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

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/

xp The last graf of that column seems right to me.

Democrats will need to radically reform themselves if they want to ever defeat the radical right. They have to realize that non-college-educated voters, who make up two-thirds of the electorate, need to be won over. They need to realize that, for anti-system Americans, a promised return to bipartisan comity is just ancien régime restoration. They need to become the party that aspires to be more than caretakers of a broken system but rather is willing to embrace radical policies to change that status quo. This is the only path for the party to rebuild itself and for Trumpism—which without such effective opposition is likely to long outlive its standard-bearer—to actually be defeated.

Pandering to Republicans when the GOP *is* the problem. They started doing that (and stepping away from Walz’s early strategy of ‘emperor’s new clothes’ when he is the guy who won a trifecta in MN and chair of Dem governors) and that’s when I first became uneasy.

Also as much as it pains me to say, asserting your opponent is fascist (even if he is) only makes his supporters more willing to torture the libs, while simultaneously they’re thinking the libs are being hyperbolic.

Yep, it's basically the problem they've had since Clinton's whole Third Way DLC shtick. Sucking up to corporate cash has been good at bringing them donors, but it turns out that comes with strings attached. They manage occasional populist moves in crises — like the banking reforms post-2008, if any of them are even still in effect — but that's about as bold as they get. Of course, going a real anti-corporate populist route might alienate parts of their college-educated base, which isn't enough to win elections with but is still an important part of the party's loyalists at this point. Not an easy thing to put together even if they wanted to, which probably only a few toward the Squad end of the party want to.

The he’s a fascist line doesn’t land because it’s not what people actually experience - the reactionary laws Republicans have passed are just… Republican laws. We still have regular elections and even Jan 6 didn’t impact the vast majority of lives.

Democrats have been calling Republicans the end of democracy for eight years but also finding Good Republicans and the need for a Strong Republican Party and Cabinet Secretary Republican.

If you’re going with Donald Trump is a fascist then your line should be the need to raze the GOP and salt the earth for the sake of humanity.

My friend who is very much of the Hill (and was at the Ellipse last week) has been mad at the DNC for years, and she is fairly representative of Beltway Dems. Maybe they will change the DNC as the Clintons age out of public life.

that was kinda the problem wasn't it? can't treat your opponent like an existential threat to this country, when the guy you're putting up there is suffering from obvious mental decline. they had to have known how bad Biden was before he stepped onto that debate stage. if Trump had refused the debates like he wanted to at first then we probably would've been stuck with him!

Given the outcome they should have kept Joe in the race for entertainment value.

They might have had an old man fistfight at a second debate.

Oh well. More power to Elon and Thiel. Well done. Noone will regret that.

I've seen many people out there blaming Kamala, but I still think she did a stellar campaign, even more with the cards she was dealt with. This race was unwinnable for her in retrospective, just too many fundamentals against her. Also not having a full campaign cycle definitely hurt her. While Hillary deserved it for running a terrible campaign, I don't think Kamala deserved such a blowout. Anyways... godspeed..

harris just ran the clinton 2016 campaign again and it still didn't work, that's a big part of why it was terrible. losing is hardly all her fault, it's biden's fault even more, but her campaign did absolutely nothing to help

It’s anecdotal but then again also repeats trends seen in the 2019 election here so behind a cut:

Talked to a young friend of mine earlier - solid blue always Dem voter who voted regardless of her problems with the ticket and Biden. During the course of us talking she said, almost as an aside:

“And social issues are important but the Dems have to move away from talking about trans stuff and immigration reform so much…”

It was a basically half formed thought but I’d seen it echoed five years ago and I didn’t like it. So I said, but I didn’t ever even see them talk about trans rights, like, at all? Maybe Walz but Harris really didn’t want to discuss it much during campaigning. And then I pointed out the problem with ceding this ground is twofold: you cede this and you have less to stand for, but equally importantly, polarisation does so much heavy lifting. Nothing needs to be true anymore; lies go viral before anyone thinks to fact-check and by then the damage is done.

I have no doubt that if the Democrats had ceded ground on those issues they still would have been painted as, whatever those ads said they were, baby killers who were funding sex change operations for illegal immigrants or whatever. It doesn’t have to be true to stick.

But yeah this happened with Labour post-2019 and they shifted far to the right and basically distanced themselves from a huge number of their voters - and won a majority because they profited off the woes of the Tories. But the policies and people in office they have now are pandering to the far right, who finished second to them in a number of constituency seats btw, and who are primed to make huge gains next election. They were supposed to have a Small Boats Week this week, for fuck’s sake.

And all of this is done by people who are as deeply ideological as anyone and the fault of the electorate is not having an appetite for “The same shit but in a different colour.” Liberals - and I mean this as “centre-left”/neoliberal in the European sense - would rather wag their tail at fascists than give anyone on the left the time of day, and the reckoning that’s coming - or has come - is going to be so very ugly.

