1mo ago

I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost | Oliver Hall

www.theguardian.com I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost | Oliver Hall

As a phone bank volunteer, I hoped to counter the Republican attacks and half-truths, but people really believed them, says journalist and podcaster Oliver Hall

Summary

Gender bias played a significant role in Kamala Harris’s defeat, with many voters—often women—expressing doubts about whether “America is ready for a female president.”

Some said they “couldn’t see her in the chair,” or questioned if a woman could lead, with one even remarking, “you don’t see women building skyscrapers.” Though some voters were open to persuasion, this often became a red line.

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.

Harris was viewed in conflicting ways, seen as both too tough and too lenient on crime, as well as ineffective yet overly tied to Biden’s administration.

Ultimately, Hall believes that Trump’s unique appeal and influence overshadowed Harris’s campaign efforts.

118 comments

Persuadable voters seemed really focused on prices. It's hard not to be condescending here. Eggs are expensive because of bird flu. Rent is high because not enough housing is being built, mostly limited by local issues. Gas is high because of Putin's war. Anyone who thinks electing Trump will bring those prices down because they were lower last time he was president is fucking clueless.
I'm interested to see how much of a factor unenthusiastic Democrats were. Trump got about the same number of votes he did in 2020, but Harris got far fewer than Biden. It looks like a bunch of people who voted last time didn't vote this time. For them, the concerns the author dismisses might have been more important.
- I’ve talked to a lot of people, and I never once heard anyone complain about her gender. In fact, I was rather surprised that I didn’t hear anything about that. It was 100% complaints about the economy, and no matter how I tried my best to explain how not only are the price of things not Biden’s fault, but we would have been much worse without Biden, it was like talking to a brick wall.
  
  I believe that there were a fair number of people who just couldn't check the box for any woman, but we're too afraid to admit it publically (or even to themselves). While their complaints about the economy were legit, they might have also been a convenient excuse to hide the misogyny.
  And didn't Obama confront this head-on? He told Black men "Look, you may not be inclined to back the woman here, but backing that man in particular would be a disaster". And he was dismissed by many as lecturing too much.
- looks like a bunch of people who voted last time didn’t vote this time. For them, the concerns the author dismisses might have been more important.
  We also made it decidedly less convenient by making mail voting more difficult, and then the media kept blasting a "going out to vote might get you assaulted by Trump supporters" narrative that frightened people.
- I’m fortunate to be well off, but I used to be below the poverty line in my city and qualified for social assistance (which I didn’t know about until a coworker told me). Having been in most of these voters shoes a little over a decade ago, I can tell you that don’t care about trumps rhetoric, he can stand there for an hour blathering non sense, but at the end of it he will say “I love you, I know you are hurting and I’m going to fix that”.
  Then a long come the democrats telling these people who are living paycheck to paycheck or still in their parents house that they are privileged racist ass holes who could never understand what is like to struggle as a rich minority woman from California. Then the most unrelatable person in the world gets chosen to replace Joe Biden and rich democrats and dumb ass celebrities like Cardi “I brag about how I used to drug, rape, and Rob men” B start telling working class men that they are stupid and racist if they don’t vote for Kamala.
  A lot of people couldn’t vote for a wannabe dictator, but they also couldn’t vote for someone who despises their very being.
  
  That is a completely accurate depiction of what every member and supporter of the Democratic party has said, which has certainly been much more hurtful than Republicans' repeated threats to rape and kill us /s
  
  You’re right. Americans as a whole are more stupid and racist than was previously thought.
  
  This is an incredibly important statement. You've perfectly summarized exactly how non-Harris voters felt. The opinions you share in here may or may not be true and the Lemmy population certainly doesn't like hearing it, but this was the thought process that brought trump to office.
  Frankly, the way to save America is to attack corporations. Regulate, regulate, regulate, put money back in the hands of the voters. Whoever does this has the vote.
  
  a rich minority woman from California.
  She worked at McDonald's growing up. Trump was the rich guy. Anybody not liking Harris because they thought she was "rich" was an idiot. She likely has far less net worth than most presidential candidates do.

