With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
There'll definitely be a campaign post-mortem -- this election is nearly as bad for them as 2012 for Republicans, and probably worse than Dukakis -- but the question of what is gonna be harder, because there's both a massive amount of blame to go around, and a massive variety of explanations and excuses, and there's a lot of the progressive sphere's decision-making apparatus that both deserves and desperately doesn't want to show up anywhere but the 'acknowledgements' page of that post-mortem.
Worst case, full Joy Reid: GOP votes were because of disinformation, minority voters are self-hating and/or disenfranchised, the working class in ungrateful for the excellent Biden-Harris economy, the margins were because of the last gasp of <hated other>, so to motivate for next election the Democratic Party needs to hit harder and reach deeper to the left. To the extent the Dems have to interact with Trump and co, the problem is resolved as not being aggressive enough. I don't think it's likely and it's definitely not a plausible explanation, but it's an attractive one because it means no Democratic party member is at fault.
Middle case, blame the campaign and economy. Harris genuinely isn't a skilled politician -- it's telling how many people from her own party outran her, as much as I hate that metric -- the last-minute swap left her little chance to build a real campaign or a positive identity separate from Biden, Walz was painful (even if you don't think he was picked over Shapiro), and broader secular trends about inflation and jobs and housing just drive too much voter sentiment. There's nothing here that's wrong, and it gives a really nice scapegoat who deserves it and isn't the unnamed professionals, but it still means little if any serious triangulation or consideration on politics.
Best case, there's a serious introspection at a policy level. The Biden-Harris maximalist immigration policies were so bad that Donald "They're Eating Dogs" Trump managed to seem more reasonable and no less untethered from reality. Trans stuff weren't a big vote-mover on their own, but the spectre of Loudon County wasn't nothing, either. You can call whatever happened with crime enforcement a policy thing, you can call it inviting police departments to have a wildcat strike, but whatever happened it pretty much sucked. Rent control, grocery store price controls, and stupidly-formed gimmick tax increases aren't real policies, they're what you do instead of having a real policy.
I'm hopeful on this, because there are genuinely a lot of spaces where there's a middle-ground position that's either factually better and/or much more politically popular than the hardline GOP one, and even if they can't get compromise they can at least make their opponents pay for refusing it. An actual immigration and refugee schema with real vetting and oversight is a lot more popular than a plain brick wall, a lot of the anti-trans and anti-gay positions only look remotely palatable when compared to a school hiding a twelve-year-old's transition from the kid's parents, there's a good few serious economic and foreign policies disasters coming down the pipe, there's a reason even Project 2025 didn't try to actually support the Second-Wave-Feminist take on porn beyond a throw-away paragraph, yada yada.
But I'm not optimistic; there's a ton of upper-echelon Dem political boosters who are very tied into the maximalist position of nearly every Dem position, and very strong institutional forces against serious introspection (and worse against cooperation-with-enemies, esp if the enemies aren't likely to want to play along). Indeed, even if federal Dems wanted to play along, there's a lot of state-level stuff that's already in motion and can't be unvoted, like New York's Prop 1 or various state sanctuary city rules.
Other worst case, the retrospective becomes They Weren't Trumpy Enough, and 2028 becomes a Populism of Presentation rather than policy considerations. Jim Carrey opens the DNC talking out of his ass sorta things. I don't think it's likely, but it's possible if the infrastructure of the party misread the situation.
Based on past performance, I would guess the worst case is the most likely one with a lot of confidence. However, past performance isn't always indicative of future performance, and I do have some hope that something like the best case will happen. Political success plays out almost entirely in votes, much like business success plays out almost entirely in profits, and if some tactic keeps losing you votes or profits, well, you can only keep following that tactic for so long before you run out of your accrued capital. 2024 may be the indication that this tactic has started to hit that breaking point; the sheer number and financial losses caused by the "woke" nature of a lot of media has added up to the point that some companies have begun to figure out that simply calling fans bigots isn't a viable corrective tactic. Perhaps the Democrats will also begin to figure this out about the electorate.
Depressingly, even taking into account all that, I'd still guess that the worst case is the most likely. It's so easy to see that any political party that actually cares about winning would choose the best case and avoid the worst case like the plague. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist, everyone knows that blaming people you don't like for your own failures is extremely seductive, even more seductive than blaming external circumstances, which is already very seductive, and everyone knows that blaming anyone other than yourself doesn't help much when it comes to improving oneself for the purpose of not repeating some failure from the past. Thus if people you like and respect are telling you that it's all the bad bigots' fault that you failed, you should be highly suspicious of the possibility that you're in an echo chamber that genuinely believes and tells you things that sound really nice to you, but which don't help you win in the future.
Which, I doubt the Republicans are any better on this, but the point of the Democratic party is that it's better than the alternatives. It's supposed to be the party of the educated and the empathetic, so much so that it actually knows the best interests of a significant portion of the population even better than they themselves do. If it can't even figure out its own best interests enough to know that any sort of blaming or placing of responsibility of failure outside of oneself is counterproductive for winning elections, then it calls into question why it's any better than the alternatives outside of simple sectarian allegiances.
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