Harris Tried to Win Over Republicans. Democratic Support Collapsed Instead.

If there’s one lesson the DNC should learn it’s this.

They won’t. But they should.

If we wanted to be Republicans we'd be Republicans for fucks sake...

We can't have 2 parties fighting to be the most hateful party of the billionaires. I mean I guess we can but only one gets to win.

The Republicans had their little tea party a few years ago. The Democrats need a Guillotine Party to properly represent us.

My take on this is that the DNC has never understood that to win the presidency in the last 20 years you need to be a fire brand.

I think this stared in 2008 with Obama who won I believe because he fired up the base with great speeches about hope and change. It didn't really happen, BUT the man knew how to give a speech. That got people inspired to do something and they voted.

Bernie was another fire brand - told it like it was and it appealed to a large population.

trump won using the same idea, but just the opposite of hope and change yet it worked. It tapped into a visceral and deep frustration that this country has left them behind.

The modern view of the American president to the population is less of a wonky politician and more of a cheerleader for big ideas, even if those ideas are abhorrent and exceedingly horrifying.

Harris just wasn't the person to pull this off, she was too wonky and it felt like the entire campaign was playing the old card of "we are not trump" Instead if they really wanted to win they would have found ( 2 years ago) a feisty out spoken progressive leaning firebrand that would have inspired people to vote for something better.

The only reason that (bland) Biden won was because of how badly trump fucked up the Covid response.

Here's a fun little tip if you're ever able to try this again.

MLK Jr. never appealed to the white man, he never tried to win over whitey nor tone down his message so that he didn't alienate his opressors, and he never tried to get the Klan on his side.

Notice how we don't have segregation anymore? It's because if Dr. King did these things, he'd have been luaghed at.

Yes. When you abandon the left, they don't vote for you. This is what Clinton did too

Yeah, the notion that she was going to put a Republican in her cabinet.....did anyone think that was a good idea? I mean, outside the beltway media?

NO! Harris just needed to go further right. Forced goose-stepping marches at rallies. Pledges to eradicate all minorities. Promise global wars of conquest.

Outflank Trump on the right, and the republicans AND democrats will vote for you.

I don't get why it's hard to comprehend. By becoming (even) more conservative, more "R", they betrayed (even more of) their base. Why would timid Republicans want to vote for traitors pandering to them?

Ding ding ding! Trump went further right and got more support. DNC should go further left. People want radical change in 2024

Bipartisanship is dead.

No one wants to work with people that they view as inherently evil, corrupt, and a threat to democracy.

Kamalas campaign thought they could win without offending any megadonors, despite seeing what a bit of honesty did for them right after biden was replaced.

Ive never seen such obvious virtue signaling, I'm not sure kamala even believed her own words.

It was the stupidest of ideas. Republicans were never going to vote for her in any numbers. She was all about gun control, she personally owned the 12 million border crossings, she had all those defund the police sound bites from her earlier years, and she couldn't effectively separate herself from the difficult economy for middle and low earners - while failing to communicate that she even cared about the common man's plight or would try to help it. Even her proposed tax plan raised taxes on lower middle class, at least the charts I saw (including here on Lemmy). And Republicans have seen four years of Trump and think all the Nazi and "all Republicans are racist" talk is literally the stupidest thing on the earth. Abortion was all Dems really had, and although lots of Republicans are pro-choice, Trump had promised to veto a national abortion ban (for whatever that's worth).

I remember when Democrats were for the working people. They need to stop being "We're not the Nazis"and start telling us who they are. But I don't think they want to tell us who they are. They're no longer the party of the working man, they're the party of corporate interest and global governance, and they're also almost as authoritarian as the right. Maybe the collapse of the Democrat party will result in the birth of an actual socialist party in the US. We've seen major party changes in the past. Will it happen again, soon?

yeah this was a really fucking stupid idea and I think any Dingus on Twitter could have told you the same. The Trump voter base does not move. everyone's been saying this. I don't understand the Democrat strategy at all

I don't know what the actual numbers are on this, but I have to imagine the number of progressive voters who want more progressive policies far exceeds the number of Republicans that will vote Democrat. if anyone has a source to this data, I am interested in it.

