Or maybe the explanation is that everybody behaved "responsibly" but they never got the changes they wanted, and chances for anything different looked more and more bleak. Why do you treat this like a single event? It is not. Lots of prior experiences fed into this.
For example, as bad as this is for us (I'm German, but I lived many years in the US once), for Europe I think it is good what is happening. Now we are forced to move and mature. Crisis are not always bad. The personalities involved this time make it especially hard to look at the whole thing calmly. I admit I have a harder time seeing what the US may get out of this except for the shakeup as a general chance. However, too much is concentrated on the personalities, and, like you did, on blaming everybody. How about Democrats look what they did wrong? I mean, other than reverting to "we didn't think the voters would be so stupid", in which case I have little hope for them to get anything positive out of this.
Democrats’ mistake was putting up a woman in a leadership popularity contest, even after the previous woman lost to the same
> racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler
And a black woman at that, to further reduce Democrats’ chances.
I’m basing this on the anecdotal evidence from many people who I spoke to, who have zero problem telling me a woman cannot be a leader. Including my own non white immigrant grandmother, who grew up without rights.
Many people don’t like to see people of a perceived lower socioeconomic status pass them up. It makes themselves feel inferior.
I'll counter your anecdotal experience with my own. I can count on one hand the number of people I know well who voted against Harris because of her gender or color. And I live in the rural south. The simple truth is that Harris failed to make a compelling case to enough of the nation in enough of the right states to win. The reasons for that failure are going to be complex and varied depending on area. Any attempt to pin it on a single trait or activity is going to be somewhat wrong. This is way too nuanced a topic for "She lost because she was a black woman" to be at all useful.
> I can count on one hand the number of people I know well who voted against Harris because of her gender or color.
You can count on one hand the number of people you know well who are willing to admit they voted against Harris because of her gender or color. This is a critical distinction.
I know a lot of people well enough that they know they don't have to be afraid to admit such things to me. This is not a critical distinction because assuming you know what people think is a great way to completely misunderstand them.
As someone who spent 30 years living in the rural south, I can state this with the confidence of personal experience: some people will not reveal their worst opinions until they are extremely sure in the safety of doing so. In some cases, they'll only reveal those opinions to someone else who has repeatedly shared the same opinions with them.
So unless you're giving big racist or misogynist vibes in how you communicate with them, the racists and misogynists you know "well" may be keeping their opinions to themselves.
The Democratic white male candidate (Biden) was polling so much worse than Harris that he was removed from candidacy.
Harris was part of the Biden administration, she was the 2IC of the Biden administration, she endorsed the policies of the Biden administration and the only official difference between her and Biden was that she was a different race & gender and polled much better than he did. Although unofficially she looked mentally sharper than Biden.
It is difficult to say it was race and gender when the approved candidate of the appropriate race and gender was clearly unelectable. At least Harris was a close call, Biden had lost before the race started. If the Biden administration had been popular and had some achievements to run on then she'd probably have won.
Why is it so hard to accept that hundreds of millions of Americans are racist, sexist, dumb fucks who don't know what's in their own best interests? They elected a crazy, raging megalomaniac over two sensible women. Twice. "How about Democrats look what they did wrong?" Well, maybe the obvious explanation is the best? They ran with women. So the solution is to only field male candidates in the future? You can see why that doesn't work for a "liberal" (< 100% right-wing) political party.
I always get a chuckle out of this. Both parties are full of NPCs who have mostly lost the ability to reason themselves out of anything partisan. This becomes even more apparent when you see each side hurl the same insults at each other, trying to rationalize the state of the world through ad hominem attacks.
It's depressing not to fit into either side, to be honest. I'm both a racist, sexist homophobe, and a libtard, depending on which echo chamber I am engaging in.
No, they ran with "horrible" women. Had they not screwed Tulsi Gabbard over and pretty much pushed her out of the party, I would have loved to have voted for Democrat woman.
Shes weird. There’s something just very insincere about her. I’m not sure if Russia really bought her off or not, but she definitely has some wacky opinions
Suggesting that she was "bought off" by Russia without even the slightest bit of evidence is pure idiocy. Attacking people as being foreign agents for not fully falling in line with the orthodoxy is really what I consider to be "weird" and straight-up un-American.
Sexism was probably a small part of why Democrats lost, but much more important reasons were the economy, alienating their base with their Israel policy, moving to the right on immigration instead of permissive policies which are popular with their base and strategically important for future demographics, and focusing most of their attention on highly divisive culture war issues that effect a vanishingly small portion of the population.
Why is it so hard to accept that Harris was _that bad_ of a candidate? Democrat voters didn't want her in the 2020 primaries (not a single delegate won) and she was basically invisible during the entire Biden campaign until the massive pre-election astroturf campaign that tried to revamp her image.
You don't get it. I agree with you. She is a woman and thus "that bad" of a presidential candidate. But to argue that it somehow was rational for the Americans to reelect Trump over her is to engage in some seriously dangerous mental gymnastics.
Well sure, but if that is the attitude they're not going to bother hiring good pollsters. Pollsters are going to do what, come back and explain that the Devil himself is outpolling your campaign. Now what? They were already catastrophising as hard as they could and the entire English speaking world knows how the US Dems feel about Trump. A majority (although admittedly a slim one) of voters just don't believe them.
Good pollsters would have been a waste of money in that environment and I'm sure the Harris campaign was judiciously watching their budget.
What's surprising to me is how many ex government employees they're able to find who voted for Trump and just didn't think they would get downsized because they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. I think it's interesting that Trump consistently gets the benefit of the doubt even in cases where the people he puts in positions of power pretty clearly intended to demoralize people by firing them.
> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
This quote doesn’t apply just to white men, or even just men.
Perhaps there is clearly something wrong with the voters to opt for a
> racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler