Democrats Post-Election Loss Freak Out

[0:01] I tried to talk Democrats off the ledge after their freakout over Trump when in the election.

[0:08] There is no need to panic. And Harris didn’t lose because Democrats were too woke. There was an obvious reason she lost and a not-so-obvious reason. And it had nothing to do with her campaign or the DNC. I’m Doug Berger, and this is Secular Left.

[0:32] Music.

[0:44] Oh, I hear that there was a presidential election the other day. What happened? I’m sorry. That was a bad joke. Bad, bad joke. That whole election was a bad, bad joke. I’m with you. I’m with you on that. I can’t believe that it happened, that the Democrats lost. I can’t believe that the Democratic candidate lost. I really can’t. Because look at it, okay? She had, Vice President Harris had pretty much the endorsement of everybody. You know, she had the Democrat endorsement. She had black women. She had former administration officials in Trump’s first presidential. Administration come out and support her. She had the generals come out and support her. She had, you know, hundreds of Republican elected officials across the country support her. She had at least a billion dollars in campaign contributions.

[2:03] She was somewhere every single day of the campaign. She had 100 days from the time that she took over the ticket, and she worked her butt off. You know, one of the complaints about Hillary Clinton in 2016 was that she stopped campaigning in Wisconsin, and then she lost Wisconsin. The Vice President Harris didn’t avoid any of the swing states. Now, I’m not going to get into the whole electoral college bullshit. I think the electoral college is bullshit, really. I do. I think it should be the person that wins the presidential race should be the one that wins the majority of the popular vote, period. But white men who were afraid of minorities taking over the country, sound familiar? They put together the Electoral College because they wanted the slave states to have the same power as the northern non-slave states.

[3:18] So that’s, anyway. So she worked her butt off. She ran a flawless, pretty much flawless campaign. So why did she lose?

[3:34] Well, the hot takes are that she lost because she was piling around with Liz Cheney late in the campaign. And she was endorsed by Darth, I call him Darth Cheney. No, that’s not why she lost. You know, there’s a segment in the far left that complain about shit like that. They’re about as party purity or value purity as the magas are on the right. You know, oh, you took Cheney on your little excursion. Well, you’re dead to me. And another hot take that I really don’t buy is that some Democrats and some people on the left were complaining that Harris was appointed or picked by the DNC to be the nominee. Without an open primary, without an open convention, and how undemocratic that was. And I just, I have to laugh. I just have to laugh because it’s wrong. That take is just wrong.

[4:47] Anyway, and the reason why people that bring that up, why they are wrong, is because Vice President Harris was already on the ticket. You know, initially it was Biden Harris running for reelection. So she was already on the ticket. Okay. And once the, the, uh, uh, democratic establishment forced Biden out, you know, pushed him aside with a hundred days left in the election, who were they expecting to take over who did they have did they have a backup plan, if they had a backup plan we would have known and i don’t think they had a backup plan, i think a lot of people that wanted to push out biden were doing it because they thought they could do a open primary but see people you had that chance democrats you had that chance at the beginning of the campaign.

[5:55] To choose a different person but nobody ran against him there was no primaries and it wasn’t because the dnc forced people not to challenge him that’s just what you do it’s an incumbent president he wants to run for re-election the only times that the democrat it’s always been well i think the republicans have had it a couple times but the only times that i remember where an incumbent president, Democratic president was challenged, the Democrats lost the election.

[6:28] You know, you had Jimmy Carter when Ted Kennedy challenged Carter for the nomination for re-election when he was running for re-election. The Democrats lost big time in 1980. Who else who else challenged an incumbent? Yeah, there was a challenge to Lyndon Johnson before he dropped out. You know, things like that. And these people that were like, you know, we should have had an open primary. You can’t, you had a hundred days, you could not do primaries again. You just couldn’t. You know, I’m not a Democratic party member. I’m not a member of any party. And from my observation, it seemed all above board to me. Now, somebody could write a book later and with the details, the behind the scenes details, and it may shock me. But from the surface, it looked legitimate to me. You know, Harris was on the ticket already. They weren’t going to have to reinvent the wheel. All they had to do was just change all the legal papers over to her. She got to keep all of the donations that had been collected up to that point.

