In fact no. It's well documented that the voters who put Trump in the White House weren't voting until Trump galvanized them. It's also been well known for centuries that white men are the single largest demographic in the US and that it is also the most fragmented one
>It's well documented that the voters who put Trump in the White House weren't voting until Trump galvanized them
It's even more well documented that Kamala is a "shallow-as-they-come transparently-just-a-puppet empty-headed political careerist", that even her own Party heads dismissed as inadequate decoration until Biden's faculties went even more downhill.
>It's also been well known for centuries that white men are the single largest demographic in the US and that it is also the most fragmented one
Which makes sense, since, native americans aside, it was such demographics that first populated and established the US, the overwhelming majority of the rest came later.
But it's irrelevant as an argument to what we're discussing.
There are plenty of excellent black women leaders - Kamala Harris was not one of those. Do not excuse the Democratic Party here with their dysfunctional internal infighting with just being down to racism.
Milquetoast uninspiring leader should still beat someone who outright hates everything about our country, divides rather than leads, and plans to sell our institutions for scrap value while putting the proceeds in his own pocket.
Although I think the people blaming it on racism are hopeful. The real answer is that it struck a chord with people who do not want women in leadership positions.
I remember reading an article when Harris was nominated, about how it was set up to be a "historic moment". Indeed, it was.
I hadn't heard that motive specifically, care to send any links that substantiate it?
(to be clear, the article was of course using "historic" in the sense of the DEI groupthink - since there's no way Trump could win then won't it be super historic to have a Black woman president)
(and disclaimer: criticism of DEI virtue signalling is in no way an endorsement of Maggot vice signalling)
This was not a move by Biden to position Kamala for a loss, but he certainly did not want Pelosi and the Democratic establishment to gloat on a win. Which is why he immediately endorsed Kamala for the presidency, right after announcing he was stepping down from the race.
Pelosi suggested there should have been an open primary after Biden dropped out. But Biden's endorsement ensured that they could not backtrack from Harris.
Selection as VP doesn't mean by default that the running candidate/party endorses the candidate. Most often, VPs are chosen because they are harmless enough to become opposition to them, as a concession to a former opponent, or in most cases to bridge the demographic gap and reach out to a particularly marginalized segment of voters who are not adequately represented in governance.
> she was a incredibly obvious choice and would have had a very strong likelihood of getting the nod had there been actual primaries.
Lol, hell no. She already lost the primaries multiple times. She was extremely unpopular. In the 2020 elections, running with Biden helped boost her profile slightly, but back then Biden was a much more stronger candidate and his choice of running mate wouldn't have mattered - Trump was extremely unpopular then.
While Democratic Party could have picked another candidate, to appease comments like this (I heard this too many times by a lot of very, very smart people so I am not demeaning your comment/opinion in any way) that other candidate would have been a white male
My point is that she was a poor candidate both times, and OP blaming this all on racism gives the DNC a pass when they really need to fix themselves. Obama would have beat Trump handily (a hypothetical), and not lost due to racism.
Is it strange that Obama and Harris are each only part black, but people refer to them as being black?
If we are like “black people can do everything” (which is true, of course), why are the political figureheads of that progressive dimension only half black?
And, beyond that, the black half of each is not even African American! Harris is African Jamaican, and Obama is African African.
If anything, in retrospect the birther thing back then seems like it may have been some absurdist well poisoning on totally valid criticism of Obama’s real heritage vs the media optics of same.
I thought civil rights was for African Americans? Why have all the political figureheads African Americans have, or have been, rallied behind, not themselves been African American at all?
> Is it strange that Obama and Harris are each only part black, but people refer to them as being black?
Yeah - the "One Drop" PoV was beyond strange:
The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of Black African ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood") is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
> I thought civil rights was for African Americans?
It was for the benefit of anyone sent to the back of the bus, forced to drink from other fountains, lynched, etc. That included minorities other than "classic Black" and all the people treated as Black despite not appearing black.
I’m confused. From tone you seem to be comparing what I’m saying to the one drop rule as if this doesn’t support what I’m saying, but it does support what I’m saying.
Late to reply, but assuming you are not American, Black folks in America are quite a spectrum of mixed race from their history. It's not unreasonable to call/identify themselves as black in this situation. I would not extrapolate to the extremes like some repliers are talking about "one drop", etc. That's not practically what the situation is.
I am American, though I don’t really feel culturally American for whatever reason.
Anyway, the vast, vast, vast majority of self identifying blacks living in America at the time of the civil rights movement were of imported-by-force African slave ancestry.
Are we to believe that those people, whose line did not even come here voluntarily, and who were treated as literally subhuman for centuries, just cared about anybody who identified as “black” anywhere in the world who would voluntarily immigrate to America in the future? To the point that they would consider those people’s wins as their own? Even when they themselves still lacked such wins?
I believe they were mostly concerned about themselves and their own descendants, actually. That’s how humans are. The thing people say they thought is basically propaganda as far as I can tell. I don’t believe just about anybody back at that time thought that way.
Now I do believe that people “with the zeitgeist”, so to speak, think what you are saying. But I’m not asking what they think.
> gives the DNC a pass when they really need to fix themselves
I've been saying this since 2016, when HRC ran on a campaign of calling her opponents sexists and then blaming Russia for her loss. Sadly, they just shuffled aparatchniks around instead of cleaning house. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was put on the House Appropriations committee after stepping down from DNC chair. Donna Brazile was rewarded with the DNC chairmanship after slipping CNN town hall questions in advance to HRC. I suspect that the self-reflection to fix themselves is just not in the DNC DNA, sadly.
America runs better when both parties are effective. Currently, neither are.
I talked about DNC governance and accountability after the 2016 primary, not denying that Russia conducts influence operations or that sexism exists in politics. Pointing to Russian interference in 2024 does not answer whether the DNC cleaned house after 2016, and it does not change the fact that Wasserman Schultz landed on Appropriations and Brazile became interim DNC chair.
Weird that you would divert main factual points into non-sequiturs and then accuse me of cognitive dissonance. If you are free of cognitive dissonance, you can now address the points I made, not ones I did not.
> There are plenty of excellent black women leaders - Kamala Harris was not one of those. Do not excuse the Democratic Party (...)
As a non-USian this blend of opinion just reeks of blame-shifting.
You guys have a two-party system. One proposed a candidate that continued Biden's administration. The other was this hot mess. You guys picked this hot mess over Biden's regime.
If you looked at Trump and somehow decided a second Trump administration was better than a continuation of Biden's administration, the blame lays square on you. Not on Kamala. Not on the democratic party. Not on DEI. Nothing.
We prefer to be called Americans, which is also the correct demonym; it derives from United States of America, and isn't used by any other country in English. If you can call someone from South Africa a "South African" instead of an "SAian," then the same logic applies to make someone from the United States an "American."
However, Canada and Mexico are also in the North American continent, so "North American" also refers to Canadians and Mexicans, and that's specifying which part of the Americas we're talking about. The term "American" can equally apply to someone living in Brazil or Peru (or at least "South American").
To my mind, it always strikes me as hubris for the USA to pretend to be the whole American continent.
To be fair, we also ended up with a proven con-man because Southern Democrats don't approve of gays enough to win the primary for Buttigieg and we ended up with Biden only 1 term.
Same US that put a black man in the house for two terms?
Maybe they just hated the idea of a shallow-as-they-come transparently-just-a-puppet empty-headed political careerist being president...