The 2024 Us Presidential Election Thread

[Axaday]

Did I really have to add "and won the election" to that?

The point is that "mandate" is not a well-defined term. It's a thing that pundits like to talk about, but there's no clear definition.

Of course you did. I am EVERY BIT as pedantic as you are.

-=-=-

We are actually saying the same thing.

Trump and his supporters may succeed in changing the word. His most clever trick is to brazenly tell people what to think and then sit back and watch them do it. But I had never seen anyone use the word simply to mean winning. You used to have to have something remarkable aside from that that was clearly visible and easy to explain to mean that the population was doubled down on selecting you. In Trump's case, if it weren't too embarrassing to do so, a Republican maybe COULD claim it on the basis of the majority of the popular vote. George HW Bush didn't do that, W Bush only did it once and Trump didn't do it before. But the explanation is too embarrassing, so it doesn't work. In 1980, Reagan got only 50.7% of the vote, which doesn't sound like that big of a deal. It is the same percentage the W Bush got in 2004. But he won 44 states, making the same narrow majority look totally different.

 

[Pale Rider]

FB friend:

In some ways, the most harmful legacy of this election outcome might be the knowledge of the deceitful tactics which are most effective in politics now. This knowledge cannot be unlearned. It will spread to other democracies. Democracy itself will become more dysfunctional, everywhere.

If he had lost, perhaps people might have absorbed the message that you can't win by simply lying. But he won, so the message is that lying works. Politicians have always been dishonest, but there's a difference between twisting the truth and what Trump does, which is simply bald-faced lying. And it worked.

Why come up with a rational policy platform when you can just claim without a shred of evidence that your opponents are lunatics who want to eat dogs, cut off kids' genitalia at school, ban meat, get rid of hot showers, and give illegal immigrants free houses? If that list of deranged accusations was actually true, I wouldn't vote for them either.

 

[Axaday]

Not always too sure of Pale Rider's FB Friend (friends?), but that is a pretty good management summary of Trump's campaign.

 

[MrBlud]

The key difference is those weren’t lies.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re objectively 100% false but as far as the majority of the electorate was concerned they never heard or processed they were untrue because their media sphere didn’t present it that way.

Almost 100 million people do not consume reality based information.

You can’t run (or even *have*) a country like that.

 

[Axaday]

The key difference is those weren’t lies.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re objectively 100% false but as far as the majority of the electorate was concerned they never heard or processed they were untrue because their media sphere didn’t present it that way.

Almost 100 million people do not consume reality based information.

You can’t run (or even *have*) a country like that.

I don't know how many people read QAnon stuff. I have always assumed it was a very tiny percentage.

But Mattel accidentally prints a porn URL on some Wicked dolls and it is staggering to me how many people comment on Facebook that they did it on purpose. How many people have been trained now to accept that a major, publicly traded, toy company, 3rd biggest in the world, wants to send a bunch of girls to a porn website. That will meet their true purposes.

 

[Ungnome]

Yup, the media shares a LOT of the blame here, an I'm not talking about the propaganda networks, like Fox, Newsmax, etc. I'm talking about supposedly left biased organizations like MSNBC and CNN. They wanted a horse race and shirked their duty by LETTING Trump spew disinformation and then NOT calling him out on it the way they should have. Sure, they made some token gestures, but no where near the level they should have. EVERY TIME Trump held a rally or an interview, it should have been fact-checked in real-time and then again after the fact to point out how dishonest he was being. Trump is good for ratings, though.... Biden was boring and Kamala never really did much to draw attention to herself as VP.

Granted Trump should have been in prison by now for the crap he pulled LAST time around(and the crap he pulled BEFORE 2016 on top of that). We live in a world of two justice systems, though....

 

[Thylacine 2000]

I don't know how many people read QAnon stuff. I have always assumed it was a very tiny percentage.

But Mattel accidentally prints a porn URL on some Wicked dolls and it is staggering to me how many people comment on Facebook that they did it on purpose. How many people have been trained now to accept that a major, publicly traded, toy company, 3rd biggest in the world, wants to send a bunch of girls to a porn website. That will meet their true purposes.

Study: QAnon draws from several faith groups, numbers more than 40 million

(RNS) — Meanwhile, nearly half of those who reject QAnon blame white conservative Christians for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

religionnews.com

There are an estimated 41 million QAnon believers in America. Basically the same population size as African-Americans.

 

[Axaday]

Study: QAnon draws from several faith groups, numbers more than 40 million

(RNS) — Meanwhile, nearly half of those who reject QAnon blame white conservative Christians for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

religionnews.com

There are an estimated 41 million QAnon believers in America. Basically the same population size as African-Americans.

I wish it was as easy to recognize them on sight.

 

[Pocket]

I'm still not sure what the distinction between "being part of QAnon" and "being part of Trump's fan club" even is, exactly. Nor whether the distinction, whatever it is, is of any real import.

 

[Pocket]

On abortion, immigration, and LGBT rights, the Democrats are probably the farthest left national governing party in the world.

Countries acting like they are more progressive than America for the most part are just scooting by on being so ethno-religiously homogenous and so low in population that nobody minds having a strong social safety net for other people who are just like them.

Immigration, sure, and let's just go ahead and say that Europeans are on the whole pretty lousy when it comes to race relations in general. But surely not abortion. Even accounting for the large Catholic populations in most of the Western world, there are plenty of countries that are too secularized for that to be an issue. And remind me again which countries were the first to enshrine same-sex marriage into law? Even if we count the Obergfell v Hodges ruling rather than the Respect for Marriage Act as the turning point, sixteen countries beat us to the punch, ten of which were in Europe.

 

[Thylacine 2000]

Immigration, sure, and let's just go ahead and say that Europeans are on the whole pretty lousy when it comes to race relations in general. But surely not abortion. Even accounting for the large Catholic populations in most of the Western world, there are plenty of countries that are too secularized for that to be an issue. And remind me again which countries were the first to enshrine same-sex marriage into law? Even if we count the Obergfell v Hodges ruling rather than the Respect for Marriage Act as the turning point, sixteen countries beat us to the punch, ten of which were in Europe.

Yes, surely abortion. The Roe framework universally supported by Democrats for 50+ years is far more permissive than European abortion laws, which typically either mandate a waiting period, mandate multiple counseling sessions, ban it after 15 weeks, or all of the above. Roe was overturned specifically because Dobbs argued that they only wanted European-style abortion law.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/us-abortion-laws-worldwide/

And then there are transgender rights. Joe Biden entered office calling it the greatest civil rights issue of this day. Kamala Harris really did support taxpayer-funded surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison. Meanwhile, Germany and Spain have voted down self-ID laws, the famously tolerant Scandinavian countries continue to call it a mental disorder, the President of France called it woke American cultural imperialism and his wife said there are only 2 genders, and as for the UK, well....

Continental Europe enters the gender wars

Germany and Spain reject laws on gender self-identification

www.economist.com