What is the point here? It’s very easy to point fingers after the fact! MAGA is the problem! RePUBElicants allowing a con man to hijack their party is the problem!!! VP Harris ran a FLAWLESS campaign and NO ONE will convince me that Elon didn’t steal that election!! I’m so TIRED of crap like this!
"The idea that Biden could have somehow done better than Harris and actually won re-election insults our intelligence and makes me very angry." THANK-YOU!!!
The way Biden, whether deliberately or through incompetence, bungled the investigation into Trump by appointing Merrick Garland, mixed with how he tried to gaslight the public about his age and mental faculties, as well as how he tried to gaslight himself about his popularity, has made my opinion of the man drop like a fucking stone over the last year.
He had no business running for a second term but decided that, like other democrats before him, could just ignore things like age and human mortality.
We are going to post a huge price for his arrogant and hubris and I’m fucking sick to death of all of these “well, he’s basically a good man who made a few mistakes” narratives people are trying to sell.
It was especially irritating how so many people thought it was some kind of ultimate revenge move for Garland getting screwed out of the SCOTUS and that he was really going to be extra motivated to get those evil Republicans for doing that to him.
This isn’t Hollywood, kids. The bad man doesn’t suddenly have a change of heart when betrayed by his fellow bad men and decide to bring them to justice as a result.
This too. Revealed Obama's complete misreading of the country. He figured "with such a sane moderate pick, this will make Republicans vote for him or they'll look so ridiculous the voters will punish them for it" and nope, it just fired up Republicans who thought they were entitled to a Scalia for the Scalia seat, and not a single Democrat was motivated to vote just so they could get a Garland in there.
Then picking him for DOJ just showed Biden had absolutely no idea what he was up against. Complete faceplant.
And after everything, STILL hasn't fired the fool!
Ooh, SER making lots of people mad. I love it. VP Harris got handed a giant bag of snakes and did as well as she could under the circumstances.
I still think racism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity played a huge part in her loss, because it's America, but this was absolutely Joe's loss. Telling us how great the economy is when many of us are watching our paycheck cover less was a huge mistake.
Most damningly, Biden failed to meet the attempted coup with the seriousness it deserved and that has hamstrung his entire term.
The biggest anchor of Biden’s presidency was the teams complete ineffectivnesss at controlling the narrative around……..literally anything that was happening good or bad. The good being the inflation reduction act, which should have been a history defining achievement that largely got defined by the intransigence of Manchin and Sinema and largely was ignored by the press since then. The bad being the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was 20 years overdue and defined by the previous administration but which Biden took 100% of the blame for.
The challenges the Democratic Party have to face when it comes to messaging are not new and don’t have to be restated here. Yes red media is going to be telling everyone how shit you are at everything at all times, and yes the traditional media is useless. It’s just your average American needs a counter narrative. Your average American isn’t smart enough to figure this out all on their own. If you don’t define the challenges the country is facing effectively and if they can’t still believe in your capacity to solve them, others will define that for you.
Biden, who I’ll never fully criticize for being the first president to reject neoliberalism since LBJ, ………couldn’t do that. Part of it was personal style and his reticence to announce how great he is. Part of it is the Democratic political arm is a geriatric anachronism, still fighting the fights of 1992.
And so the remarkable economic progress in the face of a global inflation challenge got lost in the shuffle of still ongoing concerns about inflation. It’s was always going to be difficult for anyone to step into that and sell a counter narrative in all of four months
….Except Harris was consistently more unpopular than Joe Biden throughout his entire presidency. That little surge she got upon becoming the nominee was among Biden voters, who were apprehensive about Biden’s chances and because she picked the jolly governor of Minnesota as her VP (who brought nothing to the ticket ultimately, except maybe Nebraska-2).
I like Biden and I like Harris and it all sucks. I think it wasn’t the price of eggs, I think it was a little bit of absolutely everything that every thoughtful analyst has mentioned. And our voters just didn’t get to the polls.
But don’t rewrite history - Kamala was never as popular as even Biden. Among non-progressive Democrats, which is most people, there never was a surge of excitement for her. The loss is on both of them. America is funny that way. And the responsible party better start acting that way again, because as you said, we weren’t repudiated in many important senate and gubernatorial races. But if we don’t start acting like it (while not overcorrecting as rabid AOC leftists), we’ll lose again.
