Good analysis:
“Ppl like her because she’s real. Ppl perceive Trump as real too. Dems need to do a better job of just being real with ppl. Coming on social media and chatting with ppl, etc.”
That’s why people liked Bernie too.
AOC is real.
But DJT is the most fictional character who’s ever existed. Nothing he’s ever said, done, or been has been true.
Sadly, we’re stuck in the reality that allows his falsehoods to affect real humans.
Well, like the quoted person said:
Ppl perceive Trump as real too.
Now, I have no idea how anyone could possibly think that, unless they only get Trump sanewashed by their favorite news outlet.
You vastly, vastly overestimate the intelligence of the average person/voter.
Most Americans read and write at a 6th or 7th grade level.
Most Americans have never had critical thinking as part of their educational curricula. If you’re very lucky you’ll cover critical thinking skills as part of AP English in highschool, otherwise that’s a second semester course your freshman year of college. Most Americans can’t look at a particular piece of media and unpack what it’s saying and why it’s saying it. Americans are ridiculously easy to manipulate as a result.
Tbf most schools don’t. Mine in the UK didn’t either. Critical thinking isn’t something a curriculum can teach you, it’s something you need to pick up yourself and adapt from all the other things you’re taught. School can definitely help you develop those skills tho although I think this is just another reflection of how badly the US invests in education. That and the rampant misinformation and propaganda all over the place that seems to teach people to only trust what reaffirms their own beliefs. Society is f*cked until we actually take a long hard look at where we are, why, and where we should be.
Critical thinking isn’t something a curriculum can teach you
That’s just not true. Yes, you can pick it up yourself but this is not an unteachable concept.
Well that may be a good excuse if you’re failing your critical thinking class. I had one in college and it was great.
Critical thinking isn’t something a curriculum can teach you
No.
We need a standard high school class that is some kind of intro to epistemology, how to study something scientifically, how to root out bias, and maybe even a little on logical fallacies.
How many high school grads are even aware of the concept of confirmation bias?
I fear we as a collective society are just so, so bad about knowing how to find the correct answer to something. Despite all the technology at our fingertips, so many people learn things the same way humans have for centuries: somebody I trust told me!
Which fucking sucks…Empathy is an AP course.
Extending your line of thinking: knowing the average person’s intelligence, understand that there are 4 billion people more stupid.
At what percentile do we get to a person who is not an utter imbecile?
Final question: how do I hit the reset button on humanity? I think we’re using the wrong build.
Ahh now you’re thinking like Thanos. Or maybe Ultron.
Humanity is a species of upright locusts that never socially evolved beyond our cave brains. Capitalism dangles a shiny new thing every so often to keep the masses distracted and intellectually diffuse, while a small cabal of insanely wealthy cretins gleefully destroys our planet.
Ahh now you’re thinking like Thanos. Or maybe Ultron.
Always have been. This sad observation has been a part of my life’s lamentations for as long as I can remember.
It’s the power of propaganda. The dems just need to start sending out mailers that scare voters like the republicans do. Shouldn’t be difficult. All they have to do is send everyone a copy of project 2025 a page at a time. They also need to hire a social media team that astroturfs and gets the talking points out.
It doesn’t work, they ran plenty of ads on P2025 and people responded that “Trump won’t really do that, Dems are just trying to scare us.”
I wonder if we listen to Trump more than they do. I have a hard time believing people can listen to him speak and come out with ideas like “he’s real”, “telling it like it is”, “he’ll do better with the economy”. Ok, maybe the last one because people are dumb
People here always talk about conservatives getting their news from Facebook or Fox.
But the connection I didn’t make until way too recently…… maybe they don’t know any politics firsthand. My Facebook tells me Trump is “telling it like it is”, so I don’t need to listen to him
Nah, DJT is real AF.
He said he’s gonna round up 20+ Million immigrants, I believe it. He says he’s gonna send the military after the enemy within, like Pelosi and Schiff, I believe it. He says don’t worry, no one’s ever going to need to vote again, to keep him in power, I definitely believe it.
He’s gonna try, I doubt he can convince the military to do anything to high ranking democratic officials.
Maybe if a “lower ranking” democratic congressperson like AOC do a BLM protest in Washington D.C, she might get harassed by the capitol police, but they’ll be fine. I doubt she’ll get shot.
The average civillian, however, if you still have any yard signs indicating that you support any democratic candidates, you might wanna take those down, because you might randonly get investigated for whatever trumped-up (pun intended) charges they invent. Or get a no-knock raid and ends with buller holes in your skull.
