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What's going to be the big apocalyptic struggle this election?
I wrote a piece over at my blog about how at this time in 2020 we were already in "2 Weeks to slow the spread", were about 1 month out from the first anti-lockdown protests, and 2 months out from the Summer of Floyd.
It seems obvious to me that all the chaos in the wider American empire concentrates around election years and seems to have the oxygen sucked out of it on off years.. 2020 is obvious, 2016 was only slightly less history changing, and even the 2008 financial crisis was an election year event.
There's a lot of really obvious candidates: Ukraine could go south really catastrophically really quick; the middle-east is speculated to kick-off with a potential Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and going shearly off the numbers the US southern border is one of the largest population transfers in human history with few precedents since WW2 or the even the 4th and 5th century.
But I don't know, maybe it's my mind trying to fit things too neatly to the 2020 framework... it feels like the election hasn't started yet, it feels like there's some shoe to drop or issue I'm missing, something as far from public consciousness as Immunology in Jan 2020, or racial politics in March 2020...
I can feel this massive issue just behind my peripheral vision that's about to draw all my attention and require its own Motte containment thread, and that will devour the media and twitter, for months on end.
I feel like there's this huge world shattering issue that's about to explode and within the next few months I'll be lamenting that I only have 24 hours in the day to read enough about it, convinced that it DEMANDS every second of my attention.... And I have no idea what it is?
-Is Trump going to die?
-Will a Nuke Launch?
-Is China about to take Taiwan?
-Are all those Chinese and foreign nationals on the southern border about to start targeting power infrastructure?
-Is there about to be a financial crisis?
-An "Internet Lockdown"?
-Hot ethnic cleansing in Europe?
-Global food chain collapse? .
Give me your best guess.
What will be the major containment thread at the Motte between now and election day?
I've seen little evidence the Democrats have a plan B aside from jailing Trump. I see constant reports that their ground game is in shambles, they are hemorrhaging in every demographic except college educated white women, and polling in nearly every bell weather or swing state is devastating to them. But they just don't seem to care. They are either very stupid, or they have assurances from the usual three letter agencies about another, more pro-active Peter Strzokian "insurance plan".
Put me down for Trump dies in prison, and somehow all the cameras were broken and all the guards were on break.
Let me start this by saying Trump could totally win with a hiccup in the economy, Biden looking old at the wrong moment, something going really bad in foreign policy, or something else off.
But, where are you seeing this idea the Democratic ground game in shambles? In reality, in basically every special election for the past few years, plus the midterms, the Democrat's have run past their prior margins, including just this past week, winning a Trump +1 state legislative seat in suburban Huntsville by twenty five points.
In addition, Biden just raised $25 million in one night, with a plan to actually get a healthy bit of funding out to state parties, all while many Republican state parties, including swing states like Michigan and Arizona, are either in feuds with each over who is actually in control of the state party, is basically in a deep fundraising hole, or in some cases, both.
Also, Trump's own small donor fundraising has fallen apart, which is why, along with the whole needing money for legal bills, is why all of the sudden he's friendlier with Chamber of Commerce types, and has done things like talk about being OK with entitlement cuts, and totally flipped on TikTok, once a billionaire with a stake in ByteDance got close to him.
Plus, on the actual primaries, even in closed primary states after Haley dropped out, she was still getting 15-20% of the vote in some of these places. Now, I don't that's representative of actually 20% of the GOP voter base, but in a close election, you need every voter you can possibly get.
As far as the polling goes, it is interesting - all the polls are showing the biggest shift since the Civil Rights Act with Trump supposedly winning 25-30% of the black vote, straight up winning the Hispanic vote, and either winning or getting close with the youth vote, but the other thing people don't mention because it make things look even weirder, is these polls usually show, because otherwise Trump would be up by like 10, is Biden is somehow turning around 30 years of movement, and winning older white voters.
Now, maybe that's happening.
But, we're not seeing this shift among non-white voters in special elections, and even in 2022, the only real shifts to the right happened in Florida, along the Texas border, and in some deep blue parts of NY & CA, all while the national vote for both African-American & Hispanic voters basically stayed steady from 2020.
In addition, polls that oversample black, Hispanic, and youth voters to get more than just a subsample with a higher margin of error show numbers much closer to 2020 & 2022.
