American Politics Discussion

[OrangeKhrush]

Wasnt expecting that,  I'm not sure if official by PA has been called

[Rick]

America is full of low IQ individuals. Unbelievable they’ve put him in again. 

[OrangeKhrush]

Isnt the policy the reason for the loss? If you go on key policies the Democrat regime didnt do well on anything, and if kamala couldn't be bothered for 4 years what was going to change?

[Tommy]

What a stupid country. 

[6666]

Crazy that this clown is back in but it's the Democrats' fault for thinking they don't need to try.

[RandoEFC+]

Great result for Russia. Terrible for Ukraine and potentially other Eastern European countries. As bad as Biden/Harris were on Israel, Netanyahu will be very happy with this result as well.

Western voters get stupider and stupider. All we can hope now is good old Father Time gets rid of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu for us as soon as possible to give a remote chance of the biggest global causes of dead children across the world to just maybe be replaced by something better.

Europe has to get serious about its own defence now. The days of the US being a reliable ally are behind us. Yet another day in history today where Brexit somehow looks even stupider and more damaging than it did at the time.

[Stan]

Idiots. 

[Reluctant Striker]

For suggesting in a press conference that bleach may be an answer to Covid, it's absurd he's been re-elected. For that reason alone. A generation back just any 1 of the scandal of talking such nonsense, or being impeached, or found guilty of any crime.. it would have been political career ending.

There must be some hope that he is a 1 off phenomenon though.

[Whiskey]

Banter.

[LFCMike]

Labelling people idiots or stupid for voting that way doesn't help at all. It's what happens when the alternative doesn't do anything to help those who need it most. I think Spike in a previous post covered the reasons better than I could. Those are the reasons why you end up with people like Trump in power and the likes of Farage/Reform winning seats in the UK and probably will gain more after 5 years of Starmer's Labour here in the UK

[RandoEFC+]

25 minutes ago, LFCMike said:

Labelling people idiots or stupid for voting that way doesn't help at all. It's what happens when the alternative doesn't do anything to help those who need it most. I think Spike in a previous post covered the reasons better than I could. Those are the reasons why you end up with people like Trump in power and the likes of Farage/Reform winning seats in the UK and probably will gain more after 5 years of Starmer's Labour here in the UK

The problem with this analysis is that people who come out with it are invariably people who lean further to the left than the nominal "left" option. The Labour Party tried an offer to people who needed it most under Jeremy Corbyn and suffered their worst defeat in decades.

There has to be some realism here. People haven't voted for Trump over Harris because Harris and the Democrats weren't socialist enough. Personally, I'd love the UK to have a genuine socially democratic left-leaning offer to vote for but the evidence says that the electorate at large, in the UK and in the US, just don't have the appetite for it.

Sometimes we have to step back and just admit that there's a large number of people in the US who actually like the inflammatory, faux strong-man character with undertones of white male supremacy and despotic fascism that Donald Trump plays, and that there's a bunch of low-information swing voters who see nothing beyond "my groceries are more expensive than they were 4 years ago and I'm mad about it so I'm voting for the other guy again" and a "not nice" way of describing this is calling them stupid or idiots when uninformed would be more accurate. It seems unthinkable to us very online people who find Trump's antics shocking that these people exist but go and look on Twitter to see how many Americans searched "who is Donald Trump" and "did Joe Biden drop out" and "who is Kamala Harris" on search engines over the last 48 hours to see that they exist. 

The Democrats have clearly made a litany of errors. Joe Biden should have dropped out much earlier and they should have had a genuine contest to determine who should have run instead, but there's no way that someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC running on a socialist agenda and promising to be the saviour of the Palestinians would have ended any better for them. Any time Labour in the UK or Democrats in the US dare to go any further to the left than they currently are, they get labelled as communist traitors by 90% of the media and the fight is over before they've begun.

[Tommy]

[RandoEFC+]

 

I like John McDonell but this is exactly what I'm talking about.

This guy was part of a Labour Party that put forward a genuine centre-left agenda that was emphatically rejected in the UK, and the US is largely more right-wing than the UK. You don't have the answers here buddy.

We can all eulogise about the world we want to live in but you have to be realistic about what you can actually convince people to vote for. It's a crying shame actually that his section of the Labour Party weren't in charge in the UK for the last election because the deep unpopularity of our Conservative government is the sort of exceptional circumstance you need to get a proper centre-left party into power in countries like ours, and it's probably one of the only elections in our lifetimes that they could have won and shown people what actual progressive policies can do for them.

He's right about people feeling the improvement in quality of life but again, the idea that Biden/Harris being more left-wing helping them electorally is a nonsense.

