Yves here. This piece attempts to describe why the Democrats sucked in 2024 as shown by the Kamala defeat. But IMHO even though Democrats are kinda sorta poking at the corpses of various losses, they still have not come to grips with the real issue. The reason they have shied away from having messages beyond “Orange Man/Republicans bad!” is that any ideas that would rally their long-abused base would have champion the interests of ordinary workers. Since the party now celebrates the professional-managerial class as the apotheosis of what Americans should be and is bankrolled by squilloinaires who got rich by preying on the lower order, they have set themselves up to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
By Sam Rosenthal, the political director for RootsAction. Originally published at Common Dreams
As the controversy over the Democratic National Committee’s buried autopsy report continues to rage, more Democrats from the party’s establishment wing are offering their two cents. The latest contribution is a column in The Bulwark, written by Rob Flaherty, the former deputy manager of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Flaherty’s piece “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy” discusses his conversations with DNC operatives tasked with writing the still-unreleased report. He then continues into his own analysis of what went wrong with Harris’ 2024 campaign for president.
To his credit, Flaherty is willing to do what very few mainstream Democrats have done since Harris’ 2024 loss: take a long, and public, look at the campaign’s missteps. But, as with so many other analyses from the establishment wing of the party, he believes that tweaks to the campaign’s messaging strategy and media apparatus could have won the race.
Progressives operating inside the party, meanwhile, have long argued that no amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies. (At RootsAction, where I’m the political director, we’ve written our own post-2024 autopsy that focuses exactly on this issue, and where Harris’ campaign fell out of step with popular sentiment.)
Flaherty, by his account, was principally responsible for the digital dimensions of the campaign (social media, content creators, etc.) and so his analysis proceeds through that lens. He devotes a lot of time to worrying over message alignment—alignment between earned and paid media, between the campaign and independent expenditures, and so on. What’s missing in that analysis, though, is what that message was.
At the tail end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the nation was embroiled in a number of crises. The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic had been uneven, with many at the bottom of the labor ladder still struggling to find steady work and keep up with runaway inflation. Americans at all income levels, in fact, were reeling from spiking costs in basic consumer goods. And, while Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza unfolded in full view of anyone with a social media account, Biden and his administration continued their unyielding support for Israel. On top of it all, the unpopular Biden broke his promise to be a “bridge” president, ignored the polls showing that most Democrats wanted a different candidate, and unwisely opted to run for a second term—dropping out only after a disastrous debate and massive pressure from inside the party.
His vice president was then thrust into the unenviable position of having just 107 days (as she often reminds us) to mount a presidential campaign that could defeat Donald Trump.This entailed massive logistical challenges, yes—but it also meant reckoning with Biden’s tenure as president. Would Harris continue to argue, as the Biden administrationhad, that Bidenomics had been a boon for the working class? Would she continue to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he laid waste to the Gaza Strip? These questions demanded answers. Harris and her campaign though, seemed loath to provide them.
Flaherty appears to understand that this was a major problem for Harris. He bemoans the campaign’s vacillation on its core message, contrasting that with Trump’s comms discipline: “Trump’s message was much clearer: The economy feels bad and Harris says it’s good. Those vibes were tough to argue with.”
He is heavily focused on vibes: “The moment the [BidenHQ] account switched from Biden to Harris, the campaign channeled a vibe shift that showed up in polls. We needed to consolidate the base, make the campaign cooler, and have a campaign voice that could be more flexible and nimble than the candidate’s own.”
Putting aside how a “vibe shift” appears in polls, it’s clear from the outset that Flaherty’s level of analysis is all branding, no substance. He gets into the weeds of individual social media accounts and their relative impacts with critical constituencies. Was the KamalaHQ online presence too “girls and gays” coded? Did the account turn off men? For someone who devotes a footnote to scolding the “DC crowd” for believing Biden to be broadly unpopular, Flaherty sure seems to have drunk the Beltway insider Kool-Aid when it comes to assessing the impact of an individual social media account on an election in which more than 152 million Americans cast a vote.
Vibes should not be the basis for a campaign. Yes, a sour mood in the electorate requires a particular approach, but it doesn’t mean that Democrats can entirely punt on the difficult work of crafting a resonant political message. Coordination and message discipline between social media influencers, independent expenditures, surrogates, and official campaign accounts is meaningless if those voices aren’t making a compelling argument. In 2024, Democrats’ biggest political liability was that voters had no idea what four more years of a Democratic administration would entail. It was like Harris was running back Biden’s infamous campaign promise to donors in 2019: that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Such an approach couldn’t work in 2024, given all the public discontent and anxiety.
When Flaherty steps back from the arcana of digital strategy, he seems to understand this problem quite well. He points out that Democrats, in focusing on picking up comparatively well-off, suburban voters, have shed too many votes elsewhere. “The resulting [Democratic] coalition, which has involved a shrinking share of working-class voters of color, especially men, just isn’t big enough to beat a motivated MAGA base.” He even goes on to write that Democrats should embrace “economic populism with teeth.”
Progressives in the Democratic Party would certainly agree with the last point. Poll after poll confirms that this is popular policy: Most voters support taxing the rich and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Flaherty understands enough to give lip service to this idea, but is either unwilling or unable to continue this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: Democrats should embrace this reality, codify it in their political platform, and let it ring out loudly in all their campaign messaging. Like many in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, Flaherty shows a remarkable ability to diagnose the party’s political ailments without being able to clamor for a cure.
This trend continues. Flaherty touches briefly on the discord between Harris and pro-ceasefire activists, but he is eager to wave away the negative impact it may have had on her campaign. He writes that the Biden’s administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza hurt the campaign “but not in the ways people think.” He then goes on to quote another campaign worker who characterizes Biden’s support for Israel (and Harris’ inability to create daylight between herself and Biden) as a “giant, rotting fish around [the campaign’s] neck.”
