So Trump won. Next few years are gonna be rough, I know. What happened, and where can the Dems go from here?

James Carville said it best: It’s the economy, stupid (even if he predicted the wrong candidate). Inflation was a big concern among voters, mostly driven by gas, groceries, and housing. Rightly or wrongly, many voters tied this to Biden, and through him to Harris. They viewed Trump as being likelier to fix things, with a big bold plan (tariffs, deportations, tax cuts). I suspect some (many?) voters wanted to punish Dems for inflation. Others probably thought Harris would worsen it. While she had a long proposal, she didn’t seem to talk about it much, nor boil it down to soundbites. Many of the demos that swung were hit hard by the price increases.

We saw swings among Latinos, young voters, and rural voters toward Trump. Some of this was due to depressed D turnout (Harris got 15 million fewer votes than Biden), but in other cases it was due to genuine swings. Starr County, TX went Republican for the first time in decades. New Jersey only went for Harris by single digit percentages. Black voters had a small 2% decline of the share of the electorate.

I think non-immigration identity politics played a smaller role. I do think Harris/Walz could’ve talked more about men’s issues specifically (suicide, the academic gap, poor job prospects), although they are hard to soundbiteify and not sound forced. They likely could've approached it from a universalist angle. Trans issues might’ve driven some voters to Trump, but I believe it was more localized (e.g., reduced margins in Loudoun County). Latinos likely weren’t particularly turned off of Trump because they aren’t a cohesive bloc, and in many cases not even the same race (you’ve got whites, indigenous, blacks, mixed, even Asian Latinos). Between the countries the cultures can be very different, to the point of each country hating the other. They can be more socially conservative as well, especially those in their 40s and older.

Immigration was definitely a bigger issue, dovetailing with economic issues (housing costs, “why are migrants getting help but not me”, homelessness). The migrant bussing by Gov. Abbott will be viewed as one of the greatest political maneuvers of the 21st century. It brought the issue to voters outside of border states. The number of people coming to the border was frustrating/scary for some voters.

Abortion didn’t play as big of a role, I suspect because many women don’t think they’ll need one, or because they don’t view care that legally may qualify as one.

The state of democracy didn’t motivate enough people for the Dems, in fact, some people who thought it was important voted for Trump.

Foreign policy didn’t play much of a role, although Israel/Palestine probably was significant in Michigan. But that needle would’ve been hard to thread for any candidate, and probably would’ve been less of a problem if other points were addressed.

I think the fact that Harris is a biracial woman did reduce votes, but I don’t think it was necessarily decisive in her losing. The right woman can definitely win (Thatcher won the U.K. in 1979, so it should be possible in the U.S. in 2024). I would probably hold off in 2028, but I don’t see an issue with running women long-term.

So, what are the takeaways for Dems?

1. Suburban white-collar voters are not the end-all be-all. They are a good bloc to have (reliable voters in many swing states, including in off-years), but they are not enough to outweigh the others.

2. You cannot take minority demographics for granted. They will not stay with you forever. They are not monolithic.

3. Social policy can only go so far. Its salience can be quite limited compared to the economy. Negatives can be very negative, white positives may be “meh”.

4. Running against someone, rather than for yourself only works so many times.

5. You can only have so many issues stacked against you and be able to win. If it was just the economy, it might’ve been closer, but you had the economy, and immigration, and social policy, and Israel/Palestine.

6. The average voter does not account for lag in terms of policy. Trump got credit for a good economy even though Obama did a lot of the work.

7. Places that are or have been “safe” are not guaranteed to stay like that forever, especially when paired with point 2, without work.

8. NatCon populism is here to stay. The combination of left-ish economics and social conservativism, propelled by apathetics and the hard right is a winning one, and needs to be countered accordingly.

9. Many folks view Democrats as being the “mom” or “Karen from HR” party. That is not the kind of reputation that wins elections.

10. It’s the economy, stupid.

Based on that, what would my strategy be for Dems in 2026/2028?

1. Clean house. The folks in charge lost 2024 and only barely won 2020. Care needs to be taken to ensure replacements have sufficient political/management experience.

2. Don’t be the party of why/if. Be the party of do. The former implies insecurity, the latter confidence.

3. Bring back the 50-state strategy. Open offices in rural areas. States viewed as safely blue came awfully close to flipping for Trump this year. But the reverse can also be true, especially with a good candidate (cf. Indiana in 2008 ). And even if the presidential candidate loses, downballot candidates can still win, especially in off-years. I think the Dems had a good ground game, and while it cannot make up for everything else, it’s usually better to have it than not. Local elections matter a lot because they have stronger day-to-day impact, and they are the breeding ground for future politicians. North Carolina had several good Dem victories.

4. Focus on economics. Moderate suburbanites aren’t enough to win on, and many people like Trumponomics. Go for smart tariffs, universal policies (e.g., Child Tax Credit, universal Medicare, etc), targeted tax cuts and increases along with tax code simplification, and one other oddball policy (withdrawal from the WTO? Annual gas tax holiday?) likely to be popular with voters.

