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JanusIanitos's avatar

I think the optics helped us a lot at the time, and there's a real chance that Doug Jones would have lost the Alabama special election.

Franken announced he would resign on Dec 7, 2017. The special election was held Dec 12, 2017. Jones won by ~1.5 points.

If democrats were not able to separate themselves out as having higher standards on sexual misconduct than republicans, I do not believe we would have succeeded in making Moore's crimes stick to him in the mind of the electorate.

We can have effective presidential candidates without giving up our standards on basic human decency.

Plus, I will maintain my first post-election argument: 2024 was not an election decided by policy. Tying that into this conversation, I think it was equally not an election about our candidate. Considering Harris' performance in battleground states versus elsewhere, I will maintain that she ran a good campaign. It was an election enormously tilted against us due to the political environment and in particular the media environment. I don't see any one candidate out there that could have turned this around for us.

Media environment will remain our biggest obstacle and it's something we need to figure out how to solve, or at least work around.

In some ways I think we're also looking at a problem like republicans were in ~2012ish. Where their base was too fractured and couldn't truly agree on anything, leading to large portions of their base being perpetually displeased. We've struggled with that in the post-Obama era.

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James Trout's avatar

Yep. The USA is hardly the only country where the incumbent party was voted out. Expect the trend to continue this year. And Democratic voters and politicians need to accept that life is NOT a damn Disney movie and thus we shouldn't automatically expect things to work out.

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