That's a generous way of saying "Most Americans are overly sexist and/or racist and are willing to make up any reason to not vote for a woman of color despite any evidence to the contrary"
- Just at the shop work at most citizens make below $15 an hour even trades jobs
  Not just any fucking reason
  Most US citizens are struggling with overpriced housing, sky high taxes, ginourmous energy costs, inflatated food costs, and all on below living wages
  Fuck the Democrats and the Republicans both for exploiting the citizens
  
  I'm glad the enlightened centrist take is always here to offer the right answers.
  
  Dems and Reps are both corporatists (though you could argue Reps are moving towards some neo-feudalism) neither is willing to severely curtail the big money interests. I think you're right that people are genuinely hurting and anxious. People are also probably sexist and racist. Harris had a hell of a lot of disadvantages to overcome in the president's race and she didn't.
  Mostly though, reality doesn't matter anymore for probably a supermajority because people are so checked out. Just vibes - and the vibes are bad

I just want to say this to all the people who are making up the most hare-brained excuses for why Harris lost.
Kamala Harris cobbled together a campaign in days that took a campaign that was going R+5 and counting and turned it into a toss-up. She had 107 days. From day one, she was held to an infinitely higher standard than Trump. Trump held a debate where he famously said "They're eating the dogs!" and "I have concepts of a plan!.", and Americans were just fine with it. But Harris wasn't perfectly articulate with details over some economic plan or another and apparently this makes her unfit for President. She put up a near-flawless campaign, especially given how stuck behind the 8-ball she was. It ultimately just didn't matter.
Arab-Americans were outraged over Harris' support for Israel because of the genocide in Gaza. So to protest this, they voted for a man who has vowed even more support for israel and to genocide even harder, and also try to kick them out of the country in the process.
Latino men opted to vote for a man who made it a focal point of his campaign to round up and deport Latinos en-masse because the alternative was voting for a former prosecutor who also happens to be a woman.
White people decided that they want someone who's going to fix the economy, so they decided to vote for a guy who campaigned on raising the cost of living by an average of about $400 a month while promising to appoint a budget czar who already said he actively plans on imposing "hardships" on poor people.
Well, it's either that, or tens of millions of people in a country with a long-established history of racism and misogyny refused to vote for a black female president and just used these niche issues as excuses.
I know a lot of people don't want to hear this, and I know what I'm about to say sounds racist as hell. But Obama was a fluke and America in general is just not willing to elect a minority again. That's just all there is to it. The rise of Trump, the rise of far-right groups like the Proud Boys, and the 2024 election are proof of that. Democrat initiatives did relatively fine. The senate went GOP, but that was predicted with the loss of Manchin and Tester. Democrats in the House did fine. Kamala Harris did not.
And for those who believed that embracing centrist policies is what cost us the election, or we weren't left enough, or we should have listened to people like Bernie and AOC: People like Bernie and AOC are wildly popular in their districts and with the far-left coalition of the voting base. But they are wildly unpopular outside of that. And keep in mind......I love both of them and would gladly vote for a future AOC as president. But given the current political makeup of the country, putting someone like Bernie or AOC on the ballot would have made the ass kicking Harris just got seem tame. Sure, they'd have won states like California and Massachusetts by gigantic margins. But they'd do little to nothing to flip red or purple states.
The fact of the matter is that the 2024 results prove that Americans like what the Democrats were selling. They just don't want her to be the one selling it, as evidenced by the fact that only she underperformed so spectacularly. People were so unwilling to vote for a black, female President that over 10 million of them opted to stay home knowing full well that they were essentially voting for Trump.
A majority of this country is white. A majority of this country will not vote for a minority president again in this political climate. And if the Democrats put up another minority candidate in 2028 (assuming we even have elections), they will lose again. That's just all there is to it. It's a tough pill to swallow, but it's the truth. It's not right, but it's the truth. You know how black people across the south have been fighting gerrymandering so they can have majority-black districts and vote for black candidates? Or for that matter, how minority candidates do better in minority districts when championing minority initiatives? White people are doing the same thing. And there's a lot more of them. And they just proved that they absolutely will vote against their best interests vs. voting for a black woman.
- One thing to note about Bernie and AOC is that they're not popular, but their policies are. During 2016, polls showed that even the majority of Republican voters supported Bernie's policies - but only if you told them what the policy was before you told them that it was Bernie's.
  The Red Scare is still ongoing today, and having been labeled socialists and communists has made them untouchables and pariahs. And there has never been any Red Scare equivalent for the KKK or white supremacists, or for corporatism or anything, but there has been for socialism, unions, and anything else that puts power into the hands of the people.
- I want to comment that you nailed so many valid points.
  I know a lot of people don't want to hear this, and I know what I'm about to say sounds racist as hell. But Obama was a fluke and America in general is just not willing to elect a minority again.
  This one, I don't think I agree that it was a fluke.
  Democrats are continuing to let the loudest crybabies take over the room. And then compromise. Conservatives are right on one thing: the message that Kamala put out to their people was, "You don't want to vote for a fascist." Which doesn't resonate with them. What they instead saw was a person who was going to keep things the same.
  Can a minority run again? Absolutely.
  But only stop catering to the status quo and bowing down to companies. Do Bernie Sanders shit.
  
