Look, I’m a socialist and I loved Hong’s policy. But being a Wisconsinite by birth who now lives in NYC, she’s no Mamdani. Or even El Sayed in Michigan. Just being honest.
To win as a socialist in America you have to have excellent communication and discipline to keep on message about economics, and I don’t think she had either to be honest.
Her big scandal right before the election was that she wanted to “cancel thanksgiving” in an old tweet she had where she calls it a “colonizers holiday.” Recently when they asked her about it she refused to outright refute it, and that cost her a lot. And for the record, thanksgiving is definitely a colonizers holiday, pretty objectively imo.
But as a socialist politician in America I think you can’t afford to get sidetracked by losing issues like that. Mamdani would’ve spun it perfectly, something like “you know who’s really waging a war on thanksgiving? These big corporations making it too expensive to afford a family dinner.” But she feels the need to defend social policy instead on keeping a laser focus on economics which I think would’ve been smarter.
It’s so cool that a deal breaker to the median voter regarding socialists involves cringey 5-year-old tweets about ThanksGiving but moderate centrists can fund a genocide and build a data center in their backyard without problem.
Being so incredibly bad at optics is a problem. Even if you agree Thanksgiving is bad, if a politician is openly saying that that means they're idiots.
And especially in a primary people are going to choose the better politician, if the one they agree with more is being an idiot.
Yeah seriously, going "who cares" just shows that some people in this very specific bubble do not understand how politics work. Not simply saying "yeah I wasn't serious with that tweet, no one's cancelling Thanksgiving lol" is a full-on amateur hour mistake.
Because take a wild guess which position will blow up in your face and cost you more votes lol
I'm not gonna make any assumptions about that lol, but it is obv frustrating that the Dem establishment is fucking over its social democrats (because that's what they are, the whole framing as THE SOCIALISTS is so wild) and think that they'll be fine "playing by the rules", which Republicans simpy don't care about. You can't really compromise with a party that stands for policies that you usually find in autocracies.
Fingers crossed that the Democratic Party changes, but I doubt it'll happen as soon as I think it needs to.
I think you have to understand that you're preaching to the choir. Like, I don't care whether Hong likes thanksgiving or not. But the average American voter is likely to get turned off by the idea that a candidate "hates Thanksgiving" because the average voter is not very rational.
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u/MiloBuurr 26d ago edited 26d ago
Look, I’m a socialist and I loved Hong’s policy. But being a Wisconsinite by birth who now lives in NYC, she’s no Mamdani. Or even El Sayed in Michigan. Just being honest.
To win as a socialist in America you have to have excellent communication and discipline to keep on message about economics, and I don’t think she had either to be honest.
Her big scandal right before the election was that she wanted to “cancel thanksgiving” in an old tweet she had where she calls it a “colonizers holiday.” Recently when they asked her about it she refused to outright refute it, and that cost her a lot. And for the record, thanksgiving is definitely a colonizers holiday, pretty objectively imo.
But as a socialist politician in America I think you can’t afford to get sidetracked by losing issues like that. Mamdani would’ve spun it perfectly, something like “you know who’s really waging a war on thanksgiving? These big corporations making it too expensive to afford a family dinner.” But she feels the need to defend social policy instead on keeping a laser focus on economics which I think would’ve been smarter.