I spent hours trying to persuade US voters to choose Harris not Trump. I know why she lost.

38 comments

1. Summary: too many voters believed the misinformation and didn’t want to change their mind, because doing so would mean admitting that they had been duped.

2. She failed to convince straight, white people that she would do anything to specifically help them.

   She also failed to make people think resources they were already getting, wouldn’t be diverted elsewhere.

   At least — that’s mostly what I thought when I voted for her. She’s not great, but it wasn’t even a competition based on who her opponent was.

   You can dig into the weeds of the psyche of everyone involved, but it really is so much more simple than that. The largest demographics didn’t feel like they were top priority and people are selfish and do not like that. They voted for the guy who said he was there to help *them.*

   edit: If Donald Trump had been properly called out and stopped from lying to people for the last 10 years, we would not be here. Stop letting bad faith lies be covered by First Amendment.

3. >But gender did play a role. Time and again, voters, very often women themselves, told me that they just didn’t think that “America is ready for a female president”. People said they couldn’t “see her in the chair” and asked if I “really thought a woman could run the country”. One person memorably told me that she couldn’t vote for Harris because “you don’t see women building skyscrapers”. 

4. I mean, it’s quite sad that a proportion of the US can’t cope with a woman president

5. It’s almost as if there should be a law against disinformation and spreading false claims. 

   It’s almost as if this should not be considered free speech. 

   Does anyone remember the rhetoric on the radio in Rwanda leading up to the genocide? 

   That wasn’t free speech, it was hate speech. 

   Stop getting high on your own supply of Freedom. 

6. She lost because Trump won.

   Like it or not but people wanted him.

   Your average American doesn’t mind Trump being a convicted fellon and a rapist who undermines democracy and tried to overturn election. Not only they don’t mind that, they find quite appealing what he says and promises.

   This is America. A backwards thinking country which finds violence attractive.

7. Weve lost the plot of truth. People believe what is convenient and have developed extremely short memories.

   Also, i hate to be harsh but we have a largely consequence-less society now. They don’t care that trumps a rac/pist because theyll get exactly zero flak for not caring. As long as they win.

   Well, people like myself have started drawing boundaries. A lot of parents lost their kids over the past few days. Maybe they shouldnt have been so fkn stupid.

   For reference, Romney, McCain, and others were not my pick but my parents supporting them didnt really bother me. At least it was policy and not cultural hatred.

8. About half of Americans are incapable of intelligently participating in representative self-government…but they still vote. So…here we are.

9. Admitting you were wrong is part of growing up. That says a lot about MAGAts

10. Blatant liar believed by majority of stupid country

    Edit: Not just his voters, “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice”

11. It’s nearly impossible to counteract the overt propaganda machine of the Murdoch-Musk foreign oligarchy for shaping US public opinion. Let’s blame ourselves instead.

12. This is exactly why we need to do every single thing we can to call out misinformation over the next four years. The media has a duty to do so much better.

13. I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion regarding how the Dems alienated and villainised young males who have gradually shifted to the far right as they’re the only ones addressing their problems. I may be wrong here, but most problems affecting this group are problems that affect every other demographic (rising taxes, inflation, financial debt)

    The GOP has consistently not only alienated but actively targeted everyone who isn’t a straight white male.

    Why did only these men vote in their best interest and no other demographic?

    I can understand level of self hatred in some minorities but Harris seemingly lost votes from almost all demographics even when issues not only relevant to them but can be completely life altering (deportation, abortion ban) were on the ballot.

    Everyone is ostracising the left for vilifying the straight white male while the right is attacking everyone else with guns blazing.

14. I’ve been saying this for months. You can not convince someone that the tooth fairy isn’t real. Even children need to figure it out for themselves and adults are a lot harder to change minds. What Harris should have done, one of the many things, is not try to convince people the tooth fairy was real, but admit they are real, but they’re actually screwing you by selling your teeth for a profit and you’re just a pawn in the tooth market.

15. Summary: all the ‘reasons‘ mentioned are a cover up for misogyny and racism. Period.

16. When Trump told his supporters at his rallies “don’t even vote, we got all the votes” and the the “secret” with Mike Johnson. It makes sense when the numbers don’t even make sense.

