Summary
Gender bias played a significant role in Kamala Harris’s defeat, with many voters—often women—expressing doubts about whether “America is ready for a female president.”
Some said they “couldn’t see her in the chair,” or questioned if a woman could lead, with one even remarking, “you don’t see women building skyscrapers.” Though some voters were open to persuasion, this often became a red line.
Oliver Hall, a Harris campaign volunteer, found that economic concerns, particularly inflation, also drove voters to Donald Trump, despite low unemployment and wage growth touted by Democrats.
Harris was viewed in conflicting ways, seen as both too tough and too lenient on crime, as well as ineffective yet overly tied to Biden’s administration.
Ultimately, Hall believes that Trump’s unique appeal and influence overshadowed Harris’s campaign efforts.
Is this low unemployment and wage growth in the room with us?
Unemployment is “low” because shitty gig economy jobs are counted as employment. And wages might be growing, but are lagging far behind inflation.
The majority of Americans aren’t sexist and racist, they are living paycheck to paycheck and some unlikable rich black woman from San Francisco isn’t going to be able to relate to a poor white man from Nebraska or even a Hispanic dude from El Paso. And you would think “neither should a rich ass hole from NYC”, but he at least pretends to care about them. Democrats have been demonizing the working class for over a decade and they are starting to reap what they sow.
I voted for Kamala, but she was a terrible candidate. She made no attempt to empathize with the plight of the majority of the working class voting base and instead was more worried about capturing the vote of rich trust fund babies that are being misgendered.
As soon as Trump takes office, the nuance you’re evaluating these numbers with will be lost. I’ve lived this thing before, Trump may use economic conditions to his benefit rhetorically and may even disagree with the numbers while he’s out of power, but the instant he’s in the same numbers will automatically signal to him and his cult of supporters that everything is great and people should stop complaining.
Correct, there is zero chance of ever getting through to these 75 million people… But there was a very good chance of getting through to the 10 million who stayed home but had voted last time, and at least some chance of getting through to the 50% who regularly don’t vote… But the Dems never go after those people, they continue to insist on wasting everyone’s time by only going after the imbeciles with actual policy changes (they go after the 10 million with bullying and fear mongering, which clearly doesn’t work)
Maybe and maybe not. Maybe I actually don’t give a fuck because all of this “but they didn’t actually improve main street” online shit also disappears during Republican administrations. I’ve been through multiple cycles of this shit and the people whining about the dnc online are just another level in Dante’s Inferno.
We get it, you guys love Bernie and think Bernie would’ve won everything. Carry that energy forward for another decade if you don’t wind up in a Trump camp first.
Bernie and AOC have been advocating for Americans to build a movement to get progressive policies passed by building from the bottom up, but instead everything is the mean old dnc’s fault despite the fact that there is no movement, no community, and so all you’re left with is career politicians trying to form an alliance out of everyone that doesn’t want to vote fascism. There’s a reason Democrats can’t run a coherent campaign, they don’t have a fucking coherent constituency.
They absolutely don’t have a coherent constituency, that’s for sure, but they certainly could have a large enough constituency to put Trump and his entire army of ignorance and sleeze to bed once and for all, but they only cater to a very small segment of what could be their constituency, and for many of the people who could be their constituency it often feels like they’re actually catering to the enemy rather than to them.
That’s exactly my point. To appease one section of their potential voters they have to piss off others. We can second guess them on which decisions would’ve led to a victory, but the fact remains that they come across as incoherent and inauthentic because they have to walk a tightrope to keep together an imaginary coalition between things like American Jews who support Israel and Palestinian immigrants. They fail because they aren’t representing a coherent set of people. They’re representing sometimes conflicting ideas. American atheists and Catholics. Muslims, some of whom believe that women should be subservient, and “childless cat ladies”. People in this country are overall much more regressive socially than online progressives want to admit.
When it comes to the conflicting ideas they need to pick a side. And the other side has to decide whether to show up or not, we know which side always shows up, maybe they should take a backseat for a bit, they’ll show up anyway.
Like if you think women should be subservient, you’re not on our side. If you are okay with arming a terrorist nation to carry out genocide you’re not on our side. Easy peasy ones.
