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It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, i

It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. People love getting tangled on social issues as it’s the most provocative. This conception that most people actually care about rational policies is false and has been false for at least the past decade.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Where exactly did you get the idea that Kamala was running on this? Where was she advocating for, say, Medicare for all? Or fighting vested interests by running on campaign finance reform, to get money out of politics? She was running on an abstract, classical centrist non-program of "we've done great under Biden and we're going to keep doing the same". That is the exact opposite of what GP was suggesting.
- knowknow 2y ago
  The comment is saying that liberal politicians should be >prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds. Nothing about what you mentioned at all. Nor did I ever claim Kamala ran on what you said. The fact that you and the commenter have different ideas of what rational policies are and assume politicians should be running on that platform is part of the bias. You assume that most people want the same thing as you but most people don’t. The majority actually enjoy social issues.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    They were was also saying: > Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations So I interpreted the first part in a more revolutionary direction, though you may be right that they were thinking a different direction than I was.
- anon7000 2y ago
  She wasn’t running on an abstract program, people just weren’t paying fucking attention. For just one example: https://www.kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_Book_Economic-Opportunity.pdf https://www.kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Poli...
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    That's still pretty abstract. "Everyone wins" is not a concrete proposal. Also, while I'm not one, I think some American voters noticed that the problems that appeared (or appeared to appear) 2020-2024 happened while she was the VP.
eddythompson80 2y ago
> This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. It's what Obama ran on, and it worked for him. The fact that he achieved very little there is a different issue. Kamala's 2-month long campaign wasn't very convincing.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with. Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    The lunatic fringe is generally randos on social media, not people of authority in the Democratic party. Kamala wasn't in a position to kick them to the curb.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      No excuse. It’s results that matter, not process. Defining who she was would have meant being proactive and saying something like “trans folks should be able to use the bathroom but sports leagues can decide who plays”
    - eddythompson80 2y ago
      That doesn't seem to be the attitude when the lunatic fringe on the Republican side occupy social media. I understand why politicians (both democrats and republicans) don't want to denounce any such fringe groups that are cheering for them. Seems to work better for republicans than democrats though
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        It does. Why that is is a story that has many different parts. One of them is that there really is an infrastructure to communicate what the Republican party stands for that which is connected to the party on an everyday basis. The absence of the Democratic party that potential supporters are complaining about right now is structural. Baudrillard might say "The Democratic Party doesn't exist" Secondly the left has to work a lot harder for the right because the left's slogan is "another world is possible" which is a constructive project (you have to prove it, you have to build it) and the right's slogan is "there is no alternative". It's not fair but it's the way it is. The lunatic fringe of the left also has envy for the lunatic fringe of the right. If somebody says "there are only two genders" they don't really need to justify it or explain it any more than saying that my dad believed that and his mom believed that and... People who say the opposite today expect to be to be a fait accompli and manifestly true because they said it and who could dare disagree with them and punish anyone who says otherwise but that's just a position that would be easy for their enemies to defend but impossible for them -- but they circle their wagons and form some tiny world in which it is true. The attack on JK Rowling for instance shows that they've got Kiwi Farms envy, that they think the highest form of activism is the methods of their enemies. Thus it's not so clear that the lunatic left is really left at all, it's certainly not "inclusive".
TexanFeller 2y ago
Because people have memory that lasts longer than a goldfish’s. People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. They remember Kamala’s fringe and cringe positions and statements from her California and 2019 campaigns and don’t believe she’s a proud gun owning moderate that just wants to make government work for us. Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader. I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.) People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies. The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump. Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.
- kashunstva 2y ago
  > she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
Your assumptions are wrong. Kamala lost because of inflation during the Biden admin and some related missteps. Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her. Also you're misreading my point, campaigning on these things isn't a panacea, but delivering on them just might be.
- ReptileMan 2y ago
  > Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her. She had less charisma than Hilary. Probably even less than Al Gore or Zuckeberg before his new software update was installed. And she had a history of bending the knee to the progressives.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    … and donors too. Mainstream Democrats are seen as disingenuous in that they direct cheap talk at progressives but somehow beat Republicans at the fundraising game almost every time.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - leptons 2y ago
      >"Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law." So dumb.. she has a degree in law and was a very successful prosecutor. >"Harris was elected attorney general of California in 2010, becoming the first woman, African American, and South Asian American to hold the office in the state's history.[56] She took office on January 3, 2011, and was reelected in 2014.[57] She served until resigning on January 3, 2017, to take her seat in the United States Senate." Doesn't sound dumb at all. Your comment is sounding pretty dumb though.
      - rayiner 2y ago
        Dan Quayle also had a law degree, but he was also dumb. And he passed the bar the first try, unlike Harris.
xboxnolifes 2y ago
Kamala was too little too late. No candidate was going to work for democrats coming into the presidential race so close to the election.
- Loughla 2y ago
  Combined with more of the same from the Democrats where they pick the candidate and preordain them. These are the things that tanked her chances. Hillary wasn't super popular, but what really killed her was being forced on us from the political Democratic establishment. Biden only won because Trump is such a turd for many. It's been since Obama that the Democrats actually had a candidate that people liked. I do not understand this strategy.
  - banannaise 2y ago
    They are more interested in personally retaining power over the Democratic party than they are in winning elections. Republicans winning is a better outcome for them than progressives unseating them in the party.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CivBase 2y ago
Is that what she ran on? My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" and something vague about protecting women's rights. It's almost like you need more than a couple months to run a serious presidential campaign. Despite being the VP for 4 years, most people didn't know what to expect from her. Almost nobody was enthusiastic about her and she had no real momentum. That's obviously what killed her campaign.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you? There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign. Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.
  - CivBase 2y ago
    > Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you? I know her actual platform was more detailed than that, but it doesn't matter what I know. The point is it was not communicated effectively. Go out on the streets and ask the common folk what her platform was. Aside from "I don't know", the answers you'll get will be all over the place - mostly just generic DNC talking points. The average liberal/moderate/independent voter was not excited about Harris. Do you honestly think most voters are researching candidates? Honestly? Of course they aren't. They expect it to be spoon fed to them. > There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign. Good luck insisting voters should RTFM. Professionals don't even RTFM most of the time. > Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit. Trump lost in 2020, so I'm not sure why this is relevant. But regardless his platform was the same as it was in 2016 and 2024 - "Make America great again," "drain the swamp," these are household phrases. And just as Trump's platform resonated better with voters in 2016 and 2024, Biden's "return to normalcy" platform resonated in 2020 amidst the pandemic. There's more to these platforms than a catchy slogan, but that's the part people remember. It's effective marketing. Look man, I want the Democrats to put forth a strong candidate and an effective campaign but this whole "blaming the voter" thing is not going to get them there. It's just going to continue alienating the people they need most.