I don't want to give the impression that Harris was exceptionally popular. I think she was saddled somewhat as BIden's VP, but I don't think she had the appeal among young men (of all races) that Obama did. This is an unpopular observation, but Obama was perhaps the last Dem nominee who "average" non-college voters thought was "cool." (Clinton was perhaps the other).
Ultimately, I'm all about building a winning coalition, so losing the "bros" is only a big deal if you can't make that loss up elsewhere. Both 2016 and 2024 seemed rooted in the mistaken belief that suburban white women would make up that gap.
Yeah--a lot of the hopium during the election period was people thinking Harris would bring out way more women voters (angry about Roe, but also jazzed about a woman going up against a rapist) to make up for Trump getting the men. Problem is she didn't really do much better among women than Biden did, not enough to make up that deficit.
You don't know shit. I don't know if Biden would have won but you don't either. Did the personal traits of the person who actually won the election not clue you into the fact that this stuff makes no sense at all, and trying to apply normal ideas about causality to it is folly?
Biden didn't fall in the polls after the debate, he fell in the polls after the amount of Democratic knives in his back reached critical mass, which took about three weeks.
Two things keep happening: The Biden “stab in the back” narrative that suggests Pelosi, Obama, and almost every Democrat in a tough race betrayed Biden for no good reason. This is politics. They don’t make a move as big as suggesting someone step aside unless they had good reason to believe he’d lose big and weren’t confident that he could win.
The insistence that Biden didn’t “fall in the polls after the debate.” That is technically true, but that is not a positive. He was polling behind Trump in every swing state and had a national approval rating of the high 30s. The debate reinforced for key Democrats that Biden was unable to turn things around.
Believing “Biden could’ve won” demands that we believe the sitting, unpopular POTUS could do better than his more popular VP, who was clearly burdened by his own low approval. This isn’t like speculating as whether Obama could’ve won in 2016 if he were allowed to run again.
Whether a white man could’ve done better than Trump is immaterial considering that Biden specifically had toxic approval.
I’m just annoyed with liberal defeatism that blames this loss on a laundry list of isms that are in defiant contradiction to the stated issues voters had. I suppose Dems can keep telling voters they’re bigots and don’t have legitimate concerns, but it is not a great electoral strategy.
Out of curiosity what was so bad about President Biden?
What did HE do that was so bad?
If you say old. So is Orange Guy, Pelosi , Clyburn.
Yet he gave us jobs every single month, he was able to get legislation even with a Republican Congress, he began to bring our infrastructure up to date and started moving into the future, he tried to make college free, he forgave student loans, he put more POC in high ranking positions than any other president including Obama.
His sin was that he didn’t coddle everyone. It was not his job to get the DOJ to prosecute. It was Merrick Garland and by the way I think Obama had a hand in Garland being AG. So blame him.
He also if you ever watched his press conference said that AG Merrick was a mistake but would have been bitched at if he switched him out.
So let me see. He is old, didn’t do enough and was responsible for Orange going free.
-Biden was too afraid of getting bitched out to correct a catastrophic mistake.
-Obama had a hand in Garland becoming AG even though he hadn’t been President for 4 years when Garland was nominated.
-Biden bore no responsibility for getting the DOJ to do its job, even though the head of the DOJ is literally appointed by and answers directly to the President and many past presidents have in fact worked closely with the DOJ on policies and priorities. (You’re really going to shocked when you see who ran the DOJ under JFK.)
So, by your own admission, you say Biden is a timid leader who is too afraid to correct his mistakes, even when that mistake has disastrous consequences, someone who wasn’t even really in charge of things and was being partially controlled by a past president, and someone who had no responsibility in the running of one of the most important governmental departments that falls under the direct authority of the executive branch.
Then you go on to say that I only don’t like Biden because he’s “old”?
You really can’t see any other reasons?
