters who can't be reached with rational appeals at all. They're not voting based on a supposition of which candidate is going to make life better for them, they're voting based on pure vibes, on how a candidate makes them feel, and being part of Team Trump makes them feel powerful.

Rational, materialist arguments seem dangerously easy to handwave away as technocratic wonkery, in the face of emotional appeals and the simplicity of a weak enemy who can be blamed and paraded around as needed.

At the very least, I hope someone, somewhere in the bowels of the Democratic Party machine is doing the unpleasant work of figuring out exactly how much material gains it takes to offset—to buy the vote, bluntly—of someone who puts a significant value on seeing trans kids kicked off sports teams.

Because I don't think it's safe to assume that the average American swing voter doesn't have hate in their heart and a desire to see someone else suffer.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:54 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

Trump's margin of victory was narrow enough that pretty much everyone here is correct in their assessments. Bottom line: Dems didn't get the vote out.

No. This is one of the things that surprised me. The polling data suggests that Trump would have won by a bigger margin if more people had voted:

Klein: So if you had forced them out to vote, they may have just voted for Donald Trump?
Shor: Exactly. And that does show up. If you look at African Americans, for example: Those who didn’t vote were much more likely to say that they supported Trump than those who did this cycle.

posted by dmh at 10:16 AM on March 18 [6 favorites]

My own entirely too bitter tl;dr on the matter.
Yes there is more nuance, but I believe this captures most of the appropriate points.
1) Propaganda works, and works even better with an uneducated or poorly engaged populace
2) This is compounded by the ongoing, decades-long, and systemic effort to undermine education in the US
3) This is further compounded by how humans (as a whole) are naturally stupid
3a) Yes, that's unduly harsh. Today, I don't really care. It remains true that decent education requires a great deal of effort
4) In a better society, major media outlets would uphold their responsibility to properly inform the public. Instead you get the people like Rupert Murdoch and Koch running everything
5) It doesn't matter what the fucking CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT is saying when the party fails (or refuses) to amplify certain parts of the messaging, and the press is run by those like the aforementioned wankers
6) I dunno, what's new on Netflix this week?

(And as an side, thank you NYT for making text extraction on that transcript more of a pain than it needed to be)
posted by Enturbulated at 10:23 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

This is, like, the epitome of anecdata, so take it with a grain of salt (but I think it's just reinforcing what actual rigorous studies have suggested). I've spoken with a bunch of Trump voters since the election-- not seeking them out to do some kind of study, not forcing them to have the conversation, just talking with them as I run into them or find out about them and when they themselves bring up the topic. And over and over again, to a striking degree, I've heard the same things from them. "I'm not very political." "I don't really know too much about politics." "This was my first/one of my first times voting." Ad nauseum. They make it very clear they don't particularly love or even like Trump-- as one of them put it, in a quote that left me dumb-founded and perfectly illustrated the level of apathy and disengagement involved here: "I don't think I'll vote for him next time." I don't think this is a cover for the hate and spite some folks are discussing above, I think they're really just that profoundly disengaged and prone to following whoever makes the most noise.

In a few cases I've asked what they think about Trump being a convicted felon, or about him cutting taxes for billionaires, or about the January 6 insurrection, or about various other obvious flaws-- again, not as some kind of means-tested way of finding out "what works" but just out of my own curiosity. Invariably the response is "You know, that's interesting, I need to learn more about that." The same thing happens when I ask what they think about what Trump is actually doing. Social Security and Medicare under attack, court orders being ignored, foreign aid cuts likely to kill millions around the world, all to pay for more tax cuts for the ultra-rich? "You know, that's interesting, I need to learn more about that."

They're never going to learn more about that. They will take no steps to better understand the issues. The next time election day comes around, if they vote at all, it'll be based once again on vibes. Maybe the vibes will lead them to vote blue, maybe not, it doesn't really matter. America's government is increasingly at the whims of people who simply don't care very much, don't know very much, and don't care to know more. They're not stupid, as said above, not even necessarily lazy, just... apathetic and unwilling to put in the increasingly burdensome effort required to navigate democracy. I really don't know how you break through and reach them in a truly substantive way. And while I'm sympathetic to the fact that most of them are just trying to get by, that most of them would rather spend what little time they're not working to live paycheck to paycheck on stuff they actually enjoy, their apathy and ignorance is still screwing over literally hundreds of millions of people around the world and they need to come face to face with that at some point.

I'll also second the person above who said that any analysis of the Democrats' loss that doesn't note the global trend they were fighting against is a poor one. I'm always wary of comparing electoral trends in different countries, but the sheer depth of the anti-incumbent wave around the world is too consistent to be ignored. Frankly I think it was the driving force behind Trump winning, and a less controversial Republican would have won by a lot more, by the kinds of margins we saw other incumbents lose by from 2021 - 2025... which made all the headlines run by NYT types about how "See, you can't dismiss Trump, Democrats, he's a Phenomenon! He's a Political Force!" all the more annoying. Trump got lucky in 2016 and won because James Comey brought the Clinton emails nonsense back to the forefront a month from the election and even then he needed the Electoral College to override the will of the public who rejected him and deliver him to the White House anyway. And then he got lucky in 2024 and won by riding a global backlash against everyone who happened to be in office at the time. And all of it happened by exceptionally narrow margins.

Trump doesn't have some kind of great power over the electorate. He's not some political genius. He's not an FDR-style redefining political figure. He's been lucky, and he's been given a rocket boost by our own minoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate and by a disengaged, apathetic public. The last thing I want is for us to over-correct in pursuit of understanding or capturing a Trump Phenomenon that I genuinely don't believe exists to a meaningful extent. Trump is a persistent symptom of other phenomena that we need to understand, we don't need to waste time asking what's special about Trump himself.
posted by Method Man at 10:26 AM on March 18 [44 favorites]

Wait, the moneyed elite saying that it's the poors fault? This is my shocked face.

Ceterum censeo New York Times delenda est.
posted by Sphinx at 10:52 AM on March 18 [4 favorites]

The answer to this is actually that millions of Biden 2020 voters stayed home. This was partly because of Biden and Harris' support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians, which cost Harris *at least* two swing states (Michigan and Wisconsin) and probably cost her the election.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 10:58 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

Trump doesn't have some kind of great power over the electorate. [...], we don't need to waste time asking what's special about Trump himself.

I disagree deeply, but I hope you're right, and certainly it's true that the less time wasted on the man the better.
posted by dmh at 10:59 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

I think they're really just that profoundly disengaged and prone to following whoever makes the most noise.

Trump got lucky in 2016 and won because James Comey brought the Clinton emails nonsense back to the forefront a month from the election

These sentences are interesting coming from the same comment. I don't see how a disengaged person is swayed much by the emails nonsense, but it's hard for me to imagine the context of a disengaged person because I'm not one.
posted by axiom at 11:14 AM on March 18 [2 favorites]

I'll also second the person above who said that any analysis of the Democrats' loss that doesn't note the global trend they were fighting against is a poor one.

I think the evidence of that is pretty weak. Incumbents generally didn't lose, Democrats did. If there was some 'anti-incumbent' phenomena, then more Congressional incumbents and Gubernatorial incumbents would have lost. IMO, you are just making sweeping judgements about world elections with very few data points.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:25 AM on March 18 [2 favorites]

He's not some political genius. He's not an FDR-style redefining political figure.

Sadly, I disagree with this. It's not that he's a genius per se, it's that he really does have an aspect that sets him apart from the usual fare. He looks and sounds different, and he is immensely confident / a malignant narcissist. Unfortunately, narcissists are frequently quite successful. Trump is just one example.

