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U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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What are some other factors that could explain Trump’s victory, besides “Kamala is unlikable”? It sucks that we can’t determine how Trump won as the pollsters are too inaccurate, but we can still make guesses.

I think that the rise in scrolling-based media (tik tok, reels) has made non-political social media content significantly more addicting than the political media of the 10s and news in general. This reduces the number of people engaging in online political content, and reduces the political engagement of those whose political information came via online spectacles. For a variety of reasons I think that Democrats have relied on more “addictive internet content” to recruit votes, as for instance the BLM / brutality / racism motif of Obama-Hillary-Biden campaigns. George Floyd can’t compete with Moo Deng. Consider that Northwestern study which found that BLM shifted swing state votes more than concern about the economy. If Dems rely on socially contagious hype more than Republicans then they need to fundamentally rethink their strategy in a post-2020 social media environment.

You're overthinking it. It's the economy, stupid. Inflation was the worst ever under Biden, and when pressed, Kamala couldn't identify a single policy difference between herself and Biden. In the counter-factual where everyone feels richer than 4 years ago, we'd have president Harris.

We would probably still have President Biden. If he hadn’t been sinking in the polls in May, he never would have done the debate and could have campaigned from the basement as in 2020. The unpopularity of his policies and poor economy forced him to play his hand, which turned out to be a pair of senile 4s.