extra crispy

and my axe!

Jesus fucking christ.

seems to me that they got every thing they paid for them and it was a good price to pay.

not sure what meaning, if any, being “85% down”, has in that context.

What I see in this meme:

We don’t need a new party to begin with. Just start by going independent.

It’s the same thing that we needed to be employed this election cycle, but at a larger scale. The Blue MAGA/ Any blue will do/ “Trump bad, you have to vote Blue” is the precise reason we lost this election, because the gave the did not ask anything of the candidate, which gave the candidate cover to not have to shift to more generally popular positions that would get them elected. Blue MAGA threw the opportunity, when Kamala was on a trajectory to be in the mid to high 50’s in October, by effectively making the argument that we can’t demand anything if this candidate because Trump is too great a threat. But the reality of that is that the demands laid down on a candidate serve the important function that they drag a candidate into more generally popular positions.

Kamala had no real economic plan, and when she said “I would do nothing differently”, she’s telling Americans, 60% of whom are living paycheck to paycheck, that this is what her policy is going to be.

So if we’re going to blame voters for a failure this election cycle, we need to be clear that the voters to blame are the ones who accepted less and little, and who abused and defeated those who wanted the candidate to move on specific policy positions. It was rampant and structural on Lemmy, and I’ve heard that it was similarly bad on Reddit. Extremely biased moderation here turned communities like c/News, c/Political_Memes, and c/politics into echo chambers where any pushback against an obviously failing and now obviously failed political rhetoric was basically site sponsored. And that needs to be called out and addressed. It literally cost the Democrats this election, and some of the most prominent names in Lemmy were responsible for it. Now obviously Lemmy is tiny and the impact was microscopic, but the same pattern was repeated for much larger platforms like reddit.

It started a couple months before with a tiktok video that got basically repeated regarding “strategic voting”. The problem, however, is that the strategy outlined is completely half baked. It doesn’t actually work because it keeps candidates unaccountable for having to “go to where their voters are” and get their votes. The result is that the candidate is afforded the opportunity to maintain policy positions that are broadly unpopular because they don’t think they need to move to get voters. It’s not good strategy, and both 2016, and 2024 offer direct evidence for this, while 2020 offers the counterfactual (Biden did shift in policy, effectively handing over the platform to Bernie, and he gathered the necessary coalition of voters to win as a result).

Going independent is what Democratic voters needed to do in this election to force Kamala into more popular positions. She didn’t feel the pressure to do so and lost in a frankly, almost unmitigated disaster of a campaign. And she was afforded the opportunity to do so by voters who demanded nothing for their votes. Going independent takes those votes of the table and makes it beyond clear that they are simply not yours to begin with.

Going low doesn’t accomplish shit

Ahh. A statement in direct contradiction of the evidence.

Most recent data demonstrates that going low gets you the Whitehouse, the Senate, and the House. And going low for long enough gets you the judiciary as well.

I’m not saying there aren’t other ways to succeed: but going low is clearly an extremely viable strategy. It would seem to me that when you are losing as completely as Democrats have been for 30 years, you aren’t in a position to leave options that are shown to work on the table.

It’s going to be interesting to do the post mortem analysis and see how much damage Kamal did to down ballot Democrats. I did a very light swing states analysis and it looked like she was pulling 1-2 points off every democrat in those races.

Obviously the die is cast, but there was just such a strong evidence that Harris was running a deeply unpopular campaign, the urgency to move her on issues was largely deflected through structural incompetence/ arrogance in media and social media.

The cognitive dissonance required for the economy being both the "best " and yet also people can’t afford bread is a privilege that people living pay check to paycheck simply can’t afford. Child poverty hit its all time low under Biden. Then it doubled under Biden . More American’s are living paycheck to paycheck than ever before: now a majority. Look at the memes and conversation happening in the memes here on lemmy. The struggle to afford basic goods and services is a constant theme.

When you gaslight people, telling them to ignore their lived experience and to “trust” an analysis of economy that clearly only serves billionaires: What do you expect that does to their trust in your rhetoric?

You can call them little Nazis, as a treat.

:brown shirts:

she lost because she didn’t feel she needed to have policies popular among her voters, her base.

The people who lost this election for us were those defending the candidates position on the indefensible, with lines like “But Trump is worse”

you need to develop some introspection.

What I can tell you, with recipts, is that is a failed political approach to beating fascism

you are repeating what amounts to the fundamental thesis of the Harris campaign. As a piece of rhetoric, the link “but Trump is worse”, will go down as the singularly most damaging rhetorical approach ever employed.

Progressivism in the US may or may not have suffered a mortal blow in this election, but it was not Republicans who delivered it; it was Democrats and Democratic leadership.

If progressives can’t get to the exits fast enough enough to escape the collapsing of a corrupt fundraising-for-billionaires husk of a Democratic party, they’ll go down with the ship.

Left wing populism stopped the rise of fascism globally. If it’s not going to come from Democrats; it will have to come without them.

Like 99% went to corporations and banks.

Remember when Biden broke a train strike and the lost a make endorsement because he refused to commit to not doing it again?

Anyways. here’s wonderwall.

He won because Democrats refused to engage themselves in introspection, and preferred to gaslight themselves with regards to legitimate criticisms of both the party and the candidate.

Trump didn’t “win” this election any more than he “won” in 2020. He maintained the same vote share. Democrats lost voter ship, and if you are offering static around trying to address the issues that explain why that is, Trump winning is on you.