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naraburns  nihil supernum  7mo ago (text post)   28245 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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Matty Y thinks he has the answers for the Democratic Party. It's a pretty good list but it shows an astounding lack of self-awareness: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1854334397157384421

How many smart people like Matty Y are out there who are Republicans but just haven't realized it yet? Hopefully the Trump administration can build a big tent that includes these people, but I'd also settle for a less insane Democratic party.

Here's Matty's list:

  1. Economic self-interest for the working class includes robust economic growth

  2. Climate change is a reality to manage not a hard limit to obey

  3. The government should prioritize the interests of normal people over those of people who engage in antisocial conduct

  4. We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin

  5. While race is a social construct, biological sex is not

  6. Academics and nonprofit staffers do not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private sector workers

  7. Politeness is a virtue but obsessive language policing alienates normal people and degrades the quality of thinking

  8. We are equal in the eyes of God, but the American government can and should prioritize the interests of American citizens

  9. Public services must be run in the interests of their users not their providers

Edit: I found another one, this time by the "Liberal Patriot" Ruy Teixeira. When will these people realize that they are essentially Republicans now?

'Race is a social construct'

I really hate these word-games they play. You can have endless debate over whether Greeks or Bulgarians are white, about mixed-race offspring, about the shifting meaning of Oriental or Asian based on where you are, about the genesis of the term 'white'. So yes, race is a social construct, congratulations.

But we know that blacks are superior runners, whites are superior weightlifters. We know things about sickle-cell anemia, blood type and bone marrow differences between races. We have the basic human quality of knowing that different couples would produce different-looking children. We have the basic human quality of seeing distinctions in a continuous spectrum and assigning words to clusters: races.

We have the basic human quality of appreciating that some races produce good schools, STEM Nobel prizes, powerful armies, well-maintained infrastructure and advanced technology while others don't (I say basic because I mean this is the origin of racism millennia ago, not out of consensus-building). Those continuous differences cause civilizational effects on a large scale. We have the advanced human science of genetics too, providing the causal logic behind the above phenomenon.

Saying race is a social construct is so shameless. It's communicating a specific idea via an easily defensible fact, something so defensible that the mere fact of saying it implies you mean something else entirely. And in this case, what is really being said is that there are no significant biological differences between races (in contrast to biological sex).

"Money is a social construct. It's unfair that he has more wealth than me (there aren't truly legitimate reasons why this might be) - we need to fix this inequality. I need his wealth."

"It's OK to be white. Us whites need not feel ashamed for our ancestors or privileges. There are lots of people who clearly think it isn't OK to be white: they have bad intentions."

The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. You say that whites are superior weightlifters (already a dubious claim), but Bulgaria has 13 gold medals in olympic weightlifting and Finland has 1. Yet both Finns and Bulgars are white (don't @ me). The steelman is that the category "white" (or "black" or "Asian") contains a variety of different ethnicities with different characteristics and the way that ethnicities are assorted into broad racial categories is not a fact of nature, it is indeed socially constructed.

The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints.

Cool, because if that's the steelman, then we can say that the entire notion is false, since it doesn't get better from there.

This is false, it does cleave reality at the joints. You can run a genetic clustering algorithm, and you'll see coherent clusters emerge that correspond to the colloquial understanding of "race". Containing a variety of different subgroups does not blow up a category, and if it does, you just blow up the entire system of biological taxonomy as a whole, as well as each of it's components individually

Okay, let's see the clustering.

I hope it considers that all Mexicans are white (as a federal court did in in re Rodriguez), that people who are half white and a quarter Japanese and a quarter chinese are not white (in re Knight), Syrians are white (in re Najour), Afghans are white (in re Dolla), Armenians are white (in re Halladjian), Indians are white (United States v. Balsara), Syrians are not white (Ex parte Shahid), Indians are not white (In re Sadar Bhagwab Singh), Afghans are not white (In re Feroz Din), Arabs are white (In re Ahmed Hassan) and that arabs are not white (In re Ahmed Hassan).

If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language and society doesn't always conform to what you might see on a multidimensional genetic chart. That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used. Hence, "socially constructed".

This is the game played when calling it socially constructed. Of course there are messy edge cases where the lines get blurry and arbitrary socially constructed rules throw people into one bucket or another. You could play the same game with most other categories like species or colors or flavors and so on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

I haven't encountered the notion that Indians are an edge case before.

that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.

Neither is calling it socially constructed. Colors are a great example - the set of colors in English is totally arbitrary. Some languages have more, some less, some as few as two. There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.

Yeah, but that's irrelevant. Again ask people to sort colors by similarity, and they'll reach pretty much the same result, regardless of their language and culture.

Nobody is saying that the similarity of colors to each other is socially constructed (or at least I've never heard this claim).

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Are you sure? The phrase that comes to mind is "wine-dark sea". I've seen academics suggest that the notion of blue is a surprisingly modern invention.

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If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language

That's not ordinary language, that's a bunch of court cases with goofy rules about precedents.

That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used.

If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.

The precedence defense is confusing considering how many of these cases contradict each other.

If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.

Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality (which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?)

Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality

I'm not sure what you mean by "objective", I only said it's not socially constructed, but let's go with it, I guess. I don't know how you're separating the two. Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.

which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?

If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.

Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.

The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.

If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.

If you get someone to put two groups close to each other, they'll think of them as close to each other? Is that the claim here?

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We do well in strongman contests, though, or at least did in the 90s.

Apparently (according to some Instagram posting I found) Finland didn't send a weightlifting team to olympics between 1920-1948, which also represents (apart from 1952 and 1956) the golden era of Finnish Olympics success, with the general medal count beginning its fall to 0 (in the most recent Olympics) after that. Perhaps the strong athletes were just sent to wrestling or some other strong guy sport.

It's just a motte-and-bailey, because "race realists" would be quite happy to carve up races further for precision (and do ime) but their opponents have no interest in that task at all.

Admitting that the colloquial definition of "Asian" isn't fit for purpose and maybe we should speak of "East Asians" and so on has never, AFAICT, won someone over to some sort of race realist view. If anything, people just seem to ignore it altogether and go back to attacking the model that has like five races.

The classification based in the idea of notable biological differences itself is the sin.

Well, there is currently a ton of people on (Matt's) Twitter feed socially reconstructing Latinos from the category of "non-white" to "white, white adjacent, possibly white supremacists".

Who are the big left twitter people besides Matt? I checked Hasan and he's calling for more progressivism - Kamala was centre-right with her 'lethal military' and 'border protection' rhetoric!

I'm not sure about big accounts, I mean stuff of the sort that one can find in the comments and retweets of this tweet, for example. (though admittedly in a lot of cases it's more like "white adjacent" or "think they are white" or so on.)

Glad to see my pet peeve about American racial categories getting support from an actual Latin American.

What are your predictions for the new 'Hispanic' census label? I expect mestizos to continue using it but I imagine the next generation of castizo children will abandon it for 'white'

I think it is a fair critique that Harris ran to her right. The problem with running to her right was that it was fake. She didn’t assure moderates because she couldn’t explain why she switched on numerous positions (it felt fake). But her left wing was pissed because she ran from them.

One thing I find interesting about this is that if we continue to shave "minorities" off of the "minority" list and add them onto the "white" if they vote a certain way, we will have built a more diverse coalition of "whites" than "minorities." "White" now contains Asians, Whites, and Latinos.

Most Asian American group lean Democrat,with few exceptions (Vietnamese lean Republican), none of them vote R as strongly as whites.

Asians have already been put in the White category for overperforming other minorities (and even whites) in school grades and earnings. Further, I think that they're way more fickle than a lot of other demographics. (East) Asians are much less political than other races until someone messes with their schools. You see this repeatedly in California, where every single initiative to make schools more "equitable" guarantees that Asians vote against it.

White already expanded to take in Italians. It can't get any worse than that.

The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct. It’s meaningless as a claim. Religion is a social construct and likewise contains legions of subgroups and deviations that make generalizations difficult. And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.

Further, most of the ideas of what to do (generally deconstruct it) are silly. Just because it’s no longer seen as anything other than a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something of a force of reality. People are affected by social constructs, gender roles, social norms, and other social conventions because that’s how society actually works. Even if we recognize that we drive on the right side of the road in the USA as “just a social construct” that doesn’t mean that change is desired.

The problem I have with social constructions is that virtually everything in society is at some level a social construct.

I once heard this problem neatly solved with the saying "a house is a social construct, but I do rather prefer to live in one"

And that also isn’t a good reason to say religion is unimportant. Just because Southern Baptists, Anglicans, and Greek Orthodox Christians are all Christians, that doesn’t mean they’re identical or interchangeable in obvious ways.

The people who use the "social construction" deepity are ironically the people who take the thesis the least seriously.

Imagine if every human disappeared and alien scientists had to puzzle out the purpose of these giant buildings and steel veins that dot the landscape. Why some buildings on a certain coast are built to different specifications, why standards vary across climes.

These things are clearly artificial but no archaeologist or historian worth his salt would start and stop at "people made this, so they just made it up because".

It really is just a blank slateist motte-and-bailey.

In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems. You can't expect to win every election. Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She wasn't a great candidate who ran a great campaign, but that's an unrealistic expectation. She won the states she was supposed to win and lost the battlegrounds by a few points each. Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies. The most annoying thing about these postmortems is that the inevitable conclusion is that the losing party needs to adopt more of the policies of the winning party. The second most annoying thing is that they act like one election is a real crisis point for the Democrats/Republicans and that the party is screwed long-term unless they make the necessary changes.

To the first point, I can offer an easy, lazy counterargument. Most of Biden's 2020 votes didn't go to Trump; Democratic turnout was down in general. The problem wasn't that they lost voters to Trump, but that they lost voters, period. Maybe part of the problem was that she didn't give her base enough reason to turn out? Maybe going full woke would have stirred the far lefties to action? Maybe the problem with black turnout could have been remedied by embracing BLM more? There was some discussion here yesterday about how blacks continued to vote 90% Democrat, despite claims that Trump was winning black men, and there was a post on Reddit today suggesting that the Democrats had a problem in that pandering to black voters turns off Latinos. The problem theories like this is that you don't want to alienate your base. Look at NASCAR. In the early 2000s it was gaining popularity at a breakneck pace. Bill France's though he could stoke this emerging market by introducing rule changes that would make it more palatable to the masses. The strategy massively backfired, as these changes didn't particularly appeal to the public, and most long-time fans hated them. The response was to dick with the rules even more. At this point, America's fastest growing sport has become a confusing mess that only total fanboys like my dad can follow. I'm not trying to suggest that making some changes toward moderation isn't a bad idea, but that there's an argument to be made to the contrary.

To the second point, there's no suggestion that the Democrats are screwed long-term because of one election. They ran an unpopular incumbent and were forced to change horses mid stream. Something could easily happen in the first half of the new administration that leads to a Democratic midterm blowout. Trump's stated economic policies put us at serious risk for inflation, and if that happens, people are going to want a change. Any number of things are possible. Following the 2006 midterms and 2008 Obama landslide, pundits were saying that without major changes, the Republican Party was doomed long-term. Two years later they did exactly nothing and got one of the biggest legislative reversals in history. But then they lost the presidency in 2012, and we were told that they were becoming the party of old white men and they needed to appeal more to minorities to have any chance. Then Trump came along and was massively more anti-immigration than any Republican in recent memory and won the presidency. Maybe if the Democrats had done things a little differently this time they would have won, but maybe not. If they keep losing elections by increasing margins I'll concede that it's time for a change, but we're nowhere near that point.

Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.

How so? What, specifically was good about her? What actions did she and her campaign managers take that another candidate would not have? What particular qualities does she possess that another candidate would not have, other than being the incumbent VP?

On Kamala the candidate: She was likeable, i.e. she didn't have the Hilary Clinton problem of coming off as a bitch. She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet. She had a good resume. The downsides were that she had a reputation for being indecisive and carried the burden of a stillborn presidential primary campaign in which she said some things she would end up regretting. These aren't huge, though. All candidates have weaknesses, and she had fewer than most. I'm counting her invisibility during most of her vice-presidential tenure as neutral, because visibility can be a double-edged sword. Had she taken up some initiatives that were important to her but largely uncontroversial, it would have helped, but I don't think she intended on running for president again, so I don't fault her for not doing this.

