it took a massive (coopted) grassroots movement to elect someone with a different skin color.
On the other hand, 08 Obama showed with charisma and popular policy, skin color didn’t matter.
He not only easily won the general, he carried a lot of down ballot candidates who were less popular.
2012 after voters realized he wasn’t who he said he was is a better example for skin color not mattering.
But if someone with comparable charisma ran on a comparable platform as 08 Obama, nothing else about them matters.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 day ago
One could also argue, as Ta Nehisi Coates does quite elegantly, that Trump won his first term as a reaction to Obama. A sense of anger at the fact that a black man was in office. It’s almost as if he purposefully degrades the office out of spite - “if a black man can be president, the presidency should be meaningless.”
It really is this.
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TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
That feels like a sound read on things.
I think a lot will have to change before America elects a woman, gay man, Jew or anyone else outside of the white straight man again.
One could talk about the qualities of each candidate and argue how Hillary Clinton, Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris etc weren’t as strong as X other candidate, but twice now we’ve seen highly qualified candidates lose either primaries to a senile, milquetoast sack or generals to an unqualified demagogue.
The country is fucked up.