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- cross-posted to:
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Summary
In the 2024 election, Democrats excelled with highly engaged voters but lost ground with less-engaged voters, particularly younger, working-class, and non-college-educated individuals.
Vice President Kamala Harris won among voters who closely follow politics by 5 points but trailed Donald Trump by 14 points among less-engaged voters.
Democratic strategists highlighted failures in outreach, reliance on narrow data models, and ineffective messaging.
Critics noted the party’s brand is often defined by extreme voices, while Republicans capitalized on dissatisfaction with the economy and national direction, resonating with everyday frustrations.
The “thinking” was instead to vote for the guy who tried to murder Congress?
The point of this article is that Trump was elected by those who did very little thinking at all.
They just didn’t vote at all, which is kinda the same thing but there’s nuance to it even still.
They did focus groups this past summer about at what point people would stop voting for Trump based on his felonies. The overwhelming answer was if he received a custodial sentence. The double delay signaled to voters that these felonies weren’t actually that bad.
Similarly the non action on the Jan 6 case also signaled to voters that it wasn’t a big deal. So they didn’t feel like they were voting for the guy who tried to murder Congress.
No, it’s that voters respond more to actions than words.
Democrats doomed themselves with the pro-democracy message in 2024. They shouldn’t even have mentioned Trump’s threat to democracy. It simply made them look unhinged to low-information voters. By the time the 2024 election came around, Biden’s own actions made running on the democracy angle nonviable.
The fatal flaw in Democrats’ messaging is that they ran on Trump as an enemy of democracy in 2016, 2020, and 2024. They ran on it, and yet, they did nothing about it.
Trump should have been hauled before a military tribunal and charged with treason on day one of Biden’s presidency. Any SCOTUS justices that tried to carve out special provisions for him should have been hauled in front of the same tribunal and been charged as accomplices. Every single person remotely involved with the conspiracy, including seating members of Congress, should be rotting in Gitmo right now. They all should have been sent to jail or the gallows within 100 days of Biden taking office.
THAT is how you respond to a threat to democracy. You do what you have to do, purge who you have to purge, and let history be your judge. Damn the consequences. Do some MAGA traitors want to start a riot in protest? Fine, send in the military to put them down. Do what you need to do and cut the rot out of the body politic.
You can’t just SAY something is a threat to democracy. You need to get off your ass and actually DO something about it. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had pro-Confederate newspapers shut down, and that was just the start of it.
When democracy is threatened, sometimes you need to run roughshod over a lot of democratic norms, lest the enemies of democracy get away with it and try again. They only need to win once, you need to win every time. Which means that when someone does actually try to overthrow democracy, you need to come down like the hammer of God upon them. You need to respond with such overwhelming force that people are lining up at the door to strike a plea deal for a mere decade in prison. Realistically, when things get this bad, you need to be prepared to sentence thousands of people to decades in prison based on rapid trials in kangaroo courts if necessary. When thousands of people become so far gone that they think overthrowing a democracy is an acceptable option, the only real way to resolve that is to start handing out life and capital sentences like candy.
What did Biden actually do? He appointed an attorney general who sat on the Trump case for two years and only started an investigation when shamed into it by the House. And then Trump just ran out the clock. Garland prosecuted a bunch of the low-level people who physically stormed the capital, but he made sure all the actual high-level ring leaders escaped unpunished.
Biden didn’t have a spine. He showed, through his actions, that he really didn’t consider Trump a serious threat to democracy. And if the sitting president of the United States doesn’t consider someone a threat, why would you expect disengaged voters to do so?
My only hope is that if Trump’s promised Reign of Terror does occur, that he starts with all the leading figures of Biden’s Justice Department. While whatever mistreatment they receive will be for things that weren’t actually wrong, at least they will be indirectly punished for their actual crimes - failing to defend this nation’s democracy. If Biden and Garland end up themselves sitting in prison on some Trumped-up charge, well I’ll have zero sympathy for them. They will simply be serving their sentence for their cowardly failure to defend American democracy. If anyone is to feel the boot of a new autocracy, let them be the first. They are the ones that created it.
Hmm yes, to save the democracy one must absolutely kill the democracy. We just have to suspend certain rights and liberties until “the enemy within” is rooted out.
Certainly not fascism.
Fascism is when you fight fascism
I see you went to the Bến Tre school of saving democracy.
No thanks to hauling Supreme Court justices before a military tribunal because you don’t like the way they ruled. I wish we had expedited the cases against Trump, but I don’t want a bunch of leftists suspending democratic principles just long enough to make sure their political opponents are weakened. We’ve seen that ploy before, and it doesn’t end with freedom.
They’re not wrong about Lincoln, but they’re forgetting Lincoln had an actual civil war.