On the campaign: She had a good ground game. She campaigned relentlessly in places where she needed to, and she didn't take any votes for granted. She didn't lean into unpopular rhetoric. There were no huge gaffes. She iced Trump in the debate, making him look like an incoherent old man. Most of the campaign criticisms she got are understandable, but ultimately unconvincing. She was certainly light on policy, but so was Trump, and it was pretty clear that the election wasn't going to be about policy. There was no reason to throw out bold proposals that might go over like a lead balloon. She didn't do many interviews, but I wrote about this before — the risks of her doing them outweighed the benefits. It's unlikely that anything she says on 60 Minutes is going to move the needle very far in her direction. If she does a good job it's just another boring political interview. If she does a bad job then it's news. No reason to risk it. Rogan's even worse because it's going to go 3 hours, probably veer far off-topic, and will be released unedited. There are a lot of things like this that you can argue she should have done differently, but they all would have been risky and with no certain payoff. She could have done a better job explaining the positions she took in the past and why she repudiated them.

Man… talk about two screens.

She was likeable

She’s abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career. What about any of this is “likeable” to you?

She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet.

Willie Brown.

The downsides were that she had a reputation for being indecisive and carried the burden of a stillborn presidential primary campaign in which she said some things she would end up regretting. These aren't huge, though. All candidates have weaknesses, and she had fewer than most.

She has a long and easily-accessible paper trail of taking very extreme positions, all of which she apparently just counted on journalists not to ask her about. She spent the summer of 2020 going on every program she could in order to raise funds for an organization that bailed out violent rioters and looters. This is not difficult to find! The second anyone confronted her about these things, she was, inexplicably, unprepared.

There were no huge gaffes.

When asked on The View - the most friendly and favorable environment imaginable - whether there was anything she would do differently from (massively unpopular incumbent) Joe Biden, she said that “Nothing comes to mind.” How is this not a catastrophic gaffe? It was the easiest softball question in the world and she couldn’t handle it.

She could have done a better job explaining the positions she took in the past and why she repudiated them.

Yeah, this is an extremely bad problem. And of course the reality is that she didn’t actually repudiate them! She genuinely does believe that “equity” should be the central mission of government. She genuinely does want to create a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. During her brief tenure in the Senate, she was the farthest-left senator. Why would I believe for a second that she has changed her mind about these things? Her administration’s record speaks for itself.

I am honestly shocked to hear you say that she was “a good candidate.” Leave aside any herculean effort expended by her campaign team to try and drag her across the finish line. She was a lead balloon. A massive albatross around her party’s neck.

She’s abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career. What about any of this is “likeable” to you?

You may not like her personally, but some politicians (Hillary Clinton, Liz Warren, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, etc.) have articles written about whether they're likeable enough to be president. People weren't writing articles about Harris's likeability problems.

Willie Brown

How was this exactly a skeleton. She dated the guy 30 years ago. He may have been technically married, but he'd been separated from his wife for a dozen years by that point; the relationship wasn't exactly a secret affair. Her "sleeping her way to the top" consisted of a couple appointments to state commissions nobody's heard of a decade before she ever ran for public office. In any event, it wasn't a big enough deal for the Trump campaign to make an issue of.

When asked on The View - the most friendly and favorable environment imaginable - whether there was anything she would do differently from (massively unpopular incumbent) Joe Biden, she said that “Nothing comes to mind.” How is this not a catastrophic gaffe? It was the easiest softball question in the world and she couldn’t handle it.

This is one of those things that could have gone either way. She could have distanced herself from her boss and repudiated his policies, saying that if she had been in charge she'd have done things differently. However, for her to suggest that Biden was a bad president would have been incredibly disloyal to the man who was more responsible than anyone for putting her in the position she's in. It would make the current administration look more dysfunctional than it already does. That's not a good look when you're running as an incumbent member of that administration. Furthermore, Biden isn't exactly Jimmy Carter. Inflation is down from where it was. The market is up. Unemployment is low. Illegal border crossings are comparable to Trump-era levels. To the outside observer it should look like the Biden administration faced significant challenges and met all of them. If there was any gaffe here, it was the failure to compare this to the Trump administration, which spent three years on easy mode and fell flat on its face as soon as it hit a major crisis (his response to which was largely to deny that a crisis even existed).

The argument here isn't that the Biden administration didn't make mistakes; it most certainly made several big ones. But while honesty may be the best policy when it comes to personal relationships, it's lethal in politics. If you want an example of an actual campaign gaffe, Mondale in 1984 said "Both of us are going to raise your taxes. The difference is that I'll admit it, he won't." Regan didn't end up raising taxes, but four years later Bush famously promised not to raise taxes, but raised them anyway. Bush won his election; Mondale didn't. I'm unaware of any politician in American history who has won reelection after owning the mistakes of his first term. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but if it did it's extraordinarily rare. I have seen plenty of politicians justify obvious mistakes and get rewarded for it.

How was this exactly a skeleton.

How is it not? The fact that she got her political career started by the power of her vagina instantly disqualified her as a candidate in my mind. And yes, I'm someone who could have been convinced to vote for her if not for that. I'm sure I'm not alone. So, if her past behavior turned away potential voters, that qualifies as a skeleton in her closet to me.

What gives you the impression that Willie Brown was responsible for starting her political career? She dated him for about a year in 1994/1995, and she wasn't running for anything until 2003. She got a couple of apointments, but I don't think the Medical Assistance Commission and Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board are exactly known as incubators for top political talent. In any event, she hadn't served on either within five years of beginning her political career. It's also worth keeping in mind the actual dynamics of California politics at the time. By 2003 Willie Brown was viewed as corrupt, and any association with him was toxic. Her prior association with him was seen more as a liability than an asset. Take Willie Brown out of the equation, and there's nothing unusual about someone who's worked as a prosecutor for 13 years winning an election for District Attorney. There's nothing unusual about a District Attorney getting elected Attorney General.

I think the perception is more important than the reality here. The lefts wants to paper over all of her faults right now, but if she had won give it 5, 10, 20 years and their is going to be a big old asterisk on the first female president.

That Scarlett Letter would be tough to manage in the long term.

They wrote articles before the switch about her terrible of a candidate she was including how vapid she was.

People weren't writing articles about Harris's likeability problems.

First of all, they didn't have time. She has been a candidate for about 100 days, and all of those were campaign days where serious objective scrutiny is not welcome at all. Second, writing an article like "experts suspect the ocean is wet" is also not going to make big waves. Read what people spoke of her before she was elevated, and you'll see plenty critique of her likeability.

abrasive, transparently insincere, and has had consistent staff turnover issues for her entire political career

If those are dealbreakers for you, boy, do I have some bad news for you!

I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.

Surely this speaks to big problems that can't be papered over with "hey, she never took a dump on stage!".

I don't get it. I can't reconcile "she ran a pretty good campaign" and then several paragraphs later read that her doing interviews was essentially a liability with nothing to gain.

I don't mean for her in particular but in general, though she was definitely bad at interviews. I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign. When one thinks of iconic campaign moments one thinks of iconic speeches, debate moments, commercials, etc. I am unaware of any iconic interview. Clinton had one in 1992, but that was during the primary, when exposure trumps everything else, especially for a dark horse like Clinton. In the general the only one I can think of was when Sarah Palin famously told Katie Couric that she reads all the newspapers and that she has foreign policy experience because Alaska is close to Russia. Not exactly what you're looking to get from an interview, though in fairness to the McCain campaign, Palin needed to do one because she was virtually unknown at the time she was tapped. There was also Jimmy Carter's famous Playboy interview, which is widely credited with tanking his support among Evangelicals. The rest of these, as voluminous as they are, seem to be forgotten. If you can think of an exception, I'd love to hear about it.

I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign.

They switched my view. Trump's flagrant interview literally changed my whole opinion of him, and I voted for him and it was my first vote for a republican candidate ever.

Joe Rogan has 18 million subscribers and he did an episode with 3 million views right before the election with Elon musk where he endorsed Trump.

Rogan has higher viewership then all of the mainstream media combined. I think the longform interviews were more watched than the debates.

To think this doesn't move the needle is a little crazy to me. Sure they didn't do crap back in the 1990s but we live in a different world. And Trump moved with the world rather than clinging to old strategies.

Trump's flagrant interview

I didn't watch the interview, as I've been keeping my eyes away from election politics as much as I could for the past 4 years. I'm curious though, what was flagrant about it. And it sounds like you liked that it was flagrant? Why is that?

Also, reply to @Rov_Scam here.

I am unaware of any iconic interview.

That might have been true in the past, but there's been so much change recently. Podcasts are a whole new world, Joe Rogan is a whole new level of long-form interview viewership, and Trump is a candidate ripe for this new world. I wouldn't think it's out of the question that in this particular case, the willingness to do those interviews, in the sort of way Trump would do it, really makes him more relatable in a way that a large portion of the American populace wants to see in a candidate, and it hurt Kamala that she wouldn't put herself on the line in the same way.

This is the full interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ry1IjOft95c

What was great about it is that Trump is a New Yorker, and this is a podcast of New Yorkers. I of course knew intellectually that Trump was from New York. But it didn't sink in.

New Yorkers have an aggressive and bombastic style of talking and interacting that often involves lots of interruptions and talking over one another, active ribbing each other, and grandiose exaggerations (that everyone in the conversation knows are exaggerations). Trump is often given too much of a chance to talk. It leads to him ranting and going on weird tangents. This happened quite a bit early on in the Joe Rogan interview he did, and I could not watch more than ten minutes of it. Trump gets accused of being a bully for the ribbing he constantly does. And finally Trump is known as a liar for his constant grandiose claims.

In the flagrant interview Trump is interrupted, he is talked over, and there is ribbing going on constantly, and Trump loves it and thrives in it. Because he is a New Yorker and that is how they talk and interact. He even extends the interview for an extra 30 minutes or so. His ranting is far lessened. His weird tangents are there, but don't dominate the conversation. He is quick on his feet with jokes. There are very few awkward moments.

To be clear, I am not a New Yorker. And their style of interaction can grate on me. I can take it in small drunk doses in person, and can barely stand it at all when sober. For podcast listening it can be real fun, but is often a bit overwhelming. I don't regularly listen to flagrant, but they can have some absolutely laugh out loud banger episodes when I'm in the mood for it.

I just finally feel like I understand Trump, and that is a huge relief. I don't feel like I've ever really understood him in the past, and I don't feel like I've ever understood any other president or presidential candidate in my lifetime (except for Ron Paul).

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I just don't think that these sit-down interviews are that important when it comes to a presidential general election campaign.

I would say interviews are like debates: Normally they don't really matter. But if one candidate appears to be unable to handle interviews (not even good interviews, just unable/unwilling to do them) or unable to handle a debate (winning is nice but not necessary, just participating) then that raises massive red flags.

It seems like a basic duty of the job. An applicant for a job who can send and receive emails isn't noteworthy. An applicant who can't though, isn't likely to be hired.

She was likeable, i.e. she didn't have the Hilary Clinton problem of coming off as a bitch. She didn't have any major skeletons in her closet. She had a good resume.

Wow do we watch two different movies. This is a woman who literally started her career through bedding a prominent powerful politician, and performed horribly - by the standards of her own party, which thoroughly criticized her for it when it were still allowed - once she was gifted a position. Who famously jailed parent of sick kids and proudly bragged about it. Who was explicitly and knowingly hired for her demographics and confirmed her ineptness by being unable to achieve literally anything for 4 years. Seriously, I haven't seen any proper answer to the question what she achieved that does not reduce either to demographics or to "she was around when a thing happened". Maybe the skeletons thing is true in a meaning that everybody knew how bad she was, but calling it "good resume" - my goodness. She is on record as the most extremist person in the Senate - and that's not for the lack of competition. And you personally may think about her as charming but it doesn't look like many people who vote agree with you on that...

Trying to answer Kamala's VORC is just a question of how fucked you thought Democrats were the moment Biden dropped out.

