'Democrats Lost Them': Here's Why 2020 Biden Voters Sat Out The 2024 Election (Rolling Stone)

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39. and the beat goes on...

The Good and the Bad of Joe Biden's Presidency
Story by Tim Dickinson, Tessa Stuart and Andrew Perez • 2mo • 6 min read
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-good-and-the-bad-of-joe-biden-s-presidency/ar-AA1xsT4v?ocid=Peregrine
Unfortunately, Biden's best legislative achievements may be forgotten, as some were only temporary - and others could soon be undone by Republicans. Biden's mistakes and shortcomings will likely be felt far longer, as he now cedes control of America to Trump, a Congress fully controlled by conservatives, and a far-right Supreme Court supermajority dedicated to rolling back the past century of American progress - and which has already bestowed on Trump unprecedented powers. The violence and destruction that the Biden administration supported overseas will, of course, be permanent.

Trump's authoritarian aims pose a grievous threat to the democratic institutions and norms Biden has long held dear - and which Biden failed to protect and, in some ways, crucially undermined as president, himself. Biden's story arc could be the stuff of a Greek tragedy. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it's real life.

How the Democrats Blew It
Insiders open up about how the Harris campaign lost touch with voters — and how Trump came out on top
By Tessa Stuart, Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez
Illustration by VICTOR JUHASZ
January 11, 2025

Dem Operatives Offer an Exhaustive Accounting of the Harris Campaign’s Faults
…Because you’re not getting it from that Pod Save America interview with Kamala Harris’ campaign leaders
By Tessa Stuart
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kamala-harris-what-went-wrong-1235183829/
November 28, 2024
Kamala Harris raised more than $1.5 billion dollars in less than 107 days — a staggering, incomprehensible sum of money that signified an enormous confidence in her ability to deliver the presidency — and then she went on to lose all seven battleground states and the popular vote to a four times-indicted, twice-impeached, convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser. If losing that badly weren’t fuck-up enough, the campaign appears to have ceased operations tens of millions of dollars in debt. The party’s financial outlook is so bleak that, on November 18, the Democratic National Committee laid off an undisclosed number of staff — with a single day’s notice and no severance — an act the party’s union decried as the result of “callous and short-sighted management.” It was a truly ignominious end to Harris’ much-hyped candidacy, so, unsurprisingly, there are a lot of people — Democratic voters, volunteers, and donors — asking, What the hell happened? Anyone looking for a satisfying answer won’t be getting it from senior Harris-Walz officials, four of whom — campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillion, deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks, and senior advisors Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe — emerged from the still-smoldering wreckage of the campaign this week to chat with Pod Save America about “What Went Wrong.” Here’s what that conversation didn’t include: any mention of voters who may have sat out the election in disgust over the American-underwritten atrocities in Gaza; any meaningful engagement with the critique that attempting to court Republican voters might have come at the expense of turning out party faithful; or any reflection that there may have been a better use for $20 million worth of donations than a concert series featuring Katy Perry, Bon Jovi, and 2 Chainz. (At least one DNC source speculated the astronomical price tag associated with the concerts, which Cutter championed, was a contributing factor to the DNC’s decision to lay staff off early.) In the absence of introspection from senior campaign officials themselves, Rolling Stone spoke with consultants, strategists, and party staffers — some who worked directly with the Harris campaign, who requested anonymity to speak freely, and others who worked on prior presidential campaigns — to solicit their unvarnished opinions about where Harris-Walz went wrong. And they have a lot of opinions! Opinions about Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection in the first place; about Harris’ decision to keep his senior team in place instead of firing them immediately; about the candidate’s reluctance to signal a meaningful break from a historically unpopular president; about the campaign’s decisions to squander their budget on stunt advertising while failing to deliver a consistent message to persuadable voters; about the pitfalls of relying on “efficiency” models to guide paid media investments; about their failure to answer to the biggest attack launched by their opponent — and, yeah, pretty much everyone agreed she should have gone on Joe Rogan. Any honest accounting has to begin with the fact that the biggest burden on Harris’ candidacy was the fact that it began in July 2024, rather than April 2023 — a reality created by Biden’s insistence on running for reelection after he aggressively signaled he would serve a single term in office. Only one halfway credible challenger emerged to raise questions about this decision, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who was recruited into the race by Steve Schmidt. “What Joe Biden did was the greatest act of egotism in American history,” Schmidt says.