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

I told a friend last night how if at any point in the last month Harris had said, "When I am president, I will bring Hamas and Bibi Netanyahu to the negotiating table to end this horrible war" she would've been denounced by Netanyahu and it would've helped with the Dearborn voters instead of their having to swallow her watery bullshit.

That would’ve been nice.

The correct answer is ‘I will not be intimidated by a bunch of Meir Kahane wannabes because I can remember when his notions were illegal.’

But again she seemed groomed by the Dem donor class, who, I'm sure, didn't devise "weird" in the early July/August days as a strategy; it's so simple and effective it was beyond them.

read this morning that she was encouraged by a 71 year old Clinton campaign staffer to drop "we're not going back" and the "weird" thing and to start chumming up to Repbublicans. Good strategy!

But it was Bill who wondered why the hell they weren't responding to that anti-transad.

Ah yes, the wisdom from that family who last won a Presidential election in 1996.

One of my pet theories is that Hillary Clinton would have won if she had divorced Bill after 2001 (her generation of women being the ones in 9 to 5, and the phrase ‘male chauvinist pig’ is a bat signal). Because it’s hard to repudiate SA by powerful men if one of them is your husband.

Definitely. Trump used this in the 2016 campaign. He made Bill’s accusers sit in the front row of the second debate. I think this was the most disgusting political stunt I’ve ever seen in my life.

It was. Married men who abuse women outside a marriage, whether infidelity or SA, always like to blame wives for not having hubby under control, but scream the minute their own wives try to assert themselves on the topic.

I remember that moment so vividly. It was right after the access hollywood video. I hated him already, obviously, and thought he was a race baiting, right wing misogynisitic demagogue. But something about taunting Hillary with Bill’s accusers made my stomach sink. It was clarifying in terms of how sick Trump is.

And how thoroughly he planned to degrade American civic life.

People love this stuff though. They love Trump.

yeah kinda what gets me about this, we can go on all day about what the Dems should've done different but at the end of the day the country overwhelmingly voted for Jeff Epstein's best friend, whose only policy proposals involve hurting people. doesn't really make me comfortable to be around my fellow man.

What happened to Qanon btw? Seemingly kept quiet during the election.

my friend and I went out to cheer ourselves up last night and of course my first thought is how many smug pieces of shit are gonna be at this place 'celebrating'. fortunately, I couldn't see any outright, though the six dudebros outside totally smelled like young Trumpers

Yeah i am not comfortable blaming kamala for this. Whatever her faults, and there are plenty, at the end of the day she seem like a normal person who doesn’t wake up in the morning looking for ways to cause as much damage to america as possible. Not so her opponent! The fact that people chose him over her says more about them than her.

yeah... i mean people chose hate, let's call it what it is

The kind of people who respond happily to this shit have an obvious history of bullying - particularly a certain type of high school mean girl who seems otherwise reformed. Also DUI douchebags who find Jesus for a do-over, and the guys who troll right-wing talking points to provoke lefty FB friends (and secretly relish the smackdown).

people chose hate, let's call it what it is

sure some people do this with their eyes open but mainly i don't think it works that way. we live in different realities. if somebody read ilx and watched msnbc full time and then voted for trump i'd agree they chose hate, but that's not what happens. people either don't read anything at all or they watch stuff that turns him, in the words of that great post from hawaii, into a demi-god. is it choosing hate to vote for a decisive, charismatic demi-god? they either don't hear or ignore the stuff that we know is damning. i am really coming around to the idea that yes this result is partly about trump and his unique "qualities" but it is as much about the democrats if not more so

Idk. He isn’t just a close the borders, america first, antiwoke right wing populist. He is an obvious sadist and criminal and everyone in the country knows it.

There’s a political side to this, and then there is another side.

they do not know it imo. people barely pay attention. they decided to hold their nose and vote for the famous white business guy instead of the black woman they'd barely heard of. it's really not terribly complicated

yeah sorry if the only takeaway people have here is that “people are just hateful,” that is 100% kicking the can down the road and allowing for further failures of the Democratic party to capture any sort of popular progressive economic agenda, as it absolves the Dems of running a shitty campaign with a mediocre candidate that appeared optically good but did not resonate at all with a voting population that is struggling.

