The left is having a foaming-at-the-mouth, screaming meltdown over this but it was extremely clear in the actual data that Dems were energized about Kamala
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This is fucking stupid. Put up the election results, that tells you how much reach the democrats have and then shut the fuck up forever, you chart loving shitweasel.
The base is always going to be "enthusiastic". That is kind of irrelevant. The dem leaning groups are what get someone elected or, as we saw in every swing state, don't show up for you when you ran on a objectively bad platform.
You and Will are using the fallacy of equivocation to shift meanings and equivocate between different groups and types of people.
People that call themselves democrats are already a group that has been filtered. It’s a group that has been shrinking for years as people leave the Democratic Party.
I don't know how you got there. If she would have leaned into populist messaging and ran on at least some progressive policies that poll high across the entire political spectrum, like minimum wage, healthcare, abortion rights, and so on. Let Waltz speak. They would have won, full stop.
How does that square with so many Dem votes failing to turn out in safe blue states? My prior would've been to assume that turnout in safe blue states would've increased in safer areas as partisan enthusiasm increased.
It’s not necessarily “dem” votes but rather previous Biden votes. Probably likely to be moderates who were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party and high cost of living in these states either not turning out or voting trump. Trump also gained votes too
Why bother voting in a safe state is a problem. Votes only "count" in a few swing states with the electoral college. Some people don't show up just for local and state races
Agree when it comes to Leftists who are anti-electoral and whose primary focus is decreasing support for Dems. There are a whole lot of Leftists/Progressives who are not this way. We don’t really have the language for it.
This.... makes no sense when you look at the actual votes, DEMS voted for Trump (and then for Dems down ticket) if this was energized, what the hell happened on the actual day?
If Dems didn't vote for Trump, but the votes SHOW it, then why aren't they freaking out about it?
Call us racists and misogynists all you want, but some of us wanted an option that wasn't comically evil. In 2020, I ranked Biden #2 on my ballot and my partner ranked him #1. This year, I ranked Kamala #2 and she ranked her #4.
I said she gained with urban whites a lot of suburban whites (mostly men) who voted for Biden didn’t vote, and lots of rural whites (mostly men) were more mobilized for Trump this time.
All 3 trends are best explained by underlying racism and misogyny.
We're rural whites. You just can't deal with the fact that the candidate and the admin she refused to distance herself from were both ass, and would prefer to throw up your hands and pretend she was just unfairly hated.
My brother, she campaigned with the Cheneys, pledged to continue funding Israel's unending slaughter, co-signed the fascist framing of immigrants as dangerous super-criminals, and didn't say jack about protecting trans people. People are desperate, and she had nothing to offer
If you voted for Trump you voted for hate and I will not mince words on this. I will not pretend empathy and kindness as you vote for a man who ran on hatred of trans people & immigrants.
Biden outperformed all global rivals in dealing with post pandemic econ conditions & advanced pro worker policy
lol, no. We ranked 4 candidates on our ballots, and Trump didn't make the cut. I'd sooner light my hair on fire.
Just as another anecdote, my best friend is another rural white male. He voted for Biden in 2020 and planned to vote for Kamala this year, but was so demotivated that he never sent it in
No? I think the left is standing on the easy argument that in a race against a Republican, running as another Republican is stupid and turned out exactly as anyone with a brain thought it would
But it's not the base we need to win. It's that dude in the middle of PA and his wife we have to win. The problem is that what energizes the base, sometimes turns off the voters you need to win. I say, don't pick the person in the primary you want, pick the person that dude and his wife wants.
53% of white women voted for a foul-mouthed adjudicated rapist who brags about grabbing unwilling women by their privates.
Again.
After bragging he took away their right to control their reproductive rights.
There is something very wrong with my fellow white people.
Saying you’re enthusiastic about voting is quite a bit different than actually voting. Turnout bears this out. It was higher in 2020 (64% vs 66%). Clearly more people consistently say they’re enthusiastic than actually vote.
Need turnout broken down by party.
It was a devastating loss and dems are still hurting and lashing out over it. IMO, that’s a natural part of the healing process; my opinion currently is that the narrative around inflation conservatives pushed was ultimately what did it. With hindsight, I feel we would have lost with any candidate.
This just makes me skeptical of polls tbh, because Harris lost every swing state and saw declining support among almost every demographic and almost every county
How does that square with this info on enthusiasm?
