Vincent Oriedo, a biotechnology scientist, had just such a question. What lessons have been learned, he asked, from Harris’s defeat in this vital swing county in a crucial battleground state that voted for Joe Biden four years ago, and how are the Democrats applying them?
“They did not answer the question,” he said.
“It tells me that they haven’t learned the lessons and they have their inner state of denial. I’ve been paying careful attention to the influencers within the Democratic party. Their discussions have centred around, ‘If only we messaged better, if only we had a better candidate, if only we did all these superficial things.’ There is really a lack of understanding that they are losing their base, losing constituencies they are taking for granted.”
“We have set ourselves up for generational loss because we keep promoting from within leaders that that do not criticise the moneyed interests. They refuse to take a hard look at what Americans actually believe and meet those needs.”
The only lesson is that unreliable voters can be ignored.
People only ever emulate the winning individual, side, or group.
There is no “They lost so next time they will cater to me.” There is a “I didn’t vote, so next time they will ignore me.”
Edit: Don’t put words in my mouth. It makes uou sound stupider than your words do.
What you call unreliable voters, the rest of us call the American people. If you think you can rely on a voter, you’ve already lost. You are taking your supporters for granted, just as Hillary did, just as Kamala did. Didn’t work out well for either of them.
‘I’m not Trump’ is not a winning strategy. Not for Hillary, not for Kamala, not for the DNC.
If you want to win elections, you have to look at what VOTERS actually WANT. And voters want radical reform. The unfortunately aren’t informed enough to realize they’ll get more reform for their vote in congressional, state, and local elections than in a presidential vote. But they still want radical reform from their presidential candidate, for better or for worse.
There are an awful lot of valid reasons not to like Donald Trump, but lack of reform in his messages not one of them. His very slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, implies change.
People are angry. People see a system that works very well for the 1% and tolerable at best for the rest of the country, and they want that to change. They want a country that works for them. It’s a reasonable ask. And since they aren’t getting it, they want reform.
If DNC wants to win elections, they need to put forward some new ideas, which won’t necessarily be popular with big business but will be popular with voters. Bernie would have mopped the floor with Trump had he not been squeezed out. There’s a few younger more charismatic Democrats who could bring about some real positive change. They always get sidelined in favor of the milquetoast boring status quo candidate.
Look at Obama as an example. Young, charismatic, and a campaign based on reform. He didn’t deliver nearly enough reform but he generally left things better. It was enough to get Biden elected…
Biden was really the only one that ran on a campaign of “I’m not Trump”. Both Harris and Clinton had independent platforms that had nothing to do with saying they are not Trump. They weren’t coming into the mess Trump had made so their policies didn’t have to focus on reversing what he had done (which is essentially all Biden ran on and did). I don’t think this argument is that strong because the 2 candidates that lost actually had a fair bit of reform in their platforms with much more fleshed out plans and details than anything Trump was offering to do.