r/moderatepolitics • u/cathbadh • 21d ago

Democrats should pay attention to Kristen McDonald Rivet's election postmortem Opinion Article

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/kristen-mcdonald-rivet-democrats-win-rcna184010

88 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

u/wes424 21d ago

This is the same nonsense that led you to losing in the "most consequential election in our lifetime".

Instead of rejecting the left fringe, dems are trying to mainstream it even more and America rejected it. That's what you need to realize.

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u/Xalimata 21d ago

Answer his question. Why can the GOP embrace their fringe while the dems can't?

12

u/pixelatedCorgi 21d ago

I mean the simple answer is because America as a country has voted that they’re ok with it [the GOP fringe].

At the end of the day all that matters for either party is winning elections. If the GOP was getting slaughtered electorally then yes, the advice probably should be “the GOP needs to drop the crazies and moderate themselves towards the center”. But that’s not how 2024 panned out, it was the opposite.

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u/Xalimata 21d ago

I'd argue that the voters rejected the center. Harris ran a centrist campaign and lost.

19

u/wes424 21d ago

Most liberal voting record of any senator. Wildly unpopular as VP. Her campaign may have attempted to be centrist by trying to ignore it but that's why the stupid "they/them" Trump ad was effective. Showed her real fringe views and she never came out and refuted it directly and people saw right through the campaign BS.

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u/Xalimata 21d ago

So what do you suggest? Stop trying to protect LGBT people? Let the hounds of the right attack them? Some things are moral principals that should be kept. Abolition was unpopular yet Republicans kept to it.

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u/wes424 21d ago

That was not just about LGBT rights although I get the generalization. She was on camera saying taxpayer funded transition surgeries for prisoners... that's a pretty fringe, non centrist idea.

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u/Xalimata 21d ago

Treating prisoners like humans is a good thing. They are wards of the state after all

7

u/wes424 21d ago

Come on, we can't twist that into a mainstream position whether either of us supports it or not. Clearly most independents didn't because that ad was very effective, proven by stats.

When there are a lot of financial issues facing most of America's middle and working classes, they don't want to hear about their tax dollars going to gender transition surgeries for prisoners.

1

u/Xalimata 21d ago

Maybe she should have run a progressive anti rich message

8

u/wes424 21d ago

Would have also been hard to do that when she was taking all the small donations and giving millions to rich celebs.

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u/pixelatedCorgi 21d ago

Kamala Harris is not in any sense of the word a centrist, nor anything even remotely resembling one. You can say her 3 month campaign was fairly moderate but she has a 2+ decade career resumé as an extreme progressive.

0

u/Xalimata 21d ago

Maybe if she ran an actually progressive campaign rather than parading around the Cheney she might have won.

7

u/pixelatedCorgi 21d ago

I guess it’s possible 🤷‍♂️

We’ll never know, though I find it hard to believe that tripling down on progressivism would have accomplished anything other than an even larger defeat.

The whole Cheney thing was bizarre regardless though and an obvious misstep.

2

u/Xalimata 21d ago

She ran a centrist campaign that had little to no substance. Actually having real beliefs would have helped.