Showing Contempt for Young Voters Is a Great Way for Democrats to Lose in November
Hillary Clinton’s arrogance already lost one election. And if Joe Biden follows her example, it can easily cost another.
Who will replace the young people that Clinton regards as dunces? In 2016, the pitch was made to suburban Republicans of the Never Trump persuasion. In 2024, this has been recast as the Biden campaign’s attempts to appeal to Nikki Haley Republicans. This strategy only makes sense as a response to Biden’s loss of support among young people and nonwhite voters.
Clintonian triangulation failed in 2016, and it will fail again in 2024. You simply can’t win as a Democratic presidential candidate by giving the back of your hand to large parts of your own coalition. Joe Biden understood that in 2020—but tragically seems to be suffering from memory loss in 2024.
That's just a spot on analysis.
There are no Republicans that will vote for Joe Biden.
There are voters who will vote Joe Biden if he moves to go get them.
This isn't complicated.
There were enough Republicans who voted for Biden in '20 to flip Georgia, which is solidly "mainstream" Republican (e.g. Reagan Republicans).
The article's analysis of why Hillary lost is correct, and the diagnosis of the failures of Clintonism is also correct. They fail to point out that Clinton "won" '92 because Perot pulled away enough Bush votes in enough states to swing the Electoral College to Clinton, who only got 40% of the popular vote. That "victory" somehow convinced a bunch of Democrats that conservatism without bigotry (or at least less) was the key to electoral success. Clinton got reelected with the power of incumbency and BobDole being a fairly weak candidate. That cemented the conservatism lite in the Democratic Party for a generation, many of whom are still in the party.
It's changing though. Biden is not a classic conservative Democrat anymore, or at least his team and policies aren't.
One big thing they need to do is acknowledge that the system is rigged against the non wealthy, and that small-d democracy as it exists today in America is not up to the task of helping the non wealthy. Then they need to propose ways to fix our broken democracy, ask young people for suggestions for how to fix it, and write some binding policy proposals to implement those fixes.
Because right now Trump and the Republicans are acknowledging that our democracy is failing non wealthy (straight white Christian) people, and the solution they're offering is to do away with it entirely in favor of Hungarian or Russian style authoritarianism.
The first part of that message will resonate, and the "help us fix democracy" part needs to be the 2nd half. Or Trump probably will get reelected.
Reaching for the republican defectors instead of reaching for the disenfranchised progressives that are unfortunately stuck in your party already. They may just be too busy working to try to survive in this economy than to show up to vote for someone who forgot about them anyway. Dems would rather scoot to the right than get pulled to the left. Hell, they would rather have a Trump presidency than move to the left. Progressives hurt their doners, a Trump presidency gives them tax breaks and lowers the bar for the office so they can run an even shittier candidate in 2028 as we spiral into this corporate idiocracy.
Anyway, I will be voting for Biden in November to keep it as far left as possible. But it is not a great strategy. I am getting more and more apathetic with this bullshit game and might keep my nose out of federal elections and stick to local/state elections in the future until someone comes along to shake things up. The last 8 years have been horrible in this country and embarrassing, and the best they can do is give US THE SAME SHIT OVER AND OVER. The federal level elections are just a money funneling clown show that gets gerrymandered into alignment in their desires anyway.
To clarify, I haven't seen Biden actively disregard us as a species, I've seen him pretend to placate us with things like a half assed "attempt" at student loan forgiveness thinking we are dumb enough to be like. "Well, he tried, guess Republicans are bad." At the end of the day he has actually done nothing productive during his first term, the term he is supposed to be worried about reelection. Even less is somehow going to happen in his second term. But at least he's not actively going backward like Trump would do.
To clarify, I haven’t seen Biden actively disregard us as a species, I’ve seen him pretend to placate us with things like a half assed “attempt” at student loan forgiveness thinking we are dumb enough to be like. “Well, he tried, guess Republicans are bad.” At the end of the day he has actually done nothing productive during his first term, the term he is supposed to be worried about reelection. Even less is somehow going to happen in his second term. But at least he’s not actively going backward like Trump would do.
he disregarded you if you took any private student loans after 2005
biden was instrumental in making student loan debt easy & non-dischargeable; he deserves more of the blame for it than anybody else for the crap this country is about to experience from this $1.4 trillion fuck up.
also: if you're not straight he voted against gay marriage and gays in the military and also advocated against gays in federal service.
also: if you think integration was a good thing, biden disagreed.
I agree with the article except for this part:
Joe Biden’s success in 2020 was due in no small part to his deliberate rejection of Clinton’s failed strategy. “Scranton Joe” courted both Sanders voters and blue-collar whites. He promised expanded infrastructure spending and tougher trade deals. Progressive young people might not have given Biden their votes in the primaries, but he campaigned as a candidate who saw them as part of his coalition and duly won their votes on Election Day.
I think the main reason Biden won in 2020 is because of COVID. That and correctly recognizing that people despise both him and Trump and realizing that if he simply stays out of the limelight people won't pay as much attention to how bad he is. Neither of these factors are working for him now, it's much harder to stay out of the limelight when you're the one in charge.
I suppose there may have been less open hostility towards the left compared to Clinton, but only because that's such a low bar.
I also believe COVID played a huge role. People were like "Trump is an idiot and is going to get us all killed!" so they went with Biden. Then Biden did ok for awhile then some of us had to die for the economy. :(
Put aside all current issues and just look at the fundamentals. Obama was a charismatic politician and organizer who inspired youth vote and a way-above-average black turnout. Makes sense. Biden by contrast lacks rizz in any appreciable amount. He isn't going to move the needle for young people or any particular groups. He has no built-in support.
It is really as simple as that.
Idk, dark Brandon was kinda hype for me.
Cynically I presume that the Dems keep trying to court moderate Republicans because if they can get enough support from them, they can justify sticking with a moderate platform that allows the DNC to continue collecting enormous piles of soft money from corporations.
In order to appeal to the more progressive younger voters (and make no mistake about it - appealing to them would GUARANTEE victory), they would have to adopt a platform that would cut into thise enormous piles of soft money.
And they're just not willing to do that. The simple fact of the matter is that the DNC values the money more than it values actually winning the election. If guaranteeing the ininterrupted flow of soft money requires tactics that mean the Democrat loses, then that, to them, is just the way it goes.
And after the fact, they'll just blame someone else - almost certainly the progressives.
Democrats stab you in the back, Republicans stab you right in the fucking face. But they are both stabbing you...
Pretty much, yeah.
The Republicans are able to overtly promise to do things the corporate jackals want, and just spin it a bit so the voters will think it's for them. They can promise to cut taxes (and not mention that that's just taxes for the rich) or promise to downsize government (and not mention that they're just going to eliminate regulations to which corporations and rich people don't want to be subject), and so on.
The Democrats are in a much trickier position, since there's no way to spin their intention of working for the benefit of the corporate jackals as representing the will of their supporters, and they can't sincerely promise to do the things their supporters expect without alienating the jackals and cutting into the flow of that sweet, sweet soft money. So they're stuck either making vague, wishy-washy promises that they then don't keep, or just being overtly moderate-at-best and trying to shame leftists into supporting them anyway.
God what a whole lot of mental gymnastics to get a clickbait headline. The article is 95% "Hillary Clinton bad" and then backflips to try to associate it to Biden.