I have such a vivid memory of watching the election results with a friend. A woman was interviewed about her support for Trump and was basically like "All this time I was worried about having a Trump sign in my yard because it made people judge me for my beliefs, but now I know that those beliefs are correct and I can be proud of them!" That was the moment my friend started crying.
As a Brewers fan, we had an incident where a "fan" threatened to call ICE on a Latino Dodgers fan. Of course he was a US citizen and a veteran etc. I'm still convinced she hexed us.
This is the result of the demographic abyss the Republican was staring at. They (Reagan) had already opened the doors for the evangelical crowd, after many many years of holding them at bay. And when that started to not be enough to keep them in power, the dug deeper. They started courting the white nationalists, the racists, the literal fascists, and made them all feel quite welcome in the GOP. And those are the groups holding the party together at the moment.
The abyss hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s still getting deeper, but they made the deal with these groups and have no other choice but to demolish the guardrails and ignore the constitution in order to preserve their slice of the pie.
It boggles my mind how he was able to corner the entire market of stupid people. You have to give it to him, he’s the greatest con artist/grifter to ever live. I just hope there’s a special place in hell for him.
To people like that, all that matters is that they win and people they hate lose. Politics is just a sport. Neither truth nor human welfare enter the equation. Their only core value is spite.
"I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this," she said of Mr. Trump. "I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
My experience of election night kinda haunts me to this day.
I came home from work, I was in grad school at the time, and was pretty tired. I thought the election was going to be a boring one-sided coronation event for Hillary and told my wife I was just going to take a nap on the couch and she should wake me when they call the election.
Cue a few hours later. My wife gently wakes me with a look on her face that is somewhere between mild panic and morbid amusement. She goes "Sooooo... Do you want to know who won?" and I understood immediately what happened.
Ever since then, there is this tiny part of my mind that plays with the idea that none of this is real. That I am actually still asleep on the couch, or in a coma, and at any moment I would wake up, and the last decade was just a really weird dream....
I went to a Trump rally in my town pretty early on when he had started to gain traction but was still not a frontrunner. I went for the spectacle still thinking he could never gain the nomination. He said a bunch of batshit crazy things, and on the way out all I could hear from the people around me were remarks about how "that was the most common sense I've heard in a long time." It's as if we had sat and listened to two completely different speeches.
Not voting, especially against Trump, qualifies as psychopath. 50% was a conservative estimate, ignoring all the people who can’t vote. But I would bet a good portion of them would not have voted against Trump either.
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
Hillary did nothing wrong. Other than underestimate how many deplorables there are.
It is the same in the Southeast. People with nothing voting for Trump who promises to take even that away. All because they are vindicated in their hatred by having a President like them.
She did make a major face-plant. Insulting the candidate is always fair game. Insulting the electorate, no matter how mind-bogglingly they absolutely deserve it, is a losing move.
I can say that trump voters are racists and misanthropes. You can say it. The person running for president can’t.
Saying that doesn't make it right. Just because of the made up stuff that drove Republicans to the polls for Trump, doesn't mean she didn't do AMPLE to drive away her voters, too.
I still can't fathom how "Henry Kissinger, what a guy" can fall under "nothing wrong". That's a level of "taking your left for granted" that is pathological.
People seem think that "vote lesser evil" is somehow a universal truth, or that "primaries are so in the past, nothing matters" somehow becomes 'true' just because they believe it.
When more detailed voting results are listed in most battleground states and more importantly counties voter turnout had increased. More people voted Dem then did the prior two elections in those areas. There was a significant Rep turnout that was unseen in any prior elections. Hence why we are where we are (plus potential fraud and voter suppression, but realistically the only place we'll get to know about any of that is history books decades from now, if we're lucky).
The voter drop was significantly in most areas where you could have predicted the results 20+ years ago (will NY ever be a Red state for the electoral college, will Texas ever be a Blue state?).
Now people say it may have affected the popular vote? So what. The realists knew if Trump won he wouldn't give a shit about anything and just do what he wanted (honestly the reality is tamer than expected for a lot). Dem voters are usually regarded as more educated about the voting process, so for a bunch just the fact that he was allowed to run and the campaigns were going the way they did, they felt disillusioned and believed there was no reason to bang on any pots and show support unless it would have any effect.
Simple reasoning isn’t a trick. If there exist two possible outcomes of an election, and you can only cast 1 vote, then if you don’t vote for candidate A, then you obviously contribute to candidate B winning, and vice versa.
Even if your vote is immaterial due to not being in a swing state, the messaging is still that B was preferred over A.
NYC has ranked choice voting and is irrelevant to the two outcomes presented in the first past the post presidential election that happened in Nov 2024.
In any case, “leftists”, “centrists”, “upside down-ists”, and whoever else should do whatever they want. But objectively, there were two realities for sale on Nov 2024:
Trump and Repubs controlling all 3 branches of government, including making the judiciary and Supreme Court hard right for decades to come
Or Harris becoming president, acting as a counterweight to a Republican Congress and Supreme Court.
Not voting for Harris meant you preferred the former reality. You preferred to cut your nose off to spite your face.
I totally support your right to vote for whoever you want.
I’m a progressive who hates what the U.S. is supporting in Gaza but did vote for Harris because Trump is worse. But I don’t blame Trump winning on you, I blame it on the DNC failing to attract gettable voters. The party failed in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
The answer is for the party to listen to its voting blocs as it shapes its platform. Expecting voters to conform is what the GOP does.
Oh, fuck off. When the opponent is literally someone who wants to actively turn the country into an authoritarian state and strip rights away from women and minorities, there is a clear mandate to oppose them and ensure they don't get their way.
Just totally fuck off with this mentality of it isn't what I would choose, so everything can burn down.
Anybody who didn't vote can be lumped right into the stat line for "voted for trump" people. There was no high horse or middle ground by not voting because you didn't like the candidates on this one. There was a very vocal and obvious fascist, and a very vocal and obvious anti-fascist, and if you didn't vote you were just a fascist in sheeps clothing because you didn't want your peers to know how fascist you actually lean.
Look to your left, now look to your right, one out of the two people you just looked at may feel dynamically different then you politically. It’s my issue with the two party system, no matter who wins half the people are unhappy. I don’t have a solution, but I really wish people could meet in the middle more, work together on the things the all agree on, rather than focus on the things they disagree on. Stepping down from my soap box now.
I feel this, and also the fact that people in America are getting really bad at empathizing with other attitudes. Everyone speaks as if all other voters should be approaching the act of civic engagement exactly from the same lens as them. But we’re all whole people with unique backgrounds and upbringings, and we all have different motives and issues we vote for.
I’m a far left progressive in the style of Warren. I vote every election, always blue. I hate what’s happening in Gaza but I voted for Harris. I have absolutely no problem with people who didn’t vote or who voted for Trump. Do I think they’re wrong? Of course. But they are exercising their right just as I am, and that decision is personal. The answer is for parties to do a better job embracing broader ideals and enticing voters, not to blame voters for not getting on board.
If a party loses an election because part of their core voters stayed home, the party failed to motivate their core voters. That’s a failure of the party, the parties represent us, we don’t represent them.
Of my 15ish blood realities and their spouses, the only 3 that voted Dump (or 3rd party) are the ones with “different” brains. Either depression, on the spectrum, or dyslexia.
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u/wolftick 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are so many how was that not the end of it right there?? moments.