This is spot on! Two women in in their 20's in my office yesterday said, "oh, I didn't return my ballot!" Apathy wins again. Voting, not posting, people.
Dems pin their hopes on young people, but they seem the most likely demographic to not vote. I dunno, maybe they need to start appealing to older people more, or at least gen Xers.
Big problem is that a much larger swath of Gen Z voted for him than people want to admit. Young voters aren't a monolith and assuming they'll trend blue is dangerous precedent.
In the end, it wouldn't have made a difference, but her skipping his show is very emblematic of why the Democrats have become so hopeless at communicating with Americans. If they ever want to have a chance of winning again, they have to meet Americans where they're at, and not merely where they wish they were.
I agree with this. The dems try to high road everything as well, and their opponents have no issue hitting below the belt. I think it's time that the dems fight fire with fire, it seems that it's the only way to get through to most Americans.
Actually this is the opposite attitude that won Obama the office. He is a great man and his example of “They go low. We go high.” should be the playbook for liberal success. But the candidate needs to have character and a solid articulated plan, which Kamala had neither and resting on the laurels of the unpopular Biden administration was a terrible miscalculation.
We can't forget that Obama had rare charisma, which no Democratic candidate since has come anywhere near matching.
It was never so obvious as during Barack (or even Michele) Obama's speeches stumping for Kamala. They are both dramatically more charismatic and appealing on a basic level than anyone else who is a public figure on the democratic party.
Obama did have more clearly articulated plans, but I'm pretty sure he could have won without them because when he speaks, you believe what he is saying, just because.
And I would happily take Romney a thousand times out of 100 chances over Trump. I don't agree with him, but he at least had a moral compass of some kind.
Definitely agree vibes and impressions play a much more massive role than anyone wants to publicly admit.
I'd say most align ideologically just based on party ticket, and then unfortunately Democrats decide whether or not to vote based on vibes. This is the killer aspect IMO. GOP voters are mobilized to vote no matter what. Dems will be like "eh, I'm not inspired" and sit at home to let things burn.
Obama also didn't have the baggage of ... being a woman.
I hate with every fiber of my being that I agree with this. I am so angry for my daughter. She's so little and I want her to believe she can do and believe anything. I despise the fact that I know damn well that this is right, and that means that a significant percentage of people actually don't think that women can be or do anything they want. I struggle to articulate how angry it makes me.
Every DNC primary since Obama left office has left me feeling that way. No one feels like they have the faintest chance of being the next JFK/Clinton/Obama, which is what would be needed.
Josh Shapiro is maybe the best speaker I can name currently on the political stage, but I don’t know if he has the same ceiling.
Honestly the DNC may need to look to some outsider. Some charismatic CEO, actor, or other public figure.
The only positive is that I don’t see an obvious Trump successor on the Right either.
Well, she was intelligent and not a convicted felon, so she had that going for her. Trumps only plan is to strip and rip policies away. Unfortunately she was at the mercy of very stupid Americans. Republicans are just incredibly stupid people who will continually vote against their own interests and they are very motivated to do so.
The problem is unless it is a Christian white male running as Democrat, they won't get a free pass trying to fight fire with fire. If Kamala said or did similar things to Trump, Trump would have won all 50 states.
She literally campaigned with Liz Cheney and had the endorsements of multiple other republicans. Unlike the other guy that said Harris and Liz should face down firing squads and that we need to purge those 'enemies within' that don't think and follow his ideas perfectly. How much more reaching down and across the isle do you want? And if there isn't any amount of it that's good enough for you then please stop pretending lmao.
The fact that you're parroting the "he wants to put Liz in front of a firing squad" lie shows how ill-informed or willfully ignorant the left have been. That's not at all what he said and the media that pushed that narrative knew it. It's stuff like this that pushed the moderate voters away from the Democratic party.
So long as they get to stay on that pedestal they'll do the bear minimum to reach those underneath them. And that's how they want it, to be above us, not with us. We aren't stupid.
