Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning. She’s been holding rallies nonstop with Tim Walz & not making her talking points about her race or gender like Hillary. She’s offering expanded healthcare, reinvestments back into public housing, wants to take on corporate greed, protect reproductive rights and chose a pro labor, pro education running mate.
Yet, she’s either barely leading or ties in most polls with a guy that:
Is a convicted felon.
Liable Sexual Predator.
Gets sentenced in November.
Has several more pending cases.
Increased Drone Strikes by 300%. (Joe Biden dosent use drones anymore).
Illegally killed an Iranian General unprovoked with a missle strike.
Increased tensions in Israel/Palestine with the Abraham Accords.
Wants war with Mexico (his words).
Tried to coup Venezuela.
Will bend the knee for Netanyahu’s potential war with Iran.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
Told people to drink bleach during the pandemic.
Is the main driving force for America’s current division.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
Tried to steal the 2020 election (Find Me 11,000 votes in GA).
Did Fake Elector Slates to pressure Mike Pence to not certify the 2020 election.
Caused a riot on the capitol that lead to his OWN supporters dying.
Just got washed by Harris in the last debate, was completely unprepared on anything but immigration (“I have concepts of a plan”).
And so much more. So seriously what is it? Is it just the attraction to bigotry/racism? Is it to end “wokeness”. Is it because Kamala is a woman of color? You can’t use the both sides argument like Hilary or Biden, Kamala is the obvious better choice. Could you imagine if Kamala had as much baggage as Trump? The media would lose their minds.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.
There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.
To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.
Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.
An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.
The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.
Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.
Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.
A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.
There’s a difference in attitude when they keep doubling down and proving their critics right. That’s how misbehaved children act. Except when you’re not a child but full grown adults who refuse to budge like when mommy used try to give you that cough syrup you don’t want it so you twist and turn your head with your mouth sealed up tight. Yeah of course people are going to laugh at you. People laughing at you on social media is no excuse. What the hell even is this logic. This is not much more than a thinly veiled reddit tier pseudo-intellectual reply. Complete with the “ill be downvoted but”, “btw I’m actually voting liberal”, and the pièce de résistance using Black people as a rhetorical cudgel.
Btw I’ll get downvoted for this reply but whatever.
Look man I don’t know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I’d expect a teenager to write. it’s not just that you’re acting like a massive asshole; You’re using insults and arguments that I’d expect a teenager to come up with. It’s the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you’d just come off looking like a massive jackass.
Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?
I think this is accurate. But I’d like to restate it.
The Left (as the apparent big tent party full of literal minorities) has been learning to deal with disenfranchisement and the feeling “that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked” for its entire existence. Because of a huge variety of factors, the Right is losing some of its influence. They are not handling this well. The Left (being well acquainted with feeling unheard) should have been able to help the Right through this transition. Due to deep seated insecurities on both sides, we are no longer able to help one another as a people. Buckle up.
I feel like a common trend is that if people generally showed more compassion for others, quite a bit would much better already. I mean for instance with vaccines, , not immediately vilifying people for not wanting the bacon, but trying to understand why. Also on the other side, antivaxxers trying to not just get pissed but trying to understand the other side. Not sure if I’m now thinking “understanding” or “compassion”, but i guess the later would be a first step to not just giving up on people, instead of getting pissed or writing them off like stupid.
But lol not gonna lie that’s hard.
I think it was easier to interact with people who made poor decision due to being illiterate on the topic because they just did the shit to themselves and that was that. Don’t get the vaccine, that’s fine. But now we are dealing with a world where every single person feels the need to not only speak their mind but scream it as loud as fucking possible.
What’s ridiculous is that we now have concepts like “canceling” someone for something they said. That the natural result of saying something stupid or bigoted. In the past people ignored you if you were an idiot or asshole. But now that people think that others should be compelled to listen we keep having platforms for obvious nonsense to be disseminated.
The culture war has been going on for a lot longer than a decade, it’s just only in the last decade or so that it’s been amped up to 11 in terms of how aggressive it’s being fought. Conservatives are almost always on the losing side of social issues that require a culture shift. Women’s suffrage, civil rights, seatbelt laws, anti-smoking laws, gay rights… the list goes on, and the fight is never quite done for some, but they always lose in the end.
