It’s easy to understand really, once you think about it in the perspective of a property developer getting prime land with the existing occupants cleared away, for free.
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I think we should all head to the Winchester until this blows over.
Who’s with me?
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Also, if I were Harris and I had any ambitions left to run again for 2028, I’d be taking some time off to rest, before travelling around the country talking to people, going on local radio stations (essentially the way she’d campaigned before), and organising people a la Abrams.
Say “I told you so” without saying “I told you so”, by just continuing to promote your vision for the country, and keep reinforcing that message. I think continuing to work hard on that would probably change the image that many voters have of her in their minds.
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So what happens if he is assinated by an American. Will the US nuke itself?
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This eerily similar to Brexit
Stage One
The project to get control of our country back will be fantastic. We’ll be able to take all the money we save and pass it on to you. Everyone will be prosperous.
At this point the project happens.
Stage Two
Obviously not straight away. There will be a period of hardship and we’ll need to pull together to get through that.
Stage Three
Obviously we’ll all be a bit poorer. We never said everyone would be better off. But the sacrifice is worth it to get control of our country back
Stage Four
Look. The only reason the project didn’t work is because it was sabotaged by the radical left. It’s their fault. We need to get control of our country back.
Stage Five
Here is our project to get control of our country back. You just need to vote for it.
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Essentially the same people behind both I believe.
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She needs to fuck off not run again. Even if she feels hard done by because of Biden stepping down late the American public saw what she had to offer and chose fascism instead.
There simply has to be better options.
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I think that’s falling into a trap though. The underlying presumption there is that the poor performance is because of what she had to offer, and not that she performed as well as she did despite prevailing headwinds.
Given how poorly the Democrats fared across the board, I think it would be poor to jump to conclusions here. If Harris systematically underperformed Democratic candidates across the whole country, then you may have an argument, but even then I’m not sure how you can disentangle that from the effects of incumbency and other idiosyncratic issues.
I think by far, the biggest issue the Democrats have is that Americans by and large seem to be living in an alternative reality to what the facts show.
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Apparently, all overseas USAID staff have been instructed to prepare to return to the US in the next 30 days - but the staff who actually handle the logistics for that kind of process in DC have already been sent home.
edit: payments to local landlords are normally handled by the local US embassy/consulate, but transfers to cover that have been suspended. They have no access to their emails or USAID computing networks, and are in or will be in default on their leases.
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I think the bigger trap is believing that “Trump-ism” will go away by 2028 and so it’ll be safe to run the candidate that just lost to Trump again.
I think what the Democrats need is to find a good speaker, someone is emotive and clear about their direction. Someone who can hold a crowd’s attention. Harris I think was a poor speaker both in terms of lacking that gravitas and in that way she failed to convey her message clearly. Yes the right-wing media makes that tough for Democrats to ever do but someone has to figure out how to cut through against their noise or we’ll forever be sat in the minority complaining that it’s all so unfair.
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Your implicit assumption being that somewhat free and fair elections will continue.
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I’m a hopeless optimist.
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That could very well be the case but I tend to think the Dems are actually living in an alternative reality and are out of touch with the needs of an angry working class. Harris is one of those Dems and sadly Schumer and Jefferies are two others.
Or perhaps the Dems aren’t out of touch but are funded by a class of GOP light donors. And so they just don’t care any more.
Either way…the Dems in their current form are done as a useful tool. As Jefferies said though, at least we still have God.
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Firstly, I think the both of us are being rather optimistic believing that there will be elections in 2028.
Beyond that, I don’t think it’s about running the same candidate that just lost to Trump again. Changing the candidate is just window dressing, and doesn’t go anywhere towards dealing with the actual problems the Democrats face.
Throw in any name, and there will be immediately obvious drawbacks. It’s not the name. It’s that the Democrats, like pretty much most centre-left parties in Europe, seem to be running scared of their own shadows.
They’ve tried that, it doesn’t work. Didn’t work out for Brown in Ohio, nor for Tester in Montana. Nobody watches the speeches in full. If they did, it would be amply clear that Harris is by far the much better speaker compared to the idiot in the Oval Office right now.
Clinton was right when she spoke about the deplorables, that there are simply a bunch of people for whom any form of rationality will never appeal. It’s only growing, and the media environment simply makes it a lot worse. You can argue on and on about right-wing media and it may be true, but the so-called “mainstream media” isn’t much better.
Hence my point being that it’s not about the personalities, it’s about a genuine ground game and effort to reach out to voters and convince them, with a well-thought through plan, and listen to their anxieties and tell them why your plan will work.
I think that’s the bubble that seems oddly prevalent (caution, may be my confirmation bias here) in what I’d call the online left-wing circles. It’s not so much that the Democrats are out of touch with “the needs of an angry working class”. That is exactly the problem right there, that it seems to be accepted wisdom even with people who are supposed to be left wingers. Harris did better with union workers (While Other Voters Moved Away From the Democrats, Union Members Shifted Toward Harris in 2024 - Center for American Progress Action) than Biden did, even though he’s supposedly everyone’s favourite boy from Scranton.
Trump won on culture war issues, and not being the incumbent in a time of inflation, not to mention the absolutely absurd media coverage around current affairs in general.
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Unfortunately as the article says, unions are only 10% of the working class. There’s a lot more to it than unions.
We’ll see where the analysis of Dems losing finally lands. But I tend to believe Bernie and AOC, especially since she seems to be the only one trying to understand it. I could be completely wrong and usually am.
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My point is that economics played almost no role apart from that he wasn’t the incumbent during a time of high inflation (although I’m sure they would have found a way to excuse him).
I tend to disagree with people who already had a prevailing view going into the elections. Invariably it will be their pet cause.
EDIT: The preview of the video does seem to be quite on the nose though, the notion that Trump is somehow “anti-establishment” no doubt is quite relevant. Literally the candidate backed by and in thrall to billionaires is “anti-establishment”. And that’s precisely my point about media coverage, and how some voters are simply impossible to convince.
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I think there is an argument to be had there, but I think this is part of the deal for getting the inside straight on the nomination. There were lots of people who would have been a credible challenger for nomination in an open nomination but chose to step aside, in part because they knew there wasn’t time for a messy nomination fight, but in large part because they understood the person who lost to Trump would have to exit the stage. That might not be fair. It might not be a fair reflection of how much of her performance created this situation, but politics isnt fair.
A lot can change in even the 2 years it will take for the nomination field to start taking formal shape, so as bad a candidate she looks like she’d be now maybe there is a chance. FWIW though, most of the noises coming from her side suggest she accepts this.
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Do you think that better orator would have got through to these people?
Trump super fans explain why they don’t believe anything his critics say
They are a cult. It would take something cataclysmic to bring them back to their senses.
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