Reply to your post is inline, below. Your post has been reformatted to facilitate reply. QUOTE="TreeFrogTrader, post: 6063134, member: 499789"] "Harris was a talented candidate running a modern professional campaign that was just reaching full speed by Election Day." You have said in the past the more voters hear Kamala speak, the less they will like her. Did we not see this effect during the 202o Democrat primaries? I figured that Kamala was being groomed for a eventual run for the Presidency as Vice President. I base this upon the various responsibilities assigned to her. I never heard anything notably positive coming out of that. In addition, it is my understanding a fundamental part of being a prosecutor is to efficiently research a variety of subjects to the point of becoming a near expert. The fundamental problem with career politicians is they seem to lack situational awareness when it comes to business and economic policy decisions. It seems Kamala was focused elsewhere, probably assuming Biden would run again. There's her problem right there, and underlies all her sneering comments trying to make the point that voters are too stupid to understand what a great candidate Kamala was, and that anyone who supported Trump was obviously not getting information from any reliable source and that the only reason the pubs won was because all the knuckledraggers and neanderthals of the country were organized into a movement. I feel it is important to make a distinction between various factions within the Democrat Party. It seems Kamala is a Marxist, through and through. Marxist philosophy is a "subtractive" in a lot of areas, from long term negative economic stability to negative social stability. There is one area the philosophy can be beneficial, but resources have already been allocated to address that area. Those Democrats more focused on Worker's Rights and Green Policies should be lent at least some consideration, including the more open minded from the Right. Marxist influence should be pressured, but cooperation should be encouraged from the rest of the Democrats. Their voices matter and I believe obligations exist to fairly govern all US Citizens and not just of a particular party. Cooperation and conflict on geopolitical scale has been becoming more intense and polarized according to political and economic philosophies, it seems. This is extraordinarily dangerous as more WMDs are developed in our ever increasing AI influenced system. They way things are going, the advantages of autonomous, AI driven weapon systems will be considered critical by most major powers. Further, redlines that were traditionally respected are routinely crossed. We are on a path toward planetary wide destruction. National and International cooperation is our only chance. James Carville would eat her for breakfast and spit her out. He is disgusted with his own party and says they may be out of power for decades for this very reason. You don't have to agree with James but he is pantload smarter and more experienced than the lefty woman who wrote that article. I give the author credit for her forty years or so journalistic experience as well as her recent canvassing experience. It is very likely she has not shared all of her insights gained from her canvassing in the quoted article. I have done telemarketing, door knocking, and signature gathering. Became fairly effective. Just saying it is worth 1 unit of productivity. How you say it is worth at least 3 more additional units of productivity. Being perceptive and adjusting to prospect personality type in addressing prospect's concerns is worth another 3 units of productivity, or influence. In other words, in the United States, anyways, song and dance is 10 times more productive than content alone. Scary, perhaps, but fairly accurate. The point I'm leading up to is the author could very well have some insights that are more current than James, and should not be underestimated. Also, at the end she gloats and pats herself on the back a bit by saying that at least she and the army of volunteers in her canvassing area held the line on latinos and blacks crossing over, etc, etc. Nope. The Trump campaign in PA was dominated by Elon Musk's PAC and Charlie Kirk's PAC and their analytics undoubtedly showed that there were few moveable votes in that area, which is why no republican ground game was encountered there. Instead, the author and her canvassers got sucked into working their arses off there when it was better to write it off. Republicans notoriously have a poor ground game compared to the dems so I am not shy about being critical of that. But they played PA very well.[/QUOTE My take is the Republicans had less resources, from money to volunteers than the Democrats and had to make tough allocation decisions. Certainly Republicans could not afford to bus in canvassers from other states, which is what the Democrats did. Fortunately for Republicans, they had a quality candidate to work with. Wink.
Well, yes, democrats and republicans are united in the belief that Kamala should have focused on - and at least pretend that she liked- working class people and issues. From there, dems and pubs differ on how to raise them up. Kamala's problem is that she loves the lefty language and atmosphere of marxist but dishes out progressive babble about transgender rights and electric school buses when asked about kitchen table issues. Bernie Sanders, however, is a life long marxist who cares or at least consistently focuses on working class issues- for a lifetime- and thus is not as phony and obnoxious as Kamala. But yeh, I can't look inside someone's mind and know how sincere they are, but if any dem is focusesd on working class issues because they care and are not just working some campaign shtick then they are welcome to chime in and be listened to. But believe me, now that the campaign is over, Kamala could care less and in fact she showed that she could not care less during the campaign. She goes to PA and tries to answer some questions about why working class people are suffering. Answer: Trump is a fascist and joins Biden in making it clear that working class people are garbage unless they support her. The rest is history. It was the same in 2016. Everyone knows that Michael Moore is a fat, leftist, slob but everyone knows and listened to him in 2016 when he said Trump was relating to working class people and the dem's were clueless about how to relate to working class people in Michigan. Ditto for 2024. All their chatter now is about how they have a "messaging" problem. No they don't. They have a "giving a shit about anything outside the beltway" problem. The other thing that was weird and showed her ignorance is the way she continually mushed together the terms "working class" and "middle class" as in continually, continually telling us how much she struggled growing up because she was "middle class." But when she was growing up, to be middle class in American was the envy of the world. Both her mother and father were Phd's. How "working class" does that sound to you. She lived in one of the best sections of Montreal.
It will be interesting to see if Democrats ultimately decide to either look for "More effective ways to get voters to accept their ideals" or to actually represent the interests of their constituents. One way does not seem have a great political outlook, especially if facing competent Republican opposition. Then again, Robert De Niro, et al, may decide to take a stand. Grin.