Also, let’s not pretend his appointment of Garland and denial of Trump as a future threat was just some little “Oopsie” that should be forgiven in light of his other accomplishments. You can design a car that’s the best in the world in many ways, but if it blows up whenever you start it, not many people are going to say “Oh well, it’s still pretty good.”
In light of 1/6, dealing with Trump as a future threat to the country was Biden’s TOP priority coming into office, and he failed miserably and I don’t have to prove that in any way because we’re going to see the proof in about 5 days.
So save me the “oh but he improved infrastructure” when he didn’t do the same for democracy.
So you didn’t watch his SOTU speech. So many people said they wish he sounded like that all the time. Well, he did sound like that whenever they would show him.
What people forget is his stutter. He has a disability that we should embrace instead of comparing him to an imbecile.
He has overcome his stutter but not rid of it. So he has to be careful of how fast he speaks.
To me, it speaks of how we see people with disabilities.
I saw his SOTU speech--it was fine, nothing amazing, but the problem is Biden needed to do better than fine because of the hole he was in. And a normal SOTU speech gets completely undermined when he has viral clips going around of him giving speeches where he wanders off topic, or his voice is broken down to a weak whisper. Superficial? Sure, but image-making and superficiality is a key part of communication and that's the political job of being a candidate.
I know he has a stutter, but these issues have nothing to do with a stutter--his whisper may be due to weaker lungs or something, but while he may not be able to help it that still is a major problem for a guy whose job is giving convincing speeches. If I was hiring a salesman to go around talking to customers and he was unable to speak in a convincing way, I'd feel bad for him but I'd be crazy to keep him in that job. As for Biden's mind wandering in mid-sentence, I don't know whether it's due to him being over-coached or undisciplined, but this is still a problem if his job is to make convincing messages. And whether to blame him or his advisers (that he chooses to use) doesn't make much difference--when he's addressing the biggest scumbag in presidential history and his one line is "you have the morals of an alleycat" (which sounds a lot more like "you lovable rascal!" than "you fascist fuck") that's a big whiff.
I think we can all agree that the media has fallen well short of its journalistic obligations (though as Stephen points out, voters who get their news from the MSM tended to vote for Harris). But if Dems are dependent on the MSM to do the job of communicating our message to the voters, they're screwed--you cannot outsource that. Republicans learned that long ago, we are just apparently learning that now.
So how do they get the message out. Every president has been the center of attention until now. The good, bad and ugly.
The media never covered our President’s accomplishments not once. When you don’t inform the public how are they supposed to know. Look at the civil rights movement, the DNC didn’t put ads out. They went to the news organizations and was able to directly bring it to Americans. News organizations that is their job.
Orange wasn’t the president Biden was and that is who they should have focused on.
Also when you allow Fox News to look legitimate is what failed the democrats. I am also going to say Racism had a lot to do with us losing.
As a black woman who is married to a West Virginia man, racism is ok in America now.
It's not easy--Dems need their own communications channels, and they have to figure out how to manipulate the ones they don't control--Republicans learned that long ago, it's how they now can get their preferred messages through the MSM which is trying to go for "balance" but will chase the shiny objects. Part of it is message discipline--how to break through the noise.
Trump does this all the time--he doesn't say "we need to bring down the levels of illegal immigration" he says "they are eating our pets!" and in our outrage over his dumb statement, everyone keeps hearing the subtext which is "people who we assume are not supposed to be here are doing weird awful things in our neighborhoods!". We in effect amplify his message when he does this, and suddenly we're all talking about the issue that works best for him (illegal immigration).
Our side simply does not do this--I'm not calling for lying, but hyperbole and simple, emotion-tinging sentiments work far better than measured, restrained messages. Also, messages have to be repeated, by everyone, to break through and force widespread conversation. Instead, we get "send out a tweet" and then move on to the next subject, so it's not surprising Team Biden couldn't get its message through.
Biden is fundamentally bad at communication and messaging. It’s the catch 22 of his age being a primary reason for this yet people claiming its ageist to point out that he has trouble with modern forms of communication and messaging. It’s *not* ageist considering that Trump is only a couple years younger and is a master of the form.
Yep--and hell, Biden was a poor messenger even when he was young. No one is pulling out clips of him in the '80s and saying "THIS is how it was done!"
