Elections have consequences, many people say both sides are the same, but there's one side that constantly does things like this, on top of giving tax cuts to rich people that need it the least. Please go vote on 2028 if you don't want more of this.
Where we set our eyes don’t matter. The US electorate has shown we care more about “owning the libs”, “anti-woke” and what bathroom people use than our own health and welfare.
Absolutely no one who voted for this mess went in blind.
Not giving enough of a shit to learn about… in some cases, seemingly anything, doesn’t mean you get to later claim “oh I didn’t want this, how could I have known?”
I’ve given a lot of leeway on that stuff over my life, and after this last election, that’s over. Anyone who doesn’t get it at this point has raised stupidity to such an art form that they’ve achieved immorality. That’s aside from the ones who just outright want bad things to happen, which is a lot of people.
One of my “friends” on Facebook who is a devout evangelical Christian that I went to school with between elementary school at a private Christian elementary school, a magnet middle school and she was one of the few white people at my majority black high school and even one of the fewer that didn’t segregate herself and made friends with everyone claimed that Charles Kirk was a good Christian and said I was insensitive for quoting his words after his death.
I honestly had never heard of him before he was shot and looked up things about him thinking from all of the things said about him by her and other conservatives was that he was a traditional pre 2016 Republican who I might disagree with around the edges. But I could have a beer with him.
I then looked up some of the things he said, showed her with links to videos, verified sources etc and she refused to even read the links because they would have forced her to confront her cognitive dissonance.
For the record, she isn’t one of the fire breathing conservatives and 99% of her posts are quoting scriptures and family oriented.
I didn’t realize until after social media how a lot of people’s whole lives revolve around the community of the church and how lost they would be without their church community. That’s not by itself meant to be an insult.
But I saw it in real time with her. Everything I knew about her as a person was at odds with her support of the current MAGA movement. I thought she would be bemoaning that Republicans didn’t choose another of the candidates last year like Pence who was a traditional religious conservative Christian and she would at least admit that she held her nose and voted for Trump because she thought Kamala was worse. I could have respected that if not agreed with it.
I do have a good friend who is slightly on the other side of the aisle than I am. But he doesn’t demonize anyone. He is the good ol’ boy that I could have a beer with.
Yeah well my experience is a lot of conservatives seem completely normal until you start dating a black girl. That's when you see how racism/tribalism works.
Try a fun experiment: ask your guy friend about ARPA-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA-E
They usually love that government program after learning about it. Then ask him about government investment into education, and watch his tune change. Education is one of the highest ROI govt programs, just below like roads and plumbing. Way higher than ARPA-E. But no, they only see poor black people using it.
Hope I'm wrong about your male friend specifically, but overall there's a reason Trump is the president. Your female friend's perspective is usually how it goes in my experience.
My stepson was 14 when we moved there but had been living in the burbs all of his life. The outer burbs where we stayed saw a lot of development and had become one of the most affluent parts of Atlanta and was still conservative. But not MAGA conservative. There were only around a dozen other black kids in his entire high school. He is 23 now. He’s dated exclusively White girls - that’s all who has been available - and we have met plenty of parents. There has never been a problem with parents. He’s actually engaged to a white girl now. I haven’t met her. But my wife has a couple of times when she flew back in town and they talk.
We have since moved - he is still lives around the same area. Not because of any discomfort. We downsized in 2022 after he graduated in 2020, I started working remotely and we wanted a change of scenery from GA and moved to a state tax free state with better weather.
You didn’t need “sources of information”. Trump was in office for four years before he was re-elected. It’s copium to think that people aré ignorant when in actuality, they are actively hostile to minorities, non straight, the college educated and non Christians.
They would rather feel the fallout of Republican policies as long as it doesn’t help or actively hurts people not like them. In my former home state GA, the Republican governor spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to get the Hyundai plant to GA that would have created 8500 jobs directly and no telling how many indirect jobs.
ICE invaded the plant and the opportunity is now lost potentially. The governor still can’t bring himself to criticize the President and the Republicans in GA are cheering the raid. The engineers from Korea were training Americans.
I think it's rather the choice we are given at this moment in history. But I may be wrong.
