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 -
In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems. You can't expect to win every election. Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She wasn't a great candidate who ran a great campaign, but that's an unrealistic expectation. She won the states she was supposed to win and lost the battlegrounds by a few points each. Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies. The most annoying thing about these postmortems is that the inevitable conclusion is that the losing party needs to adopt more of the policies of the winning party. The second most annoying thing is that they act like one election is a real crisis point for the Democrats/Republicans and that the party is screwed long-term unless they make the necessary changes.
To the first point, I can offer an easy, lazy counterargument. Most of Biden's 2020 votes didn't go to Trump; Democratic turnout was down in general. The problem wasn't that they lost voters to Trump, but that they lost voters, period. Maybe part of the problem was that she didn't give her base enough reason to turn out? Maybe going full woke would have stirred the far lefties to action? Maybe the problem with black turnout could have been remedied by embracing BLM more? There was some discussion here yesterday about how blacks continued to vote 90% Democrat, despite claims that Trump was winning black men, and there was a post on Reddit today suggesting that the Democrats had a problem in that pandering to black voters turns off Latinos. The problem theories like this is that you don't want to alienate your base. Look at NASCAR. In the early 2000s it was gaining popularity at a breakneck pace. Bill France's though he could stoke this emerging market by introducing rule changes that would make it more palatable to the masses. The strategy massively backfired, as these changes didn't particularly appeal to the public, and most long-time fans hated them. The response was to dick with the rules even more. At this point, America's fastest growing sport has become a confusing mess that only total fanboys like my dad can follow. I'm not trying to suggest that making some changes toward moderation isn't a bad idea, but that there's an argument to be made to the contrary.
To the second point, there's no suggestion that the Democrats are screwed long-term because of one election. They ran an unpopular incumbent and were forced to change horses mid stream. Something could easily happen in the first half of the new administration that leads to a Democratic midterm blowout. Trump's stated economic policies put us at serious risk for inflation, and if that happens, people are going to want a change. Any number of things are possible. Following the 2006 midterms and 2008 Obama landslide, pundits were saying that without major changes, the Republican Party was doomed long-term. Two years later they did exactly nothing and got one of the biggest legislative reversals in history. But then they lost the presidency in 2012, and we were told that they were becoming the party of old white men and they needed to appeal more to minorities to have any chance. Then Trump came along and was massively more anti-immigration than any Republican in recent memory and won the presidency. Maybe if the Democrats had done things a little differently this time they would have won, but maybe not. If they keep losing elections by increasing margins I'll concede that it's time for a change, but we're nowhere near that point.
No she was not. She was a horrible candidate. She was universally unlikeable - which has been demonstrated many times before when she tried to get elected. She had no consistent message and vacillated between "All Biden did is also mine" and "I'm going to fix everything" - which looked completely fake. In fact, almost everything about her looked completely fake - from her demeanor to her positions to her personal history. She was unable to coherently speak on policy like politician, and she was unable to speak like a human being to other human beings. She did not attract any audience except one that would vote for an open can of surströmming if it had "D" written on it, and turned away many audiences who traditionally were Dem's strongholds. She pandered hard but it didn't work. She played "I was born in a middle class family" but nobody bought it. She made both workers and billionaires hate her. She got both Jews and Muslims endorsing the other candidate. She went all in on the Hitler thing when it should be obvious it doesn't work anymore. She was a crappy candidate who ran a weak campaign. The Party Machine is powerful, and it held what it could, and provided the money, the resources and the bodies, but turns out the Machine alone can not win, at least not yet. Our Democracy (TM) is not in a self-driving autonomous mode yet. It still needs a popular person at the helm to drive it. And Democrats chose very poorly.
I would argue they chose very poorly when they didn't oust Biden in 2023, but instead waited to the very last days and then were doomed to nominate Harris. If they did the smart thing, they could field a convincing candidate, and a convincing candidate plus the Party Machine could trounce Trump. I am so glad they did what they did instead. I am also so glad they do not seem to understand what happened to them. I wish them many happy returns.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
Money in elections is such a curse, sometimes.
But for a lot of Democrats, the money is in winning the elections, not losing them. And yet, they are doing everything to avoid understanding why their popularity declines and people turn against them. Even if they are paid by Soros or any other deep pocketed entity - I doubt this entity would pay them for long if it sees they can not produce more power and more wins, and most of the power in the US, luckily, is still gatewayed through voter consent, so pissing off voters is an uniquely bad strategy. Yet, the left insists on it again and again.
