Should I stay in line? Someone please tell me whether to stay in line.
https://www.threads.net/@max_berger/post/DB_scimJH56
Now this is a sufficiently grandiose thread!
Wow, John King sure seems to age fast when you only lay eyes on his visage once every 4 years.
Is he the guy who got wasabi in his eyes?
Well, the report from the 9-4 was mid. I was only number 539 at 5:50 pm, out of ~2,900 potential registered voters in my precinct. When I was judging I don't think we ever broke 1,000, but I was a little bit hopeful turnout would be much higher tonight. However, lots of young people of color and especially young women voting, so that seemed like some cause for a little hope.
Which websites are you all breathlessly refreshing every few seconds?
https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/
It refreshes for you, even.
Trump is leading by a lot in Florida, but both abortion and marijuana are prevailing there. Idk.
12: They need 60%, so not obviously winning.
I have CNN streaming for lack of anything better to do. Atossa expressed interest in World of Warcraft, so I'm watching her run in circles and get killed by bandits.
Bloomberg also has a good auto-updating one.
Auto-updating removes one of the things I can do to kill time. I need a website that requires me to go run around the block before it updates.
I looked at the Guardian live blog a couple of times but they're running pieces where they talk with individual voters, and the last thing I want is some reporters' attempts to find the most idiosyncratic and infuriating voters. "Well, I voted dog bites man downballot, but I thought we needed a man who could bit a dog in the White House." What a story!
I'm refreshing here periodically, but otherwise totally checked out and waiting for lourdes to get home. The friends who were going to hang out with us tonight blew us off for the ER, so that sucks, but less so for us.
I'm reasonably calm and stoic now, but something is definitely going to rip through that before long.
Seems like any Harris large win scenarios are pretty clearly out of play.
Allred briefly winning but I know it won't last.
The candidate I love most for city council is leading 65-35 in early voting.
Most Trump and Harris voters were motivated in support of their candidate
That's some old-school shoe-leather reporting right there.
Just back from a 13 hour shift working the polls. Did I miss anything?
The "don't balance based on recalled votes" polls predicting a close national vote but no PV/EV in the blue wall polls looking kinda good.
How freaked out should we be?
Moderately? It's still a coinflip, just like the polls said. But whatever vibes that it was moving towards Harris in the last week don't seem to have panned out.
High turnout is a bad sign for Democrats, as has always been the case in the Trump era.
The optimistic case is Ohio early results + Selzer Poll + Harris running even with Casey makes the Blue Wall scenario still pretty plausible.
It does? I felt like things felt better in 2020.
Harris is dropping 4-5 points in a lot of rural places vs 2020 but cities aren't clear yet.
Florida being significantly redder than expected is putting me back in 2016 frame of mind.
With a much smaller PV margin though. And 2020 was very close.
Given what we're seeing in Florida and Texas, I'm pretty pessimistic about AZ, so I do expect things to be closer in EV compared to 2020.
No, the early hours felt terrible in 2020 in the exact same way.
I agree with Teo on the vibes in 2020.
When did the vibes change then? My recollection was the early (premature?) call in AZ played a huge role.
According to exit polls the Olds are alright.
I'm freaked out by the "shift from 2020" little vector map on the NYT.
Look at the Ohio part of that map though.
Apparently the NYTimes data analysts are on strike so everything they're saying is basically bullshit.
Is there a best network to watch? NBC? CBS? ABC? I just flip randomly between them.
What's the explanation? I assumed votes were still just coming in.
For complicated reasons (involving when I had covid, having a trip soon, and rescheduling when I had a cold last week) I got my flu and covid shots today. Do I feel bad because of the election or because the immune reaction is kicking in? Who can say?
In 2020 I went to bed Tuesday night around 10pm after a day of poll watching in Tucson, and the vibes were very bad. Woke up the next morning to discover AZ had (questionably) been called and hope was alive, but then we had to spend the day driving back to the Bay Area so weren't following the micro-shifts.
The 2020 Results thread, just for funsies. I haven't yet scrolled through to see how awful I felt at the concurrent hour.
Fox called AZ just before midnight EST.
GA rural is shifting 2-5 towards Trump but Atl suburbs 4-7% towards Harris from 2020. The story might be increased polarization so rural reports looking like Trump doing better but later reports shifting to Harris. If they can finish counting with all the bomb threats coming from Putin.
GA rural is shifting 2-5 towards Trump but Atl suburbs 4-7% towards Harris from 2020. The story might be increased polarization so rural reports looking like Trump doing better but later reports shifting to Harris. If they can finish counting with all the bomb threats coming from Putin.
I was despairing at 8:13 Unfogged Standard Time that I needed to go to bed and hadn't yet gotten any good news. So that's reassuringly parallel.
Apparently my hopes were accidentally up and I'm already full of the anxiety I thought I had avoided.
Good luck and good night everyone!
You guys will be my election update tomorrow morning so no pressure.
I guess I didn't comment in the election night thread here in 2020. Could have been during a period when I wasn't commenting at all.
Anyway, I remember the Arizona call being encouraging but also going to sleep after midnight PST thinking the signs were pretty good for Georgia, then waking up and seeing Georgia still looking good and feeling mildly confident in a Biden win from that point.
I'm sad about the Florida abortion referendum results.
On the NYT vector map, why are Kentucky and Tennessee so different than Mississippi and Alabama?
Well, climate change is going to fuck over that state far worse than a few Klansmen in fancy suits ever could. I wonder what percentage of current Florida residents will die there? Probably a much smaller one than people think.
We've discussed here before whether putting all the old republicans in The Villages might make the source states in the midwest slightly bluer. Here's hoping!
LGM is doing a nice pets thread if anyone needs a distraction.
Ok lovely people, it's time to catch some more Z's.
If its distraction you want, here is a streaming link of an episode of Ned and Stacy from 1997, featuring the last appearance of Mr. Belvedere on network television.
I am very nervous right now. I'd been saying for a couple days that this would be a white knuckle evening, but really feeling that now.
The link shared at #45 is mildly reassuring perspective. So thanks for that Heebie.
New Hampshire will have a Republican governor. Fuck!
I just woke up and read the thread, how worried should I be?
(In 2016 when I asked this here I was told to go back to sleep.)
It really sucks to be less popular than this guy
71: Somewhat? It's still early and the results so far have been pretty bad, but there's a lot left to count and Harris can definitely still win. Still feels like 2020 to me.
71: you might want to go back to sleep.
It's like 2020, but slightly worse. But slightly worse is enough to lose the election, which is what it looks like is happening.
I don't think Fox is going to call Arizona for Harris an hour from now.
75 feels correct to me. And despite Stein winning the governorship here, the guy who literally called himself a Nazi and supported slavery is going to get over 2 million votes, confirming every stereotype I have ever held about Republicans except their willingness to vote for a black guy.
Good news on the diversity front in my region. Sarah McBride, of Delaware, will be the first openly trans representative. Lisa Blunt Rochester (also Del.) and Angela Alsobrooks* (Maryland) will increase the the number of Black female senators by an infinite percentage. Andy Kim (New Jersey) will be the first Korean-American senator.
*Alsobrooks also qualifies to join Senators Crapo, Boozman, Tuberville, and Hickenlooper in the Bipartisan Caucus of Senators with Funny Names.
Maybe if SOME people had spent less time dithering and more time indicting, we wouldn't be in this mess.
The story of Sarah McBride and her husband is a heartbreaker. I'm glad she'll be there. I hadn't realized till now that over the last four years I really got used to feeling like the federal government basically had my back.
The only thing I'm feeling good about now is that I know a lot more about mutual aid and organizing than I did in 2016.
"We keep us safe" isn't just a slogan, it's a practice, and I know there are a lot of folks on this blog who have been practicing it for far longer than I have. We're going to need in in the months to come, no matter what happens tonight.
I'm feeling pretty good about having the three myocardial infarctions under my belt*. Whatever happens, at least I probably won't have to put up with it for all that long.
*I wear really high-waisted pants
Maybe if SOME people had spent less time dithering and more time indicting, we wouldn't be in this mess.
Judge Merchan shoulda sent Trump to prison for six months starting last July.
This is all unfathomable to me.
He'd have just won from prison, it's not like he was campaigning.
Biden wouldn't have won. Harris was our best shot and the polity just is that rotten.
Biden would have been crushed. Harris should and could have kept the momentum she had coming out of the gate instead of putting Walz in a box and sending Bill Clinton to Michigan to tell everyone how it was just and good that their relatives were getting killed. Dick Cheney too. And saying there was nothing she'd do differently than Biden. What the fuck were they thinking? The whole of the Democratic consultant class should be dragged behind a wall and shot. After Merrick Garland.
Used to be a thriving economy and cheap gas would win a president re-election.
Yeah, Biden was sleepwalking toward a 40-state loss.
I don't think Biden would have won, no. Some of this seems like anti-incumbent sentiment which would definitely have been worse with him.
I don't think there's much Harris could have done to get a better result, also. I'm very skeptical that tacking to the left rather than the right on any issues would have worked. (And she may still win!)
Anyway, we won't know the actual result for a while. Polls are still open some places (including here!).
Nice how Biden killed police reform and stifled the police reform movement. I don't look forward to the next four years of un-reformed policing.
