I think the title of the article is way too tame, but damn it's terrifying
I know we're months away still, but one thing I find frustrating is that you just don't see political ads from the democrats that simply show clips of these conferences and interviews. The GOP has been running this ad in Michigan where they show Harris saying "The border is secure" super imposed over images of migrants coming in by the dozens. It's highly effective. The same should be cakewalk for the dems where you can literally just show Trump yelling about "ending voting" or "being a dictator on day 1" or Vance saying that women belong at home (never mind the fact that his very own wife is a successful lawyer--yet more evidence that he actually believes in nothing). Democrats have a strong history of running the nice campaign under the assumption that people will see through the moron they're running against. But that strategy collapsed in 2000, 2004, and 2016. I don't know why they're so bad at elections, but they need to wake the fuck up and fast. As an aside I think it's fairly interesting that pro-family policies have been gaining traction among the GOP. If they would wake up and realize there's no going back to 1950, there might be some room for progress and compromise there. Not at all hopeful about that, but it seems like there's some convergence on both side of the aisle that the status quo sucks. Though my personal belief is that the only pro family policy that could ever do anything to actually encourage families is to fix the housing crisis. To me that is the single biggest domestic policy issue out there and it gets virtually no play.
I’ll be honest in saying that the fundamental problem is that democrats don’t understand power. They have this idea that you come up with policies and that people will thus hand them power. Republicans understand that power is the first order of business. If you don’t take power, your policies don’t matter. You want to help people? Cute. You aren’t even trying to take power, and when you do, you don’t use it to consolidate your power, you pretty much give it away. Case in point was RBG. She knew it wasn’t a given that there would be a democrat in power when she retired, she didn’t quit when there was one. And thus Trump got a free SCOTUS pick. When it’s the GOP, they only resign when their party will pick their successor.
The problem is not their understanding of power, the problem is their source of power. Politicians derive power from consensus - if the party agrees with you, you get to do what you want. Democrats/liberals require that your values align with their values, your policy positions align with their policy positions, your morals align with their morals. Democrats have a long and laborious purity test that every politician must pass whenever the polity feels like testing, and the democratic polity will test whenever anything happens. Republicans/conservatives, on the other hand, assign their values, policy positions and morals to whoever is leading the party. This worked for the Democrats when they were the party of labor. It's fucked 'em pretty hard since becoming the party of globalist investment treaties. The Republicans are in disarray whenever they can't find a charismatic leader - it's gonna be interesting if Trump has a stroke and they become the party of JD Vance.
I think that's definitely a problem- another example: they won't even consider packing the courts. Its so frustrating rooting for a party who's platform is built on not being willing to get things done. For this election though, I think the bigger problem was that they ran two pathetic candidates with a pathetic message and a pathetic campaign
Looking back at it? I think their only hope would have been going "ohhhh shit inflation is in Carter territory" instead of "fuck yeah our inflation is lower than Germany's" and then come up with a way to bring prices down. I don't think they had a prayer of that. The Biden administration was manipulating the strategic petroleum reserve like crazy and that sorta worked but without price controls there was nothing they could have done. Carter ate shit because Nixon killed Bretton Woods and inflation went bugshit. Volcker dealt with it by jacking the shit out of interest rates which was the objectively right thing to do but also heinously unpopular and what we got was a smarmy, fatuous oaf most famous for shilling GE, starring opposite a chimp and ratting out his friends to McCarthy. That wasn't much fun either, nostalgia be damned.
I still think a democrat without strong ties to the Biden admin and running on a somewhat econimically leftish platform like Obama did would have worked out. Kamala was republican-lite. There's no reason to vote for her instead of the real one. Anyone who was upset at the state of thing and wanted change was offended by her ties to the Biden admin and her "plan" being essentially nothing, her base was offended by her hard shift right, no republican would touch her with a 50 foot pole. I genuinely don't know who they were possibly trying to appeal to.
Do you still feel this way now? Forget legacy media. looking at instagram, tiktok and youtube, the Harris campaign has been EXTREMELY active and MUCH MORE hands on and willing to get 'nasty' than I've ever seen democrats. Strong defenses of Walz's military record, the 'weird' attack seems MASSIVELY effective based on the conservatives immediate and strong reaction to it. If we are being positive, this is a post legacy media election. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, PBS, all irrelevant except as citations being quoted to people who don't read them anyway.
I have zero social media exposure besides whatever gets so much attention that they cover it in a major newspaper ("brat", e.g.), so honestly I have no idea. I guess I'm basically a dodo at this point. My species is not long for this world, and I'll be the first to admit I'm hopelessly out of touch.