I wish I knew what to say or do about any of it, but I don’t.

a local prop to convert the Great Highway along the ocean in SF to being a public park closed to motorists passed

Also not having a full campaign cycle definitely hurt her

but on this very thread, people were celebrating the brevity of her campaign and wishing all campaigns were this short

On the contrary: had she definitively and quickly parted ways with Joe Biden in July she might've had a chance.

okay maybe not a "stellar" campaign but at least she didn't have all the hubris Clinton had. She also had more challenges: Soaring inflation worst in a generation to deal. Housing policy. Oh and 3 months to turn it all around and try to rebrand the Democrats on these issues. Democrats are usually very bad at communicating how their political party could help. They spend too much time on social issues and the vast majority only cares about economic issues.

It's not like the other side have a good plan either, the proposed tariffs if implemented will likely make it worse. But Kamala's message was more in the line of "everything will be fine, we will be working together on it", Trump's message was "everything sucks and they are to blame". For many people that message resonated more. Americans want change. Well... here you go.

yup xp

budging a single inch on Palestine would have helped a lot

Just read this paragraph in Politico

And other calculations Harris made at least internally seemed even riskier — notably the refusal to separate from Biden, even after the president publicly offered her his permission to do so. Harris’ aides during the campaign stressed that this was a line she was unwilling to cross, offering that doing so would undermine a litany of public statements she’d made about the president and blow holes in her own record of accomplishments in the White House.

It definitely would've been a difficult needle to thread, but I also think it would've been a risk worth taking. But I've gotten the impression that Harris has always a risk-averse politician.

*always been

Soaring inflation worst in a generation to deal.

I do think that constant refrains of the Will Stancils of the world, that the economy is 'good actually' and that inflation didn't exist anymore, was a big fucking problem. people are still getting laid off left and right; white color jobs now, not just blue collar manufacturing jobs. I don't know why those people would think Trump would be more amenable to their needs but it doesn't help when the liberal party gaslights them.

I mean it's not possible for her to REALLY distance herself from the current administration. She's part of it.

Aid a dumb war, and if you run from the VP’s office, you become Hubert Humphrey.

People did not vote for Trump because they hate women and abortion (look at the abortion measures that passed in red states), and in most interviews with the bulk of his voters they openly talk about disliking his rhetoric, believe it's a lot of hyperbole, and don't think he's going to do half the shit he says (they're not entirely wrong, after all he never locked up Hillary). Dems and high propensity voters get caught up on how terrible Trump is (and he is) but the people who vote for him are voting for him as an act of protest against a very out of touch system that doesn't effective recognize their very valid economic problems. Trump says "shit is bad, let me fix it" and of course people lean towards that over a "i'll do more of the same" message.

voting for him as an act of protest against a very out of touch system

a coworker opined that Harris had too many Beyonces and Cardi B's up on stage and probably should found more Joe the Plummer-types

Moka otm

But her females

I'd also add racism and misogyny.

I think a lot of people who normally vote Dem decided to stay home or only vote on down-ticket.

Those people are fucking stupid

I dohave a friend, who is an immigrant from central america who is more socialist than anything else, who didn't vote for trump, but despises the democrats, and he's been laughing all day. he's on the accelerationist bent: "burn the dems to the ground". this is based on the assumption that people will revolt when things get bad enough I guess, but the problem is I don't believe they will do that.

At least we can say the election was relatively peaceful... a couple burnt ballot boxes, no (so far) nobody shitting on Pelosi's desk

a coworker opined that Harris had too many Beyonces and Cardi B's up on stage and probably should found more Joe the Plummer-types

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, November 6, 2024 7:23 PM (one minute ago)

this is an incorrect framing of what happened but it does highlight something interesting about the campaigns. trump openly campaigned w/ rappers and other musical celebs as much or more than kamala did, the notion that trump was centering the everyman is false. but kamala's celeb endorsers were mega famous A list people that only emphasized how out of touch she was w/ the constituents she needed to win over -- beyonce, lady gaga, katy perry, billie eilish etc. trump meanwhile campaigned w/ artists like Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow in NYC, puerto rican artists like Anuel AA and Nicky Jam. he had Kodak Black releasing tribute tracks. these are artists that resonate with people in voting blocs that trump targeted specifically all campaign and then rode, in part, to victory. kamala's celebs, like her campaign, were meant to appeal to everybody, which in this election meant they appealed to nobody. we all bemoan the democratic party's celeb worship, but it should be something they own -- instead trump even kicked their ass on that! the coal mine is so full of canaries that it looks like the sun down there, but trump outfoxing the dems fucking majorly on celeb endorsements is one of them

a coworker opined that Harris had too many Beyonces and Cardi B's up on stage and probably should found more Joe the Plummer-types

i blame dj cassidy personally get that guy outta here

seems like some Dem insiders are partially blaming Walz: who one operative said “ultimately offered next to nothing.”

I don't think that's fair, I think we was a good everyman foil to Harris' coastal 'elitism'... I'm not sure Shapiro or anyone else could have substantively made much difference in the final count

Walz was fine, they sidelined him if anything