Summary
Following the Democrats’ recent election losses, some, including Senator Bernie Sanders, argue that the party failed by “abandoning” the working class.
However, critics counter that Democrats under Biden implemented one of the most pro-working class agendas in decades, passing union-supportive policies, job-creating infrastructure bills, and increasing wages.
Despite these efforts, Democrats saw little electoral benefit, especially among nonwhite working-class voters, as cultural grievances took precedence for many working-class voters.
Analysts suggest that the party’s best path forward may be to focus on college-educated suburban voters rather than attempting to win back working-class Republicans.
They had been telling us nonstop from day one that we are not struggling, that everything’s okay, that the economy is strong and And unemployment is low, which means nothing if people are not getting paid a livable wage. They Ignored our cries for help that we are struggling. We cannot afford food, we cannot afford rent, our wages are stagnant. Time and again they kept repeating the same lie, everything is okay, you are not struggling.
That is blatantly ignoring the working class.
I watched these too. But I didn’t walk away with the same conclusion. I walked away with the economy is headed in the right direction. And they know people are struggling. Which is arguably true. Inflation was reducing and wages were going up. That’s been happening for the last two years.
Can you show an example where either Biden or Harris said Americans aren’t struggling?
During the Biden debate. Moderator asked Biden a question along the lines of, “what do you say to the millions of Americans struggling with high prices in this economy?”
Biden said, “No the economy is doing fine,” and dismissed the fact that Americans are struggling.
Edit: I’m not sure where I heard this from. I could find it in the transcript either and I don’t care enough to search where I heard him say it. It was a long political race and I’m tired.
When I first read this comment I actually believed I had missed where biden said this and I believed you. But then I went back and reread the transcript of the debate. Nowhere does biden say anything remotely close to this.
Here is Bidens respond when he is asked about the economy:
Let’s begin the debate. And let’s start with the issue that voters consistently say is their top concern, the economy. President Biden, inflation has slowed, but prices remain high. Since you took office, the price of essentials has increased. For example, a basket of groceries that cost $100 then, now costs more than $12; and typical home prices have jumped more than 30 percent.
What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?
BIDEN: You have to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me. We had an economy that was in freefall. The pandemic are so badly handled, many people were dying. All he said was, it’s not that serious. Just inject a little bleach in your arm. It’d be all right. The economy collapsed. There were no jobs. Unemployment rate rose to 15 percent. It was terrible. And so, what we had to do is try to put things back together again. That’s exactly what we began to do. We created 15,000 new jobs. We brought on – in a position where we have 800,000 new manufacturing jobs.
But there’s more to be done. There’s more to be done. Working class people are still in trouble.
I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I come from a household where the kitchen table – if things weren’t able to be met during the month was a problem. Price of eggs, the price of gas, the price of housing, the price of a whole range of things. That’s why I’m working so hard to make sure I deal with those problems. And we’re going to make sure that we reduce the price of housing. We’re going to make sure we build 2 million new units. We’re going to make sure we cap rents, so corporate greed can’t take over.
The combination of what I was left and then corporate greed are the reason why we’re in this problem right now. In addition to that, we’re in a situation where if you had – take a look at all that was done in his administration, he didn’t do much at all. By the time he left, there’s – things had been in chaos. There was (ph) literally chaos. And so, we put things back together. We created, as I said, those (ph) jobs. We made sure we had a situation where we now – we brought down the price of prescription drugs, which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for – for an insulin shot, as opposed to $400. No senior has to pay more than $200 for any drug – all the drugs they (inaudible) beginning next year.
And the situation is making – and we’re going to make that available to everybody, to all Americans. So we’re working to bring down the prices around the kitchen table. And that’s what we’re going to get done.
TAPPER: Thank you.
You right. I thought it was then. Maybe it was a reporter question around the debate. That would explain the tone of what I remember. I don’t care enough about this to search any more, so you can just say I’m misremembering.
