5 ms·

Don't rule out Harris' internal polling just being bad and the public polling was superior. We're looking at a team whos message was "our opponent is a racist,

by roenxi 2y ago

Don't rule out Harris' internal polling just being bad and the public polling was superior. We're looking at a team whos message was "our opponent is a racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler" and then saw him gain margin which is quite remarkable. What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing something wrong. If the team managed that I wouldn't assume their pollsters were a lone beacon of competence. It seems quite plausible they hired bad pollsters and their internal data was off.

kubb 2y ago
What they did wrong was picking the candidate - she wasn’t popular. It wasn’t the time to try this kind of candidate, but they did it because of their own priorities. It’s OK, they won’t learn. Democrats need to start nominating famous actors and influencers.
- ReptileMan 2y ago
  They had all of Hollywood this year and quite a lot of nonpolitcal content creators came out for Harris in the last days.
  - cwillu 2y ago
    Having hollywood endorse a candidate is not the same as having hollywood be a candidate.
    - ReptileMan 2y ago
      And who is the mythical hollywood figure untainted by the culture war that could pull voters from the other side. The only thing you have to do with any hollywood celebrity to thank their presidential campaign is just post screenshots of their Covid and BLM tweets. And if they don't have stupid Covid and BLM tweets then they will have antisemitic ones.
      - DrFalkyn 2y ago
        Bill Maher
    - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
      Your point restated, nobody cares about endorsements.
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  Michael Bloomberg already tried the "hey, I'm like that guy but without the wrong think" xerox strategy and it didn't go well. Mark Cuban has toyed with it too but keeps getting cold feet, maybe due to lack of confidence or maybe due to analysis that shows being Them-Lite rarely works. Trump's reality tv show is not a major part of what got him elected but if someone wants to fund and convince Mark Cuban to try a doppelganger campaign, a fool and his money are soon parted. Cuban seems to know better than to try with his own fortune.
  - kubb 2y ago
    If Cuban ran against Kamala he wouldn’t even have to campaign.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    Cuban would have done much better against Trump. Any white southern male would have but Cuban might have pulled in Texas.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Their mistake was much more basic than that. They kept assuming that they could re-run Biden until it was too late for a switch to work. When they did decide to switch, it had to be Harris, because she was the only one who could legitimately claim to use Biden's election funds, and they didn't have time to raise money for anyone else. From there, they didn't fix the other mistake - the one Democrats have been making for at least a decade. The Democrats' natural constituency is the working class. They can't win without it. But much of the working class is rather socially conservative. The Democrats have spent the last decade telling working class people that if they, the working class, don't think gay marriage is a good idea, or don't think trans people belong on womens' sports teams and in womens' restrooms, or aren't comfortable with abortion, then they are moral lepers and their entire culture needs to be completely eradicated. Well, the natural result is that at least some of those people are going to flip you the bird and vote for the other guy. Democrats wonder "how could people be so stupid?" I ask, "How could you be so stupid? What did you think was going to happen?"
  - adastra22 2y ago
    They didn't "have" to run anybody. They could've, and should've gone with someone else. Everyone knew when Harris was selected that the Democrats had lost. The DNC tried to turn that sentiment around, but they started from a losing position and never recovered. There were alternatives...
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > don't think gay marriage is a good idea That's the culture war of a decade ago: Obergefell v Hodges was in 2015.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      And Roe v Wade was in 1973. That that war didn't end then, though.
  - kubb 2y ago
    The gay and trans thing was a wedge issue pushed by Republicans, because they saw that it worked, and the only way Dems could have appeased the riled up masses would be to straight up start oppressing LGBT people. I don't hold it against them that they didn't budge on this one. Beating up on a minority for political points is morally repugnant, and the whole appeal of Democrats is that they have some kind of integrity. The "moral lepers" thing feels to me like a distortion of reality. The actual Democratic politicians generally didn't engage in denigrating their base. Maybe you mean people on the disgusting website.
- rurp 2y ago
  This pretty much covers it. Harris ran a terrible campaign in 2020 and was never popular. Biden picked her anyway, against his better judgement, because that was what the Left wanted and he was trying to appease them. His disastrous decision to run again for so long left the party with no other options. Harris tried to correct some of her past mistakes and did better this time around but she should have never been in that position to begin with. Most of the blame should go to Biden and the activists who want to self-immolate the party on the altar of tokenism.
lotsofpulp 2y ago
>What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing something wrong. Perhaps there is clearly something wrong with the voters to opt for a > racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler
- roenxi 2y ago
  Well sure, but if that is the attitude they're not going to bother hiring good pollsters. Pollsters are going to do what, come back and explain that the Devil himself is outpolling your campaign. Now what? They were already catastrophising as hard as they could and the entire English speaking world knows how the US Dems feel about Trump. A majority (although admittedly a slim one) of voters just don't believe them. Good pollsters would have been a waste of money in that environment and I'm sure the Harris campaign was judiciously watching their budget.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    What's surprising to me is how many ex government employees they're able to find who voted for Trump and just didn't think they would get downsized because they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. I think it's interesting that Trump consistently gets the benefit of the doubt even in cases where the people he puts in positions of power pretty clearly intended to demoralize people by firing them.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh... > If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." This quote doesn’t apply just to white men, or even just men.
- nosianu 2y ago
  Riiiight.... https://youtu.be/eVddGSTjEd0?t=51 https://youtu.be/eVddGSTjEd0?t=51 Or maybe the explanation is that everybody behaved "responsibly" but they never got the changes they wanted, and chances for anything different looked more and more bleak. Why do you treat this like a single event? It is not. Lots of prior experiences fed into this. For example, as bad as this is for us (I'm German, but I lived many years in the US once), for Europe I think it is good what is happening. Now we are forced to move and mature. Crisis are not always bad. The personalities involved this time make it especially hard to look at the whole thing calmly. I admit I have a harder time seeing what the US may get out of this except for the shakeup as a general chance. However, too much is concentrated on the personalities, and, like you did, on blaming everybody. How about Democrats look what they did wrong? I mean, other than reverting to "we didn't think the voters would be so stupid", in which case I have little hope for them to get anything positive out of this.
pjc50 2y ago
> What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? Biden should have pulled out a lot sooner. When? At least a year before the election. But you can easily make arguments for earlier and earlier all the way back to having been too old to run for President in the first place, despite having had a really good term. Also Harris needs to fire her consultants, who were still trying to play "fair" in an unfair fight and pulled back on the one attack line which was working: that Republicans are "weird". Things are unlikely to improve until voters start primarying out anyone still trying to do bipartisan equivocation.
- xienze 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - pjc50 2y ago
    And what's wrong with those images?
    - xienze 2y ago
      Nothing, you're right. It's JD Vance who's weird, not the man wearing dresses that he steals from airplane luggage.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Two people can be weird for different reasons. Me, I can see why the label "weird" would apply to Brinton therefore the Democrats would have a hard time using that word to attack Republicans… except, of course, for the fact that Brinton was fired in 2022. And if you're going to bring up arrests, then you have to wonder about the mind of a man who frames his own arrest warrant mug shot, on charges of election interference, on the wall just outside the Oval Office: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump#/media/File:Donald_Trump's_mug_shot_hangs_in_the_White_House.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump#/medi...
    - gnarlynarwhal42 2y ago