If you think Trump was always going to win and is a generationally talented political leader, you might say she didn't do that bad. If you think Trump is a bad candidate, she must be an ever worse candidate.

By my own metrics, she failed to hold the popular vote. That's a major failure for the Dems from a marketing perspective, and represents a bad candidate underperforming expectations.

In fairness to Rov_Scam, Kamala was the top of the ticket for just over 100 days and during that time, the race went from what looked like a sure loss under Biden to a very competitive race. I credit that entirely to the Democratic operation (including the media narrative shapers.) From my view, I would describe Harris as a poor candidate propped up by a very effective party structure.

Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.

This interview was not of a good candidate who ran a good campaign. She was handed a damn multiple choice question with pre-written softball answers, and instead of just picking A over B, she wrote in Potato. If she'd been facing an opponent whose net approval rating doesn't hover around -10 then she would have lost in a landslide.

Though I wouldn't let the Republicans off the hook here either. Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?

Though I wouldn't let the Republicans off the hook here either. Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?

It's an interesting question, especially insofar as any politicians have positive net approval ratings. Part of the problem is that a lot of well-liked politicians aren't that well-known (even if they're nationally known to people who pay any attention at all to politics). So, if by positive you mean that a majority of Americans have a favorable view of them, there is exactly one: Arnold Schwartzanegger, who has universal renown and a 59% approval rating, though a lot of this may have to do with his acting career. Number two is Trump, at 42%, also with universal recognition. If you adjust for recognition rate (and assume that those who have heard of the guy are representative of the country as a whole), Tim Scott is around 50% and Adam Kinzinger is at 65%. That's it for Republicans who have at least 50% recognition. While Scott may have a future in the party, Kinzinger's political career is pretty much over.

Just for comparison, I looked at Democrats, too. Jimmy Carter is the most popular at 61% with near-universal recognition. Others in the same boat are Obama at 59% and Harris at 54%. For those with less than Universal recognition we have Bernie Sanders (53% favorability), Liz Warren (52%), AOC (51%), Mayor Pete (54%), Cory Booker (53%), Tim Walz (55%), Gretchen Whitmer (53%), Hakeem Jeffries (56%), Mark Kelly (54%), Beto (51%), Amy Klobuchar (51%), Raphael Warnock (53%), Katie Porter (63%), Tammy Duckworth (55%), Jon Ossoff (58%), Jamie Raskin (55%), Claire McCaskill (55%), Jim Clyburn (51%), Sherrod Brown (52%), and Wes Moore (54%), plus a few others who are irrelevant. Some notable exceptions are Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman, who are all below 50%.

So, if by positive you mean that a majority of Americans have a favorable view of them,

"Net approval" = %approve - %disapprove. "Literally who?" counts zero, as does neutrality.

Do they even have any nationally well-known politicians with a positive net approval rating?

Now they do :) I mean, he won the popular vote, isn't it the ultimate approval rating?

Nah; the popular vote is a relative rating rather than absolute. E.g. if I'd been in a swing state I'd have voted for Harris, not because she is a non-awful candidate I approved of, but because she seemed like the less awful of the two. I suspect a lot of Trump voters feel the same way in reverse.

On the other hand, one reason for disapproving of a candidate you'd vote for is that you think their weaknesses will cost your team an election, and if that's the case it's possible that Trump's approval rating is shooting up right now as his more pessimistic voters realize he wasn't too much of a liability this time after all. I'm only seeing one poll post-election so far, and it's still got him at Unfavorable +1 among registered voters, but that's within the margin of error of 0 and it's a big jump from the same pollster's Unfavorable +8 a week or so earlier, so maybe he's actually up in the positive numbers now.

Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.

No she was not. She was a horrible candidate. She was universally unlikeable - which has been demonstrated many times before when she tried to get elected. She had no consistent message and vacillated between "All Biden did is also mine" and "I'm going to fix everything" - which looked completely fake. In fact, almost everything about her looked completely fake - from her demeanor to her positions to her personal history. She was unable to coherently speak on policy like politician, and she was unable to speak like a human being to other human beings. She did not attract any audience except one that would vote for an open can of surströmming if it had "D" written on it, and turned away many audiences who traditionally were Dem's strongholds. She pandered hard but it didn't work. She played "I was born in a middle class family" but nobody bought it. She made both workers and billionaires hate her. She got both Jews and Muslims endorsing the other candidate. She went all in on the Hitler thing when it should be obvious it doesn't work anymore. She was a crappy candidate who ran a weak campaign. The Party Machine is powerful, and it held what it could, and provided the money, the resources and the bodies, but turns out the Machine alone can not win, at least not yet. Our Democracy (TM) is not in a self-driving autonomous mode yet. It still needs a popular person at the helm to drive it. And Democrats chose very poorly.

I would argue they chose very poorly when they didn't oust Biden in 2023, but instead waited to the very last days and then were doomed to nominate Harris. If they did the smart thing, they could field a convincing candidate, and a convincing candidate plus the Party Machine could trounce Trump. I am so glad they did what they did instead. I am also so glad they do not seem to understand what happened to them. I wish them many happy returns.

I am also so glad they do not seem to understand what happened to them.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

Money in elections is such a curse, sometimes.

But for a lot of Democrats, the money is in winning the elections, not losing them. And yet, they are doing everything to avoid understanding why their popularity declines and people turn against them. Even if they are paid by Soros or any other deep pocketed entity - I doubt this entity would pay them for long if it sees they can not produce more power and more wins, and most of the power in the US, luckily, is still gatewayed through voter consent, so pissing off voters is an uniquely bad strategy. Yet, the left insists on it again and again.

I've seen it repeatedly stated that Democrats didn't lose votes to Trump but just had lower turnout than 2020, but is there any evidence for this other than what you stated: that Trump got roughly the same number of votes and Democrats got fewer than 2020? Just as a possibility:

2020: Trump: 10 votes / Biden: 10 votes

2024: Trump: 10 votes / Harris: 8 votes

It is possible that the same 10 people voted for Trump and 2 of Biden's voters stayed home for Harris. But it is also possible that 2 of Trump's 2020 voters stayed home and 2 of Biden's voters switched to Trump. How do you distinguish between them?

That's a good point that those are not easy to distinguish. We'll have to wait for the statisticians to get their hands on all of the data (both the precinct-by-precinct results and exit polls) and see what they can come up with. Possibly there may be a way to try to collect some more data by polling, but asking people who they voted for in the past is notoriously unreliable.

The extreme case would be if there were zero votes in cities and all the votes came from rural areas, you could be pretty sure the effect of Democratic voters staying home was a stronger effect than people switching parties. Obviously the effects will be a lot smaller and less obvious than that, and the final vote totals won't even be completed for another couple weeks, so it will take time for people who know what they're looking for to have any kind of educated guess on the matter.

IIRC city turnout was up. I suppose the Democrats in the cities could have stayed home more while the Republicans in the cities turned out more, but it does look like swing voters to a reasonable extent.

If democrats were forced to pick a 2028 candidate right now, would you advise them to pick her, or someone else?

She's a good candidate in the same way your child's crappy Christmas pageant was a good show.

...bur seriously now. Do we have to be performatively agreeable, here of all places?

She lost to Donald Trump: arguably the weakest and most divisive candidate since the Civil War: and to a degree in which even Hillary Clinton did better. At least she didn't lose the popular vote!

The one thing political candidates need to do - absolutely and without a doubt - is to get elected. She didn't get elected. The prize for getting second place in politics isn't a silver medal: it's being publicly humiliated as a also-ran loser and run out of town tarred and feathered. If Kamala Harris is a good candidate, I hope that the Democrats get many, many more good candidates.

In addition to prognostications, I'd like to voice my disdain for these postmortems… Obviously not an ideal outcome, but far from cause to hit the panic button and start realigning your policies.

I think you’re correct, and the reason we get a flood of prognostications is that the prognosticators are not arguing in good faith. They’re arguing because they want jobs. In the same way that (I contend) lawyers and bureaucrats make law and bureaucracy unnecessarily complicated in order to invent jobs for themselves assisting normies trying to navigate their regulations, so too do policy analysts try to make every event constitute a “We need a serious policy reevaluation” moment. They hope the “…therefore, hire me” is inferred by think-tank funders.

It’s hustlers all the way down.

The big thing Matt Yglesias leaves out of this list that makes him a Democrat is that he wants to expand social welfare programs and raise taxes.

But the strange part is that many of the items in his list undermine the justifications for raised taxes, etc.
If academics and nonprofits don't have a presumption of moral status, how do we justify taking people's money to fund them and using their judgements to rule the people?
If education should be run purely as a service to students and parents, what moral argument is left against school choice?
If "politeness" rules aren't supposed to be a political weapon to stifle debate, how is his preference that "bad left wing ideas should gain power" at the expense of the truth going to be enforced?

It's all self-defeating, and so I suspect a totally performative offering of peace from a position of weakness, with his fingers firmly crossed behind his back.

If academics and nonprofits don't have a presumption of moral status, how do we justify taking people's money to fund them and using their judgements to rule the people?

I mean, in the "fund" case, it's just "having people research this is diffusely positive for society, so funding it from the taxpayer internalises the externality".

Of course, there are departments whose output is negative for society (obvious nonpartisan example: marketing psychology), which that argument suggests should get no grants and should in fact have to pay the government to compensate society for their "pollution". One can question whether internalising this externality is worth the costs of implementing such a scheme, but the "axe funding" part I'm completely sold on.

how is his preference that "bad left wing ideas should gain power" at the expense of the truth

Where did he say this quote? I can't find it.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GXd0TunXoAASp0t?format=jpg one of his more famous quotes, but I forgot he said "wrong" instead of bad. It was a delightful preview of 2020.

That quote has lowered my opinion of him, although he didn't say he wanted it at the expense of the truth.

EDIT: With that said, he appears to have kinda contradicted this since, although AFAICT he hasn't specifically walked it back (besides deleting the Tweet).

I think he started walking it back with "correction: I do not want wrong left wing ideas such as 'Yglesias should be fired from Vox' to gain pow--wait no!"

Most of the worst nonprofits are funded more by wealthy donors than taxes.

True, but I've spent the last four years watching obscene amounts of government money go to them too. Over a quarter of national science grants are now for DEI programs now, for example.

And that's not counting the constant use of nonprofit propaganda as a moral bludgeon, which yglesias himself is often guilty of.

Well, that and his whole "1 billion Americans" thing which would see the U.S. turned into India.

But I think there's still room for common ground here. If the government can be made more efficient, higher taxes would be justified. I think it would be awesome to spend money to build high speed rail like they have in China. The problem is that we spend money and get nothing in return, because our government is full of useless bureaucrats.

Fix the efficiency problem, and taxes become a lot more palatable.

You know what, I for one am missing the Democrats that just want to expand social welfare programs and raise taxes. I mean, no open borders and putting thousands of migrants into hotels on taxpayer cost, no ban on combustion cars, no government censorship of speech, no taking kids from parents to change their gender, no males in woman sports, no pro-Hamas riots, no banning Jews from campuses, no camps for people who don't vaccinate, no DEI commissariat at every major institution, no calling me Nazi every time I disagree with them? I don't say I would agree with them, but that's certainly something I'd rather have in the opposing party. We could actually have an argument and see whether voters like more taxes in exchange for more services or not, and whatever would be the result, we could keep some respect for each other once we're done. Right now, it's like "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills".

Presumably he's not including parts where he thinks that the Dems are currently correct and should keep doing what they're doing (or where he thinks they should go left).

Just what the democrats need, more waffling and apologizing for their beliefs. I guess with a platform this boring and incomprehensible, nobody can be offended.

How many smart people like Matty Y are out there who are Republicans but just haven't realized it yet?

He isn't.

Everyone is a "policy wonk" or "class-first leftist" until they have to actually cast off their progressive social beliefs. Then you see how they really prioritize them. See also DeBoer, Freddie.

I don’t see how this makes him a republican. There’s plenty of issues that differentiate the two parties, and his point in this case is a set of changes/tweaks that the current party should make. It’s not an exhaustive list of what the democrats should be.

