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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   27977 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.

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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.

At the time, it was widely predicted that the first assassination attempt against Trump had secured him the election. As polling data seemed not to reflect this prediction, it was quietly discarded. But I genuinely think the attempt and Trump's reaction to it might have cinched it for him. Within 24 hours, everyone knew that this was the most iconic photo of the year, if not the decade (a decade which has already given us J6, Covid, probably the worst American riots since '92 and the invasion of Ukraine).

man the 2020s have a LOT more in them than the 2010s. The 2010s were a mostly boring decade all things considered, Cell phones and the economic rise of china were the 2 big news stories of those times

2020s have

AI, COVID and the invasion of Ukraine!

The housing bubble crash was 2008.

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