Let's face it, Dem voters didn't show up.

[Sympthsical]

23. I'm going to disagree somewhat

I responded in that thread as well, and the thrust of my argument is we just kind of ignore what's going on in the country in favor of preferred narratives.

Part of it is that we were the party in power. And when you're in power, you want to tout all the awesome things while minimizing the rough ones. The economy is great on paper- and if you have investments, hooray for you. But the costs of living just haven't recovered from the pandemic. Working people are still finding day-to-day living difficult. I see it everywhere with my own eyes. I see it in my own pocketbook. I stand in the aisle of Safeway looking at prices and thinking, "Yeah. I'm not paying $11 for a jar of mayonnaise."

There's a longer argument that this has been a decline that revved up since the 2008 financial collapse and then started landing body blows during the pandemic.

But we haven't had a coherent response to this stuff. The past three months has been "Trump Trump Trump!" But what if people don't share that obsession? What if they're not political junkies and are just focused on scraping by, feeding their kids, and keeping a roof over their heads? Then they turn to you, and it's "Twitter hates Trump, but Swifties have got this!"

That's . . . not where Americans are. It's where the terminally online and insular media elite are, tho. So, that's nice for them, I guess.

I think we, meaning the party, are in a self-obsessed bubble. And we spend too much time only talking to people who live in there with us. We just don't see this country well. And now we have a choice. Do we let the bubble pop or do we start lining it with steel reinforcement?

Not super thrilled with the direction people seem to be choosing if the replies here are shared widely.