it’s not an excuse, we’re just telling you the reality. how do you think hitler got elected?

So, we can wring our hands about how awful our fellow man is for not seeing the clear moral imperative that we do (exactly like the Genocide-Joe folks have been doing for months), or we can recognize that Dems need to start doing things differently.

no no, don’t you understand? the american voter is just too racist, because they voted for donald trump, so we just need to tack harder to the right, I mean the center, actually I do just mean the right. then, surely, they will vote for the democratic party in overwhelming, obama-era numbers.

I’m going to suggest this book as some personal reading on this issue. But the point I would more broadly make is that running exclusively oppositional candidates does not work, and I would say that’s probably because they don’t really present a clear vision of the future, they only present opposition to something rhetorically. By opposing something in that way, you sort of, only serve to reinforce that thing. Only define yourself in relation to it.

That’s also not really to speak about how she legitimately presented an incredibly conservative face to her campaign, and if that’s the case, people would just vote for the guy who’s actually just conservative.

all the left things that left people care about aren’t just progressive policy, they’re populist policy. Abortion makes the most sense when classified as a healthcare issue. Universal healthcare, and medicare for all, consistently polls popular. So does increasing the minimum wage. So does student loan forgiveness, and free college, which is why biden campaigned on that.

Harris’ most popular policy was probably price controls, because despite all the hemming and hawwing that economists get up to whenever you touch any economic lever, that’s something that the american people can believe will decrease their costs of living. people don’t give a shit about the left, or about ideologies, you’re right on that front, as the person before you is. but make no mistake, those policies which tangibly reign in the economy, control it, and give people free shit, those are, at the very least, progressive policies, if not outright leftist policies.

blue maga and blueanon wasn’t just a sort of tongue in cheek name, it was also an accurate description. we’ve seen this shit burgeoning up, to me, most notably with the people who were adamant that trump didn’t actually get shot and it was all a PR stunt. been lost in the sauce for a while.

There was an absolute mountain of evidence that Trump would be a disaster.

nobody gives a fuck about that. most people aren’t clocked into online politics. they just live under one admin where trump benefits from obama’s policy, things are squeaky clean for the most part, and then they’re chilling, and then they move to living under joe biden where a once in a lifetime (hopefully, haha) pandemic decides to fuck shit up during the transition from one admin to the other, on top of inheriting a much worse economy, and then they attribute that to biden. it’s not a super complicated figure, there, and that’s all on top of biden just not being a very popular candidate to begin with.

if you actually look at the numbers, then the third party candidates had less of an effect for kamala than the third party candidates for trump did. which makes sense, because RFK, at the least, was campaigning on some sort of dystopian vision of the future that his deluded q-anon supporters actually liked, and he had money. jill stein is just grifting like always, basically, no change there, and no change with the lesser known candidates either, really. the bigger story is that a shit ton of the voters stayed home.

everyone wants to shift blame from the democratic party, which has obviously either mishandled this campaign or intentionally lost as a party of controlled opposition, and shift the blame onto the voters. ah, well, it was latino men’s fault for being too socially conservative! ah, it was the third party voters and the leftists! it was the arab americans, who should’ve voted after we funded the bombs that killed their whole entire family! it was trans people, for just being too weird! those are all legitimate explanations I’ve heard people bring up, and I’d classify them all as basically the same, because they all equally have no evidence behind them. the real story is that she had low voter turnout. probably because she was associated with the least popular administration in decades, and refused to distinguish herself from that, and on top of that, campaigned with like, liz cheney. the most she did was offer like, tax exemptions for people starting small businesses, and tax exemptions for people who haven’t missed their rent a single time in the last kajillion years. it’s not rocket science, that’s just not really an inspiring campaign. if they had low voter turnout, that’s probably why, it’s probably not because america is just too racist to vote for a black woman or whatever shit everyone’s bloviating about so they can justify the democratic party turning to the right even more.

I dunno, I think it was mostly that they wanted joe to step down later on in order to justify not having a primary, and dispelling a populist candidate, like tim walz may have been, a populist candidate which goes against the interests of the donors, and could’ve still probably gone through with a ton of funding and a groundswell of support regardless (see: kamala getting 1 billion dollars), from the running. Then, they can run kamala by default, and it doesn’t matter whether or not she really wins or loses, as she’s still campaigning on basically the platform that the republicans of 2016 were running on. I dunno so much if the time was the problem, other countries have full elections in as much time, I think the real problem was the electoral calculus that runs everything the scenes, as it has always been, and I think a lot of people got their brain cooked by brat summer and coconut memes into believing this was somehow going to be any better than 2016.

The most I’ve seen anyone able to manifest is that she wasn’t an old white man, and instead, she was too radical, because she was black, indian, and a woman. I have seen milquetoast liberals saying this, black people saying this, indians saying this, and women saying this. I don’t really know how true it is, and I guess I never will know because she really didn’t run a good enough campaign for me to actually run any sort of postmortem analysis relative to someone else’s real turnout, because she wasn’t even a baseline democrat, she ran below the baseline in terms of promises. She campaigned with dick “killed a million people” cheney and his wife. I dunno. somehow I don’t believe that it’s because democrat voters are just super racist or sexist or whatever.

no, but everyone wants to pretend that everyone became ultra-super racist idiot trump voters over the course of 4 years because they listened to a lot of joe rogan, rather than listening to a bunch of CNN like good little vote piggies. see one infographic of a bunch of red arrows everywhere and then everyone loses their fucking minds and decides that the only way to win the next election is to become more racist. if only they tack to the right harder, then they’ll win, they just need to be more racist, see, and then it’ll work!

and the problem is that this is exactly the lesson they want to learn. it’s the lesson they have an interest in learning because they are also a right wing party. maybe it’s because there’s just gonna be more posters running around two days after the election because this is the top drama and it’s eating up time they otherwise would’ve spent talking about celebrity drama or whatever, but we can talk for years about how the democrats, anywhere else, would be a center-right party of neoliberal warmongers that are fundamentally unwilling to give positive material concessions to basically any of their voters. as soon as the election gets called, that all vanishes, suddenly they’ve run the most perfect campaign of all time, and really, it was the voters that were at fault, and if anything, they should be more racist. it’s not that the economy sucked, that they didn’t present an enthusiastic, optimistic, or hell, coherent, vision of the future. no, it’s because they just weren’t racist enough.

it’s 2016 all over again. the punishments will continue until morale improves, time is a flat circle, and I keep falling down the stairs.

do’h