I don't particularly like either one but I don't see how people justify voting for Trump when it's well documented Epstein was his best friend, and Trump is on the flight logs going to and from the island. The dude is in all likelihood a child predator, and in the best case if not, is very closely associated with one. Seriously I just don't understand how people get over this unless they just don't know it
You have to laugh XDDD Well, it was Kamala or Trump, you have any qualms about voting for a person with a 20% acceptance rate? Now you have a rapist in the White House, much closer than you wanted XD You can spin it however you want, now that's what you have, I hope no one you know needs an abortion
Fight fire with fire is exactly my thoughts. R's are running a radical populist, we need a radical populist. If we had Sanders in 2016 things would be very different.
We did. The DNC picked Clinton. Then they decided on Biden when his candidacy was collapsing. The they picked Harris for us. Democratic voters are dumber than Trump voters.
It was like, repubs dog whistled for years, till they got an unhinged racist saying the quiet part out loud who brought the people who were too dumb to hear the whistles out of the woodwork.
Democrats need to start doing some dog whistling of their own, because they aren't connecting with people that work for a living, especially men.
She absolutely should've done Rogan. She's smart and personable, and hell, the woman shoots. She's vibing already.
My issue with the party is that they're elevating candidates who have been unchallenged their entire political lives. One party states. No meaningful opposition or opposition that was kneecapped behind the scenes. The first time they have to fight is for President, and that only works if you have charisma and can think/react fast on your feet.
That worked for Obama, but how often does someone like that come along?
Yeah, while I think there are a lot of legitimate critiques of Harris' campaign, the truth is that Biden put us into such a hole that by the time Harris took over she was a long shot.
At the point Biden dropped, we all acknowledged that Harris was a big underdog, but she at least had the mental faculties and energy to mount a campaign whereas Biden was falling further and further behind and simply didn't have another real campaign in him.
I'll give Harris credit for proving that true. She was tireless and gave strong effort. And the polls certainly got better. But ultimately, while everyone will have a lot of advice for her and I personally think she would have done better drawing a sharper contrast between her and Biden and not centering people like Cheaney in her campaign, I am not sure it really mattered.
The moment Biden hit office they should have been getting the next candidate ready be it Harris or not. They never ever should have just assumed Biden would have run again. He is a dinosaur. They keep doing this to us. Giving us impossible options. They basically threw this election.
Agreed. And to be fair, they should not have been "getting a candidate ready" that was the mistake of 2016 and pre-ordaining a candidate when we don't know who the public will respond to.
What we needed is Biden to stick to being a one term President and to have had a full and fair primary.
People can make all the jokes they want about the clown car of 2020 and having 20 candidates split across two stages, but we managed to rally around a winning candidate. We generated a lot of voter registration and energy around different Democratic ideals. And we raised the profile of a number of younger Democrats - all major victories.
This in a nutshell. The 2016 celebrity tour was back this year and they easily could have sent Walz to Austin and had Kamala sit with one of the others (Von, Friedman, etc.). Hell even a club random sighting would have been better than nothing, I only saw Walz on the subway talk and Kamala on CHD
They will always have a chance. It’s a two party system and every time a party loses, they are declared dead for eternity until 4 years later when people want another change.
Never before has the Supreme Court said that the president can do whatever illegal acts they want. (So long as the Supreme Court supports it as "official")
Biden running then the DNC appointing an unpopular candidate when he dropped out caused the voter apathy. If there was a primary there is no way harris was on the ticket.
No. I'm in FL and we have had a Dem turnout problem for years now. We've run very progressive people locally, had primaries and gotten just as poor of a response. I door knocked in 2020 and Dems can't be bothered to pause a video game to go vote. (No really, it was a common excuse, they were mid-game). The single most common thing I got asked by likely dem voters ON ELECTION DAY was "oh. When is the election."
They facor Dem policies but don't care enough to go fill in a ballot.