This is actually exactly how progressives think that Gaza hurt the campaign. Those of us who were pro-ceasefire, and who clamored for Harris to reject the policy of unquestioning support that the Biden administration had pushed, worried that the moral stain of US complicity in Gaza would be impossible to wash out, even as the Democrats switched standard-bearers midstream. We worried that critical constituencies—young people, Arab and Muslim Americans—who had been bombarded on social media with an unending stream of carnage from Gaza would be unable to hold their noses in the ballot box when it came time to vote for the Democratic ticket, even against Trump. Harris’ campaign faltered because 6.8 million Americans who supported Biden in 2020 did not support her. With such a stark drop off in support, it makes sense to focus on an issue where the Democratic Party policy was firmly out of step with popular sentiment among the Democrats’ base. This disconnect can’t simply be brushed aside.
Flaherty admits that, by the time the Harris campaign got going, they were “playing around the edges.” That is, campaign staff were permitted only to make marginal tweaks to a campaign that was already underway; the time for grand strategy had passed. Postmortems from insiders about the 2024 election sometimes read like the accounts of survivors struck by some environmental catastrophe. But this was a tragedy of the Democrats’ own making; Flaherty himself was a deputy manager of Biden’s aborted 2024 campaign.
Donald Trump’s political career is nearing its end, but the effects of Trumpism will be felt for decades to come. If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are. Progressive policy is increasingly popular among Democrats and the broader American electorate: universal healthcare, debt-free public college, AI regulation, and an end to endless warall rank as attractive policy planks with majority support. Any candidate running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 should have this policy at the core of their platform.
Otherwise, there is no amount of consulting, brand management, influencer outreach, or narrative shaping that can save a campaign with no message at its core. If Democrats can’t internalize the real lessons of Harris’ campaign, they may be doomed to repeat its failures.
I recall Kamala’s main message as Send me five dollars
So inspiring….
:)
It’s my belief, and I may be way off base, that the downhill slide in the US began when Volcker financialized the economy.
He took away the economic… and therefore political… power of the labor unions, and handed it to Wall Street.
The (D) team gravitated to where the political power lies.
It was not just Volcker, although you are correct, Volcker’s most important metric for whether he had gotten far enough in breaking inflation was average construction wages, which he tracked on an index card and kept in a suit jacket pocket.
In 1980s, Carter deregulated the trucking industry. The Wikipedia entry cutely skips past that most of the alleged improvement in costs came on the backs of drivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_Carrier_Act_of_1980
See here for some data points: https://www.facebook.com/Dauminiquethedumptruckdriver/videos/driver-wages-in-the-1970s-were-wild/2252568221917301/
I’ve often said in conversation that Carter began the Democrat attack on labor. Shock is always the response. Well. Here we are.
Thomas Frank covers the ground well.
In addition to trucking, Carter deregulated airlines, throwing unions in these unionized industries under the bus. The Teamsters (and Ralph Abernathy, and Ralph Nader!) endorsed Reagan in the next election, as a consequence.
Deception is a primary tactic in any political campaign. Never mind the consequences, better lipstick for the pigs!
Here in Kansas, incumbent MAGA Senator Roger Marshall, wants to talk about bathrooms and transexuals participating in school sports, because it’s a winning conversation—for him, that is. The presumed Dem nominee, Methodist minister Adam Hamilton, is avoiding this conversation. Does it make sense to avoid such topics when we are in the midst of a half-assed war with serious consequences looming, rampant corruption, a Congress that has abandoned Constitutional duties, and a rapidly mounting debt? A rational person would think so. But a significant section of the electorate has been convinced that such trivialities are of the utmost importance.
Dems and non-MAGA Republicans have to choose which is more important: Preserving our democratic and constitutional ways from a corrupt political machine, or defending the rights of a very small group of people. One would like to do both, but that doesn’t seem possible. This is where we are, like it or not (I don’t ), and we non-MAGAs have to deal with it head on.
I don’t actually buy this line of thinking. I agree that a smart candidate needs to *focus* on a message of economic populism etc, but I believe one can do this without throwing marginalized groups under the bus. At issue is that the “bathrooms and girls’ sports” argument is framed as to be unwinnable, but there are very few voters for whom that is their #1 priority. A candidate who acknowledges that there might be ‘little things’ like that where people may not always see eye-to-eye, but who will consistently deliver on ‘what matters’ [like cost of living & quality of life] can exploit the “left but not woke” playbook that was working for Sanders before the DNC put the full weight of the party behind Biden to stop him. When you look at the dems / progressives who have won in right-leaning areas, that’s the playbook that has delivered better results.
The vast, vast majority of people don’t care about the transphobic attacks that many GOPers want to focus on. Your argument that people should abandon a small group under attack by the right wing is exactly what the mainstream Dems, the folks most loathed by the broader electorate, have been pushing for. The reason Dems are losing to people demonizing trans folks is because they offer nothing. Medicare for all plus prosecuting the crimes of the ultra rich plus opposition to data centers is a winning platform without throwing trans folks under the bus, it’s just that the Dem leadership would rather lose than commit to those positions.