    Then all of a sudden he’s quiet as a mouse.

17. Why is this even a surprise? And why can’t the dems plan around that simple fact? Dems are led by a bunch of idiots. They lost to a TV character twice now and the second time after he tried to overthrow the election. People mobilized to get rid of Trump in 2020. Then dems decided to do nothing for four years. GOP is bad but dems pretend to do good and do absolutely nothing. Same thing with Obama. He let the rust belt die and instead rolled out ACA which ushered in mother of all inflation in healthcare costs. Sick of this stupid party.

18. The general vibe during most of Biden’s term was ‘this sucks’. He and Harris remained underwater in approval polling since Sept 2021.

    But if you live in a blue bubble, you likely were shielded from this reality.

    Its not that people believed Trump’s campaign, its that Trump’s campaign was able to ‘read the room’ and then amplified & broadcasted those widely felt feelings far and wide.

    Democratic leadership doesn’t ‘read the room’ outside of its own echo chamber.

19. I still feel like this isn’t confronting the truth of the numbers – Trump basically kept his voters while the Dems lost theirs. A major part of the voting bloc that supported Biden in 2020 didn’t show up for Harris. Presumably these aren’t misogynistic maga cult members indoctrinated by talk radio, fox news, and podcast bros. These are people who were dissatisfied with what they were being offered by the Democratic party, and the real question is why and what can be done about it.

20. Maybe that is partly true. But how about the dems have to look in the mirror and reflect on how they have to be better. Just saying voters got duped gives them too much of a free pass.

21. Trumpers say the 2020 election was stolen. Why didn’t the Democrats steal this election?

22. Democrats lost because Clinton moved right and gave us NAFTA without any basic income services to so many people who suffered. All they got they got was a limited time of job training and whole communities were decimated.

    Trump is riding the populist wave that began with NAFTA, and was reinforced when Obama gave into the Chicago School of Fuck the Regular Folks Economics.

    We may laugh, but regular folk see trump as their Christian Bernie Sanders.

    Democrats fkd up when they did that hard right corporate turn. Biden was swinging the ship slowly back in the other direction – going after the large monopolies, finally using anti trade laws to bust them.

    Too little, too late.

23. The dems lost when they didn’t have a proper primary with debates and just decided to run Biden. They kept digging themselves a deeper grave when Biden dropped out too late, when Harris said she would do nothing different from Biden, when she said she would have republicans on her cabinet, and finally when they never did alt media. Americans don’t want to hear about a child tax credit, or about the CHIPS and Science act after the fact, I doubt the average American knows that those were things. They want a narrative about how you’re gonna help bring CHANGE and put food on their table. Trump won not because people didn’t care, it’s because he was different than an unpopular president who had a bad economy despite it not being Biden’s fault. How can you take a dude out because he isn’t going to win, and then put in someone who is saying “I won’t do anything different”?

    That’s how she lost. Quit fear mongering about Trump. Tell us how you’re going to make the middle class thrive, and eat the fucking rich.

    Edit: added primary debates at the start.

24. Watching TikTok debates where the left was debunking every claim and policy from Trump and literally turning it into why Harris is better on those reasons. Every time a Trump supporter got cornered and basically agreed with the host, they just moved onto the next debunked talking point.

    It got to a point you could see there was no point in even having these debates. It might have helped undecided voters, but never once changed a Trump supporters mind.

25. Will never win the Midwest if you can’t come out against free sex change operations for prisoners.

    Americans are anti-tax, even if you are LGBTQ+, you are American. Does anyone want to really pay for this, for convicted murderers?

    This should be an easy no. This is what people call a radical left idea.

26. “The first type of voter I encountered as a volunteer on the Harris phone bank was the one focused purely on the economy. It is hard for us to grasp on this side of the Atlantic that soaring growth rates and low unemployment in the US would not be seen positively in the eyes of an American voter. But it was clear in my conversations that the Trump campaign was extremely effective at countering that story. Wages may well be rising at all levels, but everyday inflation was more discernible to voters.”

    Yeah. Poor people can’t eat GDP. And it pisses them off when wealthy politicians tell them that everything is great and they should be happy that the rich are making so much money.

