The modern Democratic party fights harder against its own “base” than they do against the opposing party. People still came out in droves to vote for them despite that but their dedication to complacency in a system that is failing everybody but the rich left enough people behind to tip the scales. The Dems have enabled this and anybody who expects them to save us from it is delusional.
You can’t berate people into voting the way you want. That is the lesson the DNC needs to learn if they actually want to win.
Social media trolls could do to realize that too.
Even when Democrats are in power, they still don’t do anything hardly at all. I have voted Democrat for a long time now, but what we really need to do is get rid of First Past the Post voting in America, as it would really light a fire under them to be effective or be replaced.
Tens of millions of people voted for the Democrats. Do they not get to complain?
I think if you voted for Democrats you get to complain, but if you were eligible to vote and didn’t have to jump through a ton of hoops to do so you don’t get to complain. This could have been avoided.
edit: to be clear, I don’t think Democratic leadership really cares that we’ve got a dictator. But voting for them was harm reduction and too many people couldn’t be bothered, whatever the reason.
Why do people pretend that each election is in isolation? That if somehow we had all just voted for Harris even harder that America wasn’t headed down this path anyway. This shit has been a plan of American politics since Ronald Reagan.
I’m not an “accelerationist” by any means. But it’s just silly to act like this is a problem with voter turnout and only if we had “voted harder” it would all be fine. No. The entire system is fundamentally broken. That’s how we got here.
And the Democratic leadership allowed that to happen. The GOP did all of this in full public view.
The Democrats aligned themselves with Republicans on economic and labor policy under Clinton, they deregulated the media under Clinton, and they did nothing at all to counter the massive GOP controlled media empire. That’s on them.
The Democrats are weak. Even now they blame everyone but themselves for their political failures. Mainly trans people and progressives. It’s always the voters ’ fault when they lose.
They completely ignore the fact that most Trump-voting independents voted for him because of the economy, not because of social issues. They gaslit us about having the “greatest economy in the world” while we’re living through a housing crisis, record inflation, and a job market full of shitty work and a completely stagnant white collar sector.
Fuck the Democrats. We need to take them out like MAGA did the GOP.
you are absolutely welcome to complain, however i would advise you to complain about actual real issues, rather than “black hole issues” like “The DNC didn’t personally target me and now i feel left out” because let’s be honest, nobody fucking cares. We have problems to be solving, not shit to be moping over.
And over one third of voters didn’t vote for anyone. This is talking about them:
https://www.environmentalvoter.org/updates/2024-was-landslidefor-did-not-vote
The people complaining hardest are the ones who called democrats genocidal fascists and refused to vote. This site was filled to the brim with anty Democrat posts at election time, now it’s filled with “why aren’t they doing anything??” Posts, it’s the same people
TBF I voted extra hard for Harris and I’m still wondering why Democrats are voting yes on Trumps cabinet picks and why an 83 year old Bernie Sanders is out drumming up the masses while Hakeem Jefferies tells Jon Stewart that we’re all too stupid to know how amazing Democrats are.
ALSO, Democrats don’t seem to give a shit about the genocide, including you. So IDK what the fuck you expect me to say. I voted for harm reduction because I knew exactly what Trump was going to do, but that doesn’t mean I gave up all of my rights to complain about the shit job that Democrats do.
You need to understand that American non-voters are unironically fucking stupid. They heard you complaining about Democrats and that just reinforced their decision to not vote for anyone.
Its simple cause and effect.
Wait, so it’s up to me to sweep all of the bullshit under the rug so we can trick people into voting for the lesser evil instead of the Democrats being responsible for giving the people what they want and need?
Wtf
Yes. Unironically yes. Unless you enjoy what we have today.
Na, lying to people is far above my pay grade. Knock yourself out, though.
I’m not saying that. I’m describing cause and effect.
You need to ask yourself what is more important, consequences or virtue? Because sometimes you don’t get both.
What’s more important to me is that we demand better from our elected officials and stop accepting “at least it’s not the very worst” as acceptable.
