How did this happen?

“So what you’re saying is we need to move further to the right.”

Democrats and pundits

Exactly the message I expect them to take away from this, if 2016 and 2020 are any indication. Zero introspection.
- I would not be surprised if the new iteration of the DNC is the 90s, early 2000s GOP. Look how they are spamming McCain on reddit.
  Such a sick cruel joke to make it so the choices in our false election be GOP or Orange Putin.
  Remember Tucker Carlson fucking a loaf of bread in a Russian grocery store? Well I hope you all like bread!
  The only thing that makes all of this interesting is trumps inevitable death. I know his mental decline is in there too but they'll just weekend at bernies him for the final years.
Our constituents' rent went up 15% and their wages stayed the same, so everything is basically ok.
I don't know why everyone keeps insisting that courting the right was a stupid move. I personally know a lot of life long Republicans that got real tired of the MAGA stuff. In this matchup specifically, trying to scoop the conservative-but-not-MAGA vote makes sense by the numbers. Obviously it didn't pan out, but at least in theory, there should be a sizeable bloc of voters there.
- Less people voted Trump in 2024 than in 2020. It is not that Trump won, it is that Biden/Harris lost hard.
  Trump: 74 Mio. in 2020, 73 Mio. in 2024
  Biden/Harris: 81 Mio. in 2020, 69 Mio. in 2024
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
  Seems like people on the less right side of politics also got tired after the whole "we need to stop Trump or democracy ends" messaging led to an underwhelming / genocidal and dementia struck president
They were literally saying Democrats were too woke. Did you see any woke policies? None! Not even progressive. The media needs to join the rich on the pyre

There is no single group of people on the planet Earth as adept at shitting and falling back in it as the Democrats.

They turned "Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory" into an artform.

This why people think they are a psyop.
- I don't need convincing. They showed me in 2016 that they're controlled opposition. Admitted it in court.
  Wilding v. DNC Services Corp.
  Google it for yourself.
I don't think there has ever, in history, been a group capable of doing that at this scale other than the Democratic Party. They are the greatest to ever do it.

To be fair, the Republicans did all these same things and won all three branches, so...

Turns out people who want those things can vote for Republicans. Who offer more of those things!
And the people who did not want those things stayed home.
It shouldn't have to be repeated so often that maybe Republican voters aren't who the Democratic party needs to be gearing itself to attract.
Republicans had a primary.
- This point needs to be driven home over and over and over again. The democrats haven’t held a real primary where the DNC operatives weren’t interfering since 2008! which coincided with the election in a landslide of Obama after he won an extremely competitive primary.
  Democrats learned the wrong lesson from that election, they thought it was identity politics that won the landslide. No idiots, it was democracy itself. Of course being the first black man to be president helped him but having an appealing platform that outcompeted everyone else’s (and a better record re Iraq war, he voted against it as senator unlike Clinton) won him the popular mandate that led to the landslide in the general. Against a formidable candidate! John McCain was no joke and I think todays democrats and even progressives would be thrilled to have him as president if he were still alive compared to our current options.
Because right wingers want that and left wingers don't, that's some surprising maths.
Actually true. The Republican politicians at the time hated Trump in 2015

Either you are able to vote on harm reduction alone, knowing that your pick isn't ideal...

Or you are so ideologically locked in that nothing but "your brand" is enough.

Harris sucks but the vote was to keep MORE, NEW people from being at risk.

