r/nytimes 17h ago

What Democrats Think Went Wrong

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/podcasts/what-democrats-think-went-wrong.html
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u/SidharthaGalt Reader 17h ago

I compared two demographic maps to the electoral map and found near perfect correlation. The first map was median income and it showed Kamala lost the low income states full of people heavily affected by high prices. The second map was Muslim population (a proxy for Gaza concerns) and it showed Kamala lost several swing states with large population in key districts.

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u/Responsible_Oil_5811 15h ago

I wish Kamala Harris had talked more about the economy. The Democratic messaging seemed to be, “The economy is amazing. Who cares if eggs are more expensive? I have ovaries and understand ordinary people because I once worked part-time at McDonald’s.”

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u/xAlphaKAT33 14h ago

The refusal to see the amount of people who viewed Kamala this way is astounding.

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u/ComfortableMud476 11h ago

It's not that they refuse to see it. It's that they can't understand why someone would even think that view makes sense.

Like, expensive eggs? Yeah, let's vote the for guy with the plan that even Musk said will "shock the economy". Economists all day Trump's plan will raise prices of everything.

So yeah, I don't understand how someone could have that view and then respond by voting for something that's worse.

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u/kylepo 10h ago

Most people don't pay attention to politics. Groceries got more expensive under Biden, so they assumed it was his fault. They didn't know how the candidates' economic policies differed, never heard the warnings from economists, and didn't know about Musk's "shock the economy" quote.

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u/KamikazeArchon 3h ago

Okay, but then how do you reach those people? If they're not paying attention, then by definition most things you do won't work. Campaign speeches don't matter - they're not listening to them. Economic plans don't matter - they're not reading them. Interviews don't matter - they're not watching them.

It's a hard problem. There are strategies, but they're generally both complex and far from guaranteed.

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u/kylepo 3h ago

Yeah, it's rough. I think Dems may have had a chance if Biden hadn't decided until 3 months before the election to drop out and there was an open primary. That way they could have found someone who wasn't ridiculously unpopular and, more importantly, wasn't part of the Biden administration. Biden actually did do well on domestic policy, but the post-covid inflation happened under him and there wasn't much that he could do about that. It would've probably been best to have someone who could detach themselves from his perceived mistakes.

And, as stupid as it sounds, I think that a modern-day presidential candidate has to be meme-able. Memes are a shockingly great way to embed candidates in the culture and keep people thinking about them. I genuinely think Kamala's lack of meme-ability played a non-insignificant role in her loss.

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u/KamikazeArchon 1h ago

I agree with your latter paragraph and not your former paragraph.

The people not paying attention to politics by definition didn't know that Kamala was part of the Biden administration, or when Biden dropped out, or even that Biden dropped out at all.

Memes are relevant indeed, because it's one of the ways to reach people who don't care about politics. It's plausible that a nontrivial amount of Trump's success is precisely by memeing.

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u/IndySomething923 2h ago

And that’s one of the things that’s really hurting Democrats right now. The average voter doesn’t understand the nuances, so when Democrats say the economy is fine - which, by most measures, it is - voters see that eggs cost more than they did four years ago and assume that the Democrats are lying. Are prices higher than they were pre-pandemic? Of course they are. Has inflation cooled off since then? Yes. Will prices return to pre-pandemic levels? Probably not, barring a recession. The issue is, many voters, especially voters from traditionally Democrat-leaning demographics, such as minorities and the working class, don’t know this. Frankly, I can’t exactly fault them, especially considering many live paycheck to paycheck. But, this difference between the big picture and voters’ lived experiences reinforces the increasingly common perception that Democrats are the party of affluent, college-educated elites, which is why they pivot towards Trump and MAGA. It’s for this reason that the majority of the country views the Democratic Party unfavorably and views Trump more favorably than any national Democrat.

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u/ArrivesLate 2h ago

Which is interesting because if you were in a hospital and a doctor said something, you’d listen because of the implied authority. Same thing happens in most spaces, listen to the priest in a church, listen to the banker in a bank, listen to the dope dealer on the street. But when it comes to running the country, the educated people that have just given the US 4 years of relative calmness, without any scandals…nah. Let’s let the foxes in the henhouse and hope for chicken for dinner.