U.S. Politics, November 2024: GARBAGE DAY!!

The left has streamers like Hasan that do numbers but they’re not welcome within the Democratic Party because they question things like “arming a genocide”

strangling the bernie campaign in its crib

in every state that held a Democratic primary the ballot had Bernie on it and all they had to do was make a mark next to his name if they wanted him to win. Bernie was also pretty good at small donor fundraising and ran a good campaign in 2016. He got plenty of votes, but most of the time Hillary got more. Sure, the DNC and big donors backed Hillary, but Bernie had a direct path that bypassed the DNC and big donors and he still came up short. He did help move the party left and got some minor policy concessions because of that, but if you want more votes for progressive issues, you have to keep pounding at your message, making your arguments, finding ways to break through the media 'brownout' on how and why people are hurting and who is responsible.

There is probably no Democrat capable of getting the nomination who could have beat Trump. Obama might have. Bernie maybe. But none of the dream candidates mentioned when Biden was dropping out could have done it.

Hasan also said America deserved 9/11 so yeah he's not going have Hillary as a guest

Trump won NC by 3.3 points, but Democrats carried most statewide offices: Josh Stein (D), Governor. Rachel Hunt (D), Lt Governor, Jeff Jackson (D) AG, Elaine Marshall (D) Sec of State, and Mo Green (D) superintendent of Public Instruction.

— Stuart Rothenberg (@StuPolitics) November 6, 2024

Kamala Harris is speaking now, if anyone cares! (And I get it if you do care. Or don’t care!)

also Harris underperformed most of the Democratic senate candidates

we do really need to work harder at getting more state legislatures. punting on those as a priority is how we got Florida permanently ratfucking itself.

(yeah it's more complicated than that, some states are just longstanding strongholds for one party or hte other, but Florida didn't used to be that way when I was a kid)

Florida could have at least cheered a little today if we'd gotten Amendment 4 through

at no point was there ever a reckoning with the fact that kamala harris was a dead on arrival candidate for the nomination for her own party the one time she had to run. and she turned out to be a dead on arrival candidate for president. 2016 felt like being slowly consumed by quicksand. last night we showed up to a game that we thought started at 8 but was actually already over. this person was regrettably a completely awful candidate for president and next time around that hopefully should not be the case

wouldn’t bet on it

can Trump fight MIke Tyson instead plz

nevermind, he'd probably convince him to take a dive

she seemed like a really good candidate to me! shows what i know.

i didn't hate kamala at least. that's pretty huge right there.

yeah I think she was fine. more fool me.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_did_it,_Joe!

i never liked biden. on the other hand.

some of these disaffected white men can be brought back by a political candidate who cuts thru their feeds w/ a new compelling message. it's absolutely possible and i think to some degree will happen, but the democratic party has to help facilitate its own survival

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, November 6, 2024 2:50 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

right I do think the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline was a real thing, spurned on by Joe Rogan types - people just really, really fuckin' hate the establishment

if things don't go completely haywire in the next four years, the only way i seeing a dem defeating him is if the candidate is a straight up bully on trump's level.

with good reason, to be fair

(xp)

In the midst of this Garbagest of Days, are there any local election results people are happy about?

someone or someones should start a real honest to gosh third party right now. a bernie-type party. cuz fuck these two parties. they both suck.

agree, the problem isn't hating the establishment, it's that the disillusioned seem to conflate being an outsider in the political sense w/ not being a part of the same machine they actively hate. they may be in different wings of the same hospital, but they both work for it

If you think about actual progressive media, you've got like Mother Jones, Dissent, maybe TNR these days (I don't have a subscription so don't have a clear bearing on where they're at). I guess MSNBC qualifies, but it's still part of NBC, it has its built-in limits. So anyway, yeah, I think especially there's room and a need for overtly/intentionally progressive media, in the digital arena.

I know people here think it's corny, but Crooked Media (the company that puts out Pod Save America) was created specifically to address this imbalance and has built a pretty big fan base. One limitation, though, is that the founders are, by virtue of their background as Obama staffers, institutionalists who are closely aligned with the Democratic Party. That's great when it comes to motivating people to participate in electoral politics (through its Vote Save America initiative), but it isn't *leading* the party in the way that right-wing media has led elected Republicans over the past 30 years.

nah you have to take over the party from the inside, which will hopefully easier now that the elites have been fully discredited for the ninth time (prob not but feels good to say)

xp to scott

In the midst of this Garbagest of Days, are there any local election results people are happy about?