Republicans always seem to win with shitty candidates because they understand this intrinsically. They do not care that DJT is an utter buffoon, they care that he will enact the shit they want, and now they're getting it because they refused to stay home. As the saying goes: Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans want to fall in line.
So Republicans backed their guy, just like they did the last two elections, and there was no line that could not be crossed that would convince even a fraction of Republicans to not vote. Meanwhile, virtue signaling lefties desperately tried to convince me for months that I shouldn't vote for Biden OR Harris because they were both equally culpable for a genocide that is happening halfway across the world, as if Trump would have been any better.
Yeah, we absolutely deserve to be punished for this. We let this happen. If Dems could actually get a solid trifecta in the government, we might have a shot at actually reversing some of the damage that has been accumulating since Reagan, but that requires people to set aside their purity tests and hold their noses at the ballot box. The real elitists are the Democratic base who feel personally slighted at the idea of compromise or harm reduction.
- There were 14 Presidents since FDR. And many of the Democratic ones had ample possibility to enact progressive laws and chose not to.
  You keep claiming that people like Clinton, Obama, Clinton, Biden or Harris are "left", but they are center-right, in many aspects far right by European standards.
  People don't vote "perfect" also not on the left. They vote "this is current issues, who addresses these issues?" Trump pretending to care about working class people helped him. Biden/Harris made a point of alienating everyone that is against genocide, which should be a nobrainer for progressive politics, and also peddling racist messages with bragging about their deportation numbers.
  The idea that the center to far right Democrats would actually bring any leftist solution is laughable. They haven proven time and time again, that they are the party of maintaining the neoliberal and imperial status quo.
  The solution is to offer a progressive solution against the reactionary solution, so people can rally around your progressive solution. Providing no solution and denying the problems is a surefire way to demotivate and disengage people. Someone who wants genocide, deportations and neoliberal economics can always vote the Republicans. And the Republicans can succesfully further the image of the Democrats being the billionaire cultural elite party, while the Reps are the billionaire "hard working" party, peddling the lie of the American dream. But it can be peddled to Joe and Jose in the milling plant.
- California has a bulletproof Democrat supermajority, They don't have any of the things that the DNC campaigned on. Why would I believe the DNC could get anything accomplished with a trifecta if a bulletproof Democrat super majority in California can't. Democrats are indebted to the same donor class, CEOs and bankers that Republicans are. They are merely controlled opposition to Republicans.
Trump won both times because he departed from GOP ideology, not his voters. Harm reduction doesn't get voters to the polls.
This isn't about you and me. A campaign centered around "stop this person" is just less effective than one centered around "let's start doing this".
- Just saying this is a hypothetical reality. As you say, it doesn't get people to the polls.
  What it means is folks have to live with a FURTHER candidate because they aren't smart enough to serve their own interests and take the NEARER candidate.
This is the second time in a decade that the liberal establishment expected the US voting public to actually do something about all the fascism they themselves don't seem to actually want or can do anything about.
The "Vote Harder!" brigade was warned about this - at one point or the other, "lesser evilism" is going to hit rock-bottom.
- That's fine, my point stands.
  If more people need "their brand" then they'll also in the bed they made: the further possible candidate from their brand
Harm reduction does not exist, that's shit that liberals tell themselves because they know that what they are voting for is evil.
- Naw dawg you bought a trump by sitting on a pedestal.
  It's all fun and games to build the perfect candidate, but it wasn't on the ballot.
  Ignoring "harm reduction" just put thousands of trans and millions of immigrants right in front of the bulldozer. Own it from your ivory perch.

I don't get it. Yeah all of these things are horrible but the other choice is literally Hitler. We could say the same thing about them but we didn't win

The term "literally Hitler" is a lot less impactful when democrats have been complicit in genocide for an entire year.
If Trump did what Biden did, I have no doubt you would have called him literally Hitler for it.
- Oh I have no doubt since his plan os giving Israel everything they need to massacre every and each Palestinian. At least the Biden administration pretended to care
Kamala Calls For Peaceful Transfer Of Power To Adolf Hitler
- So did Hillary right before she went on every media talk show to talk about illegitimate elections, stolen elections, investigations, et cetera. Blue Maga, is losing their shit right now.
The other choice may have been literal Hitler, but the choice the Democrats put up was Goebbels

Stop it Patrick, you’re scaring the liberals. Imagine how shocking it must be for reality to prove that the leftists were correct about everything this entire time. Again.

Really weird how leftists have a 100% accuracy rate about all of history going back 150 years, but I’m sure the liberals will take some Ws eventually.

Just keep barreling towards fascism, libs! I believe in you!

“Voters voted for the choice furthest to the right because they wanted the choice on the left to be more left”

Less people voted Trump in 2024 than in 2020. It is not that Trump won, it is that Biden/Harris lost hard.
Trump: 74 Mio. in 2020, 73 Mio. in 2024
Biden/Harris: 81 Mio. in 2020, 69 Mio. in 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
- Less people voted overall in 2024. That’s less for Trump and Harris. Because 2020 was the highest voter turnout ever. It was record breaking because of the pandemic. Without another motivator as big as the pandemic you’re going to see less voters for both Trump and Harris. You’re also going to see many different reasons claiming why. But it’s a fact that if you don’t have record breaking overall voter turnout in 2024 also, both sides will lose voters.
Yes. People want a populous movement. In the absence of left-wing populism (like socialist reforms), they will take right win populism (fascism).
- Democrats campaigned on making billionaires pay their fair share and addressing health care and student loans etc so socialist reforms. But the majority of voters were still convinced that that would make them worse off unfortunately.
People didn't vote. Significantly less turnout this year than 2020. Further left is more exciting than an idiot chasing endorsement from Republicans.
It's stupid, but if people weren't stupid Trump wouldn't have been a candidate.
- 2020 had the highest voter turnout in the history of our country because of the pandemic. Without a major motivator like the pandemic, we are not going to hit those numbers again.
  So naturally there will be less voter turnout this year.
I know someone who didn't vote and gave this exact logic.
- What logic specifically?
More like out of 2 right wing options people went for the more right wing option.
- Democrats have been moving further left ever since progressives joined them. This “democrats aren’t left enough” talking point is in line with the Russian strategy to polarize American politics more so that we dont get anything done.

