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by DiscourseFan 581 days ago
The problem is that Harris appealed to some women, but Trump appealed to the majority of men
1 comments

Yes - white women were within a couple of points of white men voting for Trump, as being a larger chunk of voters made up for a slightly lower percentage share.

The big story is the starkly disparate turnout rates: Trump successfully got most of his 2020 voters to internalize his legal problems as their own, and most of them came back in 2024. There’s a lot of media coverage about the point shift but when you look at the actual turnout it’s striking how much closer the absolute number of votes he got in 2024 is to 2020 versus the sag on the other side.

Lots of discontented liberals who didn’t want to vote for more of the same, and the same politically motivated leftists who went to the polls for Biden in 2020 abandoned Harris after she moved to the right.

According to a Silicon Valley funded pro-Harris SuperPAC, her strongest messaging was on economic populism. Kind of strange she didn’t follow through with it…

I have been tossing around thought that her campaign didn't feel like it positioned an opponent/enemy as part of the attempt to appeal to disaffected republicans. I'm not convinced that trotting out officials from the Bush era did enough good among non Trump republicans to make up for how it might have disaffected more left leaning voters.

It seems clear there was a motivation gap with the reduced voter numbers compared to the 2020 election. But for me it is hard to say why, I appear to not exist as a potential voter since the last text I received was somehow related to a Bernie contact list but wasn't even meant for me. Also coming from a state with mail in ballots I don't understand the calculations people do to decide about voting. I drop off my ballot at one of the several locations nearby when it is convenient.

On the motivation issue, yesterday at the store I heard an employee talking to a customer about the election and he said he didn't have money now, and neither of them was going to make a change for him so he saw no reason to vote. The customer agreed and of course they might not have felt their vote would count given where they lived. But I still found it to be interesting to hear so bluntly stated.

The less people vote the better. It signals a lack of confidence in the system as a whole. Trump is going to turn out some center-right administration with his New America PAC cabinet; he positioned himself as anti-establishment but I'm starting to doubt it. Hopefully this election broke the illusion of democratic will for the American public.