alt Hacker News> You sure are letting the U.S. voter off the hook here…
Because blaming the voters for not supporting you is foolish and stupid.
Not only do they have far less room to maneuver to express themselves (essentially through a single, unclear multiple-choice question), but blaming them prevents actual political actors from doing needed self-reflection and adjustments needed to win.
It's like if you had a failing business selling poop-in-a-bag, and focused on blaming your potential customers being too dumb to see how superior and high-quality your poop is. You think it's awesome, so they must be idiots! Stop wasting your time doing that, and re-evaluate the products you're selling. Maybe no one wants to buy poop?
Your comparison rests on the idea that politics is an elastic marketplace where people are not bringing in priors when deciding on who to vote for. It completely ignores that at least part of that market is propagandized to the point where no matter how you sell you will not make the sale. Voters overwhelmingly support policies that Democrats support when polled. You can blame Democrats for not finding an effective way to sell those policies. I think your comparison is far too simplistic to be useful.
When the history of this time is written I believe it will be exceedingly obvious that the MAGA and the Republican Party were an incurable cancer and there was nothing that the Democratic Party could have done within the context of the existing political structure to stop it from spreading. They might have had one opportunity to avoid it by focusing more on supporting individuals and less on supporting financial institutions in 2008, but the political context of that time was entirely different. At some point it is worthless to blame one political party for another driving the country off a cliff. Yes, they should have done things differently in hindsight, but there is little value in holding them accountable for information they did not have at the time.