If they went in blind, they chose to.

Not giving enough of a shit to learn about… in some cases, seemingly anything, doesn’t mean you get to later claim “oh I didn’t want this, how could I have known?”

I’ve given a lot of leeway on that stuff over my life, and after this last election, that’s over. Anyone who doesn’t get it at this point has raised stupidity to such an art form that they’ve achieved immorality. That’s aside from the ones who just outright want bad things to happen, which is a lot of people.

But they were open about wanting to do this stuff.

You didn’t need “sources of information”. Trump was in office for four years before he was re-elected. It’s copium to think that people aré ignorant when in actuality, they are actively hostile to minorities, non straight, the college educated and non Christians.

They would rather feel the fallout of Republican policies as long as it doesn’t help or actively hurts people not like them. In my former home state GA, the Republican governor spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to get the Hyundai plant to GA that would have created 8500 jobs directly and no telling how many indirect jobs.

ICE invaded the plant and the opportunity is now lost potentially. The governor still can’t bring himself to criticize the President and the Republicans in GA are cheering the raid. The engineers from Korea were training Americans.

The presidential debates were the most watched tv last year beating out football. Trump was in office for four years. No matter how filtered the news is, people knew exactly who Trump was.

Because of the electoral college. It didn’t matter who didn’t vote. If 0% more people voted in Mississippi or Alabama and every single eligible voter voted in New York and California, it wouldn’t have mattered.

But then you alienate some of the most vocal part of the party and end up like in 2016 where they blame the Bernie bros instead of the dnc leadership.

Isn't this what they have been doing? What nationally prominent democrats are vocal proponents of progressive social policies now? I certainly don't remember harris running on any of the things being implied here.

> cut some dead weight

This "dead weight" is the rights of minorities to participate in public life plain and simple. This is exactly why leftists are so skeptical or even hostile to "centrists." Once you're calculating whose rights you can drop for political convenience you share a lot more ideologically with the far right than with historic liberalism.

That's the thing. Trump would be eminently beatable if the democrats bothered running good candidates and had the courage to stand for something. But they are perfectly content collecting tons of money which probably goes to connected "consultants" who then spend 20 million on figuring out how to talk to people.

This went out the window as a viable approach when McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat. We’re at minimum-two justices being on the take, post a coup attempt with the leader of said attempt back in the Oval Office, and Republicans have already declared intent to gerrymander their way to victory with no roadblocks to that in sight. And this is not an exhaustive list of ailments.

You can’t go in with legal gloves and no hitting below the belt et c. while your opponent is bare-knuckle and going for nut shots and headlocks. You’ll just get your ass kicked, every time, no matter how morally pure you feel about it.

Meanwhile, fixing gerrymandering almost certainly means getting Republican votes to do so. The only way to do that, in this environment, is going to be to make them believe their odds are better without gerrymandering, than with it. That means using it against them, until it’s made illegal.

One possible solution is to get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans and run liberal/progressive candidates as Republicans. Built on the Eisenhower platform of 1956 and his record as a military commander. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p...

Granted, it's not ideal, but coming in the back door may be necessary.

This attitude is exactly what the far right is banking on to make sure there is never another liberal gov elected fairly.

They can be "defeated" that way in the sense of a classic Pyrrhic victory, exactly like in 2020, sure. That's the absolute worst out of all options available. "Losing" in 2020 would have been much better. You need to start thinking about the game, realpolitik, and the patterns that have been happening. And the long-term. You think you're thinking long-term by prioritizing the things you do, but it's the exact opposite.

The first thing you need to come to terms with is that losing in 2020 would've been better for the long-term. Once you've gained that freedom, realizing that simply winning an election can be the worse option, you can start thinking about what would instead be better.

To liberals a “socialist” like Mamdani is way worse than conservatives like Trump. They are more than happy to support a sexual predator over a socialist. Trump and the DNC largely have the same donors to keep happy. Capitalism and how to make a select few fabulously wealthy isn’t a power either the democrats or republicans want to give up. Unfortunately due to the first past the post voting system we have to align to one of the two fucked up corporatist political parties. One which pretends to care about things like equality and fairness and one who has removed their mask and fully embraces all the worst aspects of humanity. I’d still much rather have a Target that pretended to care about things than a Target who fully embraces late stage capitalism.