[scarface_74]

Where we set our eyes don’t matter. The US electorate has shown we care more about “owning the libs”, “anti-woke” and what bathroom people use than our own health and welfare.

Absolutely no one who voted for this mess went in blind.

[tomrod]

They absolutely did, because many listen to the absokutely rank propaganda the right puts out and seek no real sources of information.

[yepitwas]

If they went in blind, they chose to.

Not giving enough of a shit to learn about… in some cases, seemingly anything, doesn’t mean you get to later claim “oh I didn’t want this, how could I have known?”

I’ve given a lot of leeway on that stuff over my life, and after this last election, that’s over. Anyone who doesn’t get it at this point has raised stupidity to such an art form that they’ve achieved immorality. That’s aside from the ones who just outright want bad things to happen, which is a lot of people.

[raw_anon_1111]

One of my “friends” on Facebook who is a devout evangelical Christian that I went to school with between elementary school at a private Christian elementary school, a magnet middle school and she was one of the few white people at my majority black high school and even one of the fewer that didn’t segregate herself and made friends with everyone claimed that Charles Kirk was a good Christian and said I was insensitive for quoting his words after his death.

I honestly had never heard of him before he was shot and looked up things about him thinking from all of the things said about him by her and other conservatives was that he was a traditional pre 2016 Republican who I might disagree with around the edges. But I could have a beer with him.

I then looked up some of the things he said, showed her with links to videos, verified sources etc and she refused to even read the links because they would have forced her to confront her cognitive dissonance.

For the record, she isn’t one of the fire breathing conservatives and 99% of her posts are quoting scriptures and family oriented.

[Herring]

It's actually about tribal belonging.

https://bigthink.com/articles/how-tribalism-overrules-reason...

[raw_anon_1111]

I didn’t realize until after social media how a lot of people’s whole lives revolve around the community of the church and how lost they would be without their church community. That’s not by itself meant to be an insult.

But I saw it in real time with her. Everything I knew about her as a person was at odds with her support of the current MAGA movement. I thought she would be bemoaning that Republicans didn’t choose another of the candidates last year like Pence who was a traditional religious conservative Christian and she would at least admit that she held her nose and voted for Trump because she thought Kamala was worse. I could have respected that if not agreed with it.

I do have a good friend who is slightly on the other side of the aisle than I am. But he doesn’t demonize anyone. He is the good ol’ boy that I could have a beer with.

[Herring]

Yeah well my experience is a lot of conservatives seem completely normal until you start dating a black girl. That's when you see how racism/tribalism works.

Try a fun experiment: ask your guy friend about ARPA-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA-E They usually love that government program after learning about it. Then ask him about government investment into education, and watch his tune change. Education is one of the highest ROI govt programs, just below like roads and plumbing. Way higher than ARPA-E. But no, they only see poor black people using it.

Hope I'm wrong about your male friend specifically, but overall there's a reason Trump is the president. Your female friend's perspective is usually how it goes in my experience.

[AlecSchueler]

But they were open about wanting to do this stuff.

[Herring]

They were extremely open. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump

This works just like holocaust denial, and there's a reason that's criminalized in Germany and a lot of other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Holocaust_denial

[scarface_74]

You didn’t need “sources of information”. Trump was in office for four years before he was re-elected. It’s copium to think that people aré ignorant when in actuality, they are actively hostile to minorities, non straight, the college educated and non Christians.

They would rather feel the fallout of Republican policies as long as it doesn’t help or actively hurts people not like them. In my former home state GA, the Republican governor spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to get the Hyundai plant to GA that would have created 8500 jobs directly and no telling how many indirect jobs.

ICE invaded the plant and the opportunity is now lost potentially. The governor still can’t bring himself to criticize the President and the Republicans in GA are cheering the raid. The engineers from Korea were training Americans.

[kbrkbr]

I think it's rather the choice we are given at this moment in history. But I may be wrong.

