"In this conjuncture, Democrats and other center-left parties around the world have a fundamental choice to make: continue to play the role of the loyal opposition in a political order defined primarily by the populist right, or mobilize a transformative ideological vision, viable electoral coalition, and distinctive set of policies capable of defining the political order itself.

Choosing the latter will require accepting the failure of the popular front general election strategy Democrats have embraced for the past three presidential cycles. A coalition that, as Tim Walz bragged, ranges “from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift” will always be about defending the status quo, nor does it actually succeed in pulling Republican voters across the aisle. Even party apparatchik Rahm Emanuel can now admit that the status quo is broken and no longer defendable.

No doubt, the transformative choice is a tougher climb for Democrats. For decades, they have avoided spending the political capital necessary to push through legislation that would make it easier to form private sector unions, challenge business power, and foster a progressive social base at the heart of the party. There are some signs that an increasing number of Democrats are amenable to filibuster reform, which would lower the legislative hurdles to pro-labor legislation, and Biden did take significant though symbolic action to establish himself as a pro-union president.

But establishing a new political order requires more than just good policy. It means nothing less than resetting the very boundaries of politics and making what once seemed impossible possible."

https://jacobin.com/2024/12/democrats-blame-game-populism-postelection

#USA #DemocraticParty #Populism #Politics #Elections #PresidentialElection2024

"This article is based on interviews with 11 Harris campaign staff members and volunteers who were directly involved in organizing the stealth efforts in the weeks before the election, most of whom insisted on anonymity to talk candidly about internal campaign matters. The New York Times also spoke with more than 20 other campaign officials, volunteers, Democratic Party operatives and elected leaders who were involved in voter outreach around the country and described how it fell short.
The covert operations, many of them led by Black organizers, represented extraordinary acts of insubordination against the Harris campaign.

Campaign organizers in Philadelphia said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods, such as attending community events, registering new voters, building relationships with local leaders and calling voters.

Instead, they said, they were instructed to spend most of their days phoning the same small pool of volunteers and asking them to knock on voters’ doors and help run field offices. The strategy essentially turned experienced organizers into glorified telemarketers making hundreds of calls daily, with some harried volunteers begging to be taken off call lists."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/us/politics/harris-philadelphia-black-latino-voters.html

#USA #PresidentialElection2024 #KamalaHarris #Philadelphia

"Silicon Valley poured more than $394.1m into the US presidential election this year, according to a Guardian analysis, the bulk of it coming from an enormous donation of about $243m Elon Musk made to Donald Trump’s campaign.

The analysis of new election data from the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows the increasingly heavy influence of the tech industry in US elections. Advocates of cryptocurrency were particularly active in this election as they fought to stave off regulation, pumping money into the presidential campaigns and key congressional races.

The donors came from tech’s biggest companies: Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Netflix. Others were powerful venture capitalists who had made billions from investing in tech."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/07/campaign-spending-crypto-tech-influence

#USA #PresidentialElection2024 #BigTech #Crypto #Plutocracy

"Progressives, Yglesias says, are “detached from practical reality.” But here we have someone who advocates readying ourselves for a war with China, even if in doing so America hurts itself economically, who wants to embrace fossil fuels without taking climate science seriously (he thinks beating China is also more important than climate change), and whose political advice for Kamala Harris was that “she should pivot to the center” (she did, and got creamed). I think it’s very clear we should not listen to such a person, and that if America is to have a future worth living in, guys like this are going to have to be ignored. Because Yglesias, for all that I’ve dwelt on him personally, is not the only smug centrist in the world. There is an entire class of people like him, all posturing as experts, consultants, and pundits of one kind or another. And these people try to pass themselves off as merely offering data and common sense, when many of their positions ignore relevant data and conflict entirely with basic common sense. We should show the same level of respect for the opinions of Matt Yglesias and his ilk that he shows for the “socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe,” that is to say, none at all."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-opinions-of-matt-yglesias-should-be-ignored

#USA #DemocraticParty #PresidentialElection2024 #KamalaHarris #RadicalCentrism

"Any honest accounting has to begin with the fact that the biggest burden on Harris’ candidacy was the fact that it began in July 2024, rather than April 2023 — a reality created by Biden’s insistence on running for reelection after he aggressively signaled he would serve a single term in office. Only one halfway credible challenger emerged to raise questions about this decision, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who was recruited into the race by Steve Schmidt. “What Joe Biden did was the greatest act of egotism in American history,” Schmidt says. “And it was supported and sustained by a relatively small handful of powerful people.” (Schmidt places Biden strategists Anita Dunn and Steve Ricchetti, as well as First Lady Jill Biden and the Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski at the top of that list.)