by roenxi 2y ago

kubb 2y ago

What they did wrong was picking the candidate - she wasn’t popular. It wasn’t the time to try this kind of candidate, but they did it because of their own priorities. It’s OK, they won’t learn. Democrats need to start nominating famous actors and influencers.

ReptileMan 2y ago
They had all of Hollywood this year and quite a lot of nonpolitcal content creators came out for Harris in the last days.
- cwillu 2y ago
  Having hollywood endorse a candidate is not the same as having hollywood be a candidate.
  - ReptileMan 2y ago
    And who is the mythical hollywood figure untainted by the culture war that could pull voters from the other side. The only thing you have to do with any hollywood celebrity to thank their presidential campaign is just post screenshots of their Covid and BLM tweets. And if they don't have stupid Covid and BLM tweets then they will have antisemitic ones.
    - DrFalkyn 2y ago
      Bill Maher
  - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
    Your point restated, nobody cares about endorsements.
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
Michael Bloomberg already tried the "hey, I'm like that guy but without the wrong think" xerox strategy and it didn't go well. Mark Cuban has toyed with it too but keeps getting cold feet, maybe due to lack of confidence or maybe due to analysis that shows being Them-Lite rarely works. Trump's reality tv show is not a major part of what got him elected but if someone wants to fund and convince Mark Cuban to try a doppelganger campaign, a fool and his money are soon parted. Cuban seems to know better than to try with his own fortune.
- kubb 2y ago
  If Cuban ran against Kamala he wouldn’t even have to campaign.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  Cuban would have done much better against Trump. Any white southern male would have but Cuban might have pulled in Texas.
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
Their mistake was much more basic than that. They kept assuming that they could re-run Biden until it was too late for a switch to work. When they did decide to switch, it had to be Harris, because she was the only one who could legitimately claim to use Biden's election funds, and they didn't have time to raise money for anyone else. From there, they didn't fix the other mistake - the one Democrats have been making for at least a decade. The Democrats' natural constituency is the working class. They can't win without it. But much of the working class is rather socially conservative. The Democrats have spent the last decade telling working class people that if they, the working class, don't think gay marriage is a good idea, or don't think trans people belong on womens' sports teams and in womens' restrooms, or aren't comfortable with abortion, then they are moral lepers and their entire culture needs to be completely eradicated. Well, the natural result is that at least some of those people are going to flip you the bird and vote for the other guy. Democrats wonder "how could people be so stupid?" I ask, "How could you be so stupid? What did you think was going to happen?"
- adastra22 2y ago
  They didn't "have" to run anybody. They could've, and should've gone with someone else. Everyone knew when Harris was selected that the Democrats had lost. The DNC tried to turn that sentiment around, but they started from a losing position and never recovered. There were alternatives...
- pjc50 2y ago
  > don't think gay marriage is a good idea That's the culture war of a decade ago: Obergefell v Hodges was in 2015.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    And Roe v Wade was in 1973. That that war didn't end then, though.
- kubb 2y ago
  The gay and trans thing was a wedge issue pushed by Republicans, because they saw that it worked, and the only way Dems could have appeased the riled up masses would be to straight up start oppressing LGBT people. I don't hold it against them that they didn't budge on this one. Beating up on a minority for political points is morally repugnant, and the whole appeal of Democrats is that they have some kind of integrity. The "moral lepers" thing feels to me like a distortion of reality. The actual Democratic politicians generally didn't engage in denigrating their base. Maybe you mean people on the disgusting website.
rurp 2y ago
This pretty much covers it. Harris ran a terrible campaign in 2020 and was never popular. Biden picked her anyway, against his better judgement, because that was what the Left wanted and he was trying to appease them. His disastrous decision to run again for so long left the party with no other options. Harris tried to correct some of her past mistakes and did better this time around but she should have never been in that position to begin with. Most of the blame should go to Biden and the activists who want to self-immolate the party on the altar of tokenism.