Realistically, what, if anything, is going to change from a culture war perspective because of this? Will the DNC conduct an election "autopsy" to determine what they got wrong here? They outspent and our raised Trump, a convicted felon with a negative approval rating, and still could not win. Will the Democratic party take a hard look in the mirror? Will the Republican party completely abandon moderates/the establish in favor of the winning populist rhetoric? Will nothing change at all?

I think Trump winning is a huge victory for wokeness and a huge loss for liberalism, just as it was in 2016. Trump in office will give institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent. Speaking on issues like free speech and meritocracy will become impossible, since the #Resist movement will occupy 100% of the airtime for the next four years, and anyone making the slightest criticism of leftist idpol will be labeled a Trump-supporting fascist. Young white men will be demonized at levels never seen before. Meanwhile Trump/Vance will likely erode civil rights and liberal values from the right, with things like porn bans, social media IDs, religion shoved into schools, etc. Basically, it's joever.

The level of vitriol I'm already seeing from my boomer democrat family members is even bigger than 2016 or Jan 6. Living in the blue bubble for the next 4 years is going to be hell.

Back in 2020 some people here tried to say a Biden win will the blue tribe to de-escalate, only for all the things you're warning about here to happen anyway. They'll keep on clamping down on dissent no matter what, they're doing it even in countries with no Trump. The idea they'd go easy on us if we let them win is hard to take seriously at this point.

Well from my point of view, things did dramatically de-escalate with Biden. But I think what I'm trying to say is that it's easier to critique idpol leftism when idpol leftism is explicitly in power. Trumpism is a backlash to idpol leftism, and is therefore perfectly optimized for providing it endless outrage to feed on. Trumpists and SJWs are having a conversation that I have no interest in participating in, I want to have a different conversation. If I'm over here arguing with a leftist that we should strive for equality rather than equity, it really doesn't help if a Trumpist starts yelling about how both equality and equity are for cucks. That just causes the leftist to stop listening to me.

That just causes the leftist to stop listening to me.

Maybe you should try cutting a deal with the Right instead?

Progressivism lost its mind in 2014, and their excesses have done significant damage to our nation and its institutions. Maybe it's time to cut the crazier fringes loose, rather than bankrolling them at every turn. And if you can't do that, why should we on the Right consider you distinct from them?

Maybe you should try cutting a deal with the Right instead?

Well I might have thought that was possible back in 2016. But the right are moving away from liberalism, not towards it. In 2016, Trump held up a rainbow flag, and now in 2024 his campaign is at least 25% about how transgenderism is destroying womens' sports. There was a brief time during G*mergate when we had a liberal backlash against wokeness, but the anti-SJW movement has long been replaced by unironic family values christian conservatism. On the other hand, it seems like more and more democrats are waking up to the flaws in the idpol system.

Trump held up a rainbow flag, and now in 2024 his campaign is at least 25% about how transgenderism is destroying womens' sports.

In what way is that against liberalism?

Well personally, I don't think MtF trans people should compete against women either, but it's not a political issue. It should be decided by individual sports leagues.

There's things like college sports where a women's divisions were established by a supposedly-liberal state decree in the first place (Title IX, I think). What's illiberal about enforcing that they remain women's divisions?

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Womens' sports leagues are an explicitly political creation, so their policies are a political issue.

A minor criticism, even though I sympathize with your views: what stops individual sports leagues from just all agreeing to lump transwomen in with ciswomen anyways, and leading to a sort of "market failure"? These kinds of organizations are probably prone to follow-the-leader, which is something that happens in the corporate world across many specific kinds of markets, and many sports leagues are basically just corporations anyways. I happen to agree with the take that market failures may often need government correction to cut through market actors' inability and lack of motive to solve market failures.

To a first approximation, liberal = trans because "my body, my choice". "Bad for society, thus should be prevented" is usually the illiberal take.

Sure, you can have a liberal "my body, my choice" based argument on transgenderism, but it's about adults making their own decisions about their own bodies, not about abolishing sex-segregation in sports and all other spaces. Somehow liberals managed to go on a couple centuries without arguing for that, until like 5 minutes ago.

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Well from my point of view, things did dramatically de-escalate with Biden.

Was it anything specific that gave you that impression? As far as I can tell to the extent things got better, it was a result of Reds escalating, not Blues de-escalating - Elon buying Twitter, the Bud Light boycott, Red states banning gender affirming care for minors...

But I think what I'm trying to say is that it's easier to critique idpol leftism when idpol leftism is explicitly in power.

I'm not interested in critique that doesn't result in anything.

Trump in office will give institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent.

Having a government which supports clamping down on dissent also gives those institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent. And it's a much better excuse.

By your reasoning, voting for Trump is bad for Trump supporters because of the backlash, but also good for Democrats, and you should be recommending to all your Democratic friends that they vote for Trump because voting for Trump helps the Democrats.

Having a government which supports clamping down on dissent also gives those institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent

You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture. The most egregious cancellation of all time imho (James Damore) happened under Trump. And the biggest cancellations under Biden have been by right-wingers (e.g. the ivy league presidents).

you should be recommending to all your Democratic friends that they vote for Trump because voting for Trump helps the Democrats

I don't think voting for Trump helps democrats win elections, I think it helps woke leftists gain power within the democratic party. Which I think is very bad for democrats longterm. The best thing for democrats would be to campaign hard for a reasonable, principled liberal candidate in the primary, and then vote blue no matter who in the general.

The most egregious cancellation of all time imho (James Damore) happened under Trump.

Man, we need some Catalogue of Cancellations, because I've lost track of what happened to who, and when. In any case I'd say the Twitter Files and Zucks confession of the government putting pressure to censor dissidents is probably more egregious.

The Twitter Files were mostly about attempts to censor Twitter by the deep state while Trump was President, not attempts by the Biden administration to censor Twitter. In other words, they are a point in favour of "1st-term Trump was too ineffective as President to do much about pervasive censorship," which is what @LiberalRetvrn seems to be getting at.

I'm pretty sure I recall that it was both, with a marked change in how hamfisted it was the moment Biden got into office.

You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture.

What he did was not deliberately try to make it worse which the Biden administration did. Merely doing nothing is an improvement over censoring Facebook.

You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture.

Rescinding the Dear Colleague letter, for example

Living in the blue bubble for the next 4 years is going to be hell.

Only if it remains a bubble. Musk bought Twitter, and it's interesting to note the giant seachange for Trump in young voters, those most exposed to the big social media platforms. Bezos may be starting to exert editorial control over WaPo. I would assume that Vance at least has a plan to dismantle Grievance Studies programs. You might find that that bubble bursts and people deradicalise.

(Or you might find that that bubble literally dies in nuclear fire. Never forget that awful possibility.)

I would assume that Vance at least has a plan to dismantle Grievance Studies programs

That's the problem, though. Vance isn't opposed to Grievance Studies programs for the same reasons I am. I oppose them because they're illiberal and divisive and force an absolute moral framework onto me. I'm fairly certain that Vance would replace them with something I dislike just as much.

It's going to take a huge amount of effort just to move directionally towards more fairness. Actually taking such good control of the institutions that they reach fairness, go beyond it, and tilt towards the other side is pretty much impossible.

You're assuming that fairness is some bright line in the middle of a spectrum. I think this is incorrect, there are a lot of ways to impose your will illegitimately/immorally that don't require reaching 'fairness' from a position of disadvantage first.

I'm fairly certain that Vance would replace them with something I dislike just as much.

Like what? Do you have a specific policy in mind, or is it more of a vibes thing?

Maybe wokism gets worse. It's definately a possibility. But I am not convinced. The woke policies under Biden never really moderated. They just leaned on the messaging less hard. I don't see any reason to believe they wouldn't have ramped right back up once they secured a victory. Just like Biden running on a 'moderate' veneer.

At the end of the day, Kamala was the final boss of woke ideology - an unaccomplished diversity hire who rose to the the highest level possible, unelected, annointed all through intersectionality, surrounded by true believers. Her winning would have been a confirmation of everything woke, not a repudiation.

I would agree with you if this weren't entirely politically irrelevant. It's the philosophy of vaguely autistic fandom guys. It's a story people tell themselves to play pretend. Your involvement in Democratic politics is as real as D&D licensed fiction. Nobody outside of here even hears you.

What you believe in died fourteen years ago. Get through the grief, cut it out of yourself, and go live.

The lesson is clear: do not run women

Maybe pick a woman worth running? Hillary was famously loathed by a large percentage of the country. Harris... an empty suit would have been an improvement.

Can you name a woman worth running? Hell, can you name a man worth running? Most people here would argue every president since Jefferson has been a low iq moron, which usually makes me think they either don't understand the incentives involved or drastically underestimate our politicians.

Can you name a woman worth running?

Anyone tried cloning Margaret Thatcher yet?

Hell, can you name a man worth running?

Vance is looking real, real good to me right now.

...But those aside, Harris was, legitimately, an absolutely terrible choice, and I am pretty sure she was chosen because the better candidates, male and female, saw the writing on the wall and didn't want to tank their future prospects trying to salvage an election that Joe Biden's dementia had already pretty clearly lost.

The legacy media gave her every possible advantage they could, at considerable cost to their own dwindling credibility. She couldn't do interviews. She couldn't field basic questions on policy or on her record. So they let her hide in a closet and spun their guts out trying to astroturf contentless, mean-girls-style social consensus ex nihlio, while claiming all possible policy positions to the point of obvious self-contradiction. She claimed she'd protect the Second Amendment from Trump, man.

In her prime, I can't imagine Nancy Pelosi would have been this bad. Clinton wasn't anywhere near this bad. I'm pretty sure AOC wouldn't be this bad. I can't imagine Oprah or Michelle Obama being this bad if they threw their hats in. I would strongly oppose all of those women if they ran because I disagree with their values and their preferred policies. But Kamala is all that and a bag of rancid chips. Oprah is a billionaire businesswoman, an expert on public relations and communication. She boot-strapped herself into a commanding position as one of the richest and most influential women in America. Kamala sleazed her way into a position under one of the most corrupt politicians of the modern era, made a career for herself personifying the worst stereotypes of a "tough on crime" caricature, was massively unpopular as a presidential candidate, was tapped for VP explicitly on the basis of identity-politics checkboxes, and has now lost an election to Donald Trump. She outperformed Joe Biden in zero counties in the entire nation. [EDIT] - This is false; I missed the clarification on CNN last night. Apparently she outperformed Biden in by at least 3% in 58 of 3144 counties, and presumably by less than 3% in more.

Blues need to take the L and ask themselves some serious questions about the long sequence of bad decisions that brought them to this moment.

Ah, Margaret Thatcher, universally loved and respected across the political spectrum. Not to mention a bizarre choice for a Trump supporter given her antipathy for the working class, out-of-touchness robotic character and neoliberalism. This smacks more of someone you agree with rather than an objective measure of quality or intellect, no?

Vance? Silicon valley, VC 1%er Vance who happens to have a convenient origin story and connections to an ecosystem of companies weaponizing AI to surveil our citizens?

You're missing the point. 8 years ago you were sitting here writing that Clinton was a historically unpopular candidate, manipulative, stupid, whatever. 4 years ago you were sitting here writing how useless Biden is, he can't even leave his basement to campaign, dementia means he doesn't have two functional brain cells left to rub together. 4 years from now you'll be sitting here writing that Pete Buttigieg was the worst candidate in history, who tries to nominate a goddamn secretary of transportation man, at least Kamala ticked some diversity boxes and had some funny coconut memes or something.

Most criticism of politicians is hopelessly facile and ignorant (I assume, this isn't my field) of the realities on the ground or the workings of the system we've created. And most criticism in general is just people playing Monday morning quarterback to feel smart.

Kamala was a candidate who, so far as anyone could tell, had a 50% chance of becoming president yesterday. Sure, hopefully the dems learn from the experience (insofar as they really had that much control over events), but I don't believe the over-the-top criticism of Kamala and Hilldog is warranted.

Ah, Margaret Thatcher, universally loved and respected across the political spectrum. Not to mention a bizarre choice for a Trump supporter given her antipathy for the working class, out-of-touchness robotic character and neoliberalism.

