U.S. Politics, November 2024: GARBAGE DAY!!

Here's the demographic table, with all the exit poll caveats.

https://i.imgur.com/36KQSUi.jpeg

Sorry, xposted without seeing ivy's post ❤️

Gen Z is way more conservative than we thought I think

Yeah I knew I had seen the gender split written up. This is relatively recent but I’d be shocked if the actual breakdown was much different because this pattern was noticeable in the UK elections too.

Young women said they’ll vote for Harris over Trump by a 33-point margin. Young men were essentially even, with Harris having a 2-point lead.

My sister and her boyfriend are in Spain or Portugal right now. I wonder if they're looking into staying.

Love to ufo and ivy and everyone at the sharp end of this shit.

It sucks.

To even speculate about how much my family doesn't see me or my nieces just chills me.

100 per cent afraid that they’re coming for gay marriage, and know that the ACA is doomed, which means I will be without insurance, which is um… not great for a cancer survivor with a genetic cancer marker. also i am not just gay, but married to a non-white person.

but in the meantime, a poem from Assata:

AFFIRMATION
I believe in living.
I believe in the spectrum of Beta days and Gamma people.
I believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls, tricycles and rocking chairs.
And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
I believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
I believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.
I believe in life.
And i have seen the death parade march through the torso of the earth, sculpting mud bodies in its path.
I have seen the destruction of the daylight, and seen bloodthirsty maggots prayed to and saluted.
I have seen the kind become the blind and the blind become the bind in one easy lesson.
I have walked on cut glass.
I have eaten crow and blunder bread and breathed the stench of indifference.
I have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if i know any thing at all, it's that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.
I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth.
And i believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port.

Democratic centrism has helped make people so cynical about the power of the state and society to make anything better I don’t know that running a strong progressive campaign would have worked either. People will just say “Democrats/politicians won’t follow through.”

The killer this time seems to be the Latino vote, not great performance with Black voters and predictably Arab voters. Tailoring your platform to white suburbanites was bad enough when it cost working class votes, if you’re going to lose minority votes across the board yiiiiiiikes.

thank you for that table.

They failed to seize the initiative in 2021 when they had a unified government and citizenry still high on memories of the government giving them money and making life easier.

Thanks, President Manchin!

Yeah that exit poll is illuminating
- Misogyny
- Educated people flocking to the two coasts
- Non-black minorities only marginally voting Dem

Harris probably was seen as less legitimate due to being the default candidate, and having only a few months to present herself as the candidate, when Trump has somehow become this enduring familiar figure. At least from outside the US, there was a lot of fatalism about a Trump return.

I just hope he is too incompetent, egocentric, disinterested and petty to do much of his own, especially after he faces backlash when he inevitably tries to mess with rule of law and after he starts his game of constant staff turnover. But he is also so soft and influenceable that it opens the gates to the worst and it will also set back global agendas / stability. I'd say I hope for Republican dissensions even with the two houses, but that's probably wishful thinking. It's just a lot and four years is a long time. Good luck.

xps i'm not in the usa so i'm not at the sharp end of anything (yet, anyway, there was a rather bad election result here very recently too but it's not clear how bad it'll be on a personal level yet) but i wish everyone who is the best & hope that trump will lean into all his most incompetent tendencies and struggle to do anything

Democratic centrism has helped make people so cynical about the power of the state and society to make anything better I don’t know that running a strong progressive campaign would have worked either. People will just say “Democrats/politicians won’t follow through.”

i don't think it's even that they needed to run a progressive campaign (though i think that'd be better of course), they just needed to offer people a clear vision of change from both biden & trump and managed neither

Maybe they should try some strong left wing politics? We’ll never know

telling myself they will need to next time. if there's a next time. ha! ha! best from canada. maybe you will scare us off the track of the conservative majority in the election next October... that has been looking certain in the polls

Yes, the main thing that has characterized Trump's entire life (and definitely his first term) is extreme incompetence and that's the only thing I'm able to hang my hopes on right now.

him becoming best buds with musk, rfk, etc. and promising to give them a lot of influence is also a good sign for incompetence

Did the only actual checking I aim to do and at least Tlaib and Omar won.