79: My husband picked me up at the train, and I heard that about Brown. That makes me so sad.
Yeah, that sucks. The Senate is going to suck. Is there any way we can still take the House?
90: An awful lot of people decline to believe that either of those things is the case.
I guess it's a bad time to make a "Bernie would have won" joke.
Is there any way we can still take the House?
Oddly enough, yes, it still seems very plausible that we take the House.
PARSIMON. What is up? What a terrible occasion to see you here again.
Watching Georgia, I wish that Stacey Abrams was there.
191: I know. Hi y'all. I'd say all is well, except it doesn't seem to be, does it. Very sad about Sherrod Brown.
The little I saw of Harris on the national media that harangued her about going onto that same national media was not inspiring, I have to say. Especially, the not distinguishing herself from Biden comment. But I guess if she avoided that same media like Trump did, only she would have gotten negative press for it. Like she did anyway.
Thing is, I thought Biden did a fantastic job governing (except Israel/Gaza). Harris shouldn't want to do anything different than Biden did (except Israel/Gaza).
Second-guessing the minutiae of how Harris ran her campaign is silly. Trump literally said he wanted generals like Hitler had, has talked about being a dictator on day one, has plans for putting people in camps, is clearly in failing health (physical and mental), and on and on... We're not here* because Harris threw a curve when she should have thrown a slider. We're here because a substantial segment of the population wants fascism.
*Wherever here is. a the only thing that's certain in that nothing is certain.
Honestly, I can't blame the Harris campaign for much of anything. People have drunk the Trump koolaid very deeply -- the success of the right-wing propaganda machine has been tremendous. It's astonishing to see local people around here, for example, declare with true fear in their voices that the Evil Left must be defeated, for it will close down all future elections, put people in jail for teaching the Bible, give citizenship to the criminals it has illegally imported across the border, shut down all oil and natural gas production and force people to surrender their gas-powered vehicles. And on and on with this parade of horribles based entirely on fantasy.
Honestly, I can't blame the Harris campaign for much of anything. People have drunk the Trump koolaid very deeply -- the success of the right-wing propaganda machine has been tremendous. It's astonishing to see local people around here, for example, declare with true fear in their voices that the Evil Left must be defeated, for it will close down all future elections, put people in jail for teaching the Bible, give citizenship to the criminals it has illegally imported across the border, shut down all oil and natural gas production and force people to surrender their gas-powered vehicles. And on and on with this parade of horribles based entirely on fantasy.
Honestly, I can't blame the Harris campaign for much of anything. People have drunk the Trump koolaid very deeply -- the success of the right-wing propaganda machine has been tremendous. It's astonishing to see local people around here, for example, declare with true fear in their voices that the Evil Left must be defeated, for it will close down all future elections, put people in jail for teaching the Bible, give citizenship to the criminals it has illegally imported across the border, shut down all oil and natural gas production and force people to surrender their gas-powered vehicles. And on and on with this parade of horribles based entirely on fantasy.
Yeah, this is a cultural war thing that we are losing.
There's what you do and what you say about what you'd do. If a lot of people think the Biden administration was some kind of inflation crime wave immigration hell hole, you probably shouldn't say you'd do the same things. You could say the things you'd do and they could happen to be the same things Biden did, but without saying they're the same things and leave it at that.
We're here because a substantial segment of the population wants fascism.
This is indeed the problem.
Triple posting, you really are back, parsimon.
Ugggh. I just struck me that, given a close election, Musk may have made the difference, which would be particularly galling.
Sorry - I'm using my phone, and it's tiny.
The apparent ticket-splitting where Harris is way behind other Democrats seems remarkable. There must be more people who don't see the parties as starkly distinct than I would have expected. Or they see Harris as uniquely bad for whatever reason.
Or they see Harris as uniquely bad for whatever reason.
I can think of a couple reasons.
Heebie had the right idea, going into this.
119: Black and a woman. She was so much better than Clinton. But, honestly, Trump is so terrible that the only answer is 107 as apo noted in 114.
i'm drinking some very powerful copium here. in wi & pa early & absentee votes probably lean pretty far democratic. mi early & absentee is probably 50/50. many more votes to be counted in philadelphia. az is still a coin flip, and who knows about nv. it still looks 50/50... unless there's something (probably a lot) i don't know about unaffiliated voters in wi, pa, and mi.
We are a racist and misogynist nation. Let's stop pretending that is not the case. Add that to the fascists and general morons and we can elect a racist rapist conman felon.
I guess it will be interesting to see how badly the Republicans fuck things up over the next 2 years. If Trump is in with a compliant Senate and who-knows-what-kind-of House, there will be myriad opportunities for them to do things as awful as the COVID response. Mass deportations will REALLY screw up the economy. Unmaking the federal civil service will mean a lot of things just not getting done, or being so delayed as to be essentially moot. More rightist judges might not make a huge difference right away, except for abortion and queer liberation struggles, but eventually they'll make it difficult for a lot of parts of the economy to continue to function as they do. Cf. banning IVF based on goofy religious beliefs, never mind how most people actually feel about it. Two years of seeing Trump bumbling around and breaking all the china is going to be a great opportunity for Democratic House challengers. Sucks that all the little kids are going to have to live with the effects of this clusterfuck for the next seven or eight decades. I wonder if Poutine will really try to claw back the Baltics or Central Asian former-SSRs? That's going to unleash some chaos in the markets!
2 inches to the right, dude. 2 inches to the right! Sigh.
Trump can implement tariffs without Congressional approval. A recession is not unlikely. I'm personally deeply concerned about the Affordable Care Act.
126: No extension of subsidies, but it's safe if we can get the House back.
Tim was naturalized this fall. He could move back to Canada, and they'd probably take me too. How do we resist? I don't have kids. Less to lose.
Sadly, this will renew Newsom's presidential hopes. I hate for him to have any personal satisfactions.
hopium update: nevada's isn't voting d. arizona still might. pennsylvania and wisconsin have a large number of early & absentee ballots that are weighted heavily democratic. michigan's early & absentee votes are possibly R-leaning, but maybe not.
Maybe this place. I wonder what kind of renovations it needs?
128: Thanks, BG, I'll cling to that for the moment.
132: It's just slightly possible she holds on, but not likely at this point.
Anyway, I'm not going anywhere. We'll see how much success he has at implementing his insane agenda.
There was a huge rallying of grass roots organization after 2016, which carried our side in to 2018. A lot of people who participated in that have burned out or otherwise gone by the wayside, and many of the organizations they founded have shriveled for lack of interest and support. Can all that be revived? To do what? I don't know.
135: that's why its called copium, not basking-in-victory-ium. maybe it's genuine hopium though. it's +4 r in wisconsin, +6.3 r in michigan, and a mere +2.9 r in pennsylvania. 56.2% of early & absentee ballots in pennsylvania were from registered democrats. wisconsin.& michigan voters don't register by party, but it's not unreasonable to believe - even with the newfound republican love of early voting - there could be enough democratic votes left to count to make up the difference. wild-ass guess: 1/3 chance there's a slim EC victory for harris. i know that won't prevent a coup.
I'm surprised in many ways, but one of them is: do celebrities mean nothing anymore? I mean, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Oprah, Bad Bunny?
139: All preaching to the choir. Trump voters already saw them as the enemy.
I guess so? In their millions of followers, not enough were new voters?
watch me achieve insight into the actual situation in real-time. i've gone from thinking it's 50/50 to 33.3/66.6. but i was taught to never give up on the ball. i know that makes no sense in this context. it's still a good ethos.
A lot of people who participated in that have burned out or otherwise gone by the wayside
Me, and I achieved nearly nothing and don't care to do it again.
ah, there it is. cnn calls pa for trump. finally i can sleep. i'm deeply sorry.
While Democratic campaign strategists, who should all be shot, share a lot of the blame it's clear mainstream media wanted Trump to win. I don't know what you do when crime is high and the economy is in shambles none of which is true is the dominant narrative.
Well if he wins the popular vote this time, I won't have to be angry that it was the Electoral College that allowed this to happen.
Sometimes you just can't win. This seems like one of those times.
Can't wait for Trump to return to running for the 2020 election until he's finally declared a winner by the Supreme Court.
Ukraine is fucked, and Poland can't be feeling good.
I would hope that Trump would offer Netanyahu asylum to end the war, but of course that's not going to happen. Trump wants more war even more than Netanyahu does.
Why would he need asylum? There's no accountability coming.
And Biden isn't going to use his presidential immunity to do anything useful about this.
Wouldn't want to be anyone important who has spoken up loudly against Trump.
154: That depends on how things go internally, but yes, this is the result he has been working diligently to enable.
How it started:
431 I still want Harris to win and I'm still happy when protesters give her shit. She's going to win in a blowout anyway, its fine to criticize her for supporting genocide.435
431: honest question - what will you do if it turns out you were wrong? If Trump wins, or if Harris only wins 276-262 or something?
438
Same thing I've done for the past 8 years: continue the fight.
How it's going:
I could move to Montreal, probably.
Trump can implement tariffs without Congressional approval.
Unlikely he will, though. He's always been quite open about his approach to negotiations in business - you go in there, demand some ludicrously high price, you thrash around and make a lot of noise, and finally you graciously consent to something well below your original ask, but well above the maximum that your opponent was previously prepared to consider. He wrote a book about this in the 80s and he's been repeatedly saying that this is how he's approaching taxes, NATO contributions and so on.