Is it “abandoning a small group under attack” that one not agree to have Genderqueer in the elementary school library (anything else is book banning, oh horrors!) and to teach children that those religious people are haters and wrong because our woke attitudes are the only correct ones? It’s not that most people want to attack trans people (although, yes, some do), it’s mostly that they don’t want an unshared ideology pushed on them and their kids under the seeming imprimatur of authority. I remember when book banning meant you got arrested for bringing a book into the country or fined big money for trying to sell it in a store. Now you can order that book from Amazon for your 6 year old, even if the Harper Valley PTA has it pulled from the school library. Like everything else, the grievance claims get inflated far beyond the reality. The reason the issue is as big as it is, as fake as it happens to be, is that the identity politics Democrats want to use public institutions to enforce their supposedly enlightened ideology on everyone else. Which obviously is not going to go over well with the Christian
nuttersfundamentalists. So it’s creating a “big issue” for the Republicans to exploit.The trouble is, the Democrats and Republicans have a whole set of these “whatever you say I say the opposite” issues that can inflame partisan hostility, but the Democrats just don’t have the numbers to win those fights in the majority of electoral venues. In presidential elections, especially, they refuse to address their Electoral College problem. So they can only win when the previous Republican President is so bad that people go to the polls in a “throw the bums out” mood. That’s why all they can run on is “Trump! Trump! Trump!” talk now, their other relentlessly advocated positions are only enthusiastically subscribed to by a minority of voters (mostly among the professional-managerial class and non-religious urbanites).
And as far as running on more popular positions, Medicare for all, ending stupid wars, improving the lot of the working class, etc., they’ve promised those things for over three decades, and once in office they never deliver. And everybody knows that now. What we get is bank bailouts, telling workers they need a new degree, public-private partnerships to siphon off tax money to corporations, deregulation, and more stupid wars like Ukraine. The best solution is put this party out of
its miserybusiness and start a new one that will focus on the right issues and then deliver on them meaningfully once in office. They are toxic waste in the political arena now.Amen!
They will just find another scapegoat beyond trans. Democrats need to rewrite the playbook and control the narrative.
My point of no recovery for her was when the party simply shoved his successor down our throats – shut up, vote blue no matter who, take it or leave it. And many voters chose the latter option.
No primary – Democracy, American style. The party’s chosen successor a total non-starter in her presidential primary, not even able to carry her home state. I’ll go so far as to say it would have even been better had she become the constitutional successor.
Exactly right! Biden validated Obama’s observation (“Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up!”) by appointing Harris as his successor. No need for those pesky elections! All hail Kamala!
Probably another reason for their loss was their inability to get Biden under control after they decided that they had no choice but to go with Kamala. So while she tried to campaign for herself in those few months, old Joe Biden – probably out of spite – was continuously trying to spike her campaign and sabotage it.
CNN has just published what they’re claiming to be an authenticated copy of the DNC’s ‘incomplete’ autopsy. It basically takes the same approach as Flaherty does – make “tweaks” but not changes, and be more like the conservatives in terms of ‘always on’ messaging (what that messaging would be is left up to the reader’s imagination).
If you tell a lie “ten thousand times” that must make it true right?
Unfortunately, our elites seem to believe that the lies they tell over and over become true in the telling. Even worse, “Gaslighting works”! Most people lack direct evidence that the lie is a lie so because they have heard it ten thousand times, they accept it. And then there are those, who at some level know the lie is a lie, but think they must be crazy, because they have heard the lie ten thousand times…
How to end this? I think we in the West will need to go through some very dark times, so that we learn the value of truth, and learn to “test the spirits to see if they are of God” as a great teacher told us a few thousand years ago.
Post-Mortem:
1.) If you are going to campaign on “saving democracy,” why not have a competitive primary instead of hiding the fact that your incumbent is senile and then anoint the VP? This coming following collusion against Sanders in the last two election cycles, the Democratic Establishment needs to rebuild trust with voters, not pretending to be the last defenders of “democracy” whatever that means for the DNC. . .
2.) Harris is a terrible candidate. Word salad. Stands for nothing. HR department vibe. Spineless, unprincipled. I don’t want to debate this point if someone feels otherwise, beyond my suspicion that my take is closer to the take of average voters than the “Harris is the Best Candidate” crowd.
3.) Give me a G, give me an A, give me a Z, give me an A. How many Muslim and Black voters did they lose on this no-daylight nonsense. Biden should have read the tea leaves and attempted to separate Bibi from Israel, and blamed it all on Bibi and the Israeli right. Then Biden/Harris could have been “pro-Israel” but “anti-Israeli Trump rightwing” and maybe not lost 20 million votes. I see they are trying to do this now, but why not before you completely f— yourself in a national election. Not addressing it at all was terrible, they probably would have gotten more votes even if they came out in favor of genocide.
4.) The whole campaign was a bunch of procedural issues, “democracy” blah blah, as if you are going to ever reach some high school educated person who works in a plant with some abstract procedural argument, instead of concrete appeals. Remember Trump with the no tax on tips? Why can’t the Democrats, who we know are not populists, contrive some demonstratively populist measure like Trump that doesn’t really matter to gain support? Why was Trump working the McDonald’s drive through?
Obama is very smart, very rhetorically gifted, and he manages to exude an aura that he has principles and stands for something noble, even if he doesn’t. The Democrats aren’t electable until they can find someone who is as good a bullshitter as Obama again if they are going to continue to run on this neoliberal “centrist” economic slop with extreme culture wars on the side.
Harris was spotted and dismissed (or more, condemned) here in NC long before she hit the national scene, and your analysis of her “talents” is on target. Furthermore, in the light of your last sentence which I think summarizes the Democrat Party over the past twenty years or so, what does it matter for us, the citizens, if the Dems do find such an electable champion?
God help us. Because they won’t.
Re your point number 1: I cannot resist revisiting this 7 minute video from Fratelli d Crozza that went viral in its day. It seems that everybody but the Dems knew Biden was senile.
And then there was Estee Palti on Kamala Harris.