You can Susan Collins at me all day but you’re never going to convince me to go out and cheer on “could be worse, bro”. I KNOW it could be worse and that’s why I vote against republicans but I’m going to demand the people I vote for DO BETTER.
Our officials mostly lost this election. And might not even have a chance to run again.
Demanding better can be phrased in a way as to not encourage people to abstain form voting them in.
It doesn’t really matter anymore.
Maybe the Democrats should prove the complainers wrong. The Democratic leadership has had plenty of opportunity to build trust amongst the voters, and decided to ignore them instead. They’ve spent years letting their voters down, which is why they aren’t trusted.
“Why should we prove the complainers and voters wrong? We should stick to the guns that made people sick of us in 2016, 2020, and 2024! Nothing will fundamentally change, and that’s final!”
And they wonder why people are sick of neoliberalism and willing to listen to a lying fascist saying he’d change something, just not for the better of anyone but the 1%.
I agree.
We still should have prevented Trump from winning by more people voting Democrat.
And then what? Get 4 more years of a genocidal Cop in the white house further normalizing “tough on the border” policies and genocidal foreign policy. And then follow it up with another Republican with even more of a “mandate” to murder immigrants and bomb brown kids? America has been a dictatorship of the capitalist class since it’s founding. Voting for president is like voting for a temporary court jester. It doesn’t change who runs this country. It only changes which interest of the ruling class are served.
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What has the Democrats offered in the face of growing inequality and increasing power of corporations?
They probably told people, however media and the people where busy watching the Trump freak show, and listening to all the lies about of how bad the Democrats are.
How naive of you.
That is irrelevant. You don’t seem to understand the point I’m making. I’m saying the average American hears critiques and only process them at surface level and forms a black and white evaluation on that basis. This is incredibly fucking stupid.
And knowing that there are so many American’s like this: it is legitimately going to make fewer Americans vote to prevent the fascist from taking power (and did!) because they’ll feel like they’re aligning with the “bad guys” if you critique Democrats in public without a load of additional context (that some wont even absorb anyway if you provided it).
Why should people vote for a party that do not even want to resolve the most pressing issues that affect their daily lives?
To prevent fascists from taking power.
I feel like your missing that many people do see the Democrats as the bad guys, and I can’t say that I blame them. We recently asked them to say “Genocide is bad, and we won’t support it” and they wouldn’t. They are the baddies
I feel like your missing that many people do see the Democrats as the bad guys
No I’m not. I literally said that they would. And I hold that such a black and white surface level evaluation of the situation and to then choose not to vote is aggressively fucking stupid.
And TBH, I don’t want to help stupid people if they’re going to keep dragging me into the mud. I’ve worried about politics for most of my life and worked to make things better for other people but this election has freed me to focus on helping mostly just myself and a few close people that align with me. Most other people are hopeless. I’m done swimming up a waterfall.
Why is your criticism so heavily directed at voters? Voting for who you want is a fundamental part of democracy. You are spending so much energy criticizing voters but I haven’t seen an ounce of criticism for the actual party leadership. It is literally the job of the party leaders to create a platform that aligns with its voting base. They literally turned their back on their base in order to try to appeal to Trump voters with anti immigration policies. THEY HAD ADS TALKING ABOUT BUILDING THE WALL. Do you think MAYBE that has something to do with why the Democrats failed to get voters out to the polls?
I hate the democratic leadership as well. I can hate two groups at the same time. But I primarily hate them for losing to fascists and not taking the threat seriously. Much like I hate the non-voters for basically the same fucking reason.
The democrats thought that appealing to moderate republicans and centrists would siphon votes from Trump. This was obviously a stupid idea and I cringed as they did so and hoped that it wouldn’t hurt them too bad in the polls. It obviously fucking did.
The thing is, they more or less admitted so at this point that their strategy was dumb as fuck and that Sanders was right all along.
There are still people who did not vote who are accelerationists, “apolitical”, or think “democrats and republicans are identical” and my spite and hatred of those people is so incredibly intense. I hope they get exactly what they did not vote against. I resent that I’ve put effort where they choose not to and now expect me to continue fucking fighting after they let the difficulty level explode and likely doom the planet to a scorching hellscape.
