I legitimately did not believe it was possible for this to happen. There’s always a hateful minority but I believe people as a whole are good. How did this happen?
There are lots of reasons this happened. Fascism is very popular (as a whole we are not good), voter suppression is functioning as planned, destabilizing education from preschool to university makes people more susceptible to fear mongers and racism, vast amounts of corporate and wealthy influence on elections who favor the party of deregulation, the DNC shifting right instead of left, etc etc etc.
Also social media sequestering people in cozy filter bubbles that distort reality.
Social media, or more precisely, algorithms designed to create ever growing engagement by feeding into confirmation bias and only showing you stuff you like, have destroyed the ability of critical thinking in a majority of people.
This doesn’t only apply to the right spectrum either, as evidenced by all the “hopium” articles here and on r/politics that were trying to construct a blue win or even a blue wave when all polls pointed to a Trump advantage. I had fallen into that trap myself. And everybody was also smugly making fun of the articles in r/conservative predicting the same thing for Trump. Well, turns out they were right.
Less “fascism is popular” and more “people are so desperate for SOMEBODY actually promising change that they’ll vote for anyone offering it, no matter if it’s good or bad.”
Status quo politics is pretty much dead in the water and arguably has been since 2016. People don’t want “I’ll keep everything on a steady course,” they want someone who sounds like they’re going to take charge, and Trump provided that.
Fascism is popular, I’m sorry but it is true. That being said your counterargument can be true, and is true, at the same time. They share the same space.
I had a short convo with a check out girl at Staples the day before election day. She saw my “I voted” sticker on my phone and started talking about how she was voting trump after work today because “we can’t give the white house to Biden again” She looked confused when I told her Biden wasn’t even running. The DNC fucked us. They waited too long to replace him and some people didn’t even know Harris was an option. They tried to prop up a corpse and then changed at the last minute. I voted for Harris but I knew she didn’t stand a chance.
The DNC has a lot of problems and blame to absorb, but at some point we have to look at the electorate. You don’t have to read the Sunday newspaper or be politically active to know who is running for president. She had two months to step outside and listen/read almost anything.
She is an ignorant, zero information voter, who is likely just regurgitating what she heard her father or boyfriend say months ago. This is the problem. America is now dominated by zombies with no critical thinking skills who crave being brainwashed by their mobile phones.
I hate to be so negative, but I simply don’t see a way out of it. The masses are being controlled more effectively than ever before and I don’t see what systemic change could magically appear to change our trajectory.
How do you think the electorate becomes this way? It’s not because of some innate failure of humans. It’s because of the massive alienation that has systematically occurred over the past 50+ years (and really since WW2) as a result of deliberate policies that have decimated communities, destroyed public education, massively widened the wage gap, ruined the housing market, and is wiping out the environment. Among many other things
Policies that are frequently pushed by Republicans, but sometimes supported and often not repudiated properly by Democrats.
Yep. Trump has a fuckin merch line. Tiny little billboards reminding people every day.
The easy answer is, money. Lots of it. With the deregulation of financial crimes (let’s see how badly the IRS gets gutted now), it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. But it will be necessary to invest heavily in the next midterm and presidential election to ensure JD Vance doesn’t automatically win.
How do these people not see any news? Like, at all?
It amazes me how people can be so unaware of anything going on.
When all you have time to do is work and sleep, this is the result (as intended).
Well she did have a decent chance judging by results. It’s not like it was a crushing victory.
We’ve been seeing a see-saw effect for awhile, where without incumbency, the party last holding the Presidency loses. This reflects a general, vague dissatisfaction with the status quo, mostly felt at the emotional level instead of intellectually reasoned. The world is too complicated for the average person to really figure out, and they don’t like that. While you can distract yourself from this in innumerable ways, or paper over it with something like religion, it’ll surface when it comes time to consider new leadership.
Then, in addition to the various issues people will discuss, I think being a woman hurt Harris somewhat with latinos, where the culture prizes a more Trumpian machismo.
Yeah there is a ton of analysis to be done, but I really think the average undecided voter looks at the one choice they have and basically just asks themselves “am I doing ok right now?” If yes, they stay the course. If no, they pull the lever and flip to the other guy.
The bad economy killed them. Kamala breathed some life into the campaign but it wasn’t enough. Is the bad economy their fault? Not really, inflation is bad worldwide post-COVID. But when people can’t feed their families, they blame the people above and use the only tool they have to punish them: cutting off their nose to spite their face.
The real question is, where are all the Democrat voters who didn’t show up, that did show up for Biden? I think a combination of deep rooted misogyny, racism, and a weak message watered down to cater to “centrist” Republicans really hurt them.
The Democrats tend to focus on the undecided voter. They shouldn’t, because those people are basically just motivated by their personal good fortune at that exact time. They should focus on the occasional voter, because that’s who wins them elections.
I somewhat agree, though I’ll point out people were doing quite well at the end of Clinton and Obama’s presidencies. They flipped to the other party anyway.
I’ll be very interested to see the objective agreed upon postmortem and what can be done (if anything) to save the patient going forward. This is pretty damning confirmation that the humans are not okay, Trump is like the virus government guy from the Matrix
Canadian observer. Two things, and I think they’re related effects.