some D wins to contemplate

Bob Ferguson won the governorship of Washington state
Josh Stein won the governorship of North Carolina
Democratic winners in Senate races:
Ruben Gallego beat Kari Lake, and will replace the awful Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona
Adam Schiff in California
Chris Murphy in Connecticut
Lisa Blunt Rochester in Delaware
Mazie Hirono in Hawaii
Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts
Angela Alsobrooks in Maryland
Elissa Slotkin in Michigan
Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota
Andy Kim in New Jersey
Martin Heinrich in New Mexico
Kirsten Gillibrand in New York
Jacky Rosen in Nevada
Sheldon Whitehouse in Rhode Island
Timothy Kaine in Virginia
Bernie Sanders in Vermont (Independent who caucuses with Democrats)
Maria Cantwell in Washington
Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin
There are potential House Democratic gains in Arizona, Oregon, Iowa, and California, where outcomes are still pending
Delaware elected Sarah McBride, the first trans person to the U.S. House of Representatives
Democrats unseated two House Republicans in New York
Julie Johnson was elected to the House as the first openly LGBTQ+ member of Congress to represent Texas
Here in Oregon, Val Hoyle remained our U.S. Rep in the 4th District
Dems here also won several statewide offices:
Tobias Read was elected Secretary of State
Dan Rayfield was elected Attorney General
Elizabeth Steiner was elected State Treasurer
There was also a sneaky Republican gerrymandering measure here in Lane County. It was rejected by over 75% of voters.

yeah if it brings some comfort in the next 72 hours to call Trump voters stupid and hateful, be my guest. And we can work on winning the ones who peeled away from us or outright sat out the election -- and many did. We're no longer the party of minorities and trade unions.

looks like jackie rosen is gonna squeak it out in nevada

Bernie Sanders in Vermont (Independent who caucuses with Democrats)

sounds like one to watch :)

Bob Casey race probably heading for a recount.

just so nobody takes this as centrist Democratic party defending...

...we did this same debate in 2016, we gave lip service to Democrats having to do soul searching to win back those they alienated. although those criticisms weren't wrong on their face, it became evident after four years of his voters showing up with Tiki torches and screaming "Jews will not replace us", shooting protesters dead in the street with zero repercussion, participating in a coup, willfully spreading a novel virus when we were supposed to be isolating, committed 265 domestic attacks killing 91 people, plotted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, bludgeoned Nancy Pelosi's 82 year old husband, occupied and desecrated the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, mailed IEDs to democratic politicians, killed 23 people in a Walmart while targeting Latinos, etc, maybe I'm just a little tired of pretending that we know exactly how to win these voters.

sure, you'll say, those were the most devoted of his followers, not the father of 4 who is struggling to get by and thinks things were better under Trump, but am I really to trust the decision-making faculties of someone who experiences everything above and says "I'll welcome him back"?

also think many itt and outside are really discounting how powerful the "I will carry out the largest mass deportation of immigrants" message won votes - 30% of Democratic voters and 58% of independent voters surveyed in October supported deporting "illegal immigrants". Half of voters surveyed in the same poll supported building a wall in Mexico, including 20% support from Democrats. In July, 55% of people surveyed supported a decrease in immigration (as opposed to only 28% in 2020).

now, I'm not going to pretend Democratic politicians have a good track record with immigration, and I remember Biden's awful attempt to appeal to anti-immigration voters, which still makes me choke back vomit. what I am saying, though, is Trump converted a significant number of voters by promising to mass deport immigrants.

so forgive me if I don't feel like some of the hyper-simplistic notions of how the Democratic party lost votes are accurate. Yes, as usual, they ran as a 'not the other guy' party and that's worth criticizing, but I draw the line at humanizing Trump voters...again....as if conventional means would have won their vote. a lot of D voters are mega shitty centrists and the single-issue many of them vote on changes now and then.

I ain't discounting Dem ineptitude as a causality, but feel like everybody's trying to blame specific individual choices made as if they were definitively the cause, because it gives us the illusion of control.

I'm still -- as of today -- interested in courting the Dems who voted for Republicans in 2024 as opposed to 2020 but I'm more interested in exciting the millions who sat out. The number shocked me.

problem is, every time I say this, the response is 'you're excusing Democrats', which...no, I'm not, but if you don't acknowledge that lots of votes were won through the dehumanization of our brothers, sisters, friends, relatives, etc, you're already starting on the wrong foot.

I don't believe you win those people back by kowtowing to them, which is why I was so pissed when Biden attempted to appease them, or refused to criticize or stop aid to Israel. but you have to know what you're dealing with at the same time.