If you look “Mexican” to them, you could get deported if you don’t have your papers with you, even if you are legal, or even a citizen. (Might wanna look into getting a fireproof safe to store those documents, also keep photo backups of any documents that prove that you are here legally)
It’ll be border patrol, the same goons he used to break up protests
It’s easy for a serial liar to sound “real” when they are lying. That’s what they’re good at.
When you at least attempt to keep to the truth, it limits how appealing your sales pitch is.
He does not use politics speak. That’s all.
But you’re right, it’s a very good distinction.
AOC is real.
A real union buster
Whoever was running Harris campaign needs to be barred from being in charge of any political campaign ever again; talk about legendary levels of mismanagement.
They had the golden opportunity to lean into the ‘weird’ meme and hammer Trump/Vance on that issue - but decided against it because it was what, ‘demeaning’?
The Dems need a firebrand, with a truely populist message and policies; rather than just lip service.
The dumbfucks who stayed home chose not to have elections again.
Oh I thought it was the dumbfucks in the Democrat party who chose to run a shit campaign and marginalised their voters into not showing up while they focused on getting lobbying money and chasing right wingers fault 🤷
Both things can be true at the same time; the world isn’t black and white - but various shades of grey.
The Harris campaign was awfully milquetoast, but people’s indifference also played a major role.
Don’t run a campaign that inspires indifference then.
Yes, but that doesn’t give a false sense of political superiority to people on the Internet
Implicitly. But if you look at the responses given in the article, I do not believe these people knew what they were choosing implicitly.
So many of them seem to be rejecting the government as it is, and stupid as it may be, Trump republicans are the only ones filling that void.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet were movements created to drag the parties into areas where they’d rebel against what voters perceived as a ruination of the country.
One of them got their party switched out for heroes of their movement, the other was arrested en masse.
This is all you need to know
I mean besides that fact that the former thought black people where ruining the country and the latter blamed the fact that no one can fucking afford food or housing.
Whoever was running Harris campaign needs to be barred from being in charge of any political campaign ever again;
For whatever reason, when I’m hearing about Dems in the swing state I’m in, I’m hardly ever hearing why you should be excited to vote for the Dem candidate, but instead why the Rep candidate is so awful that you simply must vote Dem to stop them. Like, there was about a week(?) that Harris and Walz seemed to be coming out of the gate going “we’re gonna be so awesome, don’t even worry about the weirdos on the other side”, but then it became “please, it is of Vital Importance you do not vote for Trump, we promise Harris will be better than him”, and I just don’t understand why they changed.
When Walz was picked I really thought we would see a sliver of actual leftist ideology in their platform.
Democrats need to realize they’re trying to win elections, not “Ribbon for Best Behaved Boy Scout Troop”
I wonder what these numbskulls thought of Tim Walz. He seemed to do the real, down-to-earth thing pretty well also.
It was just too late. Plus, he was supporting Harris, who they didn’t see as genuine.
It was too late, but they also muzzled him, didn’t they? Just like the Weird business.
Yeah they did
We need real populists, that go after people’s needs, not pseudopopulists like in GOP.
Hard to pull that off when the entire core of the DNC is permanently latched onto the corporate teat.
We have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to break the core of the party and force even a smidgen of compromise out of them that costs their corporate donors profits.
Problem is there’s too many vested interests. Bernie Sanders would have made a great president. In 2016.
Bernie would have crashed just as hard with the same apparatus behind him.
Do you think Trump is charismatic on camera? No! It’s not him or his policy, it’s that his message would just not get through.
Harris turnout was lower than Biden. Trump’s was just barely up, but pretty much the same as last time. That means something with Harris failed. That’s the thing that changed.
Harris had the slight problem of 4 years of being VP to Biden where people aren’t better off and then saying she is basically doing the same as Biden.
And people are misogynist and racist.
Couldn’t be misogyny and racism. Has to be “she didn’t get her message out”.
Everyone looking for “the” answer needs to realize it was a ton of stuff. Lack of a primary, failing to separate from Biden, campaigning with Republicans, failure to take a hard stance on genocide, ignorant/ill-informed voters, propaganga, misogyny, and racism are only some of the reasons.
Misogyny and racism are the roadblocks to get through, and constantly influences what the public perceives she can/can’t do. Versus trump who could “shoot someone on 5th ave”
You’re not wrong or anything, all the stuff matters, it just hurts her more than average white male politician when the stuff she can control isn’t executed perfectly. They should have prepared for this rhetorical of biden not running and had a plan in place, it was such a scramble.