As regards the redefining political figure question, all of the things you are saying about him being lucky and being boosted by minoritarian institutions are not mutually exclusive here. He can be lucky and gain from the electoral college and the power of an activist conservative judiciary and still be transformative. In fact, that will make him more so. The reality is that it wasn't Trump who got lucky, it was the ideological Conservative movement. They were ready, and have broad support among corporate executives/Wall Street/inherited wealth in this country. They needed a charismatic figure they could ride to the transformative victory they have planning for decades. It may be they got more than they bargained for as well, but regardless, I fear we are going to be a dramatically different country by the time that man leaves office, and there will be no going back to the status quo ante.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:26 AM on March 18 [7 favorites]

I think if a Democratic politician got up there and said, "We are going to have a national jobs program to employ millions of Americans building millions of houses," that would be very popular

I wish we'd done a WPA-style program during COVID to give people jobs and do public works projects.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:27 AM on March 18 [8 favorites]

as one of them put it, in a quote that left me dumb-founded and perfectly illustrated the level of apathy and disengagement involved here: "I don't think I'll vote for him next time."

People doing web searches asking if Biden dropped out after the fucking election is what broke me. I don't see a way to overcome willful ignorance.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:29 AM on March 18 [5 favorites]

>I think they're really just that profoundly disengaged and prone to following whoever makes the most noise.

>Trump got lucky in 2016 and won because James Comey brought the Clinton emails nonsense back to the forefront a month from the election

These sentences are interesting coming from the same comment. I don't see how a disengaged person is swayed much by the emails nonsense, but it's hard for me to imagine the context of a disengaged person because I'm not one.

axiom, I was living in the Colorado Springs area at the time, and was door to door cavassing infrequent voters on behalf of Democrats as was my wont, and I guarantee you this makes perfect sense.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:30 AM on March 18 [7 favorites]

but it's hard for me to imagine the context of a disengaged person because I'm not one.

is there a big deal sports franchise in your town that you don't care about, except every now and then they make a playoff run and you can't help but at least notice that something is happening?

I imagine that's what an-election-every-four-years is like for many people
posted by philip-random at 11:33 AM on March 18 [19 favorites]

The fundamental problem with this kind of analysis is that it assumes that voters are driven mainly by party messaging. But I don't think that's accurate, a big part of the problem we are facing is that too many voters are actually driven by a firehose of misinformation. That's the only thing the data really shows. So unless the Democratic Party's new strategy is to dismantle media hegemonies like the NYT, the whole conversation feels deeply disingenuous.
posted by grog at 11:34 AM on March 18 [3 favorites]

These sentences are interesting coming from the same comment. I don't see how a disengaged person is swayed much by the emails nonsense, but it's hard for me to imagine the context of a disengaged person because I'm not one.

As someone who was somewhat disengaged at the time-- you would see the headlines and nothing more. Articles would be shared on social media, or they'd show up on Google when you were just browsing around, and the headlines would say things like "Leaked emails show what Clinton told executives in private" or "Leaked Emails Appear to Reveal Contents of Clinton's Wall Street Speeches" or "New Emails Jolt Clinton Campaign In Race’s Last Days; FBI Looks at Messages Found During Inquiry." (All three actual headlines from the time.) You wouldn't actually read the articles and find out what was in them, but the headlines alone would subtly reaffirm a lot of people's general stereotype of Clinton as untrustworthy, slimy, in bed with Wall Street, etc. And then the fact that it was in the news meant people were talking about it, and that provided another avenue for disengaged voters to hear about it without actually learning much more than the surface-level aspect of it.

So a disengaged voter wouldn't have to go digging for this stuff-- it would find its way to them, and because they were, well, disengaged, they weren't particularly impelled to look any further.

I think the evidence of that is pretty weak. Incumbents generally didn't lose, Democrats did. If there was some 'anti-incumbent' phenomena, then more Congressional incumbents and Gubernatorial incumbents would have lost. IMO, you are just making sweeping judgements about world elections with very few data points.

I'm not saying people voted against whoever held any given office, they voted against the party they perceived to be in power. Democrats were perceived as the party in power, Democrats suffered. If it seems congressional Dems suffeed less, I think that's a function of 1. voters focusing on the top of the ticket, so the more engaged voters will cast a full ballot while others will simply vote for president and call it a day 2. the much, much greater visibility of the presidency than of Congress or governors (hence people treating Democrats as unequivocally the party in power because they were the party in the White House), and 3. gerrymandering badly reducing the number of House districts that are really swayable even in a wave election. Even then, Democrats did pretty significantly lose vote share in a lot of districts and states, so congressional Democrats were not immune to this phenomenon.
posted by Method Man at 11:45 AM on March 18 [6 favorites]

So unless the Democratic Party's new strategy is to dismantle media hegemonies like the NYT, the whole conversation feels deeply disingenuous.

And Facebook/Instagram, and Twitter, and TikTok, and YouTube, and.....

But yes. 100% this.

As I said way, way upthread, no one has ever faced anything like this before. Ever. It's a real issue.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 11:47 AM on March 18 [6 favorites]

And Facebook/Instagram, and Twitter, and TikTok, and YouTube, and.....

Everyone talks about dismantling. Why not talk about infiltrating?
posted by kitcat at 11:49 AM on March 18 [1 favorite]

Everyone talks about dismantling. Why not talk about infiltrating?

Because, as was famously said, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:02 PM on March 18 [6 favorites]

This is a safety blanket. Trump voters weren't tricked. They weren't hoodwinked by a lack of reporting on Trump. They knew "exactly...what Trump was, is, does, and wants" and they voted for him because they wanted it too

This seems a little contrary to the premise of “low-information voters skewed towards Trump?” Certainly anecdotally I think there’s plenty of reason to think that swingy voters like the vibe of what Trump says he wants without necessarily being clear on the details/while believing the parts they don’t like won’t happen and I guess I wouldn’t personally characterize that as “knowing exactly what he’s about.” And the Project 2025 stuff he basically lied to dissociate himself from during the campaign.

I agree that very little points to it being the fault of (for lack of a better term) “traditional media,” though. Liberals love to complain about the NYT because we pay enough attention to it to know what’s wrong with it but the table with the TikTok bit suggests that the more “nontraditional” your news diet, the more you swung towards Trump.
posted by atoxyl at 12:40 PM on March 18 [4 favorites]

One tendentious one aimed a bit at MetaFilter, here - I am more and more convinced that the obsession on the left with staying away from right-wing platforms over the past eight years was a terrible own-goal, that it ended up a self-deplatforming more than anything.
posted by atoxyl at 12:43 PM on March 18 [8 favorites]

This was partly because of Biden and Harris' support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians, which cost Harris *at least* two swing states (Michigan and Wisconsin) and probably cost her the election.

Do you have any sources for that?
posted by kirkaracha at 12:46 PM on March 18 [5 favorites]

MetaFilter: actually driven by a firehose of misinformation
posted by kirkaracha at 12:49 PM on March 18 [3 favorites]

the more “nontraditional” your news diet, the more you swung towards Trump

It is that way, but I don't think it has to be. TikTok especially is (for now) a place where it's possible for the left to try to sneak some messaging into those right wing feeds. It's pure idiocy to neglect that platform.
posted by kitcat at 12:49 PM on March 18 [3 favorites]

Another interview with Shor (archived) on the last election, published today in Vox, by Eric Levitz. Delves into AI and jobs and the reversal of party affiliation among college educated and wage earners. Also claims Gen X is more conservative than boomers, and Gen Z is X offspring, amounting to a trend.
posted by Brian B. at 12:51 PM on March 18

I trust no media analysis of the 2024 Presidential Election that does not include an examination -- or a confession, perhaps more accurately -- of how differently the media would have handled a Democrat saying they had "concepts of a plan," with no specifics at all offered, about healthcare, one of the most critical issues for the nigh-mythical "average American."

I saw no analysis in that article of what Biden/the DNC did in 2020 that was so amazingly different than anything Clinton or Harris did in their campaigns. Maybe someone in this thread can help me understand what he did that was so persuasive. Because it looks a lot to me like what he is was more of a critical factor.

(Another thing to give you all an idea of just how much antipathy there is towards black women in this country: lately, I've been taking screenshots of reactions to news articles about prominent Black women on Facebook because I wanted to start documenting the hatred.