The point is that you cannot look at what he's saying he'll do and assume that he will make any serious attempt to do it. Not because he's lazy or incompetent (although he is lazy and incompetent) but because he has an approach to negotiating that has served him very well throughout his life, and he's sticking to it.
The good news is that I can already feel the immigrant invasion slowing, crime dropping, and the economy improving tonight. Trump will have accomplished so much by the time he's inaugurated!
Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a brief, beautiful moment, we sent a strong message to the organisers of the 2024 Democratic National Convention about our disagreement with their decisions on speaker scheduling.
In other news, California seems poised to refuse to abolish slavery (Proposition 6).
Get ready for some whiplash as you watch Democrats discover there's genocide going on in Lebanon and Palestine
Everyone take off your lucky clothes.
The house race is not over? Any insights on that?
Saddened to find that we're in the scenario. I was wrong about it. From what signals there were, I did think that the gender divide in the vote was real - and possibly it was? - but clearly whatever was there just wasn't enough. Against it the whole of the US seems to have tilted right, maybe not by all that much, but uniformly, which was decisive.
I wonder if he will actually pardon every single J6 rioter, including the out and out Nazis? Can't think why not at this point.
Quarantined all night until now. Probably better for it...but fuck.
Selzer was the most sad and despairing head fake ever.
At least we'll have most people saying the economy is great and crime is down.
168: I think so and will form the Ashli Babbitt Memorial Presidential Honor Guard or somesuch out of them.
He should have been sentenced for crimes a while ago. I suspect he'll pardon himself.
I await with an emotion i cannot yet name the response of powerful institutions.
Obviously people want to say x or y should have been done differently, but if Casey is going to lose that just looks to me like there's not much anyone could have done.
Hopefully there will be years of think-pieces about the average Trump voter and we can devote ourselves to self-flagellation for failing to embrace their peasantlike urge for deporting all brown people and having women die outside hospitals.
172, 173: "Hare" that's the emotion I couldn't name! I hare the response of our powerful people and institutions... I refuse to take down the sign for at least a day; not going to sneak out and do it now.
175: I think that's right. Plus misogyny and racism.
176: But heebie, the economy is so freaking bad right now. Surely you can't expect people to ignore that!
No jobs, stock market in the tank, ...actually, I'm not sure I can do this. Gallows humor is probably not quite so funny on the way to the actual gallows.
Mad at Merrick Garland. Trump should be in prison.
Media helping the mood.
Politico "Trump promised to get revenge. Here are his targets."
It's looking like Eugene Vindman won his race to be a US Representative from Virginia. Someone will be standing up and saying true things about Ukraine.
Illinois and NJ were a lot closer than they should have been.
183: Undoubtedly, but i urge folks to hold off on takes based on turnout and %s until all the votes are in . Don't think those states are real slow counters, but the large urban areas do tend to lag.
181: Not sure of your point, but I found that a useful bit of journalism (if a bit obvious).
The media sets the agenda. It would have been nice for this sort of thing to have been top-of-front-page news in recent months.
I'm a bit amused that Politico accurately places itself on the target list.
Thank you for trying, those who did.
Am I wrong to think that red staters - the ones that vote GOP, which is obviously most of them - just do not care about anything beyond their new truck, house, barbecue grill & growth industry job? A big part of the Democrat heavy lift is trying to communicate why you _should_ care about a whole long list of things, but plenty of voters here seem to have decided that those are irrelevances.
To put this a bit differently. If Democrats had been able to simply message along the lines of: you can see it's going not so great, we have this short list of things we will do that are guaranteed to make your life better. Since they were incumbents, that wasn't an option. But apparently nor could they say: as you can see, it's going excellently well, let's continue. Even though it does seem to be going pretty well. Why couldn't they get any sort of incumbency advantage either?
186: Not sure of your point
Well it specifically was about my mood independent of the journalism. but, publishing a "here's a reminder of the enemies list" the day after rather than in the runup is certainly a choice.
Early thoughts on what will happen:
Mass deportation. A half-assed attempt at this similar to the "Wall." Business fascist will keep it to the margins.
Tariffs-- some half-assed stuff with subsidies to impacted groups (similar to the first term).
Ukraine -- no more aid
Israel -- Carte blanche, but effectively no different than now.
Abortion-- probably no national ban, but Comstock act or other restrictions on mail stuff. (not so sure about no national ban, however).
SC-- Thomas and Alito retire replaced by younger versions of themselves. (their egos may get in the way, however)
Public Health-- accelerated erosion on vaccines, women's helth etc. Will RFK Jr really get a meaningful role?
But what will happen to the price of eggs?
Not to mention the price of Chipotle burritos delivered by Uber.
Half of Americans are irredeemable morons.
In 2016 I had a lot of woulda coulda shoulda feelings. The EC is bullshit, the media was unfair, the result was an accident people just didn't think he'd win, and a better candidate or campaign would have easily won. If I'd had strong political leanings yet in 2000 that'd be similar.
By contrast for me this feels like 2004. The people just wanted the bad guy. That's what happens sometimes in a democracy. With the benefit of hindsight, Kerry was a great candidate who ran a great campaign, there wasn't anything the party could have done differently.
Am I wrong to think that red staters - the ones that vote GOP, which is obviously most of them - just do not care about anything beyond their new truck, house, barbecue grill & growth industry job?
I think that's a bit off the mark, yes.
The biggest concerns among Republican voters (in all states) were inflation (31% of Republican supporters said it was "the most important issue for voters" in October this year) and immigration (24%). After that it's "jobs and the economy" (11%) and "national security" (9%).
For Democrats it was inflation (16%), abortion (15%), jobs and the economy (14%), healthcare (12%) and climate change and the environment (12%).
For independents it was inflation (24%), jobs and the economy (11%) and healthcare (10%).
People hate inflation, what can I say?
But immigration also is a huge concern for Republicans specifically.
191.last: I'm going to wait a few days for my mood to stabilize before I do anything, but I think I need to start planning for a period of unemployment on those grounds.
I get it, I hate inflation. I got a one-time raise of 15% for promotion to full professor, that and the tenure raise are the only real raises we get, and inflation immediately ate the whole thing. The difference is that as a driftless cosmopolitan, I can see that inflation in the US was not as bad as in other countries.
191 is oddly optimistic. Where's the ritual cruelty? Where will they get their blood sacrifice?
Here is a similar poll with the percentage of each group who said an issue was "extremely important": https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx
Republican/Republican-leaning independent voters:
Economy 66
Immigration 63
Terrorism and national security 60
Crime 52
Taxes 46
Democratic/Democratic-leaning independent voters:
Democracy in the U.S. 58
Types of Supreme Court justices candidates would pick 57
Abortion 49
Healthcare 45
Education 40
The biggest thing that Democrats could do to win more elections is talk about immigration and crime in more conservative sounding ways. It's not even about policy, it's the vibes. Talk about how the bad immigrants are bad, but the good immigrants are good.
196, 197: Ah, issue polling !!
In other words, hateful morons.
This is unhelpful from me, but fuck it.
195: There were counties in PA where HRC did way better than Harris and somewhat better than Biden even. I don't know how you are supposed to win without being completely awful.
Several people have made the point that, electorally, high unemployment is much better than high inflation, because most people still have jobs when unemployment is 10%, but everyone sees prices go up when inflation's 10%.
189: I feel like making the negative case should have been enough. Trump literally attempted a coup. That should be both necessary and sufficient reason to vote for someone else! But apparently most Americans disagree.
I admit I find it hard to make the positive case, besides the general sense that "actually, the economy seems pretty OK" and "we're going in the wrong direction on abortion and Trump would continue that", because it feels like the last 4+ years have been too dominated by covid and stuff, for better or for worse. Inflation and crime might or might not be problems but to the extent that they are, it seems inseparable from the worldwide pandemic. The current administration reacted to historic circumstances in maybe inadequate ways that the previous and future administration would have been even worse about. Is this just being unwilling to take my own side in an argument, or is it just really hard to get a positive message from that?
195: Agreed. For the first time, with the caveat that it's not totally over yet, Trump apparently won the popular vote. We can wish that Biden had dropped out a few weeks or months later or not at all or supported Israel less, but America literally voted for the literal fascist.
199:191 is oddly optimistic. Where's the ritual cruelty? Where will they get their blood sacrifice?
Yeah, I know,. Good governance and rationality by the wayside with an increasing oligarchic control by the very rich and being part of an informal Axis of Evil strongmen. The silver lining in the cloud!
Blood sacrifices
On the margins of the immigration stuff there will be some real abuses.
Trans care and rights.
Women's health, particularly in red states.
Startling exit poll comment: https://x.com/NiallStanage/status/1854030085906456947
This exit poll data is wild: White men, white women, Black men, Black women, Latina women ALL tracking their 2020 numbers very closely.Latino men, 2020: Biden 59%, Trump 36%
Latino men, 2024: Harris 45%, Trump 53%A HUGE shift from D+23 to R+8
So who did Harris lose? She lost the Latinos.
198: Healthcare inflation and increasing the percentage paid by workers continues.
