In Reply to: Re: It is very straightforward… posted by confused442 on May 14, 2025 at 23:23:30
established that enough percentage of people changed their votes in favor of Trump in 2024 because of the "defund the police" mantra, then all you have is speculation. So perhaps your claim should not be that this issue lost Democrats the election, but that a lot of people said they didn't like the idea of the police being defunded, which I am not going to disagree with. It was a really bad formulation for what is essentially a very good idea. A rhetorical own goal, if you will. No disagreement there.
But whether that mattered in 2024 is a speculation (and I insist that defunding the police was a talking point in the 2020 election, not 2024).
To be fair, that was the formulation that the young and overly excited segment of the progressive movement came up with the formulation, and their connection to the Democratic Party does not really go that far beyond having to hold their noses every whatever many years and vote for their candidates. The bigger problem was the fact that mainstream democrats neither came with a better formulation nor distanced themselves successfully from the phrase.