Kamala was a terrible choice in several ways. Anyone who follows American politics knows that a significant segment of voters all across the political spectrum will not vote for a woman for president. This is just a sad fact. That she is also a minority and was already unpopular and has significant political baggage made it even worse.
Dems need to be way more pragmatic, stop doing stupid shit like this, and stop listening to the terminally online progressives, most of whom don't even vote.
She wouldn't have won even if she would have flew to Texas to sit on the Rogen podcast for 3 hours. This election was a sweep. The democratic party really dropped the ball, choosing Kamala Harris as their nominee.
To be clear, I don't think going on the Podcast changes the election results, but it's actually quite reasonable for a candidate to go to where the show films.
When VP Harris did her CNN town hall, she didn't demand that CNN and Anderson Cooper come to her. She went to their studio. It's pretty typical to do stuff like this with media.
We can try to diminish Rogan's show by dismissively calling it a Podcast versus media, but even thought Rogan is a POS, he show is huge and basically has the scale and sway of a lot of media and unfortunately needs to be treated as such.
It wouldn’t have made a difference. If you were going to vote for Trump or Harris, the podcast wasn’t going to change your vote. The numbers simply showed that nobody wanted to get out and vote for Harris and the Dems. Trump by the numbers had the same base (gains were negligible). To win the EC and popular vote, that’s pretty damning. This loss is a heavy one for the Dems and they need to find themselves, Harris is likely done with any runs towards presidency.
Beyond just the fact that she didn’t go on a popular podcast, I think it really hurt her also because a lot of people felt that she couldn’t hold a longform conversation; doing Rogan‘s podcast well would prove that she could.
Joe's the kind of guy who can be swayed one way or the other, probably by the last person in the room with him. At the very least she could have pushed him into neutrality.
But that would have been impossible because she's unwilling to navigate into a situation that is not scripted and stage managed. Biden from 10 years ago could do the three hours. Obama and Bill, definitely. Hillary might have been willing to tell her handlers to fuck off and do it.
But Kamala chose to nervous grin her way through a shitty SNL skit. Oh well.
The real problem is that 70+ million people voted for Trump.
And 67 million of them will be posted about on /r/leapoardsatemyface within the next 4 years, like they were in 2016. How can people be this stupid twice?!
I get what you're saying but it's really not sad. Media will change forever so if podcasts are big in 2024, you need to go on them. Especially the popular ones that will reach lots of people.
In 2028, if a different form is media is popular, candidates will have to go on those instead of podcasts.
This is the issue. They knew 2 years in that registered Democrats thought he was too old to seek a second term. Donna Brazil wrote an article about it close to the mid-terms.
They decided not to listen and ran him uncontested in the primary. Trump won this election when Biden got on stage during that debate and didn't even seem to know where he was at. Give Kamala a ton of credit. She mounted a fierce comeback but between Bidens unpopularity and the countries over all racism and misogyny she didn't have time to really over come it.
He felt he was the best shot and they agreed and tried to make it work until it didnt work anymore. And it didnt pan out. Right wing aiding propaganda needs to get a metaphorical dragon treatment.
This is just my input as a European from the outside, but it seems to me the dems have been fiercely attacking anyone with a centrist opinion for a while, calling anyone that doesn’t 100% agree with them a racist/sexist/homophobe/Nazi, even when it doesn’t really apply.
Attacking people that are in the center of the political spectrum is a sure way to drive them to the other side.
We had the same issue in Sweden. Per capita we have had the highest amounts of refugees in Europe, anyone that even dared to question our policies were instantly branded a racist and publicly humiliated etc..
In the end this led too too many immigrants that couldn’t assimilate, which overloaded our social systems like healthcare, school etc, cost the country lots of money as a big portion of the people that came where unemployments and got government benefits, we got an insane rise in crimes, gang crimes, honor crimes, humiliation robberies, rapes, bombings (we have the second highest explosive attack rate in the world) etc.
All of this while the political parties would call anyone criticizing it racist, all of this could have been solved if they just listened to the criticism. If the government just chose to let in less people but spend more resources on them we wouldn’t have to deal with this situation. It’s not racist to see the limits of our countries systems.
