People don’t vote for numbers they vote for stories. They vote for their feelings. Do they feel like they’re in a better place today and they were the four years ago. Do they feel like they’re better off financially. Do they feel like the economy is stronger. And the answer for most of us is no of course not. So regardless of the reasons for that they’re going to vote that way. That’s just a harsh reality of elections and economics.
I agree. Which is why I don’t believe the narrative that Harris lost because she didn’t go far enough left. Even though I wish our politicians would. I think too many voters don’t feel the same way.
I don’t know if it’s that she didn’t go far enough left in so much as she didn’t go and far enough left on certain issues. As odd as it might seem there is a populist movement in the Republican Party. They do appeal to the working class for some odd reason. Their policy decisions don’t always reflect it but their rhetoric oftentimes does. After all a number of Republican states passed fairly economically Progressive ballot measures.
It seems to me that she had a hard fight to win by saying she would tax billionaire their fair share. I’m sure they were all working together to pull strings against her.
Frankly I didn’t see nearly as much of that as I expected. I don’t think she was pushing all that hard to be honest with you. However I was speaking more to labor issues. To healthcare. She was certainly to the right of Joe Biden on all three of those issues I’d say. Lord knows she was far to the right on him when it comes to Consumer Protections issues. Her cow-towing to her billionaire donors and preparing to push Lena Khan out show that pretty strongly I think. Most voters heard her and smelled a rat.
She laid out a plan to handle price gouging and tax billionaires. She didnt seem left or right of Biden.
They were unwilling to go hard attack on the people setting prices.
Biden was calling out price gouging throughout his presidency.
Harris said she would make billionaires pay their fair share and they literally bought votes for Trump.
Scapegoating democrats for going up against the billionaire class seems like exactly what the billionaires would want.
I hear you, but I think they didn’t go hard enough. They needed to make noise about how they are going to XYZ to fix prices. I know they said it, I’m saying they needed to say it more, louder, and drop some of the other stuff.
Meanwhile the billionaires convinced the voters that democrats were responsible for inflation and spun “tax increases for billionaires” into “tax increases for everyone”.
And polls show that voters were most motivated by inflation.
Four years ago you couldn’t buy toilet paper. Are some people worse off than under Trump 1.0? Of course. Is more than half the country worse off? Fuck no. People have goldfish memories and Dems did a terrible job touting their wins that did make Americans better off under Biden.
Just as an aside I never actually had problems buying toilet paper. I don’t actually know anyone who did. I know that’s not really pertinent I just always find it funny people say that.
That’s exactly what I’m saying though. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves and the stories the parties are able to sell to us. Reality doesn’t matter the stories that we buy matter.
