What did Democrats do wrong?

[Kestrel]

CNN reported, "Senate Democrats did try to pass a border security measure this year, with Biden’s support, as part of a broader foreign aid package. The bill was negotiated on a bipartisan basis, but Trump attacked the measure and it failed on the floor. Even so, swing-district Democrats say any push on a border bill needed to happen long before this February, just months before the election." The democrats should have said that they tried but that the republicans played politics.

What the democrats should have said regarding the economy is that Trump's plans would make the deficit bigger, drive up inflation, and make the middle class worse off. Both of these problems are what I call kitchen table issues.

I would love it if that worked. But many Americans are too immature to listen to a reasoned discussion of real issues and real solutions. They would complain that political elites and eggheads are talking down to them. Composing the problem is they get most of their information from Facebook and other social media. Places that have become echo chambers for conspiracy theories and misinformation.

 

[Solitaire]

Dude. The economy is not healthy if artificially spiked prices don't correct. If they get high and stay high, you just got stuck in the artificially inflated state. Correction is a part of market health.

When oil prices spike, the market eventually corrects and they return to their previous projected path. They don't spike to $5/gallon then everyone throws up their hands and says "whelp, this is the new normal", but that's what's happening here. Taint healthy.

Agreed, but there is a level of objectivity. Gas prices go up and down, but across time are following a predictably rising trend. Same with a 2x4. I watch them go from a buck apiece, then a slow rise to $2.50 over a generation, then briefly $10 during the pandemic, then drop back to their natural $3.

When the rest of the economy follows the normal correction pattern, I'll agree that it is healthy. Till then, it's still in the ICU.

If you want to keep your economy going, you must normalize higher prices. Or, you can give the federal reserve the ability to raise VAT like taxes on the general population, pay off government debt, and quite literally, destroying money.

Repeating what I said back in early 2016 about the possibility of a Trump administration, a rise of the national debt above 20 trillion dollars - larger than the economy at the time - and the desperate need for future inflation to support such debt levels.


Workers earn money. (Work and money have an intimate relationship.) Part of the money workers spend and a small port they save. This small part saved winds up being loaned out to others for business expansions, construction of houses, industrial inventory purchases, bridges, schools, hospitals built by government.

At the time, state and local government had $10 trillion in debt, Federal at $20 trillion in debt, consumers at $30 trillion in debt, and $40 trillion to businesses - for a total of $100 trillion.


When Trump went in the government debt expanded way faster than the economy did, which meant that other sectors of the economy had to stop borrowing money so the government could borrow. Fewer people bought houses, businesses cut back on employment, consumers cut back on purchases, but the extra government spending papered over that decline.

Covid hit, people panicked, the government borrowed a lot of money providing small stimulus checks, and the federal reserve printed up new money to cover that debt. Afterwords, businesses stunned by the loss of employees went on a hiring bing and raised wages paying for it through price increases funded by the new money. (The economy grew to about thirty trillion dollars following the government debt. But since amount of production of goods didn't change all that much, the price per unit went up.)


When Trump gets in he will ignite a borrowing binge again. But now that the government debt has almost reached 40 trillion dollars, it will cause sharp decline in employment next year. The federal reserve following its stable employment mandate will respond slowly and print up money to get the economy moving again igniting inflation probably doubling prices in eight years.

 

[Brainster]

Inflation has declined, but unfortunately the messaging Biden and Harris have been using is that prices would decline. That was never going to happen and so it's little surprise the voters punished Harris on the issue.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

I would love it if that worked. But many Americans are too immature to listen to a reasoned discussion of real issues and real solutions. They would complain that political elites and eggheads are talking down to them. Composing the problem is they get most of their information from Facebook and other social media. Places that have become echo chambers for conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Kestrel,

Your point is well taken, but some democrats have the ability to talk, but not to talk down, to voters. Politico reported, "He [Former President Clinton] used stops in Fayetteville, Wilson, Greenville and Rocky Mount to don his title of what Barack Obama called “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” Clinton rolled through the importance of legal immigration, the role of grocery store ownership concentration in food prices and got heads nodding at one stop by explaining the impact of supply chain bottlenecks on inflation this way..."

 

[dirtywick]

If you want to keep your economy going, you must normalize higher prices. Or, you can give the federal reserve the ability to raise VAT like taxes on the general population, pay off government debt, and quite literally, destroying money.

Repeating what I said back in early 2016 about the possibility of a Trump administration, a rise of the national debt above 20 trillion dollars - larger than the economy at the time - and the desperate need for future inflation to support such debt levels.


Workers earn money. (Work and money have an intimate relationship.) Part of the money workers spend and a small port they save. This small part saved winds up being loaned out to others for business expansions, construction of houses, industrial inventory purchases, bridges, schools, hospitals built by government.

At the time, state and local government had $10 trillion in debt, Federal at $20 trillion in debt, consumers at $30 trillion in debt, and $40 trillion to businesses - for a total of $100 trillion.


When Trump went in the government debt expanded way faster than the economy did, which meant that other sectors of the economy had to stop borrowing money so the government could borrow. Fewer people bought houses, businesses cut back on employment, consumers cut back on purchases, but the extra government spending papered over that decline.

