I was gonna title this "And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice" and then write "Stuck inside of America with the fascism blues again" here, but I'm not sure if that comes off like gloating and that's honestly the last thing I want to do this morning.
Swinging left wouldn't have worked either.
There is no high horse. There is no right path. Us Americans have the critical thinking skill of an ant. The left should have fought dirty with a full blown propaganda machine, populist lies, and blatant collusion if they wanted to win, simple as that.
It needs a leftist Trump.
What are Republican's gonna do... demonize democrats even more?
It absolutely would have. Progressive policy is insanely popular and easy to campaign on by virtue of being designed to help everyone. Do you think Bernie had such high favorably ratings because they have a thing for 80 year old white dudes?
Tell people "healthcare will be free" or "We will cap rent and build housing that won't cost more than 3x local median income" and then people can't afford not to vote for you.
Biden could have cut off arms to Israel, and hundreds of thousands of students so politically activated they're willing to risk their degrees to protest would be doing everything in their power to keep Trump out.
Instead they sent the police to kick the shit out of those kids, at great expense to the colleges, and called them antisemitic.
The policies are extremely popular and universal. Doesn't really matter in a politicalcampaign if you struggle to achieve those ends. Trying is important and failing gives you ammunition against those who oppose extremely popular policies for next campaign.
The bottom line is that the average person isn't listening for anything besides "how is the candidate going to help me because I feel like I'm drowning". The right scapegoats something and promises to fix your problems by hurting the scapegoat (immigrants, minorities, socialists, whatever). This is a lie, but it's just as, if not more, direct of a solution so some voters will support them.
Harris had attention when she said things like stopping price gouging and providing in-home elder care. Those were extremely popular ideas that she didn't focus on. Instead, she pivoted right.
The US president is probably the single most powerful position in the world between explicit powers and people who serve at his pleasure and can be replaced at will, and undefined powers that that extend as far as anyone is able to stop them, as we saw under Trump. If they just flagrantly broke the law and kept doing it until the SCOTUS and others actually stopped them, the dems would be far more popular than just throwing their hands up and saying "better things aren't possible.
There's a lot of indirect ways they can get what they want done, whether it means appointing an AG and other department heads who will punish people who don't go along or using the military's vast legal protections and resources.
That's not saying how you'll improve people's immediate conditions, just that trump will make them worse
You can't credibly say that when Biden deported more people than Trump.
This is basically what FDR did with a lot of his social and work programs during his presidency. He'd establish an agency or authority or whatever, regardless of the legality, and by the time the court's or whoever made the decision to close it, they'd have 5 others going simultaneously, and/or they'd make another one. And the process would start all over again.
Yup. The nice thing about policy that helps everyone is that it's incredibly unpopular to kill. Biden could have burned student debt in the most visible way possible, and then dared the SCOTUS to create new debt. If they took the bait, you'd have 46.2 million people ready to vote for anyone who promises to expand the SCOTUS.
This was also a congressional election you know.