  "They go low, we go high" is a phrase I associate with the Obama era.
  
  This one, I don’t think I agree that it was a fluke.
  Fluke probably wasn't the right word in hindsight. He won and got re-elected decisively. Maybe they consider it a "mistake". I don't know what the right word for it is. However you want to call it, they just will not allow it to happen again.
  Democrats are continuing to let the loudest crybabies take over the room. And then compromise.
  That is a decades-long flaw in the Democrat party that had little bearing on this election.
  Conservatives are right on one thing: the message that Kamala put out to their people was, “You don’t want to vote for a fascist.” Which doesn’t resonate with them.
  Actually, many of them were on social media actively advocating for him because of the authoritarianism. They were pretty open about voting for a convict/dictator/rapist over a ~~nig..uh..blackperson..uh~~ "Democrat".
  What they instead was a person who was going to keep things the same.
  Here's the problem. When 51% of your voting base is giving very strong signals they don't want a minority as President and telling you they want things to remain the same, offering up a minority candidate who wants to change everything is not going to win you elections. Doesn't matter how benevolent their ideas are. The American voters just said they are willing to vote against policies they like simply because they don't like the person selling it.
  In the past 3 Presidential elections, the GOP put up the literal worst candidate in history. In two of those 3 elections, the Democrats put up women. Trump won. The only time he lost was when they put up an old white guy. Then they complained about him being an old white guy. Then, rather than vote for the black woman, they voted for another old white guy. And a whole bunch of people are here saying that we would've won if we just put up an even older white guy with the same policies.
  Which is basically the Democrat party as a whole saying that they may not want an old white guy as President, but they'll sure as hell put a white guy in the White House before a they put a woman there, and certainly not a black one. They tried twice, and voters stayed home. And they stayed home knowing full well what that meant. What does that tell you?
  Can a minority run again? Absolutely.
  Assuming we have elections again, a minority will not sit in the Oval Office in my lifetime. And if they put one up in 2028, they're going to lose just as hard. The American public -- from both parties -- have sent a loud and clear message that they will not put a woman in charge of the US, certainly not a black one. And if you think, especially after 4 more years of the Trump Hate Machine blasting propaganda 24/7, that a minority is going to have a snowball's chance in hell, I've got beachfront property on Mars you may be interested in.
  But only stop catering to the status quo and bowing down to companies. Do Bernie Sanders shit.
  Then wonder why you lose again. Outside of his voters and the far left, people don't want Bernie Sanders shit. We may disagree with them, but there's more of them then there are of us.
- I think a lot of your comment boils down to a few things that Americans need to accept:
  Americans don't care about policy. They like sound bites, and Trump gives those for days.
  People vote against their interests in the name for change, even if it negatively affects people like them (but importantly, not them)
  America is a deeply racist and misogynistic country.
  Playing it safe doesn't win elections in America, but minorities only win if the other choice is uninspired.
  Where I disagree is that it was a toss-up. Harris has performed worse than Hillary, which is wild considering how deeply unpopular she was. Frankly, before she ran it was obvious how disliked she was.
  
