2020 Post-Election Thread

Biden also didn’t get the black vote in any meaningful sense. Like only in the sense that the Dems always get the black vote. Trump’s percentage share of black voters this election was the highest for any Republican since Nixon 1960.

1 Like

It almost certainly swung Georgia - and won him the primaries.

I don’t think we have all the data yet, and are just going off of pre-election polls, but everything I’ve seen suggests biden turned out far more black votes than hillary did. Black people were also more likely to say they were voting biden rather than against trump, according to some junk study I saw but it left an imprint in my brain.

I believe he did reach these voters in some meaningful way but all the talking heads make it sound like it was solely because of kamala. That’s just so entirely missing the point.

One of the things that really blackpills me this election is the apparent drift in party coalitions. The Democrats are more and more the party of educated elites and their strategy the last couple elections has been trying to bite off even more of that cohort. They’re relying on racial issues to hold the coalition together, but non-white voters appear to be starting to defect.

The anger of the working class in America will go somewhere. I’m reminded of the Matt Christman Inebriated Past episode where he talked about fascism in terms of it being a compromise by the ruling class to protect against left-wing politics. Rather than change to the economic order, the working class are offered vengeance against a set of villains who are blamed for their ills.

If you look at America through the lens of class politics, it’s not clear to me at all which party is closer to unifying poor/working-class voters. The trajectory of the Democrats is to get more elitist and the trajectory of Republicans is to get more populist. The results in Florida, where a $15 minimum wage and enfranchisement of ex-felons passed easily while the Dems got spanked on the back of mass Latino defection, demonstrates that the Dems are just not regarded any more as a party looking out for the marginalised, and with good reason. There are already Republicans out there who are willing to support things like public healthcare and minimum wage increases. We saw in the 2016 primaries that supposed key planks of GOP orthodoxy (free trade good, Iraq War good) can be totally reversed in a heartbeat by a charismatic candidate. The sole thing acting as a bulwark against this realignment is race. If that’s gone, then the roadmap to such a realignment seems clear. The roadmap to the Dems becoming a populist left party is a lot murkier. Bernie couldn’t get it done.

7 Likes

Right, GA is a special case because of the work of Stacey Abrams. I don’t know though man. I feel like the whole thing is hanging by a thread.

1 Like

Depends on if people see a pattern in that 1%.

You do it all the time dude. You might pick more fights than anyone except watevs.

2 Likes

Responded to the wrong post my bad. Otoh, some of them really do like the racism.

Idk enough about exactly who an in what numbers went R this cycle to have an opinion ci can stand by.vbut I suspect there are similar lar factors as in the rust belt – for 40 years what has the Democratic party done for us. They’re getting poorer and are rightfully aggrieved and only one guy is speaking to that sense of grievance.

That’s the thing dude, i liked the post because you do go on these vendettas. No one else here really does that, and a lot of old feuds got resolved on tuesday. Hell even me and 6ix are cool now. I just wish you could confront people on their ideas rather than just jumping to immediately call them a liar or attack their character. THAT’S what people react to, not because they don’t like you or you’re persecuted or whatever.

Like you’re clearly a very bright guy, I just wish you’d put in some effort when posting rather than these lashout posts that don’t contain much other than calling someone a liar or something and does nothing other than to cause fights.

I’m guilty of it for sure, not saying I’m not, but with you it seems like the majority of the posts I actually see from you. I know it isn’t, and I like your posts in the off topic forums a lot. I wanna see more of that guy, not whatever angry character you get yourself worked up into when talking to our more center minded forum inhabitants.

4 Likes

Aren’t a lot of other countries (Thailand comes to mind) basically the bourgoise and their rich allies vs. the poor/rural and their rich grifter populist leaders?

My mom held her nose and voted for Trump in 2016 I think because baby killers. This time she was ecstatic Biden won. Same for my stepdad I assume. Here’s Johnson County, KS - which is basically the Orange County of KC (upper middle class, boring, big box stores):

https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article247013962.html

President-elect Joe Biden won Johnson County — a once-reliable GOP stronghold — by 8 percentage points, a result that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Couldn’t this re-alignment of squeamish milquetoast suburban retirees and Lululemon moms also become permanent?

Also the suburbs are getting less and less white all the time - which isn’t so much a re-alignment. But I don’t think that explains in JoCo. They’re just moderate GOP voters who for the most part aren’t super racist, are well off, and don’t seem to not be taken by Trump at all.

Also Brownback really really hosed that state. Probably still a lot of hangover from that. Maybe Trump will cause a similar national hangover among the non-crazies.

The roadmap to dems becoming a populist left wing party is by empowering young people with powerful voices like abrams and AOC to run for higher office. Abrams would have been a terrific choice for VP and I don’t think she was even on the list for consideration.

Instead what we get is the establishment shouting them down and continually putting forward these out of touch ancient fucks with one foot in the grave who don’t have young people in their minds whatsoever. The future of the party is in the hands of people under 40 and it still isn’t obvious to those in charge yet. Our politics skew significantly to the left of our older counterparts.