Tim switched companies and got a promotion since 2020 so we are doing better than we were. He also has very good health insurance.
The paycheck deductions from my employer for their plan are going up faster than our cost of living 2.5% raises. So, our nominal take-home pay is declining.
204: Yes. Inflation is a loser no doubt. Too bad there was this pandemic thing.
And it really is in part bad luck in many ways. But I also think there is just a massive will for a strongman daddy among very many. And not just the US of course.
205.3: I think supporting Israel more would have been the cynical, politically motivated move for Biden.
205: "later" should be "earlier." Ugh.
209: But I absolutely fucking challenge anyone who thinks the economic coverage of a Trump 2020-24 with the exact same economic track record has Biden had would not have been uniformly glowing for the last several years. (There would have been some heavily caveated negative coverage of inflation of course). Just the way it would have been.
For a mild example, see Reagan foist term vs. Carter.
I'm trying to stay off twitter and the parade of everyone having been proved fucking right about what this election is really about, and yet I guess I have a take? The fascists, proto-fascists, incipient fascists, and major league assholes we will always have with us. You either FDR them into quiescence, or they rise up. What it means to FDR them is up for debate, but I think we can keep it vague and still say something meaningful: people have to feel like their government cares about them and will take care of them.
Also, propaganda really works.
FDR became president after a huge crisis. That's what Obama did. Obama would still be president if it weren't for term limits, FDR didn't have term limits.
I am worried about how quickly we'll be back to pre-ACA healthcare shit. So much fun as a middle-aged family with a bunch of pre-existing conditions!
215: So, it could affect the preventive services stuff for you and me. MA has always had guaranteed issue and no pre-existing conditions.
213: My first reaction to that is to check Wikipedia to confirm my suspicion that FDR had Democratic majorities in Congress. (He did, the whole time, including supermajorities a lot of the time.) Whereas Democrats had narrow control of both houses during Biden's first two years and lost the House in the second two.
It might have been interesting to see what Biden/Harris would have done if they could have done more. Then again, that's a chicken-or-the-egg problem, and they technically had control in the first two years. But refighting the "Manchin: yay or nay" debate seems even less productive than offering my opinions to a reporter doing a "man on the street" segment, so I'm going to try to go do that now instead.
I'm fully convinced that our country voted for this bastard.
It's still terrifying that Russians threatened to bomb polling places.
what Biden/Harris would have done
I think I'm taking a longer view of Democratic strategy since...Carter, I guess.
In 2016 I had a lot of woulda coulda shoulda feelings. The EC is bullshit, the media was unfair, the result was an accident people just didn't think he'd win, and a better candidate or campaign would have easily won. If I'd had strong political leanings yet in 2000 that'd be similar.
By contrast for me this feels like 2004. The people just wanted the bad guy. That's what happens sometimes in a democracy. With the benefit of hindsight, Kerry was a great candidate who ran a great campaign, there wasn't anything the party could have done differently.
This is where I'm at too. The voters are too sexist, racist, and rotted out for the Dems to have done any better.
215: Ah yeah, I left out ACA. On this one I'm uncertain. Some kind of worsening administratively for sure, and maybe some kind of repeal/replace that can be heralded as a "fix." Pre-existing? I think depends on how much control the Thiel/Musk/Vance bloc has versus the pragmatists.
The intraparty dynamic in 221 applies to a lot of things of course. And finding out which is half the fun!
From 538 this morning, this is depressing
It is also likely that the drop in turnout disproportionately affected Democrats. While we can't be sure until we can review records of who actually voted (states will release those over the next few months), the drop-off in turnout is currently greater in the most Democratic counties across the battleground states. That is something that would uniquely hurt Harris; if you're a Democrat, then lower turnout in the suburbs is bad, of course, but not so bad as missing the mark in Philadelphia or Milwaukee, where you're relying on a lot of votes to carry you to victory.
On my commute this morning, I couldn't stand to listen to the news, but figured this is a good time to really intensely try to master Spanish. At least it feels like it might help me be more helpful.
God damnit. "It's the perceptions of the economy, stupid.". Trump's preferred policies will make inflation worse but maybe Vance (who is an eel, but smart) figures it out. I bet we have the best economy ever on January 21 though. Sigh
189: Harris was in a tough spot because she had to distinguish herself from Biden, but also had to run as the change candidate because of inflation. That's hard to manage. I thought it would be closer (I had her winning but losing Nevada) but this isn't an insane outcome.
216- going to be a lot of federal preemption of state regulations in the name of "regulatory freedom". I'm sure they've thought about making it illegal for states to require standards that businesses don't like.
226.2 and yet she refused to do so, when asked point blank if she'd have done anything differently she flat out said no. Awful campaign but I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference.
Just talked to my Brazilian gay coworker. He said that some Brazilians on Facebook are loudly proclaiming that they voted for Trump.
Re: the economy. What happens when it tanks under Trump?
If it was such an awful campaign how is her vote share running neck-and-neck with Casey's?
Harris 48.32, Casey 48.29. Trump is 1.5 points ahead of McCormick, but that's voters who like Trump and don't care about anything else. Harris running even with Casey is a big surprise, she did fine as a candidate relative to other dems.
229: yeah, I'm not arguing it was a good campaign, but it probably requires a much more talented politician to thread that needle.
For me my concern is state politics mostly which is surprisingly nearly the same as 2020 and maybe slightly better, in that the complete R loon lost in the primary and didn't make an impact in the general, and Harris did as well as Biden.
Abortion did better than Harris in all ten states. That makes me so furious somehow.
I will argue that it was a great fucking campaign. She did not make any missteps. This kind of hindsight micro-guessing lets the fucking racism, sexism, and depravity of the American voters completely off the hook.
I didn't read this thread, but I agree with 236, especially the last sentence. This wasn't because Harris messed up, or did a bad job. The American electorate chose Trump because we're a garbage people and we deserve a garbage president.
219: Can't argue with that.
227: Agreed.
231.last: breadlines, covered on the news in the chyrons at most.
235: American women are stupid too? Misogyny is motivating, but not as motivating as strongman-worshipping in and of itself? I don't know, that's not helpful, but lots of other things today aren't either.
I mean, he would have been whiter and maler, so maybe yes.
Trump ran the absolute fucking worst campaign in history and it didn't matter because there were too many scandals for any one to catch on and the media obscured how insane he was the last couple months. Debates don't matter- he probably had the worst performance in the history of televised debates. He got no criticism for chickening out of another. He swore like a drunken sailor, called his opponent a bitch, had half-assed outsourced GOTV, openly lied about his positions, had rambling poorly attended rallies, and it all made no difference (in terms of winning- maybe he runs up the score with a real campaign apparatus?)
I'm thinking less that and more that the Biden of "this is a big fucking deal" might have been a better advocate for his own successes. 2024 Biden is too old.
241: Again, see Casey who is very male and very white. Maybe 2012 Biden runs 1 point better, but that's about it.
08 Obama or 1996 Bill Clinton does better of course.
Does better because of who they are, or because the US in 1996, and even 2008, was less depraved than it is now?
245 is a better phrasing than what I was wrestling with. But yeah - racism has been fanned and become salient in a whole new way since 2008.
So, what happens officially to his conviction?
The American electorate chose Trump because we're a garbage people and we deserve a garbage president.
And so it came to pass.
247: If Merchan is feeling really ballsy, he sentences Trump to something, Trump appeals to the Supreme Court, they rule in his favor because they say so. (Jurisdiction? What?) I doubt Merchan will, though. No offense to the man, he seems to have done a pretty good job in unprecedented circumstances, but I'll bet he regrets postponing certain rulings and hearings until after the election.
As my guy put it, "Sorry Ukraine. But have you seen the price of Doritos?"
Disagree strongly with 236 but agree with 238
She was fantastic out of the gate but afterwards absolutely awful, courting Republicans Wtf? Dick Cheney? Sending Bill Clinton to Dearborn where he talked about Judea and Samaria? WTF were they thinking?
In the end though it seems none of that mattered.
Of course, the main psychological effect of this on me seems to be that I quit blocking out all my fears and worries about the EU's political present and future in one fell swoop, and get to reread recent threads about Germany and stumble through French media at leisure. Fuuuuuuuccckkkkk.
Going to be near the Ukrainian consulate in a few hours; I'm wondering if I should leave flowers or a candle or something.
Yeah, pivoting from "weird" to making nice with Republicans was a mistake. Those Nikki Haley voters never showed up.
227 link does just about sum it up.
Agreed.
She was fantastic out of the gate but afterwards absolutely awful, courting Republicans Wtf? Dick Cheney?
I don't know; I'm much closer to:
By contrast for me this feels like 2004. The people just wanted the bad guy. That's what happens sometimes in a democracy. With the benefit of hindsight, Kerry was a great candidate who ran a great campaign, there wasn't anything the party could have done differently.
I don't think the Harris campaign was perfect; you can always point to decisions that could have been made differently, but it was a serious, well-run campaign. It was focused on the correct swing states; they didn't have major gaffes or scandals -- you can point to examples of things that might be clunky to someone following the campaign, but hard to think of anything where they made a bad decisions which was the main story of the day (or week). Until I saw the turnout projections above I would have also said that Democrats did what they were supposed to -- navigated the Biden --> Harris transition well, rallied around her, gave time and money.
