These candidates are aligned with the Democrats.
That's what the party is.
It's not a party of the left or liberals or whatever you imagine it to be. They've been extremely clear on this.
Go over the historicals. I have. Many times. This is correct.
The Republican primary process doesn't have as many ways for party members to put their fingers on the scale.
Also they've misappropriated words like "leftist" and "socialist" so much that in my interaction with Trump supporters, at Trump events, I hear plenty of actual left and actual socialist policies presented as new ideas or attributed to Trump.
At a policy level, these people actually don't want neofascism, I've interacted with plenty. They really don't.
The Democrats tried to appeal to the hard right voter who found Trump icky. For that they were called socialist so and I know this is hard, people I spoke with associated the word socialism with the policies of Harris
What the hell are the democrats supposed to do to oppose a party that gets to redefine language however it wants with seemingly great effect?
America spent 100 years demonizing socialism. Not the policies, the word. And now republicans can just deploy it against whoever, because it doesn't have a meaning to US voters.
What possible strategy is there against that? My "democrat for life" (because republicans wanted to fucking murder the french catholics in the area, lookup the KKK in Maine) would vote against "socialism"!
The US is a uni-party state at the federal level. You either play with the republicans, or you will be labeled "socialist", no matter the objective reality, and you will lose.
In fact, the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote in all four of the most recent elections before this one (from 2008 - 2020, inclusive).
2. Nobody has beaten Trump since he's been a convicted criminal, lied about winning an election he didn't, or stole classified documents from the White House. So it doesn't make sense to discuss "barely beating an incompetent [...]" in the context of my comment that refers only to Democratic candidates who ran before those things happened.
There was clearly a winning path with say, Bernie in 2016. The state by state Bernie/Trump matchup polling data consistently predicted a clear and decisive victory. Or, maybe Estes Kefauver 1952, or go back to the 40s and Gallup predicted Henry Wallace would have had a 1936 style landslide instead of the squeak they won with Truman.
As a hobby I've poured over archives of primaries, old newspapers, speeches, going back even to Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first VP and how he got replaced.
I continue to claim that any actual left project (as opposed to whatever the propaganda industry is deciding to imagine the left is) would be far more successful under a Republican flag because they aren't as committed to the neoimperialist project.
That's why the Democrats had all the warring Republicans on their side this time.