  I’d agree with your paraphrasing but it exists in a media vacuum.
  Americans don't care about policy. They like sound bites, and Trump gives those for days.
  That’s a comment on media that Americans consume, not necessarily Americans.
- hard disagree, progressive policies up for vote were adopted even in deep red states unlike the fake progressive party.
  this sort of holier than thou analysis same as dnc is why they never fix their smugness towards voters.
  “held to an infinitely higher standards”, “genocide even harder”, “happens to be a woman”, “make the economy worse”, “obama was a fluke”, “bernie & aoc are wildly unpopular outside of that.”
  outside the bubble of .world and reddit, the above statements are seen as nothing but dogshhit gaslighting. people understand that trump is stupid, incompetent and repulsive but they also correctly see that dnc are double dealing scammers who have no problem mass murdering kids for few million in campaign donations. for how many brown women murdered in gaza and now lebanon did harris opened her mouth full of aipac money. her career is full of oppressing poor and blacks and including single mothers, and at the same time sucking up to the rich including trump. she has shamelessly flip-flopped on issues wherever she had seen more votes. why the hell someone would vote for a smug power tripping hack like this in name of democracy and lesser evil. she would have absolutely nuked gaza, lebanon & iran to get funding from aipac and mic for a 2nd term, while inflation and corporate greed would have remained unckecked same as trump.
  and if not for trump and dnc’s over the top fear mongering, she would have likely lost many deep blue state. she lost like hillary because they were planted by the megadonors to create a win-win situation for them for that they sabotaged sanders in 2016 and warren in 2020.
  even the votes dnc got this time were mostly in despair, and many of them unlikely to do it again, those who sat out were disgusted enough to not care.
  the same people wishing more genocide and mocking egg prices were dismissing any criticism of biden & harris as russian troll. and now they are surprised that many of them sat out for not wanting to do anything with this farce of an election where you loose against the oligarchy not matter who you vote.
  imho i don’t see dnc winning again, it will be better if aoc and warren form a new party and destroy them for good.
  
  hard disagree, progressive policies up for vote were adopted even in deep red states unlike the fake progressive party.
  Which is why I said the policies weren't the problem. She was. The voting base did not want to vote for a black woman. The rest of the election went pretty much as predicted.
  “held to an infinitely higher standards”, “genocide even harder”, “happens to be a woman”, “make the economy worse”, “obama was a fluke”, “bernie & aoc are wildly unpopular outside of that.”
  Tell me which one of these is wrong.
  Is it the one where Trump got no criticism for "They're eating the dogs!", while Kamala Harris was criticized for not being perfectly articulate?
  Is it the one where people criticized Harris for supporting Israel, then voted for someone who was going to ....... give even more weapons and support to Israel?
  Or it is the one where the only two women were both beat by Trump after a smear campaign from the mainstream media?
  Or the one where Trump has vowed to increase prices on goods by slapping tarrifs on everything? Or the one where Musk already said he was gong to impose hardships on people?
  Or the fact that the country as a whole has been leaning hard into the racism since Obama was in office?
  And as for bernie, the entire Democrat base had been saying that they didn't want Biden because he was "too old". And here you are offering someone older. Which means his age was never really the problem, was it? Because half the country just voted for a dementia patient , and the other half are now saying we should've put up someone older.
  And try getting AOC over in independent or right-leaning areas she'd need to pick up a win. Good luck with that.
  outside the bubble of .world and reddit, the above statements are seen as nothing but dogshhit gaslighting.
  Prove me wrong.
  people understand that trump is stupid, incompetent and repulsive but they also correctly see that dnc are double dealing scammers who have no problem mass murdering kids for few million in campaign donations.
  So the answer is to vote for someone who's going to mass murder even more people? Remember, last time Trump interfered in the middle east, he moved the embassy to Jerusalem which pissed off just about everybody and sent Jared Kushner over there, who did exactly nothing outside of collecting $2 billion from the Saudis which they still refuse to explain.
  But sure, the dnc are the scammers.......
  for how many brown women murdered in gaza and now lebanon did harris opened her mouth full of aipac money. her career is full of oppressing poor and blacks and including single mothers, and at the same time sucking up to the rich including trump. she has shamelessly flip-flopped on issues wherever she had seen more votes. why the hell someone would vote for a smug power tripping hack like this in name of democracy and lesser evil. she would have absolutely nuked gaza, lebanon & iran to get funding from aipac and min for a 2nd term, while inflation and corporate greed would have remained unckecked same as trump.
  And tell me how voting for Trump was somehow better in any possible way. And if you abstained from voting knowing all of that full well, you essentially voted for Trump.
  and if not for trump and dnc’s over the top fear mongering, she would have likely lost many deep blue state. she lost like hillary because they were planted by the megadonors to create a win-win situation for them for that they sabotaged sanders in 2016 and warren in 2020.
  Ah yes, it was all a Democrat conspiracy to......hand the Presidency to Trump. Oooooooookay.........
  the same people wishing more genocide
  voted for Trump.
  and mocking egg prices
  Which is the result of bird flu.
  were dismissing any criticism of biden & harris as russian troll. and now they are surprised that many of them sat out for not wanting to do anything with this farce of an election where you loose against the oligarchy not matter who you vote.
  So voting to lose harder was your solution?
- Regarding election of a minority, I think this country would elect an Arab American before a woman. Anecdotally, talking to right leaning voters who really had no great feeling for trump, the theme came up again and again "how can a woman go toe to toe with Putin or the Saudis?" "Will generals listen to her?".
- So much this. The voters fucked up the country - they just don't want to face up to the reality that their childish narrow-mindedness hath wrought. The political mechanism was merely what it has always been.
- They lost because they lost touch with America.
  You can blame everyone you did in your post because you fail to see the bigger picture.
  The democrats did not let you take place in democracy. There was no primary. Kamala Harris was the chosen one of the elite. She would never have been elected by voters because she is a hollow shell of catchphrases and memorized talking points.
  She is unrelatable and therefore unelectable. She had no platform except that she was going to keep doing the Genocide Joe walk.
  The only tears that you should be crying was that they were able to get you to vote for them while genociding kids Gaza, effectively saying "yeah I don't care."
  