It certainly didn’t help, but no I’m pretty confident that isn’t the factor that changed.
Anyway, agreeing with that creates an issue. The democrats can only control what they do. Blaming it on voters just not liking women or PoC means the only solution is to only run white men. I don’t agree with that. There’s things that went wrong that democrats can control that aren’t just that. Primarily, appealing to the working class. Yeah, democrats are better for them but their message wasn’t appealing to them while Trump’s was.
Sorry buddy, but you’re wrong. You wish it was that easy to handwave away the democrats failures. We can’t afford to let the blue conservatives run in circles in that tiny box they think in any longer.
The democrats need to give us that change Obama promised us. They need to give 3rd parties equal access to the electoral system by getting rid of First Past The Post voting in states they control.
It’s over… they had their chance. Pass electoral reform and get the fuck out of the way.
Could be that “I’ll preserve the current untenable status quo” was a shit message.
This is fucking nuts. Some of those answers are people being so uninformed and then acting like they’re the ones that are informed. Some even voted for Trump because they think he’s anti-war and will stop the Genocide in Gaza despite him wanting to turbocharge it. It’s just. Fucking depressing. I don’t know how to counter this. The far right has created a media ecosystem that allows them to feed trash into their viewers brains even if it’s a blatant lie and those people will go from voting for a blatant racist and fascist who thinks people of color are not real Americans, to voting for a left leaning woman of color.
It’s almost like they don’t have any actual morals or beliefs and only care about being anti-establishment. Some say they’d vote for Bernie but instead voted for Trump despite them being completely opposite people. These people don’t have media literacy. They’ve been brainwashed, and I don’t know how to fix it.
The thing AOC, Bernie and Trump do have in common is that they are all populists. That they would also have accepted AOC or Bernie means that they dont necessarily want a demagogue, but its also not a deal breaker for them.
We need to stop with the brainwashing talk. A few people on the fringe were clearly mentally ill, but the rest of them had agency and they made a choice.
I get what you’re saying. And agree somewhat. But I think you don’t have to be mentally ill or an idiot or whatever to be brainwashed. But being brainwashed is 100% what a lot of people on the right are and refusing to use that term might make sense in some regard, but it also doesn’t properly address how we could go about fixing things. While I don’t fully know how to fix this, treating it like brainwashing is the only way we can address it, as long as we also approach these people with patience and compassion and try to show them why what they spout is brainwashed.
It’s a cult ya know? And cults are brainwashed. And calling people mentally ill or idiots for falling for it will definitely just make them double down. But it’s still brainwashing.
If half the population is actually susceptible to brainwashing over Facebook then democracy itself is unworkable. These people clearly have preferences and are making choices, including the choice to know very little about what they vote for. Im afraid that patience and compassion will only encourage this behavior.
If half the population is actually susceptible to brainwashing over Facebook then democracy itself is unworkable.
It’s a bit like how the divine right of kings couldn’t survive the invention of the printing press
We’re all brainwashed in the US though. We’re all in the USA cult here while our taxes bomb and starve millions of people. We still vote for blue even when they continue the embargo on Cuba and we bomb the poorest countries in the world.
Dunno who’s downvoting you, you’re right
Trump is a pseudopopulists, he fools people into thinking he is fighting for them while fighting for himself.
Everyone thinks their populist is the real deal and the others are frauds, but at the day populism is not about good policy, it’s about making a show of putting up a fight. There have been many populists in political history and only a very small percentage have been materially helpful to their constituents.
American voters have zero agency. We only exist to pay taxes and legitimize the state, which is not obligated to provide us with actual options to vote for.
Trump ain’t no fucking populist, he tried to dismantle democracy, ignore every human right, and said out loud he plans to do it all again.
they think he’s anti-war and will stop the Genocide in Gaza
He’s an IRL Peacemaker… He wants peace in Israel and doesn’t care how many have to die to achieve it.
people being so uninformed and then acting like they’re the ones that are informed
I see you’ve met my Trump-supporter/Qanon MIL
This is my thoughts exactly the one person who said Harris had no plans when she did and Trump literally had 0 it’s insane.
only care about being anti-establishment.
I bet they’d feel differently if the establishment had a meaningful impact on their lives.
If you voted for trump and AOC you need to make sure you never leave home without your fucking helmet on. Fuck.
Liz Cheney.
