Pretty much, yeah

Oliver Hall, a Harris campaign volunteer, found that economic concerns, particularly inflation, also drove voters to Donald Trump, despite low unemployment and wage growth touted by Democrats.

This. This right here is the issue.

According to the studies done by the Federal Reserve, only 54% of Americans have enough savings to cover 3 months of expenses. That means nearly half the country is basically living paycheck to paycheck.

Dems say wages are on the rise? So is the price of food, with some items still 50% more expensive than they were at the start of the pandemic (and now in even smaller packages to boot). Many Americans are also still stuck working a laughably low federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Why should they care about wage hikes when they haven’t gotten a raise since 2009? Meanwhile a large portion of the working class is in food service where the base rate is even lower and they have scrape by on tips — tips that are harder and harder to come by as fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to eat out.

Dems say unemployment is falling? Of course it is, when many Americans have no choice but to work multiple jobs just to make rent. And speaking of rent, it’s up a average of 30% which is even higher than the supposed ~25% wage growth Dems were running on.

If someone is living hand-to-mouth, struggling to keep a roof over their head and food in their stomach, the last thing they wanna hear about is fucking GDP or employment rates or the stock market. Millions of Americans are getting screwed by the economy, and when Democrats run on a message of prosperity, that spits in the face of their lived experiences. Meanwhile Trump tells them that the system is rigged and they’re getting screwed. He points the finger at all the wrong things, of course, but at least he acknowledges that things suck, even if all his proposed “solutions” are all empty demagoguery.

Stop telling working Americans how great the economy is and start telling them what they want to hear, what they know in their bones is true: The system is rigged against you. The ownership class has spent the last 3 decades gleefully stealing our wages, raping the environment, and padding the pockets of politicians so that we all stay divided and distracted. Stop running for the economy and start running against it. Run against robber barons and union busters like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Run against the Kochs and the Waltons who’ve been fighting for decades to keep wages low and the keep the pockets of rich politicians full with hundreds of millions in PAC money. Run against Comcast, run against Starbucks, run against fucking Nestle.

And while you’re at it, stop taking economic policy advice from capitalist assholes like Mark Cuban. Stop flaunting all your celebrity endorsements — more rich people who understand absolutely nothing about the day to day lives of working Americans. And for the love of God… please, please stop running to the right at every opportunity you get.

We need a labor party.

Let’s quit pretending, that without all of the dirty money and influence from foreign countries, this idiot would have won.

I think you’re wrong here, as least on the money side of things. Harris out-fundraised Trump 3 to 1, taking in almost a billion dollars this cycle. Democrats didn’t lose because of dirty money — they had more than enough of their own to compete.

Kentucky also voted NO on a proposed constitutional amendment that would give the state legislator power to siphon funds from the public school system to give to private schools.

Small victory in spite of everything else, but a victory none the less

Ask yourself: Why did Donald Trump win. And think about it. The answer is right before you and blazingly far more obvious than any particular action that was within Democrats or Kamala’s control.

Trump won because more people voted for him, plain and simple.

For 9 years now I’ve listened to fellow progressives wring their hands and breathlessly say “I just don’t understand how anyone could vote for him!” The problem, the real problem is that for like 95% of us, this statement is the end of the conversation. If the democrats want to win, they need to sit down and really, really consider the “why” of the Trump voter.

Yes, there’s racism and yes there’s sexism and yes there’s xenophobia and christian nationalism that all influence the far right, but there are also plenty of people voting R that don’t give a damn about that stuff. As the dust settles, it’s becoming increasingly clear that lots of voters voted split-ticket in this cycle, so blaming it all on dogma and party loyalty isn’t going to cut it — in fact, the data is suggesting that Americans are less loyal than ever to any particular political party, so what is it specifically about Trump that resonated with so many this time around?

I don’t have any exact answers to that question (which is honestly pretty embarrassing since we’ve all had 9 years to contemplate this), but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s something to do with the fact Trump actively acknowledges that things suck right now. “Make America Great Again” is a slogan that inherently implies we’re living in an empire in decline. Regardless of which side of the isle they sit on, I think most Americans can agree with the sentiment that things are getting worse, and have been for a while.

Of course, the two sides have wildly different ideas about why things suck — with the right largely blaming the decline on immigration or abortion or LGBT proliferation or some nebulous “eroding of traditional American values”, and with the left blaming things on regulatory capture, military adventurism, and the general corporate cannibalization of all our institutions and infrastructure. But both sides lately agree we’re heading in the wrong direction, so why is Trump’s message more resonant?