Right right, it’s a neat graphic, but it kind of ignores people who remember multiple presidential elections.
If we vote Democrat and then the Democrats don’t do jack s*** then what surprise is it that people stay home next time? Obama was weak. Biden was weak. They could have pushed policies that would benefit the average American citizen, and they mostly didn’t. The party threw us away, not the other way around.
And I still think people should vote, but you don’t get to blame them for the Democrats being s*****.
Realistically, it’s the Democrats who failed the voting public. Their campaign of “We offer you nothing!”, did not seem to drag in very many undecided voters. You and I might be very politically active, but the majority of Americans are not.
You need to give them a reason to go out and vote. A lot of people have very short attention spans, and easily forgot how bad Trump was the first time around and shaming the people for their shortsightedness is not how you win elections.
The democratic message was less “we offer you nothing” than “nothing will change”.
Nothing will change has good sides and bad sides. The bad side is that there are no new radical fixes, just small, incremental changes.
The good side of nothing will change is… well look at the absolute chaos of the Trump second presidency. Installing absolutely unqualified candidates everywhere, the military’s first DUI hire for secretary of defence. The absolute destruction of USAID. Musk’s chaos putting BigBalls in charge of trillions of dollars of government spending.
(And, as an aside, it’s not even true that with the democrats nothing was going to change. Just look at the progress they had been making on antitrust. But, it’s true that they were shit at messaging and taking credit for their accomplishments.)
“We offer nothing” and “nothing will change” are fundamentally the same thing when things are objectively bad.
Not when things could get much, much worse.
If you are eating raw veggies and corn flakes nothing will change means you eat boring food. Offering nothing means you die a painful death. See the difference?
Biden was the “Nothing will essentially change” candidate. We finally pushed him out, but Harris only had 2 weeks to come up with “Something”. That something? A small tax credit for small businesses that was DOA in the house. It was probably why they didn’t promise anything else - if a TAX CUT isn’t passing the GOP controlled parts of congress, what the heck could Harris promise that would?
“That something” also included the largest medicare expansion in history and $25k first time homebuyer assistance.
Keep telling yourself the democrats failed and somehow they are now suffering, they aren’t, they’ll get to take 4 years off and enjoy their wealth, it’s the voters who tried to punish the dems by not voting who are the morons
Keep telling yourself the voters are morons until we lose in 2026 and 2028. If Democratic candidates don’t convince people to come out and vote we are lost.
If we lose in 2026 and 2028 I think that would just further prove that voters are morons.
The only people actually losing here are the American people.
Hey I’m Canadian, looking at this from the outside. You guys inside the shit show can’t quite see how the rest of us see you and your situation
Hey I’m Canadian too. Don’t speak for “the rest of us.” It’s the Democratic parties’ own gd fault that they lost. If you can’t convince the average voter to vote for you when you’re running against an obviously volatile, incompetent, narcissistic, geriatric moron with fascistic tendencies backed up by the world’s richest and least charismatic deadbeat dad then you done fucked up.
People love it when outsiders comment on their country’s politics
lol the irony and utter hypocrisy of an American saying this 😂
P.s. im native, it’s MY continent
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I was born in Central America and have lived on every extreme of my continent, is that an issue for you? I’ll stay out of American affairs when Americans stay out of everyone else’s and then act alert righteous while lecturing others, you’re all so full of shit.
But that’s the problem. The voters are all morons. The Democrats knew this. And Republicans were giving a master class on how to make that work. But the Democrats didn’t do anything. They treat politics like a friendly game of Monopoly. They assume the rules are magically enforced. So when the Republicans started to cheat, the Dems kept playing by the rules. And now we have a fascist government.
Also, I don’t think the Democrats are suffering. They’re all rich. They can live just fine in a fascist US, they have enough money. We are the ones that are going to be loaded onto the trains.
Their point was that the Democrats didn’t fail, because they didn’t try in the first place
How do you vote to get rid of the dumb voting system in USA?