27. Personally I believe there was a whisper campaign that people heard then stayed home – just based on everyone using the same phrasing in their arguments.

    What’s infuriating is their arguments are valid so I can’t blame them beyond a FAFO

    The working class/discouraged/unmotivated suggest that Kamala talked about things they were interested in – removing homes from private equity and higher wages and then suddenly stopped talking about it. Similarly Walz began talking about it and also stopped in the last month.

    Personally I blame the shortened campaign season. She needed to reach so many different pockets of voters so once she thought they were in on the plan she moved onto the next group.

    That first group felt the conversation stopped and then she began distracting them with all the celebrity endorsements. To a 20 something – who is Bruce Springsteen? Does Beyoncé and Little Jon hold any sway? Finally in the last week she pivoted to Liz Cheney and the never Trumpers.

    By this time all the resentment set in. She stopped talking to them after they came out and registered. They started pandering to the other side who only represented the 2% of the final vote.

    So they stayed home.

    The DNC has a history of this. Black men specifically and POC in general all insist they are always asked to bring out the vote but then none of their concerns are ever addressed.

    Sadly the lesson they learned is they have an impact on the election, but the DNC better start pandering to them or they will never come out.

    As much as the DNC wants to blame them for being “uninformed” which they are triggered by as much as other terms like racist and fascist, they blame the DNC for losing touch with who should be their base.

    So both sides are pointing fingers and no one cares about seeing their part in the mess we are in.

    Reluctantly as a bleeding heart liberal (my vote was never in question) the abstainers have a lot of good points.

    I can understand why they feel slighted but I have no idea where that leaves us because I don’t see the DNC changing.

28. Trump spent $30M on anti trans kid ads. That was part of it. Transphobia and homophobia played a significant role in his his win. Plus other hate and fears.

29. > Was [poor messaging](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/08/democrats-harris-election) to blame? That didn’t seem obvious. Democrats tried to tell the story of average wages being higher and unemployment being at an historic low, but people just seemed to believe Trump more often than they believed Harris and Tim Walz. There was no easy way to counter that, especially in a campaign lasting barely 100 days.

    I’d argue this guy volunteering on the phone bank and not knowing that Harris also proposed some solutions to help alleviate the burden of inflation didn’t help.

30. Those who voted for Trump and those who sat out the election deserve everything that is coming. Being duped is not an excuse.

31. If gas were 50 cents and eggs 10 cents, they would have had another excuse. If Harris had the ability to double all salaries, it would have been another excuse. 10 years is a long time to pretend to be ignorant. The truth is, Trump voters want to be disgusting. Imagine if Trump went around doing what he does with a Vivek Ramaswamy face. America wouldn’t be so open to look the other way, would they?? Absolutely not! Suddenly raping women and robbing charities would be unacceptable.

32. 54% of American adults read at our below 6th grade levels.

    21% are functionally illiterate and cannot perform simple logical tasks with words.

33. If there was a teenage boy living in your house 5-6 years ago, and you had an opportunity to listen in on the gaming conversations, none of this stuff now should surprise you.

34. And just wait until after Trump and his Republicans start Project 2025. Then many will wish they had voted for Harris instead. But it will be too late.

35. At the end of the day it’s going to be really hard to persuade people with logical things they can’t see over things they see every day in grocery store prices.

    No Democrat could have won this election. Look globally at how incumbents have been doing. It’s not a coincidence. Inflation is a global issue. But when someone sees something everyday they are going to be mad at the person in power even if it’s not that persons fault.

36. Personally, I think there should be a concerted effort to use MAGA’s inability to tell truth from fiction to turn them on each other and fracture the coalition. Sow distrust amongst MAGA’s various groups and encourage infighting. The goal would be to make them as ineffective as possible and much harder to bring together. 

    You can’t go after Trump, but you can go after the base and the people around Trump. 

37. This is entirely a psyop by the liberal establishment to ensure there is no accountability for the Democratic power structure and that the party moves even further to the right in 2028

38. The Democrats will lose again next time if they don’t accept their shortcomings and failures in this election. This article reminds me of the “am I out of touch” meme

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