Because of the pandemic, the aftermath of which was awful inflation. This has been the pattern globally for a few years now. And US-specific, because of immigration.
Yes, Harris was treated by voters as the incumbent, and the incumbent administration was unpopular. That is usually an uphill battle for the incumbent.
It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative! Plenty of people wrote about the possibility that this would be a pretty bog standard "reject the incumbents" election.
> It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative!
I find this baffling. With the dems tying themselves to biden and then Harris, it was absolutely an uphill battle. But that was an unforced error.
If they had a robust primary, you have to assume there was someone on the blue team that could beat Trump. If not, then they deserved every bit of this anyway.
No, it was an uphill battle regardless of the candidate, is the point. The fundamentals were always difficult for Democrats in general, for non-candidate-specific reasons. Primarily this was due to inflation, which in my view Biden actually handled about as well as he could have, it just still sucked and pissed everyone off. But also because of immigration, which was indeed a policy error, but one which happened years before the campaign began and was not fixable at that point.
Yes, and that's one of the problems: the DNC defers to tradition and "politeness" rather than what will win elections and keep the party in power. Right up front they should have told Biden he was not going to be the presumed nominee, and that he would have to fight it out in the primary like everyone else.
Yes, Harris was treated by voters as the incumbent, and the incumbent administration was unpopular. That is usually an uphill battle for the incumbent.
It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative! Plenty of people wrote about the possibility that this would be a pretty bog standard "reject the incumbents" election.