You should include more links to Twitter.

soon-to-be
Required
DOUG
under
don-
old.

"it's part of why they lost so spectacularly."

Here is a better explanation.

"Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues."

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/a-party-of-prigs-and-pontificators-suffers-a-humiliating-defeat/

All of the negativity of the upcoming Trump shit show noted in the rest of today's Slog AM could have been avoided, if the advice from the NYT Columnist in @3 had been taken to heart.

15 million people didn't show up because they were as sick of the Democratic Brand as they were of Fascist Boy.

Found out last night that my husband's side of the family (who all voted Trump, which is not surprising but still fucking infuriating) all rolled up to the polls in Nevada decked out head to toe in Trump gear, including my FIL wearing a shirt saying, "I'm voting for the felon." He was not happy when I told him that shirt was absolutely made in China, and even more so when that shirt did, indeed, say "Made in China."

So anyway, I'm gonna be blackout drunk on Thanksgiving this year.

@5
I do this weird thing when family dinners I don’t want to go to pop up.
I don’t go.
If my wife wants to go I tell her sincerely that I hope it goes well.
Besides, you shouldn’t be celebrating Thanksgiving. Is a holiday that celebrates the genocide of the indigenous people and theft of the land that the indigenous people took from another indigenous group.

@5
My sympathies to you.
And to the many tens of thousands this will apply to.
No amount of cranberry sauce will make up for this.

Obviously it doesn't matter in WA but people like Hannah all but calling Kamala a goose-stepping nazi have killed the Ds (nationwide) as much as the gop calling her a radical communist. Voters shouldn't have to hear about what the Ds actually do through a filter of apparatchiks.

@3 is right. Plus the fact that middle-of-the-road voters (aka most people) don’t support the far-Left tactics of blocking traffic and ‘occupy’ to promote a defund-the-police, BLM, support Gaza agenda.

It’s a myth that ‘the whole world is watching’ ended the Vietnam War. Those protests alienated middle-America and got Nixon elected, which begat the bombing of Laos and the invasion of Cambodia.

"Nobody's buying the arugula milkshakes! Must need more arugula."

“But, no. The Democrats love to capitulate to the right. And, it's part of why they lost so spectacularly.”

The right is very, very popular in America. If the Democrats want to win, they have to entice right-leaning voters. I don’t think the lesson to draw from the drubbing of 2024 is that American voters secretly more lefty policies.

@6
Prediction: your wife divorces you within the next 4-6 years. Your bitterness isn't good for either of you, and more importantly definitely not for her heart. The poor thing.

@12
I give her
two weeks.

@11 the right is moderately popular in America, but more to the point you can't beat the right by being Right Lite. Democrats need to provide a compelling alternative. Specifically they need to get back to giving a fuck about working class people, as even Bret Stephens realizes. (Great link btw @3)

@6 I love my husband, and despite their bullshit, he does love them. They don't love that he joined the military from a super pro-republican family and came back jaded AF hating the republican party and everything they stand for. I'd consider myself a left leaning centrist, and he more of a right leaning centrist. They are the true extreme on either side of the families. But goddamn does it make for some really entertaining holidays watching their heads explode when my husband forces them to try to use logic and reasoning to explain their positions outside of just "BUT COMMUNISM AND THE LIBRULS OMG!" His sister called their mom out for something really heinous she said last Christmas and I haven't seen them since, but I've heard she's not pleased that her children and the rest of the cousins don't hold her same fucked up views. The bullshit dies out with their generation.

My husband has always said he'd pick me over his family, but I'm not about to put him in a position to make him choose permanently. I only see them maybe twice a year and he's never forced me to go with him outside of obligatory holidays, and even those I've started to pick up on hosting and made a blanket rule that politics do not get discussed on said holidays in our home.

Left wing economic solutions have ALWAYS been the way to beat fake rightwing populism. Democrats moving further to the right will ensure their irrelevance for decades to come.

15: That's the right disposition to have. Diversity includes hearing views we don't agree with, and it's more fun and meaningful to steer the conversation to recipes and other innocuous subjects anyway.

@14 to expand on this, Republicans have a fairly consistent vote share over the years. Democrats are more variable. Since 2000 when turnout is over 60.1% Dems win and when it's not Dems lose. Turnout this year was way down--Trump got slightly fewer votes than he did in 2020, but Kamala got about 15 million fewer than Biden, and that was the difference.

16: I think that goes against the grain of the old adage that "politics is a game of addition, not subtraction."

@16 what is a left wing economic solution. Thr only thing I’ve ever seen them suggest is “tax the rich” which of course is not a solution at all.

@18: “Trump got slightly fewer votes than he did in 2020”

It’s highly likely that Trump will receive more votes this year than he did in 2020.