I appreciate the value of honesty and authenticity as key reasons people choose to support a candidate.
However, it is clear that Donald Trump often makes false statements.
Furthermore, Kamala Harris might have benefited from participating in more contemporary media formats, such as podcasts and Twitch streams, to enhance her outreach. Additionally, focusing less on appealing to Republican voters might have been advantageous, as this strategy CLEARLY contributed to her electoral loss.
Being a complete phoney didn’t help. She had all the charisma of a late night preacher. That doesn’t play well with most people.
her opponent went on the national debate stage and said Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. What exactly does “being a phony” mean to you??
I agree with your point, but pretend you are a moron for a minute.
Anyone who speaks well is now an “elite” and therefore cannot be trusted. Trump is automatically more trustworthy just because he speaks like an idiot and not “the elites who always lie”.
“Eating dogs and cats? Man, that sounds like something cousin Dweebus would say. Cousin Dweebus and me go way back, I trust him. This guy must he for real”.
It really shouldn’t matter. I get what you’re saying, but I want a politician to he a politician, someone who governs and write bills that help me. I don’t care it they are charismatic, but for some reason that’s the most important part for a lot of people.
especially since as far as authenticity goes, nobody is less authentic than trump. I think its more about seeing their flaws in you, and since trump just says everything about everything he seems relatable.
I don’t know about seeming relatable, but then again I didn’t have a worm die in my brain haha.
Please describe her phonyness
Fracking, Border, Medicare for all.
So she attempted to make her campaign more palatable to the never trump wing of republicans by accepting that she wouldn’t have the political capital to do medicare for all? No politician in this country is getting medicare for all in the near future (no votes + supreme court will take down). No politician is banning fracking (they could but it would go to supreme court and be shut down). Border is one of those areas I’ll agree with, there’s more room to spare on that topic.
She flip flopped if there’s one thing Americans hate it’s a flip flopper
I just find her 100% fake, like she is always acting/performing. I don’t need to justify it, over half the US population agrees so it’s really not my problem it’s hers, and if you choose to defend her, yours.
This is why it’s so important to the dems to run charismatic celebrity figureheads who will let the VP and secretaries run the government.
People like you can then focus on how much the President reminds you of your father and how much you wish you could have a beer with him, and not be worried about boring stuff like not having mass deportations.
Ah the parliamentary system. The folks who want a king can have him, everyone else can get someone competent actually running the show.
But nothing you said there was actually specific or precise. Just a vibe, and a vibe held by…well, all politicians. So I’m asking the same question as OP…what precisely is different about her vs other politicians that makes her phony to you?
To provide a concrete example of what im looking for I’d say: “over half the US population agrees so it’s really not my problem it’s hers, and if you choose to defend her, yours” literally shouts insecurities. I don’t know if that’s real, but if I were asked what’s my vibe check on what you’ve said so far, that’s it. So what I’m looking for is a similar example or set of examples from Harris which demonstrates the vibe you experience.
Every time she talks. Especially the rallies.
Give a single actual example pls
She never seemed to do well in unscripted situations. When answering any questions in an interview, even from friendly interviewers, she always seemed to be thinking “what did my staff recommend I say for questions like this?” rather than “I will answer this question with what I believe in”.
I just find her 100% fake,
That reflects on you, not her. With a bullshit take like that you probably just resent her gender or something. Trump is the fake, since he is purely a bullshit artist with no other actual skills.
so it’s really not my problem it’s hers,
Its not her problem at all. It’s the country’s problem that people like you pick politicians for trivial bullshit “reasons”. Nothing can be done about people ruling out voting based on stupid shit like gender though.
I don’t understand what attacking the user for sharing their feelings gets you. It’s the vibe that enough voters shared in to stay home on election day. Her interviews seemed canned and focus group searched to death. Trump speaks like a deranged imbecile, but that’s how his voters are able to connect with him. He stands apart from the rest of the establishment despite being the most snake oil establishment figurehead there is. People see what they want to see in him. He is a tabula rasa for the magats
I don’t understand what attacking the user for sharing their feelings gets you. It’s the vibe that enough voters shared
Because voting or not voting based on a “vibe” is the single stupidest reason anybody can have in making a voting choice. It is based on the idiotic idea that you are doing the candidate some sort of favor, rather than doing yourself a favor, by voting for a good candidate.
I don’t disagree but it’s the sad reality of the world we live in. I don’t know what the solution is apart from more education but singling out this indv won’t get us far… I understand the frustration though.