There are so many, so very many, laugh reactions to any article detailing a setback of any sort for Black women: Sha'carri Richardson not winning a gold medal, anything -- any fucking thing at all -- about Michelle Obama, any fucking thing at all about Beyonce/Lizzo/Britnney Griner. It turns my stomach every time I see those reactions, but I investigate and capture them because I know how important it is to keep the receipts lest my accusations of misogynoir be hand-waved away by opponents and self-professed allies alike. And while I cannot claim true scientific rigor in my evaluation, I have not yet seen a similar level of joy expressed over setbacks for non-Black women.)

Back to the Klein piece, I also saw no mention of voter suppression efforts. Nothing about Republicans reducing staffing, hours, and locations in areas that lean D. Nothing about the voter roll purges that disproportionately affect minorities. They wouldn't put so much time and money and effort into these things if they weren't paying dividends, along with their gerrymandering.

So I'm feeling that all these election think pieces that fail to mention voter suppression and hatred of women in general/Black women in particular are akin to an announcer watching the US-USSR gold medal basketball game at the 1972 Olympics and saying "The Americans could have won if they'd just gotten more offensive rebounds" without commenting at all on the...irregularities...in the officiating in the closing seconds.

But that said...the thing that drives me to madness and despair is that it actually is true that more offensive rebounds would have made a difference for the US team, just like there are definitely things mentioned in the Klein piece and in this thread that Harris should have done or done better. There was fuckery, there was built in antipathy to contend with, *and* there are things the side that lost ought to have tightened up as the game progressed in order to get the W. All those things are true at once.

Looking at everything that I just wrote, I don't even know if I have a point to make other than "Things are fucked up, y'all." Ugh.
posted by lord_wolf at 12:53 PM on March 18 [20 favorites]

It is that way, but I don't think it has to be. TikTok especially is (for now) a place where it's possible for the left to try to sneak some messaging into those right wing feeds. It's pure idiocy to neglect that platform.

Yes I am sort of implicitly arguing that. Though honestly I think “TikTok makes you right-wing” is an irresponsibly sweeping conclusion - “gets news from TikTok” is potentially a proxy for a lot of things.
posted by atoxyl at 12:55 PM on March 18 [4 favorites]

I am more and more convinced that the obsession on the left with staying away from right-wing platforms over the past eight years was a terrible own-goal, that it ended up a self-deplatforming more than anything.

Not to thread-sit here, but this is an error of legacy media thinking. We could have flooded right wing social media sites and it wouldn't have mattered, because our participation would have been silo'd. Look at TikTok - people think it's a radical bastion because it highlights Palestinian causes, but the data shows that on balance people go more for Trump if that's their news source. Also factor in that the Palestinian issue undermines Dems. Polarization and siloing is profoundly effective at capturing organizing.

We need to entirely rethink how this works, and it probably involves some degree of hacking and/or radical organizing in physical space. Viral content as it existed even just a few years ago is gone now. All our base are belong to them.

Note that this isn't full on doom. The context wherein all of these social media owners agree that they want the Democrats deplatformed is not forever. But their power base is going to be lasting, and the left, broadly, does not have a purview, because algorithmic content has become very directed and top down, not based on who shows up or is more witty and creative. These are recent changes and hard to adapt to, but we must do so or become irrelevant.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 12:58 PM on March 18 [4 favorites]

Do you have any sources for that?

Here, for one. The utter refusal of mainstream Democrats to engage with Biden/Harris' positions on Israel as a key factor in why she lost looks like both willful ignorance and political malfeasance, honestly.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 12:58 PM on March 18 [3 favorites]

We could have flooded right wing social media sites and it wouldn't have mattered, because our participation would have been silo'd.

But it's possible to be a sleeper cell and break through the silos - for example, I was obliviously watching Theo Vaughn videos for a few months thinking what an interesting and thoughtful guy he was. Oops. Or sometime right and left accidentally piggyback their way across silos - you might be a Piers Morgan fan and then come across that interview with Gary Stevenson (2.4 million views on TT) and hear someone talk for the first time about how billionaires really are stealing from you.
posted by kitcat at 1:22 PM on March 18

The change that is happening right now is so immense that I really don't think it makes sense to make any predictions.
One thing I will say is that Europe has a different perspective on the I/P situation, for better and worse, and that might bring on a lot of unexpected change as Europe decides to become a global power. I can't even imagine how that will work out. Europeans have a very different view of both Israel and the Arab nations.

For the record, most Europeans aren't anti-semites, a minority of Europeans hate muslims, but there is no clear agenda and no direction. Other than if Europe takes leadership on this it will be very different from American leadership, perhaps mostly because Europe is a neighbor to the Middle East.

I don't want to derail this discussion about the Democratic Party and its failures but the point is that Trump has already achieved a huge shift in global politics, where the US is no longer automatically a global leader. The next Democratic president is going to inherit a structure where the US may still be the formal leader of NATO and the predominant economy in the world, but the reality will be that China and the EU will be far stronger, and maybe even allied against the US.
posted by mumimor at 1:31 PM on March 18 [10 favorites]

Not to thread-sit here, but this is an error of legacy media thinking. We could have flooded right wing social media sites and it wouldn't have mattered, because our participation would have been silo'd

I didn’t really mean (directly) “flooding TikTok” anyway but I don’t really think this is correct regardless - yes people get sorted into bubbles but the content comes from somewhere, and the sorting happens through associations that may not even be explicitly political to start out.

I know invoking Rogan here is a cliché so I’ll throw in a Theo Von, there’s a cottage industry of these guys who span comedy and general “guy stuff” and also weave in politics, who generate a ton of content that gets disseminated to shorter formats and is heavily recommended from adjacent topics, and you can really trace them getting more right-wing over time. I don’t think there’s any guarantee that more people on the left doing these shows would have averted this but I certainly don’t think it would hurt (and yes, people like Bernie Sanders, Hasan Piker have and have done fine).
posted by atoxyl at 1:45 PM on March 18 [4 favorites]

Coming in hot just to say Ezra is a douchecanoe.
posted by aspersioncast at 2:39 PM on March 18 [3 favorites]

The utter refusal of mainstream Democrats to engage with Biden/Harris' positions on Israel as a key factor in why she lost looks like both willful ignorance and political malfeasance

Is Gaza currently better off, or worse off, than if the democrats had won? Given that it, and the West Bank, will soon likely no longer exist, worse by a long shot. Let's stop denying the role activist emotional malleability and gullibility played in this. The end of Palestine and the end of western democracy in response to aggressive agitprop, just to punish the Democrats. Nice job, kids.
posted by CynicalKnight at 3:46 PM on March 18 [9 favorites]

here is Shor saying if only they'd turned down the "woke" dial below zero and lied about how bad inflation was the way Trump did, they might have won

I’m not generally a huge fan of Shor but I am not sure you read this interview because in the one part where he really addresses “woke” his take is that it’s overstated as a factor in Trump’s victory and that he still thinks “anti-woke” is probably a suboptimal use of Republican energies. He even calls the infamous “Kamala is for they/them” ad overrated.

And I don’t even know what you’re trying say about inflation.
posted by atoxyl at 3:59 PM on March 18 [3 favorites]

Is Gaza currently better off, or worse off, than if the democrats had won?

Hard to say given that Harris was 100% refusing to condemn any of Israel's actions. Asking this question is also being deliberately obtuse.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 4:06 PM on March 18 [4 favorites]

Is Gaza currently better off, or worse off, than if the democrats had won?

The UNSC veto regarding Palestinian full membership happened under Democratic administration in 2024. UNGA resolution to upgrade Palestine into a non-member observer state was voted no by the US in 2012. The Democratic Party merely continues to uphold bipartisan consensus at the very least. Under Biden, Israel also has begun fresh bombings on Syria and Lebanon, not to mention the pager attack, not to forget. Is there karma involved? Above my pay grade but eventually the contradictions cannot hold the centre.
posted by cendawanita at 4:07 PM on March 18 [7 favorites]

(it's also been pointed out elsewhere under the immigration tangent that South and Central American migrants and refugees will continue to be politically salient because their nations are constantly destabilized under the American regime, of whichever stripe. So let me point out that the constant destabilization of the Middle East/West Asia will continue to impact your voting demographic and their political concerns as well. Is it agitprop or are there new political planks? Well.)
posted by cendawanita at 4:13 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]

Hard to say given that Harris was 100% refusing to condemn any of Israel's actions.

