Now there’s another shower thought.

What if one day airplanes just like…stopped working…

One of the reasons Kamala failed was that her central message was crippled from the start. Her main campaign plank was that Trump was a threat to democracy. The problem with this was that Biden didn’t treat him like a threat to democracy.

Trump should have been arrested on day one of Biden’s term. He should have been rapidly tried in a military tribunal, had the book thrown at him, and quickly been convicted. And SCOTUS justices that dared to try to intervene should have been charged as accomplices tried with similar swiftness.

Biden didn’t do that. He appointed a Republican to lead the DOJ. That Republican then sat on his ass for two years, then began a slow investigation, only for Trump to eventually run out the clock.

Biden did not treat Trump like a threat to democracy. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus the last time there was a similarly-scaled threat to democracy. Lincoln ruled like a dictator during the Civil War. He had pro-Southern newspapers, in the North, censored and shut down. He actually showed what you need to do to a true threat to democracy.

True threats to democracy require bold and sometimes quite draconian response. It’s an emergency, democracy is on the line, and drastic action is required.

If you DON’T act with that kind of haste, you show that you don’t actually feel democracy is being threatened that much. Biden proved that he really didn’t believe his own rhetoric. Biden in his heart really doesn’t believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, as he certainly didn’t act like he thought he is.

This is why Kamala’s central campaign message fell flat on his face. There is ZERO reason an incumbent should ever be able to run on a platform of “my opponent tried to steal the last election.” If you’re the incumbent, it was YOUR responsibility to protect the republic from threats against it. If your opponent is truly a threat to the republic, why weren’t they locked up or sent to the gallows a long time ago?

That was the central problem of Kamala’s core message. If someone tries to violently overthrow the government, you are supposed to send the military after them and turn them into a fine mist or turn the justice department on them and see them hanged for treason. You’re not supposed to just let them off the hook and then bitch to the electorate that they’re dangerous and can’t be trusted. And if someone is a true threat to the republic, you shouldn’t even let the Supreme Court get in your way.

They’re too corrupted by corporate bribes to right the ship, hopefully it sinks into a sea of conservative ignorance and an actual leftist party can rise from the ashes.

And you know what’s really sad about this? They don’t even have to be! Kamala massively outspent Trump. One thing the DNC refuses to learn is that there is such a thing as saturation in campaign messaging. Past a point, past a certain number of commercials, flyers, mailer, door-hangers, text messages, and on and on? At some point it just stops working. At some point you just start annoying people. Hillary massively outspent Trump in 2016, and Kamala massively outspent Trump in 2024. It didn’t matter. Most of those dollars were completely wasted showing ads to voters that were already completely over-saturated with ads.

Maybe you need corporate money for the type of wasteful campaign Kamala ran, but it’s not like she didn’t also raise millions and millions in individual donations. Even in the era of big money politics, it is entirely possible to bring in enough small donations to run a presidential campaign. All that corporate money that Kamala sold her soul for was ultimately spent preaching to the choir or trying to reach the unreachable.

I’m not so willing to give the DNC a pass.

Is it easy? No. But it’s not like the DNC has tried numerous strategies and had brilliant plan after brilliant plan fail despite their well-considered attempts. The DNC algorithm for finding a candidate is quite simple:

1. Survey the existing party ranks.

2. Find the highest-ranking centrist within the party you can.

3. Ideally, don’t have a primary at all. But if a primary cannot be avoided, throw the full weight of the party apparatus behind that person before the primary and do everything possible to sabotage anyone else during the primary.

2016 was a coronation, with massive numbers of superdelegates endorsing Hillary before the first primary vote was cast, putting their thumb on the scale. 2020 saw the DNC actively collude against Sanders. When it looked like he was about to win the primary, they arranged that all the centrist candidates except Biden drop out, while leaving Warren in to dilute the progressive vote. The ONLY reason Biden got the nomination was because the entire party leadership structure colluded to get the other centrists to drop out, ensuring his victory. And of course, in 2024, well you’re aware of that clusterfuck.

The lesson here really isn’t that hard. Primaries exist for a reason! Competitive primaries ensure that your candidate can handle themselves well, and that they actually have some broad support among the electorate. They’re a trial by fire that only fools skip.

I CAN do better than the DNC. I can do better than the DNC because I have some humility and realize that I have no business trying to select who the next ideal democratic candidate is. If I ran the party, I would adopt the following rules:

1. Every election must have a primary. Even if an incumbent is running, a full competitive primary will still be held. The incumbent president should receive no advantage in that primary other than name recognition.