tsimionescu 2y ago

Where exactly did you get the idea that Kamala was running on this? Where was she advocating for, say, Medicare for all? Or fighting vested interests by running on campaign finance reform, to get money out of politics? She was running on an abstract, classical centrist non-program of "we've done great under Biden and we're going to keep doing the same". That is the exact opposite of what GP was suggesting.

knowknow 2y ago
The comment is saying that liberal politicians should be >prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds. Nothing about what you mentioned at all. Nor did I ever claim Kamala ran on what you said. The fact that you and the commenter have different ideas of what rational policies are and assume politicians should be running on that platform is part of the bias. You assume that most people want the same thing as you but most people don’t. The majority actually enjoy social issues.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  They were was also saying: > Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations So I interpreted the first part in a more revolutionary direction, though you may be right that they were thinking a different direction than I was.
anon7000 2y ago
She wasn’t running on an abstract program, people just weren’t paying fucking attention. For just one example: https://www.kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_Book_Economic-Opportunity.pdf https://www.kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Poli...
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  That's still pretty abstract. "Everyone wins" is not a concrete proposal. Also, while I'm not one, I think some American voters noticed that the problems that appeared (or appeared to appear) 2020-2024 happened while she was the VP.

eddythompson80 2y ago

> This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. It's what Obama ran on, and it worked for him. The fact that he achieved very little there is a different issue. Kamala's 2-month long campaign wasn't very convincing.