KLG, had not seen this before. Thank you! The Unburdening. Priceless.
on this note…
SNL imitations
TC 5:42
Maya Rudolph with Kamala Harris (2025)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Funs6yyEw
Jimmy Fellon with Trump (2015) – I assume this is the best one and I can´t find only this short snippet
35 sec.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Dth67ti7os
NATO Cafeteria Cold Open (7 years ago)
8:31 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBjGD5VGVg0
Foreign leaders (Jimmy Fallon, Paul Rudd, James Corden) that were caught making fun of President Trump (Alec Baldwin) at the NATO summit continue their taunting in the cafeteria.
Donald Trump Baltic States Cold Open (8 years ago)
7:23 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iCm8tYX-Vw
“It seems that everybody but the Dems knew Biden was senile.” Oh, they knew. They just didn’t care.
Re: #3 What makes you think that the Gaza genocide was mostly an issue exclusively for Muslims and Blacks? Any moral person of any race or religion could not help but be disgusted by the Biden/Harris support of the Zionists.
Your proposal that some sort of word salad criticising Israel concurrent with continued arms and military support would have allowed nose holding votes for Harris may have fooled some but nowhere enough for a win IMO.
As a Canadian I was appalled when the world discovered that Biden had dementia…and what was worse was they were aware if it and STILL tried to put him in the oval office.
Excuse me, they DID put him in the Offal Office. Oh, they fooled some people–maybe a lot of folks–the first time, but they didn’t fool me. If you watch videos of Biden walking onto a stage and speaking as VP in 2016, and then doing the same thing in his 2020 run, the difference was obvious. Except for those who didn’t want to see.
Yes, it was obvious but then so was Donald Trump’s rapid cognitive decline that we could see in the 2020 campaign. What surprised me was that Biden declined more quickly than Trump.
Not to mention Ronald Reagan being senile for his second term.
America needs some more good old anarchist syndicalist “campaigning.”
Viva el communismo libertario!
The Democrats stopped being a “party” in about 2009. They are a tiny cabal of a half-dozen D.C. operatives who gained control of ballot access and messaging infrastructure and run the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as a closed private business.
Any form of popular democracy is a threat to that business. The way that the DNC apparatchiks rammed Joe Biden through as the 2020 nominee when it was evident that Bernie Sanders had high levels of popular support is exemplary of how the Democrats aren’t a “political party” but are a totalitarian clique gorging themselves on the contribution stream from a handful of billionaires.
Members of such a clique are incapable of self-reflection. They can only lament that their “messaging” didn’t browbeat voters harder and lie to them more shamelessly. However, they will never let go of the “party” apparatus that they control because they get paid win or lose.
The same can be said of the (R) team when Ron Paul ran in 2012… or even Ross Perot a couple of decades earlier.
Outsiders aren’t welcome… nobody wants any sand thrown in the machine.
Or, as Boss Tweed memorably said: “I don’t care who they vote for, as long as I pick the candidates.”
The five-second epistemology is the wife party serves the husband party in keeping the household under thumb. It is a lusty but happy marriage — some nights the wife puts on sweats with “Socialist” printed on the butt to get the rough policy sex she craves and make him beat the kids harder, but threesomes are right out.
Outstanding analysis. When you work with Democrats you never get a sense of who’s in charge, only that someone will get back to you (assuming they don’t just blow you off entirely for coming in with a great idea instead of a check).
I will die never knowing who exactly kept shutting off my social media but I have long had anecdotal “proof” that higher ups in the D party were using their European censors to silence not just disinformationists. Almost every critic of the party I know suffered enormously from the algo-driven dampening of their tweets, posts and articles.
The neoliberals simply cannot bear to hear any message but their own because they know (from experience) that when their message comes into contact with the real world, it’s like dropping potassium into water. Their beliefs cannot hold up under scrutiny but that’s OK because they don’t believe in anything. Their beliefs are whatever they are at the moment and subject to change as convenience necessitates.
This all day. I live in Texas and have been getting the Talarico spam a lot lately. Of note in the messaging is it’s never policy, it’s not even “Trump bad.” (Or in the case of Texas it might be “Gov Hot Wheels bad” instead). It’s just “Send me 26 bucks to save democracy” or some other pithy nonsense. No solicitation of volunteers, signing of petitions, or any other form of direct action. Just plain ‘ole “send me your money and shut up.”
Good analysis. 2009 is about when I gave up on Obama, and the Democratic party. Watching Obama give speeches about how “we have to take the car keys away from the Republicans because they drove the car into the ditch” while he was bailing out the banksters that had effectively crashed the world economy, and nobody was going to jail, much less even be investigated was my limit.
As a retired marketing executive, branding has always been one of my pet peeves. Branding is what cowboys used to do to cattle to mark which ones were theirs.
In today’s world, a good brand is supposed to represent a good reputation. IOW if you like a company’s potato chips, then you’ll probably love their motor oil, too!!! Problem is, if someone tries your potato chips and finds out they suck, they’ll probably avoid your motor oil, too!
The moment I heard Flaherty use the words ‘better branding,” I all but dismissed his credibility.
Democrats’ problem is that their reputation is in the toilet. The solution is not glitzy messaging but a good track record. Failing to comprehend this basic fact, Kamala couldn’t even think of anything she would have done differently from Biden. She couldn’t even mouth something as anodyne as, “Joe did some good things, but it was clearly not enough. We need to do more on inflation, etc.” Despite Kamala’s empty suit, it might have convinced some of the more gullible, who still take politicians at their word. But the fact that she had no compelling track record, it probably would not have been enough.
Anyway, I stopped giving money to Democrats after years of deceptive messaging that intimated that they were trying to respond to voters’ concerns. A classic was John Kerry’s “opposition” to the Iraq War. Paying closer attention, Kerry was actually not opposed to the war, only to the ineffective way that US was conducting it.
I would get surveys from the DNC that purported to seek my opinion on whether I favored a Republican talking point or a Democratic position that seemed to address voters’ concerns but was weasel worded in a such way that actually avoided the issue or proposed a phony solution.
