Every single third party protest vote could have gone to Harris and she still would have heavily lost. She managed to even lose the damn popular vote by five million votes, despite Trump having a lower turnout than 2020.
This wasn’t because people voted third party, this was because at a time when incumbents have seen massive pushback across the globe from Covid inflation and Biden was unpopular across the board she ran as completely the same as Biden but even more Right on the border.
At a time when the politically disconnected working class families that make up the record trunout in 2020 were struggling with wage stagnation, erosion of Covid gains, and greedflation eroding their savings and pensions, four more years of the same but we’ll adopt even more Republican policies and look how many rich Republicans like us was never going to get the everperson off the damn couch.
More of the same is not a good platform for ‘progressives’ during economic hardship, even if it was out of their control and less hardship than most peer nations.
Even though Trump is a disaster for many of us, most people got though his first four years just fine, and don’t understand just how much damage he did or how much more he could do if the guardrails failed.
Getting the general public out to vote requires giving them something they want to vote for, and when the biggest thing you can point to doing or wanting to do more of is some clean energy related tax breaks that is a major problem.
Had the Dems impeached Clarence Thomas for his and his wife’s role in Jan 6, had Biden improved the immigration system like promised, had he provided free National Guard abortion clinics on federal land, had he made the FDA make puberty blockers and abortion medicine available by teleheath and mail, or indeed had any major victories in the last half of his term to show, we would not be here. Had they run AOC, Bernie, Waltz, or anyone at all who could articulate a platform beyond four more years of the same, we would not be here. Had Harris focused on how she could use left wing policy to fight the effects of late stage capitalism, we would not be here.
This election was an unforced error of the highest consequences, and one brought about by a political party that was so confident that until he dies of old age every politically disinterested Amarican would be so scared by the threat of Trump that they would maintain an unprecedented level of voter turnout without them having to actually do or promise anything.