What did Democrats do wrong?

What did Democrats do wrong?

  • Didn't fight inflation enough.

    Votes: 12 16.9%
  • Didn't fight illegal immigration enough.

    Votes: 21 29.6%
  • Too much focus on abortion.

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Too much transgender stuff.

    Votes: 27 38.0%
  • America not ready for Progressive women leader.

    Votes: 24 33.8%
  • Should have kept Joe.

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Not enough focus on new jobs.

    Votes: 2 2.8%
  • Nothing, Trump cheated & played dirty!

    Votes: 12 16.9%
  • Didn't stop Gaza War.

    Votes: 6 8.5%
  • I can be Agent M.

    Votes: 5 7.0%

  • Total voters
    71
Whereas Trump secretly plans for the largest forcible population exchange transfer since 1948.
not much of a Plan.
And Trump got the ceasefire and hostage exchange Biden couldn't, and is DIRECTLY negotiating with Hamas, something no US administration has ever done. And is doing so WITHOUT Israel.
Biden or Harris would have never done that.
 
Netanyahu delayed the ceasefire specifically to screw over Harris. And he broke it anyway.

Also, the reason why no other president would deal directly with Hamas is they are a terrorist organization. Governments don't want t legitimize them. For the same reason no other president dealt directly with North Korea. Its why no president was ever seen near Sinn Fein until after the Good Friday Agreement.

And he managed to piss off the Israelis by not including them.
 
It was to not pick a lane, but to let its foreign policy be dictated by a Client State.
It made them look weak.

It's not hurting Trump to sideline Netanjahu.
 
So, every other western democracy is an oligarchy? Because, that is what pretty much every other democratic system does. The parties chose candidates, and the voters choose from among the parties. That is a better system. I just think the dems should have done that a bit sooner.

Even in the US, while the primaries were originally a progressive and democratic reform over caucuses and conventions, they were mostly used by the parties to figure out which of the potential candidates could actually appeal to the people. They weren't really how the parties chose candidates until the IDK, 70s or 80s.
This is correct. I have an old copy of the classic political science book, The Making of the President: 1960. You would think you were reading about another country. The idea of the primaries was not to win a bunch of them, it was to win enough to prove to the party bosses that you could get people to pull the lever next to your name. Then you went to the convention and the deal-making began, because nobody went to the convention with enough delegates. So-called "favorite son" candidates (a state's governor or senator) would control all his state's delegates, and thus any hopeful nominee would need to appeal to multiple parts of the country, ensuring moderate candidates.

The system fell apart in 1968, when LBJ decided not to run. Humphrey decided not to contest the primaries, relying on his strength with the party bosses. The anti-war candidates (McCarthy and RFK) had won all the primaries, but in the end Humphrey, who more or less pledged to continue Johnson's policies, got the nomination. However the anti-war folks spent the next four years ensuring that the primaries would be more important in 1972, and they got their way.

Since then it's been more or less a tug of war between the moderates in the party and more liberal base; for awhile the mods tried "superdelegates," but that proved too unpopular. Having early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire probably helped to moderate (and whiten) the candidates as well; we'll see if Biden's effort to move South Carolina to the front of the line stands.
 
E on X, June 8, 2025
Read Pitfalls of Liberalism by Kwame Ture
“The liberal is so preoccupied with stopping confrontation that he usually finds himself defending and calling for law and order, the law and order of the oppressor. Confrontation would disrupt the smooth functioning of the society and so the politics of the liberal leads him into a position where he finds himself politically aligned with the oppressor rather than with the oppressed.”
 
What the Democrats did wrong in 2024 was position themselves as the party of law and order?

Pull the other one.
 
Yes, running with a right-wing talking point is a bad idea. Nixon's campaign coined the term as a dog whistle.
 
when we talk about the party of law and order, are we talking about branding or conduct?
 
Depends. Are we talking about both parties, or neither?

i'd be interested in hearing anyone's thoughts any of those

regardless i think there's a big difference between what the dems did wrong with regards to their messaging vs their actual policy stances and conduct, whereas the republicans did a pretty good job on controlling the messaging and have done a pretty piss poor job on their policy stances and even worse in their conduct. particularly when it comes to lawfulness.

so much so that, i think, they're pretty different discussions on what the dems did wrong. or for that matter, what wrong even means.
 
trump guy.png
we did not have this guy
he is the most useful ad for them: someone is ripping me off! the poor! the immigrants! those vaccine people vaccinating the country at my expense
 
We were outvoted by the ignorant.

The biggest change of the last election was the participation of people who generally do not pay attention to politics actually voting this time.
In the 2024 election, Donald Trump gained a surprising edge from an unlikely group: Americans who typically don’t vote. According to a New York Times analysis, these low-turnout voters backed Trump by a double-digit margin, flipping the script from prior years when non-voters leaned Democratic. This wasn’t just a quirk of the horse-race polls; Campaign operatives, analysts, and post-election surveys all pointed to the same conclusion: The less you followed politics, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.

But now that he's president again, something’s shifted.

