“If the purges [of potential voters], challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.”
"[…] Democracy can win* despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.
And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK."
So the new campaign is that the DNC did nothing wrong, they were just thwarted by voter suppression?
Couldn’t be they completely fucked up by campaigning to a center that doesn’t exist any more. The DLC’s triangulation bullshit is dead and needs to stay dead. Every Dem from the Clinton era needs to get that through their damn heads, they should have retired a decade ago anyway.
The Democrats have plenty of problems, but none of that compares to Republicans who are worse in every conceivable way. Propaganda, foreign interference, and domestic voter suppression won this for Trump and his goons.
I get the argument, but at this point, nobody is contemplating whether to vote Democrat or Republican. It’s between Democrat and apathy.
Comments like these sound as if during WWII the French were saying “well, the French army has plenty of problems, but Nazi German occupation is worse in every conceivable way, so there is no point criticising the French army”.
Everyone knows the Reps are Nazis. The problem with the Dems is not that they are not less bad than the literal Nazi party, but that they are unable to effectively fight the Nazi party. The problem is that Democrats fail to demonstrate that voting for them is better than not voting at all to a large part of the electorate.
The problem is that Democrats fail to demonstrate
And compounding that problem is people being angry at the Dems for this failure instead of trying to help.
“Clearly you’re not worth voting for because you can’t convince people to vote for you.” Great.
“Clearly you’re not worth voting for because you can’t convince people to vote for you.” Great.
But it’s not that. It’s “please do something because you’re abandoning wide swathes of people and are going to lose, and lose our best chance against the fascists this way”.
The problem is that Dems don’t like progressives’ help, they would rather get help from Cheney than Sanders.
abandoning wide swathes of people
Because forgiving college debt and giving you $50k towards your first house and bringing prescription drug prices down is abandoning you? Fixing our rail system is abandoning you? Repeatedly saying they’re going to tax billionaires is abandoning progressives?
It’s not like we give them enough to have the power to actually get big things done. When we do give them a little, they have to bring in the vice president to break ties in the Senate.
In this regard, it’s not like Republicans wield power any better. They couldn’t even repeal the ACA. It’s just that they get more credit. First, they get credit for every Dem initiative they stop (even if it’s not real). The reverse isn’t true. Second, everything the Republicans do get done tends to be negative and stings more than the positives.
I know you want to abandon billionaire money. You want Dems saying the right things to you, in a closet where nobody hears them. Because if you don’t have money, you lose elections. Period. That’s a big problem that needs to be solved, but it can’t be solved by people who lose elections.
The Dems absolutely could have tried to appeal to the progressives more instead of moderates. Clearly, in hindsight, it’d be worth trying something different. But I doubt it would have worked. People weren’t happy, and they were going to take it out on the incumbent party. And right now they’d be hearing “why didn’t they appeal to moderates?”
My point is that it’s more complicated than just “appeal to progressives instead of moderates”. The Dems have more realities to deal with than we give them credit for.
Because forgiving college debt and giving you $50k towards your first house and bringing prescription drug prices down is abandoning you? Fixing our rail system is abandoning you? Repeatedly saying they’re going to tax billionaires is abandoning progressives?
Tax billionaires how? Any concrete plans? Any proposed laws that were brought to the floor as much as repealing Obamacare was by the ghouls?
And trying to win by forgiving student debt that they themselves made undischargeable as recently as 2005 is good, but it’s just trying to clean up after themselves. Unsuccessfully.
And giving $50k towards a first house, when houses are nearing a million is not going to do anything other than drive housing prices even further up. How much public housing have they built? Have they even proposed putting a tax on large-scale corporate homeownership or price gouging, houses sitting empty?
I’m not even going to mention Gaza.
But the elephant in the room, Joe Biden could have nominated anyone, literally anyone for AG. He nominated known conservative Merrick Garland, who then proceeded to let Trump go after 34 felony convictions and who knows how many hundreds of actual felonies, to become US president.
In this regard, it’s not like Republicans wield power any better. They couldn’t even repeal the ACA.
At least they tried. How many times have Democrats brought a vote to tax billionaires or megacorps, even if it failed, just to keep it on the table?
I know you want to abandon billionaire money. You want Dems saying the right things to you, in a closet where nobody hears them. Because if you don’t have money, you lose elections. Period. That’s a big problem that needs to be solved, but it can’t be solved by people who lose elections.
If money is more important than getting votes in order to win an election, then the US is not and has not been a democracy. That said, the Dems got all the money ever this election. Where is the win then?