And yet she was evidently damn good at her job, and it seems to me that it ain't the same working class, nor the same neoliberalism, nor the same world for that matter. She fought for liberty and against bureaucracy and communism.

Vance? Silicon valley, VC 1%er Vance who happens to have a convenient origin story and connections to an ecosystem of companies weaponizing AI to surveil our citizens?

He's the first politician I've listened to who could bring up interesting data-points I hadn't heard of before. I'm looking forward to his presidential bid. His "convenient origin story" happens to be his actual life, born to drug addicts and working his way up to the vice-presidency of the united states. Certainly his story looks considerably better than Kamala's.

8 years ago you were sitting here writing that Clinton was a historically unpopular candidate, manipulative, stupid, whatever.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't. I was planning to vote for Hillary until Trump cinched the nomination, because I wanted the neoconservative wing of the Republican party destroyed forever. She was quite unpopular in much the way Trump is, but 2016 was a very close election. I am pretty sure that I have never agreed with the moderate talking point that Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate and the only one the Dems could have picked that would have lost to Trump. I think if Trump could beat her he could likely beat most of the other Democrat contenders. I think she's a very bad, very corrupt politician, but that doesn't make her bad at securing power or an unserious candidate in the way Kamala was.

4 years ago you were sitting here writing how useless Biden is, he can't even leave his basement to campaign, dementia means he doesn't have two functional brain cells left to rub together.

And he was, in fact, actually suffering from dementia, a problem that only got worse throughout his term. And Progressives sticking their fingers in their ears about it is how he was allowed to vegetate in office, which is why they had to dump him at the eleventh hour, couldn't get their actual talent to sign on, and were left with running Kamala. His dementia actually was real, actually cost him the race, and after more than a decade of Progressive claims that Republican presidents were senile (a common accusation against both W and Trump), they collectively missed their own candidate actually going senile right in front of them. And sure, I claim Biden was a bad president, because I think the record pretty clearly shows that his policies had numerous woeful effects in the real world. The exception, of course, was the Afghanistan Pullout, which I think was a masterful achievement and which I will defend against all comers.

I'm not on your side. I'm opposed to your candidates, because I disagree strongly with their policies and values. But I, at least as an individual, am actually trying to speak honestly here: Progressives have suffered multiple, severe unforced errors due to believing their own bullshit. Their control of the consensus narrative has made them lazy, and now that this control is failing, they're stuck in a position where the main effect their spin is having is to compromise their own decision-making. Biden was in fact too old, as was RGB when she tried to hang on till Hillary. They should have picked a running mate who could actually run for his VP, but they were too busy playing identity bingo, and besides, it was an article of faith that he was sharp as a tack. They did this to themselves.

4 years from now you'll be sitting here writing that Pete Buttigieg was the worst candidate in history, who tries to nominate a goddamn secretary of transportation man, at least Kamala ticked some diversity boxes and had some funny coconut memes or something.

I am pretty sure it is in my direct interest for Progressives to see things the way you do.

Kamala was a candidate who, so far as anyone could tell, had a 50% chance of becoming president yesterday.

I predicted a Trump win, with weak confidence, based on a lot of factors that seemed to be leaning his way. This does not appear to have been a coin-flip election; pretty much every state in the country shifted right by significant margins, with Donald Trump as the candidate. As recently as two years ago, IIRC, Democrats were still directly funding Trumpian candidates in Republican primaries, hoping that public revulsion for him and his supporters would make them unelectable in the general. But as I said above, I am pretty sure that Progressives doubling down further is pure advantage for my side. By all means, don't let me dissuade you.

I think pulling out of Afghanistan was the right call. I think how they executed was terrible. They were managing to a sept 11 timeline. That’s dumb.

Even the Biden administration gave strategic credit to Trump in trying to defend their tactical blunder. “This was the timeline Trump negotiated” was their refrain.

Yet it seems plainly obvious that if you’re going to exit the county, you retreat to your strongest position and exit from there. And you don’t leave unspoiled equipment for the enemy to use.

Why in the world would the last point of exit be the civilian airport and not the military airbase?

And yet she was evidently damn good at her job, and it seems to me that it ain't the same working class, nor the same neoliberalism, nor the same world for that matter. She fought for liberty and against bureaucracy and communism.

She was good at her job based on what, winning elections? Justin Trudeau won as many, after breaking 9 years of conservative rule, yet I doubt you think he's a particularly good candidate or Prime Minister.

As for fighting against bureaucracy and communism, these are just partisan buzzwords. 50 years ago, our ancestors were sitting in a pub bemoaning the sorry state of British politics and the terrible candidates and the country going to hell in a handbasket because the new generation was a bunch of pussies.

Not to mention it's telling that you picked a politician from 50 years ago that (I assume, based on the apparent age of your children) you were barely alive for in a country you never lived in. I'm willing to bet that 50 years from now our grandchildren will lionize the greatness of Obama and Trump without having to deal with the shitty day-to-day reality we inhabit. I'm willing to bet that very few people think [current year] politicians are particularly talented.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't. I was planning to vote for Hillary until Trump cinched the nomination, because I wanted the neoconservative wing of the Republican party destroyed forever. She was quite unpopular in much the way Trump is, but 2016 was a very close election.

Whatever - without guessing the particulars of who you have voted for, would you agree that my characterization fits a broad swathe of the at least the American public, and likely the local commentariat?

As for the 'historical unpopularity' that gets thrown around constantly - this absolutely drives me up the wall. Look at favorability polls (first figure). Insofar as Trump and Hillary were historically unpopular, they're just continuing a 70 year old trendline with vanishingly few exceptions. Do you think our politicians suddenly became retarded and unlikable in the 90s? Here's a bet for you - the next pair of candidates for both major parties will be historically unpopular (say the bottom quartile of favorability). Want to take it?

I am pretty sure that I have never agreed with the moderate talking point that Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate and the only one the Dems could have picked that would have lost to Trump.

I actually largely heard this from progressives and the right, not the center? If anyone liked Hillary it was the center. Bernie bros ain't moderates.

And Progressives sticking their fingers in their ears about it is how he was allowed to vegetate in office, which is why they had to dump him at the eleventh hour, couldn't get their actual talent to sign on, and were left with running Kamala.

Because if we had 25th'd Joe out (presumably he wasn't about to leave on his own)in the middle of the COVID and inflation shitshow and let Kamala run things for 2 years, this election just would have gone swimmingly for democrats? If you think 'the actual talent' refused to sign on this year, they 100% wouldn't have signed up in your hypothetical. Not to mention you'd be sitting here lecturing me about how stupid it was to 'allow' Joe to get elected in the primaries in the first place, or something.

And...you think progressives like Joe Biden? Is this just some Overton ploy to define Joe as a progressive such that everyone to his left is some insane fringe radical, while Trump and Vance live in the center? Public figures endorse him because they hate Trump, but Joe Biden was not the progressive candidate of choice in 2020.

And sure, I claim Biden was a bad president, because I think the record pretty clearly shows that his policies had numerous woeful effects in the real world. The exception, of course, was the Afghanistan Pullout, which I think was a masterful achievement and which I will defend against all comers.

I disagree. With the exception of inflation (and who knows whether the counterfactual recession would have been better or worse than inflation, or whether there actually was a center path that avoided both) I think he's been on point and centrist for the most part. CHIPS act and infrastructure are both great (though we'll see if either can actually be implemented in a meaningful way, there seems to be a lot of grift), the economy is doing well (just watch - the economic doomerism on the right is about to evaporate with the election alongside the voting fraud narrative), he tried to push immigration reform. The manufacturing sector is doing better under Biden than Trump. But I imagine this is an entire separate discussion.

I'm not on your side.

We're all on the same side here, brother.

Progressives have suffered multiple, severe unforced errors due to believing their own bullshit. Their control of the consensus narrative has made them lazy, and now that this control is failing, they're stuck in a position where the main effect their spin is having is to compromise their own decision-making. Biden was in fact too old, as was RGB when she tried to hang on till Hillary. They should have picked a running mate who could actually run for his VP, but they were too busy playing identity bingo, and besides, it was an article of faith that he was sharp as a tack. They did this to themselves.

And what was that mistake, not being leftist enough to inspire the workers revolution (cf Freddie De Boer, Bernie bros)? Not being centrist enough (cf Tracingwoodgrains, stupidpol, I'd guess some MSM outlets in the next few weeks) to win the suburban wine mom vote? You all agree that progressives are stupid and lazy and mistakes were made, you just completely disagree about the directionality.

Here's a different narrative - in 2020, Biden wasn't senile yet and won the primary. In 2020, the focus was on winning the election in front of you, because there's four years to worry about the next one. He governed well, although Harris got some tough assignments and the optics for both of them were bad with COVID/inflation/Ukraine/Gaza. Ending lockdowns would have enraged one section of the population as much as enacting them would another. Bombing the shit out of Gaza or taking a hard stance against Israel both would have pissed off a core constituency. Refusing to fire up the money printers may have triggered a recession that would have lost the election just as surely as inflation/idpol/whatever else actually did.

As an aside, you say identity bingo, analysts say lock down the black vote because you're an out-of-touch old white man. For all you know Biden would have lost in 2020 with a different VP pick.

I am pretty sure it is in my direct interest for Progressives to see things the way you do.

Y'know, the funny thing is Trump will probably push policies that benefit me more personally. Please cut my taxes and kill my competition from China, what do I care?

Whatever. Anyways, you think I'm an arrogant, complacent and intellectually lazy progressive who can't see the flaws in his own party. Leaving aside whether any of those are true, I just think the arguments here are lazy, superficial and mostly ignorant of the realities of governing and winning elections in America. Discussing politics is >95% hindsight bias.

I predicted a Trump win, with weak confidence, based on a lot of factors that seemed to be leaning his way. This does not appear to have been a coin-flip election; pretty much every state in the country shifted right by significant margins, with Donald Trump as the candidate.

If it wasn't a coin flip election, why did you have such weak confidence? And given your uncertainty, why would you say running Kamala was a mistake if you (and presumably the dem machine) couldn't have predicted her loss in advance?

But as I said above, I am pretty sure that Progressives doubling down further is pure advantage for my side. By all means, don't let me dissuade you.

Four years from now, conditional on the Trump faction losing the general election, will you be here saying you guys fucked up and Rs had better learn from their mistakes? Somehow, I doubt you'll take that L particularly gracefully if past experience is any indicator. I know the drill - time to reach for the fourth box, the election was rigged, America will be destroyed by a communist dictatorship.

I hope Trump is as successful as you think he will be, and that our country flourishes over the next four years.

I think the point is that Thatcher was an impressive woman, worthy of running regardless of what you think of her politics or sensibilities.

Vance?

Yes, people like Vance. I'm guessing you don't? I'm struggling to parse your criticism other than a vague hand gesture towards his previous career.

You're missing the point

I think I'm missing your point... are you suggesting that we can't criticise politicians or are you saying that you can't criticise the Dems for consistently running poor candidates since Obama?

[Kamala] had a 50% chance of becoming president yesterday

Isn't this pretty much true for every US election ever?

I think I'm missing your point... are you suggesting that we can't criticise politicians

No, I think you do get my point - it's just a bit funny that you dismiss my criticism as superficial for Thatcher and Vance, but (and I make some assumptions here not knowing you) would accept my criticisms of Harris as being a historically bad candidate. Probably Clinton as well.

The point is that almost all of these 1-2 sentence comments about Harris being an unlikable whore who sucked her dick to the vice presidency is about as substantial and knowledgeable as me saying Vance is a 1%er puppet of the SV elite. I don't think these people know anything about politics, have never worked a political campaign or crafted a bill or written a political speech.

But hey, it sure is easy to wake up the morning after and rant about how the losing candidate was historically bad and the dems are a bunch of morons.

are you saying that you can't criticise the Dems for consistently running poor candidates since Obama?

I'm saying they weren't bad candidates, depending on what you mean by bad candidate. If you strictly mean they lost elections, well, I guess Biden wasn't a bad candidate? Or do you mean something else?

Isn't this pretty much true for every US election ever?

Maybe to put it differently, would you have taken 50-50 odds for Biden v. Trump in 2020? Or would you have taken 50-50 odds for Obama v. McCain?

