Now is a great time for if I were there hypotheticals, so here’s mine.
Once it was decided to run Harris and push Biden out, they should have gone all the way and used the 25th amendment to let Harris become president. This would have effectively separated her from Biden while still allowing her to take credit for the good stuff. She could have instructed the DOJ to start investigating price gouging now, and campaigned on needing to win to keep it up.
The 100ish days wouldn’t have been enough for wholesale replacement, but it could have created a concrete message of this is where I want to go. A campaign focused on already delivering is a positive message people could get behind as well.
Another thing Dems shouldn’t be doing now: making excuses.
The $15 minimum wage passed in a landslide here in Missouri.
That’s empirical evidence that it was stupid to float tax breaks and cosplay as moderate Republicans. They should have leaned into New Deal politics, but they didn’t. Only Trump spoke to workers, even if he was lying.
In retrospect the teamsters and other unions declining to endorse Harris should have triggered every alarm in the campaign, and I don’t think it did.
Absolutely it should have. As a Green Party supporter, it felt condescending and tone deaf to me how everything Dems said was about being “joyful” in a country where many people are paying double or triple for groceries, utilities, and rent for the last three years. I had to loan my 80 year-old parents my car so they can drive for DoorDash, because we don’t have a social safety net for the elderly and no one else will employ them. Don’t tell me to be joyful. Tell me you’re going to hold corporations accountable and actually take care of our people.
Except… they won’t, though neither will the conservatives. The only thing required for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. Which there seem not enough of, at least in comparison to the forces on the other side that want to tear everything down - in fairness, it is significantly easier (and thus needs far fewer resources) to destroy than to create.
Maybe. I’m hearing that a lot lately, but I’m not politically astute enough to judge there - especially regarding Missouri that has more than a little contentious relationship with liberals. I’m talking bombings of abortion clinics, Josh Hawley being the only Senator to vote against a particular sex-slave trafficking bill, death threats delivered to SO MANY doctors etc. Even if what you are saying is true, I can see why her campaign did not think that Missouri could have been flipped over to actively voting for her. And even if it could have been, at what cost i.e. what amount of resources would that have required, vs. trying harder to win e.g. Pennsylvania?
Definitely that - similar to Hillary’s promises “just suck it up and take it b/c everything is fine now as it is” (except pro-tip: it was NOT, and more people voted against her than for him). Both of them I noticed barely had a primary, which broke the older convention of leaning more left to first win the libs, then shift a bit to the right to engage the centrists (like people in MO). Perhaps not having a campaign is what led to her shifting too far to the right, straight out of the gate, and never having a chance to show the actual liberals what she wanted to do for them? She counted on people showing up for her to spite Trump… but apparently the Gaza situation, in combination with so much else (inflation & other economic hardships) did not make that happen, particularly where it counted i.e. again Pennsylvania (but the latter would have been substantially helped by hearing from many other places that had likewise chosen her over him instead of the reverse).