I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.
The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.
The Democrats reliably back the color "beige" as a candidate.
Obama was different, and he won back to back.
Biden succeeded, barely, because Trump was fresh in everyone's mind. But for some reason the Democrats have been allergic to charisma for far too long.
Voting in the US, it feels like I am forced to choose between evil and incompetence.
Hell, when it comes to government, I easily prefer boring to not-boring in an executive all else being equal. Which it wasn't here, but still.
I want the firebrands with big ideas to improve things in the legislature, and steady hands on the tiller in the executive. Unfortunately it seems that my compatriots want firebrands in both places.
Obama is a very unique case. I wouldn't exactly call him a firebrand, but his public persona managed to give the perception of being a steady hand on the tiller who also had big ideas. The only other presidential candidate in my lifetime to give a similar impression was Al Gore, but he leaned more into the "steady hand" thing to his detriment. He also, as you note, had far less charisma than Obama.
I think you would be surprised by how not completely unique Obama was!
The Democrats have had a number of pretty high quality, charismatic candidates, but for some reason they never receive the party backing on the national stage, at least not for the presidency.
The Democrats seem to lean in to almost inheriting nominations. Hillary Clinton, Biden, Kamala, etc.
“The heir apparent”.
Honestly the most unique thing about Obama Was that they broke from “the heir apparent” and ran someone who had risen up from the state level and was merely a high quality congressman for a short period of time.
I mean, I followed the 2020 primary. Basically everyone who thought they had an outside chance seemed to be running there. I liked Buttigeg and Booker then, because they most fit the Obama mold -- well-spoken, charismatic, unifying rhetoric, credible claims (at the time) that they could take on the establishment, no serious baggage. Realistically, both were closer to Al Gore than Obama in execution, but still.
Booker clearly never had a chance in the primary to begin with, even moreso than Harris. Buttigeg suffered from never finding a strong enough constituency -- he wasn't loud enough to pull from the populist wing (who went to Bernie), but never made a serious play for any of the other major wings. He couldn't do that the way Biden did (by calling in favors with other popular Democrats) because he didn't have the connections, but didn't even try to do it the way Warren did (by advocating specific policies).
Meanwhile, Bernie never really tried to expand his coalition outside the populist and leftist wings (which he basically took all of). It turns out that those groups are not enough to win a democratic primary on their own. He was also perceived as a liability in the general -- remember, Democrats hadn't totally given up on Florida yet, and embracing the term "socialism" is a massive liability there.
Warren was somewhat effective in building a broad coalition, and had a similar strategy to Obama. She maybe could've pulled off that style of insurgent campaign. Her candidacy was doomed because of two factors: first, she is just not charismatic enough to compete with Bernie for the populist and leftist wings, but they are absolutely required for an insurgent campaign. Second, even if she had won the primary, she is a massive liability in the general election for a lot of reasons -- which ensured she was never going to win a primary when the primary concern was stopping the bleeding that Donald Trump was seemingly-deliberately causing.
Once you've ruled out Booker, Buttigeg, Sanders, and Warren, you're basically left with Biden vs. a crowd of other boring people. Is it really surprising that the guy who can barter for endorsements and trade on Obama's legacy managed to beat people like Klobuchar?
Now, you might say it's possible that those people (Booker, Buttigeg, Sanders, Warren) would have all made better candidates than Harris in 2024, and could have succeeded with Biden out of the field. I'd agree with that! I am not trying to argue that none of these people are better than Harris; I'm trying to argue that none of them are what Obama is. They were either trying to do something very different than what he did, or much worse at it. They all also lost significant "outsider" cred by 2024 for various reasons.
Yes and no. It's a two-party system and a lot of people vote for candidate X to stop candidate Y getting in. Indeed IIRC a lot of democrat messaging around the previous election was explicitly about stopping Trump rather than the merits of whoever their guy was.
Enough people did not vote against Trump is my point. "The democrats" voted against Trump, otherwise they don't really count as part of "the democrats" for this election, right?
And he won the popular vote if you believe that all U.S. elections are secure and sacrosanct. He is diabolical at getting people to talk about him and think about him constantly.
Joe Biden on the other hand was a senile wrecker for Build Back Better and the party finally made "the switch" to unelected Harris far too late in the process. Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy. Her VP candidate choice was hobbled by rising anti-semitism in the party against Shapiro and perhaps concerns of being outshined by him. No, the Democrats did not do themselves any favors in the '24 election.