The Dems absolutely could have tried to appeal to the progressives more instead of moderates. Clearly, in hindsight, it’d be worth trying something different. But I doubt it would have worked. People weren’t happy, and they were going to take it out on the incumbent party. And right now they’d be hearing “why didn’t they appeal to moderates?”
Has that ever happened? Once? Or has it been dozens of elections in a row, always appealing to “moderates” - actually wealthy donors - and leaving progressives to rot. And then blaming progressives for the election loss. Damn, Lina Khan, the one woman who was arguably doing her job well was possibly on the chopping block. How do you get people to vote for this?
The Dems have been the perfect Weimar to Trump’s Hitler. May they be remembered as “fondly” as them.
Thank you for this, it’s speaking exactly the unending frustration I have with these lines of “thought”.
That said, the Dems got all the money ever this election. Where is the win then?
Why are you blatantly lying about this? Any chump can look at the wall of CEOs Trump has next to him for his victory speeches and see where the money was backing.
This article is in desperate need of citations and a public revelation of the calculations involved. It also has problems. I can’t speak to other states but where it does mention Pennsylvania, where I live, it omits critical information.
In Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), the Poison Postcards wiped out 360,132 voters, three times Trump’s victory margin.
These don’t get sent out for fun. This is how the ordinary voter roll maintenance works. The cards are sent out after you fail to vote two consecutive federal elections, or when the department of state gets notified you moved or died through some other means, not for ‘targeting’ voters. You only actually get purged from the roll if you fail to respond to the card AND fail to vote for at least five consecutive years (This isn’t specified as far as I know, but a product of the timings involved). If you show up and vote in every presidential election, you do not get removed from the rolls even if you throw out the postcard. So if this:
According to the EAC data, before the 2024 election, 4,776,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return the postcard.
Includes Pennsylvania, it is simply false. You can read the actual law yourself, they are all online. It’s PA Title 25. Chapter 19 lays out the rules for removal.
Details on Pennsylvania specific mail-in ballots being cancelled, which is a real issue, are woefully absent. According to the Governor’s office only about 1% of the 2 million returned (about 20,000) mail in ballots were rejected.
Of the roughly 1% of mail ballots rejected in the 2024 general election, the most common reasons for rejection were:
receipt after the 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day (33%), incorrect or missing date (23%), lack of a signature (17%), and lack of a secrecy envelope (15%).
Harris lost by ~120,000 ish votes in PA. ‘Clerical errors’ are not even close to closing that gap.
It also mentions Secretaries of State being partisan hacks, but some odd reason fails to mention Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State was appointed by our Democratic governor who was not only a Democrat, obviously, but short listed for consideration as a running mate for Harris. Nevertheless, it is implied we should concerned about his Secretary of State targeting voters from her own party for removal in an election that could have had handed the governor his own path to the White House. Forgive me for my skepticism.
Voter suppression is a big deal, I’m sure there are elections it will swing at times. Heck, there is a fair chance it swung the senate race in PA since that one was only decided by ~15,000 votes, but based on what I already know, this article isn’t credible enough to be taken seriously in its current state.
An award winng investigative journalist who has spent at least the last 25 years looking into this type of behaviour isn’t credible?
this article isn’t credible enough to be taken seriously in its current state.
I keep seeing a lot of arguments along the lines of “they can’t have done that, that’s against the law.”
**Republicans do not care about the rule of law. ** They loudly and repeatedly flaunt this at every opportunity. The entire reason we keep having to talk about this is because of how loudly and repeatedly they prove they are willing to break any law in order to win. The law does not matter, it is toilet paper, it does not stop them. That’s the whole REASON we are all up in arms about this in the FIRST place.
Your argument is a nonsensical one. You’ve illustrated the way the Poison Postcard is supposed to work, absolutely. But did it actually follow those rules? In some places like Texas and Georgia, that answer is a booming, resounding, FUCK NO they didn’t. So what about elsewhere then?
In some places like Texas and Georgia, that answer is a booming, resounding, FUCK NO they didn’t.
I can’t speak to other states but where it does mention Pennsylvania, where I live, it omits critical information.
I’m supposed to believe that hundreds of thousands of Democratic Pennsylvania voters were illegally unregistered and denied their right to vote while democratic county election officials, county attorneys, the governor’s office, the state attorney general’s office, the department of state and many civic/legal orgs all just sat on their hands because of an article whose demonstration of fact taps out at “Trust me bro, I did the math.”
But my argument that we need to see the sources and math is “nonsensical”?
Fuck off.
