Well, I don’t want to give him too much credit. Biden is and always has been a centrist. He has a mixed history on Civil Rights (cause he’s 120 years old), he has a pretty pro-bank history, he’s supported some anti-consumer stuff (like the anti-bankruptcy laws), and he even helped put Clarence Thomas on the bench. And that’s not even touching on his administration, where Gaza and the border will probably be his lasting legacy. But, two things that he’s always been pretty consistent on were unions and infrastructure, and he read the room in 2020 and leaned heavily into those things.

I do what I can. If the question had been asked in good faith, I might have even been nice about it.

I sure did. I was genuinely hopeful when Biden stepped down, and when they announced Walz, I actually got excited. Then they started to try and reach moderate Republicans more and more, and I slowly realized they were doing it again. I felt like I was going insane watching them repeat the strategy that caused them to lose to the same guy in 2016.

That actually occurred in 2019, not 2020. After Bernie nearly stomped him in the primary, he made a hard pivot to the left in 2020. As I said, he’s a centrist, but he actually does have a strong history of pro-union activism, which made him a fairly credible (though imperfect) messenger for a populous platform.

And if you’re a politician and people don’t vote for you, you have no one but yourself to blame. I wish Harris hadn’t run a dogshit campaign, but she did, and I’m not gonna blame voters because she was bad at her job.

Yeah, and your comment is a great example of the Democrats 2024 outreach strategy: a smug, self-righteous attitude that failed to get you any votes.

Are you fucking kidding? Because Biden 2020 was a progressive platform and Harris 2024 was a centrist one. They weren’t even remotely similar. Biden may be a centrist, but he’s very pro-labor, and he could see how important the progressive base was that election, so he literally sat down with Sanders and hammered out a platform that they could get behind. And while I’ve got a lot of problems with Joe Biden, he actually was very committed to that platform. He really wanted BBB to get through and he kept trying to find ways to abolish student debt.

Harris, on the other hand, had a handful of disparate, vaguely left policy positions, like the first-time homebuyer’s credit and legalizing pot, but her campaign was mainly centered on economic opportunity for the middle class. She also committed wholeheartedly to the most right-wing polices of the Biden administration, like arming Israel and cracking down on the border. But worst of all, she made bipartisanship and Republican consensus a huge part of her campaign, promising to add Republicans to her cabinet , campaigning with Liz Cheney, and even praising Dick Fucking Cheney.

TL;DR, Biden campaigned like Obama in 2008, Harris Campaigned like Hillary in 2016. And the results were the same.

I mean, realistically, they’d adopt leftist talking points and then abandon them after they won, like they did in 2008.

Tim Kaine. A pro-Wall Street centrist.

I don’t think you can point to one specific thing that got Biden elected. Covid mismanagement was a huge part of it, but student debt relief and other progressive proposals that Bernie pushed the campaign into played a big part as well. Even with Covid, I think there’s a good chance that Biden would have lost if he’d run the same kind of centrist campaign that Harris and Clinton ran.

These aren’t progressives. These are liberals. These are the same people who, when they were told 8 years ago that economic anxiety made voters turn to Trump, mocked them, saying, “Oh, I guess the economy made them racist!”

Yeah, racism and misogyny played a huge role in this election, but people don’t vote for a guy who promises to burn everything down when they’re doing well. I’d have thought this time, given that the Democrats lost ground with both black and Latino voters, they might finally have to acknowledge that their failures are due to more than just bigotry. I’m starting to doubt that, though…

No one reported your comment, no one asked you to delete it, it hasn’t been removed…you’re being tolerated, you’re just not getting approval. You’re not entitled to people’s approval.

The party that ran a populist message won. When their economic situation is dire, people turn to populist leaders. When there’s no populist movement in the left (usually some for of socialist/labor movement) they turn to right-wing populism (fascism). Democrats spent the last 12 years stamping out any kind of pro-labor movement that started in their party in favor of neoliberal centrism, and now their losing to right-wing facism.

Edit: Oh, just saw the shit you added! You know, when a physicist finds out that their experiment contradicts their hypothesis, they have to admit their theory is wrong! They don’t just run the exact same experiment again in 8 years and expect a different outcome. That’s why physics is a real science and political science isn’t!

I mean, yeah, I think that’s unironically who they want to listen to. They’re waiting for someone to tell them why the choices the party made were actually good and smart and how all the left punching they did was actually justified. I’m not sure they’re going to get it, though; even the Pod Save America guys sounded on the verge of some self-reflection. But who knows, maybe they’ll blame Russian disinformation campaigns again and put their heads back in the sand.

I’m just so fucking tired of hearing why the policies that I and most of the country want are unpopular from people who can’t win a fucking election.

Yeah, except progressive positions are broadly popular. Raising billionaire and corporate taxes? Popular. Single-payer healthcare? Popular. Universal Basic Income?Popular. Bernie Sanders? Still pretty fucking popular!

Meanwhile, how popular was the flaccid centrist platform the Democrats put up this year? Is Kamala gonna be president? Are they gonna keep the Senate? Is the house looking good? No? Then maybe it’s time for all the popularity experts in the Democratic party to shut the fuck up.

Democrats aren’t progressives. Maybe if they were, they wouldn’t lose all the time.

Oh, I get to blame it on anything I like? Really? Then I’m going to blame it on Democratic party that was actively working against Sanders, a coordinated effort to anoint Biden after he won South Carolina, an actively hostile media, and a billionaire who spent his on money on anti-Bernie ads. There were more headwinds against Bernie in those primaries than there were against Hillary, Biden, and Kamala in the general. Stop pretending that it was just, “people picked Biden,” FFS.

You’re right, I forgot that Bloomberg was still in and running a campaign entirely designed to block Bernie. Nothing says, “Democracy,” like an oligarch entering an election and using his personal wealth to undermine another candidate, right?