Saru Jayaraman tried. As far back as January, the president of low-pay campaign group One Fair Wage recalls telling Democratic leaders in Washington DC that voters were worried about the cost of living.
Democratic media strategies haven't changed since the 90s, and that's a problem. Also, Trump did the independent media circuit and Kamala just didn't. In the few sit down interviews Kamala did, her top priority was message discipline, not connecting with voters. Every answer sounded like a stump speech. For all of Trump's lack of humanity, he came off as far more relatable than Kamala.
The entire campaign model used by the Democrats needs to be shredded. The consultants that have failed over and over and over need to be gone. Democrats need to deliver better for the working class, and they have to get much better at bragging about it. They can't continue to dull their message so as not to offend wealthy donors.
Voters need a narrative, and narratives need an enemy. Republicans have no problem finding an enemy, they just pick a disadvantaged group and go at it. Democrats must take on the corporate and wealthy interests that are legitimately keeping workers down, and they must do it loudly. That's the only narrative available to them. The strategy of beating up the targets the Republicans chose, but not as much, is a total loser.
Lmao this is like raising prices in october to 'slash' them for black friday sales. "Hey everybody, remember last month when grocery prices got up to 3 times as high as when i took office? I had some really good phone calls with my corporate donors and we agreed that itd be a good pr move if we could announce theyre going back 'down' to 2.75x as much!"
not even close, that's all completely off the mark.
a literal global pandemic happened, and US food production companies were found responsible for price gouging simply for profit because they thought everyone would be too distracted by dying from the pandemic.
you combine price gouging, which Biden publicly exposed and told the worst companies to stop doing, and they did revert prices, in with shrinkflation, which Biden set up a regulatory committee specifically to combat, with Russia's War driving up energy prices, and Biden still was able to bring down inflation within a couple years to normal enough levels that the treasury stopped raising interest rates. he brought it down from 14% to about 2.
Yes, it is good that Biden was able to lower grocery prices and gas prices.
you wanted lower prices. Biden gave you lower prices.
Biden doesn't set grocery or energy prices, but he can bring them down as much as possible despite a service industry attacked by Trump, a pandemic killing and isolating the work force attacked and dismantled by Trump, and an aggressive War from a leading energy producer that will lead to more wars and higher prices with the support Trump has pledged to Putin.
gas is a commodity, it's price is based on opec oil production, whether we get oil from them or not, along with global demand, the seasons and severity of winters around the world, political bullshit on the other side of the world, and corporate greed.
if you want to lay blame on high prices in the u.s., blame yourselves first for your addiction to large, gas-guzzling vehicles (among other things)... then blame the oil companies, who produce more now than ever before and choose to export at higher prices than they can sell domestically (the u.s. actually exports more than we import).
egg prices have been affected by infected farms and loss of production, and compounded by corporate greed eyeballing opportunities to artificially inflate, and hold high, prices; and they'd rather write-off a culling than spend a dime on preventive measures such as lower density farms or vaccinations (you know how well that would play out with our far-right dominated media these days).
neither can really be controlled by congress or the president. neither is the democrat's fault. neither is biden or harris' fault.
if you didn't demand the giant trucks and weren't willing to pay giant premium prices for them; manufacturers wouldn't have the profit-driven motives to make them, focus almost exclusively on them, and cut production and selection of smaller and more affordable vehicles to 'make room' for them in the market.
To be fair, you are probably not taking into account all the things Americans have to spend money on that are government services elsewhere. Healthcare alone takes a large chunk of American income. By the time people are spending money on groceries, there is often little or no money left.
The other day a guy i met from the D.C. area told me that low quality coffee costs 20$ a bag. Fucking pregrinded coffee for the filter machine. You can get the luxury beans for that money in Europe.
neither can really be controlled by congress or the president. neither is the democrat’s fault. neither is biden or harris’ fault.
False. just straight up false. you literally straight up mentioned things to address some of the problems in your post. But besides that congress absolutely can pass laws that penalize companies for profiteering and then enforce them.
Pass a law making CEO/board members personally liable w/ jail time for a company's profiteering on food prices and watch what happens at even the wiff of a federal investigation.
Now tell me how many democrats supported bernie's windfall bill?
How exactly do you make raising profit margins illegal? You can do it for natural disasters and such, but companies raising prices when the market allows is just what all companies do all the time.
The government is capable of addressing these issues, but not by making profiteering illegal. They need to break up monopolies, vertical integration, and certain trade associations. They also need to address short term performance pay for CEOs. Any performance pay should be tied to company performance over at least the next ten years, not this quarter.
Americans aren't educated enough to know the difference, so without more clever messaging, all these facts are written off as "educated people trying to show they are more superior than us".
Politics is a show of messagimg and failed promises and Dem's consultants and marketeers failed miserably at this.
The average shmoe doesn't give a f if the stock market is doing well if the groceries are high. Democrats could have addressed this asap and would have been better off come November. But anytime I said that I got yelled at how the economy is doing good..oh well, enjoy the fascism.
Democrats Won Highly Engaged Voters: In the 2024 presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party successfully retained support from frequent and highly engaged voters. However, they struggled to connect with less-engaged voters, where Donald Trump held a significant lead[1].
Democratic Assumptions Challenged: The election results challenged several Democratic assumptions, such as the belief that increased voter turnout favors them. In 2024, Republicans benefited from mobilizing less-engaged voters[2].
Demographic Shifts: Democrats faced difficulties with working-class and non-college-educated voters, while Trump expanded his support among these groups and in urban areas[2][3].
The other guy is fucking insane and his voters like it. Those people were never going to vote anything other than Republican and it makes no sense to bring them up in a conversation about Democrat failures.
The new trend will be to focus on how the democrats failed. It’s a tactic. Redirecting anger, and the media, to the wrong thing so that the real problem groups operate unnoticed.
Remember how lemmy was ablaze with “Genocide Joe?” Keep an eye on the ML and hexbears, as the usually ride the maga train.
Price of gas is high now? I hadn’t heard that complaint and the price has been going down.
Sure enough, I see a spike two years ago when the sanctions hit after Russia invaded Ukraine but it quickly got back to near normal and stayed that way or trended down. I guess the new plateaus is higher than four years ago but not by much, not recently, nor is there an upward trend.
I agree, but that's a different issue than changing people's consumption. Ignoring that things people consume have increased in price and not doing anything about it is effectively just a lower standard of living. It would be received very poorly if any political party tried to get rid of subsidies for fuel/animal products, you would need levels of state control comparable to the Soviet Union or another socialist country to get people to change their consumption to that degree. In capitalism consumption is many people's primary identity and it would take a lot of deprogramming to change that. This is to an extent going on and many climate groups are doing a good job getting people more comfortable with the idea of veganism/shifting away from fossil fuels, but saying you have less money in your bank account and that's a good thing because maybe you'll change your habits to avoid climate change would have resulted in a 50 state blow out, you will never get people on your side operating like that.