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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Notes -
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.
Maybe, but at least one big study found that “declining assessments of personal economic well-being also failed to change voter preferences.” I’m wary of the typical explanations. Do we find that people whose economic position increased in recent years are more likely to vote for the incumbent, and those whose decreased are less likely? Eg, if we look at an industry that “randomly” got more earnings on average, are they more likely to vote for the incumbent?
I doubt you'd be able to find any signal like that, because inflation affects everyone similarly.
It really doesn't in this case. Inflation was very heavily tied to a handful of goods, particularly housing and briefly transportation along with services, while barely touching other goods like consumer electronics or clothing. And wage increases were very concentrated in a handful of jobs, rather than being spread evenly, with union jobs seeing 50% pay increases and non-union government jobs going unfilled or poorly filled because the salaries became uncompetitive.
Someone who worked in a field where pay scaled with inflation quickly, and who owned a house and car which they still own, did pretty well, even if groceries or McDonald's got more expensive. Someone in a similar social class who happened to work as an admin in a government department and needed to buy a house and a car in the last four years, got fucked.
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I somewhat doubt that most voters are looking at objective metrics of inflation rather than “how am I doing financially”. The inflation theory also doesn’t hold true across demographics, I don’t think? Why would elderly women, a demographic which is keenly aware of shifting prices at stores, shift even further toward Kamala? But a “social media environment” can explain this shift, because they aren’t on the new environments but stuck in the old news cycle + newspaper environment.
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