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

In the midst of this Garbagest of Days, are there any local election results people are happy about?

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, November 6, 2024 1:26 PM

thank you for this, will report back later

accelerationists also think perhaps 'dismantling the system' is the solution, even if the vehicle is a mortal enemy, but the problem is, all electing Donald Trump did in 2016 is drive the Democratic party even more towards establishment candidates in 2020/2024 and dig us deeper into elections that bounce back and forth every cycle.

like, ok, we have another four years for Trump to permanently wreck the country and maybe that creates the seismic shift that finally creates something new emerges from the ashes, but it feels to me less that as the goal and more 'lol my candidate got destroyed by machine politics, so fuck u America'.

we would probably need to completely revamp elections to generate leftist candidates worth a shit - and I don't mean abolishing the Electoral College, I mean adopting European style runoff elections etc. and the chances of that ever happening in America, even 300 years from now, are too small to publish on PredictIt

i think it is probably #notgood that winning the presidency as a dem requires being a generational political talent (*biden covid caveat applied)

In the midst of this Garbagest of Days, are there any local election results people are happy about?

As I mentioned last night, the abortion rights amendment passed in Montana. That only lasts until the federal ban goes into effect, of course, but for a few months at least, it's not nothin'.

xxpost (that is not me saying the Democrats had 'no choice' but to run Biden and Harris, but me saying 'we already know from the last 40 years this is what they are going to do, and most politicians favor their career first, country second, so the idea that Trump was ever going to be the catalyst for a reckoning within the Democratic party was a pipe dream. they will not learn)

I really wonder if somehow Ted Cruz had won the nomination and somehow got into the White House in 2016, what happens after that re: Trump, like does he stick around and influence things or move on to other boring shit

Kamala was a bad candidate depends on what you mean by that. She wasn’t bad on the stump, she solved a lot of her awkwardness, she was a direct contrast to the two old white men.

But she was tied to the Biden boat anchor and doesn’t seem to have a consuming political vision that could separate her.

right. I couldn't articulate exactly what she stood for either. I knew she used to be fairly progressive and wasn't really any more. I proudly voted for her because Donald Trump is a criminal, a rapist, an asshole, and a constant spout of maddening, confrontational bullshit and maybe the last person you'd want to have any real power. but I guess Americans just don't find that to be that compelling of an argument.

I know people here think it's corny, but Crooked Media (the company that puts out Pod Save America) was created specifically to address this imbalance

Yeah, good example, didn't mean to leave them out. But also yes I very much think of "Pod Save" as a voice of the Dem establishment.

what got me was that supposedly people remembered that the economy was good under trump but they DIDN'T remember what a total failure he was during the pandemic. makes no sense.

people only remember money i guess. and not grandma.

she was about as good a candidate as the Dems have on the bench

besides Bernie i suppose

to be fair, grandma would only give you a shiny penny and trump gave you checks with his name on them.

I guess the "standard Democrat without baggage" isn't the sure winner people thought it was.

i don't think harris was completely dead on arrival this time, there was a real burst of enthusiasm when she entered the race just because she wasn't biden or trump but she didn't lean into that and instead ran on being exactly the same as biden

assuming there will even be a competitive 2028 election there should be a lot of room for someone to run to the left of the dem establishment in the primary - one of obama's distinguishing points was opposition to the iraq war after all, and there's not really anyone left with the sort of clout that clinton or biden had

kamala looked like a t.v. show/movie president too i thought that would be in her favor.

People don’t expect that Democrats would have been better than Trump on COVID, though. They weren’t gung ho about the economic measures at the start, Biden didn’t exactly act like a COVID warrior when he got in office (as sic routinely pointed out IIRC), regardless of Trump’s ineptitude and insanity we did get vaccines as quickly as possible.

"Makes no sense" captures my thoughts (from the UK).

people think the economy has to do with their buying power, but it's more about the stock market. You know, that thing goes up when companies fire thousands of workers or replace them with AI/robots.

Part of the reason people remember the economy was "good" under Trump is that he never stopped talking about it, all the time, over and over. He is good at self-promotion, at least.

And yeah I had big reservations about Harris getting in the race because of her primary run, but I also understood why for lots of reasons it needed to be her. And honestly I think she did well! She came out strong, focused and energetic, very much gave the impression of a no-nonsense problem-solver with her shit together. I agree about (and posted a lot about) her vagueness on some key things, the economy most especially. And the whole outreach to Republicans thing NEVER WORKS and they should just completely sop it. But any campaign is going to have its flaws. She ran aggressively against Trump, Walz worked his ass off, it wasn't a bad campaign and she wasn't a terrible candidate. She just lost. The fundamentals were too bad. Maybe there was a way through or around that, but she was inheriting all of Biden's legacy up to that point, she didn't get a completely fresh start.

she seemed like a really good candidate to me! shows what i know.

― scott seward, Wednesday, November 6, 2024 4:22 PM (twenty-six minutes ago)bookmarkflaglink

i didn't hate kamala at least. that's pretty huge right there.

