Dem Post Mortem

[laughing dog]

That is so true. Many of those reasons are sad or frightening. But if the Democrats want to regain support, they need to figure out how to reach out and deal with those people. It is bloody obvious that the USA is centrist right at this point, and the Democrats need to start dealing with that reality.

This whole campaign was based on trying to drag the party right. It didn't work. They didn't win over a single centrist voter. In fact, in nearly every district, there were more people who voted Democrat previously switching over to the Republicans in this election, than there was the other way around. What, exactly, do you think Harris should have done that she didn't already do, to bend over backward for Trump fans?

It didn’t work because Ms Harris and the Democrats were not credible to many.

BTW, the voters who plumped for Trump but are not Trump fans are the potential “swing” voters.

 

[Elixir]

Dems used to skew younger than Republicans, and showed every sign of it. Their strategies were always shorter term, and they always had their eye on the Grand Prize. So despite times of National political success, they slowly lost their handle on State and local races, as well as the judiciary.
Republicans, meanwhile, have built a strong foundation over decades. We shall see if it can withstand fascist attack and top-down takeover.

 

[Emily Lake]

That is so true. Many of those reasons are sad or frightening. But if the Democrats want to regain support, they need to figure out how to reach out and deal with those people. It is bloody obvious that the USA is centrist right at this point, and the Democrats need to start dealing with that reality.

This whole campaign was based on trying to drag the party right. It didn't work. They didn't win over a single centrist voter. In fact, in nearly every district, there were more people who voted Democrat previously switching over to the Republicans in this election, than there was the other way around. What, exactly, do you think Harris should have done that she didn't already do, to bend over backward for Trump fans?

I don't think there's anything Harris could have done that would have made much difference. Harris herself simply wasn't appealing. She wasn't appealing in her prior runs at being selected as the Dem nominee, and nothing at all changed. And contrary to the various insistent parties, I don't think it had anything to do with her being female. There were several other female candidates who performed better than Harris in the run-up to the 2020 election.

The only thing I think would have been effective is for Biden to have tapped out prior to the Dem primaries, and let someone else be selected by the people.

 

[ZiprHead]

If they voted for Trump they're morons.

Who is worse? Me for using crude language for ignorant people who voted for Trump? Or Trump et al using simple language to get the ignorati vote then fleecing them like sheep?

"Well done! So when Melkur has taken control of the Source, you'll have the consolation of knowing your personal honour is intact." - The Keeper of Traken

I'm glad you think I have so much influence over others. Your thoughts will keep me warm at night.

But there are millions of people who think just like you, and you collectively have quite a bit of influence over others. If the millions of you all collectively convince others you're collectively the last people on earth they'd want ruling over them, they will vote against the person you collectively tell them they should vote for. You are all helping people like Trump get elected collectively, but if we want to prevent that sort of thing from happening again we need to persuade you all to stop helping make it happen, one at a time.

(But, then again, this is the Dem Post Mortem thread, and if there's anything the Dems are masters at it's avoiding learning anything from defeats.)

WTF is wrong with you??? You act as if Trump was just another Republican candidate for president and we're just being mean.

He's a fucking traitor, he lead a fucking rebellion against the country, he's a fascist dictator wannabe, he tried to steal national secrets, and he's the biggest criminal who's ever run for office.

It's the people that support him who have something wrong with them.

 

[Derec]

he's the biggest criminal who's ever run for office.

Technically, Eugene Debbs ran for President from a federal prison cell.

 

[Derec]

I don't think there's anything Harris could have done that would have made much difference. Harris herself simply wasn't appealing.

Indeed. I think the damage was done when she was one of the most left-wing Senators and also when she ran in the same outside left lane with Bernie and Warren. You can't go from calling for banning fracking and offshore drilling in 2019 to ...