Carter, Clinton and Obama were media creations, vaulting to national prominence out of nowhere. It helped that Clinton and Obama were great, charismatic choices.
Now the traditional media is fragmented and weak. You're not seeing furtive vaulting attempts for potential phenoms like Newsome gain any traction. Who is the media going to be stuck with next time? Will it be take-two for Harris?
WHEN, not if, Harris loses bigly to Vance, then the Democrats will absolutely be to blame. Where are their all new shiny, beautiful, erudite candidates that would need all four years to gestate and promote? Shouldn't we be getting acquainted with them now? I wager they're not going to appear, and we'll get more flunkies. My theory as to why is that those currently in power in the party do not share; they're aging out and hollowing out the party in the process. We're to the point now of collapse. I'm surprised a third party on the left hasn't yet formed.
> Even if she was a great candidate, with her odd laughter and fascination with buses, there was not enough time to shape her candidacy.
I don't think anyone who would have ever voted for her actually cared at all about her laugh. I do think that she'd have done much better with more time though. I also agree that Democrats are too invested in themselves and the status quo to put forward a candidate who will make the kinds of meaningful changes that Democratic voters actually want. If a third party were viable I think a lot of registered democrats would be eager to jump ship, but in order for that to happen we'd need elected officials willing to make major voting reforms which at this point would take a third party.
> I also agree that Democrats are too invested in themselves and the status quo to put forward a candidate who will make the kinds of meaningful changes that Democratic voters actually want.
The old saying "the customer doesn't know what they want" seems true of the average Democratic voter. I look at the Democratic party planks as primarily boomer-era causes increasingly misaligned with technological progress and social evolution.
I see average Democratic voters as wistful and earnest, but ultimately not (yet? ever?) grounded with a cohesive vision for modern/future American society _at scale_. In my opinion, the moment for a legitimate new vision to emerge was Occupy Wall Street. All that movement seemed to yield for the grassroots was an acquaintance with homelessness culture.
Yeah I think the presidential election system may be the one to blame. Only two parties, both very much "to the right", doesn't feel like a sane system anymore. IMO the better way is to have the government represent the people, and representing the people generally means enough politicians and having to go for a consensus.
Somehow "centrist" has taken on a negative connotation in Democratic circles, but I don't understand it. Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation.
Governing in a sustainable way usually means big tent politics with give and take on the small stuff. Bill Clinton epitomized that style.
> Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation.
Are you talking about US politics here? I don't see anything that would get close to "left", so "far left"... unless they reach the far left by going enough to the right I guess?
1619 project is Jacobin-style, revisionist history politics. Defund the Police, Jacobin. To flood drugs, homeless and immigrants into sanctuary cities is intentional Jacobin tactics to cause normal people to become fed up and to overturn the system. Revolutionaries are gonna revolt. Too bad everyone is too tired and distracted to give a crap about their utopian visions.
In rare and extreme circumstances it makes sense to have a revolution because the people are oppressed. For the rest of history, revolutionary fervor always comes from power hungry psychopaths who'd jail and kill everyone that stands in their way and then rule perpetually over everyone that's left if they could.
Thankfully, their time is usually short. They had a good run this time, very sneaky and devilish, but back to the political desert they go.
Every politician is to blame for their losses, just as every politician own their wins. The people voted for Trump because the Dems failed to get the people to vote for them.
Democrats will not let people choose candidates because that may be too dangerous for their interests. We'll never get good candidates as long as the current leadership is in control.
Denying that the democrats had two high-profile situations where the “wrong” candidate ended up running is denying the obvious. It’s manifest that Obama wasn’t to win the primary, and that the superdelegates exist for reasons.
When pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.
Nate Silver is not a magician! He can't magically make polls reliable!
All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty.
TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!
> All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand.
He (or anybody) can make adjustments to the data. He was challenged to explain why his predictions were so different, but he wouldn't do it.
> 538 did that better than any other poll analyst
He made a binary prediction, and it was wrong. There's no such thing as "better" when you only have one outcome. Your prediction is either right or wrong. If by "better" you mean he was wrong but assigned a higher probability to a Trump victory, the best forecaster would have been someone that mechanically changed the probability of a Trump victory to slightly less than 50% no matter what the data said.
What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?