Sure I must be sexist, or racist. Keep going with that bullshit line of reasoning and see where it gets you. Obama is my favourite president. Nearly all of my mentors and role models are strong women. Plus you don’t even know my gender, or race, or nationality…
Okay but there must have been some actual reason that you didn’t state. The actual reason could not have been the reason you stated, that “she seemed fake”. Because nobody could be stupid enough to have that as their actual reason.
As opposed to the down home folksy charm of a rapist and convicted felon.
Well yes, and she still lost, so how poorly must she be coming across? Or is it 10s of millions of people that are just wrong?
So you believe god is real? Billions of people can’t be wrong, right?
Nope but I am not bitching about it online. I just get on with my life.
Being a complete phoney didn’t help. She had all the charisma of a late night preacher. That doesn’t play well with most people.
You’re quite literally bitching in the original comment but okay
This one is on the folks who either voted for him or couldn’t be fucked to get off their couch. This time we ALL knew exactly who he was. I would have voted for a ham sandwich to prevent fascism. Dems suck but it’s verifiably true that the electorate can pressure them into action. Good luck pressuring ol’ donny smoothbrain to do anything that isn’t in his own self interest.
Or is it 10s of millions of people that are just wrong?
Well, they chose not to oppose fascism, so, yes. Yes, they were wrong. And they are the reason that, best case, the US is in the process of undoing every positive social advancement for the last hundred years.
Okay you run with that and see how that helps to affect change.
Really, it doesn’t matter at this juncture. The car was already in reverse with the foot on the gas. Now, the emergency brake has been released without any show off resistance. The cliff is right behind us and it’s just a question of whether we go all the way over or high-center on the edge. We’re going back and there’s no way to undo what is about to happen for, best case scenario, a generation.
You know what I love the most about late night preachers?
They don’t put people in concentration camps.
They don’t take away human rights.
They don’t sexually assault people(typically).
They don’t quote Hitler(typically).
You know what? Now that I think about it, she was a lot better than a late night preacher.
- not a Nazi
- not a racist
- not a rapist
- not sexist
- not a fascist
Wow! Why didn’t 20 million Americans vote for her?
btw, that’s a rhetorical question, I don’t care about your opinions on her.
You clearly do as you’ve responded.
Lost to Trump again, opinion discarded
trump only picked up 500,000 more votes than last time. Lets hear from the 10,000,000 that voted in 2020 but not this election
Those people could only be motivated to vote when it was as easy as possible and they had nothing better to do. They voted for the party that would handle COVID better and let them get back to their lives of not worrying about politics.
Why does this even matter? We have an electoral college and turnout in the seven swings state met or exceeded 2020 turnout.
That parts easy. They voted against trump and got absolutely nothing for it. They went back to being non voters because the dems showed they weren’t going to do anything better than trump just had.
Covid killed at least 1,104,000 people in the United States to date. In 2020, about 385,000 were killed with Covid as a contributing cause. I can’t find numbers about the total deaths that occurred before election day specifically, but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to use the year total. Just note that the actual number of deaths by that time was somewhat lower.
We can subtract the number that had already passed in 2020 from the total number of deaths to date. That gives us over 716,000 people who died of Covid between the 2020 election and today, and therefore could not have voted in 2024. Also note that the 65+ crowd is historically the most reliable voting demographic by age and Covid laid into that same age group the hardest.
We can be upset at people who didn’t turn out to vote this election, but we can’t dismiss the significant chunk of 2020 voters who simply weren’t alive by 2024.
Maybe related to massive mail voting - just speculation haven’t seen breakdowns.
Didn’t you hear? Starlink hacked the Voting Machines and deleted 20,000,000 Harris votes
I mean cheating to win is not even a crazy conspiracy theory. It’s all the right has ever had to win, and this year, they had the richest person on the planet who has the technology on their side.
more like 20,000,000
When your platform is all about “hey at least I’m not that guy”, it doesn’t inspire people to vote
That was also Biden’s platform. It worked then because we were still in the grips of covid
And right after a trump administration…
Is the memory of voters really so poor?
How are we supposed to avoid repeating the mistakes of history when the voting public can’t even remember why they scrambled to get out and vote for Biden 4 years ago?
I mean, if Harris lost to somebody like Romney or McCain, sure I could see that voters weren’t excited by the campaign plus the racism/sexism angle. But to just ignore how absolutely insane Trump was as President, and all the open messaging about how next time will be worse, never mind all the criminal and traitorous stuff… it’s insane.
