That I cannot disagree with… Will 100% agree that flaws were made with… (in no particular order)

1. Voters not actually researching until it was too late. The amount of trump voters posting “what do you mean tarrifs will raise prices on stuff”. and amount that were searching “what is a tarrif”, stories of actual trump supporters that literally are getting deported etc… There’s absolutely a lot of trump voters, that wouldn’t have voted it if they took the time to understand what trump was literally openly saying he’d do… and did.

2. Non voters… IE via apathy or disagreements on the democratic party. Be it over just lazyness, or to try and get the democratic party to represent them better… the end result is now it’s going to take years of work whenever power is taken just to bring the country back to where it was a month ago… let alone improve it in the ways they wanted.

3. The democratic party. Honestly there’s 2 pretty blaring mistakes IMO in this campaign… starting with bypassing the primary, covering up Biden’s senility and letting him re-run. Rushing the flip to harris with now no primary or system in place of letting anyone chose our candidate… Then some major misteps on the harris campaign, which I felt was doing amazing early on… making solid steps solid grabs, minor misstep in refusing to criticize or draw a strong contrast between herself and biden., climbing in the polls… Before suddenly making a hard right turn on messaging. Courting the unobtainable red voters instead of focusing on motivating her own base to get out and vote.

I agree, trump is awful enough, that this should have been a slam dunk. the fact that this was ever anywhere close is an embarasment to the country as a whole constantly.

That being said… it still sucks that there’s a very good chance that even through those flaws, there’s still reason to question if we had won by a few percent… because honestly the potential of a small scale sabatoge (IE one to drop a few percent of votes rather than just outright change the machines and do it in bulk), would just be a 4th factor to add to that list.

I think the key here is that Harris could have been a better candidate, and at certain points, especially before the convention, she was a better candidate.

She specifically and intentionally pivoted away from the politics that work for the Democratic party, Democratic Socialism, and towards neoliberalism and neoconservatism, a politics that doesn’t work for the Democratic party. It was cheerleaded by many here on Lemmy, and when told that this wouldn’t work, that it was harmful to her electoral chances, that they were pivoting to a non-existent center, we were called bots, schills, fascists, communists, armchair activists (although many of us making these criticisms, like myself have litterally put in thousands of hours into political campaigns). The briggading, the trolling, the abuse, the gaslighting: moderators and some very prevalent posters here on Lemmy were directly responsible, if not complicit. It was structural, and moderation abuse allowed it to happen and allows it to persist. And while it’s not unique to Lemmy (the same process was happening on Reddit), this is our house and we are collectively responsible for the outcomes that happen here.

Yep, she dropped out before Iowa because she was polling this badly when she ran for President in her own right. So yeah:

• no primary (Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson would not have been the only candidates if there was a competitive primary).
• everyone in the media just throwing away their credibility by claiming Biden was a young spring chicken, despite us seeing him have senior moments on the regular.
• gaslighting people about the economy (inflation is down, wages went up, stock market is up). Sure, those metrics were all technically correct, but all of those were skewed by the high end of the income scale, and the average person was still worse off than before. I don’t think Biden could’ve done a lot more besides manhandling Manchin and Sinema to get a higher minimum wage passed and renewing the child tax credit, but at least be honest about this and acknowledge that there’s more to be done, and have done plans about what you’ll do about it in a next term.
• all those previous things (and you could add more stuff to that, like Gaza and the tiktok ban), that were obvious to anyone with eyes, and destroyed the credibility of all mainstream media when they talked about project 2025 and Trump being the next Hitler (again, true things, but you need credibility to get through to people).
• wasn’t helped by Kamala running around with the most unpopular politician around that isn’t liked by Democrats or Republicans, and her unwillingness to draw any contrast with Biden in a change election where he’s underwater in the polls.

The people running her campaign committed malpractice, and because of the 2 party system, it’s but like voters can vote for another party without throwing away their vote (which they still should’ve done outside of the swing states, but the left again didn’t have their shit together and the whole thing was a shitshow with Cornell West wasting everyone’s time running for a Greens nomination he wasn’t going to get).