So far as anyone could tell, it seemed like a true toss up last night. People with money and reputations on the line with access to similar information as the most of us agreed those were the odds.

No, I think you do get my point

No... I didn't... But I do now - so thank you for explaining.

Whilst I agree that there are superficial criticisms of all candidates, the difference is that Thatcher and Vance have ameliorating qualities to them whilst it's hard to parse what positive qualities Biden and Harris have when it comes to their candidacy.

Thatcher was intelligent, articulate, charismatic and had a penchant for leadership. Vance is intelligent and articulate; I wouldn't say he's particularly charismatic but he does come across as overwhelmingly normal and down-to-earth which has a charm to it, even if you wouldn't call it charisma.

This seems to be the difference that people are gesturing towards: whilst you can come up with superficial criticisms for all candidates, Biden* and Kamala seem fairly unique in their lack of positive qualities.

*2020 Biden.

I'm saying they weren't bad candidates, depending on what you mean by bad candidate. If you strictly mean they lost elections, well, I guess Biden wasn't a bad candidate? Or do you mean something else?

No, I would say they are bad candidates. Why would you say they're not bad candidates? What positive qualities could you name? Are they great orators? Especially charasmatic? Wonkish? Great leaders? I'm really struggling to see what your argument would be here.

Maybe to put it differently, would you have taken 50-50 odds for Biden v. Trump in 2020? Or would you have taken 50-50 odds for Obama v. McCain?

Yes to Biden v. Trump in 2020 and then I was too young back during Obama v. McCain to make a call there.

However, I imagine they were close.

Campaigns spend millions trying to secure the vote of a slither of the electorate. Given how few people the campaign is actually fought over, it kind'a means that all elections are close.

More comments

Kamala was a candidate who, so far as anyone could tell, had a 50% chance of becoming president yesterday.

As far as anyone could tell bears a lot of weight here. It's not like the US flipped a coin yesterday. She had a much lower chance, we in the public just couldn't tell if the public polls were honest, artificially trying to keep it close to encourage turnout, or were afraid of predicting anything but 50%-50% because that's the safest prediction possible.

Ah, Margaret Thatcher, universally loved and respected across the political spectrum. Not to mention a bizarre choice for a Trump supporter given her antipathy for the working class, out-of-touchness robotic character and neoliberalism. This smacks more of someone you agree with rather than an objective measure of quality or intellect, no?

She didn't need to be universally loved across the political spectrum, honestly, I'd struggle to name a politician who was.

The fact is, she won three elections and was the longest serving prime minister for over 150 years. She was, objectively, an extremely successful politician.

Thatcher, though now somewhat overrated on the right, won multiple elections and completely upended the political consensus. She succeeded at destroying the dead hand of the trade unions--an incredibly popular policy that Labour had promised and failed to implement--and was one of very few post-war politicians to have genuine convictions and enough political nous to push them through.

The people who hated Thatcher really hated her, but she was clearly beyond the vast majority of her peers. And I've met many, many working class people who loved and voted for her because she rescued them from the grasping hands of the people who pretended to speak for them. Any parallels to the modern day are left as an exercise to the reader.

She outperformed Joe Biden in zero counties in the entire nation

There's a map at https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/11/05/compare-2020-2024-presidential-results/?itid=ms_1 which is indeed mostly red, but there are a few blue arrows, e.g., in Colorado.

This confusion is due to a misunderstanding from CNN last night (I saw it live) King talking to Tapper said that, and later clarified the stat is actually there's no county she outperformed Biden by 3% points.

Yes, Tapper was confused. It looks like the clarification was Harris outperformed Biden by 3% in 58 counties. That's plausible enough that I'm not bothering to check. There's 3,144 counties, so I was skeptical of claims that something didn't happen in any of them. In Henry GA, with rapidly shifting demographics, Harris improved on Biden by 9.2 points; Biden improved on Obama in the same county by 16.1 points.

Yup, repeating what I saw last night. Apologies for the confusion.

I like Tulsi, although admittedly I don't know very much about her. I think that the fact that she's a veteran would win over a lot of undecideds, and being good-looking never hurt.

Do you think if she ran a campaign and lost, the commentariat here (and elsewhere) would say I know she lost, but damn, she's a fine politician?

I'm not really sure what you're asking me. "The commentariat" aren't a hive mind.

All I know is she could destroy me in combat or debate. That is enough.

I remember my parents had hoped Condoleezza Rice would run in 2008, though by the time the primary season came around, they both agreed that she was too tainted by her association with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be a viable candidate.

I actually don't think running women was the problem. plenty of women have won positions at all other levels. It's just that the way the DNC does it is to bypass primaries and put in a woman who might do well in closed-door insider politics, but is bad at public speaking in a normal election.

Isn't "closed-door insider politics" exactly how the examples of Thacher and Merkel rose to power? I don't entirely understand the parliamentary systems used in the UK and DE, but my limited understanding is that people vote for the party and the party produces the leader primarily through "closed-door insider politics". OTOH neither Thatcher nor Merkel ever won a direct election either. This comment is admittedly from a position of partial understanding of those system.

yeah, those are parliamentary systems where the party (mostly) selects the candidate and voters simply vote for the party. very different system. But it is somewhat analogous to how American politics works in "safe" seats, like Harris's California senate seat, where you simply have to win inside the local party political machine and then they'll guarantee you a victory.

Exactly exactly. Women in the House do just fine, though how often they emerge from the recruitment process varies greatly. I honestly don't think gender matters a whole lot anymore. Sure there are some double standards still, but also some advantages for a woman (though fewer), but overall it just doesn't move the needle a lot.

Europe would like a word...

Both Clinton and Harris got where they got to because of who they slept with, and because their parties wanted a woman to be president. Compare someone like Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel, who earned their positions.

completely different circumstances

Will the Democratic party take a hard look in the mirror?

They will double down.

I both hope and legitimately think it’s possible this could be the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party.

After nearly two centuries, they might not survive this. The Whig party doesn’t exist anymore.

People say stuff like this every election. They still have the support of half the country and all the institutions. I'm pretty sure the institutions will have to go before the party does.

I do think it’s a distinct possibility that it’s really “different this time” because the institutions have tanked their credibility so completely in a way never done before, and the second Trump administration seems more primed to detonate the vest over and over again instead of cooperate.

In many ways the second Trump administration will likely be like the first, but there’s a significant non-zero chance they will pull a Milei and just start slashing and burning.

Why not? There’s virtually no downside.

Why not?

The answer, of course, is the deep state.

Also, "the institutions" includes mass media, social media, and large Internet companies like Google, and there's little that Trump could do about them. Yes, Musk got Twitter, but that's a single black swan event, and isn't repeatable.

That “why not” had a lot more punch in his first term eight years ago, but now? The man has gotten into a slew of political knife fights and came out alive on the other side.

Success breeds success, victory brings victory. You see a black swan event, but it very well might just be the opening in the armor to hammer the deep state and scoop out the soft brains.

Second term, no need for re-electing. He doesn’t need speaking fees or book tours. He’s already clearly been targeted and survived to tell the tale. If anyone capable of burning the boats behind him and conquering, it’s him.

I’m not 100% on this either, I could see him being conciliatory. But I think the deep state is much, much more vulnerable than either the black-pillers and “nothing ever happens” crowd thinks.

Me, personally? I hope what’s swimming around in his mind is similar same as mine;

“The ram has touched the wall. No mercy.”

Why not? There’s virtually no downside.

There is a lot of downside. Institutions, captured as they might be, have a lot of value. There has been a lot of pain in Argentina from Milei's reforms, and we were in much worse shape than the US already.

I’d say it’s manifestly obvious that our institutions have much less value than they did in the past.

There has to be a limit to how much they can beclown themselves and burn through their credibility until the currency they use to keep themselves afloat, reputation, is virtually worthless.

Clearly I’m not alone in feeling this, Trump has a mandate and I hope he uses it good and hard.

No, I don't think so. They've survived genuine landslides against them before (as opposed to this "slim but consistent margin against them delivering many states"). It would still be totally fair, even after this election, to say roughly half of american voters want what the Democrats are selling. There's no reason for them to go anywhere, just to do better.

When was the last time they were in such a precarious position, losing every branch of government and being at an absolute nadir of lack of trust in their favored institutions? The 19th century?

I’m not being smart, I’m genuinely asking. From my understanding of history they just got absolutely walloped on a scale not seen since before the 20th century. Am I wrong?

2004 was a rough time to be a liberal. Dubya won an election that was close, but not that close, and massively improved his numbers with Hispanic voters compared to 2000. The GOP won its fifth straight House election (and actually had a capable Speaker) and a 55 seat Senate majority. If you were a doomer, Bill Clinton was looking like he papered over a losing platform with sheer charisma and the blue dog Democrats were not quite dead but dying fast. Unless you were paying attention to Illinois politics, you'd probably not heard of Barack Obama.

For fun, here's a bit of what passed for terminally online leftism back during the W era. For bonus points, here's his predicting that Hillary would lose back in '05, and his take on the Borderers long before Scott Alexander.

Is there any proof that outraising and out funding helps campaigns ? In local elections sure. But once the national candidates are chosen. The media pretty much self-funds their preferred party. Who doesn't know about Kamala and Trump ? What does an extra dollar get you ?

Kamala was a horrible candidate. Everyone knew it. She lost. America has always voted for the more charismatic candidate, and wierdly 2020 biden did well on that front too. Kamala couldn't even place top 3 in the famously weak 2020 primaries (The whole Obama era chill grandpa routine worked well for Biden)

I hope this spurs a return to 'moderate' democrats. More Buttigieg, less AOC. Hope dems give up on their baffling support for free drug use, police abolishment and illegal immigration for good.

Is there any proof that outraising and out funding helps campaigns ?

Fundraising has a massive impact on campaigns. If Hilary Clinton had raised $200 million less, she would be President of the United States.

I think one of the most interesting lessons people often miss is that money in politics doesn't actually matter as much as most people think. People have the perception you can buy wins, and that's just... not true, broadly speaking. There's still plenty of room for more reform, but it's not a corrupt hellscape where only money talks.

With the priors a lot of people I talk to, and the cash advantage the Dems had pretty consistently, you would have seen a Harris victory.

After 2012, establishment Republicans conducted a similar autopsy and concluded they were too hard on immigration. Then the base ignored the result, and elected Trump, to some level of success.

I would love if Democrats took some time for self reflection, but elections are very noisy signals. There's no particular reason to think anything in elite culture will change because of this.

I'd also point out that Trump isn't particularly conservative or right wing. He's just a moderate populist.

It turns out that that autopsy was wrong though. Personally I think it was a complete lack of doing anything while claiming to be against it.

My prediction is that the DNC will just double down. They did it when Clinton lost, there's no reason to believe they won't do it again. I expect that after this there will be a lot of hand-wringing about how Harris lost because she's a black woman, gigantic screeds on the supposedly pernicious nature of misogyny and White supremacy in America will be penned, and Trump will be scrutinised for any hint of wrongdoing a la the Steele dossier. Expecting the DNC, their voter base, and their institutional apparatus to have any self-awareness at this current point in time is, I think, completely unrealistic. The strategy they've been going with for a while now is just to claim that it can't be anything they've done, it must be these horrible voters who are the problem. See also these exemplars from other countries: Brexit, Australia's Voice, the Irish referendum on women and family. Every time the voters vote "wrong", it is a sign that democracy itself is flawed. Perhaps much of this will be driven by strategic party-political considerations, but I think many members of the DNC certainly still believe that this tactic will help them garner support for 2028. They certainly have enough institutional clout to (try and) make it work.

Besides, the current tribal political landscape is not conducive to self-examination - oddly enough I'm reminded of the situation in many former communist countries. ln Mao's China, the horrific failure of the Great Leap Forward was attributed not to the communist system that produced it, rather it was attributed to the members of the cadres trying to sabotage their great political project. Despite the fact that the cadres acted the way they did because of the incentives created by the system, they were portrayed as secret members of the Kuomintang plotting a bourgeoisie revolution under the noses of the communist authorities, and Mao's reputation remained untouched. The ideological can never admit that what they're doing isn't working - rather, it is because their enemy is just too strong and too powerful, and it needs to be railed against even more until it goes away. These kinds of narratives are very easy to capitalise on, and I doubt one failed election will stop the DNC from using it.

