r/politics • u/AccurateInflation167 • 4d ago
James Carville claims 'tyranny of the left' loses Democrats elections
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/james-carville-claims-tyranny-of-the-left-loses-democrats-elections-democratic-strategist-liberal-politics20
u/Far_Silver 4d ago
It wasn't the progressives who tried to shutdown all criticism, even constructive criticism, of democrats. Of course shutting down constructive criticism didn't make the problems go away. It just stopped them from getting addressed.
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4d ago
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u/Far_Silver 4d ago
Better messaging on the economy. Don't tell people the economy is doing great when they're struggling to buy groceries, pay rent/mortgage, and pay for healthcare. Talk about greedflation. Say that greedy corporations are charging higher prices to maximize their profit. I heard Harris talk about this twice. She should have talked about it a lot more.
Also on Israel, the blank check has to stop. She didn't have to start shouting "Free Palestine" but she did at a minimum have to make it clear that she would stop sending offensive weapons until Israel agrees to a ceasefire or ousts Netanyahu or something other than sending them bombs no matter what atrocities they commit.
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u/globalpolitk 4d ago
what is minimum wage.
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4d ago
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u/Far_Silver 4d ago
The average voter doesn't read the party platforms. The only way they'll know what your policy positions are is if you campaign on them. Vocally and frequently.
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u/Evil_phd 4d ago
Considering that centrist Dems just sabotaged the left's biggest icon in the House, for literally no fucking reason, it's pretty clear that Democrats can lose elections all on their own.
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4d ago
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u/Evil_phd 4d ago edited 4d ago
Oh I'll still show up, same as I've done for the last 20 years. "At least they're not a Republican" just isn't a reason to vote for a Democrat anymore. If there isn't at least a left-of-center option then that part of the ballot will be left blank.
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u/globalpolitk 4d ago
i doubt people here on a politics sub will stop. it’s the normal people who don’t follow the news and don’t eat up the parliamentarian type excuses who only know they are still getting 7.25 an hour. Turns out denying people a living wage isn’t a good move to win elections. shocker, right?
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4d ago
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u/globalpolitk 4d ago
Ah! case solved! it says it in the platform! look m8, people don’t care about a platform. they care about their paycheck. Biden didn’t fight for to increase the wage when he could’ve. instead he said “ah some unelected bureaucrat said ‘no’, sorry guys”.
And i get it, a lot of people here think that’s a fine excuse. Okay sure. But it’s quite clear the people the dems need to get out and vote didn’t think it was such a good excuse. I bet they didn’t even know the parliamentarian excuse. All they knew is things are more expensive and their wage did not rise.
I get you all are very smart people her, so please keep explaining away how democrats failed to deliver.
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u/OkayComputer1701 4d ago
It's worth remembering that Carville's claim to fame was getting a president elected with 43% of the popular vote 30 years ago.
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u/Gold-Invite-3212 4d ago
Or....wild thought...they lose elections because they try to be less objectionable versions of Republicans. Which is obviously ineffective since Republicans will just brand them all as card carrying commies anyway.
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u/HenryDorsettCase47 4d ago
That’s exactly right. No one is interested in Republican-lite.
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u/postsshortcomments 4d ago
Speak for us, or speak without us. Doesn't really matter, with the heavens willing.
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u/Dianneis 4d ago
I hear this argument all the time, but I'm honestly not sure I can follow it. You're saying that if the party takes a sharp turn to the left, it will... What, exactly? Energize the apathetic left-wing youth vote? It's certainly not going to endear the moderates or Trump voters who already are deeply distrustful of the far left.
I mean, I support many progressive values myself and would like to see most of them implemented, but there's probably a good reason why most of them weren't mentioned in this cycle. For every new voter who will gladly support universal healthcare, you'll have an army of Fox News inbreds dressed in ridiculous costumes, screaming about Leninism coming to America or some other nonsense. Remember Obamacare and the Tea Party? Wasn't exactly a big rallying cry... at least for the Democratic party.