Democrats moving more progressive would make me happy, and I'd love to be able to vote while holding my nose, and there are plenty of progressive policies that have popular support that we haven't tried, but I am also not convinced that making this pivot and actually running on a positive rather than a negative platform would necessarily churn out the results in the near future. which, fair...movements take time. but I get sick of the constant "if we ran on xxx, we woulda won" simplicity at the same time.

a lot of Democratic voters hate immigration, support the genocide in Israel, don't want M4All...I know these people in my regular life. I try to reason with them. but there is no shortage of people who think nobility lies in the middle ("argument to moderation"), so...it's slow going.

so yeah just let us be angry at the voters perhaps for a day, k

Alfred otm

*without holding my nose

Thank you for that, sleeve.

good post Neando

exciting the millions who sat out

hella otm

How many sat out this election vs 2020? (Roughly speaking, I know the counting is still happening)

"yeah if it brings some comfort in the next 72 hours to call Trump voters stupid and hateful, be my guest."

I don't want to do this, but I disagree with Tracer. People who voted for him knew EXACTLY what they were voting for. A strongman. They paid attention. They saw plenty of Trump clips online or on Fox. They weren't clueless naifs who just hated Biden. They wanted the mean guy to take over.

There’s one person in my friends list that is very Trump is God’s Plan (yikes) and I might choose her as someone to communicate with, because she knows I’m on the left and I didn’t flinch when she said she was conservative. She also knows I’m not religious, but I approach the Bible as a work of literature, and she has always admired my success as a writer, and I know I can step up to her without being unkind.

Maybe everyone here should correspond with one GOP person they can treat with civility; most of you write with skill, and I think it’s important to uncover exactly how these beliefs got hardwired in to them. This is not the same as parading never-Trump GOP at Dem events - it’s opposition research.

xxp Headlines are that it's about the same. And 2020 was the best in decades, at two thirds.

Raymond, some insight here: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/11/eight-million-missing-democratic-voters

I don't want to do this, but I disagree with Tracer. People who voted for him knew EXACTLY what they were voting for. A strongman. They paid attention. They saw plenty of Trump clips online or on Fox. They weren't clueless naifs who just hated Biden. They wanted the mean guy to take over.

― scott seward, Thursday, November 7, 2024

...which we've known since summer 2015. But so what? How do we get our people excited? (The answer is easy; knocking out the donor class is hard).

to me I feel like

"call Trump voters stupid and hateful as a means of venting"

is too often conflated here with

"call Trump voters stupid and hateful and abdicate responsibility entirety for the Democratic party and offer zero solutions going forward"

which...no. I'm upset now, let me be, it won't be forever, but every post I see from friends who seek to lose the most who are terrified right now isn't putting me in a very rational zone at the moment. the rational side will come back, it always does.

....

....

sandimashighschoolfootballrules

otm

xpost Alfred that article makes me think maybe 2020 was less a repudiation of Trump and more people just reacting to the temporarily tanked COVID economy after all :/

i mean we knew that was a factor and that it contributed to the win but there goes my image of PEOPLE SHOWING UP EN MASSE READY TO OPPOSE TRUMP as the narrative.

Our people made fun of Trump at McDonald's and riding the garbage truck and visiting a halal stand. I didn't -- I stopped doing it after 2016 because symbolism matters.

Guess what? It worked for him.

One thing that struck me in a big-picture way is that of the 10 presidential elections I've been able to vote in, the person I voted for won 5 of them. I rarely loved the person I voted for, but still, they won. So as doomy as it can feel in terms of where the country is and how we turn it in a better direction, my actual experience in my voting lifetime is not that the bad/worse guys always win.

That said, 2028 will be the 11th one I vote in, and I'd rather that balance is 6-5 rather than 5-6.

you people and your sports analogies ;)

WAR for Dems looking shaky

OBP is ok tho

I certainly don't begrudge anyone being angry at the voters right now, considering how openly hateful Trump is and always was.

My parents moved to Portugal when I was four but they were both German and so of course were my grandparents. They all passed long before I could have That Conversation with any of them, but certainly none of them offered active resistance to the nazis.

So I've been kind of trained from birth to know that the most repugnant evil comes supported by ordinary people. That's a very cliché thing to say, but I'm always struck by how many haven't internalised it, and I think partially having those memories of ordinary ppl in my life who were around for and complicit in unspeakable evil has helped me keep it in mind.

If I have a point here it's that I don't think Americans in 2024 are particularly Evil in an exceptional way, it's just that ppl in general will go down some horrible paths once the overton window shifts enough to do so.

srs question, are there even enough never Trumper or "I don't vote purely party line" Rs in the House to even block some of the insane shit if it winds up like 221-214? that's like 4 defectors needed every time I guess.