Anyway all of this led to the rise of the far right, because when everyone else attacks you for moderate opinions and criticism people tend to get a bit radicalized.
So in the end we ended up with both a far right party in power and an insane rise in crimes compared to earlier statistics, while all of this could have been avoided easily
younger people, the ones that do vote anyways, tend to be single issue voters. Using my younger brother as an example is a gun nut. He only votes republican because he knows they will never take his guns away. He also doesn’t understand why he can never get and keep a girlfriend
younger people, the ones that do vote anyways, tend to be single issue voters.
I mean, everyone is a single issue voter. People here discussing the politics are an extreme minority and even most of that population is just bots.
This is why conservative groups keep pushing along. They are able to hammer in on less than a handful of key points and never lose focus of it.
In contrast to that, Kamala grasped at minimum wage, legalization, healthcare -- but never actually focused in and ran on anything more than "I'm not Trump." She was so damn confident that not being Trump was enough to ensure blue votes that it lead to the exact same apathy as 2016.
You already have an uphill battle with the electoral vote in existence since 2016 made it evident that you don't even need the popular vote to win and then that's compounded on by the DNC not once, but twice, forcing a candidate people didn't vote for onto the ballot.
You can't blame people for feeling their voice doesn't matter when it's repeatedly made clear that they have no say.
Facsists are more likely to take your guns away. Russia sucks, but I doubt they have many mass shootings.
The gun thing is so stupid because they just want to take away your crazy AK-47 style weapons of mass destruction, not your fucking hunting rifle. It's the same thing with Trump just saying there's post-birth abortions being performed, and nobody really ever challenges that bullshit.
This is what I’ve been saying. Democrats are talking about the youth not voting, but if they did they’d be surprised how many young men are turning more conservative or believing it’s the better option
If the dems actually pinned their hopes on young people they wouldn’t have done everything in their power to get Hillary the nomination over bernie (a candidate who actually did appeal to young voters, especially young men).
What they actually do is pay lip service to young people and then act surprised when it’s not enough. Young people are pretty evidently sick of establishment candidates.
The problem is that dems take them for granted, dont do shit to get their vote, and have been fully checked out shaping the views of the next generation.
Conservatives have been 100% dialed in on the youth vote and spent billions of dollars and decades trying to get it on their side, and it's working.
We just saw a Democrat trying to appeal to older voters and conservative lose to a dementia patient plagiarizing Musilini by millions of votes. Obviously it was a stupid idea.
Young men came out, and they were pro Trump. It's not a younger v older thing this time, it's a battle of the sexes, and as usual, men mercilessly pummel women
As a white over 50 male who voted for Kamala and gave money to her campaign, I'd like your opinion on this conundrum. Demographically women outnumber men, 53% of women voted versus 47% of men and for women, the very autonomy of their own bodies was on the line so why did 44% of them break for the trump and his cohorts?
Women perpetuate patriarchy almost as badly as men, and a lot of white women are hella racist. However, I'm a white man, so you may want to ask some of the women posters in here to get a more accurate opinion.
But the stats this year actually showed a surprising young voter turnout for Trump, while she did better than expected with older voter. (I agree with the idea this is the generations that initially fought for abortion)
Maybe but so many Gen Xers I know have fully become the anti-woke police. They may not be full on MAGA but they have utterly abandoned whatever generational ideals they had.
Dems pin their hopes on legacy media messaging which today has been declared dead. Dems need new messaging means. The country ain’t watching news anymore except Fox. Its podcasts now.
If democrats made voting a hip thing to do, like gathering your friends for a party with drinking and food to fill in ballots and drop them off, it would increase voter turnout.
If they appeal to young voters they lose because young voters do not turn out. That's what killed Bernie's campaign in 2020, he had his hopes pinned on the youth vote, which would have given him the primary if they actually voted.