Considering that the most staggering turnout losses occurred specifically in the most Democratic areas, it’s weird how much stock you put in this single poll at the expense of a coherent argument
But the leftist reaction is important in one way: one difference between 2008 and now is that there’s a large contingent of poisonous social media nihilists who consider themselves the “left” but whose primary function is the reputational destruction of any Democrat, and I think it matters
The Democrats need to invest serious dollars into shaping the informational environment by going scorched earth against Jıll Steın, Cornel West, Brıahna Joy Gray, and the other DSA ratf*ckers.
if such a huge part of the base wants those policies that you lost me cuz they didn't vote for you, maybe instead of demonizing them you should cater to them the way you cater to Republicans who would slit your throat if they thought they could get away with it
Like, I know you hate us, but we're going to make you lose every election from now until the end of time if you don't start taking our policy positions seriously.
Show us that you are fighting for us and we'll vote for you.
Cornel West was actually at the Columbia protest in solidarity with anti-genocide protesters. No other presidential candidate did anything close to that. Most Dems condemned them as antisemitic.
Democrats lost 10 million votes between 2020 and 2024 and its not because of some fringe candidates and until the party figured out that you have to offer people stuff I guess we’ll keep getting moron ideas like “run attack ads against Cornell West”
buddy, we just want things like abortion rights. the democrats absolutely refuse to do that shit. voters notice. trump's numbers didn't change, harris just plain didn't get the people biden did.
so: who of these were in the campaign? who of them had the platform to ratfuck anyone?
Lol like they don't already. And no need with DSA, they're just another Dem Party front to try to bring the actual left back into the pro-genocide party
The Uncommitted Movement comes to mind. And all the Palestinian "allies" who outright harassed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a virulently anti-Netanyahu Democrat.
The Democratic Party is barely left-of-centre so not sure how it gets positioned as such and impacted by what leftist activists do or say. By Canadian standards they’re basically Progressive Conservatives (RIP PCs).
The term "the left" has been so bastardized and cannibalized that it has lost all meaning. It's a bunch of separate factions without a cohesive message.
the online buzz around any Democratic candidate is now virtually assured to be heavily negative, because in addition to endless right-wing attacks, the Democrat is sure to face bottomless contempt and anger from the so-called left
Watching this back again I truly think this is such an important video. It really shows the terrible situation the left got itself into. This was in 2020 before Gaza and all the same things apply to Harris-Trump as applied to Biden-Trump…
… If anything it’s worse now because Trump it’s going to tear apart the painstakingly achieved climate progress that was made and we’re already crossing 1.5 degrees.
It's almost like you have to appeal to people outside the party to try and win votes. She had no problem working with Liz Cheney, why not attempt to appeal to the left?
The democrats are too scared of appearing to endorse any position that's perceived as being left of Bill Clinton, and that's killing them. Only way we're getting out of it without total system collapse is either for the Dems to move (or at least reach out towards) the left...
Or for us to rewrite the constitution/restructure our government in a way that allows for smaller parties to gain a foothold. I know Sweden's parliament basically gives you seats based on the percentage of the popular vote your party gains, which might be an improvement>
That system also is the reason why the ideological descendants of swedish nazis are able to have a say in parliament, but the republicans are also surging further towards the right by the day
Fighting university administrators to bring peace to Palestine, fucking up art museums for climate change, there is literally no pointless fight the left will not wage in service of its self-esteem
Where are the protests outside Trump Tower and Mar-A-Lago? Sorry that's someone else's department
Those happened too. Anti-Palestinian genocide protestors were being violently suppressed in a democratic presidency and democratic local government. Arresting and brutalizing the most vocal and energized of your potential voter base is bad for voter turnout
Anyway this faction is allowed to persist because no one criticizes it directly. It’s almost laughably inconceivable that any halfway respected progressive opinion-setter would ever say a negative word about the left or any segment thereof, it’s social suicide. But the group is toxic and useless
What have you accomplished Mr centrist progressive? A losing election you blew a 100k on? How fucking useful are you carrying water for Joe Biden and the gang
This cohort of leftists is notable for being very vocal and centered in much of our political media despite not having a single accomplishment under their belt in 15 years.