She was advocating for a cease fire. She was trying to get through the election without touching that live wire, and if elected would certainly not have posted AI videos about Harris Gaza nor called for ethnic cleansing.

Asking this question is also being deliberately obtuse, honestly.

LOL no, it's a completely relevant question. Gaza wouldn't have been WELL off had the Democrats won, but certainly not as badly off as it is now. I love how any attempt to point out the agitprop that got people to stay home or the results of that has to be called out as outside the bounds of proper discourse here.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:14 PM on March 18 [11 favorites]

But what if this whole approach is wrong? What if confining the campaign to carefully tested statements selected by a random walk through the platform is detectable by voters and alienating to many of them?
posted by smelendez at 4:22 PM on March 18 [9 favorites]

the agitprop that got people to stay home

What "agitprop", exactly? The Harris campaign did an excellent job depressing voter enthusiasm by doing stupid things like sending Ritchie Torres to campaign in Michigan. Excellent way to tell the Arab-American voters who helped Biden win there in 2020 "we don't give a shit about you, sorry". There were also things like ignoring responses from outreach on Gaza and just marking all those as "no response". But sure, blame "agitprop". Democrats will never own any of their failures, it's always someone else's fault.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 4:29 PM on March 18 [12 favorites]

...with teams of pollsters, statisticians, political scientists, media buyers, and who knows what else—they should be good at this.

I'm reminded of a line from Neal Stephenson's novel, Zodiac:

"This year, the Pleshy-in-charge was Alvin Pleshy, a.k.a. the Groveler, an important member of the team of management experts and foreign policy geniuses that brought us victory in Vietnam."

Anyway, if you want an explanation, I'm always fond of POSIWID.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:33 PM on March 18

quoting iamck from earlier in this thread, just for emphasis:

If the argument is “Americans can only defeat Trump if they support genocide” then Americans deserve what they get.

posted by adrienneleigh at 4:33 PM on March 18 [2 favorites]

Is Gaza currently better off, or worse off, than if the democrats had won?

so how many dead palestinians was winning the election worth?
posted by pyramid termite at 4:41 PM on March 18 [5 favorites]

What "agitprop", exactly?

Jesus campers from previous election year abortion wars. They even used the same lines.
posted by Brian B. at 4:53 PM on March 18

so how many dead palestinians was winning the election worth?

Do you honestly believe that the number of dead Palestinians today is lower than it would have been if the US election had gone the other way?
posted by toxic at 5:01 PM on March 18 [4 favorites]

Look, Harris was a nothingburger candidate. She washed out early in 2020 because she had nothing to say and she didn't think of a thing in the ensuing four years. It's not her fault that she was the only plausible nominee after Biden was pushed out, but it's ludicrous to pretend she was a great choice who Americans had to be talked out of voting for. She had to talk America into voting for her and she didn't do it.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:11 PM on March 18 [5 favorites]

Do you honestly believe that the number of dead Palestinians today is lower than it would have been if the US election had gone the other way?

Before Israel broke ceasefire this week and recommenced air strikes, we had a ceasefire that still resulted in Palestinian deaths yet at a rate much much less than any point last year at the same time period. It's only worse than the same time period the year before that, which was already worse than the time period in the year before that. Should I point out who was president then?

Edit: Check in next week though, maybe republicans can continue beating the Dems at something else.
posted by cendawanita at 5:18 PM on March 18 [7 favorites]

Before Israel broke ceasefire this week and recommenced air strikes, we had a ceasefire that still resulted in Palestinian deaths yet at a rate much much less than any point last year at the same time period. It's only worse than the same time period the year before that, which was already worse than the time period in the year before that. Should I point out who was president then?

Yeah, because feckin' BIDEN organized that ceasefire. It only stopped because Trump, the guy all those protestors let into office because Harris wasn't good enough, gave a bunch more bombs and a gleeful thumb's-up to Bibi killing as many people as he wants to. This response is an all-time top ten for most disingenuous argument on this site.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:27 PM on March 18 [3 favorites]

Yes, Biden organized the terms - part of the reason it was so speedily implemented was because Hamas had agreed to those for months. The roadblock was Israel/Bibi. Trump/Witkoff broke past that. Biden's team never wanted to go against Bibi. So, who ate whose homework?
Edit: Biden also provided armaments but he also rolled over. Should that be reminded about as well?
posted by cendawanita at 5:30 PM on March 18 [3 favorites]

Again, one of metafilter's emergent convention has been an unspoken agreement to safely bound the genocide discussion into an easily ignored thread every 30 days. But if you want to have opinions, maybe follow along.
posted by cendawanita at 5:33 PM on March 18 [6 favorites]

Do you honestly believe that the number of dead Palestinians today is lower than it would have been if the US election had gone the other way?

i honestly believe that the american government, whether democratic or republican, has shown little willingness to curb the ongoing genocide - i honestly believe that there will be no ceasing of dead palestinians under either party because both have made the devil's bargain of looking away rather than risk votes to do the right thing - stop supporting the genocide

yes, both sides - yes, both parties - yes, the blood is on both of them and it's not going to wash off

i get the impression that the real answer to my question is "as many as it takes"
posted by pyramid termite at 5:35 PM on March 18 [7 favorites]

the guy all those protestors let into office because Harris wasn't good enough

We were saying she should've been better months before the election; it's not our fault she wasn't. That's on Harris and the Democratic establishment and Genocide Joe Biden whose enormous ego was more concerned with his legacy than whether Harris won.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 5:44 PM on March 18 [9 favorites]

is there a big deal sports franchise in your town that you don't care about, except every now and then they make a playoff run and you can't help but at least notice that something is happening?
That is perfect. I bet that is exactly it. Same way I throw away the sports section without reading even the 200-point headlines about whatever and I have absolutely no idea what's going on with any of it, they hurl from them their sample ballots and direct mail flyers from campaigns and studiously avoid listening to or looking at any political anything and therefore have absolutely no idea what's going on with any of it.

Then they're driving to work some Tuesday and there are fifty people standing on the side of the road waving signs and screaming and they notice and think, "Oh, right, that whole deal, wow, that's today, okay." And then everybody at work has "I voted" stickers and they get an extra hour to vote so they drive to the place they went four years ago and bubble in a circle next to one name they recognize and leave everything else blank because who can even stand to read it? This is exactly it.

Except the difference is the "playoffs," or whatever, can affect me only if I have extraordinarily bad luck. Like maybe some joy- or woe-maddened fan runs over me while I'm out walking the dog. Whereas what happens in the other competition can profoundly change the lives of every single poor slob with the extraordinarily bad luck to be living in this country or in any of several other countries that have to deal with this country. Which is all of them to some extent, given we share a globe. So everybody, then, I guess.

Bummer.
posted by Don Pepino at 6:25 PM on March 18 [9 favorites]

This is such a perfect example of the willful liberal blindness I was talking about that I had to wonder if I unconsciously created a sockpuppet account to agree with myself.

It just clicked for me. The folks on here who can only focus on the failures of Democratic institutions are absolutely, right to our faces, gaslighting us about American racism. You deny it. You defend it. You minimize it. And you expect us to fall in line. You think you're being realist. You talk about how there's a better way to convince people and yet you come here with a message that lands like a sack of shit on our doorsteps. What a grand coincidence that your powers of persuasion only work elsewhere.

When my Dad graduated from high school in Jim Crow Missouri into a segregated public college system, I wonder what institutions failed to present a compelling alternative to the majority then? Surely there was some other message that would have allowed the good folks of America to show off their better angels?
posted by Wood at 8:09 PM on March 18 [5 favorites]

If carefully triangulating messaging worked, Harris would have won the election.

I understand that many people feel that Gaza didn't change anything outside of Michigan - Shor doesn't even mention it as a factor - but I have an irrational hunch that it might be bigger than polls suggest among young people, and emblematic of a more general problem.

The Democrats' take was: "we're going to support a genocide, including vetoing ceasefire at the UN on multiple occasions, but you should still vote for us because the other guy is even worse". Like, what about not vetoing a ceasefire? Instead of scolding voters?