  The incumbent President was the nominee. Generally, the incumbents don't hold primaries because the outcome is all but certain, and party leadership has never forced an incumbent to step aside before. By the time Biden dropped out, there was no time for a primary. If we'd have tried dumping Biden, holding a primary in a country of 350 million people, and running a general election campaign in barely 3 months, we'd have been a laughing stock. We'd be infighting for months while Trump was running a general election campaign unopposed. The RNC would be saying "We're firmly behind Trump. Biden is so bad that the DNC forced him out of the race and all of the other options are so bad that they can't settle on one." If you think that the election was a slaughter, that scenario would have made everything exponentially worse.
  
  Kamala Harris was the chosen one of the elite.
  She was the chosen one of the elected delegates. Just because somebody is elected as a party delegate does NOT make them an "elite". Fuck that shit. It doesn't take a lot of money to be a delegate. It mainly just takes a lot of commitment.

"I can only think of one occasion when someone mentioned stricter taxes on billionaires or any similar policies. The atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza only came up six times in more than 1,000 calls. The idea that Harris was not leftwing enough seems false"
The problem with this anecdotal evidence is that the campaign almost certainly put this kid to work only calling likely Republican voters... An absolute waste of time, and of course these are the things those shit brains would be saying... If he had been put to work calling people who had voted for Biden but were less likely to show up this time he would have gotten a lot more genocide, she's not progressive enough, and tax the rich messages
- Exactly. On the fuckin head.
  Just goes to show how deeply-run this “focus on courting the fascists” was in the campaign.
- On ok... So that's anecdotal evidence, but not your terminally online ass seeing everyone on Lemmy upset with it and assuming that was any indication of real world demographics?
  Got it.
  
  Nah, we'll have to wait for someone to poll the people who showed up last time but sat it out this time to know for real why they did it

"Wages may well be rising at all levels, but everyday inflation was more discernible to voters."
Your wages only rise if you change jobs. If you aren't willing, or able to change jobs, your wage increase (if you get one AT ALL) is not beating inflation.
- Maybe in a world where unions don't exist (so give it a year or two)... But no, that's absurd.
  
  Union representation is a fraction of what it used to be... or needs to be.
  https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/01/24/labor-union-membership-by-year/72329342007/
  "the rate of union members is the lowest in decades at 10%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  A combination of labor laws unfavorable to unions and an uptick in corporate-backed union suppression tactics are two insights as to why union membership is so low in the 21st century.
  In the 1950s, 1 in 3 workers were represented by a union. Now it’s closer to 1 in 10."
  
