“This is a collapse of the Democratic Party.” Consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader comments on the reelection of Donald Trump and the failures of the Democratic challenge against him.
Despite attempts by left-wing segments of the Democratic base to shift the party’s messaging toward populist, anti-corporate and progressive policies, says Nader, Democrats “didn’t listen.” Under Trump, continues Nader, “We’re in for huge turmoil.”
Honestly I would be okay with it. They’ve been so ineffective and myopic that I’ve been done with the party as a whole for a while now.
Maybe blowing up the Democratic party would be best for everyone.
Well I’d prefer more than one thing to replace it, but certainly this is one of the rare opportunities to do so.
Hope and change. That’s the message Obama won consecutive terms with. The Republicans have always thrived on fear and insecurity–and hate, which is just ripe fear. To quote Yoda, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate.” The red scare, the Southern Strategy, urban crime, WMDs, terrorism, immigrants, China–since the 1950s, Republicans have monkey-barred from fear to fear.
It’s a natural fit for conservativism. What is conservatism if not the fear of change? And when you’re afraid, you want a strongman to lead you, someone who takes pride in our military and law enforcement. Someone who shows no fear, who has swagger. It’s also a perfect fit for someone like Trump who would as soon lie as breathe. When you’re conjuring terrors, truth is just dead weight.
Kamala didn’t run on hope and change. She ran on fear, too. She tried to beat Trump at his own game with none of the advantages of his shameless distain for the truth or a Republican Party and media ecosystem at home with fearmongering. She aped his disdain for immigrants and opposition to China, but of course her main bugaboo was Trump himself. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with our nation’s current circumstances, she offered only stasis, while Trump offered revolution.
Non-college graduates know they’re getting fucked. Trump says immigrants and China is to blame. Kamala has nothing to say. She could point to the billionaires, the tax dodging corporations, the thriving defense contractors, the predatory medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, the monopolies bleeding consumers dry in every corner of the economy.
She could paint a vision of affordable healthcare for all, an end to medical bankruptcy, an end to college debt, a thriving green energy blue collar economy, free early childhood education, a guaranteed jobs program, a universal basic income.
She could acknowledge the people who feel left behind and say, “I hear you. This is what I’m going to do for you.” Instead, her cries of fear just assured those folks that Trump really was going to fuck shit up fighting for them, that the people who sold them down the river are shaking in their boots. Of course, Trump isn’t actually going to make their lives better, but he promised he would, and that’s more than Kamala could be bothered to do.
He is an expert, after all. He’s the guy whose 3rd party campaign in 2000 siphoned enough votes from Gore in Florida to flip the state (and the election) to Bush.
Uhhhh, wasn’t that more due to Jeb! ordering the recount stopped? Like, I seem to recall reading that the recount WAS NOT COMPLETED, and the results that they had at that point had to be accepted, which just so happened to favor Bush.
Not saying Nader didn’t siphon votes, but I seem to remember that there was actual skulduggery and not just “3rd party go brr”.
There was a lot going on. The final count used had bush up by 537 votes out of 5.8 million cast. The close margin triggered a recount and Bush dropped to 327 vote lead.
Nadar probably cost the democrats more votes then republicans by greater then that 327. But there were other things that hurt Gore. Some intentional some random.
There were ballot design issues. In areas where the butterfly ballot was used Buchanan (who was also a 3rd party candidate) got way more votes than elsewhere. So if you wanted Gore saw him under Bush and selected the dot below you voted for Buchanan. See below.
Bush. O
/ O Buchanan
Gore. O
In another democratic area the ballot had the presidential race split on the front and back page. 21,000 votes were invalidated because they had multiple selections for president.
There was a large purge of mostly black felon voters. 15% weren’t felons.
Then there were lawsuits trying to stop and start recounts in both state and federal court. The state supreme court ordered recounts while they decided if the recount should be used. Then they decided the recount should be used and set a date it was du. Then the US supreme court stopped the recount. Several days later they decided there wasn’t time for a recount and ordered the Bush ahead by 537 count to be used.
So honestly it probably took all the above to swing the final count to Bush from Gore. I’m guessing if any one had not happened Gore would have been president.
A personal note I live in Florida and that was the first election I voted in. My vote for president has never be closer to making a difference in who was president. It’s shaped my views on elections and voting.
Well yeah, you (and the other poster who referenced the Brooks Brothers Riot) are 100% correct in stating the count ended prematurely, but if Nader hadn’t siphoned away those votes, Gore likely would have had yhe lead throughout the recount and Republicans wouldn’t have been in a position to pick a favorable time to stop.
I blame it more on Gore and the Democrats for not fighting for democracy more. Hopefully it becomes more clear the Supreme Court is an legitimate institution and people point to increasingly inane decisions as a reason not to listen to it.
Agreed. These people are demonstrating the exact behavior that Nader is talking about that put Trump in the Whitehouse in 2016 and now it looks like again in 2024. What the fuck do they expect to happen when running as “diet Republicans” against “Republicans?”