Much has been said about young men switching from D to R in 2024, but it's not just men - among young women, the party preference for Democrats dropped by nearly half (from 32% in 2020 to only 18% in 2024).

Again, the young men are somewhat explained by Joe Rogan and trans panic, but what about the young women? How would they have gone if Harris had done anything to repudiate Biden's policy on Gaza and establish herself as a bold new vision? And now, crucially: how will they go in future elections?

And not just young people. I say "emblematic of a more general problem" because it applies to everyone. You can't just say "I'm going to keep doing that thing you hate, vote for me anyway because the other guy is worse". At some point you have to actually do stuff, instead of just saying you're less harmful than the other guy. Medicare for all: do it! Green New Deal: do it! Taxing billionaires: do it! That's how you get people to vote for you.

And ffs don't run Gavin Newsom, he will throw us all under the bus and *still* end up losing to JD Vance. Careful triangulating to appease bigots never works. They don't buy it because they see your heart's not in it, and you just end up selling your soul for nothing, hurting your own base, hurting basic human rights, and moving the Overton window further Nazi-ward making things ever worse and harder to win in the future.
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:03 PM on March 18 [7 favorites]

just for emphasis:
If the argument is “Americans can only defeat Trump if they support genocide” then Americans deserve what they get.

God the shit takes are coming fast and furious here. You two are saying that African-Americans specifically deserve the tidal wave of shit they're getting from the Trump administration. Your puerile "if the argument is" weasel words won't save you from what you believe and what you say. What you're saying is that we deserve what we're getting because American failed your moral test. So vile but not surprising.
posted by Wood at 9:13 PM on March 18 [5 favorites]

I think using minorities of an empire/colonizing state to defend the imperialism is basically how we got here, no? It's not escaped anyone's attention surely that the onus of the UN ceasefire vetoes were either borne by a Black American woman or a man (the alternate US rep to the UN). And that's just an elevated expression of the same social dynamics that's caused the same non-consripted military that destroys lives elsewhere (even as it sometimes does humanitarian operations) to be over-represented by the poor which is overrepresented by minorities.
posted by cendawanita at 9:29 PM on March 18 [4 favorites]

Clip is from The View, where Chuck Schumer, not just any Democrat, is still repeating the debunked slander about beheaded babies as he flogs his new book to get into a point about increased antisemitism - Drop Site News responds/fact checks.

What is there left to say, how would you expect any party to succeed against the reality denying party when itself also denies reality? I note Joy Behar's phrasing that it was a Hamas attack against Jews. Again, using actual minorities to be the cover for an imperialist policy.
posted by cendawanita at 9:59 PM on March 18 [4 favorites]

I think using minorities of an empire/colonizing state to defend the imperialism is basically how we got here

I'm not using minorities to defend anything. There's a million miles between calling out the vileness of iamck and adrienneleigh and "defending imperialism". The real question is WTF they think they're doing with their antics.
posted by Wood at 10:25 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]

Bottom line: Dems didn't get the vote out.

The bottom line is that voters didn't vote, and their apathy came from consuming and amplifying Russian misinformation about Gaza and other matters, and now we're here.

For the rest of us, this will soon just be quibbling over the ashes of what is left of the planet, after the bird flu pandemic kills off half of humanity, and Trump and Putin nuke the remainder of the survivors who don't quickly get in line with casinos built on top of Palestinian graveyards, and other unspeakable atrocities to come.

Enjoy your apathy while you can, the window is closing.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:37 PM on March 18

The bottom line is that voters didn't vote

It is at best extremely unclear that this is the bottom line.
posted by atoxyl at 11:01 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]

There's a Big Reason Why Nonwhite Voters Swung Right—and You Don't Hear About It - "Foreign-language propaganda is thriving. Democrats are struggling to fight it."

There’s been plenty of chatter among concerned liberals over the ways Democrats have failed to keep up with the new media landscape, whether we’re talking about audio-centric outreach to young men or breaking through to rural “news deserts” without local newspapers or gaming the YouTube and TikTok algorithms. But any concerted attempts at (re)constructing a revitalized liberal media ecosystem need to reckon with American diversity in ways that, ironically, the anti-diversity Republicans have figured out. That means speaking other languages, finely targeting messages through various media, and figuring out how to present effective counterinformation. It won’t be easy. But rebuilding a coalition never is.

> Shor kept comparing to other countries, because it's increasingly clear that countries/regions that are most at risk of falling into fascism are those where education is underfunded and unequally distributed, rather than news. [Fascist bullies] can only dominate in a culture that lets them do it... it's not a genetic trait. It's a learned behaviour. And it can be unlearned.

denmark or bust! or finlandisation :P

also re: comparative developments, two countries bucking the inflationary anti-incumbency wave last year are instructive: ireland and mexico

ireland['s incumbent party/coalition rode] a "cost-of-living package" + Housing for All & infrastructure. helping the campaign?

["...four cost of living supports made. These include the €400 Working Family Payment, the €400 Disability Support Grant and the €300 lump sum payment for households in receipt of the Fuel Allowance... two Double Child Benefit Payments... a €400 lump Carer's Support Payment... a €200 Living Alone Allowance paid to widows, widowers and other single-person households... a €100 lump sum for people in receipt of the Child Support Grant... double payment of Child Benefit for each child [and] The Christmas Bonus Double Payment...]

funding the bounty for ireland's citizens? a record tax haul from multinational corporations you probably know (which are in ireland to evade taxes to begin with, granted! but also, loopholes have since shrunk if not closed entirely).

guess what? improving people's living standards materially gets them to vote for you!

also, while not a "developed country," it's worth mentioning mexico just went through its own historic realignment the other way -- led by (phd energy engineer) claudia sheinbaum -- with her socialist morena* coalition winning reelection by huge margins. that doesn't mean all is bread and roses. brutal cartel killings are a direct challenge and AMLO's constitutional overreach threatens mexico's judicial independence -- and democracy. but i do think it pushes back against the notion that incumbent parties all lost this year and were somehow helpless to do anything about it. which, if that is how people perceive things, maybe do stuff to change their perceptions?

oh and fwiw, i've never heard of cliff cash before, but i thought this was pretty good...
Southern Comedian's Hilarious Solution for Racism in the USA

It's crazy. What a crazy place to be a white supremacist. In the United States of America. The most ethnically and culturally diverse society in human history. And these dudes are on the news like, "this is a white country." Like, uh, no it's not dog. Turns out every large city in the
United States has a China inside of it. You should probably leave your road. Put a little extra gas in your four-wheeler, go to another road, have a look around, make yourself at home, you know.

I've seen this country. I've driven almost 800,000 miles touring this country performing stand-up comedy. I've performed in almost every large city in the United States. I don't want some dipshit who never left his town telling me what America is. I've seen what America is and the best thing about this country -- the best thing about this country -- is our diversity, not the other way around okay. We're the Melting Pot. It's our whole thing.

i dunno, what a beautiful world it could be?
-The Business Case for Green Energy
-The Man Behind the Republican Case for Clean Energy
-Republicans split on spending cuts, Medicaid as they seek path forward on Trump tax cuts
posted by kliuless at 11:06 PM on March 18 [13 favorites]

Russian misinformation about Gaza

This is so absurd I honestly don't have words for it; there was no need for "Russian misinformation", not when there were IDF soldiers documenting their atrocities and sharing them on social media, and not when even mainstream media were running stories about evidence of mass executions, and indiscriminate slaughter of people in hospitals (remember the "Israel would never bomb a hospital" denials?), refugee camps, near aid convoys, and in "safe zones" carried out by the IDF. The actual information was quite bad enough.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 11:43 PM on March 18 [12 favorites]

It's hard for me to imagine how anyone can believe that a Russian brainwashing program cost the DNC the election. Is it not more likely that the democrats lost because not enough Americans wanted to vote for their candidate? In any election, someone will lose. That is how elections work. I think this story is comforting to people who want to believe that most Americans want what they want, but I'm afraid it's far-fetched and more than a little condescending, because of course "they" are weak-willed and susceptible to brainwashing, but obviously the faithful know better; the democratic voters are smarter, they see through all of the machinations, etc.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:34 AM on March 19 [13 favorites]

I think you're right, kfb, because this absolves voters of any responsibility, which is the American Way kinda.
posted by Kitteh at 4:52 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]

Because they didn't know they were supposed to craft a 30-second elevator pitch for what our founders held to be self-evident.
posted by Brachinus at 5:13 AM on March 19

From the video - which is more important right now?
- Preserving America's institutons: 18%
- Delivering change that improves Americans' lives: 78%

So it looks like, to 78% of Americans, preserving democracy is like explaining the importance of physics to a dog — they know just enough to track and catch the ball but the rest is head-tilting, eye-crossing abstract wonky-wank. That really explains to me why DJT's patter is so effective on everyone except folks like us here. And also why Dems see the heavy regulation/outlawing of capitalism to be far more terrifying than a loss of freedom nobody will connect the dots on.
posted by zaixfeep at 5:31 AM on March 19

No Daylight.

