2024 Elections: One Last Chance for Democracy

[state of hockey]

Timothy A is a grade A piece of ****. Block him. He's vile.

please don't quote him and he'll go back to hiding under the bridge.

I forgot the turd existed until they responded to MT a couple days ago. Insta-ignore.

[WisconsinWildcard]

None. Trump is for exceptions.

1.5% of abortions are due to rape and incest. I think there are plenty of ways to avoid getting pregnant if you don't want to get pregnant, so in reality abortion is about people being sexually careless and trying to clean up a mess they created.

Or...you know...health care for ectopic pregnancy you ****ing idiot. You would learn a lot talking to the UW leadership (both legal and medical) who had worries about prison time after Roe fell.

[Jeb2020]

Pretty incredible watching Trump smoke Biden and then Harris all in one election cycle. Essentially winning two elections.

Nice work by the way, the dumb sh*it Dems ran a little Coup d'?tat inserting Harris because they had to save democracy and stop Hitler lmfao. Harris who was so disliked by Dems in 2019 that she didn’t earn a single primary vote, Harris who was the lowest polled VP of all time. Fukcing retardds.

You shi*t clown Statists live for this nonsense. Enjoy your absolute *** beating you were just served.

Dumb Fukcs

[aparch]

This isn't my lesson to learn.


Really looking forward to the boat. Thanks MAGA!

[Kepler]

Please stop quoting this Westboro Baptist Wannabe.

[Slap Shot]

https://www.salon.com/2024/11/08/ame...progressivism/

Yup - a few here just don't get it:

America's political discordance: The Trump voters who want progressivism
Trump voters backed abortion, minimum wage and family leave — but don't get that Project 2025 would take it away

Perhaps out of fear of insulting their audiences, the pundits, journalists, and political consultants engaged in the lengthy post-mortem about Donald Trump's horrific victory Tuesday are avoiding the most obvious cause: ignorance. Millions of people who desperately want more progressive policies cast their ballots for a man whose agenda is exactly the opposite of what they want.

In response, many progressives blamed Democrats. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Democrats "abandoned working class people," claiming that is why Harris lost. It's a tempting fiction because it allows progressives to feel a measure of control over the situation. We all would love to believe making different choices will lead to better outcomes. But Sanders knows it's not true. He himself worked closely with Biden to improve labor organizing and reduce healthcare costs. He shared Biden's disappointment that the Build Back Better plan that would have done even more was killed off by centrists who have since left the party. He knows that Democrats would have done more, if not hobbled by Republicans who control the House. And he knows that, if people were voting on policy, they would vote for Democrats. Trump, after all, will actively dismantle existing policies people like.

The problem wasn't Democratic policy or messaging. It's ignorance. As Heather "Digby" Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump's "aesthetics and attitudes" but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris' were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren't hers.

When voters have factual information about the candidates, they prefer Democrats. Polls from earlier this year show that people who consume news from journalistic outlets — newspapers, network news programs, and news websites — overwhelmingly planned to vote for the Democratic candidate. Newspaper readers clocked in at 70% Democratic support, and network news viewers were 55% Democratic. News website readers were only less so because the survey didn't distinguish between legitimate sites like Salon and bunk outlets like Breitbart, but still: merely being a person who reads stuff makes you more liberal. In states where heavy ad spending helped educate voters a little more on Harris' plans, she lost less ground than in places where that money wasn't spent.

[Slap Shot]

https://x.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1855065708033425451

Uncharacteristically, I'll say that Dems should stop beating up on themselves and firing volleys back and forth. (They can get back to that later.) American voters - as I've been warning for years - are changing, and becoming more like Trump. That's hard to counteract. /1


Maybe the mistake we all made was thinking America would elect a Black woman. I had a gut feeling they would not. But in any case, when elections are about feelings, fantasies, boredom, and resentment, the candidate who services those delusions has a natural advantage. /2


Democrats are understandably focused on voters who flipped because they're suffering economically. But a far larger number of voters werfe un-flippable and not poor! They're the comfortable Trumpers who think, like, Canada conspired with Michelle O to hijack voting machines. /3


When millions of people think that way, you can't agonize *too* much over losing another 3 pts during a global backlash against inflation (that no govt could have stopped and that the US handled well). Especially when you've won impt House/Senate races in all those states./4


