Rebecca - I want you to be right - and I fear that Tim Coffey and JVL are.
What I can piece together:
Like other elections around the world, this was an anti-incumbent election. People DID want something different.
"Low information" voters swung from Biden back to Trump because of (i) inflation (ii) immigration and (iii) anti-woke-ism - and b/c they wanted "different"
Harris as the sitting VP was given an incredibly difficult task - to differentiate herself from Biden on immigration.
Harris allowed herself to be defined by Trump's ads - and especially the ones where Harris was on video supporting federal money for transgender prisoners.
She needed to try to paint Trump as favoring the wealthy.... highlight the Biden Administration wins for poor and working class Americans, and offer something new for them.
She needed to push harder for the Lankford bill and hit Trump on killing that bill - and maybe needed to nominate a VP from a border state that had a reputation as an immigration hawk.
Even a strong attempt to differentiate may not have worked.
IF Biden had pulled out early enough to allow some kind of Democratic primary - where some Dem could put forward a third way (not Biden, not Trump) credibly - maybe that works
But... the point to me is this - that should not have been necessary. Trump was patently unfit.
And here I go back to JVL's take and to Tim Coffey's take - voters collectively knew who and what Trump was and is and will be - and still picked him. They now own it all.
I hear you on a lot of this (though there've been lots of articles on what went wrong, some saying Harris went too Left, others she went too Right...anyway) There was a great article in the Atlantic today about how the rise of misinformation has become a "justification machine." Today, if you want to think something, you can find something online to justify you. Which means that everyone who wanted to justify a vote for Trump *could*. Which made his patent unfitness moot.
I agree with you that people who made that choice own that choice. People can seek information instead of justification. But dealing with that is going to mean dealing with people genuinely not understanding what they chose.
Rebecca - I want you to be right - and I fear that Tim Coffey and JVL are.
What I can piece together:
Like other elections around the world, this was an anti-incumbent election. People DID want something different.
"Low information" voters swung from Biden back to Trump because of (i) inflation (ii) immigration and (iii) anti-woke-ism - and b/c they wanted "different"
Harris as the sitting VP was given an incredibly difficult task - to differentiate herself from Biden on immigration.
Harris allowed herself to be defined by Trump's ads - and especially the ones where Harris was on video supporting federal money for transgender prisoners.
She needed to try to paint Trump as favoring the wealthy.... highlight the Biden Administration wins for poor and working class Americans, and offer something new for them.
She needed to push harder for the Lankford bill and hit Trump on killing that bill - and maybe needed to nominate a VP from a border state that had a reputation as an immigration hawk.
Even a strong attempt to differentiate may not have worked.
IF Biden had pulled out early enough to allow some kind of Democratic primary - where some Dem could put forward a third way (not Biden, not Trump) credibly - maybe that works
But... the point to me is this - that should not have been necessary. Trump was patently unfit.
And here I go back to JVL's take and to Tim Coffey's take - voters collectively knew who and what Trump was and is and will be - and still picked him. They now own it all.
I hear you on a lot of this (though there've been lots of articles on what went wrong, some saying Harris went too Left, others she went too Right...anyway) There was a great article in the Atlantic today about how the rise of misinformation has become a "justification machine." Today, if you want to think something, you can find something online to justify you. Which means that everyone who wanted to justify a vote for Trump *could*. Which made his patent unfitness moot.
I agree with you that people who made that choice own that choice. People can seek information instead of justification. But dealing with that is going to mean dealing with people genuinely not understanding what they chose.