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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29546 thread views

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.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

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

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With Harris shaping up to receive 10-15 million fewer votes than Biden in 2020, has anyone here updated with regards to the chance of fraud in 2020? This graph is floating around Twitter: https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1854144250562429081

Is Harris truly so unpopular that 15 million Democrats just stayed home? Or was the overwhelming shift to mail-in ballots in 2020 the key to Biden's victory, giving barely motivated Dems an opportunity to fill in a ballot and mail it out rather than drag themselves to the polls? Republicans in several swing states managed to pass legislation tightening voting laws -- maybe that helped? Or is America simply not ready for a woman president (much less a "black" woman president)?

Yeah, Harris is more naturally unpopular today than Biden was in 2016. Plus 2020 happened during a high point for widespread public political involvement, activism and debate in modern America, probably the high point since the 1970s, plus everybody was at home and on the internet. Easy to see why turnout peaked.

Most people are mostly unaffected in a visceral, immediate way by politics. In 2020, the lives of most Americans were directly affected by government in a way more major than at any time since…the Second World War, maybe? Hard to know exactly, but certainly in a long, long time.

It’s not just the fact that turnout overall was higher in 2020. It’s specifically the fact that Harris underperformed Biden by 15 million votes and Trump underperformed his 2020 results by 3 million votes. Why the massive difference for the Dems but not for Trump?

3 different candidates vs 1 candidate? Two females vs one male? rederendum on Trump vs referendum on Democrats? Pandemic vs no pandemic? Trump telling people not to mail in votes vs not doing that? Height of BLM popularity vs. not? Sometimes people get more votes and sometimes less?

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