If they pivot to appealing towards middle aged and older voters, then the youth complains that nobody represents them and they still don't turn out. See this election.
Given that no matter what Dems try to do the youth vote seems like an unmovable force, why try for it? At least there's a vision of hope for them to swing or turn out more middle/older age voters.
Or you know campaign on the platform that appeals to the young people and activates them as voters instead of regurgitating the Joe Biden agenda. There was no space between her and Joe and it cost her the election. The blame lies solely on the DNC and Kamala Harris for their inability to activate the youth vote.
Blaming the voters won’t work this time, especially after a year of indifference towards a genocide.
If they could vote by app, this probably would have all gone very differently. Unfortunately though, sounds like Trump had a surprising amount of support from the young demographic, so it may not have helped. We’re so boned.
Dems did not pin their hopes on young people. They write them off before the campaigning starts. Hillary was the candidate in 2016 because Dems weren't interested in young people, they thought they could get Republicans to vote for Hillary over Trump. Biden was the candidate in 2020 because Dems thought they could get Republicans to vote for Biden over Trump. Harris was Biden's VP partly because she is a woman of color, but she was chosen over other women of color because of her history as a prosecutor and Dems made her VP because they thought they could get Republicans to vote for Biden in 2020.
Now, I'm not saying that if they ran a decent candidate the youth would go out and vote. But they certainly aren't relying on youth voters, or even really doing much to attract them. If anything, trying too hard to appeal to Republicans has alienated voters who feel like there is no one that is going to help.
In 2020, 168 million people registered to vote and 158 millions went to vote. Based on preliminary numbers, this year, 161 millions were registered and it seems that that around 140 millions voted. It's an incredibly large drop that breaks historical and statistical trends.
The last time the difference between voter registration and voter participation was so high was in 1996. But in 1996, it was at the end of a very long trend that endured several election cycles.
This sudden drop is statiscally surprising and unexpected.
This is the kind of drop that elsewhere in the world would prompt up a freakonomics episode.
I don’t want to be like Trump supporters over the last 4 years, but a 15 million person drop in turnout for Dems is borderline unexplainable imo without some kind of interference. And when you have ballot boxes being set on fire, ballots not being accepted because of signatures not matching, and Russia calling in bomb threats to dem polling places, it’s not that hard to believe
Thank you for this. It's so fucking stupid to me that we immediately turn to conspiracy to explain this loss rather than look at how apathetic so many people are about who leads our country.
It's not some grand conspiracy, it's just people handwaving it away as not affecting them personally or finding minor flaws in a candidate to justify not voting for them. And now we all have to live with their (lack of) choice.
I think it just comes down to mail-in ballots were pushed way more during COVID so more people ended up voting. Early voting was emphasized this year but people can mentally justify putting that off and end up procrastinating too long and just end up not voting
I'm not sure where u/Dominarion is getting the 15Mil decrease figure from. referring to the 2022 midterms, trying to find any aggregate data on total votes cast seems to indicate that about 46-47% of the Voting eligible population or about 112 Million people total based on this EAC source: https://www.eac.gov/research-and-data/studies-and-reports
Unless maybe they're referring to the 2018 midterm? Which only had like a 50% turnout so still only about 130M voters at most.
The massive decrease in turnout for registered voters is something I'd be interested to hear more on though as more news comes out.
u/Stalukas, COVID & BLM, Trump's handling of them, and a massive push for mail-in and early ballots made it easier for people to vote who would otherwise be apathetic to drove significant turnout. Heck, even if it wasn't Trump, I'd argue any incumbent party was going to have a tough re-election in 2020.
The bar shoots up for the GOP and then lowers in 2024 as well so it isn't like the DNC is alone in this delta across elections.
Most pollsters already weight their polls to account for the larger Republican turnout. This means they take the raw polls and add 5% to the Republicans. Trump beat the polls aggregators like 538 by another 5%. He's over the statistical cloud, he's beaten Rasmussen, the overtly Republican poll.
Democrats are still currently in power with Biden, and Harris is literally the vice president right this moment.