If you abstract away any other problems and boil it down to environment, health and work protections on the one hand, and restriction of unlimited immigration from countries with very different sets of values no matter the sociological developments that will likely follow you can only choose one.
I just tried to summarize what we hear and see from voters in analyses as fairly as I could, not present my own opinion. If that did not work out, let me know.
But in this case you choose the one problem that appears bigger or makes you more angry probably.
You're giving something away by suggesting that a balanced framing is: (1) destruction of our world, health, and lower/middle classes vs. (2) brown people bypassing an insane bureaucracy that prevents us from effectively receiving the tired, poor, huddled masses that we explicitly invite on the country's figurative doormat. You can be against the latter, sure, but suggesting these sides are anything close to equal is a choice.
I actually think he was telling the truth (from his pov). Conservatives see the world in a very us-vs-them fashion. Makes it very hard for them to even notice nuances like in-group enemies (nevermind actually deal with them). It sounds like an oxymoron.
Democrats correctly understand that immigrants are out-group benefactors. But they have blind spots too. We all do.
Only ~60% of people eligible to vote in 2024 did vote with ~30% of eligible voters voting for the idiotscape we currently have.
So, I think OP message was for the folks who didn't vote. Especially given the people against going backwards on environmental protection is a large majority of the population.
If everyone voted, we wouldn't be dealing with this. Excluding future success of social media propaganda campaigns.
We all need to fucking vote. Otherwise you get folks like Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer puppetting an orange shell.
Because of the electoral college. It didn’t matter who didn’t vote. If 0% more people voted in Mississippi or Alabama and every single eligible voter voted in New York and California, it wouldn’t have mattered.
That's some bullshit. If everyone voted the electoral college would be dwarfed across the board. If 50% more people vote the difference won't be in just AL, MS, CA, NY -- it will be across the board. Stop trying to fuck with our elections by discouraging people from voting.
If 30% more people vote it won't just be people in "blue states". That's the goddamn point. It'll mean we, as a country, get closer to the things we have 60%+ agreement.
You're discouraging voting with failures of logic, Mr 4 Month Raw Anon. "BuT wHaT iF tHeY OnLy vOtE iN bLuE sTaTeS?!" Seriously? ffs, a child could see through you.
To everyone else -- remember this. Vote in numbers that can't be eclipsed by nihilist propaganda asshats like this tool.
Let's make the margins huge in blue and purple states, miniscule to none in red states. The US can show the world a massive rejection of Trumpism if we all vote.
If 30% more voted in Alabama , Mississippi, Texas or Florida, do you think they would have voted democratic? Do you have any evidence that the demographics of people who don’t vote are disproportionate to the people who do in any of those states?
If you know anything about American history, despite what Michelle Obama says “this is exactly who this country is”
You are completely missing the point because you are pushing an agenda. Go back and read a little more carefully. And see if you can comprehend this concept: when there's a 60% consensus on a topic and everyone votes for it, that topic wins overwhelmingly. There are a lot of those issues like that in the Trumpty Dumpty clown show. That's why they're trying to choose their voters with gerrymandering.
Damn Skippy, people in Alabama and Mississippi are going to be voting more blue in 2026 and 2028.
Are you predicting that Alabama and Mississippi are going to go Blue in 2026 and 2028? And in 2026, even if people in Mobile Alabama have higher turnout - it still won’t matter because if gerrymandering.
If there is “60% consensus” and those people are in a state that’s already Blue, it doesn’t make a difference. We haven’t even brought up the fact that every state has 2 Senators meaning that the most populous states are represented by the same number of people as the least populous. The Senate decides the Supreme Court judges and the Cabinet.
You are clearly having reading comprehension issues. That or just twisting words for internet argument points. Either way, I think we aren't getting anywhere in this conversation. So, you have a great day!
I’m not. What you are saying makes little sense given the realities of the electoral college, the Senate having two senators, and how easy it is to gerrymander because democratic votes are concentrated.
The votes of the more left leaning part of the electorate are disadvantaged and diffused because of it. California and New York are represented by the same two Senators as North and South Dakota.
> Absolutely no one who voted for this mess went in blind.
