Kamala wasn't the problem, America is.

Agreed.

When Hillary lost, a female friend told me this country will not elect a woman as a US President.

She is right. I’m thinking of her now and she’d kindly gently say to me “ I hate to say I told you so….”

We have been broken since 2015. Mitch McConnell and the GOP literally STOLE the Supreme Court in broad daylight. We watched it happen.

I have no problem agreeing with you, R1. My aunt said the same thing years ago.

It’s not their femaleness. Hugely sexist countries have had female leaders.

It’s about Obama. All of this sprang out of the Tea Party and the fact that America is not mature enough to deal with a black leader. Centre-right Obama was considered a Marxist. It’s ridiculous and it will never stop being ridiculous.

Forgot to add, OP, that what I wrote at r1 is just one aspect to your larger point.

Trump encouraged his followers to commit violent, deadly theft of 80, 000, 000 American votes.

And now he’ll falsely utter another oath of office.

That’s on America, not him.

He also encouraged a failed insurection only four years ago.

CNN are using the terms "sweeping victory" and "mandate" and they're right.

Agreed R4 but you're deliberately omitting the rampant racism. It drove those people insane that a black family dared to be inside the White House.

The problem is not America

The problem is late stage capitalism

Late stage capitalism was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis. Obama was the symptom, as is Trump. Two unorthodox politicians who campaigned in abstracts. The country oscillates between two poles seeking creative solutions for an unfixable problem.

The United States will not return to “normal” because this is now “normal”. The pendulum will swing wildly until the robots achieve sentience and decide they need to end us all.

Late stage capitalism is impacting on the world, but the United States is the only English speaking nation that would ever elect a man like Trump.

Clearly the US has unique issues.

Trump represents the fraud the United States is. That’s all there is to it.

[quote]Trump represents the fraud the United States is.

And the cruelty towards others which is the United States R11.

R1 I want to go back and show you some of the posts you wrote back in April

You were told exactly what would happen

Now you want to blame America

You are just as responsible for this as anyone who voted for Trump.

As I said in another thread, this attitude is exactly why they will keep winning. Some of you folks need to do some self reflection.

So true. Remembering the way 2016 really happened. Trump came down that gold escalator in May 2015, announced he was running for President... and most of us who vote Democrat just laughed. And then WHOOSH within a couple of months a huge segment of America had gravitated to Trump and begun to venerate him. Like an instant school of fish. THEY did this, his base, even more than Trump did. And they did it because they had been shaped to want this. Shaped and conditioned for years by Fox, by Rush Limbaugh, by the full infiltration of far right wing politics into their churches and communities. Shaped and conditioned.

[quote]As I said in another thread, this attitude is exactly why they will keep winning. Some of you folks need to do some self reflection.

What should everyone self-reflect about R14?

[quote]And the cruelty towards others which is the United States

Of course. America is set up for the rich by the rich. Everyone else is just fighting for scraps. That's the mentality of most Americans because a large majority of them are fighting just to survive. Just to put food on the table. Others who are middle class realize this and want to stay middle class. They don't want to lose anything.

Let's not forget the immigrants and price gouging were MAJOR factors in the election. And when asked about the high price of groceries, President Biden just LAUGHED. People are BROKE and can't afford groceries and Joe Biden LAUGHED.

And trump isn't going to do anything to help the average citizens, but he can at least get a fake message across that he plans to help people. He's able to make people think he will help them.

The average citizen did not like Kamala Harris. She accomplished nothing, except allowing millions more mostly male immigrants to swarm through the border. Most Americans are against these immigrants. The democratic politicians don't care if people are against them. They care more about the immigrants. Trump being against the immigrants makes the average citizen feel like he cares about them. It GALLS the average citizens to see democrats throwing BILLIONS and BILLIONS at the ungrateful immigrants. That's one of the exact reasons so many voted for trump or just stayed home & didn't vote. And after this election loss, the democrats won't change at all. It will be more of the "same old, same old" with the democrats. PEOPLE DON'T WANT THAT. They want change, even if it's bad change (with trump).

That's the truth.

It was not Harris’s fault. She wasn’t a perfect candidate, that doesn’t exist. But she did fine. A different democratic candidate probably would not have won unless they really broke with what democratic candidates have been doing.

People know Trump is always hyperbolic and frequently lies. They adjust for it. So they aren’t worried about what he might really do or what his secret motivations are. He’s horrible, but it’s a case of what you see is the worst case scenario.

1. Why is Biden still president? Who is really running the country? This made Harris look bad because she seems complicit. I think she is blameless because she would have come across as a power hungry bad guy if she tried to “seize” power. But she should already be president. That didn’t happen and it made some people suspicious. This was a lose lose situation for Harris. Biden should have dropped out of the presidency, not the race.

2. Americans don’t like illegal immigration, Harris should have voiced her plan more aggressively and put republicans on the spot preemptively. “This is what I am going to do and if the republicans try to block it - blame them. And, BTW, some stuff is going to cost more. Including food. But my plan will cause less inflation and chaos than Trump’s, especially since who knows what he will actually do?” Own the inflation issue and argue it with common sense. This should have been 90% of what she talked about from the second Biden dropped out.

3. A less nuanced version of (2) - Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of voters showing ID. Make that happen. What are you afraid of if that happens? What’s the big deal? People can argue about the theoretical example of a 99 year-old who no longer has a driver’s license, but on a practical level 80-90% of Americans are Ok with the tiny minority of people who find getting a government issued ID challenging being unable to vote. Why not do this and inspire confidence? Being reluctant to do this makes conspiracy theories about election fraud easier to believe. Prove that those theories are nonsense. This was such an easy potential win.

4. People don’t care what Trump says. They discount it. What he does is a little different. More focus on his financial shenanigans (especially Jared’s dealings) would have been good. Biden couldn’t fully exploit this because, Hunter. But Harris seems above reproach. This is maybe another area where being tied to Biden hurt her.

He should have been easy to beat, but Biden’s debate performance complicated things. A more productive path forward would blame Biden and his handlers. Not the swing voters who said, “WTF?”

Looking back, a lot of us had a blind spot about Biden's abysmal favorability rating. It was already in the negative teens heading into that disaster debate of June 27. You can't win re-election with those numbers.

The post-COVID inflation spike really hurt, long after it simmered down, and Biden took the blame and still does. Wrong or right. Kamala Harris gets a 10/10 for her campaign, but she was facing too many headwinds. Not just racism, and that's all too real. Not just misogyny, and that's also all too real. But Kamala Harris is absolutely tethered politically and in reputation to Joe Biden, and too many voters saw it that way. They didn't see her as new and fresh like Barack Obama in 2008. They saw her as Biden's VP and they strongly do not like Biden.

We are no longer united, that’s for sure.

R8, the rampart racism was my point, and it started with Obama. Kamala Harris just reminds them of him.

Remember than a majority of Americans voted for Obama. And apart from the Tea Party lunatic fringe, middle Americans became horrified by lack of “gratitude” showed by the black community, and further minority groups, in the years that identity culture became mainstream on the right and political correctness morphed into wokeness in the left.

I know liberal white women who spewed venom about “old white men” are now fully MAGA. Younger left-wing generations who couldn't afford houses and grew up on tumblr didn’t sign on with their Sheryl Sandberg/white CEO/ethical slut feminism, and they felt left behind.

Because white women don’t want liberation for all women and all underserved communities; they want the power of white men.

She didn’t lose by much. Shit like this didn’t help. A foreign student registered to vote with his student ID.

Rejoice. The country so quick to call every other a 'shit hole country' is now the #1 Shithole Country. A shit hole soon to be run (again) by shit holes...and proud of it.