[RandoEFC+]

 

Another prominent left wing UK politician who played a role in the Corbynite Labour Party who offered a "radical, positive vision" that led the electorate to hand an 85 seat majority to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, who has convinced herself that people are voting for Trump over Harris out of their solidarity for Palestine.

Maybe left-wing politics would have more success if our most prominent left-wing politicians didn't come out with such moronic nonsense.

[Panflute]

Elections.

[Spike]

1 hour ago, RandoEFC said:

 

Another prominent left wing UK politician who played a role in the Corbynite Labour Party who offered a "radical, positive vision" that led the electorate to hand an 85 seat majority to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, who has convinced herself that people are voting for Trump over Harris out of their solidarity for Palestine.

Maybe left-wing politics would have more success if our most prominent left-wing politicians didn't come out with such moronic nonsense.

That’s exactly what happened though. Harris visited Dearborn and said the pro-Israel party lines which lead to the crowd reacting incredibly negatively. Michigan swung red and just barely, like 100,000 votes
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-dearborn-trump-gaza-war-elections

[Spike]

3 hours ago, RandoEFC said:

The problem with this analysis is that people who come out with it are invariably people who lean further to the left than the nominal "left" option. The Labour Party tried an offer to people who needed it most under Jeremy Corbyn and suffered their worst defeat in decades.

There has to be some realism here. People haven't voted for Trump over Harris because Harris and the Democrats weren't socialist enough. Personally, I'd love the UK to have a genuine socially democratic left-leaning offer to vote for but the evidence says that the electorate at large, in the UK and in the US, just don't have the appetite for it.

Sometimes we have to step back and just admit that there's a large number of people in the US who actually like the inflammatory, faux strong-man character with undertones of white male supremacy and despotic fascism that Donald Trump plays, and that there's a bunch of low-information swing voters who see nothing beyond "my groceries are more expensive than they were 4 years ago and I'm mad about it so I'm voting for the other guy again" and a "not nice" way of describing this is calling them stupid or idiots when uninformed would be more accurate. It seems unthinkable to us very online people who find Trump's antics shocking that these people exist but go and look on Twitter to see how many Americans searched "who is Donald Trump" and "did Joe Biden drop out" and "who is Kamala Harris" on search engines over the last 48 hours to see that they exist. 

The Democrats have clearly made a litany of errors. Joe Biden should have dropped out much earlier and they should have had a genuine contest to determine who should have run instead, but there's no way that someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC running on a socialist agenda and promising to be the saviour of the Palestinians would have ended any better for them. Any time Labour in the UK or Democrats in the US dare to go any further to the left than they currently are, they get labelled as communist traitors by 90% of the media and the fight is over before they've begun.

They label them communist regardless, Trump consistently called Harris a Marxist this campaign, so policy has literally nothing to do with that. The Cold War ensured that cultural quirk.

Sanders changed the Overton window for a lot of people in 2016, no candidate had ever sparked such interest and popularity with his policies , that was life changing campaign for a lot of people. This was nearly a purely grassroots campaign so it does show a massive appetite that Americans can have for positive policy making, just not enough to break the institutions set up, but it was closer than it had ever been. Narrowly lost out on the nomination to Clinton, that’s the closest the Democrats have had on moving towards the left, they literally never have done so in a presidential election. Harris came in on a milquetoast policy agenda echoing a weak knee republican platform from the 2000s and lost.

Redlining, gerrymandering, corporate interests causes these elections to have the results they do. People vote against their interests not because they are inherently conservative but because they are told to be conservative by figures and institutions they trust, they prey on their fear and insecurity. Some votes are worth more than others, that’s just a fact.

 

[6666]

Will be interesting what the final number is in terms of the "popular vote". At current count, Trump is around 3 mil fewer than in 2020. Dems are around 15 mil fewer than in 2020.

Lower turnout or people voting for other parties? We'll see in the end.

[Dr. Gonzo]

2 hours ago, RandoEFC said:

 

Another prominent left wing UK politician who played a role in the Corbynite Labour Party who offered a "radical, positive vision" that led the electorate to hand an 85 seat majority to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives, who has convinced herself that people are voting for Trump over Harris out of their solidarity for Palestine.

Maybe left-wing politics would have more success if our most prominent left-wing politicians didn't come out with such moronic nonsense.

Think those people are in for a surprise when they find out how close Trump and Netanyahu are lol

[Spike]

5 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Think those people are in for a surprise when they find out how close Trump and Netanyahu are lol

I wonder how many abstained or voted for Jill Stein. Dems lost by 100,000 and Stein did get a decent turnout…

[RandoEFC+]

7 minutes ago, Spike said:

They label them communist regardless, Trump consistently called Harris a Marxist this campaign, so policy has literally nothing to do with that.