Covid hit, people panicked, the government borrowed a lot of money providing small stimulus checks, and the federal reserve printed up new money to cover that debt. Afterwords, businesses stunned by the loss of employees went on a hiring bing and raised wages paying for it through price increases funded by the new money. (The economy grew to about thirty trillion dollars following the government debt. But since amount of production of goods didn't change all that much, the price per unit went up.)


When Trump gets in he will ignite a borrowing binge again. But now that the government debt has almost reached 40 trillion dollars, it will cause sharp decline in employment next year. The federal reserve following its stable employment mandate will respond slowly and print up money to get the economy moving again igniting inflation probably doubling prices in eight years.

i agree and i think shrinking the labor pool with mass deportations while trying to push growth is counter-productive, as is broadly hitting imports with tariffs and disrupting the supply chain. all while making vast cuts to social safety net programs, leaving people with nowhere to go.

i said earlier if i'm missing something here i'm not sure what it is. if you get to work in the next few weeks are your company starts buying up inventory, i'm not the only one who's thinking this.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

They didn't listen to me.


Always have a real primary. As I have said before, politics has become a "strike while the iron is hot" affair. You need to find who is the current flavor, not whose turn it is.

Of all the points you make, and which others have made on this, I currently suspect that this is the most important one. I was always worried since even before he got the 2020 nomination that Biden didn't really have two terms in him, and so really hoped that he would be wise enough not to seek reelection in '24. When he did, it effectively short-circuited the whole primary cycle.

Primaries do several things for you: they engage and energize prospective voters early, they provide *timely* information on which issues and candidates get those likely pro-Democrat voters off the couch, they reduce the chance that said voters will get purged, they give candidates more time and air to establish their respective positions and political identities, and also give them more lead-time to build their campaign infrastructure.

I am sure that I could come up with a number of things that Harris specifically did wrong, but overall, I think she played the hand she was dealt about as well as anybody could reasonably expect.

 

[theprestige]

i agree and i think shrinking the labor pool with mass deportations while trying to push growth is counter-productive,

Illegal immigrants aren't supposed to be part of the labor pool to begin with.

We already have programs that address labor shortages via legal immigration.

 

[Venom]

Yeah this assumes the electorate are just angels and it's the loser's fault they lost. It's a good adage to live by, like "being a good sport" by not making excuses after the game, but I think perception matters more than reality here.

The Democrats "abandoned the working class" line ignores GOP tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while Biden has been called the most pro-labor president in a long time. Look what the NLRB did under Biden while Trump bragged to Elon Musk about firing striking workers. ◊◊◊◊, they should have put that in an ad. We can zoom out and look at the trend of Democrats shifting from appealing to the working class back in the day, but you could say much worse about the Republicans.

Trump barely gets punished at all for his "broken promises" while Democrats seem to pay for every slipup.

Democrats didn't get on Joe Rogan and all of the big shows early and often enough.

 

[dirtywick]

a harris appearance on rogan looks a lot like when he had alex jones on after the sandy hook judgement. you understand, these guys were all in trump's corner, right? tony hinchcliffe, the puerto rico is garbage guy, is a rogan guy. dana white, elon musk, jake and logan paul were prominent, he went on theo von. they were thanking the nelk boys and adin ross in his acceptance speech.

these guys aren't buying when the dems were selling imo

 

[theprestige]

Abortion to save the life of the mother or cause fetus is terrible ill or disfigured, is not an abortion of "convenience".

Yes, and if you reread my post I think you'll find I agree with you.* Some abortions are abortions of necessity.

And yours is exactly the dishonest framing I'm talking about.

The debate about abortions in this country isn't about making it illegal, and then carving out exceptions for abortions of necessity.

It's about legalizing abortions for any reason or no reason at all, no questions asked. Too many Americans have noticed the bait and switch, your dishonest framing. And that's why it was a mistake for the Democrats to make it a centerpiece of this campaign.

 

[Stacyhs]

That doesn't change that I'm paying 80% more for my Acme brand coffee since 2020, and that many of my building materials have similarly doubled or more in cost. My rates can't double in the same time frame, of course.

Great. Putting a psychopathic, pathological lying, fear and hate mongering, racist authoritarian in the WH is better than cutting back on how much coffee you drink.

Anyone who thinks Trump is going to bring down the cost of building materials, many of which are made in China, with his high tariffs is delusional.

I'm using the general "you" not specifically you.

 

[Thermal]

Great. Putting a psychopathic, pathological lying, fear and hate mongering, racist authoritarian in the WH is better than cutting back on how much coffee you drink.

Anyone who thinks Trump is going to bring down the cost of building materials, many of which are made in China, with his high tariffs is delusional.

I'm using the general "you" not specifically you.

Understood. But the argument wasn't that Trump was a solution; its that the problem was real.

Eta: the one thing Trump can be provably unable to fix is finances. He is a financial failure at anything other than covering his own ass

 

[mumblethrax]

A free market allows suppliers to do as they please, and that can include forming a cartel. It is a regulated market when they are not allowed to form cartels not a free market.

