What did Democrats do wrong?

[johnny karate]

What is there to refute? You seem to be saying that there is nothing the Dems did wrong because anyone that voted for Trump buys into everything he believes and apparently now, everything his potential appointments believe. How can we possibly refute that?

I've tried to point out that we have a binary choice and I for one voted for Harris despite not agreeing with her on most things. I guess you can't believe that?

If you voted for Harris despite not agreeing with her on most things, do you understand that means you still voted for those things?

 

[johnny karate]

The entire project of scientific skepticism rests upon the premise that it is possible to talk at least some people out of beliefs which they could not possibly have adopted rationally, that is, by validly reasoning from sound premises. If you're not down with that, you may well be in the wrong forum.

Now that you've finally admitted that Trump voters did not arrive at their choice rationally, all that's left for you to do is let us know how to change their minds.

The floor is yours.

 

[johnny karate]

One more thing the dems do wrong, nobody cares if its a "crime" or a "Civil Violation" and when folks say things like that, 90% of the room rolls their eyes.

I'm sure this is an important distinction for the people who just elected a 34-time convicted felon.

 

[dirtywick]

one would assume you voted for harris because the few things you agree with her on are pretty big and consequential. i can only imagine what the trump voter that only agrees with him on a few things was willing to overlook.

i can only imagine there was a significant amount of voters that have no clue what was going on and were deceived. was that the democrats big failure? not deceiving these people into voting for them?

anyway, pretty simple that failure to prosecute trump for his seditious acts and other felonies was the thing they did wrong.

 

[johnny karate]

On "the majority of Americans are too stupid to vote they way they should" - Maybe that's another thing Democrats did wrong.

The vast majority of Americans received public education up to age 18.

Both of these institutions are dominated by progressives, and have been for generations. The people who voted this year have by and large been educated by people who overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Sure, some districts are required by law to "teach the controversy" or omit sex education. And some affluent families do send their kids to private schools. But as a demographic, American voters have predominantly been a captive audience for progressive educators during their most formative years.

So that's - what? - three, maybe four generations of voters out there right now, products of American public education. And you're saying that a majority of them are too stupid to vote the way they should. So maybe (probably) the scope of what Democrats did wrong goes far, far beyond the way the they managed this election campaign.

The glaring flaw of course being that it's only Republicans who have mainstreamed conspiracy theories and anti-vaxxersim. Democrats by and large had the same public education and somehow managed to avoid those pitfalls. Gosh I wonder if there's some other, less stupid explanation?

 

[dirtywick]

i mean, you guys must feel a little taken when he started nominating loyalists like matt gaetz and dr. oz and the rest of his 3 ring circus clown cabinet instead of competent and serious people? like, he's supposed to fix everything.

 

[johnny karate]

"What Democrats did wrong is not indoctrinate kids hard enough in school" is a weird take.

Even more hilarious than the lazy attempt to blame Democrats for Republicans being a bunch of easily-duped rubes is the tacit admission that Republicans never had an interest in educating people in the first place.

 

[johnny karate]

No. I'm saying that somehow Hispanics and Blacks got "stupider" this election cycle.

And I'm saying that even most "Republicans" have been through American public schools. So why don't they have critical thinking skills and basic civics knowledge? Are American public school educators just not teaching those things?

I'm enjoying that your premise isn't that Republicans aren't stupid, it's that it's the fault of Democrats that Republicans are stupid.

 

[d4m10n]

Now that you've finally admitted that Trump voters did not arrive at their choice rationally, all that's left for you to do is let us know how to change their minds.

Whether or not Trump was a rational choice for any given voter depends on what exactly they were hoping to achieve. Suppose someone only has one policy priority, and that is to make abortion illegal in as many American jurisdictions as possible. Given that this is their sole consideration, should they pick Harris or Trump?

 

[johnny karate]

Whether or not Trump was a rational choice for any given voter depends on what exactly they were hoping to achieve. Suppose someone only has one policy priority, and that is to make abortion illegal in as many American jurisdictions as possible. Given that this is their sole consideration, should they pick Harris or Trump?