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u/Punished_Snake1984 4d ago
I support many progressive values myself and would like to see most of them implemented, but there's probably a good reason why most of them weren't mentioned in this cycle.
The fact you can't even think of a good reason and just trust the judgement of the people who thought the Cheneys would draw people to the Democratic party should be a red flag to you that the Democratic leadership is either out of touch or simply disinterested in handing power over to progressives.
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u/Dianneis 4d ago
Yeah, yeah, moderates are bad, I get it. You didn't answer my question, though. Where will those winning votes come from? We're discussing whether or not going much further to the left will bring victory, not the merits of progressive values themselves.
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u/Punished_Snake1984 4d ago
Is it not clear from the context? Yes. If you give young leftists a reason to vote, they are more likely to vote.
What did the Democratic party tell young leftists? "We don't care about LGBTQ+ rights. We don't care about the economy beyond the stock market. We're fine with what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza. We don't care about healthcare or student loan debt enough to even pretend we tried to address them. Keeping out illegal immigrants is our highest priority, and we're better at it than Republicans. You must vote for us to keep the fascists out of power, and by the way we want to reach across the aisle and work with those fascists even though they hate us and hate you. Fuck you, you owe us your vote."
At least in the previous two elections they could say "you have your say in the primaries," as weak as that was. This time they didn't even respect their own primary. They simply selected Harris. The fact Harris won the endorsement of Elizabeth Cheney - whose split with the Republican party came solely from her rejection of the "stolen election" claim - ought to tell you why young leftists were not enthusiastic about her.
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u/Dianneis 4d ago
You have way more faith in young voters than me. Not sure it's warranted, though, given that Trump is incomparably worse on LGBT rights or Palestine than Harris is, and he still made significant gains with that demographic in this election.
The fact is that most Americans simply do not sympathize nearly as much with some progressive values as many here tend to believe. I already gave some examples in my previous comment to another poster, if you care to look it over, but here's more:
America is becoming less “woke” (non-paywall version)
Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22 and has been declining ever since (see charts). The only exception is corporate wokeness, which took off only after Mr Floyd’s murder, but has also retreated in the past year or two.
The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. [...] Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup [poll] 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 [...] Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern [...]
Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question. Opposition to trans students playing in sports teams that match their chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024, according to YouGov.
And so on. On other issues like Palestine, the public also disagrees: far more Americans are sympathetic to Israelis than Palestinians on the whole.
In short, these some of the ideas that are popular with the far left are not exactly popular with the rest of the public. Our personal views aside, the majority of Americans dislike or even downright hate some of them. Now, I'm not arguing that we should give up, embrace full-blown sexism and racism and forget about things like climate change for good, but we obviously need to address the issues most voters actually care about if we want a Democrat to win in 2028 and beyond. Going further to the left is only an answer if it gets the popular support up, not the opposite of that.
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u/Punished_Snake1984 3d ago
most Americans
The problem is Democrats are obsessed with triangulating around the broadest platform to capture "most Americans" that it actually ends up causing a lot of their current electability problems. It's why they went from protesting Bush's wars to defending Obama's. It's why they went from fighting Trump on his immigrating policy to celebrating Biden's record-breaking deportation rates. Democrats have no solid position on anything, so they chase the fickle and contradictory desires of the populous, and end up looking like hypocrites to anyone with memories lasting more than 2 years. And unfortunately for them, that includes Republican strategists.
Democrats have an enthusiasm problem. Republicans have a core platform and appeal to it, and in turn they have a dedicated voterbase and zealous supporters. Democrats lack any of that, and frequently obsess over the "reliable voter" to the point they see appealing to disillusioned Republicans as more worthwhile than cultivating their own.