[7:48] And then there were some people that complained, well, she didn’t know how to communicate and she didn’t know how to talk. She was a politician. I’ve seen her in interviews where she hedges her bets and doesn’t answer a question directly. That’s what a politician does. I wasn’t surprised by that. But this whole notion that what the DNC was undemocratic, that’s just hogwash. And then there was people on the left that were still bitching about how Bernie Sanders was treated in 2016. And how the DNC screwed him over. And I have to explain to my friends, and I’ve had friends tell me that. I’ve had to explain to my friends, well, what do you expect? Bernie wasn’t a Democrat. You know, party membership means everything for candidates and things like that. And so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Bernie got screwed over. But that’s not why she lost.

[8:55] Then you have the people that say, well, it’s because the Democrats went on the identity thing, talked about identity politics, you know, about trans and using pronouns and they were woke. David Sirota, who surprised me that he would bring that up, brought that up. David Sirota, in his newsletter, said that the Democrats were too elitist, talking about pronouns and bullshit like that, and that’s why they lost. No, that’s not why she lost. There was actually two major reasons why she lost. One of them is pretty obvious. The other one’s not so obvious. The one that’s pretty obvious, the reason why she lost, was because she was a black woman. I’m sorry, but seriously, she lost votes among women. She got less votes so far. I mean, the final totals aren’t in. But she lost traction from Joe Biden in 2020 with white women.

[10:11] All right that tells you something you know and the other thing too is you had some of these states like missouri that voted to enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions, and they voted for trump.

[10:31] The only explanation that makes sense is that Harris was a black woman. I mean, it was 10 times worse than being, you know, Hillary Clinton was a white woman with baggage. Harris had no baggage. She was a woman, but she was a black woman. That also explains why Trump gained with black men. Because black men don’t like taking orders from black women. You know, men in general, some men, most men in general, don’t like taking orders from women. And it showed there’s a bias in this country for women leaders. You know, you’ll see scattering, you know, they can be senators. You’ll see scatterings of governors. But when it comes to the most powerful person in the country, people didn’t accept her. And then the other issue that was not so obvious is that the media, the political media, is biased towards the right wing. And the prime example that I’m going to talk about was talking about garbage, okay?

[12:00] Donald Trump, and there’s clips on the internet, he bath-mouthed people all the time. He even called Vice President Harris trash at a rally. He talked bad about immigrants. He said that they were poisoning our country. You know, and then the one that did get some juice in the press that they actually talked about was when he said that illegal immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. And that was mainly because that was at the debate when everybody was watching. But the rest of the stuff, when he called Harris trash and talked about the enemy within, And it was crickets, crickets from the mainstream media, from CBS, NBC, MSNBC, blah, blah, blah. I mean, they talked about it on the pundit shows on MSNBC because I watched some of them. But in the news? No, not a thing.

[12:59] Joe Biden gets caught misspeaking, and he did misspeak because he’s not that good at speaking anymore, because he’s lost a step, where people thought he referred to Trump supporters as garbage when he was responding to that comedian at Donnie Trump’s Madison Square Garden Nazi conference called Puerto Rico and Island of Garbage. So naturally Joe Biden responded to it in an interview or, or he was appearing in some radio show or something and he misspoke and he, people thought he said that he was calling Trump supporters garbage. And you could tell the reaction because it was on the, it was on the news. It was led the news for a couple of days. And then you had Trump driving a garbage truck and wearing a vest. And then you had pictures on social media of various right wing stars wearing garbage bags where they were playing that up. You know, the outrage that got like two or three days of coverage on the news. That Biden had said that, which he didn’t really say.

[14:20] So that just goes to show you that one of the things that the Democrats are going to have to do if they want to start winning more elections is they’re going to have to get a handle on this media thing. And I am sorry, but I do not believe that there is not a liberal billionaire who can cut a check to start a competing network to Fox News that is strictly liberal. Not this watered-down corporate bullshit MSNBC or CNN. Nothing that’s owned by major corporations. that you are not getting objective journalism from those outlets. I’m sorry, you’re not. That’s why I refuse to watch them on a regular basis. You know, I check out some blogs that watch them for me, so I get the gist, but you are not going to get objective journalism from a corporate news outlet. You’re just not.