... in 2024. She could get away with it in 2020 because she was the running mate, supporting the nominee's agenda. But when she herself got the nod for presidency, her past positions hounded her.
Which is why she preferred to run on vibes and memes such as "coconut tree" and "brat summer" and avoided substantive interviews until late in the already truncated campaign timeline. Even her running mate selection of Tim "they are weird, man" Walz fit that campaign strategy.

And contrary to the various insistent parties, I don't think it had anything to do with her being female.

I don't think so either. Twice Democrats nominated women, and twice they failed. Is it because they were women? We can't conclude that with that sample size.
I think it's other factors. Both of these candidates were highly flawed. Both were unpopular. With Harris we did not even have a primary, and with Hillary DNC was so much in her corner most credible candidates did not want to challenge her. 2016 could have been Biden's year. I think he would have beat Trump and would be leaving office now after two terms.

The only thing I think would have been effective is for Biden to have tapped out prior to the Dem primaries, and let someone else be selected by the people.

A 1000x this! Peacing out in Summer 2023 would have allowed for a proper primary season. Even if Harris had prevailed in that primary, she would have been a stronger candidate for it.

 

[ZiprHead]

he's the biggest criminal who's ever run for office.

Technically, Eugene Debbs ran for President from a federal prison cell.

You're really comparing Debs crimes to Trump???

 

[southernhybrid]

That is so true. Many of those reasons are sad or frightening. But if the Democrats want to regain support, they need to figure out how to reach out and deal with those people. It is bloody obvious that the USA is centrist right at this point, and the Democrats need to start dealing with that reality.

This whole campaign was based on trying to drag the party right. It didn't work. They didn't win over a single centrist voter. In fact, in nearly every district, there were more people who voted Democrat previously switching over to the Republicans in this election, than there was the other way around. What, exactly, do you think Harris should have done that she didn't already do, to bend over backward for Trump fans?

I don't think there's anything Harris could have done that would have made much difference. Harris herself simply wasn't appealing. She wasn't appealing in her prior runs at being selected as the Dem nominee, and nothing at all changed. And contrary to the various insistent parties, I don't think it had anything to do with her being female. There were several other female candidates who performed better than Harris in the run-up to the 2020 election.

The only thing I think would have been effective is for Biden to have tapped out prior to the Dem primaries, and let someone else be selected by the people.

I have to respectfully disagree because I personally know a lot of people, both men and women who were very enthusiastic about Harris, although most of them were women, both young and old. I thought she was very upbeat and did a good job of pointing out the dangers of a 2nd term for Trump. I also have heard many people say they wouldn't support a female for president. Did you watch any of the propaganda about how voting for a woman would make you lose your manhood that was put out by the MAGA campaign?

She is very experienced and did her best to reach out to both sides, imo, but of course, we all perceive things and people differently. The thing that amazed me was how many Democrats simply didn't bother to vote. I've always voted even when I lacked enthusiasm for the person I voted for because I always felt the other option was much worse. Voter apathy is simply something I will never understand. Voting is the one tiny bit of power that we have, and there has never been a perfect candidate. I also know there was a lot of disinformation put out about Harris by Trump. Musk, who basically bought him the election did a good job of misrepresenting her as well.

I wanted a female president who was willing to compromise and who would do her best to treat all Americans, regardless of who they voted for, as her constituents. I felt that Harris would be good in that role. And, even if I didn't feel that way about her capabilities, I would have still voted for her.

I'll tell you what's weird. There are still Trump signs up in parts of my neighborhood, despite the fact that the election has been over for over 2 months. I've never seen anything like that in my lifetime. If that's not a sign of a cult, I don't know what else it could be called.

In the past, just about everyone removed their signs on the day after the election. A friend of mine told me she saw two in an exurban area this weekend. It's hard to understand how people got so sucked up into this Trump mania, when he is a man who over 20 women have claimed, he sexually assaulted them, who has failed in just about every business he ever started, who has a long history of racist behavior dating back to his younger. years, who is a pathological liar, an obvious narcissist, and who apparently has no moral compass. He wants to punish those who criticize him and pardon those who committed violent act on 01'06/2021. I guess it's just hard to understand how someone like him, gets people to "drink the Kool-Aide". I can't imagine a worse candidate and yet a lot of people are criticizing Harris because they don't find her charismatic or appealing enough to get their vote. It stuns me that my country has elected Trump, not just once, but twice.