As for the Republicans, I expect they will take this as a sign that populist politics are working, and it might motivate them to lean into it even more. I don't expect anyone to do anything that will decrease the temperature of the culture war. Perhaps something like a bringing back of the fairness doctrine might help prevent these partisan bubbles from forming, expose people to a more balanced information environment and stop people from creating superweapons backed by The Authorities, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

My biggest hope personally is that the DNC loses enough elections to moderate themselves significantly on the topic of idpol or discard it entirely as a part of their platform, but unless they have a very long string of losses under their belt, I think the only thing that'll happen is a doubling down. I think they'll need to be forced into having a major come-to-Jesus moment before any of this materialises. And until they stop being "woke" entirely, I'll take pleasure in their losses. I am also not of the opinion that a Trump win is a "win for wokeness", I certainly think they'll try to use a Trump win to drum up support, but I don't believe in giving your enemy what they want with the faint hope that maybe they stop stepping on you. The right way to deal with this is to make it very clear that such tantrums do not yield results, and if that entails increasing the temperature of the culture war, so be it.

My prediction is that the DNC will just double down. They did it when Clinton lost, there's no reason to believe they won't do it again.

The reason why is the Israel and Ukraine Wars, which serve as powerful wedge issues that break party lines, even as the DNC from a decade ago no longer exists.

In 2016, the DNC was able to double down because there was nothing particularly important that major Democratic constituencies or politicians wanted that Trump could give that they couldn't also get by opposing him. 2016-2020 was almost entirely domestic-focused, with few foreign policy priorities interfering. There was very little to gain for crossing the line, and so the party could be united in the name of anti-Trump by the still-credible Obama political machine who had only just barely had its first presidential failure by a narrow margin.

In 2024, the Obama political machine is in tatters. Key kingmakers (Obama, Pelosi, and now Biden) are out of politics and in many respects discredited as 3 of the last 3 Obama-machine candidates (Clinton, Biden, Harris) have cratered. The Democratic party is going through a major generational change, without the sort of iron-handed party control that Pelosi had on fundraising support. At the same time, the Democratic party has sunk substantial political capital into supporting Ukraine, and has had an internal civil war (complete with a Muslim voting block abstination) over Israel.

The DNC may try to double-down again, but that's different from the ability to. 2016 was a result of unexpectedly high Republican turnout in first-time deplorable trump voters, but 2024 has been a demonstration of low Democratic turnout. The political energy, the leadership and the unity simply are not there, even as major wedges are currently in the coalition.

There'll definitely be a campaign post-mortem -- this election is nearly as bad for them as 2012 for Republicans, and probably worse than Dukakis -- but the question of what is gonna be harder, because there's both a massive amount of blame to go around, and a massive variety of explanations and excuses, and there's a lot of the progressive sphere's decision-making apparatus that both deserves and desperately doesn't want to show up anywhere but the 'acknowledgements' page of that post-mortem.

Worst case, full Joy Reid: GOP votes were because of disinformation, minority voters are self-hating and/or disenfranchised, the working class in ungrateful for the excellent Biden-Harris economy, the margins were because of the last gasp of <hated other>, so to motivate for next election the Democratic Party needs to hit harder and reach deeper to the left. To the extent the Dems have to interact with Trump and co, the problem is resolved as not being aggressive enough. I don't think it's likely and it's definitely not a plausible explanation, but it's an attractive one because it means no Democratic party member is at fault.

Middle case, blame the campaign and economy. Harris genuinely isn't a skilled politician -- it's telling how many people from her own party outran her, as much as I hate that metric -- the last-minute swap left her little chance to build a real campaign or a positive identity separate from Biden, Walz was painful (even if you don't think he was picked over Shapiro), and broader secular trends about inflation and jobs and housing just drive too much voter sentiment. There's nothing here that's wrong, and it gives a really nice scapegoat who deserves it and isn't the unnamed professionals, but it still means little if any serious triangulation or consideration on politics.

Best case, there's a serious introspection at a policy level. The Biden-Harris maximalist immigration policies were so bad that Donald "They're Eating Dogs" Trump managed to seem more reasonable and no less untethered from reality. Trans stuff weren't a big vote-mover on their own, but the spectre of Loudon County wasn't nothing, either. You can call whatever happened with crime enforcement a policy thing, you can call it inviting police departments to have a wildcat strike, but whatever happened it pretty much sucked. Rent control, grocery store price controls, and stupidly-formed gimmick tax increases aren't real policies, they're what you do instead of having a real policy.

I'm hopeful on this, because there are genuinely a lot of spaces where there's a middle-ground position that's either factually better and/or much more politically popular than the hardline GOP one, and even if they can't get compromise they can at least make their opponents pay for refusing it. An actual immigration and refugee schema with real vetting and oversight is a lot more popular than a plain brick wall, a lot of the anti-trans and anti-gay positions only look remotely palatable when compared to a school hiding a twelve-year-old's transition from the kid's parents, there's a good few serious economic and foreign policies disasters coming down the pipe, there's a reason even Project 2025 didn't try to actually support the Second-Wave-Feminist take on porn beyond a throw-away paragraph, yada yada.

But I'm not optimistic; there's a ton of upper-echelon Dem political boosters who are very tied into the maximalist position of nearly every Dem position, and very strong institutional forces against serious introspection (and worse against cooperation-with-enemies, esp if the enemies aren't likely to want to play along). Indeed, even if federal Dems wanted to play along, there's a lot of state-level stuff that's already in motion and can't be unvoted, like New York's Prop 1 or various state sanctuary city rules.

Other worst case, the retrospective becomes They Weren't Trumpy Enough, and 2028 becomes a Populism of Presentation rather than policy considerations. Jim Carrey opens the DNC talking out of his ass sorta things. I don't think it's likely, but it's possible if the infrastructure of the party misread the situation.

Based on past performance, I would guess the worst case is the most likely one with a lot of confidence. However, past performance isn't always indicative of future performance, and I do have some hope that something like the best case will happen. Political success plays out almost entirely in votes, much like business success plays out almost entirely in profits, and if some tactic keeps losing you votes or profits, well, you can only keep following that tactic for so long before you run out of your accrued capital. 2024 may be the indication that this tactic has started to hit that breaking point; the sheer number and financial losses caused by the "woke" nature of a lot of media has added up to the point that some companies have begun to figure out that simply calling fans bigots isn't a viable corrective tactic. Perhaps the Democrats will also begin to figure this out about the electorate.

Depressingly, even taking into account all that, I'd still guess that the worst case is the most likely. It's so easy to see that any political party that actually cares about winning would choose the best case and avoid the worst case like the plague. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist, everyone knows that blaming people you don't like for your own failures is extremely seductive, even more seductive than blaming external circumstances, which is already very seductive, and everyone knows that blaming anyone other than yourself doesn't help much when it comes to improving oneself for the purpose of not repeating some failure from the past. Thus if people you like and respect are telling you that it's all the bad bigots' fault that you failed, you should be highly suspicious of the possibility that you're in an echo chamber that genuinely believes and tells you things that sound really nice to you, but which don't help you win in the future.

Which, I doubt the Republicans are any better on this, but the point of the Democratic party is that it's better than the alternatives. It's supposed to be the party of the educated and the empathetic, so much so that it actually knows the best interests of a significant portion of the population even better than they themselves do. If it can't even figure out its own best interests enough to know that any sort of blaming or placing of responsibility of failure outside of oneself is counterproductive for winning elections, then it calls into question why it's any better than the alternatives outside of simple sectarian allegiances.

Democratic attitudes definitely play into it, but the candidate herself completely failed in the second half. I think many people might find this video about Buttigieg interacting with 25 undecided voters very interesting. Pete himself is great -- but a LOT of the voters totally drew blanks when it came to Kamala's actual policies, which is so telling, and for good reason. She didn't talk about them a lot, and didn't have a full set of them to start with! She leaned on the Hillary "Trump bad" playbook instead of the Biden "do things" playbook. Even good old Mayor Pete's response to a question about why Harris wasn't being very outspoken (people noticed) was met by a kind of "well it's awkward when your boss is still President" -- he didn't actually challenge the perception, because it was accurate.

In an alternate world she could have released an actually ambitious set of changes and altered the narrative. Talk about what she wanted to actually DO. That's worth maybe a 2 point swing in swing states -- almost exactly the amount by which she lost.

I ACTIVELY follow politics and I can only name maybe TWO actual policies she proposed and actively promoted, and one of them was bad: a harebrained anti-scalping scheme, and an at-home medicaid expansion. That's literally it. That's all that comes to mind. And I'm a news junkie. That's horrific.

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)?

I consider this pretty strong evidence that the sloppiness of just spamming mail-in ballots to just about everyone successfully increased turnout in 2020. Whether you consider that rigging, illegal, totally fair, a desirable state of affairs that should be permanently implemented... whatever, it just seems like that's actually the explanation. If that's not it, we need to explain the big fluctuations in the Trump vote as well.

The voting process should select for higher agency / lower time preference voters. That’s a good thing; those are the people who should have a bigger influence on politics. It’s outside the Overton window to require an IQ test as a precondition of voting, but thankfully it’s still within the Overton window to have some very simple and reasonable measures like, requiring that someone physically travel to a polling place, or requiring that someone procure a mail-in ballot for themselves. Any slight barrier to entry is better than canvassers going door to door and telling people “just sign on the dotted line, please” in order to harvest votes.

I agree with this, but can't put my finger on the principle. It's just a vague sense that universal suffrage is a problem not a solution.

Oh sure. I agree completely. But if we’re stuck with universal suffrage, then the least we can do is require that people actually go to the damn polling place if they want their vote to be counted.

What alternative do you propose to universal suffrage?

I think people on this site have made a surprisingly (to me) good case for bringing back property ownership requirements to have the vote. That may not be the best solution (buying a house is not exactly easy depending on where you live), but I do think it's a good idea to require voters to have a vested interest in the long-term success of the country and proof that they are able to contribute positively. I used to think that universal suffrage was an obvious good thing, but I'm not so sure after seeing some discussions on it in the past.

That sounds very interesting. Would you happen to have links to such past discussions?

Unfortunately no, I wish I did.

Extra votes for my in-group.

Married men, with children born of the marriage get extra votes for their children, provided they're not drawing state benefits.

Following a discussion with friends about the electoral college last night, I came up with an idea that would select for higher agency / lower time preference voters without venturing into dangerous waters. Basically, if we're not going to have direct election of the president then we should do away with any pretense that we have direct election. My ballot shouldn't say Harris or Trump if I'm really just voting for a predetermined slate of electors to cast the real ballots on my behalf, especially since these real voters are political muckety-mucks whose names aren't even widely publicized. We should get to vote for these people directly, and they should all be selected at-large. If California has 54 electoral votes, then California voters select up to 54 names.

To take things a step further, political parties won't be listed for any of the candidates. You just get names. Running for elector is just like running for any other position; have a certain signature requirement and fee and adjust things enough so the ballot has a reasonable number of names. So when people go to vote they're presented with a ballot on which they have to select numerous candidates from a slate of names without any party identifier. There's already precedence for this; if you vote in off-year elections in Pennsylvania you'll occasionally have to vote in some nonpartisan election for the board of a special district where you have to pick something like 5 names from a list of 20, and unless you really care about the makeup of this board there's a good chance you haven't heard of any of them unless you happen to know them personally. To my knowledge no one has ever complained about this.

Furthermore, the Founding Fathers hated the idea of political parties and would be appalled to discover that they've become a semi-official part of our system of governance. I'm not advocating the abolition of parties, but I don't know why our electoral apparatus needs to provide what is essentially free advertising to people who haven't otherwise paid attention to the election. In my system, electors can advertise who they plan on voting for, and newspapers, the League of Women Voters, and other groups can publish voter guides, and everyone gets full media access. But you have to do a modicum of preparation beyond selecting one of two names that have been pushed on you ad nauseum for the past six months. Some people just won't vote, and others will arbitrarily select names, like many do in the elections I described above. But a sufficient number of actually motivated people will do their research and fill out their ballots, and these are the people who will likely decide the election.