A single-issue voter when so much more was at stake is already an irrational person.

 

[d4m10n]

A single-issue voter when so much more was at stake is already an irrational person.

Binning all of humanity into either rational or irrational.

What a perfectly fantastical idea!

 

[johnny karate]

Binning all of humanity into either rational or irrational.

What a perfectly fantastical idea!

What a weird takeaway.

I’m judging a specific group of people as irrational based on the objectively irrational decision they made.

Voting for an explicitly anti-vax candidate is an objectively irrational decision.

A couple pages worth of “How dare you!” responses and I don’t see anyone disputing that simple fact.

 

[Minoosh]

This is a tautology but it somehow works for me. The Democrats lost because they didn't get the votes they absolutely need to get. Higher turnout in a few urban areas would have tipped it easily. Turnout wasn't bad historically, it was just off from record highs. What I'm not sure about: With early voting and mail-in ballots being the bulk of the votes, it's easy to see exactly which Democrats haven't voted so far. How hard did Harris's campaign try to get these people to return their ballots, or vote early? She really only needed a small bump in Philadelphia, Atlanta and urban Michigan to win. Mathematically, she could have lost the popular vote by a huge margin and still won the Electoral College.

I guess that's a fallacy of sorts, given the luxury of 20-20 hindsight, but with early voting and mail-in ballots, you actually *have* a kind of hindsight. You can track who hasn't voted, and among those, who voted in the last election. You don't know who they have voted for, of course, but you can use obvious proxies such as party registration. You can't entice them with material rewards but you can give them rides to their polling place etc. Neighbors can even bug neighbors to vote, social media can spread memes ... Did Harris use social media effectively? Republicans hounded me relentlessly with texted attack ads.

 

[bruto]

Then deportation should be a piece of piss, since it only requires a preponderance of evidence.

I think standards of proof are a little different in criminal cases. No doubt there are some who would like to see the criminal process sped up and streamlined and made less rigorous, but I suspect some negative consequences might surface.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

What is going to happen is that the Migration Courts are going to be completely overwhelmed instantly, filling up all prisons.
Then ICE will start to deport people who's case is still ongoing, illegally, and pretend there was a bureaucratic snafu, and they would totally bring the person back, only they forgot where they sent him a his kids to.

 

[The Don]

What is going to happen is that the Migration Courts are going to be completely overwhelmed instantly, filling up all prisons.
Then ICE will start to deport people who's case is still ongoing, illegally, and pretend there was a bureaucratic snafu, and they would totally bring the person back, only they forgot where they sent him a his kids to.

Probably. And then it'll turn out that thousands of them were US citizens and tens or hundreds of thousands were in the country legally but now they can't come back into the country because they've been deported but it doesn't really matter because they're brown.

 

[Samson]

A single-issue voter when so much more was at stake is already an irrational person.

That is not sensible.
Gad Saad expands on that but his podcast with Sam Harris appears to have been deleted.
Argument ad extremum suggests single issue voting is the only way to a true democracy.

 

[johnny karate]

That is not sensible.

Team Anti-Vax has thoughts on what’s sensible.

 

[Thermal]

Whether or not Trump was a rational choice for any given voter depends on what exactly they were hoping to achieve. Suppose someone only has one policy priority, and that is to make abortion illegal in as many American jurisdictions as possible. Given that this is their sole consideration, should they pick Harris or Trump?

They should be DQed as voters.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

1) Put a person with dark skin and a vagina up as their candidate for President of the United States of America. Maybe one of those unfortunate characteristics can be tolerated, but not both.
2) Allowed the ultra-wealthy to accelerate away from everyone else by continuing to enable the funnelling of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the ultra-wealthy. E.g., what happened to Biden's plan to tax billionaires more?
3) Announced that the US economy was doing well when this is only true on aggregate; lots of people are losing ground even though a minority are doing very well.