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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

This is the classic argument of "only Democrats have agency". 99% of the problem is Republicans, but here we are wishing the Democrats did more. They ran a perfectly fine campaign. Biden passed the biggest climate bill in history. Republicans ran an utterly disgraceful and wantonly malicious campaign based purely on lies and hatred. What I wish is that people voted rationally and maintained an iota of empathy and logic.

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My position is: Democrats, or someone else, needs to field good enough candidates, and run good enough campaigns with strong enough messaging, to defeat Republicans.

What's your stance? "We should just ask the Republicans nicely to stop"? Will that work? What happens if they just keep being evil?

Democrats ran mostly fine candidates. I think people have really unrealistic if not impractical expectations. I personally want my politicians to be boring.

As to how to get Republicans to stop voting for evil? I have absolutely no idea and I'm not sure anyone does. I'm not sure why anyone thinks the Democrats can conjure great people either. I just think that Republicans are the bigger problem by far.

Why can't there be 2 good parties? The very existence of an "evil" party is a problem.

Sure but that's the reality.

Voters still need to look through the barrage of miss- and disinformation, hatred, blaming etc. in short through all the shit the zone is flooded with. Republicans can if required always turn the dial further.

A principled democratic opponent on the other hand should not succumb to all of this, they should act with integrity etc. traits that also seem to not be pushed by algorithms nowadays. All in all I think it's a lot harder, especially when paired with short attention span of viewers.

They already did that - the Democrats are/were clearly not the same as the Republicans and that should have been enough (especially after we already got a preview of Trump's Republican party the first time around). They already ran strong enough campaigns and their candidates were already good enough. Most of them actually wanted the job because they believed in the mission of government, not because they personally benefited from ruining whatever office or authority they might be given.

The only thing the non-Republican voters had to do was show up, hold their nose over whatever bullshit short-coming their rep had (in comparison to "perfect" and whatever it is the Republicans offer to voters), and vote for whichever jerk had a D next to their name. There were only ever two options and U.S. citizens fucked up - through either silence (mostly) or blind support of whatever it is that's happening now.

> the Democrats are/were clearly not the same as the Republicans and that should have been enough

But it wasn't.

> They already ran strong enough campaigns and their candidates were already good enough

Clearly not. They lost.

What's your solution? Shout on Hacker News that "it should have been enough"?

Unfortunately I don't have any great solutions at this point, so voting with my feet seems like the only practical method I have for reducing my exposure to this electorate. Failing that - continuing to vote for the lesser-evil and shout from the various rented/lended soapboxes I have until something different happens.

D's need to figure out effective ways to counter the Republican bad actors, but no strategy is ever going to be enough, with a full blown authoritarian party in a 2 party system and massive propaganda ecosystem absolutely dominates the media and has thoroughly cooked millions of brains.

There's just no way to overcome all that every time, at the candidate level.

The right-wing propaganda machine, from Fox to Nick Fuentes to Joe Rogan - even to Twitter - has to be effectively dismantled or countered.

This doesn't seem based in reality. You don't go from majority support for you running to less than that and blame the other side. There are demonstrable actions and events that have a distinct link to her downward popularity.

When examining why someone lost you generally don't insinuate that the loser did everything right and the other side are just bad people and that's why they won. That's a recipe for learning nothing and repeating the same mistake over and over again. Which unfortunately seems to be the national policy position.

I can't delete this comment. I am really sorry. I didn't mean to say any of this. Please flag these comments. I am so stupid.

You can fix this by emailing the mods, but otherwise - thanks for the correction

I sorry I opened my mouth. I swear I'll never do this ever again. Please PLEASE forgive me.

Damn, keep it together... Or you're just trolling because you received one downvote.

The biggest problem with her campaign was the one thing it was impossible to fix - the amount of time. Everything else is nitpicking and wish-casting.

And that's on Biden and his team, mostly. I do give credit to the party for actually forcing him out. That's a hard thing to do, and it's exactly what R's ought to have done to Trump a long time ago.

I disagree. When she announced her candidacy she largely had the election in her pocket. Had she run the same campaign for longer her support would have just been even lower. The only reason Biden stepped down was because the ruling class in the DNC made the call. The party voters were very vocally against him the whole way.

I'm a bit confused why you think republicans would toss aside a winning candidate. The party is laser focused on winning. That seems to be sadly a major difference. The DNC seems overly concerned being as milquetoast as possible and to simply assume a moral high ground.

I am wrong. Please flag so this can be deleted.

Murc's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law

Yeah really the take away apparently is that Democrats should just lie, brazenly, about everything. I mean that's what Trump and JD Vance did and continue to do. When you can just invent your own world to live in, how are rational people supposed to deal with that? Would people have reacted different if Biden and Harris had truthfully said "oh and the world is still fucked up because of COVID, electing Donald Trump won't change that"

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