2. Some process to prevent the kind of candidate collusion that occurred in 2020. Any candidate that is found to have done this should be ineligible to receive the party’s nomination.

The ONLY arbiter of who should win the nomination should be the voters. Candidates need to arise from natural political movements that arise free of central DNC influence. The party shouldn’t play favorites, and it shouldn’t nuke candidates just because party leaders don’t like them.

a wealth tax

Did she actually campaign on this, or was it just some white paper she had on her website? There’s a difference between having a policy that you are campaigning on and actually intend to carry out and some vague policy paper a staffer wrote.

25k credit for first time home buyers This was an absolute embarrassment of a policy. Did you see the requirements on it? They presented it as a typical neoliberal bullshit policy. It was filled with so many specific requirements that almost no one would qualify for it. And it was bad economic policy too, as it would simply serve to further inflate the overheated housing bubble.

support for legalized cannabis

You cannot run on something that is one of your severe policy failures. Democrats have been running on the cannabis issue for multiple cycles at this point. They’ve all dragged their feet and slow-walked it for cheap political points.

support for trans people

She’s objectively better on this than Trump, but trying to Third Way it, she screwed herself over. Democrats were vocally supportive of trans rights before any kind of major backlash emerged, but their support was only ever skin-deep. Trans issues were largely absent from the recent DNC.

The Republicans latched onto anti-trans bigotry as one of their major campaign planks, and the Democrats responded by just trying to ignore trans people entirely. They avoided discussing trans people whenever possible, and they never came up with effective responses to Republicans’ main attack points. If you actually believe in trans rights, the correct response to the charge of “you want men in women sports!” is to say, “well trans women aren’t men, and you shouldn’t moronically assume trans women have the same athletic advantages as cis men.” If you actually believe in trans rights and equality, you would say, “the differences between men and women sports performance is almost entirely due to testosterone. Any minor differences that remain are not worth discriminating against people over.” Etc. You know, actually RESPONDING TO and REBUTTING the attacks Republicans make against trans people.

Centrist democrats showed conclusively that their support for trans people was nothing more than shallow political pandering. The Biden administration hasn’t been using all the levers of federal power to protect trans kids from their state governments.

This kind of mealy-mouthed centrism is what cost Kamala the election. She isn’t an enemy of trans people, but she’s also not a real ally. She doesn’t want to actively harm trans people, but she doesn’t have some fundamental belief in the worth of trans rights. It’s just another political football to her. It was beneficial to seem extremely pro-trans in 2020, and now that the conservatives have rallied against trans people, now she’s not so eager to defend trans people. It seems disingenuous and it made her look like someone who would say anything just to win the election.

How many of those 10-15 million watching from the sidelines would have shown up for a pro-Palestine candidate?

No one was expecting her to become a rabidly pro-Palestinian protester. No one expected her to get up at the podium and say, “actually, Hamas did nothing wrong, and the Israelis should be relocated out of Palestine.” People wanted her to make US military aid contingent on Israel meeting human rights guidelines. Israel, despite all the precision weaponry we give them, has a worse civilian:military kill ratio than Hamas. They kill more civilians for every soldier they kill than radical terrorists. Despite all their high-tech weaponry, THAT is how unconcerned Israel has been about civilian casualties. Hamas has done a better job of avoiding civilian casualties than Israel.

Anyway, the polling showed that calling for a cease-fire and other measures would have been immensely popular. This was a completely unforced error on her part. She threw away votes for nothing.

He should be issuing broad federal pardons for any of the political targets Trump is threatening. Hell, he should issue broad pardons for all journalists. Anyone who has past found themselves on Trump’s enemies list should get a full pardon now.

Well, feel free to keep calling for a recount. And I’m free to tell you why there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of it happening.

I don’t know. I voted for Kamala, but I think Trump might actually be better long-term for the Palestinians than Kamala.

Yes, Trump would happily watch as Israel bulldozed and annexed the entirety of Gaza and the West Bank. But Israel’s ability to do that isn’t contingent on US military aid. What really prevents that is broader global public opinion. If Israel tries a full and rapid ethnic cleansing, it will be completely embargoed by every nation in Europe.

There is a reason Israel has been doing a slow-mo “genocide by zoning code” in the West Bank for years. They know they can’t get away with overt genocide, not without facing mass trade embargoes.

The truth is, I really don’t know if things can realistically get bad enough in Palestine for the Kamala/Trump distinction to be any different. Even in the case of an overt genocide, Kamala would simply withdraw some offensive aid. Trump would keep that aid flowing, but in either case, if Israel decided to do a full overt genocide of the Palestinians, neither a Trump nor Harris administration would meaningfully intervene.

