In 2020 Biden: 81.2 million Trump: 74.2 million
In 2024 so far Harris: 67.0 Trump: 71.9
Trump got about the same amount of votes. Dems lost 14 million votes.
Vote for my shitty policies or the other guy will have shittier policies is not a platform.
The point of a democratic republic is that elected officials enact the policies of those who elect them. If you don’t offer to enact those policies you don’t get elected.
Yes, non-voters were stupid to not vote for the lesser evil, but the Harris campaign violated the very basis of democracy and thought they could simply use Trump to bully people into voting for them.
Imagine a system where a fascist Boogeyman is held up every election and people reliably vote against them without regard for who they vote for. The other party could put up whatever shitty candidate they wanted whether they espouse the views of the population or not.
Not only is that not at all a fucking democracy, it was the documented strategy of the Democratic party! Except it doesn’t fucking work, which they should have learned in 2016.
The Biden campaign offered something, notable student loan forgiveness, but both Clinton and Harris’s campaigns relied on the dumbfuck Pied Piper strategy that they would offer nothing to the voters other than being not Trump.
That’s a dumb fucking strategy because there are fewer people that will vote Democrat as the lesser evil than will vote Republican just because Republican. They have to court people with policies they actually want.
And the absolute crazy thing is they tried this in 2016 and it failed, yet somehow had the balls to try again when it mattered more.
They didn’t lead to the apathy - they pointed out the existing apathy would cost Dems the election.
You’re exactly right about people being excited for Trump and lukewarm on Harris, but that’s entirely on the Democrats for picking the platform and strategy that lost to Trump in 2016.
Harris had a notable and surprising lead when they announced Biden was out - then they changed nothing else. People didn’t just not like the candidate, they didn’t like the policies. They only changed the candidate and thought Trump was a big enough cudgel to bully people into voting even though that demonstrably doesn’t work.
Yeah. I think it was the biggest issue and was easily solvable, but the campaign was a fuck up through and through.
Across Biden and Harris they kept trying to steal a sliver of the conservative vote instead of just taking from the huge infrequent voter slice. They didn’t do anything to try to get that slice to vote for them, they just threatened them with Trump is they didn’t get out to vote.
Trump didn’t get any more voters than last time.
He won because the Democrats lost.
The Harris campaign turned out great initially.
They fucked it up immediately by saying they weren’t going to be any different from Gaza on Biden and that was one of the wedge topics that had been created about Biden.
Rather than compromise with the electorate to get people out to vote, they tried to use Trump to bully voters out of the house saying he’d be worse.
It’s not even close to half. Republicans are a quarter to a third of the country.
It’s voter suppression and Democrats being the biggest possible fuckups they could be at every fucking opportunity.