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I'm all for a women president eventually, but perhaps the elections during an attempted fascist take over isn't the time.
Some men will simply not vote for a woman, it's sad, but it's reality. If a woman is on the ballot the democrats will lose again.
The time will come, just not yet with stakes this high. I would love to see AOC as the first female president.
Attitudes like yours are why Democrats lose elections. We talk ourselves out of our best candidates. We try to compromise with Republicans right out the gate, and try to select the more moderate 'electable' candidate.
Your line of thinking got us Kerry, Clinton, and Biden.
Trying to select a candidate based on "electability" is bullshit, because you just end up selecting for the most uninspiring centrist who can't get people to the polls.
You think you're selecting for winners, but you're taking your strongest pieces off the board.
This argument is frequently made on Lemmy. I’d like it to be true. But I just don’t know.
Makes sense in places like California or New York. But I don’t know about places in the Midwest e.g.
"We've never tried the inspiring candidate, but without evidence, I must insist that they're unelectable."
I mean, we did run the inspiring candidate. Obama. It was a huge success.
Did he turn out to be everything that everyone hoped and dreamed? No. But he energized the hell out of the base and at least the best president of the past few decades.
Exactly. And people were also saying then that we needed to go with the more electable candidate with more experience. That was the exact argument Hillary supporters made during the 2008 primary.
I hear you, but we've tried the strategies of the mainstream Democrats and they've failed hard.
Hopefully the recent ACA votes taught the Democrats that voting to end the shutdown was a terrible idea and that they should never again compromise with Republicans for mere promises of future consideration.
The Democrats should rally behind AOC and primary all corrupt bastards that enable the Republicans.
If Britain and Mexico can both elect a woman to lead their country, why can't the US?
Because half of the people who voted in the last election voted for Trump?
Because this is a trashcan nation that votes for felon rapist insurrectionist pedophiles....twice.
Most supporters voted for him thrice. Just another old white dude got in the way that one time.
More like a worldwide pandemic got in the way. Biden couldn't have won without covid.
You're just doing the left version of American exceptionalism.
California and New York are absolutely fountaining with conservative voters. These states only go blue because conservatives like Diane Feinstein and Gavin Newsom have found it easier to voice conservative policies from a liberal party than to voice liberal policies from a conservative one.
On the flip side, Bush Jr won Texas against Anne Richards by running to her Left and pandering to Hispanics and black voters while she pounded the old Dixiecrat drum on crime and drugs. Shortly thereafter, long time Democrat Rick Perry changed parties, because he decided it was easier to get oil money as a liberal Republican than a conservative Democrat.
Politics in this country is way more complex than people like to give it credit. So much is simply driven by the party with the most money or the most gerrymandered districts. What's winnable can boil down to whether or not your brother is the governor, not your race or your gender or even your voting record.
Meanwhile a democratic socialist won the mayorship of New York City.
Against a former Dem governor who was backed by a Republican president no less
That complexity sure sounds like corruption!
But realistically, corruption does add to the complexity, lol.
I mean, there was Sanders and look at what the Dems did to him. I don't think Hillary and Kamala are any better than Biden or Clinton either.
It got us Biden. I think you underestimate how much institutional support Kerry and Clinton had in the run up to their nominations. Kerry wasn't even that bad of a candidate on his face. He just got railroaded in Ohio the same way Gore did in Florida, while everyone in national media threw up their hands and proclaimed "Too Liberal!"
And Biden did poorly. It should have been a cakewalk and he barely won. "It got us Biden" isn't an argument to the utility of timidity.
Biden turned out 16M more voters than Hillary Clinton four years earlier. That's nothing to sneeze at. He still won on the margins, because Donald Trump also turned out an extra 12M voters, with a heavy 1:1 split in the same states Trump narrowly beat Hillary in a year earlier.
I don't think anything about that suggests the election was a cakewalk. I do think it illustrates the difference direct-mail voting has on overall US turnout. And the fact that both parties immediately retreated from the policy - with Trump even trying to ban it nationwide - says something about the real state of American Democracy both before and after the Pandemic.
2020 is a hard election to judge precisely because it was so fucking weird. COVID cut the knees off Bernie's primary campaign. Millions of people - particularly the elderly - were dropping dead in the lead up to the election. Misinformation was chronic. The actual elections process (which has always sucked in the US) was extra shady af, particularly in rural districts without modernized voting systems.
But I will say that the Biden pick was a desperation move by conservative Democrats who believed they were losing control of the party. And 2024 was a repeat of this process, with the spectre of Trump 2 forcing progressive voters to choose between Genocide Joe's last minute replacement and Actual Outright Fascism.
Real "Douche" v "Turd Sandwich" election. But these candidates won almost entirely because of who backed them. Silicon Valley went hard for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024.
It should have been a cakewalk because Trump was currently the guy screwing everything up and not improving people's lives. Incumbency isn't an advantage for President anymore and Trump (with help from COVID) was doing particularly badly. He had sub-40 approval polls and, before the general election campaign, polls were putting most of the main Democratic options up by 6-8. It wasn't a cakewalk in the actual election because Biden didn't run a good campaign.
Biden in 2024 was then the guy to blame for everything going wrong (inflation in this case), with sub-40 approval polls, and was on course to lose before being kicked off the ticket. And Harris made the baffling decision to frame herself as just being a younger Biden.
I'm still of the VERY strong opinion that Hillary and Kamala didn't lose because they were women, but because they were Hillary and Kamala.
I don't know, but maybe we shouldn't base our gender litmus test off of literally the most unlikeable women the DNC could have picked.
I think you're mostly right, but being women had to be at least a few percent of it.
Harris wasn't the "most unlikeable" by a long shot, but she was certainly a solid "meh".
Harris was hamstrung by not having a primary and listening to the worst possible advice from the people that helped Clinton lose to Trump.
I fear you are right. And with numbers like this, the Democrats have an uphill battle anyway, with all the rigging and ratfucking that the Republicans do, not to mention the EC system itself.
Can we all agree that those men are trash? I don't care what else they've got going on, if they refuse to vote for a woman because she's a woman, they deserve to go into the dumpster.
I'm so sick of all these sacks of shit making the world worse
Oh well, I'm sure they've got a white man somewhere who's about 90 and will keep things just the way they are because to fix things is "undemocratic".
For all practical purposes, 50% of the population cannot be reasoned with. These are rabid animals who must cajoled and manipulated. Hoping they’ll magically not be misogynistic or that they’ll vote in their own best interest for once is a fool’s errand.
Comes out closer to 27%, but the deck is so heavily stacked with Winner-Take-All elections and election manipulation through voter caging and outright fuckery a la The Brooks Brothers Riot that this cohort is heavily over-represented nationwide.
The national punditry has so much invested in the superficial identity politics of a candidate, they can't see whether a given individual is actually likeable. Nobody had Zohran Mamdani as a serious candidate for Mayor this time last year. Nobody had Donald Trump as a serious candidate in 2015. Even Obama's run was largely considered a token bid for VP in late 2007.
Underestimate candidates like AOC and Rashida Tlaib at your own peril, conservatives.