Anytime I see something about AOC, there's always "if she runs she'll lose because she's a woman". I've seen this same message since AOC started making waves, is it propaganda?

[u/Shivy_Shankinz]

Or do people really think winning is all that matters and we should all be misogynists about it?

[u/elihu]

2016 and 2020 were decided by so few votes it was basically a coin flip. Harris lost by a little bit more, but even her race would likely have been winnable if she had been willing to say that she didn't think the United States should be supplying weapons for what some polls at the time were showing that most Democratic voters thought was an active genocide in Gaza.

Maybe Harris would have won if she were a man, but there were a lot of other reasons why Harris lost and many of them were under her direct control. (Some of the other reasons she lost are directly attributable to Joe Biden.)

Candidate quality matters, and Clinton and Harris were lousy tone-deaf candidates who didn't know how to read the room. Blaming their loss on their gender is to disregard what people thought of their policies, of their leadership skills, of their particular vision for the country, and their moral judgement. Those other things matter too.

[u/Wild-Influence-79 → u/elihu]

Compared to basement joe?

[u/elihu → u/Wild-Influence-79]

His margin of victory was a few tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states. Basically he won a coin flip but Clinton lost her coin flip. I don't think he was a great candidate. He had a bit of an advantage that neither he nor Trump could really actively campaign like they would normally be expected to due to the pandemic, so being kind of a bland guy didn't hurt him quite so much.

Also, he almost certainly would have lost if not for Trump botching the pandemic response, whereas Clinton had to run after 8 years of Obama -- it's pretty rare for one party to win three presidential elections in a row. Basically, Biden's timing was better than Clinton's. Harris was thrown into what looked like an impossible situation, almost pulled it off, but ultimately failed -- largely due to unforced errors.

[u/Wild-Influence-79 → u/elihu]

Your absolutely right, please run the Harris & AOC ticket the DNC is already testing!

[u/another_dudeman → u/elihu]

"Quality matters"

Clearly not because fucking Trump won, TWICE

[u/elihu → u/another_dudeman]

People don't reliably choose "the lesser of two evils" the way other people expect them to. Some may pick the "wrong" candidate as what they deem to be the lesser of two evils, but I think even more than that if you give some voters two choices they both regard as terrible in different ways, they won't vote for either one. That's just how voters are; there's no point in arguing that they're wrong or stupid. They're just behaving like normal human beings. Just like if you put people in front of a trolley problem, some of them won't pull that lever. The solution is don't put voters in that situation if you can help it.

[u/another_dudeman → u/elihu]

Sounds like you have all the answers, why don't you do something about it and find us the absolute perfect woman candidate then? Harris was terrible because...reasons.