Trump meanders, and sounds like nonsense, but one thing he gets right is he (1) knows how to get headlines and (2) does so in a way that gets his issues front and center. While our side is yelling about how what he says is offensive or wrong, we're still amplifying the message, and the listeners are thinking "sure, there's no evidence Haitians are eating dogs, but here I am thinking about immigrants who maybe shouldn't be here doing weird things we aren't cool with".
Biden by contrast couldn't drive home that Trump screwed over the pandemic and drove the economy into a ditch in 2020 and Biden climbed us out of it. One could imagine using stark and hyperbolic language to get headlines putting this very thought in voters' heads ("this guy killed off a million Americans, I fixed it!").
What is the point here? It’s very easy to point fingers after the fact! MAGA is the problem! RePUBElicants allowing a con man to hijack their party is the problem!!! VP Harris ran a FLAWLESS campaign and NO ONE will convince me that Elon didn’t steal that election!! I’m so TIRED of crap like this!
He should just go away; total fucking egotistical asshole.
Muted
You are absolutely right.
"The idea that Biden could have somehow done better than Harris and actually won re-election insults our intelligence and makes me very angry." THANK-YOU!!!
Stephen, your takes on how we got where we're at are the most cogent, frank and clear anywhere. Everyone, read SER!
Thank you!
The way Biden, whether deliberately or through incompetence, bungled the investigation into Trump by appointing Merrick Garland, mixed with how he tried to gaslight the public about his age and mental faculties, as well as how he tried to gaslight himself about his popularity, has made my opinion of the man drop like a fucking stone over the last year.
He had no business running for a second term but decided that, like other democrats before him, could just ignore things like age and human mortality.
We are going to post a huge price for his arrogant and hubris and I’m fucking sick to death of all of these “well, he’s basically a good man who made a few mistakes” narratives people are trying to sell.
Biden picking Garland after January 6 is astonishing to me.
It was especially irritating how so many people thought it was some kind of ultimate revenge move for Garland getting screwed out of the SCOTUS and that he was really going to be extra motivated to get those evil Republicans for doing that to him.
This isn’t Hollywood, kids. The bad man doesn’t suddenly have a change of heart when betrayed by his fellow bad men and decide to bring them to justice as a result.
Hell, Garland was a bad choice in 2016.
This too. Revealed Obama's complete misreading of the country. He figured "with such a sane moderate pick, this will make Republicans vote for him or they'll look so ridiculous the voters will punish them for it" and nope, it just fired up Republicans who thought they were entitled to a Scalia for the Scalia seat, and not a single Democrat was motivated to vote just so they could get a Garland in there.
Then picking him for DOJ just showed Biden had absolutely no idea what he was up against. Complete faceplant.
And after everything, STILL hasn't fired the fool!
His record of labor rights cases was trash.
He was basically Anthony Kennedy lite as a judge.
Ooh, SER making lots of people mad. I love it. VP Harris got handed a giant bag of snakes and did as well as she could under the circumstances.
I still think racism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity played a huge part in her loss, because it's America, but this was absolutely Joe's loss. Telling us how great the economy is when many of us are watching our paycheck cover less was a huge mistake.
Most damningly, Biden failed to meet the attempted coup with the seriousness it deserved and that has hamstrung his entire term.
The biggest anchor of Biden’s presidency was the teams complete ineffectivnesss at controlling the narrative around……..literally anything that was happening good or bad. The good being the inflation reduction act, which should have been a history defining achievement that largely got defined by the intransigence of Manchin and Sinema and largely was ignored by the press since then. The bad being the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was 20 years overdue and defined by the previous administration but which Biden took 100% of the blame for.
The challenges the Democratic Party have to face when it comes to messaging are not new and don’t have to be restated here. Yes red media is going to be telling everyone how shit you are at everything at all times, and yes the traditional media is useless. It’s just your average American needs a counter narrative. Your average American isn’t smart enough to figure this out all on their own. If you don’t define the challenges the country is facing effectively and if they can’t still believe in your capacity to solve them, others will define that for you.