I just wanted to put a quote from Blackshirts and Reds here. Chapter 9 as a whole has some very prescient parts:

To the extent that class is accorded any attention in academic social science, pop sociology, and media commentary, it is as a kind of demographic trait or occupational status. So sociologists refer to “upper-middle,” “lower-middle,” and the like. Reduced to a demographic trait, one’s class affiliation certainly can seem to have relatively low political salience. Society itself becomes little more than a pluralistic configuration of status groups. Class is not a taboo subject if divorced from capitalism’s exploitative accumulation process.

Both mainstream social scientists and “left” ABC [Anything-But-Class] theorists fail to consider the dynamic interrelationship that gives classes their significance. In contrast, Marxists treat class as the key concept in an entire social order known as capitalism (or feudalism or slavery), centering around the ownership of the means of production (factories, mines, oil wells, agribusinesses, media conglomerates, and the like) and the need—if one lacks ownership—to sell one’s labor on terms that are highly favorable to the employer.

...

To support their view that class (in the Marxist sense) is passé, the ABC theorists repeatedly assert that there is not going to be a workers’ revolution in the United States in the foreseeable future. (I heard this sentiment expressed at three different panels during a “Gramsci conference” at Amherst, Massachusetts, in April 1987.) Even if we agree with this prophecy, we might still wonder how it becomes grounds for rejecting class analysis and for concluding that there is no such thing as exploitation of labor by capital and no opposition from people who work for a living.

Class has a dynamic that goes beyond its immediate visibility. Whether we are aware of it or not, class realities permeate our society, determining much about our capacity to pursue our own interests. Class power is a factor in setting the political agenda,

selecting leaders,

reporting the news, funding science and education, distributing health care, mistreating the environment, depressing wages, resisting racial and gender equality, marketing entertainment and the arts, propagating religious messages, suppressing dissidence, and defining social reality itself.

ABC theorists see the working class as not only incapable of revolution but as on the way out, declining in significance as a social formation. Anyone who still thinks that class is of primary importance is labeled a diehard Marxist, guilty of “economism” and “reductionism” and unable to keep up with the “post-Marxist,” “post-structuralist,” “post-industrialist,” “post-capitalist,” “post-modernist,” and “post-deconstructionist” times.

It is ironic that some left intellectuals should deem class struggle to be largely irrelevant at the very time class power is becoming increasingly transparent, at the very time corporate concentration and profit accumulation is more rapacious than ever, and the tax system has become more regressive and oppressive, the upward transfer of income and wealth has accelerated, public sector assets are being privatized, corporate money exercises an increasing control over the political process, people at home and abroad are working harder for less, and throughout the world poverty is growing at a faster rate than overall population.

This, I think, has a lot to do with Dems today, esp. with Chuck Schumer appealing to "moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia", which blatantly shows how little they understand class, even in an election--and as we've seen, even when a fascist could win instead. The dismantling of class conscious has been a disaster for the world. This is especially the case as people conflate hardworking intellectuals with the bourgeoise, and misconstrue legitimate protests against state greviances as a "color revolution".

What are the odds Dems win the House?

It's highly unlikely.

It happened because fascist enablers didnt vote

If only the DNC had given them something to vote for, instead of appealing to fear and guilt
- Fear was all that was needed this cycle. Just wait, we will see soon.
  To be clear: Harris sucks. Trump is a monster. Avoiding trump was all we needed to care about.
- No. Its the peoples fault for not voting. When the option is fascism or not they shouldnt need anything else. Aside from that Harris had policies which were known and easy to find. There is 0 excuse not to vote when democracy is on the line. Now you never have the chance to vote in a free election again
110% this. And they still don't get it.
The fascists in this equation are the DNC and RNC. The enablers of fascism would be the DNC and by proxy anyone that voted for them.
- The DNC were the party that was against fascism this election. The fascists were Trumpists. The enablers the non voters. They picked fascism over democracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries

Primaries happened. Biden won it, Harris likely wouldn't have, but by the time Joe dipped it was too late to do the process again.