This. Right. Here.

Stop the triangulation it needs to die already.

So left wing Democrats responded by sitting on their hands instead of voting, knowingly allowing the country to slide into whatever authoritarian hellhole that awaits us? Now that’s the definition of pettiness.

This is similar to how someone will slowly abandon their old friends to be relevant with the “cool” kids who will never see you as part of their group no matter what, and your old friends end up making new friends leaving you alone. If this doesn’t work in real life, I don’t get how this could work in politics.

The Democratic party has to stop treating us like the old friend they visit every so often just to get something out of us while forming closer relationships with others who have no business being their friend.

Yea courting Republicans was a bad move IMHO. But she's a establishment dem. So go figure.

Everyone needs to let them know how strongly this article is nailing it.

https://democrats.org/contact-us/

Dang, how did that work out? Oh? Alot like 2016 you say?

When you consider that left leaning folk are more likely to lean into voting apathy that the right-wing, the DNC were fools to assume they had all the left-wing votes in the bag without actually doing anything to appeal to them.

For Christ's sake, Harris got in because people wanted change over Biden, her campaign was for change, yet the first thing she says is she doesn't plan to do anything different to Biden - and if that's not a momentum killer, I don't know what is.

It's not so much as that it collapsed as it was artificially inflated in 2020.

The drive for covid-safe vote by mail turned out far more people in 2020 than 2024 and that helped Biden.

Are you telling me enthusiastically embracing the support of the Cheney's lowered democratic turnout!?! Whoda thunk?!?! Hopefully that's the end of the neoliberals

To be honest Harris wasted time and effort sucking up to the infinitesimally small number of non-MAGA GOPers. Time that would have been better spent emphasizing her pro worker policies.

she tried to win over moderates, not republicans.

I'd say it worked judging by the 70 million votes or so she got.

The real problem seems to be dem voter turnout instead, for whatever collection of reasons that is. I would argue it's mostly voters being stupid, but that's just me lol.

In 2016, Democrats didn't vote for Hillary because she just didn't "do it" for them. We got Trump thanks to their adorable little protest vote.

2024 14 million registered Democrats didn't vote in this election because Harris just didn't "do it" for them. But since they HAD registered, they were prepared to vote.

I'm starting to detect a really stupid, petty pattern, here.

I think the real problem is that we live amongst a sea of imbeciles.

How much of it was due to voter-roll purges, bomb threats at polling stations and other voter-suppression fuckery?

I highly suspect this is because there was no Democratic Primary. I've heard the old tired excuse "they typically run the incumbent as the democratic candidate". But this is simply asinine, it's crazy. They waited until less than 6 months from election day to randomly put Harris in the running. This is one of the most insane things I've ever seen happen. There was no chance for Democrats to vote at all!

Both her and Clinton should have been braver with VP choice.

They both chose VP milquetoast when the time called for people wanting change.

Why do people keep saying Democrats. These were not Democrats. They were political apathetics who were so dumb they didn't see a difference between an existential threat to America, convicted felon, and pathological liar... And a woman with a clean record.

No actual Democrat gave up voting for Harris because of the obvious reach to Republicans who saw that existential threat.

They gave up because of disinformation silos and the economy, stupid

Poor form, but fuck the abstained for letting the rapist become president. Genocide bad. But genocide with a child rape seasoning is fine. Yeah fuck you guys

I'm not sure that the problem was going too far towards Republicans rather than not going far enough, because I expect that the leftists staying home stayed home in solidly blue states. I think that the political positions that many people here on Lemmy wanted Harris to take would have been extremely unpopular with the electorate.

With that said, it might have been impossible for Harris to move to the right convincingly, because she couldn't plausibly distance herself from Biden's unpopular policies. I wish the Democrats nominated someone who could have criticized Biden in a way that Harris could not.