16 Comments

This was so cathartic to listen to!

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Just to clarify, Obama's roasting of Trump at the 2012 press gala, was not totally out of the blue. Trump spent years and lots of money spreading a grotesque scandal about Obama not being American, potentially putting him at greater danger. Obama was eventually obliged to release his long form birth certificate. At one point Trump offered money for anyone who can dig up dirt on Obama. That started almost from the start of Obama's presidency and was totally unprovoked.

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Yeah, Trump was already politically engaged as a leader of right-wing conspiracizing. I would have thought he was already considering running, prior to the gala.

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Great show. One of the best post election podcasts I’ve listened to.

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thank you, really nice to hear that! glad it resonated

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Nov 9Edited

Thank you Damir and Shadi, a great discussion. I wish Shadi would have elaborated on what lessons Democrats must learn from this debacle. I could sense the sadness in both of your voices - we must worry about this nation's future. I worry that we will end up with power shifting from educated, left-leaning elites to oligarchs. Space X will become a huge defense contractor, for example. Maybe, in 10 years, we are less concerned about woke ideology than the role of big business in government (not like it is not already).

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Thanks for this and although I've not had a ton of time to think about the result (I was in my own post-engagement Paris bubble) the fact that Trump not only won the EC but the popular vote really shocked me. Trump is a shadow of his former self in terms of rhetoric and his ability to excite a mass crowd. Yet, he still managed to pull one of the greatest political comebacks of all time off.

It's far too easy to simply blame this on racism. This ignores Trump's significant inroads into voters from different backgrounds and why he was able to peel off significant sections of minority communities to lend their votes to him. Interestingly enough from some of the analysis I've seen the only minority group Trump really did not penetrate was Jewish voters despite his abrasive rhetoric.

Of course racism and sexism may well play a part into why some vote the way they do but to pin it on those explanations alone strikes me as missing the wider problem. The same argument was applied by some to Brexit in the UK which ignored the catastrophic collapse of community cohesion, standards of living, local pride, and social mobility which affected these areas. I think this also goes to the question of self-interest- how can we define someone's self interest without listening to the people themselves? Surely, they know what's best for them or at least need to be listened to rather than being patronized as to how they've made a bad decision.

I think this clearly rests upon the Democrats. Harris was a horribly weak candidate and I had many an argument with my American democratic minded friends over this. They maintained that Harris was strong and would shine in debates. I really didn't see this in the way they proclaimed and I was really worried about her being tagged with the Biden administration. Harris clearly didn't inspire given the way the vote went and questions must be asked about how she was planted into such a position.

However, Joe Biden should be made to take his fair share of the blame. His selfishness and his aids spinelessness in refusing to acknowledge what everyone else could see opened the door to Trump again. If he had announced that he wasn't running earlier, hadn't had that disastrous debate and weeks of negative press then Trump wouldn't have had the opportunity to open up the kind of lead he did in the first place. Indeed, what was interesting in the Atlantic piece was how Trump's aides got him out the spotlight towards the end of the race because they were fearful of what he may do.

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The joe biden blaming is worsely pernicious than people who put it all on Harris. None of us have proof that if Biden stepped down and gave Harris the remainder of the presidency that her campaign against Trump would have been better. Nor do we have proof that if he dropped out of the campaign earlier that Harris would have done better, although with more time, indeed she may have. Biden is out now, move on, let him retire.

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100%, The racism/sexism card is tired and worn out. It actually riles up old grievances that otherwise would be part of history for many folks without a college degree.

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I get that there were plenty of Harris campaign mistakes, but the notion that she did not offer/explain policy positions is pernicous and annorying. She has explained policy positions time and time again, even a google search brought up plenty of noteworthy results. Shadi said Kamala Harris was not inspiring, I disagree. She inspired me because I knew she showed the potential to be more progressive than Biden, or at worst, the same. Not all trump supporters are racist, but all of them are ok with his racism. Subtle but important distinction. Race and sex are a key factor here, and in this case, caused many people to vote against their own interests. Yeah it's on democrats too for not figuring out how to break through people's racism and sexism well enough to convince them that Kamala Harris will benefit them. A friend of mine noted: "Even more depressing - he [Trump] won the popular vote as well. There is a book called "How the South Won the Civil War." Today, we officially surrendered to racism. Well played, racists, well played. If he had started his campaign saying "undocumented immigrants depress wages because they can be exploited with low wages, so we need to limit the number entering the country," then we could pretend this was all about economics. But he started with "they are rapists and drug dealers." From minute number one, this was about racism, and racism won." Regarding critiquing dems, lawyer and former fbi agent Asha Rangappa said it best: "Democrats aren’t going to win elections again until they build a well-oiled information ecosystem that extends to podcasts and every social media platform and can pierce the right-wing propaganda bubble . It doesn’t matter if you delivered on the economy or we are actually safer if people are being pummeled by domestic and foreign disinformation that crime and inflation are up. It’s an information war at this point."