No Outreach.

No Votes.

And we're going to see more of the same from "What's another minority sacrificed on the altar" Newsom.
posted by Slackermagee at 5:46 AM on March 19 [7 favorites]

I believe there was a long process of Soviet propaganda to convince Americans that America is fundamentally bad while presenting the USSR to be good enough that it was wrong to pay attention to its fundamental problems.

This fit well enough with Christian ideas of forgiveness and sacrifice that the ideas kept rolling on after the USSR fell, and presumably the Russian government kept promoting it.

This was helped along by actual problems with America, but it's one thing to oppose racism and another to think that America is only bad.

This meant the right became the side of Americans valuing the country. I grant that the right should have done better than choose Trump, but I think the left maintained idea that it was the side of morality, which had people feeling that if it's immoral to survive, then the hell with morality.

I can't prove this, but I think it's normal for people to like their country, and for there to be so much distain for the county meant there was an unusual cause.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:38 AM on March 19 [2 favorites]

I mean, yes? I do not like the vast road paved by a horde of blood and treasure that brought me prosperity in the imperial core in addition to mediocre governance at best. I imagine that if I were Irish, in Ireland, my complaints would be solely about governance. That's not soviet propaganda, that's just critically thinking about why my life is as good as it is.
posted by Slackermagee at 7:16 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]

Kamala Harris did not lose the election because she alienated leftists with her position on the genocide.

Also, leftists caused Trump to win because they foolishly withheld their votes for Kamala Harris for her position on the genocide.

Democrat politicians will coddle moderates with watered-down policies and when moderates don't vote for them, they blame leftists for not being appeasing enough to Democrat politicians. Leftists are too weak to be catered to but so strong that their votes decide elections.

It's such a bizarre thing that the message to leftists is "Vote Democrat or else the Republican will win" and the message to unengaged, low-information citizens is "Vote Democrat because we're a lot like the Republicans but, more importantly, nothing like those leftists".
posted by AlSweigart at 7:27 AM on March 19 [5 favorites]

the problem isn't who leftists vote for - it's who they are
posted by pyramid termite at 7:30 AM on March 19 [2 favorites]

I can't prove this, but I think it's normal for people to like their country, and for there to be so much disdain for the country meant there was an unusual cause

You mean like watching nearly the entire political leadership class go all-in on supporting a genocidal ethnostate? Drone attacks used to facilitate the extrajudicial execution of US citizens? Those kinds of unusual causes? When you've been told your whole life that "American values" meant something and see the people you voted for betraying those values on a regular basis then it does tend to lead to some rather negative feelings.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 7:59 AM on March 19 [3 favorites]

The Democrats lost because the media wanted them to lose. Democrat win = less rage clicking.
posted by Sphinx at 8:24 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]

So many interesting comments in the above thread. Given me so much to thought about.
IMO, reasons:

1. Racism and misogyny (common, she was a black woman offspring of immigrants – amazing she came as close as she did);

2. Ascendent oligarchic control of the culture and its information attributes; gilded age redux, this time with vengeance and idiocy as drivers);

3. The reactionaries winning the culture war so completely that every goddamn election is about the culture war - and the left is on the morally good side! How can we be losing the culture war so badly; e.g., why is protecting Trans people (something every decent supports) seen by the culture as a crime against humanity.
4. The utter failure of the primary elements of the democratic party (documented so well above. One of my many questions, why not unleashed Walz, by far the most popular of the 4 people on the ticket, and the best mass media communicator for major office since the centrist Obama, yup instead listen to some 87 year old third way morons still terrified of Reagan;

4. The utter fecklessness of the mass media, and the complicity, support, or outright advocacy of those various organs for the reactionary side (and aside, for those of you who don’t believe the last had any impact, please stop telling those of us who do to STFU about this, that doesn’t ever really work);

5. Econ/Covid reaction. Endless two party support for the oligarchy and its management, sycophants and hanger oners. This never ends, is a gigantic problem, can be countered by actually doing effective stuff for regular people, but hell, other than the New Deal its never been the American Way;

6. I/P, genocide.

Whatever, as someone said, opinions are like ass$#@s, everyone has one.

My question to those who care to answer, what can be done about the unbelievable, shockingly high number of our fellow American citizens who’s primary motive in voting (and sadly I think their lives) is wanting to see others they don’t like (or actively hate) punished and suffer.

The Regime has done exactly NOTHING for the citizenry (leaving aside their unending harms). And it promises to do exactly nothing, Trumps coming ‘golden age’ notwithstanding. And yet, he’s still shockingly popular.

WTF to do about them?
posted by WatTylerJr at 8:29 AM on March 19 [3 favorites]

Pyramid - "the problem isn't who leftists vote for - it's who they are"

Wow, seriously? Yea, telling me, and all other people who's primary political motivation is to make a fairer, more equitable society and culture for everyone, that WE are the problem, I'm just speechless.

I hope you really rethink this position, cause its really not helpful, and not exactly gonna sway me (or us) to your positions.
posted by WatTylerJr at 8:32 AM on March 19

And also why Dems see the heavy regulation/outlawing of capitalism to be far more terrifying than a loss of freedom nobody will connect the dots on.

Regulating capitalism and outlawing capitalism are not on the same side. It might appear that way when one assumes the word "left" seeks a benevolent state monopoly rather than a malevolent state monopoly on the right. In that view, "left versus right" as an abstract concept has merely taken on the religious form of good opposed to evil. Fascists also see it that way, as an opposing style of dictatorship. Liberal is neither, and opposed to all dictators.
posted by Brian B. at 9:09 AM on March 19

you misunderstood me - they hate leftists because of what they stand for and what they try to do - it would appear as if the establishment doesn't like that and never did

and that's why we're a problem - we're interrupting business as usual and the division of the spoils and you should know that's exactly what's going on here - who knows what conversations are happening between sworn enemies in washington?

oh, and then many of us went ahead and voted for harris and get blamed anyway by the hotheads

the only thing you're going to get most americans listening to is their cost of living as they're simply not involved enough to understand all the issues, and in the limited time they have, if some guy lies his ass off about all the things he's going to do, that sounds good to them and they'll vote for him

the democrats have too many people who benefit from the current state of affairs to sincerely address things like the cost of living

but why be bold when most of you are in a secure enough position to keep getting paid?
posted by pyramid termite at 9:15 AM on March 19 [4 favorites]

also why Dems see the heavy regulation/outlawing of capitalism to be far more terrifying than a loss of freedom nobody will connect the dots on.

I've leaned left pretty much my entire life. But if you sincerely believe the goal is to "outlaw capitalism", I'm not a member of your club. Market capitalism has proven an effective way to get a lot of stuff done. Worshipping it as a perfect system that cannot and should not be regulated -- that's insane.
posted by philip-random at 9:30 AM on March 19 [3 favorites]

wow this thread perfectly embodies the post headline

ok

Biden was (for a distant past 'was') a very very wiley politician.

If he'd been cognizant he could've seen inflation ramping up, fixed it, but did not see or do.