― scott seward, Wednesday, November 6, 2024 4:23 PM (twenty-five minutes ago)bookmarkflaglink

yeah I think she was fine. more fool me.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Wednesday, November 6, 2024 4:23 PM (twenty-five minutes ago)

to be clear my point is not to say that some of you had wool over your eyes. i understanding viewing kamala as a broadly likable personality. my point tho is that she did run once, and her electorate roundly rejected her, and that fact was not seen as relevant to democrats during this election, which it should have been

i really thought all those post-it notes in bathrooms was going to do the trick...

I dunno I think there was a LOT of talk about her as a bad primary candidate, we definitely talked about it here. That was part of the reason for the push by Pelosi and Obama to do some kind of competitive convention (or blitz primary!). But she was the vice president! She was the obvious person to go to, and had they passed over a Black woman for Big Gretch or Josh Shapiro or something there was a risk of blowback and disengagement from a core part of the base. I don't think it wasn't considered, it was just the best non-ideal option under the circumstances.

holding a primary would've been great but at the point they were at it really couldn't be anyone but her. Biden should've stuck to his word and committed to being a one-term president.

the reason Biden was there in the first place was, well.... Thanks, Obama.

This is an interesting post from a sociologist working with immigrants in Hawaii. Lots of good observations, but per the earlier talk here about the media I think her observations about news sources is important. (Post is from X, but I'm done linking to that.)

_Sharon Quinsaat
@smquinsaat

I just woke up to the news that Trump is again the president of the United States. I want to say I am surprised, but I am not. I have been conducting fieldwork in Hawaii since June 2023 for our project on immigrant conservatives. I spent 1.5 months with Filipinos and many other immigrants and Native Hawaiians who are Republicans in Hawaii just before the elections, most of them Trump supporters (there were some who are "Never Trump" Republicans). So many of them were former Democrats. I don't have a hot take right now, and my observations are perhaps limited because Hawaii is different from the mainland. And yes, Harris still won in Hawaii. But let me share what I found out while in the field. I have not processed my field notes and interview data yet, so these are preliminary:

(1) Many people have real material grievances (e.g., housing, high cost of living) that to them is not being addressed by the Democratic leadership (Hawaii has been dominated by Democrats for 70 years). They have been extremely dissatisfied by the leadership that, to them, is "not really interested in solving their economic problems."

xxp yeah. that goes back to an earlier point - right-wing media has completely taken over. they live in a totally separate world. as was mentioned many times in his first term, it's a real fucking problem that "real" news like WaPo or the NYT is behind a paywall while stuff like Rumble or the Joe Rogan podcast are free. there is no leftist equivalent to that. perhaps because there is no one who really stands to gain from it, besides the people. whereas Russia can just chuck tens of millions of dollars at Joe Rogan and Tim Pool to do their bidding.

building a huge national campaign in three months...i mean if would have been next to impossible for almost anyone. other than michelle obama.

she definitely ran a bad campaign - she didn't even try to distance herself from biden and run as a 'change' candidate, wasted most of her time & energy on trying to appeal to republicans, abandoned the 'weird' attack line pretty quickly (which seemed to be one of the most broadly resonant attacks), etc. and she lost badly. it's certainly far from all her fault - biden should never have been allowed to run again and should have dropped out much earlier in time for a proper primary - but she quickly squandered whatever strengths she had. a lot of those issues seem to just come from her making the idiotic move to keep all of biden's campaign staff running things after they'd just run his campaign into the ground.

but I guess Americans just don't find that to be that compelling of an argument.

of course it isn't, everything is broken and people want something more than just 'not being the other guy' which is all dems can seem to really offer

Biden is pretty much an all-time villain. In addition to enabling genocide, he tanked the Dems chances against Trump by running again and then staying in the race another month or so after it was clear he had to go.

I feel like the bigger problem with Harris is that she is a mainstream Democrat at a time when a lot of people distrust and are disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Maybe if she weren't the sitting vice president, she could've distanced herself from the unpopular president more, but I don't think she could've plausibly distanced herself from the party enough to convince people that she represented something genuinely different.

People (grievance fueled and otherwise) that think the system is rigged for the elite/rich are right! There are a lot of them on both sides of the left/right spectrum. Trump's main gift is acknowledging this fact in a "genuine" way that speaks to some of these people. These people are just wrong that Trump or the Republicans will do anything about it.

Unfortunately, the Dems didn't have a compelling message for these people and so just end up defending the system.

