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Comment by ifyoubuildit | Hacker News Reader

Why was this election an uphill battle from the start? This was the dems election to lose as far as I can see.

And isn't Harris the incumbent in this situation?

Because of the pandemic, the aftermath of which was awful inflation. This has been the pattern globally for a few years now. And US-specific, because of immigration.

Yes, Harris was treated by voters as the incumbent, and the incumbent administration was unpopular. That is usually an uphill battle for the incumbent.

It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative! Plenty of people wrote about the possibility that this would be a pretty bog standard "reject the incumbents" election.

> It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative!

I find this baffling. With the dems tying themselves to biden and then Harris, it was absolutely an uphill battle. But that was an unforced error.

If they had a robust primary, you have to assume there was someone on the blue team that could beat Trump. If not, then they deserved every bit of this anyway.

No, it was an uphill battle regardless of the candidate, is the point. The fundamentals were always difficult for Democrats in general, for non-candidate-specific reasons. Primarily this was due to inflation, which in my view Biden actually handled about as well as he could have, it just still sucked and pissed everyone off. But also because of immigration, which was indeed a policy error, but one which happened years before the campaign began and was not fixable at that point.

Yes, and that's one of the problems: the DNC defers to tradition and "politeness" rather than what will win elections and keep the party in power. Right up front they should have told Biden he was not going to be the presumed nominee, and that he would have to fight it out in the primary like everyone else.

IMO the fact that Harris is a black woman meant this was always going to be an extremely uphill battle. Someone like Harris winning would be completely unprecedented. I'm not surprised she lost, but I am disappointed.

I think the results demonstrated that it would have been an uphill battle for a white man as well. I think this result was pretty much a foregone conclusion after the 2022/2023 inflation surge.

Edit to add: I now think that. It isn't what I expected to happen until the results actually came in last night.

I see, the past becomes a forgone conclusion after it happens.

Well ... yeah, of course. This isn't some unusual thing.

Lots of things are foregone conclusions for a long period of time before you have the data to know it.

Think: A competitor is working on a product that massively outcompetes yours, but you don't know that until it is launched. Or you have cancer that is progressing but you don't know until it is diagnosed.

I think this turned out to be like that.

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