Biden, who I’ll never fully criticize for being the first president to reject neoliberalism since LBJ, ………couldn’t do that. Part of it was personal style and his reticence to announce how great he is. Part of it is the Democratic political arm is a geriatric anachronism, still fighting the fights of 1992.
And so the remarkable economic progress in the face of a global inflation challenge got lost in the shuffle of still ongoing concerns about inflation. It’s was always going to be difficult for anyone to step into that and sell a counter narrative in all of four months
….Except Harris was consistently more unpopular than Joe Biden throughout his entire presidency. That little surge she got upon becoming the nominee was among Biden voters, who were apprehensive about Biden’s chances and because she picked the jolly governor of Minnesota as her VP (who brought nothing to the ticket ultimately, except maybe Nebraska-2).
I like Biden and I like Harris and it all sucks. I think it wasn’t the price of eggs, I think it was a little bit of absolutely everything that every thoughtful analyst has mentioned. And our voters just didn’t get to the polls.
But don’t rewrite history - Kamala was never as popular as even Biden. Among non-progressive Democrats, which is most people, there never was a surge of excitement for her. The loss is on both of them. America is funny that way. And the responsible party better start acting that way again, because as you said, we weren’t repudiated in many important senate and gubernatorial races. But if we don’t start acting like it (while not overcorrecting as rabid AOC leftists), we’ll lose again.
I don't want to give the impression that Harris was exceptionally popular. I think she was saddled somewhat as BIden's VP, but I don't think she had the appeal among young men (of all races) that Obama did. This is an unpopular observation, but Obama was perhaps the last Dem nominee who "average" non-college voters thought was "cool." (Clinton was perhaps the other).
Ultimately, I'm all about building a winning coalition, so losing the "bros" is only a big deal if you can't make that loss up elsewhere. Both 2016 and 2024 seemed rooted in the mistaken belief that suburban white women would make up that gap.
Yeah--a lot of the hopium during the election period was people thinking Harris would bring out way more women voters (angry about Roe, but also jazzed about a woman going up against a rapist) to make up for Trump getting the men. Problem is she didn't really do much better among women than Biden did, not enough to make up that deficit.
You don't know shit. I don't know if Biden would have won but you don't either. Did the personal traits of the person who actually won the election not clue you into the fact that this stuff makes no sense at all, and trying to apply normal ideas about causality to it is folly?
Biden didn't fall in the polls after the debate, he fell in the polls after the amount of Democratic knives in his back reached critical mass, which took about three weeks.
Two things keep happening: The Biden “stab in the back” narrative that suggests Pelosi, Obama, and almost every Democrat in a tough race betrayed Biden for no good reason. This is politics. They don’t make a move as big as suggesting someone step aside unless they had good reason to believe he’d lose big and weren’t confident that he could win.
The insistence that Biden didn’t “fall in the polls after the debate.” That is technically true, but that is not a positive. He was polling behind Trump in every swing state and had a national approval rating of the high 30s. The debate reinforced for key Democrats that Biden was unable to turn things around.
Believing “Biden could’ve won” demands that we believe the sitting, unpopular POTUS could do better than his more popular VP, who was clearly burdened by his own low approval. This isn’t like speculating as whether Obama could’ve won in 2016 if he were allowed to run again.
Your arguments make sense. Reality does not.
Also, I can think of at least two electoral advantages Biden had over Harris...
Whether a white man could’ve done better than Trump is immaterial considering that Biden specifically had toxic approval.
I’m just annoyed with liberal defeatism that blames this loss on a laundry list of isms that are in defiant contradiction to the stated issues voters had. I suppose Dems can keep telling voters they’re bigots and don’t have legitimate concerns, but it is not a great electoral strategy.
This X 1000 SER. Srsly!!!
Thus x 1,000. I am heartbroken at the election but am more than ready for Joe to sit down and shut the F up.
Only because our news media refuse to report his accomplishments.
I blame them. They are supposed to inform us instead they played PR team for Orange.
He wanders off topic. He has a temper and what he is doing is putting himself in check.
Anyone who truly knows or understands Joe Biden would know he loves to talk.
He isn’t your cup of tea. Then don’t vote for him.
He is the only one who beat Orange and Orange was scared of him. Look at the clip of him talking in the golf cart.