It's the economy stupid.

oh well, leaving an evil twitter link, (not political) (but very serious) in surprisingly the near future all this changes: omg robot revoloution
posted by sammyo at 9:37 AM on March 19

The core problem, I'd argue, is that people wanted something different and Harris was more of the same.

And most people aren't thoughtful or educated enough to realize that Trump's different would be a fuckton worse than Harris' more of the same.

zaixfeep On the "preserving institutions" thing, I think that's probably a big one.

Congress is a failed institution. Shit doesn't get done. Everyone can see that.

Things suck, change is clearly needful. Heck, that's how Obama won remember "hope and change"? Yeah, didn't work out so well for us because he couldn't really deliver due to the problem of our institutions being fundamentally broken.

So yeah. While on the one hand I'm absolutely horrified at how Trump is demoloshing the government, becuase we all know that the new replacement is just dictatorship, I can see how a lower informaton person would prioritize preserving the government and existing institutions well below necessary changes.
posted by sotonohito at 9:42 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]

But if you sincerely believe the goal is to "outlaw capitalism", I'm not a member of your club. Market capitalism has proven an effective way to get a lot of stuff done

Yep, like increasing inequality, concentrating wealth in the hands of monopolists, and destroying the environment through the misguided notion that you can have infinite growth on a finite planet. American-style laissez-faire capitalism has been especially destructive; Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos shouldn't have hundreds of billions of dollars and their whims shouldn't be directing government policy.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:57 AM on March 19 [2 favorites]

thanks for clipping the context from my words so that you could make your point.
posted by philip-random at 10:02 AM on March 19 [7 favorites]

Russian misinformation about Gaza

there was no need for "Russian misinformation", not when there were IDF soldiers documenting their atrocities

Both positions are correct, and do not contradict. Likud is fascism, full stop. Their crimes are monstrous. Netanyahu's extension and intensification of the war provided the raw materiel, and Putin shaped it into a weapon for their mutual benefit.

All Russia had to do was amplify, amplify, amplify via the accounts I have mentioned before, while permeating every meme with Full. On. Democrat. Hate. Those accounts each had tens of thousands of followers, which combined meant millions of views. That intense emotional impression clearly had an impact, as it was the primary factor in the drop in Democrat support.

There was no logic in that drop, as it was clear for months a Trump presidency would be one of the most catastrophic geopolitical events in recorded human history, not to mention much worse for Palestine.

And yet many in the Abandon Harris scene deny this... just like Trump supporters, their deep emotional attachment to their positions makes them incapable of accepting they've been duped.
posted by CynicalKnight at 10:30 AM on March 19 [3 favorites]

Much worse for Palestine? Trump sent one (1) guy to the peace talks and made one (1) phone call to keep Netanyahu from Lucy-and-the-football'ing the deal Isreal has just now unilaterally torn up. The deal from May. The deal Biden did nothing to advance (see the above 1 guy, Witkoff) for 6 months.

It sucks now that the bombs are dropping. The bombs were not dropping for two months. Aid was flowing. The situation would have been worse under Harris with the Biden cadre keeping her to the No Daylight policy. Biden's policy was to back Israel to the hilt and the bombs would never have stopped dropping

We can all read the fucking news, the statements above are not magic "it was definitely all propaganda" reasoning. What's magic is imagining that the dems would suddenly, after the election, have changed their mind and fully backed an end to genocide. Did anyone see this? Did this happen for any elected dem? Or, again, was it a Republican operative who pushed those talks to completion?

Sucks that Trump slow walked the ball into the endzone here, sure wish there was literally anyone else out on that fucking field.
posted by Slackermagee at 10:44 AM on March 19 [2 favorites]

If he'd been cognizant he could've seen inflation ramping up, fixed it

that’s, uh, easier said than done I think

If anything I think part of the problem is that conventional policy to “fix inflation” involves slowing the economy in places that people will certainly feel, and so the best honest narrative available is sometimes “this is bad, and in fact kind of bad on purpose, but it could be worse and things should get better before long.” Which is not an appealing message for any politician to try to communicate, but Joe Biden in particular was just not in shape to convincingly communicate it.
posted by atoxyl at 10:46 AM on March 19 [2 favorites]

What's magic is imagining that the dems would suddenly, after the election, have changed their mind

If they had done the right thing, just before the election, and cut off all aid to Israel, they would have destroyed the vast majority of historical Jewish support and would have lost by a much larger margin.

The progressive wing of the party made no secret of their opposition to unlimited aid. Post election, they would have made a much stronger push. Any IDF violation of the Biden-initiated ceasefire would have given them a stronger case for ceasing military aid.

Trump stole the credit for "launching" a ceasefire Biden negotiated, knowing full well Netanyahu would break it within weeks. Something similar will happen with Ukraine.

Even in the very unlikely event the Palestine situation remained unchanged by the election results, the ramifications for the rest of the world, for generations, make Palestine insignificant in comparison.
posted by CynicalKnight at 11:09 AM on March 19 [5 favorites]

What's magic is imagining that the dems would suddenly, after the election, have changed their mind and fully backed an end to genocide.

What's magic is believing Dems would have suggested to raze Gaza, push Palestinians to neighboring countries, and then build casinos on the rubble, which is the argument being made here when bothsides-ism is taken to its full conclusion. Never saw one Dem ever try to put that idea on the table. But the Russian magic continues.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:52 AM on March 19 [4 favorites]

Facts not in evidence. For any of that save the last paragraph. Just the post election stuff: we just lived through that. Just now. Did anything happen? Or was being a set of decent humans dependent on winning.
posted by Slackermagee at 11:53 AM on March 19 [3 favorites]

And to go further, if they had actually wanted to stop this it was incredibly easy to make the case to the public. Before and afters of city streets. Pictures of the starving. XRays of sniper rounds in too little chests and skulls. People on fire in medical tents bombed within refugee camps.

The horror could have been a campaign issue, but instead it was relegated to "no response" bins.
posted by Slackermagee at 11:57 AM on March 19 [3 favorites]

The progressive wing of the party made no secret of their opposition to unlimited aid. Post election, they would have made a much stronger push.

I think this is part of the core of the disagreement here.

You seem to think that there would have been leverage, of any sort at all, to push for changes in policy AFTER the election when Harris was safely sworn in.

Me and most other progressives, leftists, and others who aren't super happy with the Democratic status quo see it the exact opposite way: she would only give what we could extort by threatening to withhold votes.

You see Harris and the Democrats in general as fundamentally decent people who want to do the right thing and can be pushed towards the right thing by I guess a post-election letter writing campaign or something.

I see them as enemies who will only do the right thing when we have something to threaten them with to extort good behavior from them. From the POV of people like me once the election is over they will do whatever they feel like doing unless we have some means of coercing them to do our bidding.

A credible threat of withholding votes seems, to me, to be the single thing that can possibly exist as a means of coercing fundamentally indifferent (at best) people into doing what is (in our opinon) right. Once the election is done if they don't fear retribution in the next they have no reason to pay the slightest attention to our desires.

I am as close to 100% certain as I am about anything involving people that if Harris won she'd have continued doing exactly what she and Biden had been doing before.

I'm not saying it's better with Trump, just that it basically takes extortion to get Democrats to act like decent people for a change instead of thier usual callous genocide enabling. Hell, Jimmy fucking Carter supported a genocide so it's clear that even the most fundamentally decent Democrat to have existed in the past 50 years will support genocide unless they are forced not to.

I voted for Harris despite a near certainty that she'd keep doing what Biden had been. I had absolutely no hope whatesoever that post-election she could be somehow induced to give up her support of Israel's genocide.

All that said, I really doubt that Biden and Harris' devotion to genocide was much of a factor, if for no other reason than polling shows that for people who actually cared about it almost all of us voted Harris.

I know you really, really, desperately, want to blame Trump on us evil leftists and our wicked Russian puppetmasters, but let's be real.

Do you honestly think even 1% of Americans give half a shit about Israel murdering all the Palestinians? I don't. America has a long history of supporting genocide in foreign lands (and our own) and Americans have never cared.

Trump won because a lot of Americans blamed Biden for high prices, heard "change" and thought it sounded great, and didn't care about anything beyond that.