It’s pretty clear they proffered Trump over Harris. Not that I’m surprised. After all, it’s the same type of people who would’ve argued “After Hitler, our turn”
my man 7 million people who voted for Biden didnt show dems just lost them as they went right. trump voters were older whiter and richer than 2020. nothing really changed other than dems abandoning the left (again) and getting zero GOP votes in return (again).
it's crazy that their arguments need us to ignore data. blind voters preferring her policies over trump's in a landslide?! libural propoganda! america is actually dying to vote for gaza and more medicare we promise
So I personally agree with this take, I don't know if it's determinative of results and I don't think there's a bottom up way to deal it. I'm increasingly partial to @mattyglesias.bsky.social 's and probably others take that it'll take a top down effort to pull it off.
You’ll get people sort of obliquely complaining about Briahna Joy Gray or whatever, but the idea that there could be a deep cultural rot within “the left” writ large, or that the entire contingent is ultimately little more than a dark mirror of MAGA’s nihilistic online populism, is totally verboten
I'd note there are disparate ideologies grouped together as left, so that it's a fairly useless term. But there is definitely, dating back at least to the Nader campaign and hate of Gore that seemed to blind people to Bush, a contingent so focused on Democrats' sins they hardly see Republicans.
Just a reminder to everyone that writing like this is bigoted, unless you believe that "it's impossible to be bigoted against a political group," which is a WEIRD THING TO BELIEVE.
Will Stancil is a bigot and a lot of you slurp it up because you're also bigots, and he gets you off.
This is a good description of these people but there's no social code against attacking them. Everyone can and should do it more. They transparently seek only societal destruction.
"Everything is bad," "the crumbles," "our world is falling apart," and "the collapse," is pretty regular doomerism on the left. What Biden did for the working class just gets drowned out in leftist echo chambers.
I think you're losing sight of the fact that many of those who were so energized by the Harris campaign would readily identify as leftists. In taking online behavior as the signal of left-wing opinion, you're identifying noise as signal, which is the nature of the online beast.
as you attempt to exclude the left from the principle of the party that represents it, you would easily be understood as such by anyone right-of-center for your social views and fiscal opinions. the biggest endeavor of this online phenomenon is its capacity to turn the left into self-hatred.
And here is the reason why so many people are hesitant to fight against leftist clout farmers. The moment you do you get people being like "why do you want to push the left away from the party?"
The people excited about Harris likely aren't the same as these people or those who listen to them
Dunking on democrats from the left is exactly the same "holier than thou" attitude that MAGAs have. I called this shit out 8 years ago because I saw it even then. Hell, they were the first ones to cry "stolen election" in 2016, not Trump.
Lmao it persists because the US is a plutocracy and "the left" and working class have no real home in terms of a party. The R and D parties are gatekeepers meant to keep the hordes at bay. You're totally fine with that, which means I can't really take this shit seriously.
I would qualify this with any Democrat who isn't socialist (at least in aesthetics) enough, but watching the online left turn on AOC to a significant extent makes me doubt that. Popularity is its own critique, like a smug indie band fan in 1997. More of a sliding scale, I suppose.
I think the optimistic view on this is that these kind of cultural bubbles can burst as quickly as they arise. I know part of the problem here is what gets algorithmically rewarded on social media, but nothing is permanent.
So energized she was able to get almost 7,000,000 fewer votes than Biden, while Trump only gained 2,000,000 compared to 2020. If Dems were actually energized about Kamala she would have won.
Not trying to be contrarian—but how do you reconcile this data with reporting from the NYT that Harris lost significant percentages of the vote in Dem counties relative to 2020 while Trump gained there? Not sure of the methodology differences, but these results seem to contradict your chart
I think it’s probably to do with a 3 month campaign that had basically zero presence in non-swing states. The states where she did campaign heavily she had much better margins.
This is a good question and I hope somebody smarter than me addresses it. Two possibilities are that voter suppression worked or that Harris energized the base but didn't break through to others.
This says trump’s campaign itself was largely irrelevant and coasted on a national environment unhappy with their burrito taxis costing money while Harris outperformed in the swing states where she was actually campaigning
True, but this also suggests (along with the map in the article) that blue cities in swing states (like Detroit and Philly) really underperformed for her
Could be useful for Kamala to launch a public campaign for 2028 within the next ~month. Become the public face of Dem "loyal opposition" in the way that Pelosi was during Trump 1.0. Keep on repeating her pitch over and over while the damage of Trump 2.0 starts becoming visible...
Who cares if she's the right candidate to actually run in 2028. She's our most prominent Dem leader at the moment, so let's let her deploy all her power and credibility. And also provide some cover to Dems in DC and state capitals...