  What are you talking about? Unions work great in some countries, so don't drag the whole world into your issues with it.

She was a lackluster candidate, yet clearly the only reasonable choice. The problem is that the electorate is full of fuckbrains. Any fucking excuse would do - black, woman, price of eggs, whatever. Everything’s about to spiral the fuck outta control (let’s see what egg prices are gonna be like after tariffs n shit). removed wanted this in place of having a lackluster, mediocre, caretaker president. Alright. Play ball, removed.

Sucks man. I was really hoping to get to the Grand Canyon before they start strip mining it for uranium, but I might be fleeing with my family before we become the rape capital of the globe. India is still king, but judging from the chuds who vote for him, it won't be long before we surpass them. I won't have that for my wife and daughter. They deserve better.
- Look at a population density map of the US and India and take comfort in the fact that we do not live in close enough proximity to each other to ever take the title of world’s rape capital. MURICA, removed!!!!!!!!

Author gave many reasons I saw on social media, especially the top ones she mentioned like economy concerns or that she is a communist which are the opposite of reality.
She concentrated on what people are saying instead of why.
We are living in a world where huge part of population abandoned traditional news such as TV, newspapers and is getting their vote about the world via social media through memes and influencers.
The biggest problem with it is that this unlike traditional media is open to foreign interference. We had report of American bloggers being paid by Kremlin ridiculous amount of money, we have evidence of bots being used to persuade public opinion, astroturfing groups on Facebook and other social media that were traced to Russia.
And we still did nothing to stop it.
Half of America lives in a different reality. And it isn't just America but those efforts are happening also in Europe and other Western countries.

Is this low unemployment and wage growth in the room with us?
Unemployment is “low” because shitty gig economy jobs are counted as employment. And wages might be growing, but are lagging far behind inflation.
The majority of Americans aren’t sexist and racist, they are living paycheck to paycheck and some unlikable rich black woman from San Francisco isn’t going to be able to relate to a poor white man from Nebraska or even a Hispanic dude from El Paso. And you would think “neither should a rich ass hole from NYC”, but he at least pretends to care about them. Democrats have been demonizing the working class for over a decade and they are starting to reap what they sow.
I voted for Kamala, but she was a terrible candidate. She made no attempt to empathize with the plight of the majority of the working class voting base and instead was more worried about capturing the vote of rich trust fund babies that are being misgendered.
- And wages might be growing, but are lagging far behind inflation.
  To be very fair real wages grew during Biden's administration, but probably not enough and definitely not for everyone.
  
  I think that the problem is that the metric used for measuring the wages growth is an average:
  In a society where most of the wealth goes to a few, an average is not necessarily a good measure:
  I like this image from this article from the fed
  
  They have the following remark below this graph:
  For example, about 57 percent of the WGT sample had positive real wage gains during 2019, whereas during 2022, only 45 percent of people had positive real wage growth. Put another way, despite higher median nominal wage growth, the share of people with positive real wage growth between 2019 and 2022 due to higher inflation fell by 12 percentage points.
  Edit, from the bottom of the article:
  Your own wage growth experience might not look like that of your neighbors or your colleagues, and it might not resemble that of the person with median wage growth either.
- Unemployment is “low” because shitty gig economy jobs are counted as employment. And wages might be growing, but are lagging far behind inflation.
  As soon as Trump takes office, the nuance you're evaluating these numbers with will be lost. I've lived this thing before, Trump may use economic conditions to his benefit rhetorically and may even disagree with the numbers while he's out of power, but the instant he's in the same numbers will automatically signal to him and his cult of supporters that everything is great and people should stop complaining.
  
  Correct, there is zero chance of ever getting through to these 75 million people... But there was a very good chance of getting through to the 10 million who stayed home but had voted last time, and at least some chance of getting through to the 50% who regularly don't vote... But the Dems never go after those people, they continue to insist on wasting everyone's time by only going after the imbeciles with actual policy changes (they go after the 10 million with bullying and fear mongering, which clearly doesn't work)

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.
- So basically be Bernie Sanders...who they abandoned.
  
  Pretty much, yeah

There real problem is that at least 20% of the US population are evil sociopaths.