New polling shows that the very voters who powered Trump’s return to office are now abandoning him. And if that trend holds, it could upend assumptions about how much campaign messaging and elite discourse really matter. Because it turns out the people who don’t read the Times, don’t watch the Sunday shows, and don’t care about the policy details... still care when the economy sours and their lives get harder.

This is the story of the disengaged voter: why they showed up for Trump, why they’re turning on him now, and what that tells us about political accountability in the era of the “engagement gap.”
What Trump's election showed us was the consequences of an increasing engagement gap in U.S. politics. And by engagement, I do not just mean engagement in the voting process, but engagement in politics or with political information whatsoever. For example, a post-election survey from Data for Progress found that the voters who paid the most attention to the news in 2024 voted for Kamala Harris by 6 percentage points, while those who paid no attention at all voted for Trump by 19. Democrats are also posting huge numbers in special elections, largely because low-engagement voters just aren't showing up.

1750024330393.png

Comparing these crosstabs for YouGov's first poll of Trump's presidency, conducted Jan. 26–28, 2025, to their most recent survey, fielded April 25–28, 2025, we see a massive 33 percentage point decline in Trump's net approval rating over the last 3 months with people who consume the least news. When Trump was inaugurated, net approval among people who say they read or watch news “hardly at all” was +12, and it's now -21. That compares to just a 14-point drop in Trump approval, from +3 to -11, among people who say they pay attention to the news "most of the time."

Much more detail in the link.

 
Real Murica don't care 'bout no data or facts. We just care about the fa...er uh...our feelings. Which are facts.
 

i know i keep breaking the rule of discussing anything but whatever narrow parameters were supposed to be following but targeting the least engaged voters is what delivered trump the presidency.

but again, not supposed to discuss that. only what the dems did wrong. not what worked for the winners and suggesting that.
 
More and more evidence of election fraud by the GOP is being discovered by 3rd party groups. So, apparently, what the Dems did wrong was not cheat.
 
targeting the least engaged voters is what delivered trump the presidency.
I suspect you are correct but have no way to prove it.

The data at post #2,537 show that those are the voters which delivered, but do not show it was the result of targeted engagement.

An alternative hypothesis might be that Trump just naturally talks in such a way as to appeal to people who (like himself) haven't thought very hard about how to actually solve the problems facing America, for example, blithely blaming immigrants rather than asking how much they contribute to GDP.
 
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well that’s fair i suppose. although i know a tremendous amount of effort went into targeting particular demographics in particular counties in swing states when it came to advertising so i’d assume those were the voters they were targeting. but, i agree the fact that the message comes naturally may be incidental or deliberate

trump is a bit of a blank canvas.
 
This might belong in Conspiracy Theories, then again it might not. I'm not endorsing this, but I think it's worth a read.

Edited to add: Please see this post by stanfr for a counterargument.

Maybe the Democrats didn't do anything wrong. Maybe she really won, and the election was stolen by Musk and Thiel, by flipping voting data in just 88 counties in seven states.


She Won. They Didn't Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.​

How Leonard Leo's 2021 sale of an electronics firm enabled tech giants to subvert the 2024 election.​

The Dark Enlightenment Coup

The missing votes uncovered in Smart Elections’ legal case in Rockland County, New York, are just the tip of the iceberg—an iceberg that extends across the swing states and into Texas.

On Monday, an investigator’s story finally hit the news cycle: Pro V&V, one of only two federally accredited testing labs, approved sweeping last-minute updates to ES&S voting machines in the months leading up to the 2024 election—without independent testing, public disclosure, or full certification review.

These changes were labeled “de minimis”—a term meant for trivial tweaks. But they touched ballot scanners, altered reporting software, and modified audit files—yet were all rubber-stamped with no oversight.

That revelation is a shock to the public.
But for those who’ve been digging into the bizarre election data since November, this isn’t the headline—it’s the final piece to the puzzle. While Pro V&V was quietly updating equipment in plain sight, a parallel operation was unfolding behind the curtain—between tech giants and Donald Trump.

And it started with a long forgotten sale.
 
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I still can't get there. This will require some serious physical evidence. Plus, these nitwits can't keep a secret. Someone would get drunk and go blabbing about in an attempt to get laid or something. I believe they have the moral depravity to do it. I don't think they have the technical skills but could be wrong on that. they sure as hell wouldn't be able to maintain OpSec for something like this.
 
I mean, yes, but look across the aisle. Strangely, it does look like the GQP has a deeper bench of presidential hopefuls. Or a more packed clown car.
 

i know i keep breaking the rule of discussing anything but whatever narrow parameters were supposed to be following but targeting the least engaged voters is what delivered trump the presidency.

but again, not supposed to discuss that. only what the dems did wrong. not what worked for the winners and suggesting that.

The flawed premise of this thread must not be challenged.
 
I suspect you are correct but have no way to prove it.

The data at post #2,537 show that those are the voters which delivered, but do not show it was the result of targeted engagement.

An alternative hypothesis might be that Trump just naturally talks in such a way as to appeal to people who (like himself) haven't thought very hard about how to actually solve the problems facing America, for example, blithely blaming immigrants rather than asking how much they contribute to GDP.

“Trump voters are stupid” is more succinct.
 

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