It felt like a more than good-enough effort on all parts.
Yeah, pivoting from "weird" to making nice with Republicans was a mistake.
But the whole point of "weird" was to try to divide the Republican coalition. If the vibe is, "these guys are weird, and every other Republican is also toxic" you lose the claim of, "there's a better, normal politics that we can choose to be part of."
If the vibe is, "these guys are weird, and every other Republican is also toxic" you lose the claim of, "there's a better, normal politics that we can choose to be part of."
The problem is that the first message is much stronger than the second, and they went with the second.
"Weird" was effective. It got under Trump's skin. It was meme-worthy. It would have been an effective counter-message to the anti-trans stuff. And instead it just..... went away.
251: What di's guy said. I could only afford to choke down one bag of Doritos while watching the returns...
"Weird" was effective. It got under Trump's skin. It was meme-worthy. It would have been an effective counter-message to the anti-trans stuff. And instead it just..... went away.
I claim no expertise in political messaging; but my read is that it had a half-life. It worked in part because it felt organic, and like a fresh message, and trying to just repeat that would feel forced. It was a great moment, but I don't think it could have been taken much farther than it was (and, if you wanted to see more of that message, it would have needed to be grass-roots rather than an official part of the campaign).
But could I swear that's correct, no.
I agree it has a half life, but it seems like it was abandoned, rather than tactically reprised from time to time. I know the consultant-types hated it, which is probably why.
I've only read the last few dozen comments, logged out of social media, but my thoughts:
- Harris did as good a campaign as anyone nominatable could have, and Trump did the worst campaign any human could have. Lol nothing matters (esp GOTV).
- Lesson that people really hate inflation and do lash out over it, even if it's not actually harming their standard of living. Evidence that it's inflation-as-vibe (damn this not-as-cheap fast food!): seniors, the ones on fixed incomes theoretically more vulnerable to inflation, swung +1 toward Harris, while younger people, whose incomes are in fact going up more than inflation, swung away. Will have to inform future Dem economic policy.
- No matter the structural factors we analyze, including voter suppression and media manipulation, those voting for Trump are not helpless pawns. It was so easy to find out how bad he is and how much bad he wants to do, more than in either of his prior runs! Voting for him required a level of conscious, culpable depravity, either actively wanting his promised atrocities or thinking him working toward them would be funny. It is in fact the electorate (at least as currently reduced) that is wrong, far more than anything Dems did.
- Hispanic/Latino voters are indeed swinging (men far more than women, but women some) partly all the evangelicalism and racism that has a home there, but I do think there's something to the critique that Dem discourse assumes they see themselves as socially vulnerable due to ethnicity more like how Black people do and that doesn't resonate with many of them - if, again, culpably, because they want to be on the top end of racial oppression. (Maybe this happened to some extent with young Black men too, but that wasn't crosstabbed in the exit polls. Black men as a whole did not swing from 2020.)
I looked at how California counties swung from 2020. R^2 between % Hispanic/Latino and swing toward Trump: 0.39.
- Can Biden declare war on Russia for attacks (bomb threats) on our soil?
I meant because they're generational political talents, while Biden and Harris are typical level.
I think 246 is wildly wildly wrong. The Americans as a whole, and the Republican Party specifically are *way* less racist than they were 20 or especially 30 years ago. In 1992 approval of interracial marriage was still below 50%! Today my Black Republican brother goes to biker bars in rural PA and has never had a problem. The Republican voter base is getting more diverse every year, and I big part of that is decreasing salience of racism as an issue for many minority voters who face significantly less racism (though far from zero!) than they did in the past.
Now Trump is more racist than a lot of previous Republican politicians for sure, but that's just that he's more in tune with normal voters than previous candidates who were more genteel. What's happen is that there's been a crank realignment where all the popular kooky stuff is on one side and all the nerdy stuff is on the other. And the Democratic Party has gotten more anti-racist, which is either somewhat unpopular or wildly unpopular with low education voters of all races.
There is a lot being read into people saying "the economy" was the reason they voted for Trump but I think the only reason that scores so high is that "the racism" wasn't an option. Saying you were mad about inflation didn't necessary mean you were mad about inflation, it meant that Trump was talking about inflation and people liked Trump so they said they were mad about inflation.
236 is correct and complete.
262.3: And even then, Trump is way less racist than the *racist* politicians like Thurmond or Helms in the 90s, it's just that they didn't get nominated.
"Weird" had an expiration date the same way everything does with Trump. Being pro-democracy, anti-fascism and anti-corruption are good messages that -- like "weird" -- are obvious political winners. But they failed because Trump ran on a platform of authoritarianism, corruption and weirdness.
Americans chose that because Trump liberates people from shame and responsibility. In Trump's world, you can be as stupid, venal, corrupt and bigoted as you want to be, and you don't have to be embarrassed about it.
The other thing to remember is that we've asked people to come a long way in a short time. When was it that the idea of gay marriage became mainstream? Google tells me that Massachusetts was the first state to legalize it -- 20 years ago. Obama as president didn't endorse it right away.
The same feeling that we all have right now -- the feeling of having our country taken away from us -- is what these people have been feeling for decades. Harris ran on the idea that we're not going back. I don't think it's her fault that she was wrong.
I feel some form of 266 must be right: the Trump GOP offer is complete release from having to care about anything (except having cheaper, better, bigger stuff, which they promise through economic magic).
And I can't in the end buy the inflation argument, or at least, there's something more going on. There's some research out there that connects US voters' assessment of 'the economy' with their political allegiance; if your tribe is in government, you'll think the economy is good, and if it's not, you won't. But how are those allegiances formed in the first place? It seems as though it'll be paradoxical to put that down to a party's 'economic offer'.
It's not a particularly well-formed idea of mine, but I'm tempted to say that internal migration has an outsize role here; it's not a feature of other countries, or at least, not so much of one. Internal migration opens up economic opportunities to Americans, and it must be a truism that it also severs community ties (family, but also things like union membership) that might provide some reinforcement of political values or at least some additional space to reflect on them. What's perhaps not so much acknowledged - to my eyes - is that internal migration is not painless either. It hurts to uproot yourself, or to be forced to uproot yourself through say, a job loss. Even if you end up with a well-paid job at the end of it. There's a trauma. And so there's a potential source of resentment there as well, looking for expression.
Anyway, I won't be one to say that fixing all this isn't a generation-spanning problem.
The main argument that it really is just the inflation is that incumbent parties are losing everywhere, regardless of ideology.
Lost years, at least a decade for decent young people, heartbreaking. Climate and infrastructure will be worse after any lurch back to sanity.
There's some research out there that connects US voters' assessment of 'the economy' with their political allegiance; if your tribe is in government, you'll think the economy is good, and if it's not, you won't.
This is the case now, but wasn't until pretty recently. And I think there was evidence that a sour outlook on the objectively amazing economy was coloring voters' preferences even excluding the Republicans speaking out of partisanship.
> The main argument that it really is just the inflation is that incumbent parties are losing everywhere, regardless of ideology.
Yeah, if we end up seeing even Black and Hispanic women move towards Trump and GOP relative to earlier elections, I think this has to be the answer. It's not an electorate whose marginal voter affirmatively wants more authoritarianism; it's a marginal voter who just doesn't care enough about it to make a difference. All that mattered was their feeling of post-pandemic malaise, led by pocket book issues.
I agree with those who said this feels a lot like 2004. Much more so than 2016, which in retrospect seems more like 2000. I'm exhausted and sad but not as despondent as in any of those years. There's always a backlash, and Trump still has all his flaws. He'll do a lot of damage, probably more than last time, but this isn't the end of anything.
Trump does really tap into something powerful and dark about the American psyche.
I suspect that most voters don't buy that Trump is going to be more authoritarian this time than last time. He was already president once, and if you weren't paying close attention what went wrong other than covid? I'm worried (but not totally sure) that they're wrong, but I think that's playing at least as big a role as apathy.
State-level results actually look pretty good here, just as they did in 2016, although we won't know final results for a while.
This outcome is overdetermined but I can't help but thinking if Harris really did run a great campaign with no missteps then we are well and truly fucked. What is to be learned from this? What can be changed going forward?
Oh really? That's good news, I thought I'd seen reports that Peltola was going to lose.
Hispanic/Latino voters are indeed swinging (men far more than women, but women some) partly all the evangelicalism and racism that has a home there, but I do think there's something to the critique that Dem discourse assumes they see themselves as socially vulnerable due to ethnicity more like how Black people do and that doesn't resonate with many of them - if, again, culpably, because they want to be on the top end of racial oppression.
This is in fact the usual trend for immigrant groups in American history, so it shouldn't really be a surprise. Dems especially need to understand this better.
I expect that the modal Trump voter will take more financial damage than I will.
Oh really? That's good news, I thought I'd seen reports that Peltola was going to lose.
She's trailing in early returns but a lot of the rural precincts haven't reported yet. It'll probably go to ranked-choice tabulation on 11/20 so we won't know for a while, and she may well lose in the end, but it's definitely going to be close.
Otherwise, state legislative races look pretty good and we may get a Dem-led majority in the House. The bipartisan majority in the Senate looks safe. The minimum wage ballot measure passed easily. The one about whether to get rid of ranked-choice is currently trailing but it's very close and there's still plenty of votes to count.