Oh, you mean the primary where no one else had universal ballot access? Where there was only one actually viable challenger, Dean Phillips, who the Democrats drove out of politics afterwards? That primary?
Like, FFS, even the pundit class doesn't pretend that was a serious primary. Stop pretending a ceremonial vote means something.
- You really think Joe wouldn't have won in a more crowded field? He was the incumbent. It's practically a given they'll get the nod with token effort. The last time the incumbent actually almost kinda sorta had a challenge was 1992, it was Bush Sr., and he still shat all over them like 75%/25%. Even Carter in 1980 got the nod and he was polling at like a 28% approval rating at times. Stop pretending that a full primary wouldn't have just been throwing money into a dumpster.
  Now if you want to say Joe should have held to what he was considering in 2019 and not running a second term then we'd be in absolute agreement. His hubris fucked all of us.
“Primaries” where they strongly discouraged anyone from running if they wanted a future in the democrat party. A primary against someone with brain worms who’s not so secretly a trumper is not a real primary.
Snap elections get held in every civilized country
They could have called one right there
- Universal healthcare exists in every civilized country too. America is special... and I don't mean that in a good way.
Not our problem, Democrats decided to run a person no one trusted or liked and instead of listening to voters they kept him in until the donor class spoke up and said no. A real indicator of runs the country.
Those are facts. Do not use them. It makes you look like a decent person and nobody likes that.
And it's not like Biden could have been forced out of the race any earlier.

How did dems abandon the working class?

Biden has been the most pro working class president since FDR.

Tell that to the rail workers
- US rail companies grant paid sick days after public pressure in win for unions https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/01/railroad-workers-union-win-sick-leave?CMP=share_btn_url
  When Joe Biden and Congress enacted legislation in December that blocked a threatened freight rail strike, many workers angrily faulted Biden for not ensuring that the legislation also guaranteed paid sick days. But since then, union officials says, members of the Biden administration, including the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, and labor secretary, Marty Walsh, who stepped down on 11 March, lobbied the railroads, telling them it was wrong not to grant paid sick days.
  “We’ve made a lot of progress,” said Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation. “This is being done the right way. Each railroad is negotiating with each of its individual unions on this.”
Biden has been the most pro working class president since FDR.
That Biden is the high water mark was an alarm bell. Just ask the rail workers.
There is no such thing as a "pro-working class" president.
- Can't serve capital and labor.
I'd say most working-class since Reagan. The Dems were obviously scared of Suburban Republicans, and obviously trying to court their vote, for some reason. They were probably convinced that the United States was a "post-industrial" society, so as the logic goes, cultural issues would take precedence over class ones, and 24/7 social media users would be more valuable than blue-collar workers. There was also the idea that China is the world's manufacturing base, most metals are mined in African countries (like how cobalt comes from the Congo), and most fruits come from Latin American countries (like bananas from Guatemala). Class, nevertheless, remains a concern, and the proletariat in the United States is not a fiction.

Abandon the working class?
unions declining to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate.
Unpopular candidate?
15m less Democrats voted.
- Eh I don't think those 15 mil were dems anyway. Maybe ultra progressive with higher standards than what the dems have to offer.
  Historical speaking Harris got standard dem numbers. No one ever got numbers like Biden.
- Which was purely political nonsense from the unions. And now a guy who held oligarchic union busting up as a good thing is in power.
Oh, look. A liberal whose liberal holy cows has predictably failed to prevent (or even slightly resist) the rise of fascism is trying to blame leftists for their holy cow's failure.
Yawn.
Unpopular candidate? Yeah, her rallies were ghost towns.
On Tuesday there was a spike in google searches asking why Biden wasn't on the ballot and at least 15 million fewer people voted than the last presidential. You consider that popular?
- Sounds like it doesn't matter what she did at all. If that many people weren't aware that Biden dropped out, she could have the perfect platform and it wouldn't have mattered.
Oh, Harris was actually popular? That's good! When's the inauguration?
- She's so popular she lost an amount of voters almost equivalent to the population of Pennsylvania when compared to Biden.
Comment removed - Dont be a dick
Unpopular candidate? Yeah, her rallies were ghost towns.
Lmao
Crawl under the covers and scream into your pillow about Palestine or whatever unforgivable issue made you let the country down by not supporting Harris
Lmaoo
IT. WAS. YOU. Fuck y'all.
Lmaooo
The Trump campaign should pay you for all the covert advertising you do for them.