Yves hit the nail on the head: “any ideas that would rally their long-abused base would have [to] champion the interests of ordinary workers.” In 2024 Kamala spent a $billion on sophisticated messaging successfully avoided the core reputational issues…and failed. Maybe it’ll take $5 billion in better messaging 2028. It’ll probably work only because voters will be in a mood to throw the bums out, no thanks to Democrats.
Branding is what cowboys used to do to cattle to mark which ones were theirs.
That isn’t where the term ‘branding’ historically came from, though.
For a few decades on either side of the 20th century’s turn, you’d order or buy a new tool from Sears Roebuck or whomever — a hammer, a woodchopping axe, a scythe — and to determine whether and how new it was, you’d look at how fresh the manufacturer’s brand burned in its wooden handle was.
That’s where the expression ‘brand new’ came from. Because that’s how buyers got an idea of a tool’s condition, provenance, how sharp its blade was, etcetera
Tell that to the slaves that got branded centuries ago. Modern branding ignores past horrible associations of the word and eventually morphed into vacuous image and narrative control.
Trademarks started in 1870. Democrats’ donkey dates from the 1830s. Andrew Jackson’s opponents called it a jackass. (If the shoe fits…)
Politico’s piece today suggests that the shoe does indeed fit. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/21/democratic-party-2024-autopsy-00931754
Harris was both a horrible choice and someone who ran the most tone deaf campaign in American History, I didn’t think anyone could beat Hillary’s 2016 campaign when it came to incompetence but Harris outdid her without raising a sweat.
The political system in the USA is broken, not damaged, broken.
And that’s been true for decades.
No functioning political system would give voters a “choice” between Hair Furore and Hillary Clinton.
Look at the 2000 campaign FFS, a “Choice” between Senator Gore’s boy Albert and “The French don’t even have a word for Entrepeneur.”
“The French don’t even have a word for Entrepeneur.”
Love it! Too funny.
Well, a Japanese person did ask whether the French had anything analogous to the Japanese concept of nuance….
Doubly funny is that the way you use the term “entrepreneur” today is in fact not quite French (although derived from it). It was actually popularized by Joseph Schumpeter in his Theory of Economic Development
Doubly funny is that the way you use the term “entrepreneur” today is in fact not quite French (although derived from it). It was actually popularized by Joseph Schumpeter in his Theory of Economic Development
As Yves indicates: “…bankrolled by squilloinaires who got rich by preying on the lower order…”
There can be no meaningful political choice when both “parties” are funded (legally bribed) by the oligarchy.
The US is a performative, managed democracy where Elections Inc. are lucrative PR campaigns that generate billions. We are told in the FPTP (winner takes all) electoral system, that you MUST vote D or R, or you will “waste” your vote. Sorry, I don’t vote for genocide, wars, murdering children, kleptocracy etc. That’s not in my interests.
I still think that publicly auctioning off political seats to the highest bidder would be more transparent and open than the sham we have now.
“I still think that publicly auctioning off political seats to the highest bidder would be more transparent and open than the sham we have now.”
KY would like a word….
This atop the uneven recovery from the great recession, NAFTA–everything going back to 1973 and the end of an overrated postwar boom dependent on massive waste and environmental destruction. Everything militates against honest appraisal of how long things have been bad, though, as always, Trump is the gift that keeps on giving (Xi was only talking about Biden; the hero’s return* fixed everything instantaneously), making Team Blue seem reasonable.
*Given the importance of the alt-right to Trump, and vice versa, as well as their self-identification as distinguished classicists, I’ve occasionally wondered how his status as only America’s second non-consecutive, two-term president has worked on their imagination.
I highly suspect that we had an unannounced recession in ’23. IIRC, there were actually two consecutive quarters of negative growth, but the gatekeepers at NBER found some technicality to deny it.
I remember the summer of 2022 being a nightmare of skyrocketing food prices, gas prices, and 9% CPI.
I also think that the cumulative effects of the great recession, the COVID recession, and the near-recession during Biden’s term destroyed what was left of the middle class. The next recession which may be here as soon as the fall is going to be brutal.
Establishment Democrats never will understand their losses. They are paid not to. They are the party of “nothing will fundamentally change” and “we just need better branding.” They could do a million autopsys or blue ribbon commissions and they’re only going continue their slide into irrelevance. It feels to me like any of this navel gazing is intended to telegraph “we really care and we really are trying” but at the core they’re always going to be the other wing of the Republican Party and that’s the problem. If they really cared about winning, they’d just embrace being 90s republicans already and stop pretending they care about the left.
I don’t think the Dems need to brainstorm much about 2024 because the solution to a winning strategy in 2028 is right in front of us; and his name is Zohran Mamdani.
Could anybody predict a near unknown Muslim democratic socialist could win in the heart of capitalism with the largest population of billionaires and jewish voters who, in the case of jewish voters, a sizable portion supported Mamdani?
What to do? First, like Mamdani, the 2028 candidate should sound like and act like a real human being. Tax the rich, eg, is a lousy slogan. Taxes are for everybody but your ideas will make the system fair; with an end to the super wealthy paying zero taxes. And if a corporation has money to buy back their stock, they can pay taxes too.
Mamdani spoke of free busses, affordable rent, and groceries in a straight forward honest style.
The 2028 candidate should speak the same way about progressive issues like genocide, unnecessary wars, wealth inequality, and on, and on.
The Democratic post mortem reads as if a college freshman put it together. They never want to change, they don’t want to govern, and they definitely don’t want to win. Just a giant fundraising operation that doesn’t have to govern because they are fine with being the pawl in our governing system.
Watching the American Empire fall because of its greed is an amazing real tine history lesson.
“the pawl”. Indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawl
Blue mafia vs Red mafia?
