[knowknow]

It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. People love getting tangled on social issues as it’s the most provocative. This conception that most people actually care about rational policies is false and has been false for at least the past decade.

[eddythompson80]

> This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work.

It's what Obama ran on, and it worked for him. The fact that he achieved very little there is a different issue.

Kamala's 2-month long campaign wasn't very convincing.

[PaulHoule]

The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with.

Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.

[CivBase]

Is that what she ran on?

My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" and something vague about protecting women's rights.

It's almost like you need more than a couple months to run a serious presidential campaign. Despite being the VP for 4 years, most people didn't know what to expect from her. Almost nobody was enthusiastic about her and she had no real momentum. That's obviously what killed her campaign.

[some_random]

One of her campaign promises was to tax unrealized gains at 25%, it was definitely more than just status quo.

[mrguyorama]

Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you?

There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.

Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.

[Braxton1980]

>My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different

But

>most people didn't know what to expect from her.

[xboxnolifes]

Kamala was too little too late. No candidate was going to work for democrats coming into the presidential race so close to the election.

[Loughla]

Combined with more of the same from the Democrats where they pick the candidate and preordain them. These are the things that tanked her chances.

Hillary wasn't super popular, but what really killed her was being forced on us from the political Democratic establishment.

Biden only won because Trump is such a turd for many.

It's been since Obama that the Democrats actually had a candidate that people liked. I do not understand this strategy.

[TexanFeller]

Because people have memory that lasts longer than a goldfish’s. People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. They remember Kamala’s fringe and cringe positions and statements from her California and 2019 campaigns and don’t believe she’s a proud gun owning moderate that just wants to make government work for us. Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.

[Braxton1980]

>People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else.

Republicans haven't?

[pessimizer]

> Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.

I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.)

People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies.

The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump.

Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.

[kashunstva]

> she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked

Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.

[anon7000]

Republicans are even more focused on controversial social issues, so it’s not obvious to me that’s the real problem.

[tsimionescu]

Where exactly did you get the idea that Kamala was running on this? Where was she advocating for, say, Medicare for all? Or fighting vested interests by running on campaign finance reform, to get money out of politics?

She was running on an abstract, classical centrist non-program of "we've done great under Biden and we're going to keep doing the same". That is the exact opposite of what GP was suggesting.

[knowknow]

The comment is saying that liberal politicians should be

>prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds.

Nothing about what you mentioned at all. Nor did I ever claim Kamala ran on what you said. The fact that you and the commenter have different ideas of what rational policies are and assume politicians should be running on that platform is part of the bias. You assume that most people want the same thing as you but most people don’t. The majority actually enjoy social issues.

[anon7000]

She wasn’t running on an abstract program, people just weren’t paying fucking attention. For just one example: https://www.kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Poli...

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Your assumptions are wrong. Kamala lost because of inflation during the Biden admin and some related missteps. Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her.

Also you're misreading my point, campaigning on these things isn't a panacea, but delivering on them just might be.

[ReptileMan]

> Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her.

She had less charisma than Hilary. Probably even less than Al Gore or Zuckeberg before his new software update was installed. And she had a history of bending the knee to the progressives.

[Gerardo1]

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

No one cared. One of the better things a president has done for the country in quite a while, and no one cared, and no one remembers.

[rayiner]

It probably wasn’t either inflation or Harris’s race, because the rightward swing was heavily skewed by race. Compared to 2016, all of Trump’s gain came from non-whites: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/03/18/opinion/18eks-sho....

Whites didn’t shift at all from 2016 to 2024. Latino moderates shifted 23 points to the right, and Asian moderates shifted 11 points to the right.

It’s hard to explain how inflation would cause a racially unbalanced shift like that. The 2016 election was a pretty neutral baseline—the economy was fine and had been for years. So if inflation was the cause, why didn’t white voters shift right compared to 2016? It doesn’t make sense that inflation would only cause hispanics and asians to shift right.

Likewise, if race was the reason, why didn’t white voters shift right, compared to 2016 when the candidate was a white woman? And why did black conservatives (a bloc about the same size as black liberals) shift 8 points to the right?

[PaulHoule]

People assume a female candidate is to the left of where they actually are. Worked great for Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel who both represented center-right parties and took their nations rightward and whose favorite slogan was “there is no alternative” but not for center-right Hillary Clinton who headed what is allegedly a center-left party. [1]

If the Democrats have a fight between an abundance agenda and populist leftists who are really inclusive like Bernie Sanders I think that will be great.

[1] Clinton was always as far to the right as she could get away with, probably to compensate for being a woman, but paid the price for her mindless hawkish in 2008 when she lost the primaries to Barack Obama