lotsofpulp 2y ago

>What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing something wrong. Perhaps there is clearly something wrong with the voters to opt for a > racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler

roenxi 2y ago
Well sure, but if that is the attitude they're not going to bother hiring good pollsters. Pollsters are going to do what, come back and explain that the Devil himself is outpolling your campaign. Now what? They were already catastrophising as hard as they could and the entire English speaking world knows how the US Dems feel about Trump. A majority (although admittedly a slim one) of voters just don't believe them. Good pollsters would have been a waste of money in that environment and I'm sure the Harris campaign was judiciously watching their budget.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  What's surprising to me is how many ex government employees they're able to find who voted for Trump and just didn't think they would get downsized because they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. I think it's interesting that Trump consistently gets the benefit of the doubt even in cases where the people he puts in positions of power pretty clearly intended to demoralize people by firing them.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh... > If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." This quote doesn’t apply just to white men, or even just men.
nosianu 2y ago
Riiiight.... https://youtu.be/eVddGSTjEd0?t=51 https://youtu.be/eVddGSTjEd0?t=51 Or maybe the explanation is that everybody behaved "responsibly" but they never got the changes they wanted, and chances for anything different looked more and more bleak. Why do you treat this like a single event? It is not. Lots of prior experiences fed into this. For example, as bad as this is for us (I'm German, but I lived many years in the US once), for Europe I think it is good what is happening. Now we are forced to move and mature. Crisis are not always bad. The personalities involved this time make it especially hard to look at the whole thing calmly. I admit I have a harder time seeing what the US may get out of this except for the shakeup as a general chance. However, too much is concentrated on the personalities, and, like you did, on blaming everybody. How about Democrats look what they did wrong? I mean, other than reverting to "we didn't think the voters would be so stupid", in which case I have little hope for them to get anything positive out of this.

pjc50 2y ago

> What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? Biden should have pulled out a lot sooner. When? At least a year before the election. But you can easily make arguments for earlier and earlier all the way back to having been too old to run for President in the first place, despite having had a really good term. Also Harris needs to fire her consultants, who were still trying to play "fair" in an unfair fight and pulled back on the one attack line which was working: that Republicans are "weird". Things are unlikely to improve until voters start primarying out anyone still trying to do bipartisan equivocation.

xienze 2y ago
[flagged]
- pjc50 2y ago
  And what's wrong with those images?
  - xienze 2y ago
    Nothing, you're right. It's JD Vance who's weird, not the man wearing dresses that he steals from airplane luggage.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Two people can be weird for different reasons. Me, I can see why the label "weird" would apply to Brinton therefore the Democrats would have a hard time using that word to attack Republicans… except, of course, for the fact that Brinton was fired in 2022. And if you're going to bring up arrests, then you have to wonder about the mind of a man who frames his own arrest warrant mug shot, on charges of election interference, on the wall just outside the Oval Office: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump#/media/File:Donald_Trump's_mug_shot_hangs_in_the_White_House.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump#/medi...
  - gnarlynarwhal42 2y ago