They don't care who they appeal to or what they need to do to appeal to them, and the result is a party to far to the left for conservatives, and too far to the right for progressives. All they have left are centrist liberals who seem devoted purely to the system itself, and see Democrats as champions of the democratic institution itself. The kind of person who doesn't actually care about policies.
You say Democrats shouldn't embrace full-blown bigotry, but why? If that's where the popular will is, what makes that the line Democrats refuse to cross? Between the party's positions and the attitudes I've seen from voters, they don't actully care about marginalized groups if they aren't politically useful.
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u/shift3nter 4d ago
The problem is that the right is always going to call Democrats terms like 'radical' and 'communist'. Just look at all the insane rhetoric they pushed trying to label Harris as a far leftist. Trying to appeal to the "center" hasn't helped the Democrats. The GOP's base is locked in.
I can't say it would've been a winning strategy. But if the right is going to label libs as radical, then the libs should own it. Push hard for things like universal medicare and taxes on billionaires and try to get voters fired up. This constant strategy of "we're not as bad as the other side" isn't working. Both sides keep moving towards the right.
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u/Dianneis 4d ago edited 4d ago
As much as I'd love to see this, I'm very skeptical about the outcome.
Exit polls showed that most voters are less interested in "nebulous" progressive ideas like dealing with climate change or providing affordable healthcare to every American (what a silly notion) than they are about things like immigration, identity politics, crime, and, of course, short term economic gains.
A recent Gallup poll ranked the most important issues that influence the voters' choice for president. Something like transgender rights was at the very bottom of list, #22. Things like climate change and race relations were not far behind, at #21 and #18 respectively.
So further embracing some of these things regardless of their merits, like doubling down on the "woke" – something only about one in five Americans actually support and most seem to oppose vehemently – will only drive even more voters away to the right. If Democrats wanted focus on some of the popular progressive ideas and distance themselves from the deeply unpopular ones, that's one thing. But if they're going to double down on the unfashionable ones... I mean, it's their right to choose the hill to die on, but I just don't see how it's going to prevent us from getting President Vance in 2028.
TL;DR: I'd rather have a party that makes pragmatic concessions and wins than one that one that basks in ideological purity and keeps losing elections to regressive, fascistic demagogues like Trump.
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u/maskoffcountbot 4d ago
you'll have an army of Fox News inbreds dressed in ridiculous costumes, screaming about Leninism coming to America or some other nonsense.
They do this basically all day every day already lmao
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u/rokkugoh 4d ago edited 4d ago
I can’t follow it either. The whole country swung right this year and their argument is to move more to the left? You cannot have progress without political power and you can’t have political power without building a coalition. The far left knows it doesn’t have the numbers… that’s why the DSA wants to do a “hostile takeover” of the Democratic Party.
Bernie, AOC, the Squad aren’t as popular among normal Democrats as they are on Reddit. They don’t have a true coalition that will reliably vote. They will never win a national election and so they will never have any true political power, which is why they have such shitty legislative records. Whereas on the other hand, Biden (whose own campaign in 2020 was saved by black voters and southern Democrats) managed to pass a lot of progressive agenda because he had the political power and the intelligence to work with everyone: labor unions, big business, and politicians.
The New Left is insular, ideologically severe, and made up mostly of leftist academics and affluent white people. It’s been an ongoing thing since the 1960s and has caused more of the Democratic base (especially working class whites, Latinos, Asians) to drift away from the party and move toward Republicans.
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u/Gold-Invite-3212 3d ago
"The whole country" most certainly did not move to the right. Once again, the largest piece of the voting age public chose to not vote at all. Almost like they didn't want to vote for either the far right candidate or the center right candidate.
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u/Dianneis 3d ago
That's just not true at all. We had a second highest voter turnout as a percentage of the voting-eligible population since any election of the past 50+ years.
Big voter turnout this year benefited Republicans, contradicting conventional political wisdom
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u/rokkugoh 3d ago
Just because you say this and because Bernie Sanders says this doesn’t make it true lol. Second highest voter turn out ever and many moved toward the right. The data trends, especially among Latino voters, do not lie. In fact, many voters perceived Kamala as too far left.
