Why Did The Democrats Suffer Such A Big Defeat?

It wasn't Russia

The results of the 2024 election have mostly come in and Trump won an overwhelming victory. So far Trump has officially won 295 electoral votes making him the winner of the presidential election. The swing states of Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wiscosin have been called for him and he will likely also win Arizona and Nevada. Trump is very likely to win every single swing state that was up for grabs this election and unlike in 2016, he won the popular vote along with the electoral college.

But how did Trump win- and the Democrats lose- so big? Democratic establishment figures are already blaming the usual suspects: Russiagate David Corn is already blaming Russia while MSNBC pundits are blaming sexism and racism. '

The reality is Donald Trump’s victory is in no way a testament to him but a testament to how awful the Democratic establishment is. From backing the Ukraine proxy war to the genocide in Gaza to pushing mass censorship to prioritize identity politics over class issues or addressing people’s real concerns the blame for Trump’s victory rests solely on the Democratic establishment.

Everybody Hates Neo-Cons

A big strategy from the Democrats was to lean into neo-conservatism in an attempt to court so-called “moderate conservatives” (Ie people who want to Murder people all around the world). A big part of their strategy was to cozy up to George W Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney. In her debate with Donald Trump, Harris proudly touted the fact that she had the “endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Congress Member Liz Cheney”.

The Democrats somehow thought that because Washington DC neocons love Cheney, regular republican voters would flock to them as well over the Cheney endorsement.

But most regular Americans who aren’t paid by the Military Industrial Complex revile the Cheneys and remember Dick Cheney as a man who sent Americans to go die in wars based on lies in Iraq in Afghanistan for his own personal profit through Hailaberton, took a giant shit on the fourth amendment with the patriot act and who was responsible for torturing innocent people at Guantanamo Bay.

For fucks sake there was even a smash hit Oscar-nominated Hollywood film about Dick Cheney’s crimes that came out only six years ago. 

Pictured Above: A Poster for director Adam Mckay’s hit satirical biopic “Vice” about Dick Cheneys war crimes.

The reality is the American people despise neo-cons like Cheney. When leaving office the Bush/Cheney administration had a 60 percent disapproval rating. One of the biggest reasons Obama won the 2008 primary and general election was over his opposition to the war in Iraq that Dick Cheney started based on lies. The same goes for the Republican base. Trump defeated neo-cons like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in the 2016 primary in big part because he claimed he opposed the wars in Iraq and Libya while saying he was against military intervention in Syria and wanted better relations with Russia.

The Kamala Harris campaign was so out of touch that she thought that cozying up to a man (and his equally pro-war daughter)- who is despised by the base of both parties and is so reviled there are smash hit movies about how evil he is- would be a winning strategy.

Another equally abysmal strategy from the Harris campaign was the fact that they made their support for the proxy war in Ukraine a central theme of it. Kamala Harris continuously slammed Trump's rhetoric about ending the war as “dangerous and unacceptable” and claimed it was a “surrender proposal”. The Democrat’s loyal propagandists in the mainstream media repeated again and again that Trump may end the war in Ukraine and that Harris would continue it (thinking it would help Harris win).

This again was a strategy from the Kamala campaign to bring so-called “moderate neo-cons” over to her side. But aside from Washington DC freaks like Robert Kagan or Victoria Nuland who think the proxy war in Ukraine is the greatest thing in the world, the war is extremely unpopular with the Republican base.

The majority of the Republican base (55 to 58 percent) is against the proxy war and thinks America has sent too many weapons and too much money to Ukraine.

The Democrats also stupidly thought they could win over Polish American voters in swing states with their support of the proxy war in Ukraine, but the irony is that they also want the war to end. Politico reporter Emilio Casalicchio spoke to Polish Americans in Pennsylvania and reported that many of them don’t want to spend money on Ukraine as they are more concerned with the domestic economic situation while many actively wanted a peace plan to end the war and supported Trump because they thought he would do this.

Turns out bragging about support for a war which is unpopular with the people you are trying to win over is a losing strategy.

