2024 Election POST MORTEM

I thought Harris would win, but it would be really close, so I’m not shocked that Trump won. I AM shocked that it was such a destruction up and down the ballots.

Obviously there are tons of reasons why it turned out the way it did, but here are my top three:

  1. Inflation/economy: don’t give a shit that the stock market has been up and unemployment has been down, prices HAVE gone up and have gone up in a very noticeable way. Harris/Biden/Dems were fucked here. They never even tried to let everyone know that the entire world had inflation and that the US/Biden admin handled it better than everyone else, probably because they didn’t want to remind voters of inflation. We know that the Biden admin did a good job guiding us through, but most people don’t.

  2. Harris is a woman.

  3. Internet/social media - has infected society, especially young and old people. Internet messaging is controlled by right-wing billionaires. Bullshit is just fed into people’s brains to the point where they think not only is it ok to give one of the worst people on earth a second shot at the presidency, but that’s it’s GREAT. And it’s not just a Trump thing. It’s an overall right-wing, fascism-curious thing. Look at California Prop 6: 5,000,000 people have voted AGAINST banning slavery and forced labor. IN CALIFORNIA.

Extreme conservatism is a worldwide cancer and it’s spreading. It’s not just a US problem.

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True. Definitely less wrong, though:

Continuing the discussion from 2024 US Presidential Election: First Polls Close in 24 Hours:

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You pretty much nailed it IMO.

It’s a mortal lock simplicitus will be soon posting about how the courts will save us.

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I mean this is literally 90% of why it played out as it did, and why we were turbofucked this cycle anyway. There was no good way to message this, the average voter DGAF that we had a softer landing than other countries and will be annoyed at whoever even tries to frame it that way.

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He was elected in 2016 in a zero inflation environment.

He was elected because Americans want a dictator. It has little to do with inflation.

I find the oddest thing about this is that abortion passed like 95% of its tests last night. I don’t understand how both of these results are possible.

Clearly, an appeal to machismo must be made if we are going to have any chance going forward.

Today I announce

Rodrigues '28: “Ain’t no woman gonna tell us what to do”

Secondary slogan

Rodrigues '28 : “Fuck it, I’ll just give you whatever you want. Ponies for all!”

I think people here deeply, deeply underestimate how irritated a chunk of biden’s 2020 voting bloc was about how the genocide in Palestine is being handled - Almost all of the progressive feeds I’d followed since ~2016 had been losing their minds about it this last year. It’s deeply unpopular with young people as well, and the clampdown on campuses and social media (and really the whole media/web) tilting to a very particular view about the topic (that seemed very much in lock step with the administration’s view) isn’t particularly great for turning out the vote.

That combined with “the economy is fine, actually” messaging going on much of biden’s term was completely tone deaf. And of course letting him go out there against Trump was the nail in the coffin. Kind of flabbergasted looking back with hindsight that’s the route they decided to take.

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Seriously though, running a half latino with a latino last name that presents as white is probably the least bad suggestion I’ve seen in the post mortem.

But really, can somebody explain what happened? I thought women were turning out at an almost +10 clip and polling for Kamala at about the same numbers. Why didn’t this pan out?

Like, I want to see crosstabs, and I also never want to think about this shit again.

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I wouldn’t say zero. It is a shitty spot to not be able to say that Biden did great things for the American economy, and that our post-covid inflation/landing was managed as well as or better than the other industrialized nations of planet earth. You can’t say it because you need poor folks to vote for you, and nothing is more obnoxious than telling a poor person that your portfolio is killing it. The other side is unburdened by this restriction.

But also, more than one thing can be true at the same time (believe it or not). Tucker is a fucking freak and a seriously weird dude, but while completely cringe, he’s right that a huge chunk of America wanted daddy to come home and give them a vigorous spanking. Now, in reality, they really want daddy to come home and spank the shit out of the icky brown/trans people, but if they catch a couple paddles to their tender backsides, so be it.

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The amount of young white women congregating around the Trump campaign rally last night was really disconcerting.

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Eh, I dunno. For sure it seems like the youngsters do love 'em some fascism, but again I think we’re all vastly overestimating the average voter’s info level. There are a zillion people who just said “Republicans better for economy make eggs cheap” and pulled the lever. Tens of millions of people voted for Trump who probably couldn’t tell you two things about his platform or Kamala’s.

I pretty firmly believe that we’d have lost easily to a Romney type republican candidate, or even an emergency insert of JD if Trump had taken that bullet to the neck.

I don’t know what to say other than this is just the most short sided of short sidedness. You’re upset over Biden’s handling of Palestine, so you vote in the guy who is clearly best buds with Bibi and going to do everything he can to eliminate the West Bank?

Ok sure thing guy, great idea. Go for it.

Like, what? How does that make a single iota of sense?

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I’m just telling you what I’ve seen in the last ~13 months. It is definitely a thing. It wouldn’t take them “voting for the other guy” but even a small single % dip in turnout from 2020 over it can be catastrophic, 2020 was incredibly narrow. It is just my hypothesis, I’m sure smarter people than me will look at the polling and the final results and come to their conclusion about it.

Yeah, I brought that up a couple times earlier this year as a reason I was afraid Biden/Harris would lose a lot of normally reliable Dem votes. I don’t have it in my top three reasons for the loss, but I don’t think it’s insignificant.

They were fucked there, too, really. I know staunchly liberal Jews who didn’t want to vote for Harris because she had the gall to say anything that was pro-Palestinian and I know liberal non-Jews who didn’t want to vote for Harris because she had supportive things to say about Israel. I don’t know how most voted, though I do know one my wife’s Jewish friends (we’re Jewish, btw) who didn’t vote for her because of the administration’s pro-Israel stance, so that’s a little different, I guess. At least he was in New York, so it didn’t matter aside from the popular vote - I think I heard he would’ve voted for her if he was in a swing state.

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Honestly one of the funniest things to me, right now, at 9am the day after, is how worked up we all were over the Selzer +3 poll, and it was -14. She was off by almost 20 points. The biggest loser of the election this year, if not you know all of us.

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Nah, he won in 2016 because he ran on an overly simplistic populist message and Clinton was hilariously unpopular and ran a dogshit campaign. That was 95% a democratic fumble, 5% Trump finding some untapped potential in the electorate.

He lost in 2020 because he did fuck all for 4 years, COVID hit, and people were fucking exhausted of the constant chaos he brought.

But then all the things dlk9s said, plus the fact that we have the memories of goldfish, and the motherfucker is back.

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They love the merch too, don’t forget that.

He lost an election, so I’m not buying that it’s just “America wants dictator Trump”. I think it mostly boils down almost entirely inflation and immigration. Either as the direct reason, or because it provided cover to come home to daddy.

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Short sighted, as in, you struggle to see beyond what is immediately in front of you.