Lowering the debt we should avoid even addressing the issue because it usually leads to austerity which ends up costing center-left candidates votes especially if they enact austerity. The reason it doesn't work is because voters prefer the original to the copy and they would rather vote for the issue owner which are conservatives obsessed with the deficit. Starmer is probably going to lose the next election with cuts aimed at the poor to increase defense spending.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/10/adopting-rightwing-policies-does-not-help-centre-left-win-votes
Obama had the right policies. He probably deported too many people but he prioritized those with criminal records, a DACA program, and he supported comprehensive immigration reform with the first step being increasing border security. I don't support blocking asylum seekers or treating those that are even following the legal process as worse than criminals which is what Trump is doing. Biden & the Democrats made a hard right shift from the Obama years but that wasn't enough to win the election. Also there is a massive amount of misinformation, much of it coming from Trump himself, that leads people into believing false narratives.
Fighting the drug war has been a losing battle. We need to address the demand on our side of the border or otherwise the drugs will continue to flow like they have under every President in at least the last 100 years and they will continue under Trump. A lot of tough on the border types like to control the flow of people but not the flow of business which can be used as smuggling opportunities. Did you know that most voters actually believed according to polls that Kamala Harris' most popular proposal which was better technology to detect fentanyl at the border was actually a Trump idea?
The politicians I trust the least are the ones promising to keep people safe. To better increase public safety would have been to elect a Democratic President which would have allowed the trials to continue and Trump would have got a guilty verdict and that would have decreased a lot of crime. Seriously, Trump's rhetoric leads to a lot of violence like it did on January 6th.
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