Multiple who spoke with Rolling Stone agreed that while Harris’ biggest handicap was the position Biden put her in, her first failure as a candidate was her inability or refusal to differentiate herself from the president. “If there only was a thing they could have done, it would have been to make a loud and clean break,” says one strategist who worked to elect Harris. (On Pod Save America, Cutter credited that choice to Harris herself: “She felt like she was part of the administration, so why should she look back… and cherry pick some things that she would have done differently when she was part of it?”)

Harris’ early candidacy, in that strategist’s view, was characterized by a particular and irreverent vibe that generated a lot of enthusiasm among the Democratic base. But that enthusiasm, in this person’s view, quickly dampened after a convention marred by a prominent fight over the war in Gaza and a pledge to ensure America had “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” followed by weeks of aggressive overtures to woo Republican voters."

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kamala-harris-what-went-wrong-1235183829/

#USA #PresidentialElection2024 #KamalaHarris #Biden #DemocraticParty

"While there are differences across the cities, a POLITICO analysis found the greatest decline in voter participation in all six appears to be in predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. There were some shifts toward Trump, but it was ultimately the turnout drop in staunchly Democratic precincts that had the greatest impact on urban margins.

The analysis of nearly 3,000 precincts — the most granular election results available for the biggest cities in six of the presidential battleground states — across Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Phoenix and Las Vegas paints a vivid picture for why Harris lost ground. (Complete precinct results for Detroit, the biggest city in Michigan, were not available as of Friday.)

How individual voters cast their ballots is not known, but stark residential segregation along lines of race and class suggests clear patterns in which voters swung toward Trump the most, and who stayed home this time.

For instance, Trump received nearly 3,400 more votes than he had in 2020 across the 476 “predominantly Black” precincts in the six cities, defined for POLITICO’s analysis as places where at least 85 percent of residents are Black. But Harris received about 17,500 fewer than Biden had, a far greater impact on the overall margins."

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/23/city-turnout-black-hispanic-neighborhoods-00191354

#USA #Politics #PresidentialElection2024 #KamalaHarris #DemocraticParty

"Jacobin looked at hundreds of speeches, rallies, press gaggles, and interview transcripts to trace Harris’s messaging over the course of the campaign and the relative emphasis she placed on a variety of issues and policies. We looked at how frequently Harris used certain phrases in campaign messaging as a proxy for her emphasis on various issue areas or policy sets. Our analysis reveals that the Harris campaign pivoted away from the economy starting around mid-September, de-emphasizing policies that she had previously advocated and moving away from an adversarial stance toward elites. This parallels investigative reporting, which finds that the last weeks of the campaign were increasingly directed by the very same corporate interests that she abstained from criticizing.

Over the course of the whole campaign, Harris spoke less about economic issues and progressive economic policy priorities than Joe Biden had in 2020, and far less than Sanders had in the Democratic primaries that year. In this cycle, Trump addressed perhaps the most important issue for voters — prices and the cost of living — more than twice as often as Harris."

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/harris-campaign-economic-populism-democracy

#USA #KamalaHarris #Politics #PresidentialElection2024 #EconomicPopulism

BULLET BALLOTS IN EVIDENTLY ANOMALOUS NUMBERS
Mastodon Post

Data Scientist's Shocking Call for Election Recount Raises Scary Questions! w/ Stephen Spoonamore
Thom Hartmann Program

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJR5uQpweko

This is a provocative piece worth hearing. See what you think.

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#2024presidentialelection #democrats #election2024 #elections #kamalaharris #presidentialelection2024 #recount #stephenspoonamore #thethomhartmannprogram #thomhartman #thomhartmann #thomhartmannprogram #uspol

:::

The news since last week: "#Trump doing xyz—what does that mean for us?"

You had the chance to report on that ever since Trump was Republican nominee. Doing it now is old hat, sorry to bring it to you. If there's anyone who wasn't aware of that before election day, they are already a lost cause to begin with.

#PresidentialElection2024 #USElection2024 #DonaldTrump