Decisions decisions. / ;)
Lol, speaking of Mafia: I would rather have the old-school Cosa Nostra back, at least they didn’t murder women and children, and didn’t whack people in front of their family like the genocidal freaks we have now regularly do – they had a code of ethics
Novelist Cyril Kornbluth of Pohl & Kornbluth fame (authors of The Space Merchants and Gladiator-At-Law) wrote a solo novel, The Syndic, in 1953 advancing exactly this proposition —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Syndic
‘The prologue introduces the setting, a future North America divided between rival criminal gangs, the Syndic on the East Coast and the Mob in Chicago, who have driven the federal government into exile in Iceland, Ireland and other North Atlantic islands. Life has more or less returned to normal in Syndic territory – as long as protection money is paid on time.
‘Attitudes to sex are generally tolerant, with free sex outside of marriage and both polygamy and polyandry accepted ….
‘The protagonist, Charles Orsino, is a low-ranking member of the Syndic who collects protection money in New York. After a failed assassination attempt, he is invited to a meeting of the leaders of the Syndic, who suspect that the exiled government were responsible. To discover the truth, Charles volunteers to go undercover to infiltrate the government, with a false personality created by hypnosis to fool lie detectors ….’
The iron law of institutions. I think that pretty much sums it up.
While everything this piece says is basically true, it omits what I view as Harris’ (and most mainstream Democrats) worst blunder: Chasing after “swing” Republicans / Independents rather than the much larger number of eligible voters that simply don’t show up on election day. As evidenced, for example, by her campaigning with Liz Cheney! And her main selling point was “not as bad as Trump would be”, which while true didn’t even succeed very well with “swing” voters (as we saw). The nonvoters are the true sleeping giant, and while reaching enough of them may be hard, it’s really the only way to the Democrats (or anyone else) will ever get enough votes without selling their souls to the corporate elites. Nevertheless, they haven’t really tried to do it since FDR, and I see no sign that they’re about to do so now.
That is how Obama and Trump happened. Whether they become a permananent part of any electorate is a different question and here, I am skeptical: there are good reasons why they are not engaged. Good electoral mobilizer, or, a5 least, someone facing a monumentally bad opponent and/or situation, can make things happen for ond election cycle or even two, but creating a new stable electoral coalition that incorporates them probably is beyond what most politicians (esp now) manage.
I’m on an outdoor forum. Lots of hunters and pickup drivers there. They hate the Democrats, I mean HATE. It’s difficult to get past that. Policy is irrelevant.
As long as the Democrats stand for “gun bans” that is going to be the reality. In fact, that might be the biggest negative for the Democrats in much of the country. And it’s unnecessary (my state reps and senators were all Democrats and had A+ ratings from the NRA 25 years ago), against the Constitution, and it’s not a real (practical) solution to the problem of why the US is such a violent country. Threaten to restrict people’s rights that they’ve always exercised and, yeah, you start to lose them on a lot of other issues too.
I recall Sen. Sanders being derided for ignoring gun issue. Which has many facets, and ignoring it on federal level was a good idea.
I’d have at least a little respect for the position if it wasn’t pushed so hard by people who live in gated communities or where the police show up on time.
Preferably pushed by people who don’t even call the police because guns are bad and they’re honest enough to not farm out their dislike to others to perform.
Oh … having watched voting records over many years, the A+ rating from the NRA is pretty meaningless… ;-)
I have to laugh because this entire comment thread reads like a mirror-image of the MAGA critique of Republicans.
The problem for the Democrat party and is that they’ve forgotten how to fake sincerity.
They don’t need to, whadda the D faithful gonna do? Vote R? It’s a cruel joke, but the illusion of choice must be maintained at all costs in order to keep the plebs divided and ruled.
As the late Jimmy Carter even said years ago: “the US is an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jimmy-carter-u-s-is-an-oligarchy-with-unlimited-political-bribery-63262/
One would think that after a former pres. said this, it would be considered important news
The democrat elites are the same as any other elites: they want what they want, and they won’t have the riffraff standing in their way. Seems clear they would much rather lose elections than give up anything they’ve gained. They ‘deserve it’ after all; punching down is their twisted sense of justice.
Harris was and is unqualified and she backed the genocidaires. Trump was and is unqualified and he backed the genocidaires. Binding my eyes and holding my nose was not enough to get me to the polls for either and the choice for Congress was between a hack and a hack. I first cast a vote for president in 1960. I cast too many “lesser evil” votes but in 2024 both were equally distasteful. The democrats are looking for a winning message? There are issues with the support of large majorities of the population, but those issues are not favored by the “donor class” the owners of our so-called politicians, most of whom would not understand real politics if it jumped up and bit them in the ass. They do understand bowing and scraping and taking orders. They are almost 100% perfect at voting for anything demanded by the state of Israel. (Is that always in the best interest of the United States? Inquiring minds want to know.) The democrats will play identity politics soft ball. Their opponents, Donnie for sure, will be doing “whatever it takes” hint, hint, nudge, nudge, to hang on to the majority in what purports to be Congress. I say purports because they seem to have forgotten or ignored any of the powers that are inconvenient to the cult leader lurking in the construction zone that once was the executive mansion. That is sufficient venom for today.
Brethren and sistren: What word is missing?
Ukraine.
Trump was promising peace, and the Dems were looking under the bed for “Putin.” Bernie Sanders still is. So you had a war-weary public marginally more likely to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
And then: Rhetoric? The famous
“I’m speaking.”
to a group of demonstrators whose family members had been slaughtered in Palestine.
And then: Liz & Dick Cheney save democracy. I don’t vote for any party with room for Cheneys, just as I won’t vote in Italy for any party that maintains the sleazy warmonger Pina Picerno.