Maybe it’s because Trump presents them with more tangible “boogiemen” while the Democrats play ineffective defense by pointing at rising GDP or the surging stock market or low unemployment numbers — stats that do nothing to speak to the lived experiences of individual voters. Maybe Democrats need to focus their attention less on policy proposals and “hope and change” and more on “boogiemen” like the right. Stop campaigning against Trump, stop campaigning for incremental change, stop campaigning for culture wars, and start campaigning against people like Elon Musk. Start campaigning against union-busting Howard Shultz. Campaign against Amazon. Campaign against Mark fucking Cuban who hoards $6 billion for himself and then turns around and acts like he gives a damn about the working class while simultaneously padding the pockets of Democrats so that if they ever do actually win, he can be sure his tidy fortune won’t be at risk.

Is rent too high? Is the price of groceries becoming a burden? Have wages been stagnant for two decades? Fucking acknowledge it— no, don’t just acknowledge it, tell people they’re right to feel that way and that they should be fucking angry about it. Then spend every last campaign dollar and stump speech and political add attacking the people who made it that way. Rally people against an actual enemy, the real enemy, and maybe we’ll finally start voting for you without having to hold our noses. Of course, the DNC probably has too much vested interest in keeping their corporate donors happy to ever make this the message. After all, the Harris campaign raised nearly a billion dollars this cycle. Then again, what good is a billion bucks if it loses your the house, Senate and presidency?

Anyway, that’s just the two cents of a frustrated liberal who isn’t terribly surprised by the situation we’re now facing once again. Take it with a grain of salt — I’m just as dumb as everyone else.

Biden should’ve never run again in the first place. He should have kept to his pledge of being a “one term president” and gracefully made way for the DNC to hold an open primary where the voters could’ve expressed there preference for an actual message, rather than being force-fed yet another campaign of “What are you going to do? Vote for Trump?”

anti-capitalist

net worth of $30 million

okay buddy

you managed to piss off a huge chunk of your paper’s subscriber base without winning over anyone from the other side

This never had anything to do with winning over MAGA voters. It was only ever about Bezos fearing retaliation from a future Trump administration if he manages to win a second term.

There’s a reason people like Musk are bending over backwards to suck Trump’s dick: They’ve all seen what happened to oligarchs in other countries who didn’t bend the knee when a new dictator came to power. Putin is probably the best and most relevant recent example, but the “Saudi Arabian purge” is another, and similar things have been happening all over the world this century.

Account created 13 hours ago

Bingo

32 posts a day is a LOT.

Honestly, that’s not even that impressive… It’s only 4 posts per hour over a 8 hour work day, which is completely achievable if Internet trolling is your hobby of choice.

What’s really impressive is the number of comments. I won’t speculate on Monk’s motives (out of fear of running afoul of this community’s rules) except to say that they seem extremely motivated to argue with anyone and everyone who posts a disagreeing comment. Their tactic is to bicker with any dissenting voices (without actually engaging with their arguments) to the point of exhaustion so that no one will bother engaging anymore — a very specific strategy I have to imagine is designed to shift the Overton window a particular way.

Fortunately, their efforts seem to have been mostly ineffective given the number of people around here who continue to call out their BS. So keep fighting the good fight, I guess!

You gotta admit, no one is better at projecting than Trump!

You know who doesn’t hate Jill Stein? David fucking Duke.

Maybe I should have read the article

In their defense, the article is extremely obnoxious to read (at least on mobile). We shouldn’t have to scroll past dozens of huge images and ‘interactive’ graphics just to get to the actual text… and that’s with an ad blocker installed — I imagine it’s even worse without one.

Lots of people are voting third party.

[citation needed]

Looks like plenty of people disagree with you

Those are your words to another commenter, whom I think we can very safely assume is also not running for president. So why bring it up at all if it doesn’t matter?

What does that have to do with anything?

Looks like even more disagree with you.

Fun fact: for a third party candidate to qualify for ballot access in New York, they need to get 45,000 signatures (which none managed to achieve this election cycle). That means that in a state of 20 million people, no third party candidate could earn the support of just 0.225% of the population… Even Kanye got a larger percentage of the vote than that in some states!

And yet there are still people in this community trying to convince us that these candidate are running in good faith, when clearly no one actually wants them. Hmm…

Observe the slow, uninterrupted decline that starts in 2004

Ah, yes! 2004! A truly defining year for the Obama presidency when…

checks notes

…he was still the junior Senator from Illinois. Huh…