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Damir and Shadi suggest that if Obama hadn't roasted Trump at the Correspondent's Dinner, Trump might not have run for president. I needed to refresh my memory a bit, but in fact the real truth is that Obama's roasting of Trump is why Trump didn't run in 2012:

> The decision [not to run] comes after the businessman was repeatedly trounced by Obama last month over the "birther" issue. Trump took doubts about Obama's birthplace from the fringes of American politics to the mainstream, but the president undercut him by publishing the long form of his birth certificate, proving he had been born in the US. Obama humiliated Trump a few days later with a series of jokes at his expense at the White House correspondents' dinner, with the businessman present.

> In spite of Trump's claims about being frontrunner in the polls, one published on Monday by the Politico website and George Washington University showed 71% of those surveyed thought he had no chance of becoming president.

> Trump went through the motions of being a Republican contender, making speeches in key early states such as New Hampshire, and for a short time seemed in tune with the public mood. But he offered little in the way of policies and senior Republicans viewed his candidacy, with its emphasis on issues such as Obama's birthplace, as an irritating distraction.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/16/donald-trump-us-presidential-race

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Definitely Trump's birtherism doesn't get mentioned often enough. Maybe the clearest instance of race-baiting in his political career.

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Regarding Hispanics, it’s important to note that many, especially citizens who can vote, may not appreciate being called “immigrants”. The majority of Hispanic citizens are natural born Americans who are bad at Spanish. The majority of Hispanic citizens identify as white. This group wants to be treated as Americans instead of as recent arrivals. Why would we be aligned with the interests of the economic migrants fraudulently claiming asylum?

Growing up in Texas, the most offended I ever got at a joke was when a friend joked about my family jumping a fence to get here. My family has been in this country since Abraham Lincoln served his term in the US house. We’ve been here. We didn’t migrate yesterday or 10 years or 100 years ago. Now Democrats can’t stop conflating us with illegal aliens. So I find myself alienated from the Dems and sympathetic to Trumps immigration proposals.

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I don't agree with the blame the voter electoral/campaign/post-campaign strategy some media might want to do, but on a personal level, it's fine/necessary to point out trumpers' hypocrisy/ voting against their own and others' interests.

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A policy director at Bluelabs publicly posted this on LinkedIn, he asks key questions about the future of the dems: "It hurts.

The outcome of our election Tuesday is as devastating as it is disappointing.

There are so many feelings, so many thoughts that I have, and we still need all of the data to be able to draw specific conclusions, but here’s where I’m personally at in this moment in terms of what happened big picture:

The simplest explanation is so often the correct one — this was a change election. Rightly or wrongly, the American people were by-and-large unhappy and unsatisfied with the current administration and its performance over the past four years, particularly when it comes to the economy. Whether or not the facts and figures demonstrate that the economy is doing better than it was four years ago, it doesn’t matter - the voters flat out did not believe it. They don’t feel it in their lives, and they wanted a change. And once again, as in 2016, Donald Trump represented change. Whether voters liked Donald Trump or not, and of course many of those who voted for Trump don’t like him, for whatever reason, they believe he is going to be better for the economy as a whole and better for their own personal bottom line.

“It’s the economy, stupid.” - that’s what this election was ultimately about, in my view.

Yes, absolutely - there is racism. Yes, absolutely - there is misogyny. But the outcome yesterday was so clear and so decisive, to blame it on these forces and these forces alone is folly.

What I also know is that the correct response to this is absolutely NOT to blame the voters. The correct response is to look inward — as candidates, campaigns, parties, organizations, practitioners, etc. — and try to find the solutions.

There are so many questions that need answering, but for me personally, there are four glaring questions in particular that I’m going to be thinking about and that collectively we need to find answers to and find them quickly:

- Why are Democratic/progressive policies consistently popular with the electorate but our candidates are not?

- What actually matters and what actually works in campaigns anymore?

- How do we credibly and effectively communicate facts, information, and our messages to voters in this age where media and information ecosystem is so diverse and so fragmented and trust in our news media and our institutions is at an all time low?

- How do we consistently and effectively reach out beyond our base of urban/suburban, educated, and affluent voters to build a sustainable electoral majority and governing coalition so that stakes of our elections every 2-4 years aren’t quite so dramatic?

Just a few simple questions, huh…

As President Kennedy once said:

“We, the people, are the boss, and we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and deserve.”

What are your thoughts? Let’s try and figure this out.

I certainly do not know what the future holds, but let’s all be good to one another and take care of each other."

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if anyone is interested, here after a bit of crapping on the dems, Jon Stewart debunks the notion that the dems ran a "woke" campaign https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKBJoj4XyFc

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