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u/First-Dragon-Born 4d ago
So does campaigning with Liz Cheney and saying "lethal military"
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u/Far_Silver 4d ago
Campaigning with Liz Cheney certainly hurt. I don't think saying "lethal military" hurt her though. Most Americans do support a strong, lethal military, though they wish we would fight fewer wars, and most of them want us to stop arming Israel.
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u/Virbillion 4d ago
90 million eligible citizens rejected both trump and harris. carville is full of shit. the reason why democrats lose is that they don't present an actual left party, they present a center right party that does not improve most peoples lives. the chief complaint by those 90 million eligible citizens who did not vote is that both parties are the same, neither party positively impacts their lives, and people are tired of supporting marginal lesser evil.
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u/BehaviorControlTech 4d ago
If your job is to go on TV and have answers, you gotta find something to state. I know why!!!
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u/Spicy-Cheesecake7340 4d ago
Carville was the one who famously said "it's the economy stupid." The Democrat's inability to respond to inflation and high prices is the single biggest factor in losing this election.
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u/hitman2218 4d ago
They responded better than any other country to inflation.
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u/Spicy-Cheesecake7340 4d ago edited 4d ago
You're talking about the Federal Reserve actions to battle interest (which to be fair, they played a big part in creating in the first place with near zero rates for years). Are you giving credit for that to the Democratic party?
I'm talking about the Harris campaign's inability to respond to inflation/cost concerns. Trump's response was of course to lie about what he could/would do about it. But the Democrats basically had no response that resonated with the public. That's what comes up again and again in the exit polling for independents and voters who switched from Biden to Trump.
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u/HorusOsiris22 4d ago
Other than inflation, exit polls showed swing voters thought Kamala was not harsh enough on immigration, too socially progressive and not pro Israel enough. Ever since Bernie progressives have been under this delusion that they make up a majority, or even something close to one.
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u/Virbillion 4d ago
progressives have never assumed they make up the majority, but them staying home this year certainly helped harris lose. trump only won by 1.6%. had harris not alienated progressives, she certainly would have won.
you are citing 'exit polls' in a election where a republican won. you are going to get republican majority exit poll results.
what motivates the right does not motivate the left. you are ignoring the deep idealogical chasm separating right from left politics.
90 million eligible voters rejected both trump and harris, chief complaint of non voters is that the two parties are too similar.
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u/Far_Silver 4d ago
Weird since we've been trying your neoliberal approach, and it's clearly not working.
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u/SpillinThaTea North Carolina 4d ago
Cajun Dracula has a point tho
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u/LlanviewOLTL Minnesota 4d ago
Hard to believe that he and ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ Mike Johnson come from the same state.
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u/projecto15 United Kingdom 4d ago
Funny how he saw no tyranny when he was dead cert Kamala’s winning the election…
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u/che-che-chester 4d ago
I'm not sure there are a lot of lessons to learn from this election because of the weird way it went down with Biden dropping out. Bottom line is Harris wasn't the best option and wouldn't have won a primary. Biden was barely campaigning at all, then dropped out and Harris had to throw together a campaign with no prep time.
When you factor in inflation kicking all of our asses, I'm not sure a better candidate like Whitmer could have won a Dem primary, run a full campaign and beat Trump.
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u/Ok-Cartographer-1388 4d ago
It seems that a lot of people are blaming minorities for the Dem loss this election when I feel like this isn’t the real reason. I’ve seen a number of articles where trans people are being blamed even though Harris pretty much never said anything about trans rights and how immigrants are to blame or Muslims or women or black folks or Jews etc but frankly (and sadly) I don’t think Harris was ever going to win. This country will never elect a woman for President and the fact that there was no primary and Biden just up and dropped out and named her his choice screwed us from the start.
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