The very fact that conservatives are very pro for things like coal mining that liberals are trying to legislate away create strong reasons for some people to hold their noses and vote Republican regardless of how noxious the candidate is. When their livelihoods are literally at stake and the liberal response is “Well you should have gone to college to learn a new skill or trade” it makes sense that they are corralled right into the arms of conservatives. Economic drivers are the most powerful force behind the conservative movement right now, not culture bullshit that deep down they don’t really care about. It doesn’t help that very few people understand the relationship between “the economy” as outlined by experts and “the economy” as experienced when paying for groceries or filling up their car at the pump. It doesn’t matter that conservatives almost never deliver on their promises to fix the economy and often end up sending the nation into a recession, if bad decisions on a national scale lead to temporary relief on a local scale for some, that’s what they will remember when voting next time.
Liberals need to be doing more to bring disenfranchised voters into the fold. Educating them without being condescending or dismissive would be an excellent start. Turning down the temperature in politics is not possible without also lowering the stakes, backing off of hardline positions in the short term might be the most effective way of undermining support for terrible conservative candidates.
This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.
We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.
Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.
It’s simple. Bigotry and greed. Trump plays to people’s fears that “others” will soon have the same rights they do while also assuring his rich handlers that he will make them richer. He’s convinced the poor to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Conservatism is a mental illness, it can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning
FOX “News” has effectively divided, conditioned and massaged Republicans for decades to regurgitate the message disseminated by Rupert Murdoch through their favorite flavor talking heads (Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and more recently Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters).
They went from ‘Russia bad’ in the 1980’s to ‘Russia good’ and ‘America had it wrong’. The viewers lack critical thought under scrutiny and regurgitate the talking points of their favorite broadcasters.
don’t forget rush limbaugh
Yes thank you, and for some time Glenn Beck as well. Also a dishonorable mention to Jeanine Pirro.
It’s not conservativism, conservativism has been captured by think tanks funded by oil and banking billionaires. They’re framed conservativism, gutted it, and replaced its insides with Libertarianism (and sometimes technocratic fascism), as that’s what gives them the lowest taxes, the most corporate welfare, union busting capabilities, and defends their wealth accumulation most efficiently.
They’re not good members of society, this is demonstrated in Trump’s fascism (which is based on Roy Cohn’s fascism). It seeks to destroy society, the nation, and government.
Elections in America are all about vibes. People who care about facts are nerds.
I’m actually curious.
Are there countries (ones that have a voting system) where it isn’t all one big popularity contest?
In Norway it is common to find quizzes in newspaper websites that question you on different topics and score how well you align with the various parties. They’re great at both introducing you to current political hot topics while also orienting you about the various parties that exist, of which there are far more that two that are viable to choose from.
Germany has one that they call a wahlomat.
Australia’s electoral system is far from perfect, but it seems to be less focus on the prime minister then there is on the US president.
Of course the PM still needs to be popular and electable, and we’re sliding to the right like most democracies, but I can’t imagine we could have an election like the current US cycle where no one is really talking about policy.
Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.
There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas (“my dad always voted for this candidate, so I’ll vote for his son”), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I’ve seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.
No
Yes, but we’re taught that those democracies don’t count because they’re non white.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
That’s all his financiers hear.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
That’s all his voters hear.
Everything else goes in one ear and out the other, muddied up with enough “whataboutism” and “both sides” rhetoric from the financiers to keep the voters from actually considering alternative options.
The same thing that is powering most other political figures, all of which can be termed “Populists”
People are angry about a number of things. The wealth gap is very large, they are constantly told that the reason they aren’t doing well in life is because of their own failings, whilst they watch elites with political access get away with things they can only dream of. They’re being told immigrants and/or AI’s are coming for their jobs. They’re being told they can’t have what their parents or the wealthy had because Climate Change, or because inflation.