On the other hand, the US population has increased since 2020, so you can kind of ret-con it into fewer votes by moving the goalposts to “votes as a fraction of the total population.” 😄

But you’d have to move the goalposts pretty far indeed to turn this into anything other than an overwhelming win for Trump. 😉

@5- hoping that the things you say while blackout drunk at Thanksgiving and then can’t remember include telling said Trumpers to fuck themselves.

Claims that voters were mainly motivated by the economy are bunk. How do we know? Because opinion polls that followed up that question with another question -- "And how are YOU doing financially?" -- found that most people said they were actually doing fine or even better. And the data on wage growth vs. inflation bears that out. "The economy" is a socially-acceptable basis to rationalize voting for Trump. But let's be clear: trans panic, misogyny, and immigrant hate are what ruled the day.

@21 it was an overwhelming win for Trump, and the rest of the party, absolutely. Dems got smoked. But it's primarily because they failed to motivate voters to support them not because voters moved to Trump. He did basically the same but Dems did a lot worse.

@19 only if you assume the Dems got all possible voters on the left, which is a faulty assumption. It's not true that they can ONLY add by moving right. In fact it may likely be more true that they CANNOT add by moving any further right.

@23 you are wrong.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/politics/2020-2016-exit-polls-2024-dg/

"Voters were about evenly split in 2020 on whether the economy was in good shape or not, an incredible thing given the raging pandemic that was affecting Americans’ lives that year. In 2024, about two-thirds of voters said the economy was in bad shape."

"In 2020, just about one-fifth of voters said they were doing worse than four years before. This year, it’s nearly half of voters who say they are doing worse than four years ago."

@12 & 13
Sorry to disappoint, but we’ve been married for 31 years and have never been happier due in large part to the fact that we no longer feel the need to make someone else miserable just to keep family that we only see once or twice a year happy.
It works both ways too.
She doesn’t go to dinner when my sister is going to be there, I don’t go anywhere near her mother.
Politically, she is deep red where I’m more of a right leaning centrist.

@16, The point of the NYT columnist lined @3 is that you may well be right. Dems might well have prevailed on that basis, but they get in their own way with other issues.

Nobody hears those Democrat economic policy arguments because of what they otherwise prioritize and how they communicate.

@14, See @23 for an example of what the columnist linked @3 was taking about.

That Bret Stephens column was ridiculous. Lots of generalizations of what a "liberal" is. Believe it or not, some of us can be confused by pronouns or "concerned about gender transitions for children" too.

It's just more "you can't say anything anymore" bullshit from the Right, who are apparently bummed that the the N-word and F-word are not longer cool. Call me a prig? You're a fucking retard.

nyt:

Devastated Democrats Play
the Blame Game, and
Stare at a Dark
Future

In interviews, lawmakers and strategists tried to explain Kamala Harris’s defeat, pointing to misinformation, the Gaza war, a toxic Democratic brand and the party’s approach to transgender issues.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/democrats-kamala-harris.html

the top two
Readers’ comments:

The only reasonable response I’ve read here is from Bernie Sanders and yet they keep ignoring him and his points. It’s infuriating to listen to other democrats pretend the issues they care about the most are going to get them elected.
--Josh; Queens, NY

Harris voter here. I really wanted her to win.

But if you lose the senate, house, electoral college, and popular vote, and you think the lesson is that half the country is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and stupid, then that is the wrong lesson to take away from this election.

Democrats have to seriously look back at themselves and a party as a whole, understanding how important the economy really is to Americans, and the certain bit of moral flexibility which comes into play when people are struggling to afford basic necessities.

It wasn’t Israel and Gaza that lost us the election, but the bank accounts of over half the country living paycheck to paycheck. Being the VP of the country during this time put Harris in a particularly hard position, and the voters are looked for a change.
--Luke; Minnesota

oodles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/us/politics/democrats-kamala-harris.html#commentsContainer

@29 for once I am in complete agreement with you. But that person is not "the left" they are a classic elitist lib who prefers to believe Americans are all bigoted idiots rather than confront the dramatic economic policy and messaging failures of the modern Democratic party.

@24: “He did basically the same but Dems did a lot worse.”

Not necessarily true. Even in a scenario where Trump received precisely the same number of votes in 2024 as in 2020, it would not necessarily be the case that he “did basically the same.”

Your conclusion depends on the unproven assumption that ONLY Democratic voters from 2020 stayed home this year. We don’t know that’s the case. It is also possible that Republican voters from 2020 stayed home this year, and that Trump’s numbers this year came less from returning 2020 Republican voters and more from flipping voters away from Democratic in 2020 and toward Republican in 2024. In that case, Trump’s performance this year would actually be stronger (in terms of his popularity with voters), even if his total number of votes remained precisely the same.