This is true but when the "left option" is just not aggressively right wing, the energy with which this is done is a lot lower than when the "left option" actually dares to flirt with a bit of mild social democracy. Again, see the media establishment treatment of Corbyn in the UK vs. its treatment of Starmer. In both of those instances, the opponent and the biggest head-bangers in the media continued to pursue the Marxist/Communist line but it doesn't get nearly as much traction in the mainstream.

46 minutes ago, Spike said:

That’s exactly what happened though. Harris visited Dearborn and said the pro-Israel party lines which lead to the crowd reacting incredibly negatively. Michigan swung red and just barely, like 100,000 votes
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-dearborn-trump-gaza-war-elections

I know Harris will have lost voters to Jill Stein or other third parties because of her stance on Israel as part of the previous administration. There was some Harris > Trump movement among Muslim voters though apparently which is baffling. The problem is that any leader of the US that breaks from the pro-Israel status quo might save 20k Muslim votes here and there but they'll take serious damage elsewhere.

You're not wrong I just can't take the smug leftie posturing on "well if only Kamala Harris hadn't committed such a big genocide". Those voters are perfectly entitled to use their vote as a protest.

13 minutes ago, Spike said:

Redlining, gerrymandering, corporate interests causes these elections to have the results they do. People vote against their interests not because they are inherently conservative but because they are told to be conservative by figures and institutions they trust, they prey on their fear and insecurity. Some votes are worth more than others, that’s just a fact.

Yep, shite.

[Spike]

4 minutes ago, RandoEFC said:

This is true but when the "left option" is just not aggressively right wing, the energy with which this is done is a lot lower than when the "left option" actually dares to flirt with a bit of mild social democracy. Again, see the media establishment treatment of Corbyn in the UK vs. its treatment of Starmer. In both of those instances, the opponent and the biggest head-bangers in the media continued to pursue the Marxist/Communist line but it doesn't get nearly as much traction in the mainstream.

I know Harris will have lost voters to Jill Stein or other third parties because of her stance on Israel as part of the previous administration. There was some Harris > Trump movement among Muslim voters though apparently which is baffling. The problem is that any leader of the US that breaks from the pro-Israel status quo might save 20k Muslim votes here and there but they'll take serious damage elsewhere.

You're not wrong I just can't take the smug leftie posturing on "well if only Kamala Harris hadn't committed such a big genocide". Those voters are perfectly entitled to use their vote as a protest.

Yep, shite.

That’s the UK. You cannot compare the two, the UK legit had a decent left policy that lost, they USA has never had that in a presidential election and the closet it came aaa purely because of those policies and ‘being socialist’.

It doesn’t matter if she alienated 5,000,000 people in Texas on Israel policies what matters is winning the swing states. She lost Michigan because of this and Michigan is democratic leaning state to begin with. As I said earlier 20,000 Muslim votes on Michigan is worth more than a million in Alabama.

This isn’t a popular election, we’ve seen the popular vote lose many times.

 

[OrangeKhrush]

Jill Stein and Robert Kennedy both have around 600 000 votes.

[RandoEFC+]

10 minutes ago, Spike said:

That’s the UK. You cannot compare the two, the UK legit had a decent left policy that lost, they USA has never had that in a presidential election and the closet it came aaa purely because of those policies and ‘being socialist’.

It doesn’t matter if she alienated 5,000,000 people in Texas on Israel policies what matters is winning the swing states. She lost Michigan because of this and Michigan is democratic leaning state to begin with. As I said earlier 20,000 Muslim votes on Michigan is worth more than a million in Alabama.

This isn’t a popular election, we’ve seen the popular vote lose many times.

 

She lost across the board though, with all demographics, men, women, Muslims, whites, Latinos, blacks. You might be right about Michigan but that's one state. There were other issues in Georgia, Pennsylvania, etc.

I just can't see anything remotely socially democratic succeeding in the USA. It would be interesting to see it tried though.

[OrangeKhrush]

1 minute ago, RandoEFC said:

She lost across the board though, with all demographics, men, women, Muslims, whites, Latinos, blacks. You might be right about Michigan but that's one state. There were other issues in Georgia, Pennsylvania, etc.

I just can't see anything remotely socially democratic succeeding in the USA. It would be interesting to see it tried though.

It was lost on poor policies and the her track record was awful.   I am trying to look up what the historical results are for Republicans in California and NY which in more recent times have been one way states yet it shows Trump getting mid 40's which would be alarming if you are strategizing for the Democrat party. 

Narrowing it down,  it came down to the economy and the Biden Harris presidency was awful and excluding foreign policy the Hawaii fires and the recent Hurricane relief was also not that good.