[15:30] But so they need to get a handle on that. For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at secularleft.us.

[15:41] Music.

[15:47] And so again, the black woman situation, you’re not, that is something bad about the country. I mean, and then they’re like, well, we have elected Barack Obama. Well, see, again, he was a man, so he didn’t have the double whammy. You know, Harris had the double whammy. She was a black woman.

[16:13] You know, and Hillary Clinton almost won. She won the popular vote. She just didn’t win the electoral college. And that was because she wasn’t black. She was a woman. So that’s why she did so well. But when you put those two things together, that’s when there’s a problem. It seems that’s when there’s a problem in this country. So let me, I just wanted to read this article that I saw this weekend. And it was written by Michael Tomaski in the New Republic magazine.

[16:49] And where he talks about the media bias towards the right. And he’s talking about having conversations about why Donald Trump won. And he says the economy and inflation, Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that, sexism, racism, the border. the trans inmate ad that ran a jillion times, and so on. He says, These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of disgusting impressions, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president? The answer is obviously no. Not enough people were able to see any of those things, at which point people throw up their hands and say, I give up.

[17:57] And so he has an answer. He says the answer is the right wing media. And he says, Today, the right-wing media, Fox News and the entire News Corp, Newsmax, One American News Network, the Sinclair Network of Radio and TV Stations, iHeart Media, the Bot Radio Network, Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcast like Joe Rogan’s, and much more, sets the news agenda in this country. And they feed their audience a diet of slanted, distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win. Okay. Let me say that again in case it got lost. Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not the New York Times, not the Washington Post, which bent over backwards to exert no influence with Jeff Bezos’ pull-to-papers-Harris endorsement. Not CBS, NBC, or ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake. If you, uh, let’s see. Says i’ve been in the media for three decades and i watched this happen from the front row fox news came out in 1996 it was an annoyance and we had rush limbaugh um.

[19:12] It says, but billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left. Those ad-supported VC-funded operations started to fizzle, but once social media and Google started eating up the revenue pie. And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is, once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beach ball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media, what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting, is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger. This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger, it’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice is Democrats and liberals or treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school, your daughter.

[20:16] And Tomaski says, and this is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media, no Fox News, an agenda still set, and more still established by state old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and the New York Times. That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life, banded together to marginalizing. And I totally agree with that take.

[21:04] One of the top things that Democrats need to do and liberals, progressives in general need to do is they need to start a competing media network to get the liberal progressive message out. Because if you remember when they were complaining about Sleepy Joe Biden, that he couldn’t articulate all the good things that he did. It wasn’t that he couldn’t articulate the good things that his administration did. It’s just he didn’t have, he didn’t get a voice. He didn’t get a platform. They refused to cover it. You never saw, you never heard that on Fox News. You know, you never heard about that. You had these, these slimy elected officials come on and, and say, hey, we’re getting a bridge built in my district without being truthful and saying that they voted against it in Congress because it was Joe Biden’s plan. You know, you have tons of these slimy Republicans doing that.

[22:14] And then you never hear about the inflation. You only got the story about the inflation. You didn’t get the story about the corporate greed that led to the inflation in the right wing media. And when I was talking to you about calling people garbage, where did that start? That started on right-wing media. The eating the cats and the dogs in Springfield, that started as a post on X, the home of misinformation. And then that also explains why younger people failed to show up in the election, because they get all their news from social media now. They don’t watch MSNBC They don’t watch NBC News So even if they did go into details About the good things that Joe Biden did They wouldn’t have seen it They would have seen Joe Rogan Talking about how COVID vaccines are causing autism.

[23:14] Or Bullshit like that Or that three hour snooze fest That he had with Trump, And these people are like Oh yeah, he’s our guy You know, it was like this self-centered people voted because of what it could do for them instead of helping the country. It wasn’t it wasn’t about the country is about it was just like Trump himself. It was about the you’re the person voting instead of about how you could affect other people. You know, that’s the whole reason why Trump ran for president in the first place. was to benefit himself.