 

[crazyfingers]

In the past, just about everyone removed their signs on the day after the election. A friend of mine told me she saw two in an exurban area this weekend. It's hard to understand how people got so sucked up into this Trump mania, when he is a man who over 20 women have claimed, he sexually assaulted them, who has failed in just about every business he ever started, who has a long history of racist behavior dating back to his younger. years, who is a pathological liar, an obvious narcissist, and who apparently has no moral compass. He wants to punish those who criticize him and pardon those who committed violent act on 01'06/2021. I guess it's just hard to understand how someone like him, gets people to "drink the Kool-Aide". I can't imagine a worse candidate and yet a lot of people are criticizing Harris because they don't find her charismatic or appealing enough to get their vote. It stuns me that my country has elected Trump, not just once, but twice.

And that is why I still contend that anyone who voted for Trump has to be either evil, stupidly ignorant or crazy.

 

[southernhybrid]

In the past, just about everyone removed their signs on the day after the election. A friend of mine told me she saw two in an exurban area this weekend. It's hard to understand how people got so sucked up into this Trump mania, when he is a man who over 20 women have claimed, he sexually assaulted them, who has failed in just about every business he ever started, who has a long history of racist behavior dating back to his younger. years, who is a pathological liar, an obvious narcissist, and who apparently has no moral compass. He wants to punish those who criticize him and pardon those who committed violent act on 01'06/2021. I guess it's just hard to understand how someone like him, gets people to "drink the Kool-Aide". I can't imagine a worse candidate and yet a lot of people are criticizing Harris because they don't find her charismatic or appealing enough to get their vote. It stuns me that my country has elected Trump, not just once, but twice.

And that is why I still contend that anyone who voted for Trump has to be either evil, stupidly ignorant or crazy.

Does greedy count as evil? Some of the wealthy ones supported him for the tax breaks, despite not needing all that extra money. I'm going with ignorant for the rest of them as there are so many people who only watch or read the nutty far right garbage. I guess we could call them low information voters.

 

[crazyfingers]

Does greedy count as evil? Some of the wealthy ones supported him for the tax breaks, despite not needing all that extra money. I'm going with ignorant for the rest of them as there are so many people who only watch or read the nutty far right garbage. I guess we could call them low information voters.

Ya, in my opinion greed gets lumped in with evil when the greed clearly will come at the expense of others, such as super rich wanting more tax cuts which will only reduce assistance to others who need it or in the cases of bribery, theft, fraud and grifting, etc..

"Low information voters" definitely are the stupidly ignorant.

 

[Shadowy Man]

It stuns me that my country has elected Trump, not just once, but twice.

and if he and his voters are to be believed, three times!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

One reason why countries like Ireland, Macau, Bermuda ... and the USA -- do so well in GDP is financial industries: "economic" activity which offers little help for ordinary "people." (I quote "people" since I refer to H. sapiens while the term includes corporations in post-rational American diction.)

Agreed, you can't make a reasonable comparison for the haven countries. Look at the others.

Did you notice I included USA on the list of what YOU call "havens"? Should we exclude it too?

But I didn't use the term "havens." What I wrote is in Red above.

GDP measures the "production of goods and services." If a drug company raises its prices to make an extra million dollars to pay its CEO's salary, that million is included in GDP! Break windows and then repair them? The cost of repair is included in GDP; the breakage is NOT subtracted. GDP blipped upward when employment surged to clean up from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

I was saying you can't compare the tax haven countries because they get "production" that doesn't really happen. It's not the same thing as financial industries.

BUT now you miss MY point. Much financialization (financial industry) does NOT contribute to human happiness nor to "true" production. Instead we see Wall St. gamblers sliding pieces of paper around, often ripping off the little guys.