5. Social moderation/tolerance. The party is a big tent one, and there’s going to be friction over social issues. This doesn’t mean abandoning core constituencies, but being smarter about rhetoric and candidates (you won’t win the Georgia governorship with an Everytown candidate). Candidates should be allowed to have differing views on social policy (especially if it is personal and doesn’t extend to the political realm), and there should be a mechanism to allow dissent on an issue an individual is out of touch on. Related: get the loudest social progressives away from the party. They frequently clash with it but manage to tie the party to an unpopular viewpoint with something they said on Xitter/Tik Tok. I did like the initial message of freedom the Harris campaign was putting out, but it didn’t seem to be used much.

6. Turnout still matters. You need to be able to turn out more people for you than the other guy.

7. (My weird, hot take-ish view) Go on an offensive cyber campaign. You’ve got Russian operatives shilling for Trump and the GOP. Hack them. Make it so they can’t just continuously pump out disinfo. Even a few million should be enough to establish a unit dedicated to fucking up Russian troll farms.

8. (Courtesy of @EgoEimi) Go for the reality TV angle. Lots of rallies, some political stunts, and bring loads of energy.

One final thought: Trump is a sui generis candidate. He energizes people who aren’t into politics normally. Thus far, the GOP hasn’t been able to translate that into off-year elections or non-Trump POTUS candidates. Nobody wants diet Trump, they want the real deal. When he passes away, it remains to be seen whether someone (Vance?) can take over with the same level of success.

I will preface this by stating I'm not an American, and I certainly don't claim to speak for everyone. I'm also not against voting in principle, and in my own country I prefer to vote when I can, and have done so most of the time. But there were times when I chose not to, and there was a time when I regretted voting. I've also been browsing the English internet for a long time, which is dominated by Americans, and I've been part of English-speaking leftie spaces for a while too, which are also dominated by Americans. I base my post on these experiences.

There's a lot to be said on this topic, but I will try to briefly explain a key point I've been able to put into words only recently. Being a leftist, not a left-leaning person or a "leftist" that just means left-leaning liberal, but a genuine leftist, is a weird experience. You have a lot of issues close to your heart. You spend a great deal of time and energy learning to criticize the systems you live under, whether they be capitalism, nation-state, or some cultural hierarchy. You already feel alienated from most people on political issues, because you hold wildly unpopular opinions, and people treat you like a weird person for it. You get into a lot of arguments and conflicts as a result, which often result in further alienation. After all, refusing the status quo is not an easy thing to do, and it often leads to social isolation at some level. It's not predestined, and it's not all-encompassing, but you can't help but feel alienated from most. Their ideas, their ideologies, the things they endorse—it all seems, to put it mildly, a little bit insane.

Then comes the election season, and you realize the politicians of the supposed major """left""" option, which is actually just relatively left compared to the insanely right alternative(s), never take you seriously. They never voice policies that speak to your sensibilities, wishes, beliefs, morality, and principles. They always voice par for the course arguments, and obviously don't care for what you want.

Then, people that are part of the "normal" politics start making the same arguments. In my experience, this happens regardless of the country we're talking about.

• You should still vote for us. The other side is worse.
• If you don't vote for us, you're a traitor.
• A vote not cast for us is a vote cast for them (interestingly, the opposite of this is never voiced: "a vote not cast for them is a vote for us.")
• I don't approve of them in every way either, but this is the lesser of two evils.
• This is not the time to be having these arguments. It's a time for unity.
• This is the only option possible.
• You're not voting out of privilege. (extremely untrue, can even be called an outright lie)
• You should be logical and not emotional. Vote with your brain, not your heart. Be an adult.

The last item on thist list, I think, strikes at the heart of this post. People expect you to be this ultra-rational decision-making machine, "pragmatic" to the core, always willing to shut up and toe the line when it matters, without a care for what you want. But they don't expect this from anyone else (barring minorities). The far-right, right-wingers, centrists, liberals, people satistified with par for the course politics—they all get to voice their wishes, wants, opinions. They all get to act according to their own emotions, without critically examining their own beliefs, ideology, behavior. They all get concessions made to them by politicans. They all get to have a say. But not you. You should shut the fuck up and vote for them. You don't get a say.

They take it for granted that you would vote for them, that's why they never take what you want seriously. They give tons of shits about every other group, which are all part of the status quo politics, but they never give a shit about you. That's why they never make concessions to you.

At some point, naturally, you realize how hypocritical, unfair, and insidious this is. You may not consciously know it, or even be able to put it into words, but deep down you feel it: everybody else gets one, but not you. Then they seriously expect you to support them. And when you don't, they go on a witch hunt, labeling you a traitor.

For example, they expect you to be fine with "your" candidate supporting a genocide, even though this is the worst possible thing a country can do, and then be baffled when you don't take this well. And god forbid, if you "act emotionally" and have your own worldview and sensibilities, like every other group does, and not vote for them, you get labeled a traitor. These people don't realize that their own eagerness to so readily uphold the status quo politics, resulting in your own wishes and values getting eternally ignored, brings about your response.

