Basically Dems were just out of touch with the most important part of their base until it was too late.

Which is their consistent problem every election when the prior Republican admin hasn’t made a catastrophic fuck-up.

You can’t run on the “we’re pro labor” platform and expect the working class to show up for you when your pro labor stance hasn’t put money directly into working class pockets since the 1970s or 1980s.

Where are the big public works programs? Where’s the massive government spending that employed millions? That’s why labor showed up for Democrats in the 1900s, when there were huge govt contracts that employed organized labor, and it’s no surprise at all that when Democrats abandoned those policies labor stopped being reliable supporters.

You want to run a successful campaign? Talk about the massive public spending that employed hundreds of thousands during your prior admin. Talk jobs. Talk improved standard of living. Talk taxing corporations to pay for those things and voters will hand you a landslide. Democrats are so afraid of taxing corporations to pay for social spending that directly recruits voters to their cause that they’re seen as corporate stooges. And honestly, they kinda are at this point.

And this is why the DNC will continue to run candidates who lose elections. When you lose a popularity contest you don’t say “well clearly everyone’s wrong” you ask what the other side did better.

Every politician you mentioned by name made an effort to reach out to the working class and be inclusive of them and tell them that their interests were a priority, that’s why they won. My point is that all of these unpopular candidates talked past the working class and ignored the reality faced by most people (work doesn’t pay enough and everything is too expensive) and essentially ran on an “I’m not the Republican” platform. They misidentified the core needs of their voters and failed to be electable.

The especially frustrating part of this is that we just did this same thing in 2016 and the democratic neoliberal committee appears to have learned absolutely nothing. We’re right back in the same pattern as 2016 where everyone’s looking to point fingers and blame some group for our current misfortune. Pro tip: stop doing that and start really trying to understand what went wrong and how the party platform can include more people and get them excited about a good candidate. It’s a popularity contest for crying out loud, run on popular issues.

🤞

Yes! This is it right here, this is how you grow the fediverse. Props to UoG for figuring this out early! Here’s to hoping that other universities catch on that providing Mastodon hosting to their employees and students has more value than offloading all of that discussion onto Twitter or Facebook where it can be shaped by a potentially hostile corporate owner.

Lemmy and Mastodon have an equal amount of shitposting and meme content in my experience

Lemmy, I like the simple post structure with all related commentary under the original submission.

Mastodon is fine for people who like it but it’s hard to follow the thread of replies as every reply is its own individual post.

I guess the twatter format makes sense for dashing off quick messages but I find it hard to follow and it’s difficult to find communities and topics of interest without also including a shit-ton of noise along with the signal.

These posts really miss the mark.

This election was a referendum on neoliberal business as usual for the top 15% at the working class’s expense. Every election from here on out is going to be exactly this until conditions improve for the bottom 85%. Until the DNC finally gets the message that they need to offer real material improvements to the working class without condescension they’re going to continue to run unpopular candidates who lose to awful Republicans that at least have the courtesy to lie to the working class in order to secure their votes.

Stop finding scapegoats and start really looking at what went wrong or we’re looking at 20y of faux-populist Republican administrations.

Yeah, our inflation metrics (mostly the CPI) have been juiced and jury rigged to hell and back so that on paper “inflation” remained perpetually low for 30y and capital wasn’t pressed to raise wages. This has been an ongoing issue since the 1980s but really, really, became a core issue in the last 15y as energy prices, healthcare and housing costs ballooned while wages stayed relatively low or fell.

The economic growth of the last 30y has almost entirely funnelled to the top 15% and while there are plenty of jobs available to everyday folks they’re almost exclusively McJobs or gig work that don’t pay enough to support living independently much less actually doing anything other than working and sleeping. So when Democrats talk about “the economy” they might as well just say “rich people’s money” instead because they don’t seem to understand the distinction between those two phrases.

You’d think Bernie’s widespread support from the working class and Trump’s win in 2016 would have clued them in that they’re missing something but they pointed the finger at literally everyone else (“Bernie bros,” “low information voters,” misogyny, every *ism under the sun) instead of asking where they went wrong in their candidate selection and messaging.

I don’t even think they have anyone who represents (or is even willing to act like they care about, even if they’re simply manipulating) a low income working person and it shows.

I’m sure we’ll see plenty of opinion and “think pieces” in the Atlantic and NYT pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat in the next couple of weeks, surely that’ll solve the problem.

Her performance on The View was absolutely, hilariously, abysmal. They asked her something like “what would you have done differently from Biden to grow the economy?” and she replied with a canned “We’re very proud of Bidenomics” and no further elaboration 🤷‍♂️

Like, yeah, sure, Bidenomics has been great for the top 20%, but what about everyone else who’s had to move back in with their parents? She demonstrated absolutely zero understanding of the economic reality for 4/5 of the population.

He rambled at great length about making America great again and bringing back jobs and Kamala told folks that nothing will change. If you’re struggling to understand why things went this way I’m not sure I can help.

At the very least Democrats probably should have told people they’d do something to help them instead of just assuming that people would intuit that over the long term Democrat economic policy would be more stable and provide better net growth.

People in the US are dumb as shit, you have to explain things to them and make them feel like you’re paying attention. This is something Democrats have utterly failed to do reliably since Clinton 1 or Obama and it’s why they lose elections. They’re quite literally out of touch and don’t realize it’s not the 70s or 90s when blue collar workers would reliably back them because they’d (relatively recently) supported the labor movement and life was, overall, pretty good for everyone. You can’t run on a policy of inclusion and civil rights for marginalized groups when the main voting group is struggling to make their own lives work.

Democrats would have benefited greatly from telling the public that they were going to do anything at all about 30+y of neoliberal policy that benefits Wall St at the expense of the bottom 80%. This election (and every election since Obama left office) was a referendum on business as usual neoliberal policy at the working class’s expense. You could get away with that in the 90s, but when the working class can’t earn enough to rent their own apartment or start a life they’ll vote for literally anything else, including a convicted rapist and con man.

No shit? The first Trump admin absolutely gutted the CDC and the FDA and red states suppressed any discussion of pandemic spread by either harassing or firing public health officials who dared to speak publicly. DeSantis sent a SWAT style raid team to one public health lady’s house at 3am because she wouldn’t shut up and fall in line. So yeah, no shit our public health apparatus isn’t functioning.

If you want to be terrified go look at the public health folks on Twitter try to track H5N1 spread. It’s way more virulent than COVID, sticks around in the air and on surfaces significantly longer and we’ve been effectively ignoring it as it spreads through much of our cow, chicken and pork farms. The CDC and Dept of agriculture are supposed to be on top of situations like this and they’re too scared to talk to the public for fear of being fired.

Never underestimate the obstruction from establishment Democrats at every level of government. We passed a bill authorizing statewide use of ranked preference voting in CA and our neoliberal democrat governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it. I generally support his policies but this one was a flat out “fuck you” to everyone alienated by the neoliberal business as usual party that runs our state.

This election, like every failed election effort since 2000, was a referendum on the democratic party platform: neoliberal business as usual for the top 15% sprinkled with “we’re not Republicans”

You don’t need a union to strike, you can self organize and just do it

200% markup doesn’t matter when you’re billing it straight to the client anyway 🍻

They are. The Republican playbook in every state is to slash education funding, make abortion and birth control as hard to access as possible and then wait 20-30y for a big poorly educated population to grow that they can control easily with media and the Jesus

They’ve done it more than once now

Whatever they can get their hands on, including your unique hardware identifiers