Biden had to make the case that he has been successful AND he’s the right person to continue to help people. Which is what both have done.
It’s what Obama had to do in 2012. It was probably impossible to do this election.
Biden focused too much on his accomplishment (which are legitimate), although he wasn’t going to make a eloquent case regardless given his speech problems and his ego.
Harris practically ONLY talked about how she would help people with inflation and other struggles like home buying. But she didn’t make her case well enough (nor do I think she could have).
FYI Biden never said anything along the lines of what that comment above pins on him. Its exactly why I asked for an example. People will blatantly lie and make shit up because they know most people wont actually go check. This guy said Biden responded to a question in the debate saying “No the economy is doing fine” when that couldnt be further from the truth. Biden highlighted the shit econonmy he was given from trump then the work he has done to improve it then said “But there’s more to be done. There’s more to be done. Working class people are still in trouble.”
Her plans were all tax rebates
Everyday, ad nauseam, the White House press Secretary repeats the lie that Americans are not struggling and the economy is good. She is the direct mouthpiece for the White House for the president.
Give me an actual example that I can look up because I dont think this is true.
There are years of WHPS events on YouTube. She says it every morning
I skimmed through a few of the whps economic focused ones and no one says anything remotely close to what you claim.
It’s what happens when the idiots calculating your indicators of economic prosperity care only about aggregate levels of production, but don’t give a shit how many are homeless.
And now, the billionaires who were the only ones doing well already are in charge of things. My only hope is that they might finally be eaten, French revolution style.
Why is this comment getting downvoted so much? Asking someone for evidence to support what they’re saying doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
Because people want to be angry, they want their feelings justified, and there’s no actual evidence for what the other person claimed.
I respectfully disagree. there was no real, tangible results for most working class adults. Inflation was still terrible and there seemed to be no relief from it. not many real progressive measures were enacted that people actually wanted or noticed. industries all around were still slowly shutting down and quite a few factory towns suffered badly during their term. they could have done something about it proactively, but chose to brush it under the rug. it’s awful, and I didn’t want this outcome but you gotta understand that most people want cheaper stuff and not be jobless.
it really goes to show how far people will go if they think their livelihood is at risk. they’d go as far as electing a Nazi. crazy isn’t it?
Democrats under Biden implemented one of the most pro-working class agendas in decades,
there was no real, tangible results for most working class adults.
Both things can be true.
When the bar is just that low literally anything can be the most in decades.
A red flag for me, from an outside perspective, was how the #MastodonforHarris campaign was dealt with.
A completely grassroots organization led by ordinary Americans who care about democracy get together and collect hundreds of thousands for the campaign. Some are relatively well-connected and attempt to reach out. And, as far as I could see, the campaign couldn’t even be arsed to issue an official “thank you”.
If this is how far removed the campaign was from ordinary Americans, who in the world had any access? Who would feel like their voice is being heard, if fundraising half a million is not even enough to be recognized with a thank you from some low-ranking representative?
I’m not American, and I have no idea what the situation is like on the ground over there. I kind of hoped/assumed they put in their effort being available to steel workers in Pennsylvania rather than nerds on Mastodon. But seeing how it all went down I guess they were equally far removed from everyone.
If this is how far removed the campaign was from ordinary Americans, who in the world had any access?
The Cheneys.
I’ll never get over that
They failed to predict voter sentiment so obviously they’re right about the voters being at fault.
Reminds me of Clinton’s vaunted “Blue Wall” that totally collapsed. Harris expected Democrats to show up without campaigning to them and were shocked when they didn’t.
Progressives need to start their own party. This coalition with the DNC is ridiculous and just keeps getting worse all the time.
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You can’t say she had no desire to court working class voters, and be upset that she was campaigning in Texas and with Liz Cheney.
Why not? What the fuck did Liz Cheney ever do for the working class?
Analysts suggest that the party’s best path forward may be to focus on college-educated suburban voters rather than attempting to win back working-class Republicans.
fuck no
i’m already done with this. we are in for the final fucking mile.