Harris is a minority and a woman. The Democrats were convinced they were the party that minorities would automatically vote for. But what they failed to realize was that those same minorities are misogynistic as hell. Like, have you ever been to a Baptist wedding? If you ask them what the role of a woman is…
The US is also the only first world country where the birthrate is above replacement. But if you look at who are having children, you’ll find that it skews conservative. And they’re passing those values along.
But if you look at who are having children, you’ll find that it skews conservative
Just like Mike Judge predicted in Idiocracy.
The average lifespan is like 70-80+ years. All the shitheads have plenty of time to pass down their hatred and humans tend to be tribal so easily willing to accept propaganda that blames ‘others’.
The old trope about the racist uncle is relatable because of how many racist people there are.
I wonder how the Joe Rogan bros who voted for this guy will like it when Project 2025 makes porn illegal. I bet 99% of the dipshits don’t even know that is a thing.
It looks like Trump still got ~70 millions vote, like before, but Harris got 66M while Biden got 81M, so the problem looks like Democrats failed to get people to vote.
Maybe because Democrats were often lefties, workers, unionized, lower salary, lower education, etc, and they do not recognize themselves anymore in the Democratic party.
We had the same things in France with the “gauche caviar”, basically the “caviar left”, all traditional factories workers who voted Socialist for decades, didn’t recognized themselves in this caviar left so voted elsewhere like right-wing, go figure…
It’s quite simple, and aligns with why he got in in the first place.
The economy and cost of living is still in the toilet. Trump is a protest vote because competent public servants have failed to even acknowledge that everything costs 2-3x what it did a decade ago. Sad to say, but most people don’t give a fuck about LGBTQIA+ rights, Israel, Ukraine, or anything outside of this.
Call it apathy if you want, but it’s ultimately a failure of moderates to acknowledge a better social net for people (I.e. left policies) or propping an economy by improving lives for regular people so their money goes further.
I have the same confusion about the election. Why would anyone vote for that disgusting predating geriatric fraudster incompetent convicted fellon who tanked any business he ever got into, is beyond me. But I’m not American so I can only hypothesize.
Either people don’t care or maybe thats what they like? Either way, this hatered is fully ingrained into America and it comes out in fascism and some kind of religious death cultism. This will ripple across the world for a long time.
The conditions required for fascism to flourish have been building up since the freaking 1950s.
Labour laws getting systematically stripped, unions getting crippled, corporations exploiting workers like fucking battery hens. Wages stagnating for decades, social programs stripped bare, people starting their careers with a lifetime of crippling student debt, Corporations and investors pricing housing completely out of reach, education systematically defunded, ongoing militarization of the police into armed gangs accountable to nobody, weird creepy fetishization of the military pushing unconditional support for increasingly brutal and cynical invasions and regime-changes, apologia for and allegiance to fascists like Netanyahu…
it’s literally everything that Cyberpunk 2077 was parodying, for god’s sake.
People are poor, they’re exploited to the bone, they have no secure income, they’re drowning in debt and can’t afford housing. They feel un-represented by the government, they have fuckall education, the corpo media piped into their home keeps telling them that immigrants and deviants are the cause of all their problems, they’re constantly shown how their government bombs hell out of Evil Brown People overseas and that this is a good and righteous thing, so they want more of it at home. They hark back to a mythical Good Old Days they’re constantly told about when things weren’t as bad and brown and/or LGBTQ people weren’t a thing (or could be freely lynched) and women weren’t so uppity, and they want that back; let’s try that last part and the first part will surely come with it.
You get these people, you show them a political outsider who says screw all the rules and bureaucracy, I’m going to take charge, sweep all the red tape out of the way and do all the things you know you want…
Of course they’ll get sucked in.
And of course it doesn’t matter that their figurehead is worthless and incompetent and clearly evil.
It’s not about results, it’s about emotion. People are fed up, worn out and sick of the way things are.
Trump and his degenerate shitgibbons promise to trash everything, and hurt the people their followers believe are the problem. And that’s deeply emotionally satisying.
Trump got about the same amount of votes, but Harris got way fewer than Biden did. It wasn’t hate that won the election, but apathy that lost it.
NPR was just discussing this a few minutes ago.
The Democrats put the majority of their push behind abortion thinking that would be the turn out vote and it didn’t seem to be.
More people voted for Trump because of the economy based on exit polling and (surprisingly) more women voted for him this time as well.
There was also more votes coming from younger people who hadn’t been through a recession before and were just basically voting ‘opposite party’ because they were tired of their money going nowhere. The voting trend was something that had been seen in several other countries recently.
I think one factor is that Democrats and Republicans actually hardly differ in many fundamental positions. I think the fact that an unscrupulous business man like Trump, who was once a member of the Democratic Party, can switch party affiliation just like that illustrates what I mean: there are no real alternatives, which is why election campaigns in the US need to be emotional rather than rational. That favors baseless fear mongering and empty finger-pointing that misses the real problems. I supect that many US citizens have become so accustomed to these empty election campaigns that they lost the ability to identify the lesser evil in this charade of mutual accusations far away from rational discourse. So in short I think Trump was just the better demagogue which is pretty much all that matters when reason or actual arguments are not part of the “election show”.
Because of uninformed voting. Doesn’t matter now. There won’t be another one.
