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Attitudes like yours are why Democrats lose elections. We talk ourselves out of our best candidates. We try to compromise with Republicans right out the gate, and try to select the more moderate 'electable' candidate.
Your line of thinking got us Kerry, Clinton, and Biden.
Trying to select a candidate based on "electability" is bullshit, because you just end up selecting for the most uninspiring centrist who can't get people to the polls.
You think you're selecting for winners, but you're taking your strongest pieces off the board.
It got us Biden. I think you underestimate how much institutional support Kerry and Clinton had in the run up to their nominations. Kerry wasn't even that bad of a candidate on his face. He just got railroaded in Ohio the same way Gore did in Florida, while everyone in national media threw up their hands and proclaimed "Too Liberal!"
And Biden did poorly. It should have been a cakewalk and he barely won. "It got us Biden" isn't an argument to the utility of timidity.
Biden turned out 16M more voters than Hillary Clinton four years earlier. That's nothing to sneeze at. He still won on the margins, because Donald Trump also turned out an extra 12M voters, with a heavy 1:1 split in the same states Trump narrowly beat Hillary in a year earlier.
I don't think anything about that suggests the election was a cakewalk. I do think it illustrates the difference direct-mail voting has on overall US turnout. And the fact that both parties immediately retreated from the policy - with Trump even trying to ban it nationwide - says something about the real state of American Democracy both before and after the Pandemic.
2020 is a hard election to judge precisely because it was so fucking weird. COVID cut the knees off Bernie's primary campaign. Millions of people - particularly the elderly - were dropping dead in the lead up to the election. Misinformation was chronic. The actual elections process (which has always sucked in the US) was extra shady af, particularly in rural districts without modernized voting systems.
But I will say that the Biden pick was a desperation move by conservative Democrats who believed they were losing control of the party. And 2024 was a repeat of this process, with the spectre of Trump 2 forcing progressive voters to choose between Genocide Joe's last minute replacement and Actual Outright Fascism.
Real "Douche" v "Turd Sandwich" election. But these candidates won almost entirely because of who backed them. Silicon Valley went hard for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024.
It should have been a cakewalk because Trump was currently the guy screwing everything up and not improving people's lives. Incumbency isn't an advantage for President anymore and Trump (with help from COVID) was doing particularly badly. He had sub-40 approval polls and, before the general election campaign, polls were putting most of the main Democratic options up by 6-8. It wasn't a cakewalk in the actual election because Biden didn't run a good campaign.
Biden in 2024 was then the guy to blame for everything going wrong (inflation in this case), with sub-40 approval polls, and was on course to lose before being kicked off the ticket. And Harris made the baffling decision to frame herself as just being a younger Biden.
He brought in 74M votes, with a surge in fascist supporters coming from big historical swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. On what planet was that going to be a cakewalk?
That's not true. Incumbency channels money to your campaign. The Biden/Harris warchest was bigger in 2024 than in 2020. It affords you a roadmap based on your prior victory. Harris - like Hillary before her - failed to focus her campaign in the winnable states and squandered manpower chasing red states she had no chance in.
2024 was a great year, economically speaking. The market was up enormously. Unemployment was low. International trade was strong in the wake of the COVID recovery. Business was booming. The inflation was - if anything - a product of the economy running too hot, as demand outstretched supply in a number of retail sectors.
Republicans were happy enough to take credit for this prosperity at the Congressional/Gubernatorial level, then twist in their seats and condemn inflation as a uniquely Presidential sin. Democrats let them get away with it, because they were too busy covering their asses on Israel, backpedaling on the COVID response, and trying to find some kind of middle ground on the fully fabricated "transgender athletes" issue.
Not countering your opponent's gains is also part of running a bad campaign. The same people who ran his campaign were running Harris's and making all those dumb mistakes you highlight. Only she didn't have the "change" label and Trump's failures at the front of people's minds to edge her over the line. Biden was heading toward a loss in 2024.
Presidential elections keep going down to the wire and it's not because Donald Trump is just that talented. These things shouldn't be being won or lost on the margins. All of the last three candidates have been a lot closer to John Kerry than Barrack Obama.
And this pants-on-head stupid take was why we lost the election.