Summary
Fox News’s attempt to find support for Donald Trump in Greenland backfired, as most residents expressed disinterest in his proposals.
While one Trump supporter was found, the majority of Greenlanders interviewed criticized Trump’s comments and expressed a preference for remaining under Danish rule.
Despite these setbacks, Trump continues to advocate for acquiring Greenland, citing economic security concerns.
Nah, miss me with that shit. I voted for Kamala, but we’re on two, arguably three elections now (16, 24, arguably 12) where the big Democratic pitch has been “we’re not that guy”. Not “fix healthcare”, not “fix the housing crisis”, not “fix the student debt crisis”-- and bear in mind that when I say fix, I mean fix, not take a few small token steps towards addressing it (maybe)-- no, the big pitch is “we’re not him.” The two times now it’s failed to resonate, and reliably they blame the voters for failing to be inspired by their powerful message of not being the other guy. It’s political and intellectual laziness, they don’t want to have to make and keep meaningful promises (and potentially piss off big donors).
It is 100% on each political party to bring a message that resonates with the voters and gives them a reason to show up. Blaming the voter is a trap, it’s not actionable, and it’s setting the democrats up for failure all over again.
Your position amounts to saying “We cannot move left until we have moved much farther left”.
Biden and/or Harris pretty much tried to do everything that was politically possible on both of those things. If you were holding out because you thought it would be possible to immediately do MORE than what they tried/proposed, you were merely setting yourself up to be a lifetime loser in politics.
I voted for Kamala, I didn’t hold out. I’m trying to offer a tough and honest critique of how to move forward from this. The democrats have settled on a strategy of slowly shuffling right and being yesteryear Republicans on many fronts, and making mountains out of molehills when they do get the occasional small W. That’s reliably bitten them, as we saw in this last election; I think the exit data shows they flipped a total of 1% of Republicans. Meanwhile, Trump’s out there trying to buy Greenland, and the republicans went “okay, I guess we’re doing this”. It’s time to stop fretting about what the horoscopes say and start pushing on the gas as hard as we can.
No. That was their strategy 20-30 years ago. They are actually trying to make progress now, but I agree they need to become much more aggressive in doing that.
You are forgetting that these “small wins” are HUGE WINS to somebody. I had ACA health insurance for several years. Dems did that. Would I have rather had medicare for all? Of course. But I would have had NO health insurance for YEARS without Dems creating the ACA. That was huge for me. And before the ACA people on the internet were always telling me there was no chance at all that health care would ever be reformed.
Let’s not forget that Obama rode into office on the huge promise of fixing healthcare and providing a public option. He got elected on swinging for the fences and big systemic change. To his credit, he did try pretty hard that first term. The second term was much more jaded, and Obama himself seemed to shift right on a number of things, chiefly LGBT rights. But I digress, what big promises have we seen since then? Where have the democrats swung for the fences? I can’t remember a single equally powerful promise from HRC16. Biden had some okay ones, like student loan forgiveness, but nothing that felt equally powerful, I think. Kamala promised to codify Roe V Wade, which is something, but that was couched with expanding fracking and fixing housing by offering first time home buyer credits.
And building low income housing.
I could go on for days about what we need to do for housing, but it’s one of those things where I went into it giddy about the Harris campaign and came out of it saying “oh… Well, that’s alright.” It certainly didn’t feel like anything incredible.
So then we’re all good here. You did what you could, end of story.
The rest of it - how politics in the US today works; how it should - is standard disagreement.
Blaming the voter is extraordinarily important and apt. The people who didn’t show up fucked us, and by extension the planet, over. Furthermore they now wish to be absolved for fucking up extremely badly. No.
As for setting the Democrats up for failure, I disagree with that too, but I see your point there.
Okay, then tell me, what do you do with “it’s the voter’s fault, we made no mistakes and deserved this win”? Because to me, that’s the political equivalent of shoving your hands in your pockets and blaming God. It’s a way to absolve yourself of any responsibility in how things went and of any need to deal with it. Because, I mean, what are you going to do, climb into the bible and fight God / climb into the CNN exit polls and fight the voters? That’s a non-starter.
NO ONE is saying this. I haven’t even seen someone claim a majority of blame belongs to non-voters. They absolutely deserve some of the blame. There’s quite a few turds in this punchbowl.
JUST VOTE.
That’s it. That’s the whole of it.
Anything else is something else. I’m blaming the NON-VOTERS. People who voted are not in that data set.
Okay, I’m seeing a lot of caps. Remember that our goals are more aligned than you probably think just now. I’m going to ask you to take a breath and know that I’m not trying to prevail against you. Rather, I’m trying to persuade you of the urgent need for the democrats to critically re-examine their strategy going forward.
What you’ve just said doesn’t seem actionable to me. What do we do with “JUST VOTE”? How do we execute on that and get a meaningful outcome?
Well, for one, we can foster a sense of civic duty to vote.
For two, we can focus on rideshares, ways to make voting by mail easier, things like that to remove obstacles to voting
For three, we can focus on defeating the evil measures set into law by generations of republiQans to prevent people from voting such as voter ID laws (although that horse has probably left the barn), robo calls, gerrymandering, challenging voter eligibility, things like that.
Those are three main areas that will help people vote. The Democrats are on board with all of them. The republiQans are actively working to demolish all of them. If someone wants to vote for Jill Stein or their gramma or something - fine, we can argue about that later. At least it’s participation in the fundamentals of democracy.
That all sounds great.
The first item kind of reads like “we’ll just go to the moon” once you start to think about it. It’s not impossible, but I think it’s not a realistic tasking.
Two and three definitely seems like something the DNC can and should be organizing.
Believe it or not, generation after generation of American citizens understood that it was their right and duty to vote. And to defend that right.
But a few months ago a whole slew of people right here happily waxed vitriolic about how voting itself was “collusion” and “supported genocide” and other insane shit, and thanks in no small part to them we are now going to get screwed at every level - corporate, governmental, societal - every day, for years.
Faith in our systems (government, economic, civic, etc) has been broadly declining, alongside the portion of eligible population who goes and votes, for decades. It’s both cause and effect of how we arrived at the populist moment, I think. This started waaaaaaay before last October.