Why do you think he went after his son? He knew he couldn’t compete against him.
Name one candidate who has his credentials?
I am sick of all the he shouldn’t of ran. You have no candidate who could do what he did in four years.
He was the most successful president in our lifetime.
But he is old. Whatever. I know he made my life better.
And he isn’t respected by his own supporters but the world loved him.
That is why you will miss him when Orange Guy comes in.
Had people like you just waited until after the election to trash things would be different.
Btw every single candidate that ran away from Joe Biden lost their race.
None of them ran on his accomplishments.
“He isn’t your cup of tea. Then don’t vote for him.”
Guess what? People didn’t.
Or at least they wouldn’t have if he stayed in.
Out of curiosity what was so bad about President Biden?
What did HE do that was so bad?
If you say old. So is Orange Guy, Pelosi , Clyburn.
Yet he gave us jobs every single month, he was able to get legislation even with a Republican Congress, he began to bring our infrastructure up to date and started moving into the future, he tried to make college free, he forgave student loans, he put more POC in high ranking positions than any other president including Obama.
His sin was that he didn’t coddle everyone. It was not his job to get the DOJ to prosecute. It was Merrick Garland and by the way I think Obama had a hand in Garland being AG. So blame him.
He also if you ever watched his press conference said that AG Merrick was a mistake but would have been bitched at if he switched him out.
So let me see. He is old, didn’t do enough and was responsible for Orange going free.
So when Orange destroys this country and he will.
Biden is the last person to be blamed.
So let’s see….in your response you say:
-Biden was too afraid of getting bitched out to correct a catastrophic mistake.
-Obama had a hand in Garland becoming AG even though he hadn’t been President for 4 years when Garland was nominated.
-Biden bore no responsibility for getting the DOJ to do its job, even though the head of the DOJ is literally appointed by and answers directly to the President and many past presidents have in fact worked closely with the DOJ on policies and priorities. (You’re really going to shocked when you see who ran the DOJ under JFK.)
So, by your own admission, you say Biden is a timid leader who is too afraid to correct his mistakes, even when that mistake has disastrous consequences, someone who wasn’t even really in charge of things and was being partially controlled by a past president, and someone who had no responsibility in the running of one of the most important governmental departments that falls under the direct authority of the executive branch.
Then you go on to say that I only don’t like Biden because he’s “old”?
You really can’t see any other reasons?
Also, let’s not pretend his appointment of Garland and denial of Trump as a future threat was just some little “Oopsie” that should be forgiven in light of his other accomplishments. You can design a car that’s the best in the world in many ways, but if it blows up whenever you start it, not many people are going to say “Oh well, it’s still pretty good.”
In light of 1/6, dealing with Trump as a future threat to the country was Biden’s TOP priority coming into office, and he failed miserably and I don’t have to prove that in any way because we’re going to see the proof in about 5 days.
So save me the “oh but he improved infrastructure” when he didn’t do the same for democracy.
mistakes
He told you that he is a threat. He also said he made a mistake about Merrick Garland.
I said I feel Obama. I don’t know for a fact.
He did say he was dangerous. How many times did he talk about Orange saying military personnel are suckers.
I never said he was too scared. I said he would have bitched at.
Listen, there are those who don’t like Biden (like you) and those us who are grateful to a man who could bring us back with grace and humanity.
I don’t need to nickpick every little thing.
You are about to live under a man that was terrified of Biden because people like you wanted a new flavor.
I will stand the greatest president in the last decade. He has helped my family more than any other president.
You are right, they didn’t and we now have Orange. So much for wanting to save democracy.
So you didn’t watch his SOTU speech. So many people said they wish he sounded like that all the time. Well, he did sound like that whenever they would show him.
What people forget is his stutter. He has a disability that we should embrace instead of comparing him to an imbecile.
He has overcome his stutter but not rid of it. So he has to be careful of how fast he speaks.
To me, it speaks of how we see people with disabilities.
I saw his SOTU speech--it was fine, nothing amazing, but the problem is Biden needed to do better than fine because of the hole he was in. And a normal SOTU speech gets completely undermined when he has viral clips going around of him giving speeches where he wanders off topic, or his voice is broken down to a weak whisper. Superficial? Sure, but image-making and superficiality is a key part of communication and that's the political job of being a candidate.