At this point, we simply don’t have enough data to know whether Republicans did “basically the same” this year than in 2020 while Democratic voters largely sat it out, or if Republicans actually did much better this year than in 2020 by stealing votes from Democrats out of a smaller overall pool in which both Democratic and Republican voters largely sat it out.

In other words, things might be even worse for the Democrats than you think! 😃 No doubt the political scientists are churning away as we speak, and we’ll know more in the coming months.

Watching the Stranger’s writers squee all over themselves about Rinck merely reminds the rest of us just how hard Seattle’s voters have been rejecting the Stranger’s local candidates. In Seattle’s 2021 general election, CM Mosqueda was the only Stranger-endorsed candidate who didn’t suffer a career-ending defeat. Instead, she has since quit, thus effectively defeating all of the Stranger-endorsed candidates from that election.

Rinck’s election thus restores — for a single year, anyway — the status quo from 2021. A status quo which the Stranger absolutely hated at that time. After the Stranger’s larger Seattle drubbing in 2023, that hated 2021 status quo has become something for the Stranger to celebrate.

Amazing.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/07/yoav-gallant-israel-army-nothing-left-to-do-in-gaza

@34 ah yes but now they have proof low turnout elections favor moderates and that in a high turnout election NTK and Oliver would have prevailed. The goal now is to go even harder to the left and triple down on those things because clearly Rincks win is a mandate (thus the comment about her earning more votes than Nelson). Picture them sitting around in a circle taking hits from their bong like “That 70s show” and I’m guessing that is how the meeting after the election went down.

@35 wonder how they're gonna manage to argue Yoav Gallant is an antisemite

@37. They don't give a flying fuck about the hostages and they never did.

https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com/2024/11/07/whats-next/

@25: Anyone who begrudges stretching the tent of the Democratic party cannot call themselves a democrat much less a progressive.

@38, Hostages are expendable as long as Hamas and Hezbollah haven't had the ability to strike Israel degraded.

What if the goal isn't getting hostages back but preventing the ability to invade and take 200 more?

“They championed an extreme and inhumane immigration platform, shrugged their shoulders at Israel’s utter decimation of Gaza”

Progressives don’t get that most Americans have a difference in opinion on those issues; moreover Trump did exceptionally well with young men, black men, and Latinos in general - and what they cared about was the economy and the border (granted the latter mostly due to right media repeating the lie that immigrants are taking their jobs / making everything more expensive). And just like so many here like to point to the random Jew supporting the Gaza protests, the right can now point to Trump’s support amongst minority voters as proof he isn’t racist (which is BS in both cases but it is consistent logic).

Democrats have to figure out how to once again be the party of the working class. Like Clinton rightly understood oh so many decades ago - it’s the economy stupid.

@40: Hamas’s strike capability is already severely degraded. Ex-DM Gallant’s argument is that further ground combat won’t degrade it further, so might as well try to strike a deal with Hamas over hostages (assuming Hamas negotiates in good faith, which, you know, lol).

The counter argument is that a full Israeli troop withdrawal will allow Hamas to rearm and strike again in the future. No point trading a few hostages now in exchange for another giant Hamas gaziya a few years from now.

The counter argument’s biggest weakness is that Hamas will always seek to rearm. At least on the foreseeable scale of decades, there always be a Hamas in Gaza, and it will always arming be up for the next attack (which is why Israeli ground incursions into Gaza are called mowing the grass - it works, but the grass always grows back, so you have to keep mowing periodically). Unless Israel is planning to keep ground troops in Gaza in perpetuity, there’s no way to prevent Hamas from re-arming. So the counter-argument only prevails if the plan is permanent troops in Gaza. Otherwise, it’s better to try and make a hostages deal, if that’s even possible with Hamas.

@40 sure but in which direction?

@41 progressives are the ones who've been trying to get Dems to focus on economic issues, but instead they tried to coopt Republican issues and got predictably humiliated. Mainstream Dems don't want to try to help the working class anymore because then corporations and wealthy individuals might turn off the donation (and, later, speaking fee) spigot.

Does anyone have a source providing info on the eligible voters that sat out the election? Specifically demographics. All my Googling just comes up with data on those that did vote.

@43: “…progressives are the ones who've been trying to get Dems to focus on economic issues,”

As you apparently have not read the Stranger at any time over the last thirteen months, I’ll kindly inform you the “progressives” here have been trying to get the local Dems to focus on Gaza, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Even after then reluctantly discovering, “Gaza Isn’t Driving Votes,” they then turned to demanding VP Harris make unfulfillable promises — because Gaza.

