"how are the democrats so good at losing?" why don't you ask how the republicans are so good at winning?? stop acting like democrats are the only political party with agency. republicans do things on purpose.
^^ It seems to me that I haven’t seen many people acknowledging that republicans are good at winning because they lie and because they have a multimillion dollar industry committing to getting them elected and backing up their lies.
I’ve seen statistics correlating misinformed views to voting choice, a study about how respondents preferred Kamala’s policies over Trump’s when they weren’t told who had which set of policies, people discussing ‘vibes-based politics’—but in my opinion all this analysis is incomplete without confronting how republicans have a veritable propaganda machine working for them. It’s pretty hard for democrats to fight that. We have to rely on average donations from normal people when corporations/rich individuals can invest millions into networks who will try to get people elected who will give them tax breaks.
#seriously I want more people to talk about the sheer amount of damage rupert murdoch has done to this country#fox news is the most viewed cable news network in the country.#i remember a few months back harris’ campaign had success bringing project 2025 to the public’s attention#but democrats still don’t have anything comparable @choppywaterswiftboats
Fun fact that I will tell literally everyone all the time!!! A former Nixon staffer said they would have survived Watergate if they had their own news network. And that staffer's name was Roger Ailes!
Books to read:
Dark Money: An examination of the Koch Empire, and its patronage and entanglement in Right wing media, politics, and lobbying.
Messengers of the Right: A history of the conservative media landscape, beginning with talk radio (Clarence Manion, before the era of Rush Limbaugh), through periodicals like the National Review, and notable books, like God and Man at Yale. I'm sorry, but you don't know half as much as you think you do about American political history if you don't know who William F Buckley is. All of this walked, so Fox News could run.
Let Them Eat Tweets: A political synthesis of history, economics, and communication scholarship that posits wedge-issue-identity-politics as the method by which contemporary conservative parties drive their white working class bases away from class-based solidarity toward a party that serves only economic elites. That, Hacker and Pierson argue, is how you explain the escalation of billionaire oligopoly, rising economic inequality, and fanatic racism/other bigotries.
If you can understand these patterns and these histories, you'll begin to see why the GOP has nosedived into overtly fascist rhetoric, while STILL successfully courting voters who vote against their material economic interests.
There are no surprises here.
In this particular election, it seems there may have been nothing the Dems could realistically have done. Literally every single developed country that's had elections this year, the incumbent party (that is, the party in control at the time of the election) lost seats/power. Every. Single. Election.
This is extremely unusual! And the Dems got pretty darn close!
This is why I don't see a point in blaming anyone on the Democrat side running campaigns. The judicial side? Oh, absolutely. It's never been more obvious the US is in need of judicial reform in my lifetime. But the campaigns were in fact good and well-run. People around the world, however, are still angry about the Pandemic and its continuing effects, and don't care who specifically was responsible for what. They just wanted to elect someone new.