I know he has a stutter, but these issues have nothing to do with a stutter--his whisper may be due to weaker lungs or something, but while he may not be able to help it that still is a major problem for a guy whose job is giving convincing speeches. If I was hiring a salesman to go around talking to customers and he was unable to speak in a convincing way, I'd feel bad for him but I'd be crazy to keep him in that job. As for Biden's mind wandering in mid-sentence, I don't know whether it's due to him being over-coached or undisciplined, but this is still a problem if his job is to make convincing messages. And whether to blame him or his advisers (that he chooses to use) doesn't make much difference--when he's addressing the biggest scumbag in presidential history and his one line is "you have the morals of an alleycat" (which sounds a lot more like "you lovable rascal!" than "you fascist fuck") that's a big whiff.
I think we can all agree that the media has fallen well short of its journalistic obligations (though as Stephen points out, voters who get their news from the MSM tended to vote for Harris). But if Dems are dependent on the MSM to do the job of communicating our message to the voters, they're screwed--you cannot outsource that. Republicans learned that long ago, we are just apparently learning that now.
Also they do outsource their message to all the whack job channels they have.
So how do they get the message out. Every president has been the center of attention until now. The good, bad and ugly.
The media never covered our President’s accomplishments not once. When you don’t inform the public how are they supposed to know. Look at the civil rights movement, the DNC didn’t put ads out. They went to the news organizations and was able to directly bring it to Americans. News organizations that is their job.
Orange wasn’t the president Biden was and that is who they should have focused on.
Also when you allow Fox News to look legitimate is what failed the democrats. I am also going to say Racism had a lot to do with us losing.
As a black woman who is married to a West Virginia man, racism is ok in America now.
It's not easy--Dems need their own communications channels, and they have to figure out how to manipulate the ones they don't control--Republicans learned that long ago, it's how they now can get their preferred messages through the MSM which is trying to go for "balance" but will chase the shiny objects. Part of it is message discipline--how to break through the noise.
Trump does this all the time--he doesn't say "we need to bring down the levels of illegal immigration" he says "they are eating our pets!" and in our outrage over his dumb statement, everyone keeps hearing the subtext which is "people who we assume are not supposed to be here are doing weird awful things in our neighborhoods!". We in effect amplify his message when he does this, and suddenly we're all talking about the issue that works best for him (illegal immigration).
Our side simply does not do this--I'm not calling for lying, but hyperbole and simple, emotion-tinging sentiments work far better than measured, restrained messages. Also, messages have to be repeated, by everyone, to break through and force widespread conversation. Instead, we get "send out a tweet" and then move on to the next subject, so it's not surprising Team Biden couldn't get its message through.
Biden is fundamentally bad at communication and messaging. It’s the catch 22 of his age being a primary reason for this yet people claiming its ageist to point out that he has trouble with modern forms of communication and messaging. It’s *not* ageist considering that Trump is only a couple years younger and is a master of the form.
Yep--and hell, Biden was a poor messenger even when he was young. No one is pulling out clips of him in the '80s and saying "THIS is how it was done!"
Trump meanders, and sounds like nonsense, but one thing he gets right is he (1) knows how to get headlines and (2) does so in a way that gets his issues front and center. While our side is yelling about how what he says is offensive or wrong, we're still amplifying the message, and the listeners are thinking "sure, there's no evidence Haitians are eating dogs, but here I am thinking about immigrants who maybe shouldn't be here doing weird things we aren't cool with".
Biden by contrast couldn't drive home that Trump screwed over the pandemic and drove the economy into a ditch in 2020 and Biden climbed us out of it. One could imagine using stark and hyperbolic language to get headlines putting this very thought in voters' heads ("this guy killed off a million Americans, I fixed it!").
Most voters who received their news through traditional media sources supported Biden.
Also, Harris didn’t appoint Garland and assume low-information voters would put up with inflation as long as the unemployment rate stayed low.
With loyalty like this.. who would join the dems?
It's tribal.
Not shopping.