There are plenty of working class democrats they abandoned.
yes! but we’re still here. i am bad at this. I encourage concepts like mutual aid.
Biden/Harris: [Works to help working class]
Working Class: [Doesn’t listen / pay attention]
Working Class: WhY ArE yoU igNOrinG us??
Biden/Harris: [drops the bare minimum of crumbs from the table without pursuing any enduring change]
Harris campaign: [runs as far and as fast as possible to the right, abandoning policies to help the working class Harris campaigned on in 2020]
people that have no clue what they’re talking about: tHe wORkiNg cLasS wAs DOiNG gREat aCTuaLlY
Or Biden/Harris didn’t works to help working class, or at least not hard enough.
Or they failed at messaging.
If Kamala would have spent half the time she spent talking about Trump, talking about corporate price gouging instead and how she would go after corporations like a bulldog, voters would have had a place to look for blame other than the Democrats.
Instead her vision was narrow and she mostly just compared herself to Trump.
Yes, she had some good policy ideas. Yes she was backing some other good policy ideas. Yes Biden has been great.
Her messaging still sucked.
Likely because she didn’t want to piss off corporate donors.
Her messaging still sucked.
It was this. I was really engaged this season. I was fully on board to support her, but towards the end, I had to remind myself why I was excited. I was already going to support her, and I had forgotten what made me excited more than once.
If that happened to me, a fervent supporter of what she represented, everybody else who was more lukewarm forgot completely. She was the candidate of change at the beginning and was Joe Biden 2.0 by the end.
If Dems don’t figure out how to capture excitement in their next attempts, if they can’t energize the young who are so naive they follow Instagram influencers without a second thought, they’re gonna keep losing to these terrible but charismatic Republicans.
She was a prosecutor and was mostly using court room style arguments that appeal to reason.
And that works great in court and for high information voters, but doesn’t connect with people’s emotions.
Trump connected with people’s frustrations and grievances and basically argued that Harris and Biden were to blame. There’s no rational argument that can counter an appeal to emotion.
This is pretty much it. The disengaged public needs simple, three-word slogans and they need to stick on message, relentlessly (and it needs to connect emotionally as you said).
And while it goes against every instinct of those who are college educated, you need to say things with over the top confidence. Hedging makes sense in the academic world, but average people trust people with excessive confidence.
They needed a blend of both. Explain in detail your plan, but pair it with simple slogans and sound bites. That way you cover all your bases, the low information voters get motivated by the sound bite and the high information voters by your detailed plans (assuming they’re good). You can of course have a terrible plan that loses the high information voters even if your sound bites are keeping people engaged.
Not really. She did talk about policy but media only ever highlighted her few minutes rightfully calling trump a fascist.
Not really her fault that media wants ratings and clicks instead of doing their job as the fourth estate.
I’m not saying she didn’t talk about policy I’m saying she didn’t connect with voters about policy.
Trump didn’t need to connect about policy because he could connect with them emotionally. Kamala just tried to appeal to reason but when people are frustrated with the government that doesn’t work so well.
And it doesn’t work well on busy low information voters either.
In other words she lacked charisma. I like her policies I don’t think she would have been a bad president and I voted for her.
But she talks like a prosecutor. And she uses that type of argument style. And it just doesn’t connect as easily as appeals to emotion.
Like every Democrat for the last forever I didn’t like her policies in general although there were a couple that weren’t terrible. On the other hand I would have gladly taken all her policies over the absolute shit storm that Trump is about to rain on this country. The closest thing to a Democrat I liked was when Bernie ran on the Democrat ticket, but then the DNC did everything in their power to fuck him over. Maybe he would have lost anyway, but he never even really got the chance, so I guess we’ll never really know.
I’ve been thinking since the election, there needs to be a rebranding. Most Republican voters agree with “liberal” policies. Most liberals agree with “progressive” policies. We need to start calling it what it is.