I think it depends. I suspect that political messaging has become so tailored that the Mercola/Natural News crowd that voted primarily because of RFK’s anti-vaxxing platform could have been getting so heavily hammered with the “this is the ’chemicals are bad’ administration” messaging that the anti-regulatory stuff seemed pretty quiet in comparison. And I’m pretty sure they also had things they disagreed with Harris about constantly rammed down their throats. I also think that democrat voters had negative things about Trump shoved down their throat, and that messaging difference is probably the main reason many on the right wing are absolutely mystified that people can hate Trump so much, even in spite of the ‘own the libs’ culture war garbage.
I have a list of news sources I hit weekly from Dissent and Jacobin to mainstream TV news and newspapers, to Hot Air and Town Hall. Most are pretty politically homogenous, but discuss all sorts of topics. Then I see how laser-focused a relative’s Facebook feed is on topics that are important to her… not just the political platform on a whole, but those specific things. It’s forgivable that she’d think her primary concerns were representative of most people’s primary concerns, and why she’s thinks people that are heavily focused on other topics are kind of weird.
The presidential debates were the most watched tv last year beating out football. Trump was in office for four years. No matter how filtered the news is, people knew exactly who Trump was.
And one hundred million more people voted than watched that debate. And of the people that watched it, I’ll bet most people couldn’t name half the topics discussed that weren’t in their list of top voting issues. I’m not saying they were deceived or didn’t have access to the information, I’m saying that the things they didn’t care about were easily drowned out by what they did. That’s how the human brain works. Nobody’s seeking out reasons to dislike someone they’re excited about and being emotionally validated by. Saying someone supports something just because it didn’t stick out enough to kill their support for someone doesn’t make sense. That’s no different than saying anyone that voted for Harris because trans rights were extremely important to them also supports Israel’s massacre. The world just isn’t that black-and-white.
For a decade, the mainstream left has painted them like simple-minded maniacs foaming at the mouth driven by blind hate with no valid concerns or perspectives, while also fruitlessly attempting to not challenge them too much in the legislature, assuming that some day they’ll be kind and return our civilized decorum. We’ve simultaneously been marginalizing any populists that bubble up on the left, in a futile attempt to return to the Obama era status quo. We’ve seen where this approach takes us— repealed rights, messed up economy, etc etc etc.
Time for mainstream dems to challenge their assumptions.
Well then maybe it's time to cut some dead weight from the left platform... Many centrists want clean water and sane society and bathrooms and woke ideology maybe needs to take a back seat in discourse for a while
Isn't this what they have been doing? What nationally prominent democrats are vocal proponents of progressive social policies now? I certainly don't remember harris running on any of the things being implied here.
> cut some dead weight
This "dead weight" is the rights of minorities to participate in public life plain and simple. This is exactly why leftists are so skeptical or even hostile to "centrists." Once you're calculating whose rights you can drop for political convenience you share a lot more ideologically with the far right than with historic liberalism.
The motto of the forest service is 'do the most good for the most people for the longest time'
Reality is you sometimes have to drop some dead weight for 2% of people to protect and further the lives of the other 98%.
Turns out it would have been better to find alternative solutions for those 2% back when they were only 0.2%, but instead Dems made them the center of attention and is now staking the future of our country on continued pacification of an increasingly violent 'underserved' social blight.
Drop the T. Protect children. Enforce laws in our urban murder cities... Or continue to lose the culture war. If you turn to violence during this process it will be worse for many more people than the 2% being staked for protection currently.
"If you turn to violence during this process it will be worse for many more people than the 2% being staked for protection currently."
You should know from history that real human beings won’t cower before this sort of unhinged saber-rattling.
So if that’s the take of your political cohort, you might as well just skip the niceties prepare for the worst. Things will get really, really bad for everyone. Perhaps your kids will get to live in a pleasant country again. Maybe the blood-rendered lesson from our grandparents that didn’t seem to stick to our generation will be able to stick to theirs.
"continued pacification of an increasingly violent 'underserved' social blight"
There is one demographic that is implicated in the vast majority of shootings, comprising far more than the 2% you’re hatefully denigrating.
> Drop the T. Protect children. Enforce laws in our urban murder cities... Or continue to lose the culture war.