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I think you’re correct, and the reason we get a flood of prognostications is that the prognosticators are not arguing in good faith. They’re arguing because they want jobs. In the same way that (I contend) lawyers and bureaucrats make law and bureaucracy unnecessarily complicated in order to invent jobs for themselves assisting normies trying to navigate their regulations, so too do policy analysts try to make every event constitute a “We need a serious policy reevaluation” moment. They hope the “…therefore, hire me” is inferred by think-tank funders.
It’s hustlers all the way down.
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If democrats were forced to pick a 2028 candidate right now, would you advise them to pick her, or someone else?
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She's a good candidate in the same way your child's crappy Christmas pageant was a good show.
...bur seriously now. Do we have to be performatively agreeable, here of all places?
She lost to Donald Trump: arguably the weakest and most divisive candidate since the Civil War: and to a degree in which even Hillary Clinton did better. At least she didn't lose the popular vote!
The one thing political candidates need to do - absolutely and without a doubt - is to get elected. She didn't get elected. The prize for getting second place in politics isn't a silver medal: it's being publicly humiliated as a also-ran loser and run out of town tarred and feathered. If Kamala Harris is a good candidate, I hope that the Democrats get many, many more good candidates.
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This interview was not of a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She was handed a damn multiple choice question with pre-written softball answers, and instead of just picking A over B, she wrote in Potato. If she'd been facing an opponent whose net approval rating doesn't hover around -10 then she would have lost in a landslide.
Though I wouldn't let the Republicans off the hook here either. Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?
Now they do :) I mean, he won the popular vote, isn't it the ultimate approval rating?
Nah; the popular vote is a relative rating rather than absolute. E.g. if I'd been in a swing state I'd have voted for Harris, not because she is a non-awful candidate I approved of, but because she seemed like the less awful of the two. I suspect a lot of Trump voters feel the same way in reverse.
On the other hand, one reason for disapproving of a candidate you'd vote for is that you think their weaknesses will cost your team an election, and if that's the case it's possible that Trump's approval rating is shooting up right now as his more pessimistic voters realize he wasn't too much of a liability this time after all. I'm only seeing one poll post-election so far, and it's still got him at Unfavorable +1 among registered voters, but that's within the margin of error of 0 and it's a big jump from the same pollster's Unfavorable +8 a week or so earlier, so maybe he's actually up in the positive numbers now.
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It's an interesting question, especially insofar as any politicians have positive net approval ratings. Part of the problem is that a lot of well-liked politicians aren't that well-known (even if they're nationally known to people who pay any attention at all to politics). So, if by positive you mean that a majority of Americans have a favorable view of them, there is exactly one: Arnold Schwartzanegger, who has universal renown and a 59% approval rating, though a lot of this may have to do with his acting career. Number two is Trump, at 42%, also with universal recognition. If you adjust for recognition rate (and assume that those who have heard of the guy are representative of the country as a whole), Tim Scott is around 50% and Adam Kinzinger is at 65%. That's it for Republicans who have at least 50% recognition. While Scott may have a future in the party, Kinzinger's political career is pretty much over.
Just for comparison, I looked at Democrats, too. Jimmy Carter is the most popular at 61% with near-universal recognition. Others in the same boat are Obama at 59% and Harris at 54%. For those with less than Universal recognition we have Bernie Sanders (53% favorability), Liz Warren (52%), AOC (51%), Mayor Pete (54%), Cory Booker (53%), Tim Walz (55%), Gretchen Whitmer (53%), Hakeem Jeffries (56%), Mark Kelly (54%), Beto (51%), Amy Klobuchar (51%), Raphael Warnock (53%), Katie Porter (63%), Tammy Duckworth (55%), Jon Ossoff (58%), Jamie Raskin (55%), Claire McCaskill (55%), Jim Clyburn (51%), Sherrod Brown (52%), and Wes Moore (54%), plus a few others who are irrelevant. Some notable exceptions are Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman, who are all below 50%.
"Net approval" = %approve - %disapprove. "Literally who?" counts zero, as does neutrality.
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I've seen it repeatedly stated that Democrats didn't lose votes to Trump but just had lower turnout than 2020, but is there any evidence for this other than what you stated: that Trump got roughly the same number of votes and Democrats got fewer than 2020? Just as a possibility:
2020: Trump: 10 votes / Biden: 10 votes
2024: Trump: 10 votes / Harris: 8 votes
It is possible that the same 10 people voted for Trump and 2 of Biden's voters stayed home for Harris. But it is also possible that 2 of Trump's 2020 voters stayed home and 2 of Biden's voters switched to Trump. How do you distinguish between them?