Again, Trump can win. I even think he could get to 15% of the black vote and 45% of the Hispanic vote. The issue is, in places like the Atlanta, Dallas, Milwaukee, etc. suburbs, the bottom is falling out of the suburban vote, especially among women who are turned off by Trump, then got turned off by Dobbs. Plus, there's a new generation of 30-something's coming to the suburbs, and they're more diverse, and less conservative than the prior generation.
But, my personal belief, is here are the actual most likely results of the 2020 election.
2020 redux - it turns out, most people haven't shifted their views
Trump inside straight redux of 2016 - slight turnoff shift by minority voters, youth vote dropoff, etc.
Big Biden win - what happened to rural voters among Democrat's in the past few decades happens to the GOP among suburban voters, there's more Haley voters/supporters who decide not to turnout, Trump's non-voter base that he turned out in 2016 & 2020 have gotten bored, and the Genocide Joe types are overstated on Twitter, and it turns out young single women care more about abortion than whether Biden is old or Doordash delivery is more expensive.
With the shift of college educated voters to the democrats, I expect this to be more common. The highly educated are much more likely to turn out for non-presidential elections (republicans benefited from this in previous elections as well). But there's a ton of voters that only show up every 4 years, and only vote for president, and those demographics seem to be sliding towards the GOP.
Also worth noting the Trump was not running in those elections -- to the extent that the guy has some reality distortion field going on, it does not seem to extend to his hangers-on; this does not me that it's not still working for him.
Sure, but the issue is there's evidence like I pointed out above that's even fallen off - see Trump's small donor donations, etc.
Now, yes, the person still posting about how the 2020 election is stolen, etc. he's obviously showing up, but not all the non-college educated Trump supporters he brought out in 2016 or 2020 are as connected as people assume, and for all the talk of Biden needing every vote, so does Trump. It turns out that you do need money to actually get lower propensity voters to turn out, and the state parties in many places are in state of disaster, Trump's focused on his legal bills, and so on.
Again, Trump could still win. I'm not denying that. But, his mythical ability to turn out non-voters is slightly overrated. Especially if his campaign, instead of being about immigration and closed factories, becomes obsessed with 1/6, his trials, and so on, as appears to be happening with his current speeches.
Donno man, the guy was turning up tens of thousands for boring (?) rallies at the height of a Deadly Pandemic (tm) -- say what you will, the man can turn a crowd. The money thing I'm pretty sure he proved false in 2016 -- as I recall he raised like half as much as Hill-dawg? For Trump, the media does it for free -- Biden does too to a great extent, we'll see how he campaigns but much of his messaging is actively distasteful to the black/hispanic (and now maybe Muslim, depending on the path chosen re: Israel) demographics.
Hey, as a leftie social democratic, I'm happy the right now seems to think they can win elections without money, without state parties, running specifically on things normies despise or think is highly weird, all depending on the greatest racial realignment in American political history since the Civil Rights Act, that has not shown up in any actual elections, including in 2022.
Again, Trump can win.
But, as I said, I firmly believe a Biden 54-45 win where the bottom falls out of the college educated vote for the GOP, and the non-white basically stays stable or drifts to Trump by a point or two, but also, the non-college educated vote for Trump also falls, ironically, in part due to some of the restrictions against mail-in voting passed in GOP-controlled purple and light-blue states, is more likely than a Trump win that's more than 2016 redux.
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They do care, they’re just flailing because their options are limited. What would you do in their place, assuming you couldn’t just fix the election? People turned out against Trump because of fear in 2016 and contempt in 2020. In 2024 people just don’t care anymore.
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This is a strange one. It is a bellwether. A "wether" being a castrated male sheep. If you want to more easily keep track of your sheep you would want to put a bell on one. You wouldn't want a bell on an intact male or a female sheep given all the furious ringing that would occur.
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My one regret about the move off reddit is that we no longer have remindmebot and fantasies like this need never intersect reality.
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My position has been pretty consistently that these people (despite appearances) are not stupid. See my "running a red light in front of a cop car" analogy. The most reasonable explanation for their lack of concern about electoral outcomes is that they know that they're sufficiently insulated from said outcomes. Though I remain uncertain as to which of the many possible means of said insulation is the most likely, I lean towards the 'bureaucratic "deep state" bypasses, stymies, and ignores any attempt by Trump to do anything, just like last time but more so' view.