Of course people don’t like to take their medicine and will now lash out and blame everyone else for the mess they’ve caused again.
In the 2000 presidential election in Florida, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes. Nader received 97,421 votes, which led to claims that he was responsible for Gore’s defeat.
However, Jonathan Chait of The American Prospect and The New Republic notes that Nader did indeed focus on swing states disproportionately during the waning days of the campaign, and by doing so jeopardized his own chances of achieving the 5% of the vote he was aiming for.
- his wiki
Yeah fuck Ralph Nader for that. He definitely helped Bush win.
His family was forced out of Lebanon by radical Islam so I think he knows a thing or two about the value of democracy.
His parents immigrated. The Late Ottoman Empire is responsible for their genocides and ethnic cleansing campaigns. Repeatedly blaming Islam over the political parties responsible is just thinly veiled islamophobia
Ralph Nader does value democracy. He has accomplished a lot through his activism
The statement failed to condition this support on the White House’s making immediate enforceable demands on Israel to stop this mass annihilation, including women, children, the elderly, and hospital patients, immediately. There is no indication of any reciprocity, simply a plea without any display of political power on behalf of the Lebanese American community. After all, there are over a million Lebanese American voters that the Democratic Party should be keeping in mind.
They need to fire the leaders of Democratic party. Find new blood and new direction. Swing to the right didn’t help them.
This is why I’m hoping that all the impending hardships reflect poorly on Trump’s term, and he can merely serve as the Hoover to an FDR-like successor.
Would be great if we avoided all the unnecessary deaths along the way, but we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t insist on learning everything the hard way.
So they did that once, Hillary was all set to take the nomination in 2008 then this young charismatic guy took the nomination. Obama served 2 terms and the Republicans lost their mind over it…
… but maybe the Democrats did too? Because Hillary still thought it was Her Turn in 2016, and there were a lot of machinations to make sure they didnt run a Socialist. Then I distinctly remember all the shenanigans to insure that Joe Biden got the nomination in 2020. And we all know what happened this year. I actually think Harris was a good candidate, I just wish she got the chance to prove it in a meaningful primary. (Edited to add: if she had lost a primary, all it would have meant was that Democrats would have found an even better candidate.)
The Democrats do have a deep bench of Governors and Senators who might make really good Presidents. They even proved that strategy worked in 2008. I wonder why they are so afraid to prove it in a primary.
Disagree, Harris would not have been close to winning at all if there was a primary. Even Tim Walz would have absolutely smoked her in a primary.
While I’m not as sure as you are about that, if it had happened that way I wouldn’t have minded at all. I liked Harris as a candidate, and feel she would have made a fine President. but I also like other Democrats.
We’ll have to watch Walz. His current term ends with the 2026 election, and while he’s not term limited he has already been in office for two terms. This campaign might give him the bug to try again in 2028.
But when Obama won the nomination the DNC didn’t support Obama in the general.
So Obama ignored the DNC for 8 years and let it fester until 2016 when Hillary’s primary campaign took control of it they shady backroom financial deals that resulted in her campaign getting approval over what the DNC did during the primary.
There was a brief window Donna Brazille got in leadership and showed everyone the receipts, then Hillary’s people got back in control and Biden kept them.
With Kamala losing the DNC votes for it’s own leadership, and will likely retain like they always do.
Obama has the chance to appoint progressive leadership to the DNC and fix the party, but instead he ignored it as a relic.
And we’re still paying the price.
I wonder why they are so afraid to prove it in a primary
Because challenging the party favorite is career suicide when the party is corrupt.
If Obama hadn’t won in 08 none of us would remember his name, and the party did nothing to help him because they knew if he won he could change leadership.
They got lucky and he choose not to fix the party
Obama, sadly was a failure. Better than any other president since FDR and Carter, but that’s not saying much. America wanted change and all we got was the ACA from him and a few less terrible trade deals. Obama deported more people than Trump and never fixed the decline in the middle class. I turned 18 when Obama first ran and was so excited for all the “change” and nothing improved sustainably for the average American. He could have solidified himself as the best ever but road the middle too often and now the party is officially dead.
The issue is the same with trump.
A lot of stuff is dependent on people “doing the moral thing”.
The DNC is a private organization, and if they decide to keep making the terrible decisions they’ve been making, there’s not a lot we can do about it.
Their platform for a decade has been “what are you gonna do, vote trump?”
So I really really think that today being the day after the election is the day we start talking about a third option in 2028. There’s no reason to expect the same people who have been running the DNC to magically change this time or even just get out of the way for the best of the country.
We can’t just “find new leadership” because when a Republican wins, the DNC votes for its own leadership and almost always elects the same kind of people if not literally the exact same people.
Their platform for a decade has been “what are you gonna do, vote trump?”
The people: Yes
But seriously, the Democrats need to get better candidates, and they need to take a long-hard look at their policy agenda. The people don’t want it and will literally vote for Trump before what Democrats are offering.
