Trump didn't win by a historic landslide. It's time to nip that lie in the bud
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you look at Europe, every party in control lost every major election in the last year.
On the other hand, Harris was the first democratic nominee to lose the popular vote (by a small margin, but still) since 2004.
My opinion is that a Generic Republican likely would've outperformed Trump, but all these hypotheticals and thought experiments don't change anything.
The GOP won, but not by as much as Donald Trump claims they did. The opposition party, the Democrats, failed spectacularly. They have for my entire lifetime become the de-facto experts in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Both are true.
The Democratic Party's constituency ought to be protesting and doing sit-ins at the offices of the Democratic Party leadership demanding change and accountability with the same fervor they've had in the past protests. Instead, what I expect is impotent mumbling about "voting against their best interests" and accusations about various -isms (lots of luck getting the public to vote when you're calling them nasty names all the time) as they march onward to another loss in 2028.
Democrats generally run on a platform of competent, centrist government. And they generally lose.
They won when they ran a remarkable orator with a short track record, and they were disappointed when he also gave them competent, centrist government. They won when they ran against a man who was in the process of screwing up a crisis, but now that the crisis has been handled, he's back.
The American left wants what the American right gets: a flamboyant demagogue who makes absurd promises that he cannot deliver. They demand change, so we might as well give it to them.
* End all American support for Israel
* Immediately cancel all student loans
* Halve the US military, and put the money into a Universal Basic Income
* Tax billionaires at 50%, and multi-billionaires at 90%
* Bans on fossil fuels and plastics
These all seem like bad ideas to me, but I've got a choice: these bad ideas, or the active harassment of the Republicans. So my best option would be to vote for these candidates, then hope that none of these policies can actually be implemented, or in dramatically reduced form.
At this point that may not actually be necessary. Right now there is a very good chance that Democrats will win in 2028 for the same reason they won in 2008: a failing economy and an obvious incompetent in office. And it's possible that by 2032, demographics will have shifted substantially.
Still, I think that this is the route they need to take. Might as well pander to the left and hope that the result is somehow a sensible policy. Because the idea of offering reasonable government just doesn't get people excited.