Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

Albeit with a smaller population than now, given that they’ve been steadily losing people in the last several years (Covid is partially to blame, but the increasing cost of living coupled with insurers pulling out due to wildfire activity isn’t helping).

@BlueYoshi
I’m not surprised on Prop 6.

Cause it’s dumb. And California is super dumb for being smart.

Meanwhile I live in Arizona.
I voted yes on Prop 139. Which is the Abortion amendment and it passed. So Arizona is going forward while California is going backward. That’s funny.

Meanwhile here in Ohio we rejected a measure that would end Gerrymandering. Would’ve replaced sitting officials with a bipartisan council of 15 or so citizens.

I want to say it’s because the intentionally ambiguous wording on the Yes and No votes meant to confuse, but I’unno man after this election in general I’m pretty sure it’s more because Ohio is conservative and therefore loves the boot.

Helps that Kari Lake remains a loser.

California is a neoliberal state with shades of progressive policies.

Since Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona flipped to red, what does the Dems need to do in order to win back those states?

Find a candidate with left-wing or progressive policies. The closest they have is Bernie Sanders, but he’s too old to run for president. Plus, he killed his chance of presidency when he claimed that he was a socialist. And Americans have an overwhelmingly negative view towards the word “socialism.”

@SleepySteve
Yep.

Kamala Harris, Sherrod Brown, and Collin Allred geared their campaigns toward the people mentioned in the second panel of that meme and lost. Most of the folks who ran left of Harris ran ahead of her and won. Case in point: Ruben Gallego.

You can’t say Harris “ran too far left” when she was running to the right from the moment she took Biden and Clinton’s advisers on board. Democrats stayed home en masses, allowing Trump to limp across the finish line.

Not only is there an appetite for progressivism, but the “median voter” wants an elected who will DO SOMETHING, make it apparent they’re DOING SOMETHING, and knock it off with all the empty platitudes and insistence on “bipartisanship.”

To the point where Second Thought only gets money from Patreon for talking about socialism in a not-negative light…

And in the midst of this national pattern of Democratic senators outperforming Harris, Bernie underperformed her. In Vermont.

I don’t think her platform was the issue. I think the fact that a lot of people didn’t hear it, for whatever reason, is the issue. But we also really need to stop acting like the Sanders route would somehow guarantee victory.

@Background Pony #27EF
They didn’t hear her because her messaging was mostly “We’ll change nothing”.

People want change, they want radical promises and miracle solutions, even if they’re bullshit. Bernie underperformed because he’s attached to the Dems’ campaign of continuance and “civility” that drowned his own out.

On a related note, dems have to stop campaigning on LGTBQ issues. Keep it in the program, but don’t run on it, don’t put it at the forefront. The people that care already “know” and will vote one way or the other on it; the people that don’t really care find it weird that it’s elevated to the same level as major foreign or economic policy. More importantly, it gives righties a lot of ammunition by allowing them to distort and lie about it all, eg. reeeing abiut “men in girls sports” allows them to mask their dogshit policies.

“For whatever reason”.

Legacy media blackout against anything the Democrats proposed, with relentless scrutiny from even the more centrist outlets like MSNBC while the rest straight up built a boogeyman scarecrow out of her and attacked non-existent positions with lies of omission (“she won’t condone this made up issue fearmongered by the far right!”).

Online media disinfo campaign with social media flooded with bots and troll networks simultaneously pushing said boogeyman arguments and fearmongering about them, worsening the discussion from both ends of the spectrum but ultimately pushing the needle towards making the left unbearable and the far right more relatable.

At this point I’m pretty confident that this complete saturation makes even an Obama-style candidate untenable in 2028.

Edit:

EVERYTHING gives righties ammunition. They could twist not wanting the homeless to be killed for sport as “Radical Socialism” and blast that shit 24/7 on Fox News for all they care.

@Poison Trail
Exactly.

Trump has announced that Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo will not be joining his administration, and there’s some reports that his team is trying to distance themselves from RFK.

Which is nice, but begs the question of who will go in place of them. Particularly RFK since apparently they only want to distance themselves after RFK made a public statement that he wouldn’t make a blanket vaccine ban. “Just” ban most.

@Poison Trail
Sure, but don’t give them anything that (after they warp it hard enough) some clueless sportsbro or soccermom might agree with.

Most voters are ignorant idiots. We need to stop pretending they’re anything but. Populism works, it’s proven. Not using it is like the good guy deciding guns are morally bad so he’ll use a foil instead, then acting surprised when his arm gets blown off from 200 yards away.

@Dustcan
Trump’s just going to be there for show, Vance (and his puppetmasters) will be the ones running things.

That almost might be better, simply because Vance Thiel and such won’t reflexively fellate whatever foreign dictator happens to give them a passing complement.

It’ll be bad, but at least not “their first impulse is treason” bad.

@Dustcan
So Trump wants Polio back. And RFK Jr doesn’t.

The votes are in. Trump won 312 electoral college votes.

I find this interesting because it means that even if somehow, the bigeest Red state, Texas, voted blue this year, he would still have 272 electoral college votes, and still be the winner.

@Dustcan
By the way, you mentioned you’d eat your hat if Cheetoman won popular vote, correct? Will there be a Livestream? Honest question!

@Background Pony #CC62
I’m guessing you’re not a native English speaker, because “I’ll eat my hat if” is simply a very common expression for “This would be too stupid to be true” and not a serious dare.

Nah I’m already crapping straw.

@BlitztheDragon
I’m sorry but this isn’t backed by anything

Yes progressive candidates in congress outran Kamala but like, so did moderate candidates? House and senate candidates outdoing Kamala has nothing to do with progressivism and everything to do with Trump voters, for whatever reason, voting only for Trump and leaving rest of the ballot blank or voting split ticket consistently

People act as if running with Liz Cheney or whatever crashed her campaign when absolutely nothing backs this up

For fuck sakes, it was inflation, inflation and high illegal immigration fucking killed her campaign, I’ve linked to this survey a thousand times and I’ll link it again

Hell one of the top listed reasons as to why not to vote Harris for voters was “debt was too high”

Yeah that sounds like a real hunger for progressive policies to me

@The Smiling Pony
Kamala didn’t run on LGBT issues at all, but the Trump campaign wanted people to think that’s all she did, and it worked

@Commune
Yeah, she didn’t directly, but by “campaign” I don’t just mean the candidate, I mean the party as a whole and the vocal spokespeople.

The talking point of Trump “winning the popular vote and thus has a stronger mandate” would make sense if Trump wasn’t receiving less raw votes than in 2020. He’s winning the popular vote because tens of millions of Florida and Texas Dems, plus California and New York Dems, all states that don’t matter, chose not to vote for Harris at all.