I’ve seen no corporate media outlet cover this:
•Post 2024 polls showed that Harris campaigning with Cheney decreased enthusiasm for her by 7%
•Post 2025 polls show that Mamdani running as an unapologetic progressive earned him 9% of MAGA voters who went for Trump in 2024
The lesson Corporate Dems need to learn: You don’t flip votes by compromising on your values, but by unapologetically leaning into them.
@QasimRashid You're probably right about authenticity being appealing.
I think both the Trump lane and the Mamdani/Sanders/etc lane appeal to a certain set of populists; they're outsiders, "try something different", very sincere, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanders%E2%80%93Trump_voters It's a thing.
So it makes perfect sense to me that there are voters that would have voted for either of these two over establishment candidates. I only wish Trump hadn't been so good at manipulating them for his own narcissistic ends.
@hosford42 @QasimRashid I think that idea of "underlying dissatisfaction with the status quo" and "shitty options" gets at it, yeah.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "oligarchy and wealth inequality", but I think both flavors of populism are lashing out against things adjacent to that. For example, the factory in your town shut down to be relocated overseas, so you're pretty mad about that and want Trump to stick it to the wealthy execs who threw you under the bus to pump their stock up. Distrust of "big tech" etc and their control of society (oligarchy)
Both are pretty wary of banks. Remember when Tucker was praising Elizabeth Warren's proposals? haha
@ech
Even though I would never have voted for Trump even before I saw his fascist side, I have always felt that the interest in both Bernie and Trump was driven by the same underlying dissatisfaction with the status quo. The American public *knew* we were being offered the same shitty, nearly indistinguishable options -- one bought candidate versus another -- and we were fed up with it. We could all sense that we were no longer in control, that something was deeply wrong with our system.
What differed was our understanding of what was causing the problem and how to address it. Some of us recognized that it was the oligarchy and wealth inequality that was at the root of the problem, and wanted a targeted response to that root cause. Others just had a vague sense of shadow actors, the so-called "deep state", and chose a strategy of electing a strong man to tear it *all* down.
@QasimRashid