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curl-6 on 08 November 2024
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sc94597 said:
curl-6 said:

Party rather than platform would have been the better term then, I will amend.

Maybe I am naïve but I think most people don't believe the more wacko insane shit, (many people clearly do, I just doubt it's a majority) and more that most people care more about their own immediate comfort and wellbeing than issues that they don't feel affect them personally.

It's easy for people who struggle to put food on the table to roll their eyes at a lot of leftist ideals or issues and decide to stick it to a party that they see as not doing enough to help them, regardless of whether the alternative is any better.

I'd say that the Democratic Party's message this year (and in fact since 2022) toned down quite a bit on cultural issues. They won in 2020, the same year "defund the police", "abolish ICE", and other sentiments were common among a third of the base. That is when the Democratic party and its base were most "woke". 

Their main thesis and message this time was that Trump posed an existential risk to democracy. Which isn't untrue or trivial, but obviously most Americans who voted don't care. 

Kamala heavily de-emphasized  being a women or a person of color (unlike, for example Clinton, who obsessed about being the first woman president.) When people asked her about Trump's racism directed to her, she would say things like "this isn't new for him" and then just move on. 

The real problem is that in the last month of her campaign all Kamala did was try to court Bush Republicans/Neocons, who barely exist anymore, and ignored the working class part of her base. She did have good economic policies that would benefit the less-educated working class, like removing education requirements for federal positions that don't need them, or the first time homeowner subsidies, but these policies didn't get media presence. 

If there were an actual primary last year, she could have distanced herself from Biden and have her policies better communicated. That's probably the biggest mistake. Biden should have dropped out last year and allowed for a real primary. 

 

They did mostly avoid "woke" issues in her short lived campaign, yeah, which was definitely the right call, but the resentment built up by that movement over the last several years was still there, and the right's messaging smartly connected the two.

And yeah Biden should never have stood for re-election in the first place. There wasn't much Kamala could do at the very last minute, in the minds of too many she represented a continuation of an unpopular regime. The party was a damaged brand by that point.