Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Notes -
The big lesson here IMO should be properly understanding the mandate. It won't be learned, but it should. The American people primarily care about bread and butter topics as always, and your win on those as the "best of two evil" does not mean free reign to throw away economic concerns and start doing whatever you want. Like it or not most Americans still think of the parties as giant douche vs turd sandwich, and if you're turd sandwich, you do not pile on extra shit after a win.
But that's exactly what happened. Consider the infamous "Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you" ad. The underlying message painted Harris as an idealogue concerned about irrelevant topics like trans people, and Trump as caring about the real topics. But what did Republicans take away from this? The exact opposite of what they should have learned, they hyper focused on culture war shit. They spent their ad focus and money saying tranny 50 times in a mirror hoping to summon the voters again, and it failed.
And likewise with overreach. Voters are very clear that they don't like trans people participating in their preferred sports, but in general they actually trust Democrats more on the overall topic!. Most voters don't want big daddy government coming in and repressing people's access to hormone treatments or discriminating in employment or anything like that.
Focusing the political discussion on trans people both makes the GOP look out of touch and cruel.
This has happened with Trump on basically every topic. The average voter does not consider the US in an existential crisis that needs 100 million deportations. They want a secure border where criminals can't get in, but they don't want a border so shut down and so hard to get visas with that their favorite voice actors are barred from entering. Yes a single concert by itself isn't a big deal, but it's not just a single concert. It is just one example of the many ways that overreach and a misunderstanding of the border mandate happened. Yet putting extremists in charge who want to limit foreigners of all kinds and of all types into the country inevitably leads to these fuckups.
And then if it wasn't for all this shit, there's also Trump specific problems too. Even if you're a hardcore conservative who thinks two years of idealogical overreach is worth the political sacrifice, Trump is barely even doing that well! He's focusing on his ballroom, the reflecting pool, threatening to invade Canada and Greenland over and over! He's probably spent more time on the white house's furnishings than he did trying to pass real legislation with the trifecta. Certainly even a hardcore idealogue is well aware of how no voter gives a shit about that and watching the president ignore the Real Issues in favor of such nonsense is a bad look right?
The good news for Republicans is that the Dems won this election so hard that they might get cocky overreach on their new mandate and fuck things up. The bad news is that Trump is still president and will not only be causing new issues (if 2025 Trump is threatening to invade Canada, maybe 2028 Trump is threatening to bomb France. Who knows at this point?) but just by having the seat and being the guy in charge will be eating the blame for general problems.
Good post. Trump II has been a colossal, pathetic waste of what was really a historic opportunity for the American right. I’d add that this is the exact same error the Biden admin committed, taking a mandate for “stabilize the government and focus on things like physical infrastructure and protecting the economy” as an opportunity to go Full Woke, then getting thrown out four years later. Trump’s own personal… idiosyncrasies… just happened to turn it to 11 this time around and speedrun the effect.
Unfortunately, that opportunity only existed because of him in the first place, so you can't have one without the other.
You don’t think that a Romney Republican would have wiped the floor with Harris/Biden? Trump is a unique candidate to be sure in motivating the base, but he also won against uniquely unlikeable candidates in Clinton and Harris.
No, I don't think so. A big part of the revolt that caused Trump in the first place was overboiling frustration at the apparent uselessness of the GOP Congress. Time and again nominally Republican congresses failed to advance the ball on issues that conservatives cared about. The Tea Party movement harnessed a lot of energy and won substantial victories, which resulted in almost nothing except some tax cuts. Even at that time, the constant attempts to sell out the base on immigration and spending were infuriating. Trump's popularity was at least as much a middle finger to the GOP establishment as it was to the Democrats, so in 2016, I don't think another standard GOP Republican could get anywhere near enough of those voters to turn out.
It's possible that the disaffection of the Bernie wing of the Democratic party in 2016 contributed a lot to Trump's ability to get swing votes and even create new swing voters. Perhaps it is true that Republicans would have struggled to win without these voters in 2016, but it would have likely been a nail-biter. My view is that you are underestimating just how much everyone hated and hates Hillary, especially the self-anointed vibe that both she and Harris give off. Given the inflation, senility scandal and overreaches of Biden's term, I have a very, very hard time believing that a non-Trump Republican (Rubio is an obvious example) would not have won against Harris in 2024 - perhaps the only counterargument here is that Trump's first term was actually quite productive and good.
I think you are over-estimating how much Hillary hatred existed among the left prior to her losing to Trump. She did, after all, get about the same number of votes as the very popular Obama did in 2012 against the same Mitt Romney. Even with Trump bringing all these disaffected voters out to vote, she still did get more votes and the election was very close, so if we presume all the disaffected voters stay home, that mostly hurts the Republican and Hillary wins easily.
2016 was just kind of the beginning of incredibly hotly contested elections, i.e., ones in which Trump participates; Obama vs Romney was not nearly so intense. Plus, there is 4 years of population growth so the slightly fewer votes Clinton got vs Obama in 2016 was probably like 3% lower per capita. If Clinton is only against a normal Republican, it is very unlikely that she gets anywhere close to that turnout, while Republicans would have indeed been running against a great turnout motivator in Clinton (or, shit, Sanders; I would have voted for any candidate at all in 2016 opposing Trump or Sanders).
Regarding Hillary hatred among the left, my thinking on this is from my friends and family who, amid the 2016 election and primaries, talked about how much they hated her. As a fan of competence, I liked her, but vibes-based voters absolutely loathed her and pretty much always had.
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