Bernie, AOC, Warren are liberals.
Clinton, Biden, Harris are conservatives.
DeSantis, Trump, Huckabee-Sanders are authoritarian elites.
Liberals are pissed because we keep reaching across the aisle in hopes of centrism from the DNC candidates. And conservatives won’t even vote for their values.
Hell, that was a whole media cycle where the media wanted her to call him a fascist and blow up, but she kept saying “let’s move forward.” The slogan became a thing because the media kept insisting she respond to him and she wouldn’t.
Seeing everyone blame her for not doing the things she was doing makes me feel more emboldened that this was inevitable.
If Kamala would have spent half the time she spent talking about Trump, talking about corporate price gouging instead and how she would go after corporations like a bulldog, voters would have had a place to look for blame other than the Democrats.
I agree. It was really frustrating that she wasn’t hammering this home. BUT I still don’t think that it would have really moved the needle that much. Same with Palestine. Same with Biden dropping out earlier. Same with being a bit fuzzy on details. So on and so forth.
In the end, the American people wanted Trump the person. He has no economic messaging besides a nebulous idea of “fixing” the economy through tariffs, which is laughable. People who use the economic anxiety argument are either trying to deflect blame from themselves for voting for him (“I don’t like him as a person, but he has good policies.”) or because they want to believe in the fundamental goodness of their fellow Americans so that their choices can be rationally explained. The former is deluding themselves since Trump has no cogent economic policy. As for the latter, I get why they want to believe that, but the truth is a lot uglier. The majority of Americans either affirmatively approve of or tacitly tolerate Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and/or are simply too uneducated (or just plainly stupid) or (if I’m being extremely charitable) woefully misinformed or uninformed to understand the gravity of his election.
I’m tempted to blame the Democratic party and nitpick, but at the end of the day, Harris ran a good campaign. It wasn’t perfect, but even if it were, we’d still more or less be here. The core problem, I think, lies in our culture and our educational system. Trump was a uniquely awful candidate, and Harris was a competent, “standard” politician. By all measures, she should have won. Even still, the American public repudiated her, which is simply irrational. In the end, it comes down Trump being the symptom not the problem. The problem lies in our culture and society.
tl;dr: Even if Harris did message better, she still would have lost. American culture and society is flawed and ultimately at fault.
Trump appealed to emotion. Harris tried appealed to reason.
Considering most voters don’t pay enough attention to politics to have well informed opinions, it’s easy to see why her messaging failed.
I think if we would have had a primary, had Biden stepped down a long time ago, we may have gotten a more charismatic nominee.
So I absolutely do blame Biden. And I forgive him too because he has been a good president and we all are vulnerable to pride and hubris.
I still blame the Democrats, they’re a shit party that talks a big game then utterly fails to deliver on it again and again, and Kamala was somehow even worse than average. But they’re not entirely to blame, there were a lot of factors that went into this loss. A couple of the bigger ones I think were the Republicans mastery of propaganda (helped along by foreign actors), and the generally poor education in the US. Republicans have spent literally half a century now perfecting how to push peoples buttons and Fox “News” and their shows are a master class in lying just well enough to convince the ignorant. Added to that was Twitter with its army of bots both foreign and domestic with Musk providing cover to them.
Perception isn’t reality, but it’s just as important. You have to do great things for the working class, and then tell them, with examples, both how you helped and how the Republicans would have screwed them. Repeatedly. No room for kid gloves.
You also have to connect to people on an emotional level. The argument style that appeals to voters isn’t the one that is going to convince a judge that you’re right.
She appealed to reason in other words. And she needed to hit people on more levels than that.
More blame shifting, and I will not accept it. We all knew what was at stake, and we let it happen.
Again, we failed.
I could say the same thing about blame shifting.
My opinion is that Biden cost us the election, by running again and not allowing a primary to take place.
But if you want to shift that blame onto yourself and your fellow voters go for it.
