[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