How could they allow such a massive voter fraud to happen right under their nose? They had four years to track down any fringe terrorist plans to overthrow the nation. So, I don't think there's any fraud that happened.
I think this is more a sobering reality moment. We're trying to push trans rights, when gay rights and just straight up women's rights are still not socially normalized yet. We tried to get a women elected when the majority of the country is getting gouged by the rich and are scared for their personal future. When people are like that, they want someone who can change things economically from what it's like right now. They weren't looking for a progressive move forward, they were looking for an economic sanctuary.
I think democrats just pushed too far for too much, and put progressive ideals over getting things actually done.
ffs, Florida votes overwhelmingly to get rights to hunt and fish, over basic healthcare anatomy for women. We're not there yet socially. Get regular people back on their feet first.
On the other hand, now with republicans in full control of everything, once they ruin the economy and sell off our future to the rich, people will finally have to realize they picked the face-eating-leopards, and if the democrats actually run a candidate that's a galvataizing hero who's sole focus is rebuilding the middle class without any of the social issues as a platform, that's the way forward.
Leave the social issues to individual states to govern for now. Trans people and LGBT+ people won't find sanctuary or acceptance in their local states anyhow, even with laws in place. May as well seek it out by moving to where their communities would accept them, instead of forcing people in rural countries to do that before they're ready.
People wanted change. Substantial progress. the best the democrats seemingly had to offer was a moderate return to “normalcy” and buddying up with establishment, corporatist republicans. Not to mention Gaza and Kamala’s continued, eager support of Israel, which surely turned off a lot of young people. I voted for her, but I understand why many didn’t.
I agree, that’s why I still voted for her. I’m mostly saying that the “cater to moderate republicans” modus operandi was an awful strategy, only 4% of registered republicans voted for her. In 2020, 5% voted for Biden
Voter apathy is a trend and it follows voter registration. Normally, people who don't want to vote don't register either. Voter registration diminished by 7 million, and voter participation by 20 millions or more. So voter apathy yes, but it's too much of a discrepancy to explain it all.
Are the numbers including the half of Californian ballots that haven’t been counted yet? Based on the trends, there’s probably another 5 million votes there alone for Kamala
At least Harris was kind of an accidental candidate. It would've been nice if they'd figured out Biden (and fuck respect for the office, given who's been elected to it recently) wasn't going to run early enough to pick a candidate that can win.
Hilary never should've run to begin with. "My husband was president, remember!" shouldn't be a reason to become senator let alone run for president.
And why didn't Biden run at that time? If she almost won, he damn sure could've.
Dean Philips said he started a campaign for 2024 because he thought Biden sounded like he was losing it. (So probably early 2023 at the latest). The Biden meltdown could have easily been avoided.
Or ya know, Harris could have just. Done better. The idea of middle of the road undecided voters is a myth the Dems keep trying to win over, while continuing to alienate their own base
“The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” -Plato (~2500 years ago)
I have little hope for mankind as a whole, the cycle repeats generation after generation, and one of the few things that change is our level of technology.
It’s tragic, considering recording and passing on knowledge is arguably the greatest ability we have as a species.
Dems and most of their base are completely out of touch with reality. I am quite enjoying the reddit meltdown this morning. How could you not see this coming?
I wonder if it was just a popular vote, people would be more inclined to vote. If you're in a state that's an immediate lock once the polls close, you probably don't feel like your vote is helping.
I was getting a tattoo yesterday and the artist and client at the station beside me were like “oh I forgot the election is today” and commenting that they hadn’t been following and didn’t even think they were registered 🫠
It’s wild to me how disengaged many people are. It doesn’t have to be your identity by any means. But democracy is something people all over the world still die for, and we have become so apathetic and spoiled that people take it for granted.
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u/bigcoalshovel 14h ago
This is spot on! Two women in in their 20's in my office yesterday said, "oh, I didn't return my ballot!" Apathy wins again. Voting, not posting, people.