Every country has financial industries. I'm saying the haven countries aren't a reasonable comparison because they have a lot of financial "activity" that really happened elsewhere.

GDP has many flaws. Home-making and home schooling aren't included. Sales of illegal recreational drugs aren't included, but legal drugs are, however flawed. The judge who sent kids to private prisons increased GDP.

I don't think there is a perfect yardstick. GDP is as close as we have.

Wells Fargo increased GDP with its fraudulent service charges. GDP includes the million-dollar bonus paid to the Merrill Lynch "analyst" who made money for his firm with a pump-and-dump scheme and never went to prison.

Income for millionaires and billionaires is factored in to "average household income." Do you REALLY think that's a good metric to learn how STRUGGLING American households are doing?

It's not distorting the numbers like you think. I posted a thread about this recently that clearly showed that boats are floating in all income brackets, not merely at the top. But that doesn't fit the narrative and it got basically ignored.

:-( Boats are NOT floating equally. You make this claim repeatedly. I refute it whenever I notice.

Goalposts!!!

I did not say boats are floating evenly, merely that they are floating. The average inflation-adjusted wage has risen for all brackets.

When adjusted for inflation the current federal minimum wage is significantly BELOW what it was in 1968. This despite big gains in (inflation-adjusted) per capita GDP.

And last I looked it was 1% of the workforce that worked for minimum wage. (Note that the data says 3%--but the category is "at or below". Below means tipped and in general means the final result is above minimum wage.)

CEO compensation increased 1,085% from 1978 to 2023, while a typical worker's compensation increased 24%.
In 1965, CEOs were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker, but in 2023 they were paid 290 times as much.

"In 1957, Fortune magazine named J. Paul Getty the wealthiest living American while the 1966 Guinness Book of Records declared him to be the world's wealthiest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion (approximately $8.6 billion in 2023)". Elon Musk has $421 Billion, about 50 times Getty's 1966 wealth even adjusted for inflation. Do you think productivity or typical wage increased 50-fold (in "real dollars") during those 58 years?

Capische? No, you don't. You'll wait two months and distort the meaning of some graph to make the same incorrect claim

Strawman. Once again, you're rebutting a claim I did not make.

Pretty much everyone is doing better, it's just some are doing more better than others. I walk, you run, does that mean I didn't move forward?

The problem with happiness is that it inherently is against expectations, not against some accurate yardstick.

"Problem with happiness"?? I think you meant "Difficulty in measuring happiness." That's true enough. But GDP is also severely flawed.

Of course the inflated GDP which YOU seem to prefer argues AGAINST your "all boats floating" claim, as I showed above.

It should be obvious from the context that I was using "happiness" as the label of a metric.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't understand what point you think you're making here.

Ask an epidemiologist. I'm not here to keep spoon feeding you, when you just blow chunks all over the room.
Take away the vaccine for smallpox and eventually you'll have

Show

smallpox

.

Why? While it's possible for somebody with malicious intent to bring it back that's not going to happen naturally. Even if somebody nuked Atlanta the chance of it actually being able to infect anyone would be very low.

A better comparison would be polio or measles. Those would return.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But one of the the more well known, universally applicable benefit that applies to many small business owners is the pass-through business deduction. It has benefited me, and no doubt the other small business owners that I know and work with:

Pass-Through Business Deduction (Sec. 199A Deduction)

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) created a deduction for households with income from sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S corporations, which allows taxpayers to exclude up to 20 percent of their pass-through business income from federal income tax. For upper-income taxpayers, the deduction is subject to several limits.

Yes, a tax deduction for nothing other than having a business. I can see why righties would love it.

Love it? No, this was "supposed to" be for the fat cats, it specifically excluded all of us self-employed skilled workers. But they got caught and it ended up being for pretty much anyone with a schedule C.

