You’re right that “people are dumb” is a lazy answer but so is your rebuttal that Dems lost because their policies/platform are unpopular. If that were the case then Dems wouldn’t have done as well as they did in 2018/2020/2022.

Republicans had a trifecta then in 2018 Dems had a blue wave midterm where they picked up over 40 House, in 2020 they won the presidency while picking up Senate seats and retaining the House then in 2022 they had one of the best midterm performances for an incumbent party in modern history. Also, while Harris lost all of the swing states, Dems won 6 of the 7 swing state Senate races.

So just like people didn’t all of a sudden get dumber from 2020 to 2024, they also didn’t go from loving the dem platform in 2018-2022 to all of a sudden hating it in 2024. The reason Dems did poorly is going to be a lot more nuanced than either of those things and voters aren’t a monolith so the reason why someone switched parties or sat out entirely is going to vary from person to person.

-Some put a line in the sand over Gaza and refused to vote for anyone that would continue to enable Netanyahu.

-Some felt betrayed at the party over the perceived coverup of Biden’s declining health, Harris being his VP was considered complicit in this.

-By the time he dropped out, Biden was historically unpopular and some felt Harris didn’t do enough to differentiate herself from him.

-Some didn’t like her campaigning alongside Liz Cheney and felt she was doing too much to appeal to Republicans rather than exciting the Dem base.

-Some fell for the Republican propaganda about Democrats caring more about illegal immigrants and transgender people than the struggles of average working class people.

-High inflation in 2022/2023 put a large economic burden on working/middle class Americans and while things had steadily improved in the year leading up to the election, it was too little too late. As we talked about with people being uninformed, most people didn’t know or care what caused inflation, Dems were in charge when it happened, therefore they were seen as responsible.

-One thing I feel that gets overlooked is that a bunch of Covid relief programs expired in 2022/2023 and to the uninformed voter, this was seen as Biden cutting support for them. Some examples are student loans payments restarting, expanded monthly child tax credit expiring, expanded SNAP benefits expiring, people getting kicked off Medicaid once the National Health Emergency expired. Losing benefits at the same time as high inflation was a double whammy of economic hardship.

-Trump cozied up to and was supported by tech bros/crypto bros/manosphere influencers which caused young men in particular to shift to the right.

-Dems stick too close to traditional news media like cable (CNN/MSNBC), broadcast (ABC/NBC/CBS) & print media (NYT/WaPo) and these are all in decline which has caused Dems to struggle in getting their message out to people who don’t follow politics.

-The surge of asylum seekers did legitimately cause a strain on communities and Dems were slow to react, even among people who aren’t anti-immigrant, they were seen as being too lax on border enforcement.

That is 10 potential reasons that explain why Dems lost in 2024 that aren’t “people are dumb” or “people don’t like Dem policies”.

You are a walking conundrum.  You are calling me intellectually lazy but while openly admitting that you are ignoring the vast majority of points being made.  Gee whiz, remind me to introduce you to kettle some day.

And you know what is super fun?  For months in 2024 I said vibes were bad for harris, especially in middle America.  People did nothing but show me polls "proving" I was wrong.  People demanded that I admit my vibes were wrong.  I tried, much like now, to talk about how inaccurate polls are.  I was told polls are more accurate than my vibes and liberals were fine.

Remind me scooter, who won the election?

Edit 

You know what else isn't a good argument?  "Dumb people."  You know what the data doesn't support?  "Dumb people."  Yet you don't have any issues with the laziness there.  Funny how that works.  

Cool.  Let us start with giving credit for the effort and for you being intellectually honest.  Thank you, it is appreciated on my side.

I'll concede saying middle America doesn't like liberals policy is on over statement on my side, but I will stand firm with a readjustment to "in middle America a lot of liberal policies are polarizing. "  I didn't look at all the polls linked in this thread.  The one I did look at was 53% favorable, which does mean 47% are not fans or at best meh...  I do think liberals overestimate the appeal of their platform.  But fair, my position was a few steps too far.  

The ones in bold I think had major impact.  Strategically the DNC needs to do better.  

I think there were 3 major turning points:

Biden being a train wreck during the debates 

Biden calling a good portion of voters trash 

Harris saying she would change nothing during an interview 

The border killed the party.

The one aspect we might disagree on, bidens mental decline wasn't a "perceived" cover up.   They were flatly hiding it.  Just like Trump tried to take over the country.  I'm not sugar coating Biden decline and the obvious covering it.

*so glad the discussion can move pass "dumb people" and be a real conversation 

I find it baffling that human stupidity must be ruled out as a possible reason to explain what went down.

Then again, appeasement of that position is why the USA as a whole has gradually shifted more to the right over the course of the last four decades. Compromises kept being made in the same direction, so now it's a country where pardoning insurrectionists is viewed as a pretty normal thing, so it follows that pedophiles have a high chance to get off the hook too.

Alright, one last attempt I'll just spell it out for you. The reason personal vibes is not the way to find out the truth about something is that the issues with surveys you mention "sample bias and sample size" are so much worse for any one person's experience. Those who do surveys are aware of these limitations and do their best to counter them in different ways. On the other hand you just lived your life. Your vibes being right once doesn't upend the entire field of statistics. 

I can try to defend the dumb people idea if you want. Here I'll try to demo for you how to get beyond vibes and defend a thought you had. I'm already aware that those with higher college education tend to vote more liberal but that probably isn't satisfying so let's go with IQ vs. political tendency. First study on google and we get:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39130356/

And check it out, social liberalism is associated with higher scores on average. Now to be fair it would depend how many standard deviations you qualify as the marker of "stupid" but the trend is there. 

As you go through more of the studies you get:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9548663/

Which was trying to determine if IQ correlated with economic conservatism because as they mention: "Indeed, empirical evidence supports the view that a link between cognitive abilities and political attitudes exists (e.g., Kanazawa, 2010; Meisenberg, 2015). More specifically, most studies indicate that lower cognitive abilities are linked to the endorsement of conservative political views (for overviews, see Onraet et al., 2015; Van Hiel et al., 2010)."

So there you go. Dumb people tend more to vote conservative. 

Apparently I have to go simple because you don't get it.

1) liberals did fine in 2020 and even in 2022.  They did poor in 2024.  Explain how in 2 to 4 years the American population suddenly dropped in IQ and become dumber.

2) surveys/polls under represented Trump in 2016.....  2020.... and 2024.  Distrust in accuracy of surveys and polls are justified.  

You have a literally nothing.  Your position DOES NOT EXPLAIN the results of losing AT ALL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT.

I cannot make it more simple than thus.

And who won the election?   

Something CLEARLY CHANGED.  THE QUESTION IS WHAT CHANGED.

Inflation

People didn't become stupid, they were stupid all along, including in elections where the Democrats won.

There's a sizeable chunk of Americans who blames problems on the current government, so their attempt to fix things is to vote for the other party. In states where there is a quite balanced distribution of Democratic and Republican voters, these swing voters get to decide entire elections. The way you put it, Democrats lost hard in 2024. But the clear results are actually just the consequence of a few tenthousand of votes in selected states, so it looks a lot more dramatic than it really was. By now it's also obvious in which direction this pendulum will swing in the midterms.

That's the explanation why elections go one way or another. Torillian already covered why there are so many people who vote Republican out of habit.

Fair, thank you.  I buy that as having significant impact.  Great shout out, agreed.

if Rol came to the united states and run for office id maybe toss a vote his way based on post count alone