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

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?

Don’t forget Medicare for All and Kamala gaslighting us about her support. Assholes like Newsom run on it and then do next to nothing as well.

Progressives need to take control of the party. Let the Clintons and their ilk be cast into exile

I don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong in expressing my desire to see Trump’s supporters die horrible, painful, expensive deaths

there is but I'm not gonna argue with you right now

Scott otm

I’m about where Scott is.

Yeah, please don’t argue with me. I’m already spiraling and don’t need additional bullshit

the country is too big. the math doesn’t work. the most trash human being in history can just cobble together the railroad and utility squares on the monopoly board and win pretty much every time. the people who elected him are never going to vote for a progressive. they already think harris and biden are too liberal! idk what the answer is.

The country has moved to the right because Republicans offer a muscular theory of leadership and governance, even when it's stupid, dangerous and unrealistic. Americans love the aggressiveness. There is a total vacuum on the left, filled with meekness, apologies and fearfulness. https://t.co/YO6fGF8xci

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) November 6, 2024

I don’t see any rating sunshine, no matter how hard I squint. These numbers are pointing to some severely depressing demographic shifts that aren’t going away. We seem to be cranking out racist hateful young men at a record pace.

Right now, I have no hope. My strategy is going to be - cling to my loved ones, do my damn best to make sure my son stays the loving, inclusive and caring, and squeeze what we joy I can out of the rest of my years in this flaming hellhole.

Last night ripped apart any remaining shred of hope I had for a better future.

“Ray of sunshine”, thanks autocorrect.

Obama is the very picture of cowardice. He defined the image and softness of the Democratic Party. The GOP knows that they can cheat, obstruct, and steal with little more than shrugged shoulders and tsk-tsking from Democrats

I think the main thing is that misinformation networks work. FOX News knows what they're doing. Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into a right-wing cesspool worked. We do not really share a reality with these folks. They do not think rationally, they do not know how to separate fact from fiction, they have been conditioned for decades to see human interaction as a zero sum game. They win when we are unhappy. That is 90% what this is about. How to combat these disinformation networks is another issue entirely. I really did think that COVID would see the scales falling from their eyes. How can you remain a truther on this issue when 3,000 Americans were dying every single day? Yet they found a way.

actually, part of why Obama won easily twice, to jaymc's point, was presenting himself as a singular entity and force.