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, November 6, 2024 1:26 PM

thank you for this, will report back later

accelerationists also think perhaps 'dismantling the system' is the solution, even if the vehicle is a mortal enemy, but the problem is, all electing Donald Trump did in 2016 is drive the Democratic party even more towards establishment candidates in 2020/2024 and dig us deeper into elections that bounce back and forth every cycle.

like, ok, we have another four years for Trump to permanently wreck the country and maybe that creates the seismic shift that finally creates something new emerges from the ashes, but it feels to me less that as the goal and more 'lol my candidate got destroyed by machine politics, so fuck u America'.

we would probably need to completely revamp elections to generate leftist candidates worth a shit - and I don't mean abolishing the Electoral College, I mean adopting European style runoff elections etc. and the chances of that ever happening in America, even 300 years from now, are too small to publish on PredictIt

i think it is probably #notgood that winning the presidency as a dem requires being a generational political talent (*biden covid caveat applied)

In the midst of this Garbagest of Days, are there any local election results people are happy about?

As I mentioned last night, the abortion rights amendment passed in Montana. That only lasts until the federal ban goes into effect, of course, but for a few months at least, it's not nothin'.

xxpost (that is not me saying the Democrats had 'no choice' but to run Biden and Harris, but me saying 'we already know from the last 40 years this is what they are going to do, and most politicians favor their career first, country second, so the idea that Trump was ever going to be the catalyst for a reckoning within the Democratic party was a pipe dream. they will not learn)

I really wonder if somehow Ted Cruz had won the nomination and somehow got into the White House in 2016, what happens after that re: Trump, like does he stick around and influence things or move on to other boring shit

Kamala was a bad candidate depends on what you mean by that. She wasn’t bad on the stump, she solved a lot of her awkwardness, she was a direct contrast to the two old white men.

But she was tied to the Biden boat anchor and doesn’t seem to have a consuming political vision that could separate her.

right. I couldn't articulate exactly what she stood for either. I knew she used to be fairly progressive and wasn't really any more. I proudly voted for her because Donald Trump is a criminal, a rapist, an asshole, and a constant spout of maddening, confrontational bullshit and maybe the last person you'd want to have any real power. but I guess Americans just don't find that to be that compelling of an argument.

I know people here think it's corny, but Crooked Media (the company that puts out Pod Save America) was created specifically to address this imbalance

Yeah, good example, didn't mean to leave them out. But also yes I very much think of "Pod Save" as a voice of the Dem establishment.

what got me was that supposedly people remembered that the economy was good under trump but they DIDN'T remember what a total failure he was during the pandemic. makes no sense.

people only remember money i guess. and not grandma.

she was about as good a candidate as the Dems have on the bench

besides Bernie i suppose

to be fair, grandma would only give you a shiny penny and trump gave you checks with his name on them.

I guess the "standard Democrat without baggage" isn't the sure winner people thought it was.

i don't think harris was completely dead on arrival this time, there was a real burst of enthusiasm when she entered the race just because she wasn't biden or trump but she didn't lean into that and instead ran on being exactly the same as biden

assuming there will even be a competitive 2028 election there should be a lot of room for someone to run to the left of the dem establishment in the primary - one of obama's distinguishing points was opposition to the iraq war after all, and there's not really anyone left with the sort of clout that clinton or biden had

kamala looked like a t.v. show/movie president too i thought that would be in her favor.

People don’t expect that Democrats would have been better than Trump on COVID, though. They weren’t gung ho about the economic measures at the start, Biden didn’t exactly act like a COVID warrior when he got in office (as sic routinely pointed out IIRC), regardless of Trump’s ineptitude and insanity we did get vaccines as quickly as possible.

"Makes no sense" captures my thoughts (from the UK).

people think the economy has to do with their buying power, but it's more about the stock market. You know, that thing goes up when companies fire thousands of workers or replace them with AI/robots.

Part of the reason people remember the economy was "good" under Trump is that he never stopped talking about it, all the time, over and over. He is good at self-promotion, at least.

And yeah I had big reservations about Harris getting in the race because of her primary run, but I also understood why for lots of reasons it needed to be her. And honestly I think she did well! She came out strong, focused and energetic, very much gave the impression of a no-nonsense problem-solver with her shit together. I agree about (and posted a lot about) her vagueness on some key things, the economy most especially. And the whole outreach to Republicans thing NEVER WORKS and they should just completely sop it. But any campaign is going to have its flaws. She ran aggressively against Trump, Walz worked his ass off, it wasn't a bad campaign and she wasn't a terrible candidate. She just lost. The fundamentals were too bad. Maybe there was a way through or around that, but she was inheriting all of Biden's legacy up to that point, she didn't get a completely fresh start.

she seemed like a really good candidate to me! shows what i know.

― scott seward, Wednesday, November 6, 2024 4:22 PM (twenty-six minutes ago)bookmarkflaglink

i didn't hate kamala at least. that's pretty huge right there.

― scott seward, Wednesday, November 6, 2024 4:23 PM (twenty-five minutes ago)bookmarkflaglink

yeah I think she was fine. more fool me.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Wednesday, November 6, 2024 4:23 PM (twenty-five minutes ago)

to be clear my point is not to say that some of you had wool over your eyes. i understanding viewing kamala as a broadly likable personality. my point tho is that she did run once, and her electorate roundly rejected her, and that fact was not seen as relevant to democrats during this election, which it should have been

i really thought all those post-it notes in bathrooms was going to do the trick...