I legitimately did not believe it was possible for this to happen. There’s always a hateful minority but I believe people as a whole are good. How did this happen?
There are lots of reasons this happened. Fascism is very popular (as a whole we are not good), voter suppression is functioning as planned, destabilizing education from preschool to university makes people more susceptible to fear mongers and racism, vast amounts of corporate and wealthy influence on elections who favor the party of deregulation, the DNC shifting right instead of left, etc etc etc.
Also social media sequestering people in cozy filter bubbles that distort reality.
Social media, or more precisely, algorithms designed to create ever growing engagement by feeding into confirmation bias and only showing you stuff you like, have destroyed the ability of critical thinking in a majority of people.
This doesn’t only apply to the right spectrum either, as evidenced by all the “hopium” articles here and on r/politics that were trying to construct a blue win or even a blue wave when all polls pointed to a Trump advantage. I had fallen into that trap myself. And everybody was also smugly making fun of the articles in r/conservative predicting the same thing for Trump. Well, turns out they were right.
Less “fascism is popular” and more “people are so desperate for SOMEBODY actually promising change that they’ll vote for anyone offering it, no matter if it’s good or bad.”
Status quo politics is pretty much dead in the water and arguably has been since 2016. People don’t want “I’ll keep everything on a steady course,” they want someone who sounds like they’re going to take charge, and Trump provided that.
Fascism is popular, I’m sorry but it is true. That being said your counterargument can be true, and is true, at the same time. They share the same space.
I had a short convo with a check out girl at Staples the day before election day. She saw my “I voted” sticker on my phone and started talking about how she was voting trump after work today because “we can’t give the white house to Biden again” She looked confused when I told her Biden wasn’t even running. The DNC fucked us. They waited too long to replace him and some people didn’t even know Harris was an option. They tried to prop up a corpse and then changed at the last minute. I voted for Harris but I knew she didn’t stand a chance.
The DNC has a lot of problems and blame to absorb, but at some point we have to look at the electorate. You don’t have to read the Sunday newspaper or be politically active to know who is running for president. She had two months to step outside and listen/read almost anything.
She is an ignorant, zero information voter, who is likely just regurgitating what she heard her father or boyfriend say months ago. This is the problem. America is now dominated by zombies with no critical thinking skills who crave being brainwashed by their mobile phones.
I hate to be so negative, but I simply don’t see a way out of it. The masses are being controlled more effectively than ever before and I don’t see what systemic change could magically appear to change our trajectory.
How do you think the electorate becomes this way? It’s not because of some innate failure of humans. It’s because of the massive alienation that has systematically occurred over the past 50+ years (and really since WW2) as a result of deliberate policies that have decimated communities, destroyed public education, massively widened the wage gap, ruined the housing market, and is wiping out the environment. Among many other things
Policies that are frequently pushed by Republicans, but sometimes supported and often not repudiated properly by Democrats.
Yep. Trump has a fuckin merch line. Tiny little billboards reminding people every day.
Well she did have a decent chance judging by results. It’s not like it was a crushing victory.
How do these people not see any news? Like, at all?
It amazes me how people can be so unaware of anything going on.
When all you have time to do is work and sleep, this is the result (as intended).
We’ve been seeing a see-saw effect for awhile, where without incumbency, the party last holding the Presidency loses. This reflects a general, vague dissatisfaction with the status quo, mostly felt at the emotional level instead of intellectually reasoned. The world is too complicated for the average person to really figure out, and they don’t like that. While you can distract yourself from this in innumerable ways, or paper over it with something like religion, it’ll surface when it comes time to consider new leadership.
Then, in addition to the various issues people will discuss, I think being a woman hurt Harris somewhat with latinos, where the culture prizes a more Trumpian machismo.
I’ll be very interested to see the objective agreed upon postmortem and what can be done (if anything) to save the patient going forward. This is pretty damning confirmation that the humans are not okay, Trump is like the virus government guy from the Matrix
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Imagine being insane enough to type this out when Trump’s campaign is “they’re eating the pets.”
Are you listening to yourself? Trump is crazy/senile. Many of the people that support him know this, but will continue to support him because he appoints the ® judges they want. He could be the craziest person on the planet, but his supporters just won’t care as long he can be relied upon to deliver the courts.