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Yes I think the missing crisis is that the powers that be in the left blew their load on trials. It still seems like it’s a big deal that the primary opposition Presidential candidate nearly had his property seized by the state and has criminal charges all over the place. It just doesn’t seem like it’s having the desired effect.
The thing I don’t get is it feels like someone is pulling the strings for summer of Floyd, launching dozens of cases against Trump, etc and designing these election strategies but I do not know who is the puppet master.
Fwiw Democrat political strategies seem to be failures. 2020 is likely a landslide in my opinion without summer of Floyd; it would have been 2008 with Trump taking the L for COVID happening in his watch just like 2008 was a blowout with the GOP losing because of the financial crisis. Court cases also seem to have boosted Trump. The only good thing I can say from the court cases is it seemed to elevate Trump before Desantis could get in a fight.
Massive riots and bio warfare attacks would be counterproductive this cycle because Biden is sitting in the chair to take the blame. The Great George Floyd Fracas and COVID worked because no matter what Trump did the media could light him up for it.
Lockdowns>“Trump is a tyrant!” No lockdowns>“Trump is doing nothing while millions of Americans die!” Send out Federal law enforcement and National Guard to stop rioters>“Trump is a racist tyrant!” Trump doesn’t do anything about the riots>“look at all the chaos that Trump’s America has wrought!”
None of that works with Biden in the Oval Office. You see how much trouble the Israel/Gaza thing alone has caused for Democrats, with Biden getting criticism for supporting Israel while simultaneously getting criticism for not supporting Israel enough.
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As a leftist/social democratic, there are no puppet masters. It's always weird when people assume the other side are these insane puppet master, wielding superpowers that can't be stopped. The left was like this for a long time as well, and it was annoying then. Karl Rove wasn't some Sith Lord, he was just pretty good at his job.
Like guys, there is no secret decoder ring. If anything, we on the left complain about how bad we're at politics as much as you guys do, because neither side thinks they're winning.
I'm always interested when people assume this - in every other country, regardless of ideology, the incumbent leadership gained a huge advantage, and many of them won big electoral victories. Now, inflation and other issues have run some of those politicians aground, but in 2020, they were all very popular. The only reason Trump didn't get that was not that the left would not give him any credit (see various Republican governors who had insanely high approval ratings during COVID), it's he did a terrible job, outside of the one thing his base now hates (Operation Warp Speed).
I do think a non-COVID 2020 election would've been interesting, because Trump would've had a good economy, but it was basically just the late-era Obama economy continuing, there would've been no checks going out to low-info voters, and many things people on this forum like Trump that normies don't would've been a bigger deal. I also think there might've been a bigger move among the center-right to basically sit out things, especially the people who got radicalized by COVID and then supported Trump/DeSantis/etc. harder than they would've before.
I don't mean famous people, but the owner of a HVAC company in suburban Michigan whose kind of annoyed by Trump, dislikes immigration, but also dislikes that he tired to repeal Obamacare, but hated that the country was shut down, and like the PPP loan he got. Without the latter, maybe he doesn't vote for Biden, but does he turn out for Trump?
This person is a deep-red Republican who might have qualms about their abortion policies but definitely agrees with trump’s economic and border agendas.
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There are people who like Obamacare? What would be the reasoning? From the business owner POV it seems that they'd be trying to hire less than full-time not to have to pay for health insurance.
If he wanted to spend more on health insurance for his employees, he could have done that prior to Obamacare I think.
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I don’t want to touch a lot of these because they are political narratives. Personally, I think for example Trump did the best job of anyone and you highlight two of them Operation Warpspeed and the PPP loans/economic program. The first was the most important thing for saving lives and the second was a primary reason America bounced back so quickly.
On the puppet master thing it’s because they feel coordinated. America has black criminals dying from law enforcement all the time for doing black criminal stuff. In Floyd’s case it’s using counterfeit money to by fentanyl of which put himself 80-90% of the way to his death. It makes no sense to me he wasn’t just labeled an OD. Black guy dies of fentanyl OD normally wouldn’t even make a local newspaper. Instead we had spontaneous riots in every major city and a lot of small towns. It only happens in an election year. And the timing of the riots just feels like someone is organizing. It’s like a war day Ukraine where there are battles at 20 different areas of the front where it’s obvious someone made a decision to time them together.
