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I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost | Oliver Hall
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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I just want to say this to all the people who are making up the most hare-brained excuses for why Harris lost.
Kamala Harris cobbled together a campaign in days that took a campaign that was going R+5 and counting and turned it into a toss-up. She had 107 days. From day one, she was held to an infinitely higher standard than Trump. Trump held a debate where he famously said "They're eating the dogs!" and "I have concepts of a plan!.", and Americans were just fine with it. But Harris wasn't perfectly articulate with details over some economic plan or another and apparently this makes her unfit for President. She put up a near-flawless campaign, especially given how stuck behind the 8-ball she was. It ultimately just didn't matter.
Arab-Americans were outraged over Harris' support for Israel because of the genocide in Gaza. So to protest this, they voted for a man who has vowed even more support for israel and to genocide even harder, and also try to kick them out of the country in the process.
Latino men opted to vote for a man who made it a focal point of his campaign to round up and deport Latinos en-masse because the alternative was voting for a former prosecutor who also happens to be a woman.
White people decided that they want someone who's going to fix the economy, so they decided to vote for a guy who campaigned on raising the cost of living by an average of about $400 a month while promising to appoint a budget czar who already said he actively plans on imposing "hardships" on poor people.
Well, it's either that, or tens of millions of people in a country with a long-established history of racism and misogyny refused to vote for a black female president and just used these niche issues as excuses.
I know a lot of people don't want to hear this, and I know what I'm about to say sounds racist as hell. But Obama was a fluke and America in general is just not willing to elect a minority again. That's just all there is to it. The rise of Trump, the rise of far-right groups like the Proud Boys, and the 2024 election are proof of that. Democrat initiatives did relatively fine. The senate went GOP, but that was predicted with the loss of Manchin and Tester. Democrats in the House did fine. Kamala Harris did not.
And for those who believed that embracing centrist policies is what cost us the election, or we weren't left enough, or we should have listened to people like Bernie and AOC: People like Bernie and AOC are wildly popular in their districts and with the far-left coalition of the voting base. But they are wildly unpopular outside of that. And keep in mind......I love both of them and would gladly vote for a future AOC as president. But given the current political makeup of the country, putting someone like Bernie or AOC on the ballot would have made the ass kicking Harris just got seem tame. Sure, they'd have won states like California and Massachusetts by gigantic margins. But they'd do little to nothing to flip red or purple states.
The fact of the matter is that the 2024 results prove that Americans like what the Democrats were selling. They just don't want her to be the one selling it, as evidenced by the fact that only she underperformed so spectacularly. People were so unwilling to vote for a black, female President that over 10 million of them opted to stay home knowing full well that they were essentially voting for Trump.
A majority of this country is white. A majority of this country will not vote for a minority president again in this political climate. And if the Democrats put up another minority candidate in 2028 (assuming we even have elections), they will lose again. That's just all there is to it. It's a tough pill to swallow, but it's the truth. It's not right, but it's the truth. You know how black people across the south have been fighting gerrymandering so they can have majority-black districts and vote for black candidates? Or for that matter, how minority candidates do better in minority districts when championing minority initiatives? White people are doing the same thing. And there's a lot more of them. And they just proved that they absolutely will vote against their best interests vs. voting for a black woman.
They lost because they lost touch with America.
You can blame everyone you did in your post because you fail to see the bigger picture.
The democrats did not let you take place in democracy. There was no primary. Kamala Harris was the chosen one of the elite. She would never have been elected by voters because she is a hollow shell of catchphrases and memorized talking points.
She is unrelatable and therefore unelectable. She had no platform except that she was going to keep doing the Genocide Joe walk.
The only tears that you should be crying was that they were able to get you to vote for them while genociding kids Gaza, effectively saying "yeah I don't care."
The incumbent President was the nominee. Generally, the incumbents don't hold primaries because the outcome is all but certain, and party leadership has never forced an incumbent to step aside before. By the time Biden dropped out, there was no time for a primary. If we'd have tried dumping Biden, holding a primary in a country of 350 million people, and running a general election campaign in barely 3 months, we'd have been a laughing stock. We'd be infighting for months while Trump was running a general election campaign unopposed. The RNC would be saying "We're firmly behind Trump. Biden is so bad that the DNC forced him out of the race and all of the other options are so bad that they can't settle on one." If you think that the election was a slaughter, that scenario would have made everything exponentially worse.
Makes you wonder why it was allowed it to happen at all. It's not as if Biden wasn't showing signs of aging the limited times he was seen in public on the first go-round. He should have been primaried again, but it was worth it for them to lose the Whitehouse to Trump 2x. This should be a layup for a major political party to be in opposition of, but old Bernie was too extreme for the corporate warhawk democrats because he wanted to tax the rich.
Here's the truth: the democrats don't give a shit about democracy and they sure as hell don't give a shit about you.