(Yes, writers at the Stranger do care passionately about raising the minimum wage, most especially for over-educated persons who earn low wages at dead-end jobs, but that’s “economic issue,” — singular, not plural.)

from Donziger On Justice:

The Democratic Party We
Knew Is Over. Something
Fresh Must Take Its Place.

The US desperately needs a political party that will stand up for workers, average people, and the planet -- and confront Trump's pro-corporate agenda.

After watching the results of the presidential election, I am convinced that the Democratic party in the US as we know it needs to be completely restructured if we are to create the kind of just society we deserve.

First, a bit of history. I've voted in 11 elections and over that time I've seen the Democrats slowly abandon the working class to the point where the party is now further to the right than the Republicans were in 1980, when Ronald Reagan swept into office.

There is simply no political party left in the US truly representing working people that can win a national election. This presents a serious challenge.

Those upset by Trump’s victory (and I am among them) must start by recognizing it.

Many of you are too young, but I have the benefit of having voted in presidential elections for 44 years.

I remember how Bill Clinton abandoned the working class ['Slick Willy'] , [one of wormmy's Heroes] by supporting NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the first major "free trade" agreement that led to the loss of millions of jobs and seriously undermined wages in the United States;

I saw how Barack Obama came to office with a huge mandate but quickly caved to the health care industry and never pushed for a national health care plan.

The party never has fought tenaciously for a federal minimum wage or to raise society security payments, two key components of a pro-worker agenda.

Nor has the party tried with sufficient vigor to reign in the planet-destroying fossil fuel industry or the public subsidies that help produce historically-high profits.

President Biden's failure to stop my unprecedented private corporate criminal prosecution after winning the Ecuador pollution case is an example of a broader capitulation to corporate power.

--by Steven Donziger; Nov 07, 2024

oodles more, stranger!
(oh and don't be Distracted
by Wormtongue's distractions):

https://stevendonziger.substack.com/p/the-democratic-party-we-knew-is-over?r=k7ee3

This Democrats loss is a direct result of the economy. That’s all. Get away from Seattle and there is a huge amount of areas that can’t afford the extra cost of an electric car, the carbon tax that drives up prices on gas a dollar a gallon, nor the inflation that has caused a $100 bag of groceries to cost $125 now. Not all working class people have seen wage growth. The fact that initiative failed shows that democrats aren’t hearing it. I understand about global warming, but one state trying to fight it out is ridiculous.

The democrats are losing being the party of sense anymore. It's a real shame. Only a third of Americans identify as democrats.

@36: Yes, the Stranger seems to have overlooked Rinck’s victory was over an officeholder who'd never been elected. It may not always be possible to find such an opponent. ;-)

Can't we just put on our big boy and girl pants and admit a lot of Americans are batshit crazy and stupid?
And if you don't think insulting large blocks of voters is a good idea, you haven't learned anything from this election. It works. The trick is to marginalize. Let's start with Texans.

think how Stupid
the Average Person is
then think about how many're
Below Average. about Half, I'd wager

small Wonder
the Fucking
Fascist won.

@51 and that terrible government programs like WA Cares and the CCA survived. It goes both ways you know.

"[Rinck's] vote count trumps the combined total of the 2023 City Council victors..."

Why the Stranger wants to remind readers of CM Morales' 403-vote margin of victory over Woo, I can't say, but hey, I can't stop them. Are we supposed to conclude the Stranger believes Morales' victory was not fully legitimate?

"...[Rinck]’s got a 26,000-vote lead over Council President Sara Nelson’s 2021 campaign."

Nelson beat her opponent by over 20,000 votes. Is the Stranger saying Nelson defeated a very weak opponent?

@46: 'I remember how Bill Clinton abandoned the working class ['Slick Willy'] , [one of wormmy's Heroes] by supporting NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the first major "free trade" agreement that led to the loss of millions of jobs and seriously undermined wages in the United States;'

'In 2015, the Congressional Research Service concluded that the "net overall effect of NAFTA on the US economy appears to have been relatively modest, primarily because trade with Canada and Mexico accounts for a small percentage of US GDP. However, there were worker and firm adjustment costs as the three countries adjusted to more open trade and investment among their economies." The report also estimated that NAFTA added $80 billion to the US economy since its implementation, equivalent to a 0.5% increase in US GDP.'

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement)

good ole
fucking NAFTA

when
Manufacturing
abandoned America
to Offshore Labor Markets
willing to work for Pennies on the $
NO Healthcare NO Overtime NO Protections

our Unions
be Damned!

way to Go
Slick Willy!
not to Men-
tion hooking
his train up to
Corporate America
to tote the Centrists
along with the goppers
one big fat Happy Party of
TWO! different names. way to Go

& we're Still reaping
what Slick Willy sowed.