We all voted for Biden even though we KNEW he would be worthless but that’s who was forced on us…and then for four years he ABSOLUTELY REFUSED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE to do his Number One Job of defending the US against domestic terrorism and insurrection.
ABSOLUTE REFUSAL.
And then his successor campaigns as a GWB acolyte and gives vague, rambling non-answers to very simple questions while telling the constituency to go fuck themselves.
You figure it out
I voted in Taiwan. I had to take a 1 hour train ride to the American embassy to vote.
Well the Google results i saw say about 64% of eligible voters voted, which is apparently high for the US.
Based on 2020 numbers it does look like a lot of 2020 Biden voters stayed home and most 2020 Trump voters came out again. Add in some economy frustration and surprise we get this shit show for 4 years…
I’m so tired of this. Obviously more people need to be more politically active, but there’s a lot of issues occurring that we just don’t talk about enough here.
Being politically active while being a responsible and well-informed voter takes time. The first without the other two is just how you make more Republican voters. When you consider how much a lot of people are working and the other struggles they’re facing it really isn’t surprising that a lot of people are not that informed or active. Let’s also not pretend that one party doesn’t go out of its way to make it more difficult for people to vote either.
Other the other side of the issue there’s a myriad of issues that have made our current democrats less motivated to be an opposition party. Also, let me just point out that a party should never sit back and watch simply because they are not currently in full control of congress at the given moment. The Republicans have led by example on this repeatedly. Even when they aren’t in control they continue to be aggressive, to be disruptive, to keep a media presence. Democrats can do this too. They need to.
This isn’t to say that Democrats are completely to blame. There’s a lot of shitty people in this country and there are people out there that can do a bit more than what they’re doing to support the cause. This is just to say that Democrats share some responsibility and some of the burden here.
Also I just want to put this out there. I know people are scared, people are angry, people are upset, but the blame game isn’t doing anyone any good. It is important to understand what went wrong, but spending all our time pointing fingers is simply wasting energy.
The voting system doesn’t have to be this way. There are many far more representative electoral systems we could use over First-past-the-post voting.
Why aren’t the democrats doing anything? Because they don’t have to. What are you going to do, vote republican? “Vote for us… or else” is not democracy, it is a hostage situation. It is an abusive relationship.
If the democrats supported democracy as much as they say, they would be scrambling to pass electoral reform in blue states. If democrats believed what they say about the republican party, they would not hesitate to open the voting system to 3rd parties. If it’s all about preventing republican control, it wouldn’t matter who beat the Republicans so long as they are defeated. Who could possibly say no to more then one chance to beat the Republicans?
Here on lemmy and across the internet you should have seen many blue conservatives screaming to the heavens about the spoiler effect and how voting for 3rd parties is a vote for Trump and the republicans. This is the democratic party showing us that, yes, they do in fact understand that the voting system is a issue.
This has happened for longer then ive been alive. So if the issue is understood, and no reform over how we vote gas taken place, then we can easily assume that the democrats prefer this voting system alongside the republicans. The democrats, don’t want you to have any options in the voting booth. The democrats want this hostage situation. The democrats prefer trump and the republicans to win over having to actually compete for your vote.
We all understand that the republicans don’t support democracy, but now is the time to stop living in denial. The democrats also do not support democracy. They want safe states and the world’s easiest campaigns against the worst of us all. Democrats dont want to answer tough questions at debates. They want to put a party hack in front of you and laugh at your lack of an alternative. They will smash that “most important election ever” but 100 trillion times, collect checks from us and call it a day.
Electoral reform is not some impossible dream. We control how we vote at the state level. We dont need to wait for federal reform, it could still happen before the mid terms. So we must all demand the freedom to vote how we want from both the republican and democratic party in the states that continue to use FPTP voting.
Now is the time. No more waiting for the democrats to suddenly grow a backbone. We can choose a better way. We can have a future to look forward to. We can make the world a place people want to live in, at least more people then just the corporations and landlords that lord over us all.