That's the paradox of free markets--they require regulation to exist.

But I don't think this is terribly persuasive in this case, because OPEC isn't just a cartel of suppliers, it's a coalition of states. It's difficult to argue there is no state interference involved given that fact.

 

[Minoosh]

Democratic turnout just wasn't what it was in 2020. I don't know how much of that was in battleground states.

If the assumption is that the Democrats did something wrong, I think that failing to get out the vote is by definition right up there. If those lost votes were in "safe" states then it's not an issue. Everything I'm reading says Trump got about the same number of popular votes in 2024 as he did in 2020. With the caveat that numbers aren't final, etc., support for him didn't go up, but support for the Democratic candidate fell off fairly sharply. Why? I don't know. Other than looking for data I pretty much avoid media explanations. I've been in the media; I know what we do.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Maybe -- and this is just CRAZY WILD SPECULATION-- maybe there's not just one simple answer, but it was a multitude of things? I know we internet persons, in our modern times. love the whole concept of ONE SIMPLE TRICK (that they don't want you know, usually) but sometimes, in real life, a result has multiple causes working together.

 

[Tero]

They ran a woman. And mentioned wokism now and then. Wokism is not allowed, trans gender is not allowed.

 

[Minoosh]

Why would they say anything about the 36th week? They don't need to. Nor is it even possible to determine pregnancy date with that kind of accuracy that late in a pregnancy, so someone in their 36th week can simply claim it's a few weeks earlier and there's no way to prove it.

And it's easy to find providers that say they do it up to the 35th week, which in reality means they do it in the 36th week because there's no way to distinguish. Nor does this distinction even matter, because at 35 weeks you're still in the convenience stage, because it's no harder or riskier to the mother to simply deliver a live fetus at that point.

There's nothing dishonest about what I or theprestige said. Rather, you were ignorant of the reality of late term abortion. Perhaps now you understand better.

Perhaps you could tell us what percentage of abortions are performed in the 35th week? Or to make this easier for you, since it's impossible to distinguish 35th and 36th, after, say, 30 weeks?

My research tells me the percentage of abortions in the US that occur after 30 weeks is so small it registers as zero, and that only about 1 percent of abortions occur after gestational age 21 weeks. But this was a cursory look. Perhaps you have better data.

 

[Minoosh]

The debate about abortions in this country isn't about making it illegal, and then carving out exceptions for abortions of necessity.

It's about legalizing abortions for any reason or no reason at all, no questions asked. Too many Americans have noticed the bait and switch, your dishonest framing. And that's why it was a mistake for the Democrats to make it a centerpiece of this campaign.

And yet - many GOP politicians are calling for such bans and they have already been enacted in several states.

It makes no sense that someone who simply doesn't want to be pregnant would wait 7 months to end the pregnancy. If you have evidence that this is happening, I'd like to see it.

I've thought a lot about this issue, and there are pretty good reasons for making it a woman's prerogative. I trust them to make the choice. Trying to sell the notion that it's commonplace for women to terminate at 35 weeks due to "convenience" is going to be a tough one, as roughly 0.00 percent of abortions occur after 31 weeks.

I'm not going to claim to know why Dems experienced lower voter turnout than they would have liked. I'll leave that to you. But I am curious: If you don't like abortions provided with "no questions asked," what questions do you think women should be asked?

ETA: I edited this after posting because I couldn't seem to edit it before posting. Specifically I was trying to delete garble and it wouldn't delete. I'm not that familiar with the new format; maybe I was doing something wrong.

 

[Minoosh]

And it's easy to find providers that say they do it up to the 35th week, which in reality means they do it in the 36th week because there's no way to distinguish.

The page you link to says "24 weeks and later," nothing I could find said "35th week," although maybe I wasn't looking hard enough. Also, I found the following interesting. These people don't sound like dedicated baby-killers to me. And please be aware, in addition to how rare late-term abortions are to begin with, "fetal anomaly" in this context is not some cosmetic issue. It's more likely these are babies with *severe* birth defects that doom them to short and often painful lives - like 80 percent of the brain missing and near-constant seizures. It's a tough ethical choice IMO. As cold as it might sound, if resources are limited, keeping these babies alive means denying care to others.

From your link:

FETAL ANOMALY ABORTIONS​

If you are reading this page, it is likely that you or a loved one has to plan on how to handle a severely compromised pregnancy. We are sorry and would like to offer you our most sincere condolences. Should you decide that ending the pregnancy is what is the best decision for you and your pregnancy, our team is prepared to provide you with the highest quality abortion care possible.

Many patients request a remembrance of their baby to take home with them. The following lists the items and services that some of our patients have found helpful in their emotional recovery ...

• Viewing your baby after the delivery
• Holding your baby after the delivery
• Photographs
• Cremation services referral
• Funeral arrangements referral
• Footprints
• Spiritual and ceremonial accommodations
• Remembrance certificate

 

[The Don]

A free market allows suppliers to do as they please, and that can include forming a cartel. It is a regulated market when they are not allowed to form cartels not a free market.

You're right, my apologies.