Protect children from what? Our what cities? What do you believe is centrist about these stances? These are straight up verbatim right wing talking points. Stand up for your beliefs and join your actual allies instead of pretending to be mine.
Harris lost the popular vote by less than 2%. I know that popular vote is not what gets a president elected, but you make it sound like nobody voted for Harris and the entire American electorate liked Trump's views and voted for him.
That's the thing. Trump would be eminently beatable if the democrats bothered running good candidates and had the courage to stand for something. But they are perfectly content collecting tons of money which probably goes to connected "consultants" who then spend 20 million on figuring out how to talk to people.
It all started because Biden didn’t announce he wasn’t running again after the midterms and the Democrats tried to hide that he wasn’t losing his mental faculties.
I think Harris was a good candidate who did stand for something, but she didn't get enough time to run her own campaign :)
But I'm not interested in having a "she wasn't pure enough for my brand of politics" debate, I was only pointing out that almost half of those who voted did in fact vote for her – not Trump.
It’s actually the opposite. Immediately after Kamala got the nod there was an enormous amount of energy surrounding her nomination that she managed to entirely squander. If Kamala had less time as the main candidate she would have done better. She ran a shit campaign and bled support the entire time. I can’t imagine why anyone wasn’t impressed with her promises to maintain the status quo and her ability to campaign with war criminals from the Bush era.
Opinions are like assholes, I've got mine and you've got yours. Like I said, I think she was a good candidate who didn't get to run a full campaign like her opponent did – and the one she did run was micromanaged by Biden campaign staffers until the last minute – so I guess we'll never know :)
If Harris had been a good candidate she would have gone on different podcasts without hesitation. That’s where the audience is these days. Her TV interviews were so scripted and inauthentic it wasn’t even funny. Despite all these she almost got half of the votes so imagine how a more likeable and authentic candidate would have done.
I'm personally unconvinced that getting her on Rogan and other manosphere podcasts would've won her the election. It's easy to look back and attribute little misses like skipping an interview with Rogan to her loss, though it lines up with the popular misconception ¹ that young voters voted for Trump over Harris.
Instead all signs point to her loss being something as mundane as the economy:
> Further, nonvoting Democrats were more than twice as likely as voting Democrats to report feeling the economy is worse now than a year ago (46 percent vs. 22 percent) or that their incomes had recently decreased. And, perhaps not surprisingly given their economic precarity, Democratic nonvoters were substantially more likely than voters to support increased state welfare spending (61 percent vs. 52 percent). These class characteristics show nonvoting Democrats’ economic attitudes in a clearer light.
Edit: I think we both dislike Trump and would have preferred anybody would have won over him, so all of this speculation on what she could have done differently is probably just navel gazing now. If going on podcasts could have won her the election then I'm all for it.
> but there's one side that constantly does things like this, on top of giving tax cuts to rich people that need it the least.
That side is consistently good at pushing uneducated voters to care about nothingburger issues like transgender bathrooms and mass immigration.
the reality is that the average american is an uninformed moron made complacent through excess and enteratinment but thats not something that can be easily fixed.
Kindly stop supporting a nation built on genocide and enslavement. The ethical path to engineering a system that's not intended to kill people is to stop it when it does and dismantle it, evolving the foundational principles used to design it in the first place. And to do all that without sacrificing more lives. Electoral reform is impossible because there's no way to say no to the entire system.
I live in the USA. You can put all your skills to work on designing systems of collective liberation to replace the existing systems of oppression this country was founded on & requires to persist. A collapse is coming, so now is the time to prepare so we have something liberatory to fill the predictable power vacuum with. The wealthy are already doing this.
The right managed to succeed with their electoral reforms. Gerrymandering is legal, and the president is now above the law.
The left should use the same tactics: Focus on state and local elections then use those positions to fix elections so that the national majority of voters decide who runs the federal government (instead of the current 25-30% of voters).
Doing this is completely legal now that the Supreme Court has gutted the rule of law.
For starters, all states should aggressively gerrymand. That’ll basically guarantee the house goes democrat in 2026:
If the democrats fail to do this, it’s not mere incompetence. It’s probably because their financial backers actually support the changes being made by Trump.
