all this navel gazing "the party learned a big lesson and needs to do some introspection on itself" bla bla bla bullshit every four years always cracks me up...just like it did in 2008 for republicans, 2010 for dems, 2012 for republicans, 2014 and 2016 for dems, 2018, 2020, and 2022 for republicans, and now 2024 for dems. while it certainly gives a bunch of folks (especially a few here) the opportunity to project some level of superiority or gloating that "if only this enormous national apparatus of political machination that seeks to bring compromise to a million different competing interests have listened to me about who they were not properly advocating for...," it really is just a bunch of nonsense and an excuse for a bunch of marginal magazines and marginal journalists and opportunity to do longform post-mortems full of hindsight bullshit. just as much nonsense as all the poor, broken people who have been peacocking around this forum the last week making extraordinarily lame attempts to dunk on everyone else while betraying just how broken they truly are.
american politics is actually quite a simple equation for a few decades now and it really is just a consequential derivative of our society accepting (if not advocating for) a crony capitalism economic system flirting with all out oligarchy. because of the extraordinary and accelerated changes in wealth inequality over the last few decades, the overwhelming majority of the impoverished, poor, lower-middle class, and middle-middle class are now substantially poorer in a relative sense than they have ever been. there is very little dignity and they are overwhelmingly bombarded through media, entertainment, social media, and even politics with how inferior their lifestyles are now which gives them the perception of failure and a miserable experience of daily grinding. they are unsatisfied in their lives relative to how they believe models on instagram live, billionaires on private planes, etc... these are the majority of voters.
when people feel perpetually unsatisfied and unhappy, they are not rational about economics and no one out there is pointing them to the fact that in this time of "extraordinary inflation" before and after tax corporate profits have increased from 2.4 trillion a quarter in 2019 to 4.1 trillion this year. since they don't understand that, the only person to blame for the malaise and their general dissatisfaction is the most visible and perceived powerful person in the nation. life sucks and someone else is to blame. i will punish the status quo by electing something different (which is just a continuation of the status quo under a different color). for trump in particular, he exacerbates the appeal because these people that believe they have nothing to lose don't see him for what he is (the guy unapologetically stealing their life savings and exacerbating the inequality), they farcically see him as iconoclast and agent of burning everything to the ground. the preceding are the most important contributing elements to presidential elections now.
second, harris was a minority woman. minority is not that bad, woman is the worst possible sin. particularly amongst hispanic men, white men, and a heeeeeell of a lot more women than is polite to discuss.
third, biden's choices thrust harris into a losing position and created an environment with no real alternative and was just a bad situation.
there's really not much more to it than that.
2026 and 2028 will be a reaction to this election when all these suckers and losers (not the maga cult ones but the rest of them) realize that their lives are still shit (likely much worse) after a few years of the upcoming circus.