The Democrats should definitely have a reckoning about their inability to recognize that becoming the party of the college-educated (which is what the GOP used to be) has affected their ability to message. And you're seeing some rumbles already. /5


But no Dem can change the fact that millions of ungettable GOP votes are set in stone not because of economic conditions - which were the best any candidate could have hoped for - but because even relatively affluent voters have spent years marinating in complete craziness. /6


And I'll add, again, that this is not some post-hoc rationalization based on this week. I've written about this for years, and warned about it at length in a book I wrote more than four years ago. That's really why I just couldn't be optimistic about this election. /7x

[unofan]

Yup - a few here just don't get it:

America's political discordance: The Trump voters who want progressivism
Trump voters backed abortion, minimum wage and family leave — but don't get that Project 2025 would take it away

Twas ever thus. My entire adult life has seen the liberal position of referendums win about 80% of the time while those same people vote for the people who will do the exact opposite.

[ScoobyDoo]

Twas ever thus. My entire adult life has seen the liberal position of referendums win about 80% of the time while those same people vote for the people who will do the exact opposite.

We get and got the government we deserve. And this is why when you do have options in your life you do not forgo them.

[Spartanforlife4]

NPR had a story about Montana and Tester losing. They interviewed a body shop owner who said he was depressed leading up to the election and is now relieved. He said he would have likely closed his shop had Harris won because “it just wouldn’t be worth fighting anymore.” He didn’t say what the Dems were doing that were so bad for his shop, guy seemed to have a lot of anger. He also said that he was glad they “put Tester in his place” because “he’s a democrat who acts like a Republican for our votes”.

[Drew S.]

The major problem and reason why these "lifestyles" are looked down upon is because they are full of, and the public facing people are generally, ****ing abhorrent people. The defending NASCAR champion is a guy who was suspended for a long period for using the N-word during a broadcast. It's also where "Let's Go Brandon!" came from. Indycar is not much better, any sport that allows Santino Ferrucci to be a face is no good. Small tracks run into the same problem as county fairs, they are really great if you fit in, ie you're white, you go to the same church, and you're Republican. If you are in any way "different" you will be made uncomfortable at best. Country music is the same, it can be great stuff but it's forward facing people are highly racist idiots. As much as we all love hockey, it's not much different. Hockey has a lot of terrible people involved in it, players to management.

When did Blaney use the N word and get suspended? They show him in an ad with Doc Rivers and Billie Jean King all the time. I doubt they would be associated with someone like that.

[St. Clown]

Why is it always incumbent on the left to reach out? Those same "suburban" low/moderate income households scorn the left's lifestyles (rap/hip hop, bicycling, art festivals, broadway musicals, book clubs, etc.) just as much. You see plenty of "let's go talk to the average joe in a rural diner" articles in the NYT, WaPo, NBC, etc., but you never see "let's go talk to the average jow at a place in urban ghetto" on Fox News, WSJ, right-wing media.

Blue collar pride can be just as toxic as any liberal elitism. It can hold people back ("that's your edumacation talkin'") just as much, if not more so, than a Manhattanite not knowing how to fish.

Democrats aren’t scared of a discussion either Average Diner-Joe/Jane. Fox News Entertainment viewers might shoot their TVs if they saw an Urban Ghetto voter on their screen, claiming it was self-defense during a home invasion.

In all seriousness, Democrats need to work harder to reach out because nobody on the side of the aisle has ever been successful at building the Liberal/Left/not racist version of Fox. They go lowbrow on much of what they report, while the people running the Democrats’ networks inevitably want to go highbrow to appeal to its base. Highbrow doesn’t create in-your-face outrage in which Fox’s and OANN’s viewers bathe.

[rufus]

You can't really reach out to people when 75% of the things they believe about politics, society, Democrats in general, and any number of other things have no basis in reality.

Half this country have built themselves a little fantasy version of the world, and they're quite content to stay there. Nothing anyone can say to them will convince them otherwise.

[rufus]

Here's the explanation for why Trump won. And it's not pretty. But it's the truth.

https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/stop-the-votewashing

[ScoobyDoo]

Here's the explanation for why Trump won. And it's not pretty. But it's the truth.

https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/stop-the-votewashing

Yep. All of it. I agree with all of it.