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I don’t think it’s as tribal as you think. At the margins yes, there are wing nuts both ways. But Trump got a lot of votes he didn’t get before and Kamala got fewer than Biden.

Inflation has been a shocker. The border being flooded is terrifying. The economy is and has been struggling in many peoples lives. And the democrats want to still focus on identity politics.

I think they can easily win in 4 years but they need to change their ways. They need to abandon the poisoned ideology that Obama inspired.

But… all of those were addressed by the Dems? Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists.

The people who bring the issues back to identity politics are not dems.

Unless… perhaps the solutions didn’t matter, and the polls themselves were much stronger than the results.

Economists are tea leaf readers. For any given economic plan you have economists giving their endorsement. “Kamala’s policies were explained and even endorsed by economists” is a non-statement and you can replace “Kamala” with any presidential candidate in the last 50 years and it will remain true. I think the President gets too much credit for both good and bad economic situations, but the fact of the matter is that the average American feels the economy is terrible after 4 years of Biden policies and that is going to look larger than promises of future policies.

On the issue of identity politics, Democrats have been all in for nearly a decade, and only in the last year or so, when it has become apparent they are out of step with the majority of Americans, have they begun to back off. It’s not unexpected for the Republicans to now be the ones bringing up identity politics given how closely the Democrats have aligned themselves to it for so long, and the current backlash towards it. The damage is done and it will take many years of priority shifting for Democrats to get over it.

The preceding comments were about tribalism, and I was showing that policy had nothing to do with anything. That the dems talked about policy but it still be perceived that they didn’t.

> identity politics

This has squarely been a republican plank to rile and invigorate their base, regularly creating issues where none existed to get their team up to vote,

The fact that this can be blamed on the dems is always strange. I mean, the whole point of Fox was to create a counter narrative to address the march of “liberal science”. The goal was entirely to handle science and research, and present ways to combat this with feelings. Again - my favorite example is creationism.

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