spike wrote:warehouse wrote:4/5 wrote:spike wrote:
If Democrats really think they lost because of racism and sexism it's tough to imagine them getting back into power anytime soon.
elaborate please
how long until we get president vance? 2 years?
I guess he’s not going to.
Oh my bad.
First, racism and sexism both exist and it is likely that people who are are racist/sexist were more likely to vote for Trump than Harris.
My statement has two purposes which I'll expand on below.
(1) to assert that insofar as there is a "the reason" Harris lost it isn't racism/sexism. We all like simple narratives to explain complex things and this is a convenient one, but ultimately there are many reasons she lost and I think racism/sexism is relatively low on the list.
(2) More importantly,
whether or not it's actual true, blaming the loss on racism/sexism is not helpful to the Democratic Party if they want to win future elections.
McP, among others, already had a good post about knee jerk post mortems, but among the many reasons she lost:
-Biden screwed over the party hanging on too long
-Lack of a legitimate primary process
-The party chose a candidate who was
unpopular throughout her vice presidency to that point.
-Biden was unpopular and she never really even attempted to distance herself from him, making it very easy for the right to portray her as a continuation of Biden.
-Questionable campaign strategy
-Lack of substantive policy proposals
-Due to lack of primary process she was in a difficult position of attempting to shore up her left base while also trying to appeal to undecided voters
-Continuation of Biden's pro-Israel policies
-She just wasn't a strong candidate
-Recent memories of inflation
-Another campaign that amounted to "I'm not Trump so vote for me."
-The party's perceived alienation of men
-The party appearing to place identity politics above their traditional concern: working class Americans. (Bernie Sanders made a similar claim yesterday.)
-Etc., this is by no means exhaustive but there were lots of reasons.
The bigger issue, though, is that if the party decides it was just those awful racists/sexists, what even is the next move? I see the options in that case: (1) educate people to be less racist/sexist and then those repentant converts will win the next election for you. (2)
double triple quadruple down and emphasize how awful everybody who didn't vote for you is and count on your GOTV efforts to be superior and demographics are on our side! (3) decide that you'd rather have the moral high ground than win elections, or (4) embrace racism/sexism since that wins elections.
Of course these aren't literally the only options, but my point is: if you only lost because of the moral failings of a majority of the country, then it seems to me that the options are extremely limited.
In my opinion all this does is allow people to convince themselves of their own moral superiority without any introspection for how to actually win elections.
And if it is racism/sexism it also presents that sticky question about why did Trump do better with every demographic group except college educated white women. (Or is it white women in general? I've looked at a lot of exit poll data, stuff is blending.) But why did Harris do worse than Biden with black voters (especially men obviously but even women), significantly worse with Hispanic voters, literally every group but white women?
This isn't what those post is primarily about but the bigger question might be how did Democrats manage to blow up the "demographics is destiny" feeling from just 12 years ago? Did they really just assume they'd have Hispanic support without actually doing anything to earn it?