278: I think the main thing to learn is that in a democracy parties will typically alternate power, because the economy is a huge factor on voting and largely out of anyone's control. What we need to somehow do is get to a place where the Republican party is less insane, so it's less of a disaster when they win (which they will, at least one in every three elections). One day Trump will die, which will help a lot. One day Murdoch will die, which may help a lot. Probably more Dems in red states should register Republican and vote in primaries. The Democratic party should do more to fight education polarization, such as embracing more conspiracy theories and doing more hippy-punching, because education polarization leads to a very stupid Republican party.
if we end up seeing even Black and Hispanic women move towards Trump and GOP relative to earlier elections
No and yes respectively, going by the CNN exit poll, and we probably won't have better for some time. Black women went from +81 Biden in 2020 to +85 Harris in 2024, and all that could be in MOE. Latinas, +39 to +24.
I haven't seen discussed much how the trend was what our gut said... for white people. White women from +11 to +5 Trump. White men +23 to +20.
274: I'm way more despondent than I was in 2004. In 2000 I was dumb enough to want to believe that the Republican justices believed themselves to be acting in good faith. Now, the obvious fascism is so much worse. The immunity decision really brought that home.
I've been maintaining various levels of horrified disbelief since 2000 -- I keep thinking the bad times are over, and things will be normal again, and I keep on being wrong. I don't even know what I mean by "normal".
The arc of the moral universe keeps regressing to the mean
Apt from Twitter re: Jeff Bezos' cringeworthy tweet:
Mark Elliott
@markmobility
WaPo's endorsement finally drops.
Jeff Bezos
@JeffBezos
Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
I think 246 is wildly wildly wrong. The Americans as a whole, and the Republican Party specifically are *way* less racist than they were 20 or especially 30 years ago. In 1992 approval of interracial marriage was still below 50%!
Racism takes different forms over time. We historically had the ideal "if you're white you're right" with carefully policed boundaries between the race lines. But plenty of other places work more like "if you're whiter you're righter", brown people aspire to marry their kids into whiteness, skin bleaching, that kind of thing, and I think we're transitioning to that. Many older manifestations of racism are going the way of the dinosaur, sure. But if your definition of racism doesn't include materially supporting what as promised would be the biggest act of ethnic cleansing in US history - supported by many people of the same ethnicity because they'd like to feel closer to the top - then it's decreasingly useful.
Like to feel closer to the top, need someone to be under their boot, all that (waves hands).
We've got two sorts of answers emerging. One sort of answer is: it's about money, and voters mostly look past Trump's defects. The other sort of answer says that the defects - the 'performative arseholeism' - are an appealing extra feature for a good chunk of voters.
It worked for the Tories for multiple GEs, and only stopped (for now) because enough of their votes moved even further right for a change.
Both 262 and 289 seem obviously correct to me, which is a problem because they contradict each other.
I do wonder about the deportation. Not because I think organizing to stop it is going to be effective. But if people don't like inflation, removing a nontrivial portion of the labor force is probably bad for the people who do it.
It's a big country. It contains (racist) multitudes.
This outcome is overdetermined but I can't help but thinking if Harris really did run a great campaign with no missteps then we are well and truly fucked.
I mean, this is where I'm landing.
I've been maintaining various levels of horrified disbelief since 2000 -- I keep thinking the bad times are over, and things will be normal again, and I keep on being wrong. I don't even know what I mean by "normal".
Oooh! oooh! Do I get to apply my theory about people imprinting when they're 25-30 years old here?
289:
I sort of feel it's the other way around: if racism is just a name for working to position oneself and/or protect one's position at the top of a group status hierarchy, it ceases to be a useful analytic category.
Under this view, an increasing number of Hispanics, regardless of skin color, voted to ethnically cleanse other Hispanics because they increasingly identify with white group interests (unlike those other recent immigrants, regardless of skin color, who are not aligned with white group interests). But then decreasing numbers of educated white people are voting for this ethnic cleansing because ....?
It feels just easier to say that cosmopolitanism has become education-coded.
The state Division of Elections has a nice map widget that shows results so far. Setting it to show precincts really shows why Peltola is far from out of it.
294: I intended to subsume the limitedly-correct observations of 262 into my accounting-for-more 289.
269: My theory is that inflation is particularly noticeable, and that wages haven't kept up for the middle quintiles, and they're noisier, politically. Inflation pretty much ate my promotion. Food got more expensive (but lost in the noise of children eating more), we can't move into a bigger house that we could have easily afforded in 2019, our cars are old and there weren't cars to buy, and all of my little luxuries and hobbies became more expensive. I can read that the economy is better and I think the soft landing was amazing. But I don't see it, and I'm looking.
regardless of skin color
That's the thing, I don't think it's regardless of skin color. The paper bag test doesn't work, even if you move the brownness cutoff down, but I think it correlates a lot - to put it crudely, white vs. non-white Hispanics, obviously far more complex than that. Call it colorism if you want, but it's still hierarchy built around whiteness.
Interesting point that Trump dudn't really get more votes than before. It's just that she got fewer.
304: Let's check back in on that when all the votes are counted. California in particular is quite slow.
Glad I have the distraction of worrying whether I or my parents will have to flee a wildfire today. So far no immediate danger to us but one border of the evacuation zone isn't too far away and the inside of my apartment already smells like smoke. It's been about 3 hours since we got an alert that the fire had started.
306: That's really great that it's happening while we still have a president who would send disaster assistance to those in need.
305: Yes, probably ~8 million to be counted in California alone, and at least a million in new York, so nationwide assessments of turnout and margin are premature.
Right now 16 million less votes than 2016 final.
At some point ai would hope that we cou'd have a thread about small acts of resistance we can take. For example, there is a Trans man at my church, and I think it's extra important that we have public about support for those individuals.
Well, they're already dropping all of the Federal charges. They should wait until the Inauguration for that.
A perspective that I think is getting lost is how the shift was not *that* big. In the end Harris will be closer than Trump was in terms of popular vote and similarly close to turning the EC.
I don't think she will catch him in popular vote (may be close, and nice if she did) but it will tighten--see numbers in 308. Need to wait on that to gauge overall vote shift.
In the fucking "Blue Wall" (MI,WI,PA) - right now* Trump is collectively up ~241K while Biden took them by ~356K (I think he also needed one of NV, AZ or GA to get home). Turnouts in the three states are roughly similar to 2020 and that shift would amount to about 300K voters changing their vote in a voting population of ~14.6M.
So in those three states, we would have these results if about 1 person in 50 flipped from Biden to Trump.
Basically the same electorate in 2016/20/24. Some changes on the margin. Some pretty significant differences in circumstances of course.
*I believe most votes are in. PA has some more mail to come in so it will tighten a bit. (They really have better mail counting now than in 2020).
There were not nearly as many local canvassers here as in 2020.
And apparently Germany is going to get early elections. I've not really been paying attention to local things, but it looks like the right-most of the three coalition parties acted out to such an extent that Scholz had had enough and fired the finance minister. New elections likeliest in March. Whee.
306: That's really great that it's happening while we still have a president who would send disaster assistance to those in need.
That thought crossed my mind too. Every smoke plume has a silver* lining!
*The sky is orange in the direction of the fire but I'm trying not to see that as symbolic.
Looked at the precinct i usually work at and it actually shifted a few points toward Dems from 2020. So if I had worked this year and came home and quarantined (as I did last night) I would have felt somewhat positive. It is mostly white working class suburb, but has been in the midst of a big demographic change with young families replacing older folks. So probably a bit misleading just on that front.
The bigger, deeper concern that I have this year compared to '04 and '16 is the degree to which any outward appearance of truth/rationality by Trump and Rs has gone completely out the wind. All part of our completely warped information space.
I have no idea what specifically this will lead to but my read of history is that it will be nothing good. So a massive sense of urgent yet vague unease.
Let me make a prediction I will stand by 100%--this will be treated in the "discourse" as much more decisive Trump win over Harris than Biden's was over Trump.
So... how is everyone coping? Yes social media? No social media?
Where is the fucking puppy video thread?
318: I'm gray rocking the world, largely.
At the Texas State campus today, assholes showed up with giant signs - the kind that's a scroll with bars at the top and bottom, held up on a pole - reading:
- Women are property
- Homo sex is sin
- Types of property: Women, slaves, animals, cars, land, etc...
- Romans Chapter One reads your sin of sodomy is "worthy of death' Romans [something blocked in photo]
Those are the signs that I'm seeing in photos. From the photos, the scene looks like chaos. There are also peace/love/etc counterprotest signs, but they're 2'x2' hand held, not 6'x 3' massive signs.
You'd think the university would shut this down pretty fast, but who can say.
318: I've mostly been avoiding Twitter (took it off the shortcuts on my browser) and using Bluesky for social media. Doing less of that than usual too. Also, working.
My work is busy enough these days that I don't have endless hours to doomscroll, so that's a plus at a time like this.
The German government just collapsed. I'm sure that will turn out fine.
I did better than last time at going long stretches without social media, but at 3:40am I got up to pee and Google pushed "Election result called" to me. Fuckers.
This morning I logged off of Bluesky on phone and laptop both. Turns out that didn't stop Bluesky push notifications, though I'm sure I could go into the settings for that.