Finally, The Democrats completely lost their once loyal Arab base in the swing state Michigan over their backing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon. Kamala Harris lost big in the majority Arab-American city of Dearborn in Michigan where Trump won 43 percent of the vote and Kamala only got 36 percent (while third-party candidate Jill Stein got 15 percent).

The vote was a clear protest vote against Harris over the fact that she has taken part in an administration that has sent billions of dollars to Israel so they could massacre hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza 90 percent of whom were civilians.

Meanwhile, Palestinian American Democratic representative Rashida Tlaib (who has been one of the only American politicians to stand up to Israel’s genocide and America’s backing of it ) won Dearborn in a landslide (62 percent of the vote ).

This means that the Democrats could have easily won Dearborn and possibly Michigan had they just ended American support for Israel’s genocide, therefore forcing a ceasefire. Instead of doing this, they tried to win back Arab voters in Michigan in what will surely go down in history as one of the most out-of-touch political campaign moves in history.

Instead of ending the genocide, they decided to send Bill Clinton to Michigan to lecture Muslim voters for not voting for Harris and repeat a bunch of zionist talking points such as the idea that Israel was “forced to kill civilians” and the claim that “Israelis were there first” (ignoring the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that was done in order to create the state of Israel).

The Democrats actually thought that sending a barely sentient 78-year-old Jeffery Epstein affiliate to Michigan to repeat a bunch of nonsense zionist talking points would convince Arab voters that Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Arab civilians in Gaza and now Lebanon is justified and therefore win their support. And people actually wonder how they lost so badly.

Smugly Pushing Censorship Will Not Win You Votes

During the election last night, I tuned in and out of the live stream coverage of it on the independent left-wing outlet, the Grayzone. On that stream journalist Max Blumenthal made a very astute point about the election: Democrats thought that because many Americans listed the state of Democracy as a top issue for them, it meant that they would vote Democrat. But Blumenthal argued that many of them were actually referring to concerns over the Democrats’ increasing support for censorship.

This idea bears out in the polling that shows that 51 percent of the voters who said Democracy was their top issue were actually Trump voters. They are likely referring to the Democrat’s increasingly anti-first Amendment views regarding the policing of so-called “misinformation”.

Early on in his administration, Joe Biden created a “disinformation governance board” subdivision of the DHS to police and censor the internet. This policy was so unpopular that they eventually had to get rid of it but the Democrats went forward and doubled down on their pro-censorship views.

When the Twitter Files leaks proved that intelligence agencies and corporate think tanks were pressuring the company to censor users, the Democrats were the biggest defenders of this policy. They not only supported this censorship but they actively sent the IRS after journalist Matt Taibbi and threatened to put him in prison for reporting on the leaks.

Furthermore, in the run-up to this election, Democrats were open about opposing free speech. Kamala Harris’ VP Tim Walz openly stated on TV that the First Amendment doesn’t cover “hate speech and misinformation”, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said that she wanted to censor “misinformation” and “disinformation” and John Kerry even said at the World Economic Forum that the first amendment was a “major block” in the Democrats attempts at censoring “misinformation”.

Turns out that actively opposing a right so fundamental to America it is the first guaranteed right in the country’s constitution won’t win you the election, who would have thought?

Finally, the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” are almost always used to label anything that goes against the establishment narrative (which is more often than not false).

Anyone who questioned Russiagate or the idea that Russia hacked the DNC emails in 2016 was accused of spreading misinformation even though both turned out to be hoaxes drummed up by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Anyone who questioned the official narrative on COVID was accused of spreading misinformation even though it turned out that the official narrative around the lab leak, efficiency of masks, and efficiency of the vaccine was false.

Anyone who said the U.S. backed the 2014 coup in Ukraine was accused of spreading misinformation, even though the U.S. openly funded think tanks that sparked the coup, Victoria Nuland is on tape deciding who will make up the new coup government, and Senator Chris Murphy even admitted on TV that U.S. involvement led to the “change in regime”.