That's a good point that those are not easy to distinguish. We'll have to wait for the statisticians to get their hands on all of the data (both the precinct-by-precinct results and exit polls) and see what they can come up with. Possibly there may be a way to try to collect some more data by polling, but asking people who they voted for in the past is notoriously unreliable.
The extreme case would be if there were zero votes in cities and all the votes came from rural areas, you could be pretty sure the effect of Democratic voters staying home was a stronger effect than people switching parties. Obviously the effects will be a lot smaller and less obvious than that, and the final vote totals won't even be completed for another couple weeks, so it will take time for people who know what they're looking for to have any kind of educated guess on the matter.
IIRC city turnout was up. I suppose the Democrats in the cities could have stayed home more while the Republicans in the cities turned out more, but it does look like swing voters to a reasonable extent.
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How so? What, specifically was good about her? What actions did she and her campaign managers take that another candidate would not have? What particular qualities does she possess that another candidate would not have, other than being the incumbent VP?
On Kamala the candidate: She was likeable, i.e. she didn't have the Hilary Clinton problem of coming off as a bitch. She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet. She had a good resume. The downsides were that she had a reputation for being indecisive and carried the burden of a stillborn presidential primary campaign in which she said some things she would end up regretting. These aren't huge, though. All candidates have weaknesses, and she had fewer than most. I'm counting her invisibility during most of her vice-presidential tenure as neutral, because visibility can be a double-edged sword. Had she taken up some initiatives that were important to her but largely uncontroversial, it would have helped, but I don't think she intended on running for president again, so I don't fault her for not doing this.
On the campaign: She had a good ground game. She campaigned relentlessly in places where she needed to, and she didn't take any votes for granted. She didn't lean into unpopular rhetoric. There were no huge gaffes. She iced Trump in the debate, making him look like an incoherent old man. Most of the campaign criticisms she got are understandable, but ultimately unconvincing. She was certainly light on policy, but so was Trump, and it was pretty clear that the election wasn't going to be about policy. There was no reason to throw out bold proposals that might go over like a lead balloon. She didn't do many interviews, but I wrote about this before — the risks of her doing them outweighed the benefits. It's unlikely that anything she says on 60 Minutes is going to move the needle very far in her direction. If she does a good job it's just another boring political interview. If she does a bad job then it's news. No reason to risk it. Rogan's even worse because it's going to go 3 hours, probably veer far off-topic, and will be released unedited. There are a lot of things like this that you can argue she should have done differently, but they all would have been risky and with no certain payoff. She could have done a better job explaining the positions she took in the past and why she repudiated them.
Wow do we watch two different movies. This is a woman who literally started her career through bedding a prominent powerful politician, and performed horribly - by the standards of her own party, which thoroughly criticized her for it when it were still allowed - once she was gifted a position. Who famously jailed parent of sick kids and proudly bragged about it. Who was explicitly and knowingly hired for her demographics and confirmed her ineptness by being unable to achieve literally anything for 4 years. Seriously, I haven't seen any proper answer to the question what she achieved that does not reduce either to demographics or to "she was around when a thing happened". Maybe the skeletons thing is true in a meaning that everybody knew how bad she was, but calling it "good resume" - my goodness. She is on record as the most extremist person in the Senate - and that's not for the lack of competition. And you personally may think about her as charming but it doesn't look like many people who vote agree with you on that...
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I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.
Surely this speaks to big problems that can't be papered over with "hey, she never took a dump on stage!".
I don't mean for her in particular but in general, though she was definitely bad at interviews. I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign. When one thinks of iconic campaign moments one thinks of iconic speeches, debate moments, commercials, etc. I am unaware of any iconic interview. Clinton had one in 1992, but that was during the primary, when exposure trumps everything else, especially for a dark horse like Clinton. In the general the only one I can think of was when Sarah Palin famously told Katie Couric that she reads all the newspapers and that she has foreign policy experience because Alaska is close to Russia. Not exactly what you're looking to get from an interview, though in fairness to the McCain campaign, Palin needed to do one because she was virtually unknown at the time she was tapped. There was also Jimmy Carter's famous Playboy interview, which is widely credited with tanking his support among Evangelicals. The rest of these, as voluminous as they are, seem to be forgotten. If you can think of an exception, I'd love to hear about it.
I would say interviews are like debates: Normally they don't really matter. But if one candidate appears to be unable to handle interviews (not even good interviews, just unable/unwilling to do them) or unable to handle a debate (winning is nice but not necessary, just participating) then that raises massive red flags.
