this thread is full of people placing blame on everyone except the people who actually voted for trump. face the facts: the democrats could have put caucasian jesus on the ticket and trump would still have won.
something so minor and inconsequential that it would gained .001% more votes
It’s actually closer to 16% and I would definitely not call it inconsequential given that Trump won this election with several million votes less than he got in 2020 when he lost.
Frankly, this take is profoundly arrogant and indicative of why the Democrats lost to Trump (again, arguably again-again).
This implies that the Democrats could not have possibly done any better, or at least submits to the idea that there is nothing meaningful to be learned from this failure. It projects onto the general electorate a deterministic outlook, that they were always going to vote for Trump no matter what as a way to shield the Democrats and ourselves from accountability.
This is a difficult time time for all of us. We are looking down the barrel of another Trump presidency, one that promises to be a significant tragedy in the history of our nation. It hurts to know what's coming and people are resigning themselves to complacency in order to ease the pain.
But if we want to stand a chance the next time around, we need to understand that the Democrats played a role in their own demise. We need to demand better, not make excuses for them and perpetuate the mediocrity that has been the Democratic platform over the last decade. We can't just hope for another deadly crisis to get us out of this one.
The Democrats, in hindsight, fucked up with the economy and/or the messaging.
Did inflation happen because of the groundwork that Trump laid down in his term (not to mention global pandemic)? Sure --- but did inflation get really bad under Biden? Yes, absolutely. That doesn't make it his fault, but it makes it a problem that the Democrats probably needed to address more aggressively, an all-out attack on rising cost of living.
At the start of the pandemic, for me to carry $100 of normal weekly groceries home from the supermarket was a real challenge, but I could do it. Now, I carry $100 no problem, with a toddler on my shoulders. The money doesn't really matter to me, but from what I've been reading, it really mattered to a lot of voters. Again: I think his will be worse under Trump (if it does get better, it'll be due to some shady tax rebates to supermarkets or big ag or something, IMHO).
So while the Dems are talking about first time home credits and whatnot, Vance is out there lying about the price of eggs --- but it's a lie that "feels" right to a lot of people, and anecdotally, has some truth to it in that inflation/cost of living increase is real. Nevermind that the R policy is...what, exactly? But they say they'll fix it, and they point out that Dems are currently in power, and that's enough for a lot of people.
Open to discussion, but since 2008, the Democrats have won every election where the leadership didn't "put their finger on the scale" in the primaries/picking the candidate. Obama, Obama; Clinton arguably shouldn't have been the nominee and Sanders should have; Biden was (?) properly primaries; Harris was picked --- obvious pick, but still, not primaried.
Or the other reason, that the US is too sexist to elect a woman. It's depressing either way of course.