These aren’t cosmetic problems. These are moral failings, as was most of the Biden Presidency and his fall out the window into oblivion with Dr. Jill.
And Flaherty thinks the problem is that the Harris campaign didn’t issue a Pokemon card of Kamala. Or enough focus groups
These are not serious people.
These are not serious people
Yup. And yet millions of groundlings advocate for* them and vote for them.
You would think that after all the years – decades … CENTURIES – of broken promises that people would stop believing them. But … no.
*to be fair, it’s often “advocate against the other one,” but the result is the same.
Oh, they get why they “lost”….. But they don’t care. Losing isn’t the important part. They get paid either way. All they have to do is show up and make it look good. Although, now with this new level of corruption, they might pay closer attention to winning and then benefiting from the new “standard of care” that has been established.
I was musing about how Trump has set new standards for “performance” in office, something all American politicians can aspire to.
It is curious that Rob Flaherty one of Kamala’s campaign advisors is commenting on reasons why her campaign failed in neoconservative Bill Kristol’s Bulwark. Kristol was the publisher of the Weekly Standard that was subsidized by Rupert Murdock for 14 years before being sold to oil billionaire Phillip Anshultz. Trump won largely because the Biden administration failed. The border was in crisis. There were concerns of civil unrest related to the Black Lives Matter issue and there was the Hunter Biden corruption I also believe that the unaddressed harm of the 2008 crisis was not and still is not addressed. This is an example of the type of piece where advice to improve is insincerely offered to one’s opponents.
I’m 72 years old and I still vote because that right was paid for in blood, and not a small amount of it.
Genocide is a hard limit, if Harris had credibly promised to stop supporting that horror ( Using “Credibly” when discussing anything Harris promises…Okey Dokey) I would have held my nose, wiped up the puke and voted for her.
If you support the horror taking place in Gaza you are the enemy of every decent Human being.
Thunder Parley got my vote because of a wonderful name and the sure knowledge that I have a better chance of being on the cover of GQ than they do of winning.
Very hard to read, because why the hell should anyone listen to progressive politicians talking policy? Its not as if they are sincere or even a hope of enacting any of the policies when they OWE their soul to their pimps (the donor class).
The voters will just vote for whoever they think will burn it all down. And by that Metric, Donigula is going well.
I agree with the author’s criticism of the article but I think this could have been taken even further:
And why doesn’t he continue it to the logical conclusion? Because he knows, consciously or unconsciously, that doing so would cost him his job.
“And why doesn’t he continue it to the logical conclusion? Because he knows, consciously or unconsciously, that doing so would cost him his job.”
He is the embodiment of the Upton Sinclair quote: “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Yves summed it up in the last sentence of the intro. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained exactly what was wrong with both parties in his Riverside Church speech in 1967: both were too corrupted by the corporate power elite and the military-industrial complex to stop endless wars and embrace the kinds of social democratic policies that would really abolish poverty in America. Michael Harrington and other founders of the DSA attempted to keep King’s dream of democratic socialism alive in the 1970s and 1980s by trying to realign the Democratic Party toward becoming a labor party and ending endless wars. But as we know, the DLC pushed the party in the opposite direction, courting Wall Street and affluent suburban voters just as deindustrialization and globalization were destroying labor unions and what remained of workers’ bargaining power. Meanwhile, the Christian right and the GOP’s culture war-industrial complex gave a big chunk of the population other things to focus on. As a result, the Democrats lost the white working class by the 2000s, and tried to coast on symbolic embrace of identity politics while doing nothing for their black and brown working class voters either.
The two Bernie campaigns were a last-ditch effort to realign a deeply corrupt Democratic Party toward social democracy, and the establishment’s crushing of those campaigns led to Trump’s victory in 2016 and then Biden’s failed presidency in 2021-2024. Biden’s hiding behind the senate parliamentarian, Manchin, and Sinema to oppose raising the minimum wage, his opposition to Medicare for All, his breaking the rail strike, and his support for the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza destroyed the Dems’ credibility on cost of living and basic human decency. Allowing Trump to get back in so his gang of billionaire thieves and their think tank apparatchiks can loot the state while he implements a neocon foreign policy is a catastrophe of bipartisan making.
DSA Dems like Rashida Tlaib and Chris Rabb are the only people that will hold the flame of MLK’s vision alive in Congress, but they are so outnumbered by corporate Dems and a corrupt leadership determined to snuff it out that it is hard to have any hope at the federal level. But the Green Party also has zero ground game and seems mainly like a vehicle for Jill Stein’s quadrennial vanity campaigns, so I don’t know what the alternative is to getting more Rabbs and Platners elected. But Dems going to the dustbin of history like Starmer’s Labour while the GOP remains embroiled in a civil war between rival gangs of bigoted thugs and cretins financed by ghoulish oligarchs appears to be our near future.
I maintain that the Dems do not think they lost at all, as Harris raised and spent more than a billion dollars. Most of that money stayed in the pockets of party insiders or their corporate owners.
I’m mostly in agreement with this take. I’m not willing to grant them the supreme ignorance that it would require for them to not understand why they lose. They have to keep up the kayfabe and pretend that they want to win, but they won’t actually do what it takes to win. The only reasonable conclusion to draw then, is that they don’t care. And it makes sense. It’s much easier to fundraise by being against Trump that actually being for anything. Look at Trump now, his fundraising dried up after he won. He now has to resort to good old fashioned grift to inflate his coffers. The Democrats don’t have the balls to do what he’s doing, so they actually make more money being the opposition than being in charge.
So the summary of this author’s article is: “If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are.”
Articulate their political differences?!?