I think we’re actually finally at a truly 50/50ish ratio of regressive to progressive in the US… That’s why things are so tense between the progressive actual left and the regressive “left” DNC. Yeah there’s still misogynistic bigoted people here, but definitely way fewer than 100 years ago. And they should ALL be on the other team.
I think for a lot of people the choice ended up being between a quick leap into fascism or the ongoing painfully slow fascism temperature being risen one degree to keep the other guy from blowing it to 100, and I think more people than I’d have hoped decided to let the bandaid be ripped off
Less people than you think thought that was the choice. Americans are big time ignorant of politics and even on this site we had people asking if this was a normal election.
According to those who voted, this election was about the economy. 🙄
Most people probably couldn’t tell you the first thing about fascism or even capitalism.
I wouldn’t say 5 million people thinking this way would be out of the question though… Would you? And are they polling the people who voted for Biden but didn’t show up this time? Because that data would be wildly valuable
It really wouldn’t shock me if a lot of the loss could be attributed to the fact that they couldn’t mail it in from the couch as easily this go around. I also think that people in this country are not as progressive socially as some of the most ardent people online like to pretend. Some simply didn’t want to vote for a woman…which is part of what the article says.
I got 2 ballots mailed to me, and just had to fill one out and send it in. There’s no reason it couldn’t have been that easy for everyone. Anywhere that it was harder than that, I’d guess Republicans were behind it, but if it was Dems they should be kicked out of the party, if the party wanted to start leading the widely varied left.
No one on the actual left wouldn’t vote for a woman because she’s a woman… These are mutually exclusive things
I think the movement is there, it’s just kinda in the back of most people’s minds because no one is leading them effectively… Which I get, Bernie and AOC are obviously too busy to also be organizing a movement completely dependent on small donations and somehow figuring out how to use those to get the word out through the torrential downpour of bullshit we experience everywhere, but I wish they would choose leadership for that movement that can lead more effectively
Are you suggesting this movement only exists in people’s minds? I think I’d agree.
A couple of national pseudo celebrity politicians are not going to personally organize the type of movement you’d need to make any actual progress on anything in this country.
They keep telling us we need to build it, and then we keep deferring to celebrities and politicians at the top because we don’t want to build it. So we lean on the dnc. You get who shows up. I’m in CA and I looked during the pandemic for some mutual aid whatever in my area. There was one and as far as I could tell it shut down before I even knew about it.
All movements only exist in people’s minds, until there’s something for them to set in motion, a plan for them to execute.
The thing we need to build is a political movement. As you pointed out, very few people have any idea about anything, let alone politics. I think the movement is bigger than just 5 million, that’s just the nihilistic part… I’d think maybe 15-20 million are truly onboard to some degree in their minds, and even more to a lesser degree, they just don’t know what their supposed to do because they aren’t politics experts. Also whenever a true leader emerges they end up getting elected, (and apparently later they then get pushed back out by big money and Israel, who knew?) but once they’re elected they’re legitimately too busy to lead anymore.
People lean on the DNC because the DNC leans on them… The DNC demands loyalty from people who’s loyalty they could get by actually doing what they want, instead they’re chasing after loyalty from people who’s loyalty they could never possibly get. It’s insanity, and it’s insulting. And the more they do it the more the lines between them begin to blur until they’ve moved so far to the right that the group to the left of them starts to look big enough to go without them… If someone could unite them. But, the same people who own the media companies pay for the Dems campaigns… the Dems control all the levers of political organizing on the left and like 6 companies control all the levers of mass communication, so the politically illiterate group kinda need the Dems apparatus to be able to make their thing work… And the more the Dems refuse to cooperate, the more it starts to seem like maybe they’re truly just not on the same team.
To be very fair real wages grew during Biden’s administration, but probably not enough and definitely not for everyone.
I think that the problem is that the metric used for measuring the wages growth is an average:
In a society where most of the wealth goes to a few, an average is not necessarily a good measure:
I like this image from this article from the fed
They have the following remark below this graph:
Edit, from the bottom of the article:
Wanna bet the places and sectors that are doing worse than median wage growth and inflation are rural and manual labor things? That second one especially I think could explain why some gen z men voted the way they did.
If I interpret the first figure of this article correctly, the 25% poorest of the population have always been ‘shafted no lube’ (pardon my economists jargon), but were about to have a wages growth above inflation; before the fight against inflation was finally won (well done, joe) and the slaves slaved again.