A month ago, I though Harris had a good chance at winning. But as we got closer to election day, ads, headlines, and commentators focused more and more on how bad Trump is, rather than what she stands for or promises. That’s why she lost. No one was going to change the minds of any Trump voters. She needed to get undecided/swing/unmotivated voters to vote FOR her, rather than vote against Trump. “We’re not going back”? Fine, I don’t want that either, but instead of repeating that over and over, how about you remind people what it means for a Harris administration to move us forward? You can’t do that because you’re keeping us in bed with Israel and people are concerned about the implications from that? Yeah, she was going to lose to the “pet-eating” douche.
Say whatever you want about Trump and his supporters, and sure, there’s plenty to disagree with. But, they had someone they were voting FOR, and that means more than being scared of the alternative.
This is a complete deflection from the primary point: Kamala ran a campaign that would have done well in 2012. Not 2024. She had no strategy, and in fact did everything she could to not differentiate or excite despite ample historical examples from Obama to Trump on how to do so.
She ran the worst campaign you could run with the billion dollars and initial support she was gifted.
Biden’s was worse
It’s still Kamala’s fault she lost, but she wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
Relentless conservative propaganda made it a close race and Harris blew it by cozying up to Republicans and using kids gloves with Trump.
I think Harris played it better than anyone had so far with handling Trump. I think her fatal mistep was believing there were hordes of rightwing never trumpers who could be swayed. She had so much momentum when she first stepped in and people thought she’d be further left than Biden, she pivoted further right than him and probably got less votes. Being a POC woman certainly didn’t help either.
She had so much momentum when she first stepped in and people thought she’d be further left than Biden, she pivoted further right than him and probably got less votes.
This is exactly how I saw the campaign go, and how my enthusiasm died when she got buddy buddy with Cheney. By the time I voted it was solidly back to ‘against Republicans’ instead of having any hope that the Dems had learned anything.
I don’t have the energy to try and sway people to do the right thing, but voting is easy enough that I’ll probably keep doing that. I should probably just stop paying attention to Dem campaigns though because it sure makes taking the time to vote for them harder each decade. Republicans trashing the country should be enough of a reminder.
What proof do you have that cozying up to Republicans hurt her.
How did she handle Trump with kid gloves?
What proof do you have that cozying up to Republicans hurt her.
No proof, just the obvious fact that cozying up to your enemies is generally a negative. How is propping up Liz Cheney going to encourage voters who oppose Republicans?
How did she handle Trump with kid gloves?
She didn’t call him ‘convicted felon Donald Trump’. She didn’t ask him how he was looking forward to his sentencing. She didn’t ask him if he wasn’t going to let him grab her by the pussy just because he was famous. She didn’t point out that he stared at the sun during an eclipse. She didn’t point out that he nominated three SCOTUS judges that overturned Roe v Wade despite claiming he supported it. She didn’t blatantly call out his lies directly, she didn’t point out that he couldn’t focus on the topic and sounds like the sundowning jackass that he is.
She took the high road, as Dems tend to do, and not be direct and clear in their criticism of Republicans. They just softball disagreement instead of stating “That is a lie and you know it.”
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I don’t think you’re wrong, but what could she have done better?
I never expected that Trump had a chance, but this is the first time he’s won the popular vote too. Something really turned people off of Harris, and I’m curious what it was.
She could have held to her no-fracking stance, broke with Biden over Gaza, not promised to build a border wall, or not promised to put a Republican in the cabinet. Any one of these might have made the difference
She was 2 minorities at the same time.
She aligned herself with (1) the most unpopular republican vice president and warmonger of our generation, (2) did not distance herself from an unpopular president, (3) did not on any level run a non-traditional media campaign all while watching the Trump campaign triple down on it.
The actual true answer is that it’s only her fault given the opportunity, but she in fact should never have been given the opportunity—Biden should have prepared to be a one term president and give years of lead time for a competent candidate to challenge the very obvious and inevitable campaign Trump ran.
Trump vote totals is sideways. Hers went down 12MM from 2020.