This generates a great deal of friction, which in turn pushes people to radicalize their beliefs. You can’t continue to sell a liberal, centrist viewpoint of the world when it simply isn’t working for them. They might cotton on to “dumb” ideas, but this does not mean that they are stupid. It means that they are angry. This is is demonstrative of a deeper problem that is being very deliberately ignored or papered over, because those in power have a vested interest in keeping the gravy train running for as long as possible. The sheer scale of the problems we now have to deal with are exceeding the kinds of moves and actions most Western politicians have learned over the years, so we aren’t getting appropriate results out of our political apparatus.
In times such as these, many people will look to the past for ideas on how to deal with their current situation. They sometimes come back with bad ones, sometimes they come back with good ones, and the pre-existing power structure will do everything it can to resist both of them, because to change is tantamount to completely losing grip on power for many of the people invested in the way things are. They cannot adapt, and once gone they will never get it back.
So we have a kind of a worst-case situation with a maladaptive leadership, extreme public resentment and actual natural/physical catastrophes forming a kind of crucible that this civilization needs to endure.
The trumps/erdogans/farages/orbans/lukashenkos/putins/meleis of this world are symptoms of these issues.
You’re in a media bubble. It feels like there’s no way anyone could see it differently. The people who disagree with you are also in a media bubble and don’t understand how you could believe what you do.
For everything you said they
- don’t believe happened
- think it was a deep state plot
- believe it’s good actually and believing anything else means you want to kill babies or destroy the economy
- have never heard of it
Reality may have a leftist bias but most people don’t live in reality. Most people live in a reality constructed by corporate media. Social media is largely derivative of it.
There’s some truth to this, but if you take the effort to break out of your media bubble, to find original sources, to read documentary evidence, indictments, transcripts.
To go the other direction and track down evidence for Trump’s accusations against others,
the guy comes off even worse.
That doesn’t help you understand his supporters though. You have to wade in the shit they call news. You have to hear what they say to begin to understand them.
I hear what they say I still don’t understand them.
I highly recommend the Alt Right playbook:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&si=__UZVQ3cmJRDigR3
Judging by some of my distant acquaintances it’s something along the lines of HURR DURR GASOLINE WAS CHEAPER 8 YEARS AGO. They focus on a global commodity of all things.
Seriously, the only stuff I’ve seen from them that even approaches a policy comparison rather than “lol black lady is a ho” caliber stuff revolves around money. And some of that might actually be a valid discussion if it were correct and if it weren’t for the absurd amount of other issues.
It’s just a low-information team sport, regardless of how insane reality is.
But that doesn’t keep him in the race, there are moron candidates with moron voters in other countries but they generally drop out pretty quickly. What keeps Trump in the race is mostly the electoral college but also the first past the post voting. Trump wouldn’t have a shot at winning if the electoral college didn’t skew the value of individual votes and first past the post effectively limits the amount of candidates you can have.
That’s true, but I would amend it to say that the EC and our stupid FPTP system, plus the bias of the senate, are what’s keeping the entire Republican Party relevant.
The rabid and mean stupidity is what is keeping Donald Trump in particular in the race. The establishment might actually like to get rid of him and get back to “money good, human well being bad” like God intended, but they could not get away with it yet.
I dunno man. I got nothing. I don’t understand it either.
I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we’d caught with each other.
At the time I thought…who would buy Trump’s conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?
I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.
When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they’d talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump’s antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. “They’ll never let him win”, one of my co-workers said. I was stunned…who are “they”? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?
It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).
Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought “if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought”. And we undoubtedly are.
Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to “why is he still in the race?” ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.
He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the present, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of “others” instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.
even the idea of altruism is a lie.
Wow. You’re right. Helping others is as politicized as abortion. One of the tribes can’t even fathom uplifting their neighbors because that could be equated to socialism and it would get them kicked out of their in-group.
That explains the “virtue signaling” accusations.
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if you are rich and souless
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if you are a moron. I am tired of people saying trumptards are “misguided” or some bullshit like that. If you voted for him in 2016, sure, you could have been misled. But after his trainwreck of a presidential run, if you vote for him, you are just stupid. Straight up a dumbfuck.
Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.
I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.
And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.