That’s not what I’m seeing.
Obviously totals aren’t in yet, but looks like trump gained a million voters and Dems lost between 8-17 million
Which is what I’ve been saying for years. The danger isn’t cross over voters, very few people bounce between parties.
What matters is energizing your own base and getting them out to vote.
Dems keep pissing off their own base to court Republicans and it never fucking works
Because what people will do, is just not vote.
Which is what just happened. And at the end of the day the entire point of a campaign is to motivate voters, this is a failure of Kamala and her campaign.
So I really really think that today being the day after the election is the day we start talking about a third option in 2028.
Might I recommend supporting the Forward Party.
They’re trying to build a whole New Kind of Party, genuinely from the bottom up. Focusing on local politics, where election rules can be changed to make representatives more responsive to their voters. They’re quite unlike other 3rd Parties that just run pointless presidential candidates every 4 years.
Then there’s RepresentUs. Not a Party, but a political organization trying to do the same. Fix our election system at the state and local level.
Andrew Yang was one of the best spokesmen for UBI. Unfortunately, he got bought out by big Pharma to drop support for universal healthcare and stop advocating for UBI. Both have same rationale. His party of “consolidating moderates” is just pro-neocon warmongering coalition.
I hope forward party can become something different. Back to UBI roots.
Fine. Then people need to do something about it. Because the people saying it this time didn’t. Despite asking over and over, I found one person this year on Lemmy who said they actually worked for a third party’s campaign.
And when you asked them which third party candidate to vote for, they generally wouldn’t give me a name. If you can’t rally around a single candidate, you will never win.
Also, I’m not sure why abandoning something is better than fixing it from the inside.
Because fixing something from the inside takes work and time. And it’s not like it wasn’t happening (as much as I’m not a fan of it because I actually am one of the evil liberals people here love to complain about), people like AOC or Tlaib would never have been prominent voices ~20 years ago. But generational change happens over a timespan of, and I feel that it’s very odd that I need to point this out, generations.
They’ve already started the talking point that they swing too left and that’s why they lost
Yeah, courting far left people like Dick Cheney was the problem. Next time they will just run Ivanka Trump and if you’re against her, you are a misogynist.
Just kidding, they won’t run her until she’s at least 60, everyone knows people who are younger than that can’t politics.
https://democrats.org/contact-us/
Their system is so bad they accepted “gofuckyourself@fuckyou.com” as my email so go have a blast. I encourage everyone to do so.
I told them all to resign and congratulated them on chasing the mystical moderate all the way off a cliff.
Really think they have the ability to see that? Because I don’t. Nor does history. My gut tells me the Dems are going to move dramatically further right after this because “they didn’t appeal enough to the ‘center’” and “they can’t rely on the left to support them”. Our only option might be a leftist coalition committed to not voting dem until they capitulate or we gain enough support to be a viable party.
They need to fire the leaders of Democratic party. Find new blood and new direction. Swing to the right didn’t help them.
We need better people who won’t vote for Trump.
Seriously though - Biden did win. And your conclusion now is that that they need “new blood”? Biden’s as old-blood as you can get.
I love how everybody is blaming the party rather than the idiots voting for the crazy grandpa. Kamala was the better candidate. The people are broken more than the parties.
Biden barely won. No one should take 2020 as evidence of expertise. That was an embarrassingly nail-biting result.
Kamala was the better candidate. But that doesn’t mean she was a good candidate. If they want to win then making people choose between a pile of shit and a turd sandwich isn’t the winning move.
If they want to win then making people choose between a pile of shit and a turd sandwich isn’t the winning move.
They were choosing between a competent adult and the first US president to actively try to overturn the results of an election in the United States. A potted plant would be a better option than Trump.
Who do you imagine would have done better? Trump is promising the biggest deportations in US history - you think an ultra-liberal is going to compete with that?? The people of the United States are terrible - they picked this - they are to blame.
Kamala wasn’t the better candidate. Biden would’ve done better. They forced the old man out in the middle of a campaign. Kamala never fared well on her own. Stupid Dems thought because Biden lost the debate he’d lose the election. Well Trump lost the freakin debate, but did it matter?! NO! THAT’S why they need to be gone. They got lucky with Biden. They ain’t getting lucky again.
Biden barely beat Trump in 2020 and is now much older and the incumbent who people typically blame all the current issues on. They made the right choice forcing him to step down but he never should have run for a second term in the first place but instead defeat Trump and run a single term like he said he would in 2020. The DNC should have spent the last 4 years grooming someone more appealing to the public instead of trying shift the party to be more like the Republicans.
Kamala wasn’t the better candidate.
What do you do when the nation wants a fascist and you don’t want a fascist? Do you run a fascist just to win? Or do you lose elections?
We’re blaming the wrong people. Trump won by stoking fear, prejudice and outrage. How do you compete with that without feeding it?
