Bernie getting fewer votes than Kamala in Vermont can be attributed to two things:
People just voting for the president and leaving the other races blank.
More liberal third-party candidates in the senate race that take a percentage point or two.
But they both won by 30+%. One or the other “doing better” doesn’t prove anything. It’s like trying to say that one football team that won 45-10 had a better or worse performance than one that won 52-13.
My point was that it would not actually affect an incel in a meaningful way as far as their prospects for shedding incel status are concerned. Moreover, even the dumbest incel should be able to figure that out.
Some policies yes. Things like tariffs and immigration are simple on the surface but the potential downstream effects are wide ranged and likely not well understood by even informed voters. Things like legal weed and abortion are incredibly straightforward and I think most people will vote for what they want there, both in terms of policy and outcome of the policy.
But when it comes to voting for candidates, policy isn’t always the main factor. It’s mostly vibes and fundamentals. People will overlook and ignore a candidate supporting policies they dislike if they think the country is headed in the wrong direction and/or they like the person.
I think significant electoral reform is necessary to fix our politics. A lot of the undesirable aspects of our election system can’t be changed (the Senate, probably the EC), but there are nonpartisan changes that could make the system less crazy:
State-level PR for house seats. A long-term consequence of gerrymandering is that there are fewer opportunities for red-state Democrats/blue-state Republicans to prove themselves and learn to win elections. Plus gerrymandering means that the competitive election is the primary, not the general, which promotes extremism.
Primary reform. One thing that encourages candidates to take crazy positions is to stand out in the primaries. Plus the primary system doesn’t make a lot of sense (why are Iowa and Vermont so important), so it doesn’t even convey any democratic legitimacy on the winner (witness all the people still embittered about Bernie not winning). Need to simplify the system and have some kind of approval voting or RCV mechanism to limit the incentive for candidates to take extreme positions in the primary that make it harder for them to win.
Consolidate state elections and encourage pseudo-third parties that act as local “brands” for the national party. Lots of state offices are uncompetitive because they are too many of them and it’s almost impossible for voters to understand what they are about and what the different candidates stand for. We need fewer elections with clearer stakes, and we need to help voters understand what state candidates stand for with meaningful party labels that don’t have potentially toxic baggage from national politics.
Because people don’t pick candidates based on a list of policies. There’s also polling that shows Trump supporters thought Trump supported Kamala’s popular policies while she supported Trump’s unpopular ones. Absolutely 0% introspection when it was shown to them that Trump supported the things they don’t like. They were still all in on Trump. Kamala could have adopted Bernie’s bestest, most purest, leftist policy platform and thus give Trump supporters all the more things to like about what Trump is going to do for them. Policy proposals are powerless against pervasive propaganda.
No, I’m arguing against the people here that claim that Bernie’s superior policy would have translated to more votes. It didn’t even translate into more votes for Bernie!
I also remember when everyone laughed at Elon for his incompetence with Twitter, when it was clear to some of us what was really going on.
How did a genius, like yourself, miss something so obvious? I’m sure it wasn’t because you engage in a daily cynical circle jerk, naw, couldn’t be that.
I don’t think there’s any real guidance. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be constitutional, and since there’s no clear partisan winner, there’s less incentive for the SC to make one up.
This is more nonsensical than the My Pillow guy. The bomb threats were in deep blue precincts as far as I know. But he’s saying to check heavy Red areas? Did anyone even take the bomb threats seriously enough to go outside? And these hacks occurred across all the disparate voting systems in the entire country, where we saw a very uniform shift to Trump, including places like the Bronx? You’d think one unhackable state would stand out as a huge outlier for Harris. But no, the hackers are that good.
When you don’t know how anything works, everything is a conspiracy.