[knowknow]

It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. People love getting tangled on social issues as it’s the most provocative. This conception that most people actually care about rational policies is false and has been false for at least the past decade.

[eddythompson80]

> This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work.

It's what Obama ran on, and it worked for him. The fact that he achieved very little there is a different issue.

Kamala's 2-month long campaign wasn't very convincing.

[PaulHoule]

The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with.

Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.

[BobaFloutist]

And the lunatic fringe saw her as overly deferential to republicans because there were a few notable republicans that were willing to stand up and say "Actually, I would prefer this democrat over this republican" and she thought that was worth highlighting in her campaign.

There's no winning everyone, that's for sure.

[Braxton1980]

>The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with.

What made them think that?

[bryanlarsen]

The lunatic fringe is generally randos on social media, not people of authority in the Democratic party. Kamala wasn't in a position to kick them to the curb.

[PaulHoule]

No excuse. It’s results that matter, not process. Defining who she was would have meant being proactive and saying something like “trans folks should be able to use the bathroom but sports leagues can decide who plays”

[eddythompson80]

That doesn't seem to be the attitude when the lunatic fringe on the Republican side occupy social media. I understand why politicians (both democrats and republicans) don't want to denounce any such fringe groups that are cheering for them. Seems to work better for republicans than democrats though

[PaulHoule]

It does. Why that is is a story that has many different parts.

One of them is that there really is an infrastructure to communicate what the Republican party stands for that which is connected to the party on an everyday basis. The absence of the Democratic party that potential supporters are complaining about right now is structural. Baudrillard might say "The Democratic Party doesn't exist"

Secondly the left has to work a lot harder for the right because the left's slogan is "another world is possible" which is a constructive project (you have to prove it, you have to build it) and the right's slogan is "there is no alternative". It's not fair but it's the way it is.

The lunatic fringe of the left also has envy for the lunatic fringe of the right. If somebody says "there are only two genders" they don't really need to justify it or explain it any more than saying that my dad believed that and his mom believed that and... People who say the opposite today expect to be to be a fait accompli and manifestly true because they said it and who could dare disagree with them and punish anyone who says otherwise but that's just a position that would be easy for their enemies to defend but impossible for them -- but they circle their wagons and form some tiny world in which it is true. The attack on JK Rowling for instance shows that they've got Kiwi Farms envy, that they think the highest form of activism is the methods of their enemies. Thus it's not so clear that the lunatic left is really left at all, it's certainly not "inclusive".

[cryptonector]

The Republican party has a grassroots vs. establishment dynamic going on. The Democratic party has no such thing. In the Democratic party the elders decide who's going to run in the primaries and they body out any challengers -- "wait your turn" they get told, and then they do. I'm not talking about presidential elections or even congressional ones. I'm talking about local politics. If you're an outside and you want to run for office you have a much better chance on the R side than the D side.

[Der_Einzige]

Baudillard and all related thinkers are fashionable nonsense and intellectually bankrupt.

[CivBase]

Is that what she ran on?

My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" and something vague about protecting women's rights.

It's almost like you need more than a couple months to run a serious presidential campaign. Despite being the VP for 4 years, most people didn't know what to expect from her. Almost nobody was enthusiastic about her and she had no real momentum. That's obviously what killed her campaign.

[some_random]

One of her campaign promises was to tax unrealized gains at 25%, it was definitely more than just status quo.

[mrguyorama]

Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you?

There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.

Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.

[jack_h]

> Did you look up her platform at all?

I did. I also knew what she campaigned on during her brief presidential campaign in 2020. I also know her Senate record. I also know what she did as AG and DA. Harris' problem is that her platform was inconsistent with past actions. I'm all for politicians having a change of heart, but they have to be able to articulate what they believed before, what made them reconsider, and how they got to their new position. She failed spectacularly in that task which made her look inauthentic and the GOP seized on that weakness.

Her platform ended up looking like the output of a focus group with the express intent of winning votes rather than having any real policy positions. GP's "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" is pretty spot on.

[CivBase]

> Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you?

I know her actual platform was more detailed than that, but it doesn't matter what I know. The point is it was not communicated effectively. Go out on the streets and ask the common folk what her platform was. Aside from "I don't know", the answers you'll get will be all over the place - mostly just generic DNC talking points. The average liberal/moderate/independent voter was not excited about Harris.

Do you honestly think most voters are researching candidates? Honestly? Of course they aren't. They expect it to be spoon fed to them.

> There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.

Good luck insisting voters should RTFM. Professionals don't even RTFM most of the time.

> Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.

Trump lost in 2020, so I'm not sure why this is relevant. But regardless his platform was the same as it was in 2016 and 2024 - "Make America great again," "drain the swamp," these are household phrases. And just as Trump's platform resonated better with voters in 2016 and 2024, Biden's "return to normalcy" platform resonated in 2020 amidst the pandemic. There's more to these platforms than a catchy slogan, but that's the part people remember. It's effective marketing.

Look man, I want the Democrats to put forth a strong candidate and an effective campaign but this whole "blaming the voter" thing is not going to get them there. It's just going to continue alienating the people they need most.

[marcellus23]

Platform documents don't win elections.

[mrguyorama]

I do agree, but I am so sick and tired of people who insist "Her platform was X" when what they actually mean is "I made no attempt to find out what they offered and instead when Fox News or Twitter or 4chan told me that she wanted to ban being a cis white male I just took that at face value and made no attempt to find out if this was even remotely close to reality, and just started repeating that claim unprompted to other people instead"

I'm so sick of people saying "I have curated an information diet that explicitly excludes anything from a democrat or a liberal or anyone who is even kind of empathetic to their causes and beliefs, but I'm angry that I didn't hear about all the things democrats claimed they were offering" as if they didn't fucking do this to themselves?

Like, at any point, google "Harris platform" and it would have been first link. Ballotpedia has been around for a decade and makes this utterly trivial, even in local elections.

Americans ignore anything a democrat says, while taking blatant lies from a second trump admin at face value. What the actual fuck is the democrat party supposed to do about that? They have no editorial control over Fox News, and certainly don't have any power in Musk's Twitter

"The democrats didn't do good outreach" say people who consistently turn off and ignore any media that even repeats a democrat campaign promise, and have scientifically demonstrated that they will INHERENTLY distrust anything coming from someone with a (D).

[Braxton1980]

>My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different

But

>most people didn't know what to expect from her.

[CivBase]

I do not see any conflicts between those statements.

[Braxton1980]

You're right.

How do you know most people didn't and what was Trump's plan?

[xboxnolifes]

Kamala was too little too late. No candidate was going to work for democrats coming into the presidential race so close to the election.

[Loughla]

Combined with more of the same from the Democrats where they pick the candidate and preordain them. These are the things that tanked her chances.

Hillary wasn't super popular, but what really killed her was being forced on us from the political Democratic establishment.

Biden only won because Trump is such a turd for many.

It's been since Obama that the Democrats actually had a candidate that people liked. I do not understand this strategy.

[banannaise]

They are more interested in personally retaining power over the Democratic party than they are in winning elections.

Republicans winning is a better outcome for them than progressives unseating them in the party.

[TexanFeller]

Because people have memory that lasts longer than a goldfish’s. People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. They remember Kamala’s fringe and cringe positions and statements from her California and 2019 campaigns and don’t believe she’s a proud gun owning moderate that just wants to make government work for us. Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.

[Braxton1980]

>People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else.

Republicans haven't?

[Gareth321]

If you have the time, I highly recommend this interview between Ezra Klein and Democrat strategist David Shor (https://youtu.be/Sx0J7dIlL7c?si=VCLdHs48Tsk63GqP). He goes into a lot of the details around the question you imply. Long story short, Republicans have done that, but also on the issues people actually care about. This has given them a large trust lead in topics like the economy, crime, immigration, the border, etc. If Democrats had also hyperfocused on kitchen table issues, they might have won. By the time Kamala was campaigning, it was far too late to convince everyone that she actually cared about important issues. She had four years to prove she did not.

[pessimizer]

> Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.

I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.)

People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies.

The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump.

Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.

[kashunstva]

> she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked

Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.

[TexanFeller]

To be clear I didn’t support the winning candidate either. I feel this election was well characterized by that South Park episode in the 90s.

[lotsoweiners]

I had to look up when that episode aired since it is so applicable to many elections. It was 2004 so Bush vs Kerry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douche_and_Turd

[anon7000]

Republicans are even more focused on controversial social issues, so it’s not obvious to me that’s the real problem.

[tsimionescu]

Where exactly did you get the idea that Kamala was running on this? Where was she advocating for, say, Medicare for all? Or fighting vested interests by running on campaign finance reform, to get money out of politics?

She was running on an abstract, classical centrist non-program of "we've done great under Biden and we're going to keep doing the same". That is the exact opposite of what GP was suggesting.

[knowknow]

The comment is saying that liberal politicians should be

>prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds.