PaulHoule 2y ago
The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with. Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  The lunatic fringe is generally randos on social media, not people of authority in the Democratic party. Kamala wasn't in a position to kick them to the curb.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    No excuse. It’s results that matter, not process. Defining who she was would have meant being proactive and saying something like “trans folks should be able to use the bathroom but sports leagues can decide who plays”
  - eddythompson80 2y ago
    That doesn't seem to be the attitude when the lunatic fringe on the Republican side occupy social media. I understand why politicians (both democrats and republicans) don't want to denounce any such fringe groups that are cheering for them. Seems to work better for republicans than democrats though
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      It does. Why that is is a story that has many different parts. One of them is that there really is an infrastructure to communicate what the Republican party stands for that which is connected to the party on an everyday basis. The absence of the Democratic party that potential supporters are complaining about right now is structural. Baudrillard might say "The Democratic Party doesn't exist" Secondly the left has to work a lot harder for the right because the left's slogan is "another world is possible" which is a constructive project (you have to prove it, you have to build it) and the right's slogan is "there is no alternative". It's not fair but it's the way it is. The lunatic fringe of the left also has envy for the lunatic fringe of the right. If somebody says "there are only two genders" they don't really need to justify it or explain it any more than saying that my dad believed that and his mom believed that and... People who say the opposite today expect to be to be a fait accompli and manifestly true because they said it and who could dare disagree with them and punish anyone who says otherwise but that's just a position that would be easy for their enemies to defend but impossible for them -- but they circle their wagons and form some tiny world in which it is true. The attack on JK Rowling for instance shows that they've got Kiwi Farms envy, that they think the highest form of activism is the methods of their enemies. Thus it's not so clear that the lunatic left is really left at all, it's certainly not "inclusive".

TexanFeller 2y ago

Because people have memory that lasts longer than a goldfish’s. People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. They remember Kamala’s fringe and cringe positions and statements from her California and 2019 campaigns and don’t believe she’s a proud gun owning moderate that just wants to make government work for us. Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.

pessimizer 2y ago
> Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader. I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.) People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies. The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump. Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.
kashunstva 2y ago
> she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

Your assumptions are wrong. Kamala lost because of inflation during the Biden admin and some related missteps. Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her. Also you're misreading my point, campaigning on these things isn't a panacea, but delivering on them just might be.

ReptileMan 2y ago
> Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her. She had less charisma than Hilary. Probably even less than Al Gore or Zuckeberg before his new software update was installed. And she had a history of bending the knee to the progressives.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  … and donors too. Mainstream Democrats are seen as disingenuous in that they direct cheap talk at progressives but somehow beat Republicans at the fundraising game almost every time.
- rayiner 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - leptons 2y ago
    >"Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law." So dumb.. she has a degree in law and was a very successful prosecutor. >"Harris was elected attorney general of California in 2010, becoming the first woman, African American, and South Asian American to hold the office in the state's history.[56] She took office on January 3, 2011, and was reelected in 2014.[57] She served until resigning on January 3, 2017, to take her seat in the United States Senate." Doesn't sound dumb at all. Your comment is sounding pretty dumb though.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      Dan Quayle also had a law degree, but he was also dumb. And he passed the bar the first try, unlike Harris.

xboxnolifes 2y ago

Kamala was too little too late. No candidate was going to work for democrats coming into the presidential race so close to the election.

Loughla 2y ago
Combined with more of the same from the Democrats where they pick the candidate and preordain them. These are the things that tanked her chances. Hillary wasn't super popular, but what really killed her was being forced on us from the political Democratic establishment. Biden only won because Trump is such a turd for many. It's been since Obama that the Democrats actually had a candidate that people liked. I do not understand this strategy.
- banannaise 2y ago
  They are more interested in personally retaining power over the Democratic party than they are in winning elections. Republicans winning is a better outcome for them than progressives unseating them in the party.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

CivBase 2y ago

Is that what she ran on? My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" and something vague about protecting women's rights. It's almost like you need more than a couple months to run a serious presidential campaign. Despite being the VP for 4 years, most people didn't know what to expect from her. Almost nobody was enthusiastic about her and she had no real momentum. That's obviously what killed her campaign.

mrguyorama 2y ago
Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you? There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign. Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.
- CivBase 2y ago
  > Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you? I know her actual platform was more detailed than that, but it doesn't matter what I know. The point is it was not communicated effectively. Go out on the streets and ask the common folk what her platform was. Aside from "I don't know", the answers you'll get will be all over the place - mostly just generic DNC talking points. The average liberal/moderate/independent voter was not excited about Harris. Do you honestly think most voters are researching candidates? Honestly? Of course they aren't. They expect it to be spoon fed to them. > There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign. Good luck insisting voters should RTFM. Professionals don't even RTFM most of the time. > Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit. Trump lost in 2020, so I'm not sure why this is relevant. But regardless his platform was the same as it was in 2016 and 2024 - "Make America great again," "drain the swamp," these are household phrases. And just as Trump's platform resonated better with voters in 2016 and 2024, Biden's "return to normalcy" platform resonated in 2020 amidst the pandemic. There's more to these platforms than a catchy slogan, but that's the part people remember. It's effective marketing. Look man, I want the Democrats to put forth a strong candidate and an effective campaign but this whole "blaming the voter" thing is not going to get them there. It's just going to continue alienating the people they need most.