It seems like a basic duty of the job. An applicant for a job who can send and receive emails isn't noteworthy. An applicant who can't though, isn't likely to be hired.
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They switched my view. Trump's flagrant interview literally changed my whole opinion of him, and I voted for him and it was my first vote for a republican candidate ever.
Joe Rogan has 18 million subscribers and he did an episode with 3 million views right before the election with Elon musk where he endorsed Trump.
Rogan has higher viewership then all of the mainstream media combined. I think the longform interviews were more watched than the debates.
To think this doesn't move the needle is a little crazy to me. Sure they didn't do crap back in the 1990s but we live in a different world. And Trump moved with the world rather than clinging to old strategies.
I didn't watch the interview, as I've been keeping my eyes away from election politics as much as I could for the past 4 years. I'm curious though, what was flagrant about it. And it sounds like you liked that it was flagrant? Why is that?
Also, reply to @Rov_Scam here.
That might have been true in the past, but there's been so much change recently. Podcasts are a whole new world, Joe Rogan is a whole new level of long-form interview viewership, and Trump is a candidate ripe for this new world. I wouldn't think it's out of the question that in this particular case, the willingness to do those interviews, in the sort of way Trump would do it, really makes him more relatable in a way that a large portion of the American populace wants to see in a candidate, and it hurt Kamala that she wouldn't put herself on the line in the same way.
This is the full interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ry1IjOft95c
What was great about it is that Trump is a New Yorker, and this is a podcast of New Yorkers. I of course knew intellectually that Trump was from New York. But it didn't sink in.
New Yorkers have an aggressive and bombastic style of talking and interacting that often involves lots of interruptions and talking over one another, active ribbing each other, and grandiose exaggerations (that everyone in the conversation knows are exaggerations). Trump is often given too much of a chance to talk. It leads to him ranting and going on weird tangents. This happened quite a bit early on in the Joe Rogan interview he did, and I could not watch more than ten minutes of it. Trump gets accused of being a bully for the ribbing he constantly does. And finally Trump is known as a liar for his constant grandiose claims.
In the flagrant interview Trump is interrupted, he is talked over, and there is ribbing going on constantly, and Trump loves it and thrives in it. Because he is a New Yorker and that is how they talk and interact. He even extends the interview for an extra 30 minutes or so. His ranting is far lessened. His weird tangents are there, but don't dominate the conversation. He is quick on his feet with jokes. There are very few awkward moments.
To be clear, I am not a New Yorker. And their style of interaction can grate on me. I can take it in small drunk doses in person, and can barely stand it at all when sober. For podcast listening it can be real fun, but is often a bit overwhelming. I don't regularly listen to flagrant, but they can have some absolutely laugh out loud banger episodes when I'm in the mood for it.
I just finally feel like I understand Trump, and that is a huge relief. I don't feel like I've ever really understood him in the past, and I don't feel like I've ever understood any other president or presidential candidate in my lifetime (except for Ron Paul).
I can't endorse this enough. I've been more positive than you on Trump for a long time, but even with that (as well as an outright hatred of the woke) I still bought some of the propaganda, and I never really had an interest in hearing his speeches.
Now he sits down with Rogan, they both sound reasonable despite the spin, and their personalities make sense and match to others I have encountered in my life. I don't think Trump meets the criteria for narcissism after that interview, and Vance is clearly one of us regardless of any flip-flopping.
Even with all the practice in avoiding the democratic propaganda machine I still fell for it.
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Man… talk about two screens.
She’s abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career. What about any of this is “likeable” to you?
Willie Brown.
She has a long and easily-accessible paper trail of taking very extreme positions, all of which she apparently just counted on journalists not to ask her about. She spent the summer of 2020 going on every program she could in order to raise funds for an organization that bailed out violent rioters and looters. This is not difficult to find! The second anyone confronted her about these things, she was, inexplicably, unprepared.
When asked on The View - the most friendly and favorable environment imaginable - whether there was anything she would do differently from (massively unpopular incumbent) Joe Biden, she said that “Nothing comes to mind.” How is this not a catastrophic gaffe? It was the easiest softball question in the world and she couldn’t handle it.
Yeah, this is an extremely bad problem. And of course the reality is that she didn’t actually repudiate them! She genuinely does believe that “equity” should be the central mission of government. She genuinely does want to create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. During her brief tenure in the Senate, she was the farthest-left senator. Why would I believe for a second that she has changed her mind about these things? Her administration’s record speaks for itself.