The only long-term hope for any improvement for US policy on Israel is if Democrat leaders listen to their base and stop supporting them. Kamala was going to be fully pro-Israel. And with Kamala as an incumbent, no anti-Zionist candidate would have been able to run in 2028. Now with Kamala out of the picture, and with her seeming loss due to her and Biden’s addiction to fellating Israel, there is room politically for anti-genocide voices to actually have a chance at a major party’s nomination.

I would say the chances of an anti-genocide president being in office in 2029 are about 10-20%. With a Harris win, that chance would be 0%.

OTOH, I can see it from the other perspective.

I voted for Kamala, but I also recognize that NOT VOTING for Kamala is probably the fastest way to get any change in US Israel policy.

If Kamala won, nothing was going to change in Gaza. The current slow genocide would continue unabated with full US financial support.

Trump won. There is now a chance that the genocide will accelerate. However, there are strong reasons to believe this will not be the case. Israel has always had to balance its genocidal territorial ambitions with global public opinion. Trump will not stop Netanyahu from bulldozing the West Bank, but the threat of embargo from every nation in Europe might. Israel can only go far without risking its existentially necessary trade links. As nice as US aid is to have, this broader international trade is Israel’s real life-blood.

So while there is a chance of acceleration, the chance is not particularly large. In reality, the ultimate outcome of Trump and Harris administrations is likely identical in terms of Gaza.

On the other hand, a Kamala loss does present the one narrow window for possible change on US Israeli policy. Kamala chose Israel over winning the election. She gave up her presidency for Netanyahu. She betrayed her own base, and she towed the Israeli line, and what did it get her? She was still portrayed as the enemy of Israel and lost anyway.

That lesson will be remembered by future Democratic candidates. And that lesson is that cowing to Israel does not guarantee victory. And that is really the only realistic path forward we have right now to any change in US Israeli policy. It’s going to require that Democrats get their heads out of their asses and realize that Israel is not such a winning issue anymore. THAT is what is required for real change. And hopefully, with Kamala’s loss, at least some progress can be made on Democrat’s chronic case of Israel fellatio.

No, big turnout is still synonymous with a progressive candidate win.

Again, you’re living in the past. Back during the era of Obama, it was Democrats who were drawing out the infrequent voters. When turnout was high, Democrats did well. Now, it’s Republicans who are relying on the infrequent voters. The modern Democrats are very dependent on college-educated voters and other groups that turn out more reliably than Trump’s base.

And how Bernie or some other progressive would win is completely irrelevant here. We’re talking about how Kamala, a centrist Democrat, performed in an election. What happened 20 years ago is irrelevant. In the recent Trump elections - 2016, 2020, 2024, it is centrist Democrats like her who were hurt by higher turnout.

However, that being said, there’s literally a laundry list of election interference issues that should trigger a recount. And that includes speech by Trump himself that is suspect. Like he’s literally working with Elon Musk and Putin and you don’t think they may have done some bullshit? Lol. How gullible. You realize Putin has decades of experience rigging elections and using propaganda, and Musk owns Twitter?

Trump made a vague remark about having some plan in the House, a plan that they’ll never need. Do I doubt that Trump would willingly steal an election? No. But the point is that, as everyone has been trying to tell you, there is no reasonable way to pull off what you’re suggesting.

You are naive and clearly trapped in an info bubble. The simple fact is that far more people voted for Trump than did Harris. And this result isn’t in any way surprising. It’s the kind of scenario any Poli Sci 101 text would tell you could easily lose an incumbent an election.

If it were a close race at all, you would have a point. But we don’t do big national recounts just for shits and giggles. We don’t do them because you think someone’s vibe makes them a cheater. We do it when a plot is actually plausible. And the advantage Trump received is completely consistent with national polling, general economic sentiments, and Trump’s own past poll performance. There is simply no reason other than cope to hang onto the idea that Trump cheated his way to this win.

Seriously. How tone-deaf do you have to be? It’s condescending and treats people like children.

The inflation is actually something that could have been addressed with the proper messaging. They could have said, during the heart of it, “yes, I know inflation is bad. And we’re doing everything we can to fight it. But realize that this is happening because of the stimulus efforts we made during the pandemic. We printed a bunch of money and used that to keep everyone afloat while everything shut down. The alternative was that we would face a wave of defaults, foreclosures, and evictions not seen since the 1930s. We avoided that economic disaster. But in turn we have some higher prices now. We will be doing everything we can to crack down on any corporate profiteering…” And then they could have proceeded to make public examples of any company that engaged in price-gouging. They could have just flat-out told the American people, “sorry, but we’re going to have some higher prices. We are not gods, and this is the only tool in our toolkit we have for dealing with something the magnitude of what we faced in the pandemic.” If they had done that, just laid it out all honestly and on the table, I think they would have won this election.