I live in a red state and vote blue. Trump is bad for the country. But the silver lining is that the Dems are now forced to have self reflection that they refused to have four years ago, and hopefully field a legitimately viable candidate in 2028.
The average lifespan is like 70-80+ years. All the shitheads have plenty of time to pass down their hatred and humans tend to be tribal so easily willing to accept propaganda that blames ‘others’.
The old trope about the racist uncle is relatable because of how many racist people there are.
I wonder how the Joe Rogan bros who voted for this guy will like it when Project 2025 makes porn illegal. I bet 99% of the dipshits don’t even know that is a thing.
This will probably be an unpopular take, but this my best guess at why Trump won.
On the election coverage I was watching (ABC), the biggest point they kept coming back to were questions of if people thought that the economy is better now vs when Trump was in office, and if people feel like they’re better or worse off financially that they were during Trump years. If I remember right, the poll data they showed had twice as many people say that things were worse economy/financially then they were during Trump era, vs people who thought things were better financially now.
I know that matches with my personal experience, I live in a rural area, and my company primarily does work for other small businesses. The Trump years had a huge amount of negative news, but my business grew a lot over those years. In comparison, the last 4 years have been very stagnant in growth. We’ve picked up some new clients, but many of the small businesses we did business with have closed down or had to sell to new owners. I wouldn’t say our business is doing worse, but everything costs more and our company profit/wages haven’t kept up. And I know it’s worse for a lot other businesses, at least from seeing how many I’ve seen go out of business.
A lot of the economic troubles came from Covid, so it’s not fair to place them all on the Biden administration. But I think a lot of the country is unhappy financially right now, and they think Trump has a better chance of changing that. I’m guessing a lot of the “undecided voters” that decided the election picked the option they thought would help them financially over all other considerations.
I suspect US economy is in a much worse state than it’s obvious just looking at the numbers. Most of my contact with Americans is with relatively well-off people working in the tech industry. And even they are feeling serious financial constraints. I can’t imagine how the rest is doing.
People also have the memory of a fucking brain dead goldfish, and don’t even have the mental capacity to realize that Trump’s tax plan is what we are currently under, and have been under, since Biden took office.
I agree, I think it’s 100% inflation related which has nothing to do with Biden or Harris. And inflation is already back to normal, so Trump’s economy is going to look better having done nothing at all.
It’s quite simple, and aligns with why he got in in the first place.
The economy and cost of living is still in the toilet. Trump is a protest vote because competent public servants have failed to even acknowledge that everything costs 2-3x what it did a decade ago. Sad to say, but most people don’t give a fuck about LGBTQIA+ rights, Israel, Ukraine, or anything outside of this.
Call it apathy if you want, but it’s ultimately a failure of moderates to acknowledge a better social net for people (I.e. left policies) or propping an economy by improving lives for regular people so their money goes further.
I have the same confusion about the election. Why would anyone vote for that disgusting predating geriatric fraudster incompetent convicted fellon who tanked any business he ever got into, is beyond me. But I’m not American so I can only hypothesize.
Either people don’t care or maybe thats what they like? Either way, this hatered is fully ingrained into America and it comes out in fascism and some kind of religious death cultism. This will ripple across the world for a long time.
It looks like Trump still got ~70 millions vote, like before, but Harris got 66M while Biden got 81M, so the problem looks like Democrats failed to get people to vote.
Maybe because Democrats were often lefties, workers, unionized, lower salary, lower education, etc, and they do not recognize themselves anymore in the Democratic party.
We had the same things in France with the “gauche caviar”, basically the “caviar left”, all traditional factories workers who voted Socialist for decades, didn’t recognized themselves in this caviar left so voted elsewhere like right-wing, go figure…
An outsider perspective of someone who cares a lot about US politics mostly because of Ukraine war:
Turns out actively insulting potential voters rather than giving a positive plan for the future doesn’t work very well. Somehow in the last months Harris managed to be even more racist and sexist than Trump, which is amazing.
Add to all of that complete denial about real economic problems most middle class people are facing, even going so far to say the country is doing well economically.
As I said, my personal concern is 1. Ukraine, 2. global state of LGBT rights. EU needs to step up it’s military game by a lot. But I completely understand why Harris lost. Her domestic policy is a complete failure.