Well, at least we won't have fluoride

My children weren't using their teeth anyway, no big

low level in the big picture but v depressing that musk and co cobbled together a successful GOTV

Probably less that Musk was effective and more that the ground game doesn’t matter that much in Presidential elections.

xpost yeah i read something this AM and how long do you think he's going to keep RFK around

2016 - Trump’s was worse than Clinton and won
2020 - Biden didn’t do much because of COVID and won
2024 - see 2016

it’s easy to criticize dems on their message, but idk if it makes sense to focus on policy per se as it seems to barely affect perceptions of a candidate

more important is the perception of being an outsider of the system, basically every president since poppy bush has rightly or wrongly had some kind of system bucking angle (except biden but covid caveats apply), which means the dems can’t be the party of technocratic competence anymore, especially since voters don’t perceive that the supposed competence of democrats hasn’t improved their lives

Did the only actual checking I aim to do and at least Tlaib and Omar won.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Wednesday, November 6, 2024 8:21 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

And Angela A. in MD.

best hope for dems going forward is that trump does step aside in 2028 and the gop can’t recapture his grotesque appeal

He may be dead then and nobody likes Vance

well yes, best case scenario is dying in office, but he won’t

best hope for dems going forward is that trump does step aside in 2028 and the gop can’t recapture his grotesque appeal

and that trump doesn't manage to permanently prevent meaningful elections happening again somehow. trump does seem to be fairly one-of-a-kind in terms of appeal, no one else seems to be able to replicate it thankfully

Angela Alsobrooks winning and Kari Lake losing and there being a chance (however tenuous) to take the house are the only bright spots I’m seeing.

xp he can’t stop elections from happening tho he can obviously influence things behind the scenes to make them less fair

tho maybe he can stop elections from happening idk, this is a new era

biden needs to step up the crazy for the next few months and do some wild shit

narrator: biden didn't do this

elections will still happen but they suppress the vote and fuck with propaganda enough that I don't know how dems return to power. "blue wall" doesn't exist anymore. those paradigms that held for however long are over.

and the electoral map will be even worse in 2028 no matter what

I just checked and the only president until now to be in office for two non-consecutive terms was Grover Cleveland (1885-89 / 93-97).

There is no hope. Trump will repudiate the debt, bet on it. Tariffs at least up. NATO deprecated. From here we initiate the regional break up of USA. They won’t want to say it and it will be v fractious, but these are the next 40 years. I think some will be oligarchic billionaire powerlords, some will be theocratic, some maybe trade/education based city states.

I happen to be in Venice, the shattering of declining-power economic powerhouses is on my mind.

My sister and her boyfriend are in Spain or Portugal right now. I wonder if they're looking into staying.

fwiw "our" Portuguese Trump just catapulted his party from a fringe concern to the third biggest in parliament. not in govt yet but I wouldn't bet against it.

"and know that the ACA is doomed"

If Dems keep the house then not so?

Portugal no longer has a “golden visa”. Seriously, good luck emigrating. The monolingualism in America didn’t help any of you, either

yeah the margins will be tight they might not have the votes to do jack shit

xpost re ACA

I don’t look forward to articles about why people voted to reinstate him. They can keep their words.

more important is the perception of being an outsider of the system, basically every president since poppy bush has rightly or wrongly had some kind of system bucking angle (except biden but covid caveats apply), which means the dems can’t be the party of technocratic competence anymore, especially since voters don’t perceive that the supposed competence of democrats hasn’t improved their lives

― hott ogo (voodoo chili), Wednesday, November 6, 2024

This is my thinking (at the moment).

I look forward to phony optimism from Harris, Walz, and others. Go take your olive branches to the GOP and fuck yourselves with them

i'm going to ignore all media. no matter what it is. can't take any sadsack shit either. no weeping lady liberty on the cover of the new yorker. none of it. no handwringing. no cable t.v. for the immediate future. none of that matters. i will help people if they need help. that's about all i can do. i don't have any money and i don't have much free time. but i will do what i can do. that will definitely be the last time that i go through an entire political campaign again. no more rallies for me. i only did it because i hate trump so much. now i need to focus on real life in my town. we have haitian immigrants here. we have people who are vulnerable here. not talking about trump for another four years either. fuck that.

Word

don't know what to say here. I'm utterly shattered. already spent 3 weeks barely sleeping out of nervousness and now I'm just physically and emotionally wrecked.

obviously the bulk of the blame has to lie with Republican voters, who have revealed themselves to be hateful monsters time and time again, but at least have a party who matches them emotionally, who accepts them for the spineless trash they are and enables their worst impulses.

Dems do not have this. We have said time and time again how we feel about Gaza, how we feel about taking back power from the GOP, how we feel about people like Liz Cheney, and how we feel about immigration, and the party has time and time tacked right, talked about building bipartisan coalitions, made it clear that better things aren't possible, etc.

I thought this was fine because it was at least a viable electoral strategy. turns out it very much was not! Trump got about the same # of votes, Harris underperformed Biden by a lot. That's the part I really did not see coming. Apparently the threat of Trump and all the horribleness that it incurs was not enough to get people out. It's wild because it seems all yesterday morning we were hearing about turnout, how every metro area seemed primed to exceed 2020, and now it turns out...that wasn't actually true? What exactly happened here?