Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
They have no easy path to fix it because they take billionaire and corporate money. If they stopped doing that, the path would've been obvious this entire time.
The US political system has been destroyed by money. Many other western democracies are so much healthier than in the US because there's very little money in politics.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure how folks in the US pull it back. The weight of money draws in so much disinformation and outright media complicity that even grassroots movements (eg. Bernie, RCV) have been safely tampered out.
They better keep it that way.
You'll have to provide them with an alternate source of funding. I'm glad this will be easy for you to figure out. I look forward to this simple solution of yours. Because entire generations have tried to solve this for 40+ years. Since Reagan broke the unions. Who used to provide most of the Democrats funding. You might check into that. There could be a correlation.
Just replace the word easy with profitable and it makes most articles more true in general
Bullshit news. If you look at the boring stats, trumps vote is up a bit on 2020 but the dems vote is down massively.
This was not a big breakthrough for Trump, he made small gains in lots of countues and some groups. But the main issue was a bad Democrat campaign which failed to get people out to vote.
In 2020: Dems 81m votes Rep 74m
In 2024 (95%+ count) Dems 70m Rep 74m
The dems lost 11m votes in 2024! The reps so far have gained none, but probably will be up 1-2m in the end.
So this idea of some great Republican breakthrough is rubbish. The real story is the Dems lost a lot of votes.
If they'd had an open primary and a fresh candidate, or if Biden stepped down sooner and they had an actual contest to pick a successor, or even if Harris had been able to run her own campaign from scratch, they may have had a chance.
The dems lost this election because the DNC backed Biden against all voices who raised concerns about his fitness. When they finally relented it was too late. Then they ran a campaign around abortion and democracy, rather than the number 1 concern of those who did vote: the economy.
The lesson of this election is NOT that Trump has the answers or has made some breakthrough. The lesson is the dems ran a bad campaign and did not offer the voters something good to vote for - 11m voters disappeared - that's who the dems should have been targeting, not the "never trumps" and going more right wing.
The polls said the country was tied 50:50. This is bullshit - polls only showed "likely voters". The raw numbers actually showed 1/3 support dems, 1/3 support reps and 1/3 weren't going to vote. The none voters are who the dems should have been targetting - they're not never voters because 11m went missing from the election!
The dems lesson is very simple: target the disenfranchised voters with positive Democrat policies. Don't try to be more Republican to beat the republicans, it doesn't work and will never work.
They won in 2020 because those 11m came out to vote angry about Trump. The dems didn't give them a reason to vote for them this time.
They must learn this lesson as they seemingly did not understand what happened in 2016, nor even 2020.
Id argue people might need to be punched in the face like they are going to be the next four years then realize not voting isn't in their interest.
They should be voting regardless. If they don't, fuck em. They chose poorly.
The democrat answer is always to blame & shame the voters, leftists & progressives for their losses.
But what democrats won't ever do is represent the interests of the people, they can't. Democrats take bribes from rich donors who have interests that conflict with the voters.
Voters want universal healthcare, rich donors do not. Voters want free college, rich donors do not. Voters want the genocide in Gaza to end, rich donors do not. There's many more examples, but democrats have to walk a tight rope.
If the democrats cater to the voters, they lose the rich donors. If they cater to the rich donors, they lose the voters. So democrats have been pandering to their rich donors while pushing optics as if they support the voters. But it's always a lie.
When democrats take power, they implement miniscule change that expires or is easily reversed to appease the voters while still doing the bidding of the donors. But as the voter's need for change grows, the less that democrats want to win.
Winning means being in charge, which means pressure to implement change. Rich donors don't want that change, so democrats deliberately lose.
Democrats would rather be a minority party that soaks up donations rather than be the majority party and have to actually govern and fix things.
I wish more people understood this fact, especially when it comes to voting.
The only way to truly fix this is to change campaign finance laws, Citizens United, and all the other supporting cases that led to the situation we are in.
This entire comment is just pure delusional? You’re claiming Dems never want to fix anything?
Tell me, who the last Republican to leave office with a good economy according to the general public? And we’ll start there.
This entire comment is just pure delusional? You’re claiming Dems never want to fix anything?
No. Please work on your reading comprehension skills.
No he fucking didn't. People voted for Trump specifically. If Trump isn't running, the political map will be quite different.
Yeah, like a lot of politicians endorsed by Trump have difficulty of winning ballots. Once Trump is gone, the Republicans are going to have a hard time filling his spot.
