Unfortunately, I think the media has blared the things people should be caring like crazy. Problems remain:
Trump and his cult have plowed millions into “47” merch that would suddenly become worthless to them.
No, His followers have plowed millions into it and Trump received those millions.
So while funny, you just have Trump get millions more for his “48” merch.
For the politically disengaged? It is an accurate take.
In 2020, you had massive unemployment. People personally were stuck at home with nowhere they could go. Many of them saw a loved one suffer death at the hands of a pandemic, or personally get very sick. That is a direct and visceral experience of “things are bad”. They didn’t need to follow any news, study any charts, read any policy, they knew that their direct subjective experience was bad.
In 2024, things for people are largely normal, but a lot of bills are high. Grading on a curve, this is much further from a personal crisis for most folks. In fact, the grocery bills eased a bit so some people might be seeing a natural ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.
The biggest discused crisis factors in forums like this are only being considered by the politically engaged, and that’s just not most people. Whether it should be or not…
Note also that it’s not the FDA mandating those additives, the companies want them. Reducing oversight means more additives and/or worse additives so long as it aligns with the company’s interest.
All hail the brainworms, all hail the brainworms
There is a ray of hope. Historically when the GOP gets power, infighting flares up.
Trump himself has been shown to be quite malleable in the face of hollow flattery, without much in the way of things he actually cares about doing specifically, apart from whatever inflates his ego. Those different camps have had a long time to meditate on how people have manipulated Trump and are likely to be better at manipulating him Putin style.
So while they all may have decided they must be in line with Trump, they may work toward changing what policies that means. So even as they must be behind Trump, that may narrow the fixed outcome to just proclaiming Trump the most awesome president ever, with policy related stuff a bit more malleable.
I would have preferred not to risk this scenario, but for now I’m choosing to hope that there’s a more mundane path forward that avoids permanent damage to the political structure, despite this very risky situation.
Awesome, we are in a situation where I am openly hoping for the corrupt commercial outcome…
While they didn’t help, I suspect their numbers were small enough to not matter in the scheme of what happened.
The answer is likely mundane. My guess is overall turnout was lower because things didn’t feel as ‘crisis’ like as 2020. The needle for people barely aware of politics even as they vote stayed at the same place as it was in 2020: Things aren’t great, kick whoever is in office out in hopes the alternative does better. Last time they came out for Biden because Trump was at the wheel. Now they show up for Trump because the president was a democrat.
This segment of the electorate is not particularly politically aware, let alone active, and likely has little to no opinion about the broader world. The relative likelihood of them turning up at all depends on how badly things are going (less likely to show up this time compared to the unprecedented mess of 2020), and to the extent they show up they just vote against whoever is in charge that day.
However, those people are generally quiet, and so we turn our focus instead to the loudest folks proclaiming a refusal to vote for Harris.
If it was close, I would agree. It wasn’t even close by such a huge margin the more mundane factors I think are the only ones big enough to explain things.
A candidate that expressed nuanced understanding of economic principles would have been less likely to win the election.
A candidate that instead promises answers that intuitively sound right. If imports are expensive, then obviously the big business owners will build domestic and give us more money. If you get rid of immigrants, then the business owners will have to pay more for citizen workers. Simple answers that are easier for people to believe in.
Attempts to explain nuance? That ranges from nerds overcomplicating things and/or those darned liberal elites trying to truck them.
This cuts both ways. In 2020 Biden won not due to a more sophisticated understanding of things, but simply because things were bad, and the other guy therefore was the obvious choice. So to overcome an incumbent, you just have to have people believe stuff is bad, and provide some believable explanation that you could fix it.
Also now he’s convinced that God specifically saved him from a bullet and chose him…
I feel like “equally bad and good” certainly also deserves that label in this case.
I understand there’s generally nuance and all for various folks villified through history, but given the last decade of his life, his story became one of the easiest in history to break down into “bad person” without oversimplification or any vaguely acceptable case of moral relativism. More context is informative as a key part of learning of history, but it doesn’t ultimately impact ability to simplify it to “bad person”
The more nuanced data: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf
I was hoping that the ‘not all bad’ would be almost all of it. Unfortunately while it was half of it, a full half said Hitler was as good a guy as he was a bad guy, with an equal number responding unsure, which is likely leaning toward I don’t want to give a socially unacceptable answer.
https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf
12% had the rather less ambiguous responses of ‘he was at least as good as he was bad’. While 12% of folks were of the maybe defensible technicality of ‘well, even the worst person occasionally will do the right thing’, another 12% responded as ‘unsure’, which I would suspect would lean toward “I don’t want to admit a socially unacceptable answer”.
The full poll data: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf
Do you think of Adolf Hitler as. . . ?
So 12% felt he was at least as good as he was bad, 12% fell into the 'well, even a horrible person can do something right, and 12% were somehow not sure…
They wouldn’t need to bother. High risk for relatively little benefit over him nominally being in the position.
If they are going to sideline him in practice, I’d expect more of a Dick Cheney. It’s not like he’s going to stand in the way as long as he gets personally enriched/protected.
If you are talking about the in progress data, you can’t really assume much from it. Different classes of votes get counted at different times. In person versus mail in, urban versus rural. Some places had their urban in real quick, some had their urban in late.
There’s no way the population that voted Trump in by such a wide margin did not also secure the house, which is generally districted in favor of Republicans anyway
I don’t know what the final turnout figures will be, but if it is a lower turnout, I can think of a few:
Yeah but the point was about what turnout was. We know who won but it’s a bit early to discuss relative turnout compared to 2020. It is likely lower, but the specifics will be a while.
I’m going to hope that people learned from Putin how to manage Trump and more folks will be vying for influence in a competitive manner. There’s at least a chance that being aclnowledged at the big boy table will leave him somewhat less receptive to folks specifically like Bannon.