As a democratic voter I don't like this either. I vote because I want rule of law. It's not as clear cut to me that discarding rule of law to beat the GOP is the best option. There is a chance they can be defeated without undermining having a functional electoral system
This went out the window as a viable approach when McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat. We’re at minimum-two justices being on the take, post a coup attempt with the leader of said attempt back in the Oval Office, and Republicans have already declared intent to gerrymander their way to victory with no roadblocks to that in sight. And this is not an exhaustive list of ailments.
You can’t go in with legal gloves and no hitting below the belt et c. while your opponent is bare-knuckle and going for nut shots and headlocks. You’ll just get your ass kicked, every time, no matter how morally pure you feel about it.
Meanwhile, fixing gerrymandering almost certainly means getting Republican votes to do so. The only way to do that, in this environment, is going to be to make them believe their odds are better without gerrymandering, than with it. That means using it against them, until it’s made illegal.
They can be "defeated" that way in the sense of a classic Pyrrhic victory, exactly like in 2020, sure. That's the absolute worst out of all options available. "Losing" in 2020 would have been much better. You need to start thinking about the game, realpolitik, and the patterns that have been happening. And the long-term. You think you're thinking long-term by prioritizing the things you do, but it's the exact opposite.
The first thing you need to come to terms with is that losing in 2020 would've been better for the long-term. Once you've gained that freedom, realizing that simply winning an election can be the worse option, you can start thinking about what would instead be better.
One possible solution is to get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans and run liberal/progressive candidates as Republicans. Built on the Eisenhower platform of 1956 and his record as a military commander. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p...
Granted, it's not ideal, but coming in the back door may be necessary.
> get all the liberal/progressive voters to register as Republicans
Sorry, didn’t quite follow that! You can vote for anyone regardless of who you Registered for? Or, was that suppose to give a misleading signal to Republicans that they have way too many voters? :-)
It depends on the state (in some you can register as a democrat and ask for a republican primary ballot), but I did this so I could vote against George W three times. (If only we could have him again instead of Trump…). You can register for whatever party you want, but some states have early deadlines.
One problem with creating real change with this approach is that the party elites get to decide who are on their ballots.
A while back, Colbert (?) tried to run as a republican and documented all the roadblocks he hit.
To get an idea of how it went, imagine a popular candidate going to a southern plantation to kiss the rings of the great-grandchildren of slave owners.
After deciding there is no personal upside to them, they decide to keep the candidate off the ballot and ask a servant to freshen their mint julep.
> If the democrats fail to do this, it’s not mere incompetence. It’s probably because their financial backers actually support the changes being made by Trump.
This has been clear for very long. Hence why they're still not doing it, and have for the last 9 years been and still[1] continue to push for Clinton-like candidates rather than whatever candidate has the biggest chance of winning elections. It isn't incompetence, and it hasn't been for ages. They're nearly just as captured. It's true that they're slightly less captured than R overall, but not to an extent that is actually meaningful.
Stating it as an "if" is copium. They have failed to, are failing to, and will continue to fail to do this, and it's intentional. What you're saying is so blindingly obvious that there is no other explanation - no Hanlon's razor for this one, the incompetence angle is not realistic.
To liberals a “socialist” like Mamdani is way worse than conservatives like Trump. They are more than happy to support a sexual predator over a socialist. Trump and the DNC largely have the same donors to keep happy. Capitalism and how to make a select few fabulously wealthy isn’t a power either the democrats or republicans want to give up. Unfortunately due to the first past the post voting system we have to align to one of the two fucked up corporatist political parties. One which pretends to care about things like equality and fairness and one who has removed their mask and fully embraces all the worst aspects of humanity. I’d still much rather have a Target that pretended to care about things than a Target who fully embraces late stage capitalism.
The most frustrating thing about leftists is their focus on tearing down and self-flagellation over actually doing anything meaningful to make the world a better place.
There is a whole archetype of person that would rather verbally jerk off to thoughts of defeatism and disgust and criticizing everyone else than do anything useful themselves.
Maybe it's not as dualistic as you portray things. I'm literally designing and building a system for collective liberation and meeting needs to replace systems of oppression.