I don't think it's that difficult. Trump had a rather focused message: anti-immigration and pro-tariffs. He hammered just two issues and it brought out his biggest demographics, uneducated whites and business owners. The big surprise to Democrats is that this also won over many Latino voters.
Democrats need to be similarly focused on their biggest demographics, with two or three major initiatives to differentiate them from the GOP.
Codifying Roe worked to bring out college educated voters. They should probably keep that.
Now add a major new program aimed at blue collar voters (Harris lacked this) and a major new program aimed at Latino and/or Black voters (Harris lacked this too).
Now add a major new program aimed at blue collar voters (Harris lacked this) and a major new program aimed at Latino and/or Black voters (Harris lacked this too).
This is it right here, Dems didn't have a big economic plan to get folks back to where they were before the pandemic and so blue collar voters just didn't turn out for them.
We've had 32y of the neoliberal Democrat party and the bulk of the wealth created during that time has funnelled to the top 10%. Voters want to hear about the plan to give them a share of prosperity too and until that's on the menu they're not going to show up unless a previous Republican administration makes some sort of catastrophic fuck up.
Bush walked into the 2008 crash with his face and Obama ran on change and opportunity for all. He won, then passed healthcare reform and won again. Hillary pushed neoliberal business as usual and her foreign policy expertise and failed. Biden won because Trump catastrophically fucked up the government's COVID response and voters didn't trust him to steer the country out of it. Harris ran on neoliberal business as usual at a time shortly after record setting inflation (and corporate profits) without spending any time talking about how she'd address these things or how they were going to make new opportunity for the working class. It shouldn't be a surprise that her campaign failed, neoliberalism isn't particularly popular with anyone except the wealthy and the educated who see the long term benefit of democrats other policies.
It's pretty easy to see the pattern, Democrats don't represent the change voters want to see unless we're coming out of a catastrophic economic fuck-up during the prior administration.
What does that buy you, an unpredictable win every 8-12y followed by 4 more years of business as usual?
That's hard to disagree with. Kerry couldn't beat Bush even though he was a respectable Senator who also was a drafted Purple Heart war hero in Vietnam. A "Standard Democrat" can't win in a time of aggravation. You need someone on the verge of Fire Brand to rally the troops.
You need someone who's very obviously pushing a "change and prosperity for all" message at this point. A standard neoliberal has very little chance of winning at a time when we've suffered 2? 3? once in a lifetime economic crises in the last 25y.
There needs to be some plan to include everyone in the economic prosperity that we've funnelled to the top 10% and the candidate needs to beat that drum over and over until there's no space left to talk about anything else. We already know Democrats are for women's issues, we already know Democrats are for equal racial opportunity, we already know Democrats are (generally) more sane than the other guy - now we need to tell folks that we've got the better plan to uplift everyone that's fallen behind over the last 30y.
When the other side has candidates willing to say "I'll break the law to change things" you really have to step up your game beyond "we're better for long term growth and stability, and by the way we're not the other guy and we ❤️ PoC."
(Honestly it's exhausting that this needs to be spelled out, it's like national Democrats don't know a single person who's been left behind over the last 30y.)
When the other side has candidates willing to say “I’ll break the law to change things” you really have to step up your game beyond “we’re better for long term growth and stability, and by the way we’re not the other guy and we ❤️ PoC.”
(Honestly it’s exhausting that this needs to be spelled out, it’s like national Democrats don’t know a single person who’s been left behind over the last 30y.)
Well put.
The big surprise to Democrats is that this also won over many Latino voters.
It blows my mind that anyone continues to be surprised by this. Republicans have been gaining ground with Latino voters since Bush. How much longer do we have to wait before the DNC stops scratching their heads and actually tries to do something about it?
Bush was popular among Latinos, and got 40% of their vote in 2004. But that's not true of all Republicans since then. McCain got 31% in 2008, and Romney got 27% in 2012.
Trump himself only got 29% in 2016 (much less than this year).
Harris won 47% of white women, that is absolutely HUGE in today’s political climate.
Oh, calm the fuck down NBC. A lot of these dopes probably voted for "but my cheap bacon and eggzzz!" and almost nothing else. If the donvict has no magic wand to lower their prices some radical amount, he and his party will be as fucked as ever.
Their owners will be telling them Dems need to shift right, this is another Reagan style "crisis" because their job is to create that crisis.
For me it feels like the only thing your Dems have is that they're not the others which is not enough