Nothing about what you mentioned at all. Nor did I ever claim Kamala ran on what you said. The fact that you and the commenter have different ideas of what rational policies are and assume politicians should be running on that platform is part of the bias. You assume that most people want the same thing as you but most people don’t. The majority actually enjoy social issues.

[tsimionescu]

They were was also saying:

> Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations

So I interpreted the first part in a more revolutionary direction, though you may be right that they were thinking a different direction than I was.

[anon7000]

She wasn’t running on an abstract program, people just weren’t paying fucking attention. For just one example: https://www.kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Poli...

[robertlagrant]

That's still pretty abstract. "Everyone wins" is not a concrete proposal. Also, while I'm not one, I think some American voters noticed that the problems that appeared (or appeared to appear) 2020-2024 happened while she was the VP.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Your assumptions are wrong. Kamala lost because of inflation during the Biden admin and some related missteps. Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her.

Also you're misreading my point, campaigning on these things isn't a panacea, but delivering on them just might be.

[ReptileMan]

> Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her.

She had less charisma than Hilary. Probably even less than Al Gore or Zuckeberg before his new software update was installed. And she had a history of bending the knee to the progressives.

[PaulHoule]

… and donors too. Mainstream Democrats are seen as disingenuous in that they direct cheap talk at progressives but somehow beat Republicans at the fundraising game almost every time.

[Gerardo1]

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

No one cared. One of the better things a president has done for the country in quite a while, and no one cared, and no one remembers.

[s1artibartfast]

People don't believe it was anything but a huge load of pork to corporate interest with nothing to show.

[BrenBarn]

The problem is it's not enough to give. You have to show that you're taking from the people who caused the problem.

[Braxton1980]

Covid?

[rayiner]

It probably wasn’t either inflation or Harris’s race, because the rightward swing was heavily skewed by race. Compared to 2016, all of Trump’s gain came from non-whites: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/03/18/opinion/18eks-sho....

Whites didn’t shift at all from 2016 to 2024. Latino moderates shifted 23 points to the right, and Asian moderates shifted 11 points to the right.

It’s hard to explain how inflation would cause a racially unbalanced shift like that. The 2016 election was a pretty neutral baseline—the economy was fine and had been for years. So if inflation was the cause, why didn’t white voters shift right compared to 2016? It doesn’t make sense that inflation would only cause hispanics and asians to shift right.

Likewise, if race was the reason, why didn’t white voters shift right, compared to 2016 when the candidate was a white woman? And why did black conservatives (a bloc about the same size as black liberals) shift 8 points to the right?

[gopher_space]

Conservative minorities don't shift to the right, they're far right and temporarily move left whenever the Republicans get a little too on-the-nose. A Democrat in office means they won't be exposed to that rhetoric for a few years so the "bloc" will swing back to their baseline for a cycle or two. I'm trying to think of a visual analogy that isn't a double pendulum.

I feel like the "voting against their best interests" trope exists because people don't realize that conservative minorities vote as far right as the GOP will let them. Because they're conservative.

[notahacker]

Doesn't seem so hard to believe that Latino moderates were worried about Trump in 2016 and somewhat less worried about him and more worried about inflation in 2024...

[rayiner]

That doesn’t explain the lack of movement among whites though. Moderate whites were 52% Clinton, 55% Biden, and 52% Harris. 2016 was a good economy and Obama was relatively popular. So among moderate whites, Harris didn’t do any worse than Clinton did despite the inflation under Biden. The 3 point swing from Biden could easily be explained by the fact that Biden had a long track record as being moderate, while Harris always has been liberal.

The bigger signal here is racial depolarization. Historically, moderate to conservative minorities tend to vote Democrat anyway, which leaves them as disproportionately the more conservative wing of the party. What you saw from 2016 to 2024 was significant racial depolarization—moderate to conservative blacks, hispanics, and asians voting more their ideology and less their race.

[Der_Einzige]

The shift is because of rapid evangeliszation and abandonment of catholocism in American Latino communities in the past 10 years. It’s a sociological phenomenon.

[PaulHoule]

People assume a female candidate is to the left of where they actually are. Worked great for Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel who both represented center-right parties and took their nations rightward and whose favorite slogan was “there is no alternative” but not for center-right Hillary Clinton who headed what is allegedly a center-left party. [1]

If the Democrats have a fight between an abundance agenda and populist leftists who are really inclusive like Bernie Sanders I think that will be great.

[1] Clinton was always as far to the right as she could get away with, probably to compensate for being a woman, but paid the price for her mindless hawkish in 2008 when she lost the primaries to Barack Obama