Quote from: Mordo on Today at 03:05:50 PM

Alright, the dust has largely settled, post mortem time on why it went wrong for Kamala:

>The vast majority of exit polls are indicating this was about the economy. Whether you can attribute that to the Biden administration or the post pandemic recovery period is utterly irrelevant to the average voter. It happened under Biden's watch. Voters associated Kamala as the continuity candidate for the current state of economic affairs. She was doomed from the start. The Trump team nailed it on the head by hammering home the simple question of; are you better off now or when I was in charge?

>She lost the POC voting bloc, particularly with males. Latino and black men abandoned her in the droves. I think this is largely down to her west coast elite upbringing just not resonating with POC men. It also doesn't help that she was the Attorney General of California, and if I'm not mistaken, locked a lot of POC men up during her tenure. Not a great image for securing POC votes.

Just genuinely a horrendous pick from the Democrats in hindsight. I'm starting to think she might actually be worse than Hillary.

Of course she was worse than Hillary—let's not forget she was an "also ran" in 2020. She was never considered a serious candidate for anything; when Biden stepped down and the DNC didn't hold a primary, it had the same energy of crossing their fingers and hoping things would just work out.

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>She relied to heavily on vibes and not enough on policy. In retrospect I really think we should have been sounding the alarm bells as her short lived campaign went on. Seriously, I never once heard of a policy position or a concrete step by step plan on how she was going to fix the economy or deal with Gaza if she was to take over. She really just thought coconut memes and brat girl summer tik tok edits were gonna win her the white house.

This is untrue, however. Kamala had several policy positions which she discussed frequently, such as

• Expanding the child tax credit, and wanting to cut taxes for middle class families in general
• Providing first time home buyers with $25K to help with down payments
• ACA expansion
• She wanted to stop price fixing by landlords
• Protecting and strengthening Medicare and Social Security
• Restoring Roe v Wade

...among others.
You can criticize these policy positions by saying she didn't have a concrete step-by-step plan—but I would argue this is totally irrelevant and wouldn't have made a difference. I think you nailed it on your first and third bullet points. She was doomed from the start. The MAGA cult is literally just too big now, and I genuinely believe that we were going to lose no matter what. But she DID discuss policy and she had several of them, especially compared to Trump who had tariffs, and uh.... uh.... uh.... wanting to glass Palestine?... Wanting to kill minorities?... Trump was the one who lacked policies, but policy literally doesn't matter anymore.

The most salient observation you can make, I think, is that she was a generally lame and uncharismatic woman running against an extremely charismatic cult leader in an increasingly racist and misogynistic country where being a liberal is seen as being soft and weak and uncool. The democrats have utterly forgotten the concept of charisma—they don't know how to be inspiring anymore. Trump knows how to inspire people with sub 100 IQs, and that's how you win. In this country, that has proven to be an unbeatable strategy.