Instead they just papered over it. First inflation was “transitory.” Then they just repeated “inflation adjusted wages” until they were blue in the face. Inflation numbers don’t really reflect the lived experience of most people. I recall getting shouted down several times on r/economics for daring to point out the flaws in how we measure inflation, how different groups experienced different inflation rates, and how the methadologies really have been hacked over the decades to keep rates low.

The blame still stops at the leading Democrats.

Consider this. How could so many people vote for someone who is such a clear threat to democracy?

Simple. Because despite everything they said, his opponents never actually treated him as a threat to democracy.

Biden appointed a Republican to run the Department of Justice, and that Republican sat on his hands, refusing to do any investigation of Trump until he was forced to do so by House investigative committees. It took TWO YEARS before an investigation even began. This delay allowed Trump to eventually run out the clock.

Trump should have been in chains on the day Biden took office. He should have faced trial in a military tribunal. Any attempt by SCOTUS to protect him should have been declared “a coup from the bench” and seen those justices charged as accomplices after the fact.

THAT is how you need to handle an actual threat to democracy. Trump should have been put on trial, through whatever means necessary. Hell, ideally he should have received a capital sentence for his crimes against the republic. He betrayed his country. He is guilty of treason. The man should have hanged for his crimes.

But that wasn’t how Biden treated it. Trump was an EPOCHAL THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, but not enough to risk angering conservative white voters in suburban Philadelphia. He was THE NEXT INCARNATION OF HITLER, but not so Hitlerian as to justify any kind of dubious legal maneuvers that a fascist like Trump would have no problem pulling off.

Biden and co have been shouting that Trump is a threat do democracy for the better part of a decade at this point. But they never actually treated him like one. Actions speak louder than words. Democrats said Trump was a threat to democracy, but they never actually treated him like one. The Democrats, through their actions, made it clear that they didn’t think Trump was a real threat to democracy, so the voters acted accordingly.

If Democrats were actually serious about the threat, Trump would have been tried by military tribunal, sentenced, and been locked away or put in the ground two years ago.

It’s not weird if you realize that we’re no longer in the era of big turnout being synonymous with Democratic win. And rallies are a poor indicator of voter sentiment. How many rallies for Kamala did you personally go to? Rallies are a vestigial remnant from another political era, when people primarily heard about candidates from local in-person gatherings. Yes, Kamala was able to get better rally turnout this time around than Trump, but rally-goers are a weird political rounding error. It just turns out that Kamala’s weirdos were a bit more fired up this time around than Trump’s weirdos.

We just came out of an era of inflation that America hasn’t seen in decades. More people are rent-burdened than ever before, and the amount of people accessing foodbanks is higher than it has been in generations. Liberals papered over this harsh reality with wonky discussions of median inflation-adjusted wages, and they shouted down any critique of how limited main inflation figures actually are at measuring economic well-being. Or worse, they pointed at the stock market. Democrats have also held the White House for 12 of the last 16 years.

Globally, centrist neoliberal parties like the Democrats have been eviscerated in nation after nation, election after election. The neoliberal economic model has failed to deliver the widespread prosperity it promised, and the inequality it has enabled has reached crushing levels. People are demanding change, and currently, they can only find that change, any change really, on the part of right-wing populists like Trump. Neoliberals are genetically incapable of standing up to the wealthy and powerful corporate interests.

Finally, while Trump is a fascist, it was incredibly difficult for voters to take that claim seriously. You can point out that he tried to overthrow the government. But then the average voter will just ask you, “well why isn’t he in prison?” Biden put a Republican, Merrick Garland, in charge of his DOJ. And Garland sat on any investigation or indictment of Trump for two years, allowing Trump to run out the clock. Garland made it impossible for Democrats to effectively run on the “Trump is a fascist” line, simply because the Biden administration didn’t treat him as a threat to democracy. He should have been arrested and sent off to face a military tribunal the day Biden was sworn in. But because Biden didn’t treat him as a serious threat, the voters didn’t consider him a serious threat either.

In short, there are plenty of reasons why Trump won and Kamala lost, and they have nothing to do with voter fraud. Kamala offered no real solutions to struggling Americans. Trump has a simple, if monstrous, solution that actually WILL help people with rental costs. He’s promising to deport 20 million people and thus free up housing supply. It’s a monstrous and cruel solution, but it is at least a short-term solution. Yes, Trump absolutely meets any standard textbook definition of a fascist, but Kamala was not able to win on that. If your party is in power, you cannot run arguing your opponent is a threat to democracy. As if they are, the voters will ask why you haven’t put them behind bars already.

