It’s literally 2016 but worse somehow.

One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.

“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.

A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.

Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I recall reading early on that DNC campaign advisers were recommending against continuing with the “weird” rhetoric, and the article mentioned some specific people who had worked on the 2016 campaign. It floored me that those people still had jobs. I guess they got their way eventually. I now have no expectation that they won’t be doing the same shit in 2028.

    DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.

    • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 days ago

      DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.

      That’s because they’re paid by big money donors to prevent any movement to the left while big money donors pay the GOP to move further right. This shifts the center (Overton Window) further and further right over time, causing the Democrats to ultimately move towards the right over time.

      Obama said that if he was a politician in the 1980s, he would be considered a Republican, and he wasn’t wrong.

      • bamfic@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Has been the case since 1992. Blame Clinton and his triangation DLC Reagan-lite bullshit

        • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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          4 days ago

          Blame capitalism. Capitalism creates massive wealth disparity and since you can’t detangle wealth from political power, it creates massive power disparities. Those power disparities are used by the rich to slowly ratchet the government and society further and further to the right.

        • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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          4 days ago

          Oh, I do. But also we need major campaign finance reform as a constitutional amendment banning private money in politics so even the Republicans won’t be able to take big money.

          • Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de
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            4 days ago

            Not enough. As long as massive wealth disparities exist, as long as billionaires exist, they will always find a way to use their wealth to ratchet the country further and further to the right

    • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      “DNC Leadership would rather lose with a neoliberal candidate than win with a progressive one.”

      I think I had this exact revelation during or right after the 2020 primaries and it has deeply impacted my approach to voting ever since.

    • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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      6 days ago

      It was all Hillary people. Why the DNC keeps hiring hillary and her people? Well Hillary owns the DNC. It’s a private corporation that has private share-holders and their product is ballot access for the Democratic party.

      If you want to run as a democrat for almost any office in the entire country you have to go through the DNC.