Why all at large and not two at large and one from each district?

The idea is to optimize voting to favor the preferences of the voters who do research on the candidates and make informed decisions, as opposed to voters who turn out for Harris or Trump and then either vote their preferred party the rest of the way down the ticket, arbitrarily pick candidates, or leave the rest of the ballot blank. If you're only voting for one elector per district plus two at-large, it's easy for the parties to narrow in on their preferred candidates and run TV ads reminding you that a vote for Gene is a vote for Trump or whatever, and the uninformed electorate will have an idea of who to vote for. This would still be the case in the smallest states, but as you increase the total number of electors the less oxygen any individual candidate can get. By the time you get to 10 EV states it would be pretty much impossible for anyone to remember all the names based on osmosis alone, and the opportunity for osmosis is limited by the dearth of advertising. Ideally, the number of votes allowed would be based not on available seats but on percentage of the total slate, so that even small states would still have to potentially contend with large numbers of votes. The point is to maximize the amount of noise so the remaining signal comes from people who actually did their homework and are familiar with all of the candidates.

Seeing as the electors do, with few exceptions, respect the preferences of their electorate, I’m not seeing much value.

Why not just ban listing parties on ballots, period? It’s not going to change anything about the top races, but it’ll hit most everything at the state level or below.

For a more drastic (and probably illegal under the VRA) filter, require all ballots to be write-ins. To really get with the zeitgeist, text recognition and counting the vote will be handled by a dedicated AI. We can call it GW.

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. I have previously argued at some length in favor of abolishing absentee balloting outside of military service.

My claim isn't that 2020 was good, but that it just turns out that the simple model of 2020 has plenty of explanatory power.

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.

I hate to be that guy but source? I simply cannot take such a just-so explanation at face value without something to substantiate it. Especially by the margins we are talking about here. 20 million votes out of 150 million cast? 13% of the electorate just checked back out? Especially when the conventional wisdom is that once you get a person to start voting, they generally keep voting. This study even says the effect is magnified in "high salient elections" which 2020 most certainly was?

Voting for the first time for a high-salience election should have a higher effect on turnout in subsequent high-salience elections

Edit: Let me put it like this. Show me the people who didn't vote this time that voted in 2020. Show me a poll, show me on the street interviews, tell me about people you know. Anything at all that points to this massive hypothetical dark matter voter that hadn't shown up at all in any of the polling this year. Nobody predicted such a steep drop off in turnout this year. It wasn't even on the radar. Don't just default to it being the only possible explanation because the alternative is unthinkable.

Nobody predicted such a steep drop off in turnout this year.

I did.

https://substack.com/@sethinthebox/note/c-73271569

40% confidence isn’t very confident

Yeah, I was under-confident, as persistent problem. Still, I made the prediction...who else did?

Nate Silver predicted "a total turnout of 155.3 million, with an 80 percent confidence interval between 148.2 million and 162.5 million", which is something like 73% odds for lower turnout than 2020 (158.4m).

Nice. It's gratifying to know my gut is aligned with the most sophisticated prediction matrices and gurus on the planet. I probably would have taken the under though.

Lots of them were in Philly. I pointed out before the count was finalized that turnout did not seem that high to me, just from eyeballing it compared to 2020. And I was correct. We already knew mail in ballots were down as well. My wife voted but numbers of her friends did not and she had very little queue time, compared to 2020 when she queued for 2 hours.

I had a post a couple of months back that I was observing an enthusiasm gap for Harris in the black community, and again that appears to have been borne out. I think I even got an AAQC for it.

Trump held his numbers in Philly compared to 2020, Harris dropped somewhere near 80,000 votes compared to Biden, just in Philly.

Overall in PA black voters went from being 11% to 9% of the total from 2020 to 2024. In 2016 they were 10% for comparison.

Given Floyd (May 2020) and BLM energized those communities in 2020, i don't know how much is just reversion to the mean, and how much is Harris though.

In fact according to Reuters the black share of the vote dropped from 13% to 11% nationwide. Thats, what a few million votes right there?

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?

Harris is an awful candidate no one would have picked? She was not just personally awful at anything that requires charisma and communication, she was tied specifically to Biden's policy failures and the inherent cleavages they caused (e.g. Gaza) and lacked an ability to pivot away from them given she has no independent profile. Or, at least, not one she'd want to stand behind.

Nor could she explain why she shouldn't be held responsible for hiding Biden's condition, something that made him unpopular enough to drop out

In hindsight it doesn't seem that mysterious: Trump was supposed to win when it was Biden.

We were all just caught up in the media exuberance around Harris because Democrats went from a seemingly certain loss to having a chance and that breeds some Joy^(tm). Then the sugar rush ended.

has anyone here updated with regards to the chance of fraud in 2020?

Yes.

The chance of fraud in 2020 went down, since if the Ds did it before, they would've done it again.

This reasoning seem bizarre to me. I'm not saying there was fraud what is common background noise and especially not that it was enough to swing several states, but your reasoning seems to be the equivalent of saying "Well, if the Japanese snuck attack Pearl Harbor, surely they'd pull another Pearl Harbor" it neglects that after that sneak attack, the US was on a much different footing.

The problem being that Trump and republicans were talking about vote fraud in September 2020. If there was fraud, it was not a sneak attack, but rather something subtle enough to get by them while they were watching. So why not again?

Talking about it and actually doing something about it, especially with regards to Trump are very, very different things. Trump talked about fraud a lot but in terms of actual action, he did next to nothing to meaningfully try and thwart any. Four years of smarting over the loss and the GOP workshopping how to actually crack down on where they feel the fraud occurred is an entirely different thing. They were much better prepared this time and had a lot of lawyers working to make sure the rules were as in their favor as possible.

If this is true, you should be able to point to specific stats showing that change in preparation.

So. How many more lawyers did Trump have?

I think January 6 may have genuinely spooked them into deciding that they couldn’t pull that type of thing again in the near future without provoking a civil war.

Unless the Republicans were on the ball in 2024 in a way they weren't in 2020 - filing court cases and working around the clock to make sure polls stayed open in Red areas and poll watchers witnessed everything in blue areas. Even if they don't catch explicit fraud, their actions make it less likely to happen in the first place.

Not all votes are accounted for yet, so some (but not all) of that 15M drop will shrink.

Yes. I'd expect a minimum of 5m additional ballots for Harris from California alone to trickle in over the next week or so. This problem was one (of many) big flaws in the 2012 GOP post-mortem: early numbers for the popular vote are always wrong.

I'd expect a minimum of 5m additional ballots for Harris from California alone

CNN says that they are 58% counted, amounting to just about 10M votes -- which only leaves like 5M total there, no?

I agree that it will be a near-ish thing, but Trump leads by ~5M right now, and most non-CA (or AZ, WTF) states are pretty much done counting -- he might lose the plurality, but I think he still beats Kamala by a bit.

At least if I'm reading things correctly, that's 10M currently counted, for a total of around 17.25m ballots cast, and 7.25m remaining uncounted. 58% of that would be ~4.1m, but between county breakdowns and mail-ins breaking more toward Dem in general I'd guess 5m is a lot more reasonable minimum, giving a 12.5-6.5m split in the final vote count for the state. That'd be pretty comparable in final result to the 2020 11m-6m.

Yeah, my head math is a little off there -- even still, if she gets 5/7.5 remaining, Trump gets 2.5 and is still a couple million ahead. AFAICT there's no other big states with enough left to count (or that kind of margin) to catch her up.

Washington State has another 1.3m, Oregon and Colorado 0.6m, Arizona 1.2m, Maryland and Illinois and Utah 0.5m. I think Trump still (somehow!) wins the popular vote if the late ballots follow state-wide trends, and even if they're pretty blue, it's still either a win or so close as to be a tie. It's just not likely that total turnout is that much lower than the 2020 election as today's highlights suggest.

The election has caused me to update against the election theft theories more or less completely. It requires an extremely specific and absurdly narrow theory of the case for TPTB to have the ability and will to steal 2020 but not 2024 (or 2016), particularly when 2024 is clearly more important. No one really did anything to change the voting environment, no one was jailed or prosecuted for voter fraud, so they just decided not to do it this year? Unserious theory at this point.

While such a theory exists, I've never seen anyone propose it, so even if they started to I'd call it Texas Sharpshooter energy and move on.

Trump winning is proof that democracy works.

What is TPTB?

The Powers That Be, an old term for entrenched systems of power and the agents imbedded in them.

The powers that be, or the producers of The Bachelor. Depending on context.

the case for TPTB to have the ability and will to steal 2020 but not 2024 (or 2016)

My theory on 2016 has long been that Hillary's hubris led her to tell Bill and the party bigwigs that she'd win by 50 points even without cheating, and they said "LOL, okay then, you go, girl!"

There were irregularities, but Republicans were more alert and suspicious in 2024 in a more productive way than 2020. Republican lawyers were working around the clock to make sure polls stayed open in Red areas and poll watchers witnessed everything in blue areas. Even if they don't catch explicit fraud, their actions prevent it from happening.

Or is America simply not ready for a woman president (much less a "black" woman president)?

I really disagree with this but I don't have a way of proving or disproving it. I hate the claim and I think a large part of the reason is how impossible it is to prove. Maybe polling could work? I can say confidently (as a person who has voted for two different black men and at least one female) it played no role in my decision.

Clinton came pretty close to winning in 2016, and if things had shaken out in a different way (e.g. Obama decides he didn't want to run in 2008), she would almost certainly have become President.

Tons of countries have elected female heads of government and state. Of course, plenty of European and Anglo countries. But even outside of those, you have Rousseff, Gandhi, Aquino, Arroyo, Bhutto, Sukarnoputri, Sirleaf. Are all of their countries more gender progressive than the USA?

As far as the black aspect, if the US had a prominent black person who had run for office and won the Presidency, twice, that would be a piece of evidence that blackness doesn't preclude anything.

There is no way of proving or disproving it, since the claim is based around the SocJus notion of "privilege," which is fundamentally unfalsifiable. The claim that America is simply not ready for a black woman president isn't some categorical one about how no black woman could possibly win in 2024 due to there being too many sexist racists who would just refuse to vote for her. It's that a politician who is identical to Harris in every way except for being a white male would have won more points due to having to face less implicit bias from the media and the electorate, which would have translated to more votes going to this fictional man than the real Harris, with the gap accounting for the real Harris's loss to Trump.

Obviously, this is unfalsifiable.

Likewise, your history of voting for black men and/or white women would mean nothing to someone making this kind of claim, because, again, the claim isn't that you're one of the many vile American racists who would categorically vote against any black or female person. It's that, if these politicians were white and/or male, then you would have required less from them in order to convince you to vote for them. The fact that you voted for them even though they're black and/or female just proves how good of politicians they actually were, to overcome the biases you must have had against them and convince you to vote for them over someone more white and/or male. And that's before getting into the whole stuff about intersectionality where black women face bigotry in ways that are beyond merely combining the bigotry faced by black people and by women.

Again, obviously, this is unfalsifiable.

No.

I thought fraud was quite unlikely in 2020 on account of all the audits which found nothing. I still think it was really unlikely. We’re not talking about a few hundred fraudulent ballots flipping PA; this is a gap of millions. That doesn’t happen without leaving a trail.

Trump 2020 was running as an incumbent in a bad economy. Biden 2024 was running as an incumbent in a bad economy. Harris 2024 replaced that with a sort-of-incumbent in a bad economy. In hindsight, it doesn’t seem so surprising that she underperformed.

It wasn't actually a bad economy though.

I think I mostly wish that graph started at zero.

I really really despise people who try to exaggerate data by starting an axis at anything other than zero.

Maybe? but probably not. 2020 was just a weird year in a massive number of ways. I guess am a bit more sympathetic now to the argument that mail-in expansion and other COVID electoral changes were "spiritual" fraud.

I wouldn't have had a huge problem if Trump had been wink-wink nudge-nudge about it after 2020 instead of the tantrum he decided to throw, but apparently I don't have a clue what the median voter likes.


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