Anyone who said NATO expansion provoked Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was accused of spreading misinformation even though CIA director William Burns admitted in 2008 that further NATO expansion toward Russia would “lead to violence or even, some claim, civil war, (in Ukraine) which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene”.

Anyone who said Israel issued the Hannibal Directive and killed their own people on October 7th was accused of spreading misinformation even though this fact has now been confirmed by Haaretz, one of Israel’s top newspapers, and the Australian state broadcaster ABC.

I could go on all day like this. By claiming they wanted to censor “misinformation” the democrats were not only threatening the First Amendment but saying they wanted to silence the peasants for daring to question their bogus narratives around Russiagate, Covid, Ukraine, Gaza, and a whole host of other issues.

Unsurprisingly this was not a strategy that played well with the American people and certainly played a role in their major defeat.

Identity Politics Over Real Concerns.

One of the things that made Bernie Sanders so popular in 2016 and 2020 was his focus on populist economic policies. Medicare for All, Public College, A livable minimum wage, breaking up corporate monopolies, taxing and breaking up Wall Street, and support for strong Unions were some of the main policy planks he would hammer out over and over again.

All of these issues are winning ones that poll well with the American people. The main reason Sanders was able to advocate for these policies was the fact that he did not take any corporate lobbyist money. Compare this to Kamala who openly bragged about her endorsement from Goldman Sachs.

Kamala’s corporate donors would not allow her to advocate for these populist economic policies that are popular so she had to instead focus on cultural issues and dumb identity politics.

One of the more important and substantive cultural issues the Democrats ran on was reproductive rights. Many of their ads made the case that a vote for Kamala and the Democrats was a vote to protect reproductive rights. This did not work however given the fact that Democrats have already failed to protect them. The Democrats since 1976 could have codified Roe Vs Wade into law and yet chose not to. Obama even campaigned on codifying it in 2008 and then claimed it was “not his priority” to do it when he had the opportunity in 2009. Campaigning to protect a right the Democrats have already failed to protect is not exactly something that will win people over.

Outside of this, the Democrats campaigned on some of the dumbest culture war issues I have ever seen in an election. The pro Harris group “creatives for Harris” put out a ridiculously pandering ad featuring D-list Hollywood actors dressed up like stereotypically masculine men who said they “liked their steak rare and drink straight bourbon” and were voting for Kamala.

The Harris campaign somehow topped this ridiculousness by putting out an even more pandering ad that implied black men who don’t vote for Harris will not be able to find dates. Who would have thought “vote for us or no one will date you again” wasn’t a winning campaign slogan.

The Democrats came up with an even dumber campaign strategy by falsely claiming Trump threatened Liz Cheney when he was clearly making the point that she supports war while she is never willing to fight in one, a point that liberals and democrats used to make all the time about her father Dick before he joined their team.

Trump is Not The Solution

My Feelings about this election are basically the same feeling I have about every election, at first, I am happy the current administration is gone but soon realize they will be replaced by one just as bad. The Democrats have failed on these issues and allowed Trump to seem more reasonable to them in rhetoric but in reality, he will not be better.

The fact that he has received 100 million dollars from pro-Israel mega-donor Miriam Adelson and has called for Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza means he will not end the genocide. He probably won’t even end the Ukraine proxy war given the fact that sent lethal arms to Ukraine in his first term and has supported Republican leadership voting for arms packages to Ukraine in his post-presidency.

I don’t believe he will be any better on free speech either. His official platform openly supports cracking down on people protesting the genocide in Gaza and he is still closely connected to Mike Pomep who got him to bring espionage act charges against Jullian Assange for his revealing of US war crimes in Trump’s first term and even plotted to kidnap and kill him.

Trump will not implement any populist economic policies, his major legislative accomplishment in his first term was passing a tax cut for the rich and he will likely do something similar this time.

It’s great the pro-genocide, pro-war, pro-censorship neoliberal Democrats are gone, unfortunately, they are being replaced by a controlled opposition con man who will do the same things.