Anonymous #1 2w

Bc Kamala was an unpopular candidate that was given to the electorate at the last minute, it was a perfect storm between Biden’s health issues the inflation and her late candidacy

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Anonymous OP 2w

Why was she unpopular?

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Anonymous #1 2w

Things like her history of shifting policies, her baggage from the Biden admin as border person, and unfortunately, just straight up racism and sexism

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Anonymous #1 2w

Women are held to higher likability standards than men

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Anonymous #1 2w

And then you’ve got the left leaning ppl who jumped ship bc of the Gaza war

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Anonymous OP 2w

What percent of democrats see Gaza as a major issue?

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Anonymous #1 2w

According to Gallup 67% of democrats view the Gaza war as a genocide. So “major issue” idk but that’s a high number

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Anonymous #1 2w

Polling during the election showed she was generally perceived as too left-wing/progressive by the likes of swing voters. Plus, being Biden’s VP in the backdrop of his unpopularity did her the opposite of a favor.

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Anonymous #2 2w

Right but her actual policy was centrist.

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Anonymous #2 2w

So if she will be perceived as left wing regardless of what she actually says and does, why shouldn’t she just be left wing? She didn’t lose because she was too left wing, she lost because she refused to appeal to the left wing man.

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Anonymous #1 2w

That’s the thing about politics, especially American politics, Brodie. Perceptions matter more than policy. It’s the VIBES! Perhaps if she was, she would at most have won the popular vote as turnout dropped in Dem areas in California, Texas, NY, etc… Turnout in swing states were up, Georgia at historic highs for example. Swing states are full of moderates.

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Anonymous #2 2w

Right, I know.

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Anonymous #2 2w

But what she actually said was all centrist shit. There’s no Democrat candidate you could run that the right wouldn’t convince conservatives and centrists are lunatic crazy far left. So, why wouldn’t she appeal to the left, the only side who was ever going to vote for her?

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Anonymous #2 2w

Clearly it can work. Look at New York. A Muslim socialist won. In NYC of all places for a MUSLIM SOCIALIST To win.

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Anonymous #1 2w

What was centrist about what she was saying? If she was a continuation of Biden, who would by virtue be a centrist, how did Biden win in 2020? A lot of democrats are themselves moderate, Dems in states like GA, NC, are pretty moderate, even pretty conservative (black voters for example). NYC is cool yet it’s not representative of the whole of America.

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Anonymous #2 2w

Biden WAS a centrist tho

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Anonymous #2 2w

He’s the only time this centrist strategy ever worked. Because we’d just come out of a trump presidency which was awful, and we were being plunged into a global disaster. It took a GLOBAL DISASTER to get a centrist elected.

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Anonymous #2 2w

I’m so happy you brought that up that was literally going to be my next point lol

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Anonymous #1 2w

Obama moved to the center halfway through his first term, much to the chagrin of his base, he won reelection by a larger than expected margin. Bill Clinton was the pinnacle of Democratic centrism and neoliberalism, he won two terms, and polling had Perot voters at a near 50/50 split for their second preferences (which, when counting only Clinton and GOP opponents, he was still over 50%)

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Anonymous #2 2w

Bill Clinton was decades ago.

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Anonymous #2 2w

And Obama only won by explicitly aping the aesthetics of left leaning populism. He didn’t “shift to centrism”, he lied about being a left wing populist to win. Twice.

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Anonymous #2 2w

I guess if you wanna pretend the political landscape is the same as it was in bill clinton or Obamas time, sure? This’d probably work? But it’s not man. You can’t keep holding on to an America that doesn’t exist anymore.

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Anonymous #1 2w

I’m not sure why you’re saying “NYC of all places”. NYC has the largest DSA chapter at 13k. A young, Muslim democratic socialist with charism, an effective social media campaign, and zero skeletons in his closet? Against Cuomo? Of course he has a shot

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Anonymous #3 2w

Charisma***

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Anonymous #1 2w

Occupied Wall Street showed that his leftist aesthetic was not working. Plus, the Obama coalition was decimated in the midterms, especially with Southern and rural Democrats being swept clean. Dems losing seats in blue states. It was a reaction to Obama’s policies, the ACA, they were perceived too left wing.

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Anonymous #3 2w

If Cuomo was replaced by an actually competent candidate with policies, no major scandals, and tactics that aren’t “brown man scary”, this race would have been much closer

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Anonymous #1 2w

I’m left wing myself, I’d love to see a left wing president. I’m just thinking pragmatically. You have to, ironically, strike the balance of communicating left wing policies in a centrist tone. That’s not impossible when the opposite literally happens. Look at Connor Lamb and John Fetterman in PA. Tragic story. Sad!

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Anonymous #3 2w

You know a lot of New Yorkers still remember 9/11 dude. And many still blame Muslims broadly. Also, the “largest DSA chapter” is still a DSA chapter. NYCs DSA literally only has 30k dues paying members and under a hundred thousand total members. A small YouTuber has more followers than the nyc DSA. Multiple MILLIONS of people voted in this election. Even if only one million of them voted for mamdani, only 9 percent of them could possibly be DSA members.

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Anonymous #3 2w

Oh shit sorry. 90k nation wide. According to you there’s only 13k in nyc. So that’s 1.3 percent of mamdanis vote if we assume he ONLY got a million voters.

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Anonymous #1 2w

I used that as a proxy for people who would likely vote for him. There are very likely plenty more people who align with many DSA stances but aren’t actual members of DSA. NYC remembers 9/11 but also has a very diverse, progressive population. 9/11 is significant but that wouldn’t make most left-leaning (and even some centrist) people ignore Cuomo’s shenanigans and scandals. Cuomo and Mamdani essentially split the centrist vote, but Sliwa also took a considerable amount

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Anonymous #3 2w

We talked about the DSA, but do you have any idea how many members the DSA had nationally in 2015? 6000k. By 2020, it had around 90k nationally. That’s a sevenfold increase in five years. And this org has been around since 1982. You think the amount of DSA members in NYC means that nycs population is primed for a socialist, but you don’t think a sevenfold increase in DUES PAYING membership to a socialist organization in five years signifies anything about the country as a whole?

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Anonymous #1 2w

And that’s JUST the members willing/able to PAY to be recognized. If that increased by seven times since 2015, how much do you think socialism in general might have increased in popularity and acceptance?

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Anonymous #1 2w

There’s a poll for that, and it doesn’t show as significant of a change as one would think. I’m curious to see what the results will be this year though

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Anonymous #1 2w

What I was originally getting at is that you can’t extrapolate outcomes in NYC and expect the outcome to be similar in a national election. Really, we should just call the presidential election what it is: a popular election in 7 states. You have to appeal to those constituents to win. Except for some surprises, the rest are basically a lock or a lost cause no matter what policy stances you choose. As 2 said, a lot of it comes down to vibes. I wouldn’t call Mamdani’s approach a surefire…

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Anonymous #3 2w

plan for a presidential election. It’s definitely worth considering, but I’m not sure how well it would work and whether you’d find a similar situation: DSA member with no skeletons in his closet, savvy, nearly flawless campaign strategy (in terms of having to clarify things, walk things back, etc.) vs incompetent, uncharismatic establishment candidate with nearly zero strategy (besides racism), blatant funding from the wealthy, and a bunch of scandals. Even as a weak af candidate, Cuomo got 41%

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