So, I think this is why a lot of leftists don't vote when they prefer not to. I suspect this also applies to other demographics, such as minorities that get overlooked. And as long as the status quo politics ignores this problem, it won't be solved.

I think, for other people like me, something we can do is to voice why we don't vote when we choose not to. Because the status quo politicians and their supporters seem very eager to get the wrong message, which is "we need to move further right". This, of course, doesn't work, because right-wingers choose the original instead of the imitation anyway.

What I'm saying, I guess, is a very simple democratic process. If you want people to vote for you, you have to take them and what they want seriously, and at the very least make concessions to them. If you do not, they probably won't, and you can't blame them for it. This is how it works for every demographic. So, instead of blaming potential and future voters and supporters, you should criticize the party that failed to get their support.

I've been reconsidering things about honesty in the wider context of politics. I think honesty is at the heart of a good faith approach. You have to be both honest about the limitations of your own thoughts, you have to seriously consider the opinion of the person you're talking to, and you shouldn't attack their person in any way.

It's assumed in ethically liberal communities that honest and constructive conversations are the way to go to get political power, in the positive sense. "They go low, we go high." This is, of course, true in some contexts. An entirely bad faith approach to people would result in alienating potential allies. Having a good faith approaches also gives you some sort of moral argument, which you can leverage.

With this being said, this claim, that it is the only way, is extremely insufficient in several dimensions.

First of all, there are a lot of situations where bad faith approach, where you ridicule and attack your opponent, mock them, or even lie about them, etc. work. A recent example is the Couch Fucker bit about J.D. Vance. It's obviously not true, but it was a very useful piece of propaganda. It just caught on, because he really did seem like the kind of guy to do that. A similar example was misinterpreting a certain search, and saying he was searching dolphin porn. Again, he looks like the type to do that. A third example is the AI-generated images about the MAGA crowd bringing fake semen cups to support J.D. Vance. It's not real but it caught on, because the MAGA crowd contains a lot of people that seem that self-unaware and cultish.

Second, the "good faith first" approach ignores a key dimension of politics—the conflict. "Ideal citizens" in liberal democracies, or people looking up to liberal democracies and their ideals, like to imagine that a properly ethical, positive, constructive dialogue-based approach will triumph over bad actors. Gestures widely at the world This is simply not true. There are a lot of situations where such people fail.

The reason for this is that conflict is not "clean". It is conflict. It can be hard or soft in a wide spectrum, but one would have to ignore pretty much reality itself to claim there are only soft conflicts in the world. The good faith approach, which I outlined above, assumes that you can still overcome the hard conflicts with their "clean" approach (unless it's open war).

This is not true either. There are a lot of, and increasingly, bad faith actors in democracies or semi-democracies that are undermining them in every way they can. They want to take people's rights away, make them poorer, conserve or institute hiearchies, and a lot of them also want to kill you. A major chunk of the far right population would be delighted to genocide the people you love and yourself. And a bigger chunk of the right-wingers are sympathetic to them.

This is not a war in the conventional sense, but it's a serious hard conflict. So, the stakes are not just losing an election and then putting up with some leaders with "differences of opinion". Stakes are much higher. If or when they succeed, a lot of people will suffer at the hands of these weirdos. Some of them will even directly or indirectly get killed.

In light of this context, approaching bad faith actors in bad faith is within reasonable ethical limits, and it's the strategically sound option. This is, again, not a black-or-white thing. Not every situation requires the same strength or variety of bad faith response, neither ethically nor strategically. A context-sensitive approach is required.

This context-sensitivity, in other words flexibility of mind, is at the core of what I'm trying to illustrate here. Black-or-white thinking about having to choose between good faith and bad faith leads to ruin. It's a spectrum. A person ought to assess the situation at hand, and respond properly.

For example, on Tildes I try my best to approach topics from a place of good faith. I think this approach on Tildes mostly works, because a) people here in general try to operate on good faith b) people here seem to try to distance themselves from populist and rash arguments c) it's left-leaning to an extent, and definitely very anti-far right, so less insane opinions.

I neither would want to be bad faith here nor would see any point in it. However, on places like big social media sites (Reddit, Twitter, etc.) I don't really see the point. They are rife with fascists and fascist sympathizers. I saw plenty of naive people -I've been those people- try to explain things earnestly to them, assuming that their opinion is simply based on ignorance and misunderstanding, and not on active ill-will and a conscious choice to hurt people.

Before any objections, I will say that I am aware of the nuances. Not every right-winger is the same (and I have not made that claim), and even among far-right people there are ones who can be persuaded, because they simply are ignorant. But in vast majority of the time, these actors are operating on bad faith. They are not interested in constructive arguments, they are interested in spreading their filth in order to hurt people.

Keeping this in mind, it can be seen that a better counter to their claims is some variety of bad faith. In other words, more ostracization by labeling them things like weirdos and incels. More couch fucking, more dolpin porn, more cups of cum.