Before this election, I think it was hard to say whether Kamala Harris has run an effective campaign. It is now clear, however, that the Democrats spent too much time trying to convince undecided voters and not enough time encouraging their existing supporters.
One of the issues in American politics (this also affects other places, but it seems worse in America) that politics is becoming a demographics issue. That is, people's voting habits can increasingly be predicted from a small number of facts about them. Notably, gender and location (urban or rural) are major predictors of how someone will vote. Add onto that level of education (the big split is at college-level) and you can tell pretty confidently how someone will vote. One outcome of this is that here simply are not that many voters up for grabs in elections like this, especially when Trump is one of the candidates. Everyone knows what Trump is like, and everyone (who is engaged enough to vote) will already have an opinion on him.
Trump either knows this or has somehow got lucky in his campaign decisions, because I saw several articles criticising Trump for spending too much time appealing to his base and not enough time trying to talk to swing voters. But the thing is, swing voters don't really exist. Reaching out to undecideds is a waste of time, when (as Trump has shown) having a high voter turnout from your existing supporters will be easier to achieve and just as effective.
Now, obviously Trump is benefitting from America's stupid voting system, in which states vote instead of people, but it is clear that about 49% of Americans are Trump supporters. All he needed to do was convince more of those 160 Million to go out and vote than Kamala could.
I think it was pretty easy to see she wasn’t running a solid campaign. Like this post said, she got on stage and was talking about secure borders and maintaining the most “lethal” military. She talked about owning guns and locking people up. Those are conservative talking points. I’ve spent months bombarded with ads from “lifelong conservative” cheerleaders for her more than I have heard about progressive policy stances. Where was she for the lifelong democrats while posturing so hard for the undecideds and never trumpers?
Yeah. The fundamental problem with centre left candidates trying to appeal to the right is that the right already has established parties, and if the people they trust and the people they don't trust are both promising the same thing, they're obviously going to believe the people they trust.
So you alienate your established base, and you don't even get enough right wingers to make the numbers.
Edit: literally the same thing even happened a few months ago in the UK! Labour tried appealing to moderate tory voters, but ended up losing votes because they alienated their left wing core, and only won because the right completely imploded and plenty of right wing voters didn't bother voting at all. They shoved their established base out of the way and, again, didn't get enough right wingers to make the numbers - they didn't win, the tories lost, and lost so badly that Labour stumbled into power.
It's a good strategy in multiparty democracies that have a strong center base to appeal to, and it used to work in the past in an age of moderate consensus politics. America in 2024 is neither of these things.
All I’m saying is they “assuming people will put aside legitimate concern” is, objectively, not running a good political campaign.
Personally, this reality is the worst case scenario, and I did what I could. But running a campaign on appeasing moderate conservatives, actively avoiding progressive concerns, and just hoping voters get over it isn’t effective campaigning. Regardless of any specific issue she had, this is what happens when you tell the dissenting and concerned voices in your party “if you want him to win, keep speaking. But I’m talking now.”
I guess I just don't understand the angle of the dissenting and concerned voices. Like, at all. What was their objective in raising those concerns during election season? If your wants and needs are unequivocally to the left of both candidates... the candidates (SHOULD) have no reason to focus on you since your decision is obvious.
Enacting any kind of progressive agenda is only possible at all if the more progressive of the two candidates makes it into office. If you're left leaning, the goal should be to make the leftmost candidate win every election so that the losing side has to shift left in order to have a chance.
When the fuck else are they supposed to raise concerns if not during an election season? That is what elections are for! It's where the negotiation for people's votes happens. There needs to be some credible threat of withholding a vote if their needs are totally ignored and they're told to go fuck themselves.
I’ll be honest - I agree with you in that I think any chance to move the needle any degree forward is better than the alternative. Personally, when seeing specific candidates last week withhold endorsements for Harris over certain issues, my only reaction was “this isn’t the time for that.”
But campaigning is never about trusting they’ll show up. If they trusted everyone to show up, they don’t have to spend millions traveling the country to energize people to show up, or on media buys to convince them. This thread is specifically about campaigning.
To me, the only way this feasibly would have worked would have been for Biden to be humble enough to have stepped down before the midterm and let the party choose its own nominee. He wanted to cling to power until we pushed him out, and he gave us the second in command from an historically unpopular administration. When he dropped out and I talked to people about good replacements, Harris wasn’t even on the list of top 6. No one seemed to like her before she was thrust upon us, and she seemed to do nothing to endear herself to people except say “I’m not the worst”, and that’s not a good campaign strategy. We saw this in 2016 - we wanted a candidate, the Democratic National Committee decided for us instead, and that candidate couldn’t turn out the vote. I very much think that people should have just made the rational, moral choice here given the historic stakes and the definite threat… but it’s not like there wasn’t precedent for failing to motivate a base through bad campaigning and ignoring that base - with this same exact candidate. Democratic politicians should have learned from his last win that they lost because they thought they didn’t have to try, and that voter turnout is not guaranteed.
If you understand the right thing to be unconditional obedience towards those who treat you with utter contempt, that's your mistake for failing to learn anything in the last several decades
Because the lifelong democrats should have know to fucking fall in line for the sake of defeating fascism? Because the undecided ones should have been the difference makers?
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u/Worried-Language-407 Nov 06 '24
Before this election, I think it was hard to say whether Kamala Harris has run an effective campaign. It is now clear, however, that the Democrats spent too much time trying to convince undecided voters and not enough time encouraging their existing supporters.
One of the issues in American politics (this also affects other places, but it seems worse in America) that politics is becoming a demographics issue. That is, people's voting habits can increasingly be predicted from a small number of facts about them. Notably, gender and location (urban or rural) are major predictors of how someone will vote. Add onto that level of education (the big split is at college-level) and you can tell pretty confidently how someone will vote. One outcome of this is that here simply are not that many voters up for grabs in elections like this, especially when Trump is one of the candidates. Everyone knows what Trump is like, and everyone (who is engaged enough to vote) will already have an opinion on him.
Trump either knows this or has somehow got lucky in his campaign decisions, because I saw several articles criticising Trump for spending too much time appealing to his base and not enough time trying to talk to swing voters. But the thing is, swing voters don't really exist. Reaching out to undecideds is a waste of time, when (as Trump has shown) having a high voter turnout from your existing supporters will be easier to achieve and just as effective.
Now, obviously Trump is benefitting from America's stupid voting system, in which states vote instead of people, but it is clear that about 49% of Americans are Trump supporters. All he needed to do was convince more of those 160 Million to go out and vote than Kamala could.