Harris spent like the last 6 weeks of the campaign slowly losing ground and Trump spent it slowly gaining. It’s just as likely Harris would have lost by more if she’d had more time.
Like it or not, the more time Harris spent doing interviews and getting out on the campaign trail, the less people liked her.
A primary might have helped insofar as she would have lost it like last time.
This is like the one time I agree with pelosi? Minus her comments about sanders.
DNC ran right wing wedge issues, not trusted on economy. A vote for Trump gets a new try at the economy and the wedge issues for a moderate. like it seems pretty fucking obvious to me but maybe I’m just some peon sycophant I dunno.
Oh what could have been.
If only they’d had one, it’d be Hilary losing again and not Kamala.
Fucking Pelosi, out of touch as ever.
With all due respect to her history and career, I don’t give a fuck what Nancy Pelosi thinks about any of this. I don’t want to see her or hear about her or any other 80+ year old establishment liberal for the rest of their lives. They did their time. Now it’s time to retire from public service and live a cushy life with the grandkids and let the next generation take over.
Hey woah there, dont you be talking about bernie like that!
Bernie has been registered Independent until 2015 when he started his campaign for pres. He’s not part of the Democrat establishment (as evidenced by the way they deliberately dismanted his campaign to favor Hillary).
Well i stand corrected, didnt realise he had split off and i dont blame him TBH.
Bernie’s more of an outsider rather than establishment. He’s cool to stay.
Now Nancy wants open primaries at the DNC? Unlike the last 20 years when she was one of the kingmakers in the party?
This fucking party needs to push these fuckers into their graves and get on with preparing for the nightmare they will be contending with over the next 4+ years.
Nancy can fuck right off until she can’t fuck off anymore. She got hers.
She only says this because she’s probably going to die in office from old age or some dipshit republican trying to harm her.
She had no intentions of saying/advocating any of this before 2024. 2016 would have been the time to restructure it fully to get more opinions on how to beat Trump, but the DNC argued in court “We have the right to ratfuck our primaries, we’re not under any legal obligation to let the public decide.”
I think she’s partly right, but also, if she was the one who ultimately succeeded in getting Biden to drop out when he did, then isn’t it reasonable to expect that he would have dropped out earlier if she had pushed him out earlier? Which would make it her fault. Fuck, I don’t even know anymore. I don’t have a lot of confidence that the Democratic party will learn the right lessons from this loss.
if she was the one who ultimately succeeded in getting Biden to drop out when he did, then isn’t it reasonable to expect that he would have dropped out earlier if she had pushed him out earlier?
No. His debate performance is what pushed it over the edge. That’s when a concerted effort began to get him out.
You’re right, but I think it was a combo.
October 7th spilled a bunch of gasoline on the ground. (Almost immediately after that day his polling trailed Trump’s.)
His debate performance dropped a lit cigarette.
In my opinion, you really needed both of those things for him to drop out. A physically struggling Biden that’s polling at 60% would’ve stayed in the race. A Biden with an excellent debate performance that was polling at 45% would’ve stayed in the race.
EDIT: typo
Whatever they think they need to do, they need to do it or get the fuck out of the way and let someone else in there. Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden were not exciting candidates. Too many Democrats didn’t like Hilary Clinton from the get-go. Joe Biden won because he wasn’t the previous buffoon. Then was repeatedly slandered for 4 years by said buffoon over the economy, which was/is mainly suffering because of the way it was handled previously by said buffoon. When corporations can buy candidates and blatant lies are okay to broadcast because of “free speech” this was always going to be the inevitable outcome.
We need more political parties, especially ones that aren’t political extensions of the wealthy elite.
Or we could just get the neolibs out of the core of the Democratic party. They’ve been more concerned with corporate donor profits than the welfare of the working class since the 90s.
I don’t really see that happening, since you’re essentially divorcing wealth from power, and you have a better chance at abolishing capitalism. Ultimately we need a shift of consciousness in this country, but I ain’t holding my breath.
Start at the local level and build up. It’s a lot easier to have strong progressives run in races that might not really be all that contested in the first place. And make even small primaries count
That kind of power starts to add up. The local politicians tend to flow up the party. Obama first rose from the Illinois state senate. Tim Walz first rose from an unexpected flip in a deep red house district in Minnesota
Power doesn’t always flow top down. It also flow from the bottom up
Power primarily flows from the bottom up. The top just tries really hard to make sure we don’t know that so we aren’t able to organize and wield it. If power really came from the top then dictators wouldn’t bother to hold sham elections.
She thwarted Bernie in 2016. These hollow words mean nothing.
Pelosi pushed Biden out of office, and now believes he didn’t submit fast enough. She takes no responsibility for anything. If Harris only had a few more weeks…right Nancy?
She’s not saying Harris needed a few more weeks. She’s saying Biden never should have gone for a second term, and they should have had a real primary process to choose a better candate. Which was a mistake I pointed out when Biden announced his second run.
Any Democrat can run in a primary. Hell, Democrats even let Independants run. There was nothing stopping Pelosi or her chosen candidate to begin a run. What did she want Biden to do? Write speeches for them? These campaign runs start years in advance, does Nancy expect Joe to know what she’s thinking in the future?
This is naive. A Democrat isn’t going to challenge a sitting president for the nomination. Pelosi is absolutely right about this. Biden never should have run for reelection.