I am honestly shocked to hear you say that she was “a good candidate.” Leave aside any herculean effort expended by her campaign team to try and drag her across the finish line. She was a lead balloon. A massive albatross around her party’s neck.
If those are dealbreakers for you, boy, do I have some bad news for you!
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You may not like her personally, but some politicians (Hillary Clinton, Liz Warren, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, etc.) have articles written about whether they're likeable enough to be president. People weren't writing articles about Harris's likeability problems.
How was this exactly a skeleton. She dated the guy 30 years ago. He may have been technically married, but he'd been separated from his wife for a dozen years by that point; the relationship wasn't exactly a secret affair. Her "sleeping her way to the top" consisted of a couple appointments to state commissions nobody's heard of a decade before she ever ran for public office. In any event, it wasn't a big enough deal for the Trump campaign to make an issue of.
This is one of those things that could have gone either way. She could have distanced herself from her boss and repudiated his policies, saying that if she had been in charge she'd have done things differently. However, for her to suggest that Biden was a bad president would have been incredibly disloyal to the man who was more responsible than anyone for putting her in the position she's in. It would make the current administration look more dysfunctional than it already does. That's not a good look when you're running as an incumbent member of that administration. Furthermore, Biden isn't exactly Jimmy Carter. Inflation is down from where it was. The market is up. Unemployment is low. Illegal border crossings are comparable to Trump-era levels. To the outside observer it should look like the Biden administration faced significant challenges and met all of them. If there was any gaffe here, it was the failure to compare this to the Trump administration, which spent three years on easy mode and fell flat on its face as soon as it hit a major crisis (his response to which was largely to deny that a crisis even existed).
The argument here isn't that the Biden administration didn't make mistakes; it most certainly made several big ones. But while honesty may be the best policy when it comes to personal relationships, it's lethal in politics. If you want an example of an actual campaign gaffe, Mondale in 1984 said "Both of us are going to raise your taxes. The difference is that I'll admit it, he won't." Regan didn't end up raising taxes, but four years later Bush famously promised not to raise taxes, but raised them anyway. Bush won his election; Mondale didn't. I'm unaware of any politician in American history who has won reelection after owning the mistakes of his first term. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but if it did it's extraordinarily rare. I have seen plenty of politicians justify obvious mistakes and get rewarded for it.
They wrote articles before the switch about her terrible of a candidate she was including how vapid she was.
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First of all, they didn't have time. She has been a candidate for about 100 days, and all of those were campaign days where serious objective scrutiny is not welcome at all. Second, writing an article like "experts suspect the ocean is wet" is also not going to make big waves. Read what people spoke of her before she was elevated, and you'll see plenty critique of her likeability.
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How is it not? The fact that she got her political career started by the power of her vagina instantly disqualified her as a candidate in my mind. And yes, I'm someone who could have been convinced to vote for her if not for that. I'm sure I'm not alone. So, if her past behavior turned away potential voters, that qualifies as a skeleton in her closet to me.
What gives you the impression that Willie Brown was responsible for starting her political career? She dated him for about a year in 1994/1995, and she wasn't running for anything until 2003. She got a couple of apointments, but I don't think the Medical Assistance Commission and Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board are exactly known as incubators for top political talent. In any event, she hadn't served on either within five years of beginning her political career. It's also worth keeping in mind the actual dynamics of California politics at the time. By 2003 Willie Brown was viewed as corrupt, and any association with him was toxic. Her prior association with him was seen more as a liability than an asset. Take Willie Brown out of the equation, and there's nothing unusual about someone who's worked as a prosecutor for 13 years winning an election for District Attorney. There's nothing unusual about a District Attorney getting elected Attorney General.
I think the perception is more important than the reality here. The lefts wants to paper over all of her faults right now, but if she had won give it 5, 10, 20 years and their is going to be a big old asterisk on the first female president.
That Scarlett Letter would be tough to manage in the long term.
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In fairness to Rov_Scam, Kamala was the top of the ticket for just over 100 days and during that time, the race went from what looked like a sure loss under Biden to a very competitive race. I credit that entirely to the Democratic operation (including the media narrative shapers.) From my view, I would describe Harris as a poor candidate propped up by a very effective party structure.
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Trying to answer Kamala's VORC is just a question of how fucked you thought Democrats were the moment Biden dropped out.
If you think Trump was always going to win and is a generationally talented political leader, you might say she didn't do that bad. If you think Trump is a bad candidate, she must be an ever worse candidate.
By my own metrics, she failed to hold the popular vote. That's a major failure for the Dems from a marketing perspective, and represents a bad candidate underperforming expectations.
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