2 Likes

image

9 Likes

I will be very honest with you. The way you post, it feels like you are especially triggered by skydiver and Elizabeth Warren. Given the accusations of misogyny leveled against the dirtbag left, you come across sometimes like a guy trying to prove that he can criticize a woman without being misogynistic in the same way that some conservative white people try to prove that they can criticize blacks without being racist.

I’m not going to say you hate women, but there is enough of a possible pattern where I can’t be sure that you don’t. Maybe you blame identity politics for Bernie’s defeat and lash out at anyone who you identify with one of those identities. You seem to want to believe that anyone who defends skydiver against you is white knighting her because she’s a woman that they wish to curry favor with. That makes people perceive you as adopting a GamerGate framing for dismissing criticism.

You come across as an angry dude who can’t have a civil conversation with people you disagree with. You seem bitter because Bernie lost and you think he was cheated and would have smashed a fair contest in the primaries. You’re a window into how some Trump supporters aren’t going to accept that their guy lost months from now.

Given that, most of the responses you are going to get are going to be drive-by one-liners. Few people feel that it is worth the effort to have dialogue with you. If this is how you want to use the forum, to blow off steam whenever you are mad at the world, then have at it. I don’t think that is ban-worthy posting. But don’t be surprised if no one wants to treat you the way they treat other posters who they think they can have a quality discussion with.

The Democratic Party isn’t perfect. One can try to fix it or one can try to destroy it in favor of a new party rising up in its place. Either way, there aren’t enough progressives to have a purely leftist left-of-center party. A left-of-center party that can win national elections is going to have to be some sort of center-left coalition and that requires people like you deciding what compromises you are willing to accept.

The grown-up conversation that some people would like to have with you is what those compromises look like if you have to make a deal to get at least some of your priorities. I make the case that the Democratic Party is currently a coalition built mainly around a partnership between anti-racism and social liberalism and that the it should be between economic leftist populism and anti-racism. Others will argue that it needs to be built around social and economic populism.

14 Likes

But who really cares who responds to your posts? Or who likes posts for that matter? I post the data every week but it’s just a data point like anything else; data on its own is meaningless. You can choose to take your lack of replies/hearts as a personal slight, or you can try to improve that metric (whatever that entails), or you can just… not care? It’s gotta be one of those things and the first one just leads to pain for you, which I personally wouldn’t wanna deal with. I’m a little confused because by the words you say it and how you act it SEEMS like you don’t really care about what people here think of you, but on another level, you say other things like this that make it seem like you do.

Re: skydiver, I don’t even have a strong opinion on it other than if I were her I wouldn’t want to post here anymore and it’d mostly be because of you. That’s not white knighting, that’s how I’ve seen you act. And I respect you enough to tell you this plainly, and I also want to make it clear I do value your input on this forum. But man, if you just simply can’t coexist with her, or any other poster you disagree with, that’s a you problem, not an everyone else problem.

7 Likes

I have a thought experiment.

Let’s say that Biden’s governing coalition is the Democratic mainline establishment, the progressive Sanders/Warren wing, the idpol racial minority wing, the conservaDem Joe Manchin wing, and the Bloomberg/Lincoln Project Republicans who have wormed their way into an undeserved seat at the table.

The agreement is that they draft Cabinet and some Cabinet-level positions. The establishment gets two picks, minorities get one, progressives get one, conservatives get one, and turncoat Republicans get one, in that order. (Establishment gets picks one and two, then seven and eight. Progressives get picks four and ten.)

You are drafting from Attorney General; Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, HHS, HUD, Transportation, Energy, Education, VA, and Homeland Security; EPA Administrator, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Director of National Intelligence.
Eighteen positions, so three rounds of drafting.

How do you think the draft goes?

I keep seeing pundits claiming Joe can peel off Collins types in the Senate to “get stuff done.” Apparently you can get paid to have an opinion about politics and not realize that Mitch has absolute control over what gets a vote, and to further not realize he’s never giving Biden a win on anything, ever?

4 Likes

This is another reason why I think GA is going back to red for a good long while. Ten years minimum.

Honestly, at this point I find it a mixture of funny and sad more than offensive. My first instinct is to laugh when he (or whatevs) does this. I realized that it’s really useless to try to “defend myself” against him, and just easier to not indulge it at all.

My actions speak, and it makes it a lot easier to laugh it off being comfortable in the fact that I’m in the arena, and he’s only watching and yelling from the parking lot.

10 Likes

If he does give us a win it won’t be a good thing long term, of that you can be certain.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has an article about Georgians who could possibly be tabbed for Biden’s administration. It’s obviously all just a “hey, maybe” piece, but there was one realistic appointment that would be swell: Sally Yates for Attorney General.

That would send Trumpistan’s lawnmowers into orbit.

2 Likes

I’d appoint McCabe for a day, let him retire with full benefits, then appoint Yates. That bullshit needs to be undone on day one of Biden’s term.