Harris only received five percent of Republican votes — less than the six percent Joe Biden won in 2020 when he beat Trump, as well as the seven percent won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she lost to him. While Harris won independents and moderates, she did so by smaller margins than Biden did in 2020.
Meanwhile, Harris lost households earning under $100,000, while Democratic turnout collapsed. Votes are still being counted, but Harris is on pace to underperform Biden’s 2020 totals by millions of votes.
I’m not sure that the problem was going too far towards Republicans rather than not going far enough, because I expect that the leftists staying home stayed home in solidly blue states. I think that the political positions that many people here on Lemmy wanted Harris to take would have been extremely unpopular with the electorate.
With that said, it might have been impossible for Harris to move to the right convincingly, because she couldn’t plausibly distance herself from Biden’s unpopular policies. I wish the Democrats nominated someone who could have criticized Biden in a way that Harris could not.
These problems are well beyond petty “leftists”, but centrists will never engage in introspection about their failures.
Petty leftists weren’t even a significant part of the problem, IMO. Biden is very unpopular, people didn’t want more of the same, and Biden’s vice president looked like more of the same. However, the Democratic party was too hierarchical to nominate the sort of candidate that they needed to nominate.
Hell, they nominated Biden himself even though his age could have given them a perfect excuse not to nominate a sitting president. He was only forced to step aside once his inadequacies were undeniably obvious to all, and even then he was like a child throwing a tantrum. History is going to remember him as the emperor with no clothes.
What? Didn’t he step aside when he had COVID infection this year?
17 July - Biden tested positive for COVID.
21 July - He stepped down.
Source on him throwing a tantrum?
Many senior Democrats were calling on Biden to resign long before he got covid, but he repeatedly made defiant announcements that he would never resign (and Harris supported him). He’s the guy who said that he would only resign if God told him to! His covid infection appears to have been mild (lasting less than a week), and he resigned not because of it but because pretty much the entire Democratic establishment (led by Pelosi) told him that he must.
Is it possible that there were different camps in the DNC and there was another camp which wanted to ride on incumbent advantage? Especially when Biden was performing well with the hand he was dealt? US had the best recovery post-COVID, after all.