The Democrats threw it away.
For several races now they’ve been told by many actual progressives, they need to embrace economic-populism. They refused to. Instead embracing the Cheneys. They got out played by a convicted felon, who’s older than his IQ (thanks to another lemmon for that line. I love it).

This time? There was no real opportunity for meaningful change. The Democratic party is far right economically, and they depend on the donations of plutocrats and megacorps. Regardless of either Democrats or Republicans getting elected, the donor class wins and working Americans lose. Some will say Harris attempt to appeal to the right wing is what made her lose, and perhaps there is an element of truth to that. Its unlikely that the Republican base she attempted to woo would actually vote for a Black woman running as a Democrat over the old, rich White guy running as a Republican. However, the owners of the Democratic party - the ones who immediately had millions of dollars to donate the day Biden dropped out - they didn’t lose. The only way the owners could lose is by appealing to progressives and winning an election.

The time to begin doing something differently was decades ago, building power and organizing from the bottom up. Socialists need to begin running in and winning local elections, and pushing hard against First Past The Post elections.

The US is, apparently, not ready for a woman president. Especially a non-white woman president.

Y’all weren’t entirely ready for Obama either, given how he was treated.

Something I haven’t seen discussed is that Kamala is a woman. There are a lot of misogynistic voters who will refuse to vote for a woman.

As someone from Europe who only has Lemmy.world account: i am surprised, i thought you guys were handling it lol good job in keeping the façade tho, it was convincing

Not surprised. The Harris campaign ran on the status quo, which many people are dissatisfied with, and pivoted to the right on various policy, when the people who like right-wing policies already have a party catering just to them - and that can come at the cost of alienating their own base or fracturing the coalition. For instance, many Latinos trend conservative in their values, but they voted Dem in the past because of all the “Build the wall” stuff. But then the Democrats said, “Trump’s just using it to posture, we’re the ones who are actually going to build the wall,” and they lost a bunch of Latinos and didn’t win over Republicans.

Promoting the Dick Cheney endorsement was an obvious unforced error, not even Republicans like him. Honestly a lot of their attempts to “reach across the aisle” seem more like patting themselves on the back for being “reasonable” than genuine attempts to understand and appeal to actual human beings. Like, generally, I think it’s a better strategy to accept that most of them are unreachable and focus on mobilizing your base, but if you are going to commit to that approach and make it the whole backbone of your campaign, then you actually have to understand who you’re trying to reach and how they think and why they do the things they do. Like, there are genuine ideological rifts on the right that are exploitable, like nationalism vs libertarianism, but Cheney and Bush tried to do something that both sides of that hate and it was a colossal failure, so bringing him on board just papers over those disagreements and makes it easier for them to consolidate around Trump.

A major problem that liberals have is that they’re attached to this idea of “reasonableness” where the best ideas will just naturally win out in the marketplace of ideas, and when the world doesn’t actually work like that they just can’t accept it. The right isn’t reasonable, they are (at least sometimes) proud of not being reasonable, because reason is the tool of the educated elite. And that actually almost makes a weird kind of sense, it’s like, imagine arguing that the earth is flat against a five year old - you could probably “win,” right? You have way more information in your repertoire and more experience with debate than they do, so you could selectively pick-and-choose things to support your point. So imagine being that five year old, having the sense that the adult is taking you for a ride, but knowing that you can’t debate or reason well enough to win on their terms. That’s the kind of psychology that we’re dealing with.

There are three ways you can respond to that situation. Either you say, “OK, these people are crazy and unreachable, let’s focus on mobilizing our own base,” or you say, “OK, we can work with that, we just have to go beyond reason and try to build trust or reach them on an emotional level,” (good luck with that, since that emotional level includes absolutely despising establishment career politicians, along with a substantial number of people who make up the dem coalition), or, lastly, you can keep trying to reason with them, and you will lose. Like, you could legitimate run a candidate who policy-wise is to the right of the Republican candidate on every issue and right-wingers still wouldn’t vote for them if they looked and sounded like a typical Democrat. You just have to wrap your head around that concept.

Not surprised at all. You guys need to tone down the insane hyperbole by a solid 90% and actually start trying to coexist with your fellow countrymen instead of inviting in any and every threat you can find because they’ll happily confirm your biases in public while fleecing the nation behind the curtains. You need to stop playing stupid word games to try and redefine reality, as though how you talk about things can change what they actually are. You need to actually put some real effort into learning and working towards change instead of just parroting everything you heard on social media today then pretending you’re so much smarter than everyone else.