That was also part of Trump’s platform. You can generally take whatever bad thing is happening at the moment and blame it on whoever is in charge in the moment. The only time that doesn’t work is when most people agree that things are going well.
The Dems also keep running as Republican Light. But if you are interested in Republican Light you’ll probably just vote Republican.
I think Jon Stewart had a good assessment of this the other night and the fact that the messaging coming out of the DNC is “we lost for running too far left” means they will try again next time too.
That was Hillary’s platform, Biden’s platform, and Harris’s platform.
you’re funny, maybe they might put you in the camps last.
I thought this was just click bait. But some of the answers are actually interesting (and scary in that way) how people can “rationally” explain how they fell for the lies of trump (“he cares about Muslims”, “he is a political outsider”, “he gets things done”…)
It’s the delivery.
Delivery is everything.
Trump reached these people, and Biden/Harris did not. It’s that simple. The message does not matter if it doesn’t get there. And this is a tremendous failure, considering the war chest the Dems squandered.
And I have zero faith they will learn from it. All the arguing I see is over policy that these people clearly never even laid eyes on.
If by delivery you mean “lies and propaganda”.
Um, it’s called sparkly commercials if it’s from capitalism, it’s only propaganda if it’s from the province of communism.
Precisely.
Dems need to do the exact same thing, and more.
If it wasn’t for The Voice I wouldn’t have seen a single political ad. I recall very few if any YouTube ads, a buttload of Instagram ads, but pretty much every one of them was asking for money. Okay? Money to do what? Buy more ads asking for more money? I’m sure political ads aren’t super effective in changing people’s minds but they do get people start to think about the issues and ways to compare different candidates. Also, the most things I remember about the campaign were when Trump said something crazy and when Kamala responded to Trump saying something crazy. Her entire campaign was pretty much, “You don’t want this other guy do you?” I have voted for very few candidates in my life and this time I definitely voted against Trump.
I see zero ads beyond billboards and the occasional radio at if I happen to be at a store.
Other than one guy going around to make sure people had a plan for voting the only interaction I had with the Democratic campaign was them begging, PLEADING for money. A dozen texts a day. Two dozen emails. Three or four phone calls a day that never left a voicemail and have stopped since the election. (I didn’t answer them.)
If that’s what the rest of the Democratic base was subjected to it’s no wonder they had a bad taste in their mouth about the election. Even though Trump won a part of me is glad the harassment has stopped.
All I ever saw were ads of Obama asking for five dollars. Everytime I saw it all I could think was “Damn this is going to piss people off.”
Jesus christ, this is what unaffordable education does to people. For fucks sake. I mean it’s only fitting for a population that can’t figure out that someone advertising a 1/3lb burger and directly comparing it to the competition 1/4lb, bragging about the price being the same, might indicate that 1/3lb is more despite 3 being a smaller number. What a combination, people that belive their thoughts are the only source of truth while having no clue what they’re talking about.
Education is free
Attention is not
Fucking barely. American public schools suck, any school worth a damn in the states will put you in crippling debt. In other words not worth a damn again to most people.
I double checked if there actually are any good free schools and especially free collages. Turns out yes, there are some, but it’s definitely not the norm.
Coursera and edx provide a full education on a wide array of topics, and a lot of the liberal arts and sciences are considered so valueless that there’s free information everywhere.
As for public schools, some are indeed garbage but a lot are fine. Unfortunate luck of the draw just like everything else.
Learning is more about wanting to learn.
American public schools suck
Who runs American public schools?
I think long COVID has impacted more Americans than we realize. Everyone out there suffering from diminished capacities thinking that the fascist sex-pest goomba is somehow more reliable than the nice black lady. I dunno about you guys, but I’ve just been seeing a whole lot of mistakes lately. On television, in News, in articles, just… everywhere.
And while a lot of it is probably people quiet quitting and not giving a fuck, I think a lot more people are suffering from the extended brain fog of long COVID than we think, and it’s affecting everything around us. Unfortunately, that includes voting practices in elections.
mine isn’t a brain fog but COVID and a trump presidency made me not trust humans at all.
i no longer trust friends, family, neighbors, governments, leaders, police, doctors, businesses. none of them maintained trust during the Trump presidency and the pandemic.
but i still vote straight ticket democrat. because their platform doesn’t include NAZI-ism
The NYTimes wrote it out for me:
The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.
I think a big part of this might be the Democrats not wanting to take the populist pro-worker anti-rich stances due to campaign donations.