What people miss about Fascism is that it actually does, at least in the short term, help working-class people. If Trump manages to actually deport 20 million illegal immigrants? That will, in the short term, actually lower the cost of rent. Longer term, you have to start having conversations about the supply of housing and the labor to build and maintain that housing. But in the short term, kicking 5-10% of the population out of the country will actually improve the budgets of millions of rent-burdened households. As long as you personally aren’t on the right’s current extermination list, you actually benefit from conservative crimes against humanity.

People are hurting. The amounts of people rent-burdened and accessing food banks are at levels not seen in generations. And the Democrats offered NOTHING of substance to help these people. Kamala offered grants to help cities amend their zoning codes…which might bear fruit 20 years from now. Kamala offered first-time homeowner assistance, but it was a neo-liberals wet dream of a policy, filled with provisos and qualifiers to make sure only just the most-deserving people qualify. She should have been out there campaigning for a huge social housing project - direct federal construction of millions of homes, coupled with a jobs-training program to quickly train thousands of new high school graduates how to be framers, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.

She should have also come down like the wrath of god upon landlords. She was literally running against a slimy and corrupt landlord, yet she never once made that a center focus of her campaign. She should have been promising to lock up and throw away the key of any landlord, big or small, that used software like realpage. She shouldn’t have had a stump speech where she didn’t call for the complete breakup of Walmart and Amazon.

Those were things she actually could have done to tell people she was actually going to do something about just one issue, the cost of housing. But of course that didn’t happen.

You’re getting into conspiracy theory here. Trump did better than expected everywhere. Blue states. Red States. Blue cities. Red cities. Didn’t matter. There was a shift almost everywhere. And this is across a nation that uses radically different voting machines, forms of voting, voting machine providers, etc. It doesn’t make sense that the could all be rigged so perfectly. It’s insanity.

Yes, you can count “just in case,” but that way lies madness.

I voted for Harris. But in the first-past-the-post system, all that matters for a party is victory. That is how you judge the success of party officials. There is a whole class of extremely well-paid Democratic party officials whose ENTIRE JOB is to figure out how to select a candidate and sell them to the American people. That is literally their entire job.

The average voters is low-information, doesn’t pay attention, and assumes both sides frequently lie. (And they’re not wrong about the lying.) You can truthfully call the other side fascist, but the other side will simply say you’re the fascist, and low-information voters can’t tell the difference.

Voters have always been low-information. This isn’t anything new. The entire reason we have primaries is that it forces candidates to actually try their hand at mass appeal and to take the temperature of the electorate. Democratic leaders kept Biden in far too long, til it was too late to hold a proper primary.

You can blame it on those who don’t vote, but the truth is that most people pay attention to politics only tangentially. If you, as a political operator, didn’t find a way to reach these voters, you have failed.

Does the blame ultimately fall on those who didn’t vote for Biden? Sure. But the same is true of those who didn’t vote for Walter Mondale. It doesn’t mean Harris isn’t just as big a failure as Mondale.

I dunno. I find the word “decadence” ridiculous. It’s flexible to the point of uselessness. People refer to the “decadence” of the Romans to mean everything from their extreme wealth gap to the decline of citizens soldiers. Hell, half the time people use “decadence” just as a way of disguising that they’re simply blaming the fall of Rome in the existence of gay people.

That’s a clear bad-faith interpretation of what I posted. Try improving your reading comprehension skills.

And look where that type of thinking has got us. Democrats don’t run on any meaningful bold policy positions, as there’s always some needling centrist saying why this or that will never be politically viable.

Trump doesn’t run this way. Deporting 20 million people has all sorts of practical, legal, fiscal, and political issues with it. No rational or sane professional political consultant would say that it’s a winning strategy. Yet, time and time again, Trump proves that things that all the political consultants and experts would be political suicide, are in fact anything but.

Democrats give up before the fight even begins. They accept Republican framing and Republican ideas on what is politically possible. They run as Republican-lite, and they lose again and again because of this.

And their centrist wing managed to completely kneecap it. The same centrist wing that ran Kamala’s campaign.

How has US fossil fuel production been cut back AT ALL from any Biden or Harris policy?

Yes, I know you can blame it on Manchin. The problem is that there’s always a Manchin. The Democrats take turns being the sacrificial lamb, and they can always find some conservative Dem to kneecap any serious Democratic proposal.

Voters don’t give two shits about what your party introduces. Parties introduce all sorts of policies they have zero intention of passing for easy political points all the time.