But speaking of getting caught: the Republicans didn't get caught in time on gutting the IRS:

Republicans Quietly Axed IRS Funding Amid Government Shutdown Chaos

As Congress fought over the spending bill, Republicans snuck in a passage to gut funding for the IRS. And Democrats didn’t catch it.

newrepublic.com

 

[TSwizzle]

It stuns me that my country has elected Trump, not just once, but twice.

lol, are you for real?

If you still can’t comprehend why Trump won this election then you are the one that is in the koolaid drinking cult.

 

[Bomb#20]

I'm glad you think I have so much influence over others. Your thoughts will keep me warm at night.

But there are millions of people who think just like you, and you collectively have quite a bit of influence over others. If the millions of you all collectively convince others you're collectively the last people on earth they'd want ruling over them, they will vote against the person you collectively tell them they should vote for. You are all helping people like Trump get elected collectively, but if we want to prevent that sort of thing from happening again we need to persuade you all to stop helping make it happen, one at a time.

(But, then again, this is the Dem Post Mortem thread, and if there's anything the Dems are masters at it's avoiding learning anything from defeats.)

WTF is wrong with you???

You're asking exactly the right question, assuming you want to keep losing.

You act as if Trump was just another Republican candidate for president and we're just being mean.

He's ...a fascist dictator wannabe, he tried to steal national secrets, and he's the biggest criminal who's ever run for office.

It's the people that support him who have something wrong with them.

What are you yelling at me for? I didn't vote for him.

 

[Swammerdami]

It stuns me that my country has elected Trump, not just once, but twice.

lol, are you for real?

If you still can’t comprehend why Trump won this election then you are the one that is in the koolaid drinking cult.

The million-dollar pundits are babbling in confusion and contradiction about WHY the electorate's collective brain turned to mush. Harris was too far left? Harris was too far right? Harris had too few penises? The Ds were too woke? Not woke enough? Nobody seems to be sure.

Put a felon in charge of the White House? Fascism? -- Good or bad? Biden's economy was booming but Trump's magic bean-stalk fantasy was sweeter? Chaos would be fun to watch? Facebook and even ChatGPT didn't know what to "think." Did the morons out-stampede the imbeciles? Or vice versa? Some say that a 49-47 split and a 47-49 are very close arithmetically: -- The election depended on the whims of just 2% of Americans, the 2% most apathetic, confused, and perhaps mentally ill. What happened? Why? Why? Why?

But TSwizzle knows! Help us comprehend why Trump won this election, dear Guru Swizz. (Complete sentences please, if you can.)

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

It stuns me that my country has elected Trump, not just once, but twice.

lol, are you for real?

If you still can’t comprehend why Trump won this election then you are the one that is in the koolaid drinking cult.

It is easy to comprehend why Trump won. Because Americans are stupid (not all of them, but enough to produce a dumb outcome that astounded the world). But the real question is why are those Americans so stupid? Can you explain why you voted for Trump TSwizzle (without the use of propagandistic words)?

 

[southernhybrid]

It stuns me that my country has elected Trump, not just once, but twice.

lol, are you for real?

If you still can’t comprehend why Trump won this election then you are the one that is in the koolaid drinking cult.

Sure. I'm the one who drank the Kool-Aide, because I don't understand why a convicted felon who has assaulted many women, who has a very racist past, who lies whenever his lips are moving, who is an obvious narcissist, who didn't accomplish much, other than giving tax breaks, primarily to the wealthy during his first term, who failed at many attempts to start businesses, who had a phony college, who's memory is so impaired that he sometimes forgot who is was running against, who wants to put those who criticized him on trial when no crimes were committed, who calls Jan 6, 2021, when a multitude of police officers were attacked and Pence and Pelosi were threatened with death from the crowd, a "day of love", who supports the concept of Christian Nationalism, who thinks he can change things with a wave of his hand, won a second term! Seriously! You think the orange man is worthy of a second term? Wow! Just wow! Don't forget to give us the eye rolling emoji so we won't be disappointed.