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Cake day: January 13th, 2024

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  • There were certainly votes lost in Michigan over Gaza, but even if every single Jill Stein vote was a protest vote (they weren’t), it wouldn’t have been enough for Harris to carry the state.

    The tougher thing to parse is the reason why so many voters seemingly stayed home this cycle. I think there is a very reasonable argument that not enough people were excited about her message, even the base.

    It’s a lot easier for door knockers, phone bankers, and everyday democrats to talk proudly about their candidate if they can rattle off a list of great things their candidate will do. It’s even easier if those great things hit people where they’re hurting the hardest or is the moral thing to do (healthcare for the uninsured, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.). It’s a lot tougher to get low propensity voters to show up on the harm reduction argument alone, especially if you brush past where they’re hurting or concede too much ground on your moral positions.

    The biggest issue for most voters appears to have been inflation and the economy, and while democrats were technically correct to say the rate of inflation has come down and American economic indicators outperformed most other countries in this post-pandemic period, that’s all pretty meaningless to someone whose real wage growth didn’t keep up with inflation these past few years. The “opportunity economy” and targeted small business tax cuts is a much tougher sell to someone working two+ jobs to get by.

    The other issue that dominated the media was immigration. Democrats forfeited their moral position when they offered the republican wishlist border bill earlier this year. The argument that republicans weren’t serious on the border because they didn’t support the bill fell flat, and instead democrats were (rightly) criticized for abandoning their framing of the issue as a choice between deportation and amnesty, and their previous claims the border wall was racist.

    All of that to say, democrats failed to connect with their own base on the issues that make them the party’s best messengers. Add Gaza to the list of issues where Harris could have pivoted away from Biden, instead of running into the arms of the Cheneys to chase the mythical moderate republican voter.


















  • The primaries happened l. It’s over. He’s who we’re stuck with

    With these leaked conversations from Pelosi, Schumer, and Jefferies, it doesn’t seem like the party thinks he’s the candidate they’re stuck with. Seems even the leadership feels they were kept in the dark about Biden’s current state through the primaries.

    My question is, who is ride or die for Biden at this point? The people I know on the left are voting against Trump, rather than for Biden or even for a Democrat, and have said they would vote for just about any Democrat with a pulse to beat Trump.

    Is it the moderates? Maybe in 2020, when Biden was the familiar voice of reason running against a proven conman with four years of endless headlines of corruption and destruction of norms. But that’s not what people have stored in their recent memory this time around, and it’s not the Biden we have now. He can’t string together a lucid rebuttal to the practiced silver tongue that seems to have half of America fooled.

    This late in the game, the only way I see the Democrats beating Trump is if they win the same moderate voters who were sick of the uncertainty and disruptions of the Trump presidency, and Biden can’t seem to coherently communicate the dangers of returning to that anymore. The Democrats need to put forward a candidate that remembers both the start of their sentences and points they were trying to make by the time they reach the end, even after 8pm.