Will if people change their affiliation from Democrat to independent or Republican then A PERCENTAGE says very little about what was good or bad about the candidate
What are the actual numbers of those who were oh so energized?
Sure, Dems were excited about having a candidate that wasn’t Joe Biden, myself included.
But excitement among Dems doesn’t change the fact that we lost the popular vote, we lost all seven swing states, & several million just didn’t show up. A Dem was going to vote for a Dem no matter who it was.
That is not really what happened though considering the number of votes. Trump was less than last time and Kamala grossly underperformed Biden. It is because she decided to go right and alienate the Hispanic m, Arab, youth and left vote
Helllo @whstancil.bsky.social
We consider the essential post-mortem conversation to be “why, how & by whom” - are so many Americans uninformed, misinformed & disinformed.
No “perfect message”, candidate, or platform positions can break through an information diet/media-induced sense of unreality.
There is no competing with the right wing lies when the traditional media won't spend 1/1,000th the time debunking it as the right wing media spends spreading it.
Sunday morning shows didn't spend one minute telling right wingers they were lying.
The fix was in from before the Biden/Trump debate.
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You're so intellectually bankrupt pretending to be a thought leader and the larp is so fucking cringe
But, not unlike a sugar high, came crashing down. How to mobilize, re-energize now...
People that call themselves democrats are already a group that has been filtered. It’s a group that has been shrinking for years as people leave the Democratic Party.
only a small subset of people with time/interest actually respond to polls
people are untrustworthy- they want to give socially acceptable answers like “i am voting” or “no trump”, then do something else
maybe time to throw these out
If Dems didn't vote for Trump, but the votes SHOW it, then why aren't they freaking out about it?
100k’s of white suburban & rural men in those states voted Trump & left the rest of the ballot blank.
It wasn’t policy. It wasn’t “too left.” It wasn’t minority or progressive defection.
It was racism & misogyny.
I said she gained with urban whites a lot of suburban whites (mostly men) who voted for Biden didn’t vote, and lots of rural whites (mostly men) were more mobilized for Trump this time.
All 3 trends are best explained by underlying racism and misogyny.
Harris’ campaign out performed incumbent campaigns globally and nearly won. I do think a FDR style progressive campaign might have made the difference
That it was close at all was because of racism and misogyny.
Biden outperformed all global rivals in dealing with post pandemic econ conditions & advanced pro worker policy
Just as another anecdote, my best friend is another rural white male. He voted for Biden in 2020 and planned to vote for Kamala this year, but was so demotivated that he never sent it in
Again.
After bragging he took away their right to control their reproductive rights.
There is something very wrong with my fellow white people.
Need turnout broken down by party.
Brother, is that what you think I'm looking at here?
How does that square with this info on enthusiasm?
I apparently missed some foaming and screaming
Look! The base was energized! Almost enough to vote
Because you have nothing to contribute
Show us that you are fighting for us and we'll vote for you.
Tell us to go fuck ourselves and we WILL.
Start treating us like it.
Start giving us what we want because we might vote for you whereas Republicans literally never will no matter what.
https://www.dsausa.org/calendar/dsa-qa-11-19/
so: who of these were in the campaign? who of them had the platform to ratfuck anyone?
How to learn ? By eradicating your critics?
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
https://youtu.be/UnKKm5vh3pk?si=IBJMe2IW67A2W409
Where are the protests outside Trump Tower and Mar-A-Lago? Sorry that's someone else's department
(i remember arguing with a college roommate about his plans to vote for jerry brown over clinton in the 1992 general btw.)
Will Stancil is a bigot and a lot of you slurp it up because you're also bigots, and he gets you off.
The people excited about Harris likely aren't the same as these people or those who listen to them
Agreed though, would like someone smarter than me to explain this phenomenon!
What are the actual numbers of those who were oh so energized?
In short: stop lying with percentages
But excitement among Dems doesn’t change the fact that we lost the popular vote, we lost all seven swing states, & several million just didn’t show up. A Dem was going to vote for a Dem no matter who it was.
I still voted for her. Yes, I would answer in a survey that I was enthusiastic to vote. But that was more so to vote against Trump.
We consider the essential post-mortem conversation to be “why, how & by whom” - are so many Americans uninformed, misinformed & disinformed.
No “perfect message”, candidate, or platform positions can break through an information diet/media-induced sense of unreality.
Sunday morning shows didn't spend one minute telling right wingers they were lying.
The fix was in from before the Biden/Trump debate.