[23:57] You know, he had all these legal troubles and he can make them all go away if he won the office back. He won the office back. You know, Jack Smith is already winding down his documents investigation. The election interference cases are going to go bye-bye. And I can tell you, he’s still convicted in state court because he can’t pardon himself from state crimes. But he’s not going to jail while he’s president. They’re going to set aside the conviction until after he leaves office in 2028, supposedly. And I don’t think he’s going to make it to 2028. You know, I get into those conspiracy theories, too. And I think that J.D. Vance was picked as the vice president because billionaires like Peter Thill want to control the government. And they’re hoping that through natural causes or the 25th Amendment, Trump is going to be set aside and Vance is going to become president without an election. And the funny thing is that should that happen, Vance could run for re-election in 2028.

[25:09] So they have some work ahead of them. The Democrats have some work. You know, I was mentioning that David Sirota was talking about identity politics, and he had this big, long screen on his newsletter, The Lever, which generally has some good information in it. And he was talking about how the Democrats lost in 2016, and they lost in 2024. But what he doesn’t talk about is how the Republicans lost in the midterms. You know, they lost in 2022. They lost in 2020, but people like Sirota never talk about stuff like that. That’s the problem I have with some people like Sirota that always points out the wrong stuff, always points out the negative stuff, is that then they selectively don’t talk about everything.

[26:06] So what people, most people think is that, that Trump’s going to try to do, try to be Trump. Trump’s going to try to be Trump and it’s going to piss people off. And then the Republicans are going to lose in the midterms in two years. So it’s going to be just like a repeat of 2016, where we’re going to have to deal with two years of that asshole in office. And all of the shit that he’s going to pull and aided and abetted by the House and Senate that are in control of the GOP.

[26:48] And all because the Democrats, and the one thing, the one thing, the negative thing that I have to say about the Democrats is they played that game, you know, twice. The first time it almost worked. The second time they got bit in the ass and they play that game. They’re like, you need to elect a lot of us so you can get what you want. That was the game that they played. You know, Chuck Schumer stood in the in the well at the Senate and said, you know, you need to elect us and we will codify Roe v. Wade. They didn’t do it. And now they now they lost control of the Senate. You know, they let Manchin and Sinema bog down the Senate, and they could have got rid of the filibuster and got some things passed. And they said, no, we’re going to let them muck up everything, and then you just have to elect us next time, and we’ll fix it. Didn’t work for them. And unfortunately, there’s going to be a lot of my friends and family that are going to be hurt.

[28:02] What was the news report I saw? The Trump campaign, or people affiliated with Trump, spent $200 million on anti-trans ads in the campaign. I know, I saw a bajillion of them. I did, I saw a bajillion of them. And basically that came down that Harris is for men playing women’s sports. Trump is for you. Or no, Harris is for they and them. And Trump is for you.

[28:35] And that is just so much bullshit. You know, who knew? Who knew that diversity, inclusion, and equity was a bad thing for this country? You know, I think the last time that it was a bad thing, we got the Jim Crow laws. We got slavery. We got the Trail of Tears.

[28:58] And the genocide of the native americans that’s when it was decided that white people were more important than diversity inclusion and equity just think about that you know you think you make some progress and you don’t but the good thing is that the people that voted for trump, are going to be slowly dying off, especially if Robert Kennedy Jr. Gets hold of the Food and Drug Administration. So hopefully I’ll still be here talking about this stuff and hopefully the Democrats can fight the good fight. But they really need to have, coming from me, a come-to-Jesus meeting and they really have to think about stop being so academic, so cerebral for somebody who is not. You know, they tried to conduct this campaign like a normal campaign and Donnie Jr. And Donnie and his brothers and everybody blew the place up.

[30:10] Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used, in our show notes on our website at secularleft.us. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Send us your comments, either using the contact form on the website, or by sending us a note at comments at secularleft.us, Our theme music is Dank and Nasty composed using Amplify Studio music.

[30:57] Music.