And also racism. And sexism. But I think a generalized vague 'this situation is shitty, let's try someone new' feeling was the real deciding factor for the average twit.
posted by sotonohito at 12:02 PM on March 19 [9 favorites]

and then they didn't even pick someone new
posted by pyramid termite at 12:24 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

why it seems currently incapable of winning an election against the most clearly unqualified presidential candidate in modern US history

I just want to note that this is true but I don't think it implies what I think you're using it to imply.

That Donald Trump is the most clearly unqualified candidate in modern US history does not mean that he is the easiest to be candidate in modern US history. A lot of the ways that, to us, make him incredibly unqualified actually make him (disgustingly enough) a stronger candidate among the population at large.

Yes, this says not great things about us as a country. Particularly about racism, misogyny, and a general embrace of deliberate ignorance. Anyone familiar with the history of the United States should know that we deserve to have some not great things said about us. And some good things, too, of course. But definitely also not great things.
posted by Justinian at 12:40 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

Trump won because a lot of Americans blamed Biden for high prices, heard "change" and thought it sounded great, and didn't care about anything beyond that.

Just wanted to say I agree with you fully and have been arguing this for some time. Literally every incumbent party that had to defend in 2024 in the developed world lost. It's the first time that has ever happened. And Democrats did the best by a decent margin of all those parties. (ok, the incumbent party in Belgium AFAIK did about as well as the Dems. Unsurprisingly I am not familiar enough with Belgium's politics to say why).

"We were doomed in this election from the start" is not a comforting or particularly useful thought but that doesn't mean it isn't kinda true.
posted by Justinian at 12:42 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

I think a big part of the history of the US and Israel is that in many ways Israel is modelled on the US, and even people who don't really know intuitively understand that. So "patriotic" Americans who believe in American exceptionalism and manifest destiny and all of that sick stuff also believe that what is going on in Israel is A-OK.

However, when I attended American schools as a kid, I mostly had left-leaning teachers, and we would sing Israeli songs and hear about how the Jews had found an empty desert and cultivated it so we could get oranges and avocados. All quite surprising to hear as someone not-American, even as a person with Jewish family and adults going to Israel/Palestine all the time. If you can handle it, watch Exodus, or just a bit of it. That film is weird.

There's also the whole Holocaust guilt thing, which is of course immensely important, but for understanding people like Biden, who is of the same liberal boomer cohort as my teachers, you need both aspects.

Kamala Harris is my age, and has immigrant parents. I just don't believe she is as invested in that thing as Biden, for a multitude of reasons.

Anyway, in the video in the FPP, Shor's point is that Harris did better when she was talking about people's real experience of hardship, and worse when she was echoing Democratic establishment voices who claimed the economy was going great. And that she even did that had a lot to do with the 'no daylight' thing from Biden, posted above. I do think he was a fairly good president, but I never liked him as a person (as he presented himself in public, I didn't meet him). He seems like a vain, scheming person who doesn't really care about people outside his close family.
posted by mumimor at 12:48 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

they would have destroyed the vast majority of historical Jewish support and would have lost by a much larger margin

Support for Israel, among self-described Democrats, is now at 21%, according to recent polling. And "we had to support genocide if we wanted to win the election" is just about the most morally bankrupt argument possible.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:36 PM on March 19 [3 favorites]

Kamala Harris is my age, and has immigrant parents. I just don't believe she is as invested in that thing as Biden, for a multitude of reasons.

mumimor: Kamala Harris' husband is a hardcore Zionist, and i strongly suspect that influences her beliefs and policy quite a bit.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:09 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

Kamala Harris' husband is a hardcore Zionist

Is he though? Conservative Jews certainly don't think so.
posted by mumimor at 3:24 PM on March 19

Though tbf at this point in world/US history, what stands for "Conservative" in political Judaism seems to have gone off the rails quite a bit. There's also the fact that typing that out, I've also fallen into the same rhetorical fallacy of equating Judaism with Zionism, which is somewhere American/Western politics is very comfortable with.
posted by cendawanita at 3:34 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

Shor's point is that Harris did better when she was talking about people's real experience of hardship, and worse when she was echoing Democratic establishment voices who claimed the economy was going great.

I hope super data scientists like Schor run A/B tests when the economy is actually in recession vs 2024. But it's kinda pointless to do that, because propaganda and marketing which the Republicans are really good at can make up 10+ points of difference. To put it more bluntly, suddenly nobody cared about egg prices after Trump was elected. Before hand, they pounded consumer prices daily.

I'm saying the quality of the economy is what your media tells you, this is more where the Democrats failed than actually delivering. I guess one can consider that a serious mindset adjustment when you are playing from behind.

Of course, the corollary is if Harris did well talking about how much the economy sucked, then realistically who would vote for the people who made it that way? I thought people were supposed to vote for their own best interests? How easy is to campaign against someone who does that? It's useless and pointless to point such things out when you are the incumbent party.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:35 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

Even in the very unlikely event the Palestine situation remained unchanged by the election results, the ramifications for the rest of the world, for generations, make Palestine insignificant in comparison.

Palestine isn't your fucking Omelas child.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:49 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

I never said It was. I would love to see all of Likud in the Hague, next to Putin and his inner circle.

How would you have proposed we stop the suffering of this single child, then? Walking away from the city in this case means killing the child. This is a Kobayashi Maru. There is no Kirk maneuver here.
posted by CynicalKnight at 4:15 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

Even if Palestine is something so congenitally unimportant, the fact that Israel grows ever rightward (in exchange from liberal colonialism) means the deep historical and social linkages it has with the US will continue to break American politics.

How would you have proposed we stop the suffering of this single child, then?

Which is why I've become uninterested in arguing what to me is settled matter on the right of the hypothetical child because the brass tacks of it all is that the actual American body politic is in harm's way. Specific to last year's electoral performance, I'm not the only person to have pointed that aiming to break the anti-war and anti-genocide protests meant that a significant amount of civilian activism momentum was stolen/slashed at the knees. Even those who were voting for the Dems despite their misgivings weren't so volubly cheering on their decision, and that does as much to depress low-info voters as anything, because how were they supposed to pick up top headline news on how important it all is, to bring back the sports team metaphor for the disinterested person, if no one really wants to talk about it, or feel too bitter or literally jailed to talk about it?

The way institutions have acquiesced have also been a consequence of this norm-breaking that was necessary to allow rightwing authoritarian response within liberal politics. Things moving fast now because they were already in place.
posted by cendawanita at 4:23 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

(ask me how I know. Or maybe a Chinese person right now. Per NYT's International desk, which is still mostly decent : Many Chinese See a Cultural Revolution in America -
People in China are expressing alarm at what seems to be an authoritarian turn in the United States, long their role model of democracy, that feels familiar.)

American exceptionalism makes you all think even your political angst is unusual and special and people have been trying to tell you politely and otherwise that it's not.
posted by cendawanita at 4:27 PM on March 19 [3 favorites]

Very relevant to cendawanita's point: Democrats Built Trump’s Army (Jessica Pishko, for Liberties)

But all of this is the direct result of a Democratic politics that continues to rely upon and revere law enforcement — prosecutors, criminal courts, police, prisons, and all the violence contained within these systems — despite abundant evidence that the criminal legal system does not keep us safe, that militarized violence does not protect communities, and that the Democratic party want a violent law enforcement so long as they are not forced to see it. The ASMR of people in leg chains — the same leg chains that incarcerated women wear while giving birth and that children wear while appearing in criminal court even if they are charged with shoplifting — is offensive to Democrats not because they find people in chains morally offensive but because they do not want to see a practice that they themselves have supported revealed as the monstrosity it is.
…
Democratic politicians supported the proliferation of law enforcement, on public transportation, in schools, even inside homes, a move that has only served to increase the number of people killed by police. Democratic policies are what first empowered the police to become a violent force against the left and in deference to Trump. What Trump understands is that the glory, power, and social currency of the police serve as the backbone for authoritarianism in the United States. It is a militaristic, hyper masculine system which is impervious to change and maddeningly difficult to monitor.

posted by adrienneleigh at 4:55 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

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