I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost | Oliver Hall
I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost | Oliver Hall
As a phone bank volunteer, I hoped to counter the Republican attacks and half-truths, but people really believed them, says journalist and podcaster Oliver Hall
Summary
Gender bias played a significant role in Kamala Harris’s defeat, with many voters—often women—expressing doubts about whether “America is ready for a female president.”
Some said they “couldn’t see her in the chair,” or questioned if a woman could lead, with one even remarking, “you don’t see women building skyscrapers.” Though some voters were open to persuasion, this often became a red line.
Oliver Hall, a Harris campaign volunteer, found that economic concerns, particularly inflation, also drove voters to Donald Trump, despite low unemployment and wage growth touted by Democrats.
Harris was viewed in conflicting ways, seen as both too tough and too lenient on crime, as well as ineffective yet overly tied to Biden’s administration.
Ultimately, Hall believes that Trump’s unique appeal and influence overshadowed Harris’s campaign efforts.
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That's a generous way of saying "Most Americans are overly sexist and/or racist and are willing to make up any reason to not vote for a woman of color despite any evidence to the contrary"
Just at the shop work at most citizens make below $15 an hour even trades jobs
Not just any fucking reason
Most US citizens are struggling with overpriced housing, sky high taxes, ginourmous energy costs, inflatated food costs, and all on below living wages
Fuck the Democrats and the Republicans both for exploiting the citizens
I'm glad the enlightened centrist take is always here to offer the right answers.
Just see the US underneath on the daily when on the job
The real US that is hidden beneath all the media sprinkles and the propaganda icing
Gets worse every election no matter which "party" "wins"
Welp it's about to get a WHOLE LOT worse. America is finished. Experiment over.
One party gets into power and throws shit everywhere. The other party gets into power and cleans as much shit as they can, but it's on the ceiling and seeping into the walls. They never get all of it. Often they only get a small amount of it. It's never the shit thrower's fault though. Both parties are covered in shit.
You may find it an absurd opinion, but I'd say it's exactly why the Democrats can't help but grab defeat from the jaws of victory.
They're simply bad at showing off the good that they do and they spend their campaign time courting some mythical moderate Republican voting base that wouldn't vote for them anyway by moving further and further right, disenfranchising their voting base. Who they then blame for their loss. Leftists don't like voting for the lesser of two evils and vote with their heart, while Republicans vote for the nominee, regardless of their positions or values. And the stats show that the Democrats failed to motivate people to get out and vote. Trump actually lost 2 million votes compared to 2020. If there's still elections in 2028, we'll see a resurgence in votes for the Democrat candidate after 4 more years of this monstrosity, but people have forgotten just how bad it really was.
The economy does better under Democratic presidents. That's a verifiable fact. Biden added 500,000 jobs to the economy and brought inflation down, started student loan forgiveness programs, and all kinds of other things. But the Dems didn't talk about that, and the media sure as hell wasn't when going to when they could blast Trump's absurd claims instead. And when we did hear about it, it was through the lens of the economy as a whole, not what you average American experiences day to day. Inflation is down, but prices aren't, and wages haven't kept up in decades. According to the IRS, 51% of Americans made $15k or less in 2021.
So when Trump says he's gonna change things, and Harris looks like it's gonna be more of the same (no matter how much hogwash Trump's claims are and things are only going to get worse), it's gonna do nothing to alleviate the grievances leftists have had with the Biden administration on all sorts of things like the genocide in Palestine. They've heard the "vote for me or it's the end of democracy!" song and dance too many times while seemingly getting nothing out of it.
They're simply bad at showing off the good that they do
pardon me, but I think this is an extremely bad take. because the two things that were glaringly obvious to me over the last 8 years have been
- the total whitewash, sanewashing, and normalization of trump in every aspect by major legacy media and
- the total ignorance of any democratic accomplishment by that same media.
it is extremely hard for a party to proclaim their good things when the people who have the most exposure to the public outright refuse to tell people about it. pundits have complained bitterly about the democrats communication problem on network tv but never seem to question those same tv networks why they won't talk about what the democrats just did. and when democrats appear on those same shows and bring up their accomplishments themselves the hosts are completely disinterested in the topic and don't allow the democrat to expound further on their accomplishments.
this country has a severely unbalanced media coverage and bias issue that no one wants to talk about because it exposes how much the media has been bought and bullied by the right wing. for at least 40 years it's just accepted that what a republican says goes unchallenged while the democrat gets no positive press whatsoever. acceptance of the false "liberal media" trope is baked in and simply taken as fact. it's no wonder why the news is distrusted and no one pays it any attention anymore.
I agree, the media has an absurd right-wing bias. You need simply look at the view ratios between the posts of right-wing and left-wing politicians to see how leftist messages are filtered out. And that's not even getting into stuff like the company that bought up something like 500 local news channels after 9/11 with the sole intent of running more anti-Muslim broadcasts.
But even beyond that, when you look at the Democrats during the campaign, it's all maintaining the status quo rhetoric or shifting away from what their base wants to court the nonexistent moderate Republican, not showing how they've moved towards what their voting base wants.
Dems and Reps are both corporatists (though you could argue Reps are moving towards some neo-feudalism) neither is willing to severely curtail the big money interests. I think you're right that people are genuinely hurting and anxious. People are also probably sexist and racist. Harris had a hell of a lot of disadvantages to overcome in the president's race and she didn't.
Mostly though, reality doesn't matter anymore for probably a supermajority because people are so checked out. Just vibes - and the vibes are bad
Dems and Reps are both corporatists
Here's why we know this is bullshit. Reps keeping cutting corporate taxes. Biden raised corporate taxes. Harris was going to raise them more.
Saying someone is a 'corporatist' is a meaningless generality. Focusing on tax rates always provides crystal clarity on whether the label is real or not. Cutting their taxes is the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd top priority of corporations. If they cannot get a politician to do that, they don't control that politician.