The same thing with the legal cases for Trump it feels like someone tried to stack them for constant news coverage and with many timed to land with key events during the peak of the election. If he had one case coinciding with the election it would seem like one person doing their things but when you have multiple it feels like someone is giving Lieutenant's battle plans.
In your case you identified Karl Rove as doing politics. In this case there is no one.
No point relitigating the cause of Floyd's death here, but social movements triggered by one emotive incident which stands for wider grievances or concerns are hardly uncommon. Alan Kurdi, Jyoti Singh, Rodney King; these are people who under different circumstances might have dropped out of the news cycle in days, or indeed never entered it, but chance would have it that their deaths (or beatings) happened in just the right time, place and manner prompt a wider consideration of some important issue.
The puppet master thesis is the “just the right time, place, and manner” is a US election. And this was all about winning an election than any real concern about black people. If Floyd had everything else happen to him and it was 2018 or 2021 he would just be another dead black man.
The first big case in this vein was Treyvon Martin and it wasn't a factor in the 2012 election. The first big police killing case of the current era was in 2014, a midterm year, and it didn't have much impact on that election. There were a number of others and they made have made an impact on some local elections, but I don't recall any precedent for it becoming a national issue at the electoral level. If it's 2020 and you're trying to manufacture an issue so you can get votes, there's already precedent to suggest that George Floyd isn't it. And there's nothing to suggest that the whole controversy even helped the Democrats. It resulted in a lot of Democrats saying a lot of dumb things about defunding police, and Biden had to specifically go against these people while campaigning. For Trump it was easy because all he had to do was keep to the party line that Floy'd death was a tragedy but there was no systematic problem with the police and we needed to stop the riots. Biden had to navigate dangerous waters. It's hard to see how anyone in May of 2020 would have thought that making a big deal out of Floyd's death would result in an advantage for Democrats.
I agree Floyd killing himself was not used well politically he the left. It becoming a bigger issue than Trayvon Martin though is the puppet master thesis. The puppet master can be bad at his job which in this case I think they made a mistake.
Also I wholeheartedly disagree that Trump just had to call it a tragedy. The right doesn’t agree with that. That implies the police did something wrong. I do not believe that. Letting the left control the narrative is something I do not agree with. A reason I vote for Desantis or Trump is because they have the balls to call out bad narratives.
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I know that's the thesis, I'm just saying you can't prove that simply by the fact that Floyd's story was covered disproportionately, since individual cases prompting a much broader movement addressing wider issues is a pretty common pattern that happens without anyone co-ordinating it. A few years before or after 2010 Mohammed Bouazizi might have sunk without a trace, but that doesn't imply that there was any puppet-master of Tunisians.
Plus, it's pretty unclear whether that summer of protests and riots actually did Biden any favours.
The protest hurt Biden. But that doesn’t negate a thesis that they thought it would was good strategy.
And of course you can never prove any theory in this day and age. We could have a puppet master in plain site (like 2020 election fraud and mail in ballots) and it would be called a conspiracy theory.
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So the left now blames exclusively themselves for their failures, and not people like the Koch brothers, Federalist Society, or alleged Russian disinfo agents?
Seems to be in contradiction with how having an internal locus of control is today right-coded, be it in the context of Black-white achievement gap or obesity.
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I figure this is because there aren't any — there's no one person, or even small group, in charge, just a "prospiracy" of numerous left-wing bureaucratic "cogs" each following personal and social incentives to produce what looks like coordinated action. No "strings," just emergent behavior.
Agree I guess it’s similar to a market economy where you have coordination but no one understands but a small piece of how things happen.
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The Time Magazine Piece about the coordination after the 2020 election makes me think this is false, and that there is a lot of coordination.
That was a zoom call about organizing protests if they lost whose attendees liked to think of themselves as Marvel heroes. Taking them seriously would be laughable.
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What’s funny to me is that prospiracy just sounds like market behavior or an emergent behavior. Of human action if not human design. Yet academic economists — even those sympathetic to the right — always dismiss prospiracy as conspiracy.
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We see a similar dynamic in Canada.
If you look at the polling numbers Pierre Poilievre's conservatives are on track for the largest majority in Canadian history and Trudeau's Liberals might drop to 3rd or even 4th place. It might be a Conservative Ultra-super-majority with a Bloc Quebecois official opposition.