Because populism is always dangerous. If Democrats go all in on populism, I will stop voting. I am not going to play this game where we just volley lies back and forth like a tennis ball until someone trips and the other person scores a point.
I will always support sober technocracy. If American politics actually turns into populist tennis then all is lost.
Populism isn’t necessarily bad, business antitrust regulations and the 8 hour workday were historically populist policies. Dems shouldn’t go all out on populism, but they should do something to become popular. Elections are a popularity contest after all.
This is almost certainly a prime factor in everything now. And we’ll never know, because everybody will look at you like you’re a fucking terrorist if you so much as point out that covid never stopped being rampant.
Covid never stopped being rampant?
Most definitely. Whenever I mentioned that my short term memory got bad after I had covid the first time (before vaccines), many people chimed in and agreed that they have it too.
It got better after about 18 months.
The point I’m trying to make is, that people usually keep it for themselves unless they have someone that takes away the shame.
The quality of many things seems to be broken down to a grade school level. Which is pretty crazy to me.
Eh, it’s always been a convenient myth for the republican party that Americans genuinely seem to believe they are better on “macro” even though it’s always been probably the reverse (that democrat politicians have to clean up the mess that lower taxes and deregulation generate). For at least 40 years. In some states the reverse is true, like mass/NJ/ny voting blue pres while having a pretty regular flip flop in the governor’s seat and then solidly blue house/senate.
Similarly Dems always have a worse than average spin on wars, the comment being “republicans want a massive military that does nothing, Dems want a tiny military that goes everywhere” when in reality our foreign policy doesn’t really change (except Biden actually pulled out of Afghanistan).
I think a lot of this is that Republicans used to follow what used to be the recommendations of the most prominent main-stream economists. We can judge that as foolish in hindsight, but, “let the economics experts handle the economy” is a fairly reasonable policy.
2 big things changed. Republicans push more and more policies that economists consider dumb and economists have updated their models and recommendations based on new research. Even those old free market economists were not fans of tariffs and trade wars. It’s pretty hard to find an actual economist (like with a PhD from a respected econ school) who thinks wanton deregulation is a good idea.
At the same time, Democrats still hold on to a few ideas that economists all agree are dumb. There’s tons of evidence that things like rent control and home purchase credits make housing problems worse.
Democrats tend to support better economic policies than Republicans do but they support enough bad ones that it’s easy for Republicans to argue that the old status quo is correct.
For the people that don’t want to scroll a bunch of stupid stories for the answers
Did you ever know that you’re my hero 🎵🎶
🫡
I was overdue to pay it forward
Holy fucking shit, people are dumber than I thought. And I already thought they were pretty fucking dumb.
These answers read like idiocracy…
“He felt like he cared because he was an outsider”
I’m just waiting for “She talked all faggy-like”
“Ow my balls”
“He really spoke to me, and her professional speak made me feel dumb”
Cognitive dissonance? Doublethink? Humans have always been great at it.
“He felt like he cared because he was an outsider”
Everyone with common sense knows Donald Trainwreck cares about nobody but himself.
I don’t know if this kind of thing is captured very well but I wonder how many voted blue for other Federal offices but simply skipped President. I understand the general motivation behind “sending a message” and “leaving this one up to chance” but good Lord.
This is like me refusing to “play chase” with my kid even though he’s running right towards the street. It’s annoying as fuck every time but the consequence of me “refusing to play” could be dire. After I save the little shit for the 10th time I punish him, but in a way that doesn’t kill or cripple him for life.
I don’t know if this kind of thing is captured very well but I wonder how many voted blue for other Federal offices but simply skipped President.
Trump won PA by 144,739 votes, but Casey is only trailing McKormick by around 40,000 votes, which may get narrower as all the ballots are counted.
So I’d rate this plausible.Edit: In the other statewide races the democrats lost by even more than Harris did, so I’m not rating this plausible.
Their excuses are baffling. Harris didn’t have policy. Okay, but Trump did? He kept walking about “concepts” of a plan, and lying about wanting P25. Trump is for the people? He is hanging out with, like, the national league of assholes and duchebags. “Harris was scary.” BUT NAZIS AREN’T!?
People were offered center right(D) and extreme right®.
I voted for least worst harm reduction(D), but would have voted for AND campaigned for extreme left.
To the hopeless, especially the engineered ignorant hopeless, extreme often seems better than the status quo that keeps you in your hopeless state.