Its a Good Thing Trump didn’t insult ANYBODY during his campaign and Promised his voters Economic Hardship!
Somehow in the last months Harris managed to be even more racist and sexist than Trump, which is amazing.
What the actual fuck are you talking about?
The Harris campaign sent a constant message that gender and race are the most important thing about a person and must determine their status in society.
For example black and latino people were told they must vote for Harris because of their race, women were told they must vote because of their gender. And insulted by Harris supporters if they showed any doubt.Lemmy crowd is extreme in that regard. A lot of people here don’t even see the problem with that train of thought.
No, the Harris campaign pointed out that Trump would continue the racist and sexist policies from his first term again. She wasn’t saying women should vote for her because they are women. She said people should vote for her to peotect women’s rights.
The whole ‘you don’t hsve to let your husband know how you voted’ was a logical response to conservatives making women afraid their husbands would know who they voted for.
The whole ‘you don’t hsve to let your husband know how you voted’ was a logical response to conservatives making women afraid their husbands would know who they voted for.
“your husband is secretly your enemy, lie to him”
I like to believe that most people at least like their spouse. And now you have a campaign trying to convince you your husband is an enemy. I understand it was aimed only towards those in abusive relationships, but it didn’t sound like that. Tone deaf at the very least.What reason would a woman have to lie about who they voted for other than because of an overbearing/abusive husband?
“How do you run a country where you’re walking around saying, ‘Wives should lie to their husbands. Husbands should lie to their wives’,” Gingrich said on Thursday evening’s episode of Hannity.
Trump got about the same amount of votes, but Harris got way fewer than Biden did. It wasn’t hate that won the election, but apathy that lost it.
The conditions required for fascism to flourish have been building up since the freaking 1950s.
Labour laws getting systematically stripped, unions getting crippled, corporations exploiting workers like fucking battery hens. Wages stagnating for decades, social programs stripped bare, people starting their careers with a lifetime of crippling student debt, Corporations and investors pricing housing completely out of reach, education systematically defunded, ongoing militarization of the police into armed gangs accountable to nobody, weird creepy fetishization of the military pushing unconditional support for increasingly brutal and cynical invasions and regime-changes, apologia for and allegiance to fascists like Netanyahu…
it’s literally everything that Cyberpunk 2077 was parodying, for god’s sake.
People are poor, they’re exploited to the bone, they have no secure income, they’re drowning in debt and can’t afford housing. They feel un-represented by the government, they have fuckall education, the corpo media piped into their home keeps telling them that immigrants and deviants are the cause of all their problems, they’re constantly shown how their government bombs hell out of Evil Brown People overseas and that this is a good and righteous thing, so they want more of it at home. They hark back to a mythical Good Old Days they’re constantly told about when things weren’t as bad and brown and/or LGBTQ people weren’t a thing (or could be freely lynched) and women weren’t so uppity, and they want that back; let’s try that last part and the first part will surely come with it.
You get these people, you show them a political outsider who says screw all the rules and bureaucracy, I’m going to take charge, sweep all the red tape out of the way and do all the things you know you want…
Of course they’ll get sucked in.
And of course it doesn’t matter that their figurehead is worthless and incompetent and clearly evil.
It’s not about results, it’s about emotion. People are fed up, worn out and sick of the way things are.
Trump and his degenerate shitgibbons promise to trash everything, and hurt the people their followers believe are the problem. And that’s deeply emotionally satisying.
I think one factor is that Democrats and Republicans actually hardly differ in many fundamental positions. I think the fact that an unscrupulous business man like Trump, who was once a member of the Democratic Party, can switch party affiliation just like that illustrates what I mean: there are no real alternatives, which is why election campaigns in the US need to be emotional rather than rational. That favors baseless fear mongering and empty finger-pointing that misses the real problems. I supect that many US citizens have become so accustomed to these empty election campaigns that they lost the ability to identify the lesser evil in this charade of mutual accusations far away from rational discourse. So in short I think Trump was just the better demagogue which is pretty much all that matters when reason or actual arguments are not part of the “election show”.
