This tells it like it is. I am liberal and I surround myself with liberals. I had a conversation yesterday with an American liberal living here who told me that Harris would win and it, “ wouldn’t even be close”. I think there is a huge tendency, exacerbated by social media, for all of us to surround ourselves with people who think like us. This is not healthy. Not in American politics, not on this forum, nowhere. Yet we do it and then get outraged when we discover that lots of people don’t think that way. It’s time to engage with the other side in a non-confrontational way.
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it’s not that easy. the other side literally wants to limit the constitutional freedoms of my family, friends and neighbors, for them to move out of the country, or stay and accept suffering. fuck that, and fuck them.
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Well, you’re there and living it, so I bow to your view. Just trying to understand why so many voted Trump. I just see a hopelessly polarised country and recognise that Democrats have misjudged the mood of large sections of it again.
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As an aside, I’m currently in Budapest, and there’s a huge Europeam security summit here tomorrow with Starmer, Zelensky and all the other European leaders. I imagine the conversations will be VERY different from the one’s they were hoping to have.
Never seen so many police in one place (apart from Nothing Hill Carnival this year)!
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The issue that had me on edge for this election was inflation. I feel for a lot of folks who don’t really pay attention to other things, that is what moved them. And the take @MGG posted has a good point that sending people Fed reports that inflation is receding goes against their lived experience and pushes them to vote in another direction.
I have a brother in LA who went down the rabbit hole of Rogan/Tucker podcasts and changed over to Trump. I love him deeply and it was horrifying to witness the change - he started with anti-trans BS and then moved on to the evils of the FDA /vaccine mandates and how Trump & RFK Jr would change all that. If you tried to show him that GOP administrations generally roll back health/food regulations he wouldn’t really argue back in good faith. Much of his opposition to the Dems is a “fuck the system” anti-authoritarian stance (incoherent, of course). It’s also interesting to note that he hasn’t really had a stable partner in his life and has exhibited a casual misogyny that has only become more apparent with the years.
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It’s obvious why so many voted Trump. It’s nothing new for a populist leader to win by peddling fear and uncertainty, then offering the alternative escape of reliving a bygone era. America certainly isn’t the first to fall for it. Coupled with the Dems thinking that no women can be mysoginists, a lot of women are sadly.
[Related - I watched the first 2 episodes of Special Ops: Lioness and it really summed up the state of the US. The xenophobia and need for saviours with guns to keep the Chinese and Mexicans at bay from the honest values America loves. It would’ve swayed me to vote Republican! (kidding)]
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It’s just Brexit all over again. Turns out most people are c****. It’s a hard truth to realise.
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Yeah I am not American but we have the same thing here (thanks to Trump’s example) and I agree - fuck em. I know too many people who revel in the obscenity and the anything goes attitude. Especially rich people who will benefit from the chaos. I don’t think non-confrontational is the issue, I think that the issue is the holier-than-thou way of pontificating rather than proper campaigning. The more they use the crutch of “intellectuals” and especially hollywood personalities to sound like they know what is best and you don’t, the worse it will get. The backlash is toward the attitude - they don’t even get to the policies and whether they work or not. It’s serious, and it won’t be easy to fix.
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Wheeling out springsteen, cardi b etc etc was a big mistake given what they are up against.
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By the way, voter turnout was much smaller than in 2020. That’s a big factor too.
In my country when the dictatorship ended voting became compulsory if you’re over 18 and under 70. It was their way of showing everyone what an accomplishment it was to regain the privilege to participate in democracy. Our elections are always held on a sunday, through machines unconnected to the web, which allow results to be computed instantly once voting is over. It’s actually very cool. Not everyone effectively votes, we still have in person abstentions (you press a little white button on the machine and throw your vote away), and we have no absentee ballots so if you’re not where you are registered to vote during an election you send in a justification for not having voted and that makes you square. If you outright refuse to do it there are some little bureaucratic pains in the ass such as not being allowed to renovate your passport, for instance, unless you pay the fines (very small and affordable) and make your voter status regular.
After not being a dictatorship for so long I’m not so sure it’s the best way to go, but seeing the consequences of the US where voting is not mandatory makes me think compulsory works better. I’m appalled by the amount of people who simply don’t give enough of a shit to leave home and vote in a country whose leadership is that consequential to the entire world. It makes me sick.
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Exactly. It’s insane how much importance people put on Taylor fuckin Swift’s endorsement…
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The issue is that at the grassroots level the Dems couldn’t mobilize the vote. He won with 71m, that would’ve trounced him in 2020.
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I thought that he was going to walk it this time. As the years have passed since Biden’s win, the normalising of hatred, radical idiocy and even the nostalgia for the Trump era has just steadily grown in America. This time he’s going after anyone that ever stood against him or betrayed him. Expect large-scale legal “reform” as he creates a clear path for dictatorship type powers. Depressing, yes, but America has made it’s bed here.
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A vast number of Americans are hurting or perceive themselves to be hurting. They are angry. They want an angry politician. Trump (and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020) filled arenas while the status quo dems and their message of “Together, we can win this!,” “Freedom,” “I’m With Her,” etc. miss the very real desire for pissed-off commiseration. The dem campaign managers need to re-read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and then re-read it again.
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