OMG. They’ve done more than enough “articulating” and “fighting for” over the years–way too much of that and not enough demanding and governing. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but as others have pointed out, The Simpsons nailed the Democrats’ problems years ago when Bart’s pet elephant, Stampy, stampeded through the Democratic National Convention where we see the banners reading “We Hate Ourselves” and “We Can’t Govern”. Punch left, never govern even while leading the government, and only win by saying “I’m not him”. sigh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMRmuyy9f_w
I watched Flaherty on Breaking Points and found him thoroughly unconvincing. Lots of jargon, little insight. He clearly shied away from certain lines of criticism (Gaza) in a way that seemed to have less to do with an honest analysis of the Harris campaign and more to do with his personal calculation concerning his own financial future in the consultant “space.” One curious part of the BP interview: he made lots of references to polls showing that many of the points raised in comments weren’t effecting the outcome of the race, but I thought that there’s been lots of reporting that Biden and Harris’ internal polls were showing their campaigns were complete disasters?
Politics in the US is a pay to play game. Only the elites, who have all that economic rent they exploit from the world’s masses at their disposal, can afford to play. Both of our political parties are owned by those elites. As bad as the orange blob of chaos is, and as utterly compliant as the Republican congress and Republican nominated Supreme Court have been, it is now practically impossible to deny that this is the underlying reality of our current political system.
Is it really a surprise that the Democrats buried their autopsy of the 2024 election? Is it really a surprise that this autopsy is littered with a plethora of worthless corporate-speak in it? Is it really a surprise that the findings in the autopsy are so incredibly uninspiring? Or that those that have a hint of merit are being ignored or dismissed? No, no, no and no, as the last thing the Democrats want to do is to kill the golden goose, when they think they can win without changing a thing.
So, it looks like we’re going to get another round of woke and transgender bashing from the Republicans, and orange man and Epstein class bashing from the Democrats.
It is not even that the Democrats hope to win without changing anything (though they do). It’s that they would rather lose to any Republican than do anything to address America’s gross imbalances and failures (while they personally profit).
I find it impressive that this is even a topic.
The Davos Countries’ political apparatchiks only see voter interests as PR problems to be managed rather than structural problems to be addressed. Of course, for them the structure is perfect and any modification would mean a reduction of their power.
The most impressive part is the way they are so insulated from the actual electorate that they can see the world in this way.
Oh the questions you ask yourself after the fact when you didn’t ask any of the right questions beforehand!
This is a situation where Clintonian triangulation clearly applies. Gays had nowhere else to go in 2024 (2020 or 2016)! First rule of triangulation: Assume your base! “Girls and gays” are a big part of your base? Then ignore them entirely until after the election just as Bill and Hill routinely ignored the Left (who did most of the volunteer work but that’s OK — we can hire our friends to do all the work : )
Triangulation is not what Harris’s campaign did. Instead they sucked up to their donors and special interest groups just like Hillary did in 2016 and in both cycles that cost the Democrats the election. Obama’s rhetoric lifted up the base, Clinton/Harris rhetoric showed that they aspired to the ranks of the monied class (their new bestest friends ; )
Campaign dynamics don’t get much simpler than this, a high school civics class could successfully unravel what happened in 2024. Speaking for the base, can we have our party back now?
I want to get some credit for the modest secondary role that I played in defeating the Democrats. As economic policy advisor Jill Stein on the Green Party ticket, we decided to focus our anti-war campaigning on Minnesota, Michigan and other states with substantial Islamic populations. We appeared together on a number of Nima’s Dialogue Works shows and other venues explaining that the Democrats’ pro-war policy and their anti-labor, pro-Wall Street policies had to be defeated. I said directly that no political progress could be made in the US until the Democratic Party as currently constituted is replaced with a real opposition party.
I think Jill’s campaigning helped tilt these states away from Biden/Harris. Even though we knew how awful Trump was, if there were only one party in the US (as originally thought of by the Constitution writers) there would at least be open ballots, especially with the electoral reform that we sponsored. Anyway, the anti-war vote is what kept many erstwhile Democratic voters away, or drove them to vote Republican as a protest vote.
“I said directly that no political progress could be made in the US until the Democratic Party as currently constituted is replaced with a real opposition party.”
But are they?
Speaking as a board member of the Georgia Green Party, I can personally attest to the fact that I spent more time in 2025 trying to maintain ballot access against the Potemkin Unified Green Party, stood up by the national Greens and the Stein campaign, than I did trying to get out the vote. I witnessed, both in court at the initial hearing and online at the appeal, a viable party get sidelined to benefit a group that didn’t actually exist. To the best of my knowledge they still don’t. The takeaway from that fiasco was that, far from being an oppositional party, the Greens were working hand in glove with the Democratic party to take away Green access to the ballot.
She did nothing here, and speaking as one of her voters I find it very difficult to argue the point that her campaign was anything more than the vanity project that most people view it to have been.
In my opinion, any party that can’t get at least 5% of the seats in House or Senate and tries for a Presidential campaign are absolute jokes. Vanity project is putting it lightly.
It is more involved than you think. For example: At least in the state of Georgia, if you can manage a presidential ballot line then you are automatically qualified down ballot. That is why we went to such lengths to protect it. If you have to work your way up then it costs immense amounts of money and signatures for every single office. Not to mention all of the legal fights that go with each and every initiative a small party takes on from the R’s and D’s.
The process is deliberately labyrinthine, expensive and time consuming, but if you have any ideas on how to streamline it I am here to learn.
It makes no difference whatsoever if progressive policies are becoming more popular. Democrats have and continue to ignore that.. Democrats and Republicans have together spent decades fashioning a political and electoral system that makes any genuine progressive change impossible. This will once again be confirmed if the Democrats are successful in the midterms.
In the end, Democrats don’t care if they win. They have no genuine belief in anything of real value anyway. Not one. This is pure theatre, not authentic politics.