That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.
Society has to acknowledge that half of its members are of below average intelligence. And we need a way to handle the lowest tenth, since they are a danger to themselves and others.
I am tired of people saying trumptards are “misguided” or some bullshit like that. If you voted for him in 2016, sure, you could have been misled
I’ve watched my in-laws change since they first voted red in 2016. Their reasoning at the time was that Obama didn’t reach across the isle enough so they voted trump. The other option was Hillary Clinton, and Trump said some weirdly populist stuff that made him further left than her on some matters, so can ya really blame them?
But since then their critical thinking skills have declined so much, their comfort with risk has increased significantly, and their ability to empathize has dropped like lead. They’ve also shown their true colors in having zero willingness to make even the smallest changes to plans to account for severe allergies or their special needs grandkids (and refuse to see the obvious mental illness and distress in some of their family too)
Quite frankly, Trump’s base is a cult of personality. These poor souls need to be deprogrammed and taught once again how to think critically, and probably temporarily disconnected from social media and cable news
I know how democrat reeducation camps are a conspiracy theory of the right, but for these people it actually needs to exist. They will not become normal again without them
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I live in Taiwan and met a guy yesterday who is moving to Taiwan because Austin is a “liberal hell hole”.
When pressed on any issues about Trump, his answer was that Biden is worse than Trump. When I asked about Harris, he just mentioned she will just copy Biden.
The funny thing is that Taiwan is by far more liberal and more progressive than Austin Texas. He seemed to like the universal healthcare and the many social services. He didn’t mind the high corporate taxes companies have to pay.
My assessment is that he is only basing his vote on vibes and feels alone. Judging from the conversation, he is more of a Bernie supporter.
Have you considered that you actually found a tankie in the wild?
I’m going to give this guy the benefits of a doubt. He sounds more misguided and brainwashed wrapped into a heavy dose of tribalism.
I watched a bunch of YouTube videos of a psychiatrist talking about Trumpism and how to undue the brainwashing. I’m going to continue to hang out with him to see if I can wake him up.
i feel like a tankie would just refer to joe as genocide joe, but maybe i’m too internet pilled?
Tankies praise China and the Soviet. He’s from Texas. I think he’s just brainwashed.
i know that part, that ones a classic, i think there are a lot more tankies or “pipelined” tankies than we think on the left, but i also don’t know shit so that’s just conjecture lol.
People from texas are really goofy though. Something about that state. It’s the florida of the inland states. Even though it’s technically not inland.
My brother in law who was ultra pro China moved to Houston and turned into an American fundie. The entire state should just leave.
damn, what a fucking weird place down there hey?
At least that’s where they all go to violate OSHA rules, and make us more money. I’ll take what i can.
Seriously. I feel the same way about Florida
他會說中文嗎？
他一句都不會講
The media is owned by rich old white men that would gladly accept fascism for lower taxes. It’s that simple.
There’s this bizarre assumption that debates shape public opinion rather than sharpen prior biases.
Liberals watched the debate and concluded Harris was normal and therefore won.
Conservatives watched and concluded only Trump is willing to speak The Truth to a hostile media and therefore won.
Undecideds don’t like either one of them for a variety of reasons. But nothing these two said on Tuesday really turned heads. It was classic Trump and classic Kamala.
I know several magahats in my family that are having doubts, not because of anything Harris said.
I think this debate was an unequivocal victory but I’m still telling everyone I know to vote
That’ll fade by election day. Trump’s strength comes from the deluge of right-wing media that bombards people. These debates are going to blotted from their brains - if not completely subverted by talk show re-edits and talk-overs - in another month.
What keeps him in the race? The lack of alternatives. No Republican candidate but Trump has even a chance to win. The GOP has no viable political program that could create a victory, all they have are the blind and dumb masses of Trump followers.
Amerikkkans.
Is there any possible way you’d ever vote Republican? If not, remember that there are people like that on the opposite side. You’re always going to have single issue voters. A huge example is anti abortion advocates voting Republican. If someone genuinely believes abortion is murdering a baby they aren’t going to care how good a candidate looks in a debate.
