Summary
Gender bias played a significant role in Kamala Harris’s defeat, with many voters—often women—expressing doubts about whether “America is ready for a female president.”
Some said they “couldn’t see her in the chair,” or questioned if a woman could lead, with one even remarking, “you don’t see women building skyscrapers.” Though some voters were open to persuasion, this often became a red line.
Oliver Hall, a Harris campaign volunteer, found that economic concerns, particularly inflation, also drove voters to Donald Trump, despite low unemployment and wage growth touted by Democrats.
Harris was viewed in conflicting ways, seen as both too tough and too lenient on crime, as well as ineffective yet overly tied to Biden’s administration.
Ultimately, Hall believes that Trump’s unique appeal and influence overshadowed Harris’s campaign efforts.
He got almost half of the Latino vote, and we are bleeding Latino support. That’s not racism. It means there’s something else happening.
Further, you’ll get no argument from me that they believe lies. But we are seeing record numbers of asylum seekers, many of which are legitimately abusing the system. When we ignore that problem and pretend it’s not happening and that it doesn’t have acute financial impacts on border communities, we abandon our chance to provide a counterpoint to the lies.
“They’re not voting” rings hollow when these folks see reports of arrests for non-citizen voting, and then see this happening. When we pretend these things aren’t happening or downplay them, it not only feeds Trump’s narratives, it also strips us of our ability to be fact checkers.
The people at the bottom of the economic ladder believe and support him. They are not all irredeemable racists. We need to stop disparaging them as such or we will never get them back.
I think the main thing I can take away from this is I’d be terrible at running a political campaign. I already knew that.
While I can understand how more traditional conservative messages resonate with people, Trump’s are outside my Overton window. I can see the mechanics of how it works, and I can empathize with people who feel like the current system is failing them, but not with those who feel like Trump is going to fix it.
I’m disappointed your comments are attracting downvotes. They are on-topic and well-reasoned.
I appreciate your response and understand your conundrum. It’s hard to make sense of this because his movement seems so abhorrent sometimes.
Consider for just a moment, though, that the downvotes are proving to you exactly the argument I’m trying to make. I’m squarely on the left and despise Trump, but for years the left has cared more about being “right” and punishing people who disagree in life and online, than about being open to diverse people and opinions.
I really hate to have to echo tired right-wing talking points, but the terminally online left is our single most toxic bloc, and they exert huge amounts of control over what topics and opinions are “allowable” online. You get hammered with downvotes and shouted out of the room any time you even try to consider another perspective, even if you do it politely. I can see how someone looking in from the outside would start to doubt our sincerity in arguing for diversity and tolerance. We’re an awfully intolerant lot, all things considered.
What’s funny is I’m not a part of the terminally online left. It would be hard to deny the terminally online part while posting on Lemmy, but I lean more libertarian than left. I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. Now some reader here probably thinks I’m a terrible person.
Trump’s 2016 election convinced me to compromise a lot and vote for team blue even if I had major differences of opinion of certain policies. His attempt to steal the 2020 election cemented that decision, as that’s a long-term threat to the continued existence of democracy in America.