• 4am@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Many believe Harris lost in 2024 because voters viewed her as too progressive, and that Ocasio-Cortez could face the same problem.

    Who’s this “many”? Kamala lost because of her Joe Biden neolib policies, her hard heel-turn to the right, and her “nothing will change, we are the most lethal military” stance on the Middle East.

    Instead of reassuring the masses who she thought were a shoe-in, she tried to appease the “I’ll never vote for a black woman” crowd, which alienated the former and would never have worked on the latter.

    It was either the greatest miscalculation ever, lead by Third Way focus groups, or someone tugged the leash. Either way, with the GOP rat fucking that was almost certainly happening to some degree.

    Pretty shitty of Newsweek to pretend that progressive policies are unpopular with a majority of Americans.

    • apftwb@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I remember during the Trump/Harris debate when Israel came up and they both took turns declaring they could suck off Israel harder than their opponent.

      I do not consider Harris a progressive.

    • dreamkeeper@literature.cafe
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      She literally campaigned with Liz Cheney. Too progressive? Lmao no one believes that shit except brainwashed magats.

      Crazy how every rag shifts between blaming gaza voters for her loss while simultaneously claiming Harris was “too progressive”.

    • notwhoyouthink@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      Essentially, she showed herself as who she truly is: an establishment Democrat more intent on maintaining the status quo instead of listening to the left and helping push the party further towards progressive policies and reshaping the party into something that represents the modern constituency.

      Yeah that.

    • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      In fairness to Newsweek, based on the sentence before this, I think they mean, “many in the party establishment,” not, “many people in general.”

      She brings significant energy to the primary among younger voters, but some in the Democratic Party establishment believe her progressive policies could alienate swing voters in the general election. Many believe Harris lost in 2024…

    • SabinStargem@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      Personally, I think it is because there was no Democratic Party primary. Biden stole the time that any potential candidate could have used to prove their mettle to voters.

      • Kacarott@aussie.zone
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        2 days ago

        Yeah, I would also actually lay more blame on Biden over Kamela, despite Kamela being a pretty terrible candidate

          • samus12345@sh.itjust.works
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            2 days ago

            However, the immediate effect of not voting for the lesser evil is either not voting, meaning the right wins, or voting for candidates with no chance of winning, taking votes away from the more left ones and allowing the right to win. “More right” is better than “all the way to the far right.”

            • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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              If you’re not going to change direction, the speed at which you’re moving right isn’t really important. You’re getting there anyways.

    • daannii@lemmy.world
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      I’m pretty sure it was the opposite. I still voted for her cause Trump was worse. But I felt then like I do now. She’s a Republican. Her policies are conservative and Republican.

        • Postimo@lemmy.zip
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          Socially liberal

          And just like most “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” people, she just thinks we should “follow the law” about trans people.

    • demizerone@lemmy.world
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      She came out look ling like Darth vader in one of the televised things she did and did the war hawk dance. Fuck off forever, you lost to Donald Fucking Trump after spending 1.5 billion.

    • MsPenguinette@lemmy.world
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      DNC has already shown they aren’t taking that as the lesson learnt. They won’t even release the 2024 autopsy cause they don’t like what it says

      • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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        It was obvious the party was cooked in 2018 - when, in response to regaining power after losing in a great upset to an insane game show host, they kept the exact same leadership.

    • rabber@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      You think Walmart Americans thought this deeply? She lost because she is annoying.

    • starik@lemmy.zip
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      There are many contradictory opinions on why Harris lost. These opinions usually boil down to “Her policy positions weren’t close enough to my policy positions, and that’s why she lost.”

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        And every other leftist on this site seems to believe that she would have won, had she just pandered to them more. Completely ignoring the fact that leftism essentially doesn’t exist in this country, and Lemmy isn’t an accurate representation of American voters.

            • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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              Having seen it with Gore, Kerry, Obama (post win), Clinton, and now Harris, it’s not a single mistake. The Dems would always prefer to lose to the right than win to the left.

              Biden had COVID, so it’s just outside the norm.

              • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                2 days ago

                Right, because there is no proper left in this country, and Democrats are centrists who want to continue the status quo

          • starik@lemmy.zip
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            2 days ago

            It’s hard to tell if allowing Cheney to campaign for her helped, hurt, or had very little impact at all. I suspect the latter, but we’ll never know because we can’t rerun the race.

              • starik@lemmy.zip
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                2 days ago

                In that sense, everything she did “didn’t work.” Centrists will site her progressive policies as the culprit and say those didn’t work, because she didn’t win. The fact is, neither of you know what the but-for cause of her loss was, but you want to believe it was the one that serves your position.

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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      No, she lost because she was black and a woman. People always underestimate just how racist and sexist the US is. Don’t fall into this trap.

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Women won senate races in three of the swing states she lost and a Hispanic man won a fourth. It’s hard to imagine an explanation more out of line with actual evidence.

      • teslekova@sh.itjust.works
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        The polls say otherwise. She was leading after her announcement, when she was still talking about healthcare reform, economic justice, taxing the rich, etc. For about three weeks.

        Then she talked to her business rep corpo brother, and shifted gear to espousing pro-corporate policy, defending the wealthy, calling leftists Bernie bros, etc, and fell behind.

        I agree that Palestine made little difference, btw. It cost her around half a million votes, but she lost by three times that. That’s looking at state by state, too.

        She lost because she turned herself into Biden 2, instead of what people wanted her to be, which was Obama (until he became President. He lied very well, then governed well enough that we forgave him for being friends with the corps).

      • SuiXi3D@fedia.io
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        A THIRD of people, only slightly smaller than the third that voted for Trump, voted for Harris based on the fact that she WASN’T TRUMP. Another third didn’t vote because they felt her stance on Israel wasn’t enough to offset that she wasn’t Trump. I don’t feel it had anything to do with her race or gender.

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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          Everyone looks at the third that didn’t vote as if it would magically change everything. But even if they did vote it wouldn’t change the outcome all that much. It’s like everyone just ignores the Law of Large Numbers.

      • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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        Yeah, that’s not true.

        But if it was, then you need to be asking why, in an election they claimed was existential, the Democratic Party anointed a black woman to run as their candidate against Trump.

        Because that’s the conclusion of the excuse you’re making - that the Democrats can only nominate men, or they’re choosing to lose.

        • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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          No no, that’s the trap of their narrative. “The Democrats are always just bending over backwards trying to promote minority candidates even when the deck is stacked against them, because they’re just such true believers in progressive ideals.”

          The reality is, by playing up the “progressiveness” of a candidate’s inherent characteristics, they can be quietly used as a vehicle for conservative policies that make their donors happy. This is a strategy that’s very played out around the world, even Pakistan once had their own version of Margaret Thatcher, and Japan just go theirs recently.

          From the perspective that progressive politics are completely off the table, picking a minority candidate was a tactically reasonable choice. A candidate’s race and gender are about the only “concessions” they could give to the left, while courting their donors.

          But the problem with that is that second-wave feminism, the kind that tends to see Thatcherites as a win, never caught on in the US like it did in the UK, and third-wave, which is more popular these days, accounts for that failure and focuses more on systemic issues and policy than individual leaders.

          But any strategy that might work to get progressives to bend the knee to neoliberalism will be tried again and again, and if it fails they’ll just chalk it up to sexism or whatever other bullshit.

        • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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          You don’t think they chose to to loose? No matter how you look at it seems they made a poor choice in retrospect. Anyway, I didn’t say a black woman couldn’t win or that a smart choice would be to pick the candidate based on race or gender. I do think that no poll will ever show the laten state of racism in the US though and that this sadly probably hurt Kamela and helped Trump. There’s a reason politicians in the US hardly ever even talk about a platform anymore. Most people vibe vote from a very uneducated position and didn’t know shit about her thoughts on Isreal.

          • dreamkeeper@literature.cafe
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            20 hours ago

            The sample size isn’t that large. I do think people are sexist (which just seems incredibly obvious) however both Clinton and Harris did run in bad environments for Democrats. Clinton followed up a two term Democrat which usually favors the opposition in the US, and Harris ran during high inflation which the Biden administration spent two years denying and gaslighting people about.