"I know why she lost"
She lost because 11 million people sat out this election. That's it, that's all there is.
The fact is that most of this country leans blue, and when voters turn out, blue typically wins. This is why the GOP is doing everything they can to make sure people don't vote.
Trump has a vote ceiling of around 74, maybe 75 million. In 2020, 81 million people voted for Biden.
- Why do you think 11 million people sat out?
  Like, if you're walking down the street and one person calls you a horse they're a jerk, if two people call you a horse they're both jerks, but if everyone keeps calling you a horse maybe it's time to go get fitted for a saddle. The Dems got called a horse 11 million times here.
  
  I get what you're saying, but apathy at that scale isn't calling democrats a horse. It's taking a backseat on your future.
- Delusional

I really don’t think that sexism was the leading cause of her loss, or even one of the top causes.
She alienated a sizable voter group in a swing state, and people who are struggling to buy groceries are not going to vote for a person who is literally in the second highest executive position in the ruling party, unless they make changes people can see, and have a good campaign on change. When I heard harris give speeches I always thought “well, you have a direct ear to the president and are one of the highest ranking democrats in the US. Why don’t you use this to make change now?
- When I heard harris give speeches I always thought “well, you have a direct ear to the president and are one of the highest ranking democrats in the US. Why don’t you use this to make change now?
  Well said!

While I get it, I still find it weird that so many British people, including card-carrying members of Labour and British journalists volunteered to campaign for a foreign politician. It's a damaging look in hindsight, and is likely why the US-UK relationship will be dead under Trump, as opposed to tight back in 2016.
With that said, he's not wrong. The US is absolutely not ready for this, and it'll take decades of education and a rebuilding of the Democrats to claw back from this.
- It was dead the moment we didn't elect a low towing fop.
  Russia funded and led the conservative movement here in the past 10 years. We got Brexit, we got incompetent government, they got a place to park their wealth (a lot of it is still here), they got crimes without much fuss.
  Europe was weakened.
  As the funding for Trump's loans and Musk's Twitter buyout as well the moment we woke up and voted for a different party we became a target state instead of a puppet state.
  Even Boris Johnson realised we had to help Ukraine. They replaced him with Truss and Sunak, more controllable puppets.
  There are of course other factors, but the effect of global oligarchs spending fossil fuel wealth is clear in Western Democracy at the moment. Saudi is another big influence, they court both sides as long as they aren't crossed.
  Every crisis delays climate action, every election they can influence delays action. The longer they delay the more profit they get.
- Trump and UK weren't tight in 2016. The UK tolerated Trump, at first.

Read the article everyone. This summary starting with gender bias is kind of bad. The main issue was the economy at the top.
- The economy concern is straight up the issue, but the twist is that it has to be the economy as seen by people who don’t understand or don’t care about macro economics. GDP, inflation suppression, and all the other measures Biden did to help the economy wasn’t helping families buy groceries. And you can forget that trip to Disneyland. Buying power was still fucked. Now the carryover of those measures combined with the long-term bad but short term positive jolts of the next trump administration is going to increase buying power for just long enough for Donnie boy to take credit.
  If you find yourself with extra money in the next 4 years, remember it’s borrowed against your future. Better to save it, or heavily reduce your debts than to get that new car it take that family trip.
- This again is why I have so little faith now. The economy is such a cut and dry thing. Inflation went up in april after biden took office and obviously did not come from his actions when he had barely started. Inflation was largely tamed by increasing interest rates and looking at the fed rates from obama onward you can see where they dropped under trump and my satan I can't believe folks don't remember trump bully pulpitting the fed to drop them. he was whining insistently about them ruing his economy (which given his deep state rhetoric we know what he was implying). oh man then I would get folks with the inflation is caused by xyz. yeah its caused by a lot of things but the main way a president (really the fed) effects them in the short term (short term being years) is with the interest rate and we have a very direct example in the last few years. The idea that trump is the better choice for the economy is so friggin ridiculous.

Because she was a seventh-choice candidate?

Harris lost because she thought ultra restrictive border policies and handing out home mortgages was going to persuade voterers
- I think both things play a factor, but ditching shitty policies and messaging would be a lot more straightforward process than reducing the number of raging misogynists in America

Biden sucks, Harris sucks, Pelosi sucks, Sanders sucks. The circular firing squad continues. Foolish

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