So you want a free primary, but but nobody will challenge the incumbent? Seems like Pelosi wanted him to resign before he took the oath.
Biden never should have run a second time at all. His running scared away any other candates. If he clearly said he wouldn’t run for a second term, they could’ve had a full open primary with a dozen candates or more.
As it was, they did everything they could to discourage a real, full primary process.
Even after he was forced out, he could’ve not handed he’s entire campaign war chest and staff to Harris. And instead had a contested convention where candates lobbied attendees for their votes. Like used be done a century ago. Then given all his campaign resources to that nominee.
Supposedly he couldn’t give the resources to anyone else as they were gathered for a biden/Harris campaign.
Since Harris was part of that there was no problems with her taking it over
Probably some kind of fraud otherwise. Collecting funds for a different purpose.
That makes sense.
no it doesn’t harris raised almost a billion in 3 days. that billion was not committed to biden. not even 200 million of it was before he dropped out. trump won on 400 million.
I’m not sure how any that matters to any campaign finance rules that might prevent Biden from giving his war chest to another candate?
That’s ridiculous. No canadates steped forward.
It’s a circular firing squad. I choose not to participate. You can if you want.
No candidates stepped forward.
Because Biden ran.
I said that.
That was the whole point of what I said.You don’t seem to be participating anyway.
If nobody challenges it’s not a false argument.
Enjoy your circular firing squad.
It’s not an argument. It’s an excuse.
A post-hoc justification, given as a robotic response to my explaining how it’s false.
In this exchange it’s literal nonsense.
They are all complicit. There could have easily been a primary. They could have easily not backed him as the candidate. But they allowed him to wait and they approved no democratic process for electing the next candidate. Zero accountability from the democrats as usual.
Perfect summary. Harris did a superb job of instantly uniting them under her banner the second it became obvious Biden was fucked. This navel gazing from Pelosi is utter nonsense.
North of 10M voters who turned out for Biden didn’t show up for Harris. She was a great candidate but the democrats message didn’t resonate after the years of inflation.
My eggs are more expensive too. So are everyone elses in the world. I just blame Putin for destabilising and the stores for blatant price gouging the second they felt they could.
My eggs are more expensive too. So are everyone elses in the world. I just blame Putin for destabilising and the stores for blatant price gouging the second they felt they could.
Exactly this. Harris probably would have overseen the shift of the prices going back down and the “muh economy and inflation” Republicans wouldn’t have had as big of an argument for 2028.
Ukraine winning, Trump dies from health issues/arrested for his crimes (long shot on the last one), and doing her best to secure abortion and queer protections, she would have been great for her second term.
And now we get nothing but the worst of both worlds.
The Times reported Pelosi also took issue with Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders saying, after Harris’ loss, that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
“Bernie Sanders has not won,” she said. “With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working-class families.”
She’s right, Bernie Sanders has not won, but neither did the liberal technocrats. American voters don’t want social democracy, but they don’t want liberal technocracy, either. They want populism, or at least the appearance of populism. She can piss and moan all she wants, but it doesn’t change the fact that liberalism/neoliberalism is not popular, at least not popular enough.
The liberals will do what they always do: blame the American people. They love America, at least technically. They love the theory of America, the concept of America, the mechanisms, but they hate Americans. They can’t stand the troglodytic unwashed, uncouth, irreverent, ignorant masses.
Sanders is a populist, though – frankly, a much more genuine one than Trump. Populism isn’t always right-wing, nor is it always demagoguery.
Sanders’ problem is that (again, being an actual populist instead of a fake one), his platform is very unprofitable for the corporate elite, including the media, and so they sabotage and character-assassinate him in every way they can.
Sanders is a populist, though
That’s true, but he’s not the right kind of populist for America.
I remember going to a Bernie rally in Salt Lake City in 2016, during the Democratic primaries. The line to get into the rally was so long it took us an hour and to get in. He got a lot of people excited, and I was one of them. To this day it was the only political rally I’ve ever been to.
But as popular as Bernie was, and still is, among a certain segment of America, he is equally hated and despised by other segments. Trump is the (faux) populist America chose. It’s because he’s an unapologetic capitalist. Americans would never vote for a socialist, even a populist one.
Trump was chosen because the republican party accepted him. The DNC refused to platform Bernie
They accepted him only because Republican voters vastly preferred him over the establishment candidate, Jeb!
The same is not true of Bernie. He has a loyal base, but it’s not the majority of Democratic voters.
The liberals will do what they always do: blame the American people. They love America, at least technically. They love the theory of America, the concept of America, the mechanisms, but they hate Americans. They can’t stand the troglodytic unwashed, uncouth, irreverent, ignorant masses.
I think it’s more accurate to say that they love American profits, personally.
If they loved America or the American people they would have done more than the bare minimum for the middle and lower classes over the last 25y.
I think the dems have been losing for decades in essentially every political arena because the repubs have cartoon villain mastermind Mitch McConnell pulling the strings and the dems have fucking Nancy Pelosi behind the curtain fixing races against Bernie, etc.
This is the same woman who told her constituents to “go back to China” after they so selfishly demanded a ceasfire in Gaza.
It’s like she wanted to upset the voter base to get the Republicans on her side. “See? I can trigger the libs too!”
So, they aren’t going to learn shit, are they?
A lot of people are playing the blame game right now. I haven’t seen much planning for how to do better going forward. Maybe that’s part of the problem.
We’ve been telling y’all since 2015…