In retrospect I was way too taken in by the Bluesky circle that was basically poll-unskewers like from 2012.
I took Bluesky off my phone about a month ago. I still open it on the laptop, but rarely.
317: agree, and it's not a huge swing from D to R all in all. Given that such huge powers change hands on such slender margins, the norm violations really need to stop; they destroy tranquility and security to the extent that they represent a form of violence.
It's the norm violations that enable the wins.
No twitter, no facebook. Yes reddit, but there's no politics on my reddit, I've been learning about watches. Very occasional instagram.
Also had a very busy day with a major work crisis.
With Trump constitutionally ineligible, when Biden steps down the transfer of power will be broken.
What if Harris just doesn't certify it?
I really don't think "racism" is a meaningful lens for stuff like "Mexican-Americans think they're better than Mexican-Mexicans." It's certainly some kind of prejudice, and definitely some kind of xenophobia, but it's not racism. I also don't think it's a meaningful lens for stuff like "the main employer of Tejanos is popular with Tejanos." I also don't think anti-Islam sentiment is mostly about racism either (though they certainly overlap!), see [gestures wildly at India]. I'm not saying it's good, but I just don't think it has much in common with classical Jim Crow or trail-of-tears racism, and I don't think working class POC in the US see these as part of the same story.
Or said otherwise to 289, I think you're to some extent confusing access to whiteness with access to Americanness. Not that colorism isn't a problem, but the prestige of being American may be more important.
334: Oh absolutely! Opinions on more traditional gender dynamics drive much of this.
275: I keep being involuntarily drawn back to Hunter Thompson's descriptions of Nixon:
"It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close..."
Or this:
This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it -- that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?
Or this:
" 'Ominous' is not quite the right word for a situation where one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Martin Bormann. How long will it be before the 'demented extremists' in Germany, or maybe Japan, start calling us a Nation of Pigs? How would Nixon react? 'No comment'? And how would the popularity polls react if he just came right out and admitted it?..."
We've got two sorts of answers emerging. One sort of answer is: it's about money, and voters mostly look past Trump's defects. The other sort of answer says that the defects - the 'performative arseholeism' - are an appealing extra feature for a good chunk of voters.
But these are both the same concern, at root: We want to be able to make stuff up.
Fuck all those smarty-pants people who tell us that inflation was caused by the pandemic and is now entirely under control; that the economy is historically great; and that we need to treat Haitians with basic human respect.
This isn't two sides of a coin. It's a one-sided coin! *
*That's not a bad analogy. That's a bad metaphor.
I just don't think it has much in common with classical Jim Crow or trail-of-tears racism, and I don't think working class POC in the US see these as part of the same story.
I don't disagree on this, but I'm not sure when "connected in a clear line to classical 19th/20th century US racism" was added to the goalposts.
Fair enough, but isn't that a lot of the point of "racism" as a concept? The connection to traditional white supremacy? Otherwise it's just sparkling prejudice.
Im just saying if anyone is wondering whether an order is legal, or even an order, we can all read the constitution, we all know what he did.
I think I started this whole side quest with the comment: But yeah - racism has been fanned and become salient in a whole new way since 2008.
What I mean is that pre-2008, racism had settled into a comfortable (for white people) invisibility. There was a sense of homeostasis. Some people thought racism was over and others different, but no one thought it was changing much over the past decade, say. It wasn't a dominant conversation topic because it wasn't that salient to white people, and it wasn't changing one way or the other much for people of color.
Whereas since the reactions to Obama got going, it's been a major fucking topic, and emotions are way more sensitized to race than they used to be. It's not the same landscape.
My read, which may well be wrong, is that emotions among highly educated white people are way more sensitized to race than they used to be, and otherwise not so much.
340: I guess some people see it that way. But if it only identifies the racism of one country, it's a bit underpowered as a concept imo.
Oh, certainly agree with that.
But I think that anti-immigrant sentiment among American Latinos was not driven by colorism, but I don't know much about it so I could easily be wrong.
(Ignoring Cubans at least.)
Ignoring Cubans is a very subtle form of racism.
I read that as a suitable form of racism.
I can't help but thinking if Harris really did run a great campaign with no missteps then we are well and truly fucked. What is to be learned from this? What can be changed going forward?
I keep struggling with this. It was interesting to watch/listen to the podcast with Saiselgy & Brian Beutler: https://www.offmessage.net/p/uh-oh
Saiselgy has a clear answer to your question (essentially that Democrats need to be more moderate and less critical about disagreements) and Brian Beutler just looks shell-shocked. I feel like just seeing the expression on his face speaks to me.
(I think Saiselgy is partially correct, but I don't know that I have any clarity about which part at the moment).
I mean, the 18th Brumaire, bitches.
Most charitably, people are upset with the general enshittification of everything and the increasing concentration of wealth/capital in the hands of a few wealthy corporations and individuals. The problem is most people are idiot morons (or more charitably, poorly educated) and just lash out indiscriminately at "the authorities." I'm not optimistic this is going to change without WW2 levels of violence.
The Right wing has been playing a long game by undermining public education for 30+ years and is reaping the rewards. Now they're pushing evangelical homeschooling so uneducated brainwashed fascist idiots can make sure their children are never exposed to critical thinking.
Harris noticed how much the crowd responded to her talking about the housing crisis, but the Democrats have little collective record on it. Red states are "better" because they keep sprawling out. Fixing this, getting to infill-based abundance, seems critical. Not just so people can live where they want, but to solve the problem of population draining from blue to red states, which affects both presidential and Congressional outcomes.
From 1992 to 2024, California and New York went from 87 electoral votes put together to 82. Texas and Florida went from 57 to 70!
undermining public education for 30+ years
I honestly wonder the "guns vs. schools" mindset I mentioned in the other thread is also part of why so many U.S. voters seem to feel a pretty obvious aversion to these Democratic female candidates: they remind them of the teachers whose authority they were never given any real reason to respect. You know, those teachers were mostly fine, just definitionally, structurally uncool dead-enders who didn't understand why profit would motivate anyone. This is a figure that virtually everyone in the U.S. encounters early in life, and they get the thinly veiled ambient contempt pretty early too. So Americans by the hundreds of thousands (at least) recoil at the thought of a teacher-in-chief.
I'm really struggling to describe the depth of my alienation from this place.
353: I can not imagine how viscerally terrifying this is for you and yours, lurid.
But I ask Moby's question too.
Oh ha, I meant America -- I've been commenting a lot in the past 48 hours! And thanks for the concern... we continue to be very fortunate compared to the vast majority of trans people in this country, and Elke is exuberantly cisgender, but seeing the US take even this many steps down the road to Russia is pretty sobering.
I'm not on social media so I don't know, but I can't fucking imagine what M. Gessen is feeling right now -- speaking of people who are fortunate in many ways but also in genuine danger from multiple sides. It's awful. (If you didn't catch this, earlier this year they were sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison for discussing the Bucha massacre with a Russian journalist. Just imagine seeing your employer's exultant front page right now under those circumstances. What. the. fuck.)
Word of the day is 'recrudescence' (17th century): the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.
(via someone on bluesky)
I've been using that word forever without knowing that it was specifically the return of something terrible. Thank you. (In my defense -- when am I not talking about terrible things?)
I am actually not finding definitions which specifically refer to "terrible" so that might be a gloss by the Bluesky user.
However, pretty close; it seems to come from Latin "to become raw again" as in a wound and Merriam Webster has:
In its literal, medical sense, recrudescence refers to a renewed outbreak of a disease. In extended use, it most often describes the return of an undesirable condition, such as a war or a plague, or the return of an undesirable idea.
I've been dipping into social until i get repelled. Should use this to get off twitter finally, but still a few numbers folks I only find there.
The media has mostly been as bad as you might expect. They will not learn to hold their national takes* until the votes are actually all counted, plus other atrocities. But for the most part it is even too depressing for even me to wade through.**
But the NYT in their excellence managed to come up with what may be the topper. (By the same guy wrote a completely decency-washed profile of Moms for Liberty--oh, and look another former Maureen Dowd assistant.) Indulge me as I post several grafs from what is presented as a straight news story:
But there is no doubt about one thing: Mr. Trump was a ferociously effective campaigner. To watch him up close on this third run for president was to see him blend comedy, fury, optimism, darkness and cynicism like never before. He was an expert communicator, able to transmute legal and mortal peril to build upon his self mythology. He won new supporters and kept old ones in thrall.
He began communicating in new ways. On social media, he posted images of St. Michael the Archangel battling demons. He talked a lot about blood, and made curiously pious gestures, like when he slowly bent his head onstage at the Republican convention to kiss the helmet of a volunteer firefighter who had been killed in Butler. Religious scholars and experts in Christian martyrdom told me they were surprised at the newly sophisticated ways in which Mr. Trump was deploying Christian iconography. He had come a long way from writing "HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY TO ALL!" on social media in 2020 and talking about "Two Corinthians" a few years before that.
*Reminder, caution on turnout or national margin takes until those things are actually known.
**I have a dilemma in that I just launched my media criticism site and to really do i I need subscriptions. Wife already cancelled WaPo. Maybe time to just quietly walk awy.
Who has four fingers and a thumb and is up in the middle of the night? Sigh.