Our oligarchs starved public education both to cut their taxes and make their workforce this ignorant. We blame our stooopids for being so stupid, but the owner class that segregates their children into private schools they do fund destroyed public education on purpose, to ensure we can’t universally use critical thinking and identify their economic class as the root poison that has destroyed our nation.
The only reason a fascist, extreme right is even allowed and funded by our owners in this country is because fascists love crony market capitalism, the very same reason we aren’t ever given a true leftwing option, because whether centrist neoliberal or fascist Republican, they put the market’s owners first, and the owners can and do attack any candidates that threaten to reign their power in.
Which is why we’re irrevocably boned, and will continue to have the choice of capitalist exploitation with scapegoats® and capitalist exploitation with rainbow flags(D) until collapse, as the owners of this system demand capitalist exploitation as this system’s primary function, then let us vote on how to address the symptoms it causes, if at all, to make us feel in control.
Reagan was the last chance to maintain any actual control, and we gave it all away for the false promise of golden showers of prosperity in return… one day… just keep making them money… any time now… Just assume it’ll be five minutes after your body fails you from laboring for them.
promise of golden showers of prosperity in return
Trickle down. We got golden showers, just not the kind you’re describing
Every single one of those answers is straight out of the mouths of Fox News. If you don’t disable open nationwide propaganda broadcasts, you’ll never fix the problem.
That would be true if every one of those answers didn’t also strongly support AOC, Democrats, or Bernie.
That’s the whole point of this exercise. A bunch of deep red voters citing Fox is expected and doesn’t tell us anything new. When a bunch of deep vlue voters do that, something is going on.
We normally expect AOC and Bernie supporters to be very Blue. If Fox is resonating with those voters we should really be asking ourselves, “Why?”
Why is it that some Democrats hear Fox News and immediately judge them as naked propaganda while other Democrats give them consideration?edit: grammar
There is no counter propaganda. When Trump lied and said that millions of migrants are coming over the border and committing crimes, the democrats turned around and tried to pass a republican border bill.
They could have counter messaged about how 1. millions were not coming across and 2. illegal immigrants are overwhelmingly just regular people who pay taxes and commit less crimes on average than citizens.
Can we please start holding the democrats responsible for their failures instead of blaming literally everything else.
Can we please start holding the democrats responsible
Can we please stop pretending that no one wants that and just making it the only answer every time someone wants someone to stop doing something else shitty? YES I want the democrats to be responsible for for a third party to make it in, but this broken record crap is getting old.
Sorry but I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
The overwhelming sentiment I’ve seen on this website is that voters are stupid and should have voted democrat. I’m asking people to focus their energy on what they can actually change. A third party is not realistic. Pressuring the democratic party is hard, but it’s not impossible. They caved to pressure and swapped out Biden.
I’m not saying I have the answers, but I know for sure that laughing at how stupid republicans are is counter productive.
This is the problem. The grievances are largely not legitimate. They are regurgitated outrage of the day. The moment you deal it they are on to the next manufactured outrage.
I know lots of people are really down on this but it seems like people just want change. We all know the system isn’t working for most people right now and want something different.
Trump is different. Bad but different. If you have little hope make sense to break everything. If there’s a real progressive change candidate people will be excited. Change is what is needed
This is something a lot of libs need to understand imo.
You can rail on about how Trump is going to end democracy until the cows come home, it’s never going to sway voters. The average person is not doing very well and prospects look really bad for young people and democrats are refusing to acknowledge that things are broken. They are promising the status quo - and the status quo fucking sucks.
Agreed. Run on change for the better. Higher minimum wages, universal health care, paid sick time, paid maternity / paternity leave. This will get votes because people want something better in their pocket books. Student loan forgiveness was a great policy to run on. If it wasn’t blocked in courts it would have given a huge boost to Biden.
Absolutely. Bernie Sanders is incredibly popular (on both sides) and Joe Rogan actually endorsed him in 2020. All this talk about Joe Rogan winning the election for republicans is hilarious when you think about it.
It is hilarious and sad that Joe Rogan wields so much power. But the point still stands that we need an economic policy to succeed. We need a Bernie Sanders like policy going forward.
I don’t think he actually has as much power as people are implying. I think the reason he was able to influence this election was because most undecided voters didn’t like either candidate very much, and so having someone like Joe Rogan sit down with Trump and humanize him was something that probably had a noticeable effect.
I think that if Harris had actually run a campaign that actually addressed the needs of the average person she would’ve won easily and we’d be laughing at the fact that Trump was so desperate for votes he went on Joe Rogan.