Feel free to hate me bringing this up time and again. Shut me up by passing electoral reform across the country. I know more democracy is the solution to then problems we all face. Yeah it’s a long shot. But it’s better then having no shot at all.
Videos on Electoral Reform
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
Yeah now is the time to promote voting reform and try to make a serious third party.
A serious third party needs to start with congressional seats. Not the presidency.
A serious third party probably needs to start at the state or even municipal level, realistically.
So when people promote voting reform and making a third party we won’t be called splitting the vote and enabling Trump, right?
I think most third parties get blamed for that because they parachute into the presidential race a couple months before the election without anyone in lower offices.
Thank you for writing this.
And so long as men die, liberty will never perish©
(Yes, I want people to search for this quote and listen to the man)
The number of excuses people are willing to make for Democrats is astounding. I’ve been watching the Republicans obstruct the Democrats for the last sixteen years. Meanwhile, Trump has been in power for a month, and Democrats are fast-tracking his appointments, even when it’s a conspiracy theorist to lead the FBI or an anti-vaxer to head HHS. They’ve given unanimous consent to Trump’s agenda 345 times so far. You should be calling them every day and demanding they act like an actual opposition party, not justifying their collaboration with the fascists. Who knows, maybe if they show voters that they’re actually willing to stand up and fight for something, they might actually win a fucking election.
Why the lies?
Democrats used every second of their allotted talking time to block Gaetz’s confirmation as much as they could while holding a minority. You genuinely need to look up the meaning of the word “unanimous”.
Republicans obstructed democrats for so long by preventing a majority. The American people enabled that by voting them in.
Everything you just said is factually incorrect. Gaetz didn’t even have a confirmation. He gave up the nomination before confirmation hearings could start.
Also, you genuinely need to look up, “unanimous consent.” It’s a procedural method the Senate uses to speed up votes; if just one Democrat refuses to give unanimous consent to a vote, the Senate is forced to take a roll call vote and open the floor up to debate. It’s one of the many procedural hurdles Democrats could be using to block Trump’s agenda if they had the willpower.
I’ll walk that back - I think at some point I mixed up the hearings on RFK and Gaetz, so I gave the wrong name there. I apologize for that.
But even then, for RFK I read articles specifically highlighting the Democrat initiative to hold the floor; and the final vote came out along party lines (excepting some R senators that rebelled). So it sounds like the unanimous consent topic you’re referring to is on regular Senate work, not the confirmation. You specifically said they’ve “fast tracked his appointments” and I’m trying to understand that claim. To me, I’m more convinced that Democrats have political experience telling them that Indivisible’s plan is too easy to backfire, too easy for media to twist against them, and get them forcibly removed from office; especially since their efforts at filibustering have shown they’re not beyond putting in effort.
Given there’s clearly a differing view on what we’re talking about, I’ll apologize for calling you a liar, but it still doesn’t seem like a claim that makes sense to me.
Most of the members of Congress are extremely wealthy, Republican and Democrat alike. They’re not doing anything about this coup consolidating capitalist class power because they stand to personally gain from it. They don’t have to pretend to not have the votes to stop yet another grab at working class wallets because they can point at Elon and say “we have no power here.”
There are certain people who never want to hear it, but very few national politicians give a shit about us, certainly not enough to make a difference. They’re in it for personal gain, everything else is performative.
Some of them also don’t want to risk being violently purged by fascists so are bowing down early.
The handful that are actually speaking out are risking being very dead.
Which is fucking terrifying and why I’ve (and others) been screaming that nobody is coming to save us, we have to save each other. Put down the identity stuff for now and rekindle the militant labor movements we used to have in this country. Withholding our labor is the only way out of this - they need us a lot more than we need them.
What a fucking take lmao
“the blacks and the gays getting systemically purged from society doesn’t matter compared to the real stuff, things that personally impact me”
Yes, because that’s obviously what I meant. You totally got the exact right thing out of what I wrote and didn’t read your own bullshit into it at all. You sure got me pegged.
Fucking toad.
i voted for fetterman and he’s more useless at resisting tyranny than a wet blanket