363 that's unbelievable, they were clearly not watching the same Trump campaign we all were.
364 take good care, Stormcrow
I have a long sometimes boring podcast that I am listening too. Unfortunately it is probably going to lead to Cream, The Band, and Aretha Franklin being permanent associated with negative emotions.
(So yes, the 500 songs guy. But this is going to be like George RR Martin and Game of thrones; I don't think he is going to make it to 500. Episodes getting longer and longer--up to 3 or 4 hours; he now makes them multi-part.)
I just posted a thread on Bluesky outlining my various research and writing projects. It's under my real name so not linking here, but if you know it it should be easy to find. If not feel free to contact me via my blog's contact form.
Matt Stoller out here revealing himself as well, Matt Stoller:
The dirty secret of Kamala Harris is that she's extremely dumb,. That wasn't fixable.
Harris is self-evidently a stupid human being. Dem and media elites got behind her anyway.
367: Do you promise to make them long and boring?
OK, so I think traditional Political polling is pretty much over. (Political issue polling is basically gamed misinformation at this point and has been for years*.)
Results like Selzer (long string of hits and then a 17% miss!**) and that Harris ~28 New Hampshire poll demonstrate what was clearly response bias uncorrected for prior votes can lead to.
But the "corrected" pols are mostly just showing the pollsters models of the electorate (whether based on recalled votes or other types of adjustment) and not really any new information from the response themselves. The national and swing state polls will not be that far off in the end, but they will have gotten there more through models than much in the responses.
We'll see.
*Makes me not really that interested in voters concerns polls and the like. Economy in particular. utterly gamed, by both sides, but Rs far more than Ds.
FT with an analysis that I sort of knew during the election but ignored in my provincialism.
Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened.
The chart is a great visualization; the article itself less interesting to me.
The thought occurs that "he tried to seize power in a coup and failed" is not always fatal to your subsequent electoral prospects in other American countries - Chavez in Venezuela, Humala in Peru, etc. So maybe this is the year that Israel turns into a normal Middle Eastern country (incredibly corrupt leader, likes bombing civilians) and the US turns into a normal American country. Also explained why Latinos were the only group to respond to January 6 by increasing their support for Trump.
I for one am enjoying the Up All Night With JP Stormcrow Show, with his various guests.
"OK, so I think traditional Political polling is pretty much over."
Watching election results come in, I had the opposite conclusion. I admit I didn't read any of the widely shared critiques of polling, and during the campaign I kind of figured that 1% response rates made everything kind of useless, and I admit I put some small hope in what was probably "unskewing/hopium" by people on my side. But my simplistic take was that the published polls all seemed to be saying over and over, essentially "coin flip but not looking particularly great for Harris," and "popular vote lead for Harris but not enough to overcome EC tilt to Republicans." Mentally I also added in a bit of Trump boost from people who waited until in the booth to let their Trump flag fly, as has happened before (but nobody seemed to be talking about this time). And the results ended up being just what the polls had me worried about. Harris wasn't enough ahead in the popular vote (maybe behind in the end, we'll see). Results were very consistent with the polling - close but Harris wasn't ahead enough.
All my life my habit is to edit my writing just enough to ensure I end up with two nearly identical sentences in the final copy by accident. Sheesh.
374: Yes, I see that. Just that looking hat how they arrived at those results was basically applying their priors and models to scant data. And those turned out to capture things pretty well.
376 strikes me as right. It's what Imre Lakatos called a degenerating research program. They are making a bunch of adjustments so that their main theory (the application of probabilistic statistical methods to polling data) holds up and matches the expected results. They aren't using their their theory to make predictions.
I was just going to post the linked item in 371 -- "Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened." -- as a counter to
I can't help but thinking if Harris really did run a great campaign with no missteps then we are well and truly fucked. What is to be learned from this? What can be changed going forward?
The FT's chart goes back to 1948, and the article says the research reaches back to a date in the 1800s that I've now forgotten and is behind the paywall.
Of the seven countries in question this year, the Democrats lost the second-least amont of votes. Further to the point, losses were less in the states where the Harris/Walz campaign was most active. Sometimes you're the Louisville slugger, sometimes you're the ball you're just swimming against a very strong tide.
And we did some good things! The "black Nazi" guy did not get elected governor of North Carolina, nor did the woman whose kids never attended public schools get elected Superintendant of Education in NC. The Dems reduced the Republican majority in the NC legislature that the governor's vetoes will hold.
The Wisconsin Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in that state's House. That was made possible by a 2023 win in a state Supreme Court election, which led to positive rulings against gerrymandering.
One of the Vindman brothers, whose whistleblowing exposed Trump's attempts to extort Ukraine, has been elected to Congress. Harris/Walz campaigning in swing states probably saved more than one Senate seat for the Democrats.
This was a very good campaign running against massive global headwinds.
377: Election epicycles.
Yes. But I can't think of an obviously better way.
You can't really compensate for biased data with more data. You just get smaller error bars on the wrong estimate.
Anyone have a workaround to that paywalled FT chart?
Get a job, hippie! (I have also been unwilling to shell out for FT; I'm not sure why.)
382: I first got to it via twitter, so I guess it was some sort of gift link, but I have long since lost the particular tweet. Sorry to be less than helpful!
383: Because even the FT's intended audience gets their employers to pay for the subscription?
Hmm, I'm paywalled now as well. When i first clicked though I could see it and assumed it was some kind of gift link. Or maybe a time thing (or just an oversight that got corrected?)
I just looked and it is expensive. Maybe I'll just kick in enough to The Guardian that I count as a subscriber? I need to replace the WP, but I'm not paying $40/month.
Here's a link to a tweet that shows the FT chart.
https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1854485866548195735
I saved as pdf initially, let me see , try this
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j98jgNQuf-ab7loP2IMFFOPWJkZXjc37/view?usp=drivesdk
Also the link from this tweet went through the paywall, at least the first time:
https://x.com/RonBrownstein/status/1854496031846600818
San Francisco has also chosen a billionaire heir as the Anti-Establishment candidate.
(Probably. That election's not called yet.)
Rs look to be on track for a very narrow House majority. Some hope that CA mail ballots could tip it enough there for maybe a 1-seat D majority, I think.
I thought the word "subaltern" would be useful here because I thought it referenced colonized populations that were given limited power over others to reinforce the system. But apparently Gramsci used it meaning the people on the bottom / as fully excluded? Partly as code to evade prison censorship? Seems a waste given the word meant a junior officer and the partially-elevated group is such a common concept in colonial studies.
Rs look to be on track for a very narrow House majority. Some hope that CA mail ballots could tip it enough there for maybe a 1-seat D majority, I think.
Watching a teeny R majority in the House try to pass a tax bill may be hilarious, depending on whether there are still a handful of Rs who are the right combination of crazy and principled to blow up their colleagues' More Money for Billionaires Tax Cuts and Fuck You Act of 2025.
I mean just speaker elections may already be hilarious, judging by last time.
Every Trump voter that votes inflation should be reminded at every oncoming calamity that that was the worst fucking thing they could think of to say about Biden.
Why is the house close? Enough people voted only for Trump and ignored downballot completely? Or is the presidential PV margin going to be very small once CA finishes reporting?
398: Starting with the inflation that will be kicked off by Trump's tariffs.
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Is it just me? Today, without any obvious explanation, I have been just in a terrific good mood. All day. Genial, generous, content, seeing good in all my students and adjacent humans. This is 99th percentile good feelings for me easily. The only explanation I can think of is that after months of dread and tension, and a mostly sleepless night Tuesday that turned out bad, now that particular uncertainty is over. To some extent, we've been here before (I know, different this time around but I'm definitely feeling like this is the second running). Anyway, that's my very surprising experience today. With extra love, chill.
|>
I feel less awful today than yesterday, I suppose. I feel like I'm going to have to spend some more time on my own personal happiness and cultivate some Slavic stoicism on at least some things. Spent some more time on the dating apps.
My dad, who died earlier this year, often sang "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries" as advocating a goofy-but-stoic outlook. I'm listening to it but it's bringing a lot of feelings up.
I'm feeling better than yesterday, but not good.
I'm really struggling to keep it together today. I really need to quit this position I'm in (ostensibly I'm approaching 1.5 years through a 3 year stint, but I think I'm only going to make it to 2). I just can't deal with the chaoticness of how our university is functioning these days.
Still breathing on manual here, but a little better.
I realized after typing 402 that if relief is part of my odd giddiness that it's not shared by people who to whom the election has more direct and dire consequences, and I apologize for not really taking that into account when I posted.
At the state level, we did win the Alaska House and retained the Senate. Still too early to say about Peltola or RCV.
That's actually better than 2016, when we won the House but not the Senate.
402 and 403: Yesterday, I couldn't function and lay on the floor in a stupor listening to Boston Public Radio.
I feel the opposite of Minivet. Self-care is important but we need to figure out ways to fight.
I feel better than yesterday but still terrible.
I'm at the bar, because I grew up before healthy coping was invented.
I'm going to drink until my nose feels fuzzy and then do home.
I'm proud to be an American...
Or at least I used to be.
But I won't forget the coup they tried
in Washington, D.C.
And I know you're fed up
just like me.
I don't know what to say.
Ain't no doubt shit's getting bad
here in the U.S.A.