            I think Clinton also would’ve won if that asshole Comey hadn’t sabotaged her at the last minute.

            Most incumbents globally lost in 2024. People are too focused on the micro and not the macro in this thread. And Biden set her up to fail in so many ways.

            I’d like to see a woman run in a more favorable environment, which I think 2028 will be, because I think she could win even if she got fewer votes than a man would.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        No, she lost because she was black and a woman.

        “Kamala Harris ran the perfect campaign, she was just stabbed in the back!”

      • Zombie-Mantis@lemmy.world
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        It’s possible that it she was a white man, and absolutely nothing else was different, that she very well might have just barely eeked out a victory. That’s still a failure. It should have been a blowout. It was a failure of a campaign, racism and sexism against the candidate by the general public was a component, but the least relevant one.

        • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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          Exactly. People forget that Biden in 2020 under performed polls, and it’s pretty clear that absent COVID he would have lost.

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          Yeah. Her argument was that she was Joe Biden, but younger and more diverse. But Joe Biden was LOSING. Even before his debate performance. And he only barely won in 2020, which also should have been a blowout.

          It’s not the blackness or the femaleness, it’s doubling down on shitty uninspiring politics. An old white male Joe Biden was going to lose even worse than the middle aged black female Joe Biden.

        • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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          I agree, even if Biden was 20 years younger I think he would have won. If he was 20 years younger and female and Indian he would have lost just as Harris did.

          It was definitely policy that hindered them, but also the sexism and racism.

      • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
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        You couldn’t mention her name around here without a bandwagon of “She’s the literal genocide queen and a vote for her is a vote to murder Palestinian children.”

        • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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          I mean, she did support the genocide. Which murdered tens of thousands of Palestinian children. What is your point?

          • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
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            Thank you for illustrating my point. And I’m sure you feel like Trump is doing a fantastic job with human rights, at home and abroad (when he comes up for air while gargling Bibi’s balls, of course).

            • Matty Roses@lemmy.today
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              And I’m sure you feel like Trump is doing a fantastic job with human rights

              Why don’t you just go have a nice tea party with the little strawman you’ve created?

              The only thing Trump is doing a great job at is destroying the US. Whether that’s good or not, debatable.

              • berno@lemmy.world
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                “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience”

        • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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          Since you mentioned the name, I did notice quite obviously the disrespect everyone had toward Kamala Harris in the news and online comments simply due what they called her.

          Almost everywhere, it was quite common for people to refer to her as Kamala and not Harris.

          I suspect it was either due to her being a woman, or due to her being Indian (Kamala sounds a lot more foreign than Harris).

          It was always “Kamala vs Trump” never Harris vs Trump or Kamala vs Donald.

          • dreamkeeper@literature.cafe
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            20 hours ago

            I usually use Harris, but I’m not gonna lie, her first name is cool and it’s fun to say so sometimes I’d use it instead

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            Almost everywhere, it was quite common for people to refer to her as Kamala and not Harris.

            Because that’s the more unique and thus memorable part of her name. Just like “Bernie” is more memorable than “Sanders”.

            It wasn’t a sign of disrespect, sexism, or othering to call Bernie by his first name, and it wasn’t in the case of Kamala Harris either.

            Anyone who says otherwise is likely grasping at straws to explain away the fact that it was mostly her policy positions and allegiance to Biden, corporations, and Israel over the people she was SUPPOSED to represent that lost her the election rather than bigotry.

          • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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            That sounds exactly like something those Sandersbros would do, they’re basically indistinguishable from r/TheTrump.

            • dreamkeeper@literature.cafe
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              You mean like calling Sanders “Bernie”? Funny how you changed it to Sandersbros so you could defame people without immediately looking like an idiot

              • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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                Satire is well and truly dead.

                I guess r/TheDonald has been gone too long for people to get that reference.

                Point being, politicians are frequently referred to by their first names by supporters and detractors alike.

        • Enkrod@feddit.org
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          But “around here” is representative of what? 5% of voters? 16% of democratic voters max? Let’s not pretend Lemmy users represent a sizable number of democratic voters.