And the Liberals and left seem to be doing nothing about it aside from jiggering the election date 5 days later so their government pensions vest before they leave office.
I torn between suspecting they think they have an apocalyptic event between now and 2025 that will make the polls irrelevant, or that they're just resigned to cashing out and letting the entire Laurentian Elite die under a hostile Alberta led government...
We have a similar dynamic in reverse in the UK where the Conservatives are heading toward a huge defeat. Ultimately Westminster system governments kind of sputter out after about ten years. They give up the ghost. It even happened to Thatcher eventually. Everyone in power knows the people want change regardless of type, so why try?
I've been Noticing lately that governments with any significant period of incumbency during the Covid period are tending to get hammered into the ground in the first 'dust-clears' election available. I suppose it's too much to think hope that voters are putting 2 + 2 together on the 'sky-money + forced business closure --> inflation + impending doom' thing -- but the 'inflation + impending doom' thing does seem to be enough.
I guarantee you that almost every swing Tory-Labour in the UK, Liberal-Conservative in Canada, or Labour-National in the New Zealand hasn't suddenly decided COVID policies were the wrong way to go.
They think, "it was good we got checks and didn't go crazy like the American's did opening up so soon, but bad prices rose."
Meanwhile, part of the reason, outside of general two party dominance that despite his current not great approval ratings, Biden is still outpacing most other incumbent world leaders is because regardless of what the Right and Left both think, the economy is currently the best in the world and inflation is amongst the lowest.
True -- but they are also Noticing that things kind of suck ATM and seem likely to get worse before they get better; this is what I mean by the electorates' inability to put 2 and 2 together at least not hindering them in making sure the incumbents reap what they've sown.
Note well that this isn't really a left-right thing -- the British Conservatives are probably getting hammered by a Labour party which in it's Blair iteration was to the right of the current Canadian Liberals -- who are set to be hammered by a Conservative party that is a bit incohate at the moment, but certainly very left wing by American conservative standards.
Sure, but if those parties had done what people here would've wanted on the pandemic, they would've likely lose elections in the 2020/2021 era, so at worst, they got three extra years in power, so they got to do what they likely thought was right, get celebrated for it politically, but then they lost as all politicians do.
Like, I know parts of this site likes to engage in conspiratorial-type thinking, but in reality, most politicians actually say and do what they believe on the big stuff. Poltiicians are actually far more honest today in 2024, worldwide, than they ever have been in history, because there's more feedback loops than anytime in history.
If you were a random Dixiecrat from North Carolina in 1966, you could go to DC, actually work well with your African-American colleagues in the Democratic party, vote for big-time spending bills that pushed a lot of money to inner cities, but also your district, then go back to your district, say some race-baiting stuff in some speeches, go to the opening of the bridge you got money for, slam the spending in Harlem, and easily win reelection, because nobody cares about a random House race in North Carolina.
Now, for good and ill, no politician can really pull that two step.
Most of the parties in question pulled snap Covid elections to cement their mandate (despite the dEadLY pANdemIC going on at the time) -- the timing in Canada anyways was such that a hypothetical politician with some shred of understanding about inflation could have hung in there with a Sweden-level response and reaped the rewards of a strong dollar (vs the US, always a political win) and low inflation.
You're right that most of these people probably believed in what they were doing, but the fact that the consequences were eminently predictible and they did it anyways leads me to believe (or hope at least) that some politicians might notice the correlation between "not believing stupid things" and long term electoral success/legacy. Politicians who go from 'strong minority govt' to 'scrabbling to maintain second place' are not generally treated kindly by the history books.
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"Politicians tell voters what they want to hear, but don't follow up" is conspiratorial thinking now? Don't get me wrong, as an open conspiracy theorist this is welcome news to me. The issue I tend to run into is people saying "that's not a conspiracy" when I bring forward a documented case, so it will be nice to have a reference to possibly one of the most milquetoast examples of following incentives, being deemed conspiratorial thinking by an anti-conspiracist.
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I think it's just a general vibe of "things are not good -> vote out the incumbents"
Not the best, but I'll take it!
Agreed -- one would like to think that it might act as a lesson to politicians that it may not be the best idea to jump off a bridge just because everyone else is doing it, but hahahaha not likely.
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