And, depressingly, starting to see the Dems conspiracy theories about a "stolen election" swirl up. Lots of people sharing the clips of him saying "I don't need your votes, I have enough votes" and insisting it was stolen. Just... look, I'm depressed and sad. But, come on.

maybe it was impossible to distance herself from biden enough, but we'll never know because she didn't even try and instead (incredibly foolishly) explicitly ran on the opposite

Yeah the Democratic Party post-Obama has just been squandered opportunity after squandered opportunity. I am more Bernie-skeptical than a lot of you (I think he had some significant political weaknesses himself), but whatever anyone thought of his candidacy they sure should've noticed all the people and energy he brought in and figure out a way to harness it and appeal to it. Instead they basically told a bunch of people to fuck off. And nominating Hillary and then Biden just felt so stale. During Biden's first two years, an all-Dem Congress, even with what they accomplished it all just felt like such a gerontocracy with him and Pelosi and Hoyer and Schumer etc. Very much a last gasp of an era.

eggs went up to $6 a carton which caused mortgage rates to go from 3% to 8% because they wanted eggs to go back down to $3

meanwhile savings accounts started offering real juice at 4-5% but americans famously don't save so that ended up not being a plus for biden

There was a moment after one of the January 6 hearings where the Senate voted to convict Trump by a majority but not by the required 2/3 which would have made him ineligible to run for office. I just remember thinking how meekly the commission withdrew or didn't fight for the conviction hard enough and was so disgusted, like what the hell are we even doing here.

In 2018 we put an admitted blackout drunkard who has been credibly accused of rape on the Supreme Court, and later it came out that there were irregularities with the evidence in even that hearing.

The Republicans have not playing with a fair deck for a long time. We knew that from 2016 with Merrick Garland, and the thing is people have goldfish memories or hate women or don't care about this, or all of the above. Like it would be nice to joke that Biden should just Official Act™ them all but if you believe in democracy you can't have your side do anything you wouldn't accept the other side doing.

People (grievance fueled and otherwise) that think the system is rigged for the elite/rich are right! There are a lot of them on both sides of the left/right spectrum. Trump's main gift is acknowledging this fact in a "genuine" way that speaks to some of these people. These people are just wrong that Trump or the Republicans will do anything about it.

Unfortunately, the Dems didn't have a compelling message for these people and so just end up defending the system.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, November 6, 2024 2:08 PM

OTMFM

and felicity otm about the Garland moment being when the gloves came off

It still makes me angry when I think about it

In the midst of this Garbagest of Days, are there any local election results people are happy about?

Seems like the board of supervisor I wanted voted in made it, a local prop to convert the Great Highway along the ocean in SF to being a public park closed to motorists passed, Prop 3 (marriage equality) and 4 (climate change protection funding) passed. Other city props passed that are good too. Unlike 2020 and 2022 I feel much more aligned with the constituency here this go round. That's at least one positive to focus on for me, on this fucked day

Putting this here for the historical record

Kamala Harris concession speech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpSfffypLkk

What the Dems could've done about inflation.

This is what I wrote in 2021. I was ridiculed and worse.

I am from Nuremberg. I stuck my head out and called for strategic price controls because I had studied the history of inflation and inflation control for years and was worried inflation would bring Trump back. pic.twitter.com/a4omqFhTAh

— Isabella M. Weber (@IsabellaMWeber) November 6, 2024

Angela Alsobrooks being another female of color in the senate is a good local (for me) story.

In the hyperlocal sense, we had a weird city charter amendment here that would have made all 6 of the City Council seats at-large. There was a complex backstory to this, but I thought it was a bad idea, I think district representatives are good and making all candidates run citywide would create obstacles for people who might be well known and respected in their own community but don't have the resources to run a citywide campaign. It was supported by the center-left mayor and Council majority — basically because they assumed that everyone who got elected under it would be center-left professionals like themselves — and opposed by several different groups on both the left and right, who assumed (correctly I think) that it might be harder for any kind of electoral minority to get elected under it. (Within city limits, Republicans count as an electoral minority — as does the democratic-socialist Council member who opposed it.)

Anyway, it was hard to say what was going to happen because we all assumed a lot of people would be totally baffled by the amendment language. But I guess the anti- message got out there, because it got voted down by a slim margin. Which I think is good for grass-roots candidates and real community representation. So that was good news.

they had to go to Kamala or all of the money they'd raised to that point would wind up having to be refunded, they'd be giving up their entire War Chest, and be starting at a deficit. not to mention there was little time to waste at the point they decided to replace Biden.

the issue is that the decision to not have him run should have come much sooner. obviously they all knew he was severely misfiring long before we did. but after the debate appearance, pivoting to Kamala was really the only decision to make to avoid having to make up even more ground. I doubt anybody else would have done as well.

Isaac Chotiner:

The single biggest reason this defeat should fall on Biden’s shoulders is that his stubbornness in refusing to step aside as the Democratic nominee until July short-circuited the possibility of staging a primary, and left Harris as the only real choice to replace him. ... One could argue that a bruising primary this year might have left the Democrats with a nominee even weaker than Harris. ... But the most crucial attribute that another candidate would have had? Not being the sitting Vice-President of the most unpopular Administration since George W. Bush’s second term.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-party-elite-responsible-catastrophe/

Any of these Clinton ass people better never be near a presidential campaign again

I thought Trump was awful enough to lose but the subhead on that Heet Jeer column sums up my feelings over the last six weeks - the Harris campaign felt like Hillary 2016. Overconfident about how shitty Trump was, trying to run up the numbers with white suburban women.

https://theonion.com/america-defeats-america/