I was watching the Joe Rogan Trump interview. I came to a conclusion. The Democratic party is the party with all of the nerds who did well in college.
If you and the rest of the Bore don't mind, I'm gonna springboard off your post, Himu, and dump my thoughts about the election.
Since the mid 2010s, the Dem party is less the "nerd" party (I mean, the Repubs now have the first millennial awkward techbro nerd in the White House) and more the "HR Karen" party, imo.
However, that is in no where near the primary reason she lost.
Kamala I think wasn't a strong candidate, but IMO she did pretty damn good for herself even with being handed a terrible deck. The economy/inflation is by far the biggest issue, and although the US handled inflation the best out of all the industrialized countries, and I'm privileged enough to say my 401k has boomed during the era, the fact of the matter is - a lot of the working class people are suffering, the cost of living has absolutely EXPLODED post-covid. While salaries have been catching up slightly, it's still not enough. And a grocery bill increasing by 50% is gonna hurt to those people who were living day-by-day even before the pandemic. I do think Biden and the FED have done their best to mitigate this, but unfortunately it was a shit "unprecedented" (most overused word the past few years) situation causing every single incumbent party to lose.
All the other reasons why people are saying she failed, are much smaller but they did skim the margins of her vote little by little. Gaza, not appealing to the youth, their oblivious celebrity endorsements, being perceived as being too invested in identity politics. I think Kamala did a good job of not getting bogged down in identity politics, however you had a period from the mid 2010s onward where leftist academists and others would be using terms like "toxic masculinity", "white supremacy", etc. These things obviously exist and white people as a whole could stand to be more mindful of others' situations, but when they get harped on by the "HR Karens", you start seeing even your typical college white lib get tired of being perceived as "the enemy" for stuff they probably have at most a tiny hand in perpetuating. Especially the "ethnic whites" i.e. those Ellis Island descendants who still may have slight ties to the old world were a big Dem constituency in the new deal era, but now go pretty hard for Trump. He made some big inroads in the Northeast and outright won the Rust Belt in 2016 and 2024 (where you have a large portion of Ellis Island descendants). Many of these people, whose families have been in this country way after slavery ended, way after the wars against the Native Americans, and who have faced tons of discrimination before being adopted into the "white" umbrella, question why they're getting the blame for atrocities perpetuated while their descendants were still in the old world mining coal in Poland, farming in Sicily, trying not to starve during the Irish famine.
We're having a realignment here - it's no longer a multicultural/multiracial "big blanket" party vs. a neoliberal wealthy white party with large evangelical and military support. It's shifted to a working class (with their uber rich overlords) vs. the "professional managerial class"/"laptop class" or what have you, with some remnants of the neoliberal/military divisions. And the Dem leadership however still thinks we're in the mid 2000s and fighting those same battles, which is a fools errand, since the coalitions within the Obama-era party have fragmented and are now increasingly at odds with one another. The Dems have let the working class slip away as they double-down on the failed neoliberal policies present in American politics since the Reagan era.
So where do the Dems go from here? Well, I think 2028 will be much more favorable to them so they probably can continue to stagnate doing what they're doing. If the tariffs Trump is pushing actually go through, it'll do further economic damage and stifle the tenuous recovery we're in, and then the field would be advantageous to them. Especially so if some of the Project 2025 horror comes to pass. But I'm hoping that Dems go through their own realignment and re-embrace their new deal/leftist roots. Many leftist/large government policies are extremely popular (Medicare for All, lower medicine costs, make the billionaires pay their fair share), while others are absolute poison to the electorate (defund the police, identity politics). But I also think the leftists are terrible at picking-and-choosing, along with messaging (the Right's most iconic and accurate meme is by far "the left can't meme"). The one person on the left who has a clear and concise message is, of course, Bernie. And happens to be the political figure with the highest likeability ranking. Sadly his successor pool is looking pretty thin (AOC is great but pushes some of the unlikable leftist policies and already has the GOP building up a smear campaign against her).
And finally, the DNC absolutely needs an enema.
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Just some much smaller scale stuff with ZZT (Tim Sweeney's first game engine which uses textmode graphics). ONE OF THESE DAYS, I swear. A close friend of mine, who has tons of graphic design but barely any coding knowledge, took some Unity courses and is single-handedly making a pretty impressive Metroidvania: https://nixiegame.com/. This is inspiring me to take up the mantle.