If you abstract away any other problems and boil it down to environment, health and work protections on the one hand, and restriction of unlimited immigration from countries with very different sets of values no matter the sociological developments that will likely follow you can only choose one.

I just tried to summarize what we hear and see from voters in analyses as fairly as I could, not present my own opinion. If that did not work out, let me know.

But in this case you choose the one problem that appears bigger or makes you more angry probably.

[add-sub-mul-div]

You're giving something away by suggesting that a balanced framing is: (1) destruction of our world, health, and lower/middle classes vs. (2) brown people bypassing an insane bureaucracy that prevents us from effectively receiving the tired, poor, huddled masses that we explicitly invite on the country's figurative doormat. You can be against the latter, sure, but suggesting these sides are anything close to equal is a choice.

Do you think we're stupid here?

[Herring]

I actually think he was telling the truth (from his pov). Conservatives see the world in a very us-vs-them fashion. Makes it very hard for them to even notice nuances like in-group enemies (nevermind actually deal with them). It sounds like an oxymoron.

Democrats correctly understand that immigrants are out-group benefactors. But they have blind spots too. We all do.

[daveguy]

Only ~60% of people eligible to vote in 2024 did vote with ~30% of eligible voters voting for the idiotscape we currently have.

So, I think OP message was for the folks who didn't vote. Especially given the people against going backwards on environmental protection is a large majority of the population.

If everyone voted, we wouldn't be dealing with this. Excluding future success of social media propaganda campaigns.

We all need to fucking vote. Otherwise you get folks like Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer puppetting an orange shell.

[raw_anon_1111]

Because of the electoral college. It didn’t matter who didn’t vote. If 0% more people voted in Mississippi or Alabama and every single eligible voter voted in New York and California, it wouldn’t have mattered.

[daveguy]

That's some bullshit. If everyone voted the electoral college would be dwarfed across the board. If 50% more people vote the difference won't be in just AL, MS, CA, NY -- it will be across the board. Stop trying to fuck with our elections by discouraging people from voting.

[raw_anon_1111]

Really? Do you not know how the electoral college works? What do you think happens if there was 30% more participation in Blue states?

[daveguy]

If 30% more people vote it won't just be people in "blue states". That's the goddamn point. It'll mean we, as a country, get closer to the things we have 60%+ agreement.

You're discouraging voting with failures of logic, Mr 4 Month Raw Anon. "BuT wHaT iF tHeY OnLy vOtE iN bLuE sTaTeS?!" Seriously? ffs, a child could see through you.

To everyone else -- remember this. Vote in numbers that can't be eclipsed by nihilist propaganda asshats like this tool.

Let's make the margins huge in blue and purple states, miniscule to none in red states. The US can show the world a massive rejection of Trumpism if we all vote.

[raw_anon_1111]

If 30% more voted in Alabama , Mississippi, Texas or Florida, do you think they would have voted democratic? Do you have any evidence that the demographics of people who don’t vote are disproportionate to the people who do in any of those states?

If you know anything about American history, despite what Michelle Obama says “this is exactly who this country is”

[DrewADesign]

> Absolutely no one who voted for this mess went in blind.

I think it depends. I suspect that political messaging has become so tailored that the Mercola/Natural News crowd that voted primarily because of RFK’s anti-vaxxing platform could have been getting so heavily hammered with the “this is the ’chemicals are bad’ administration” messaging that the anti-regulatory stuff seemed pretty quiet in comparison. And I’m pretty sure they also had things they disagreed with Harris about constantly rammed down their throats. I also think that democrat voters had negative things about Trump shoved down their throat, and that messaging difference is probably the main reason many on the right wing are absolutely mystified that people can hate Trump so much, even in spite of the ‘own the libs’ culture war garbage.

I have a list of news sources I hit weekly from Dissent and Jacobin to mainstream TV news and newspapers, to Hot Air and Town Hall. Most are pretty politically homogenous, but discuss all sorts of topics. Then I see how laser-focused a relative’s Facebook feed is on topics that are important to her… not just the political platform on a whole, but those specific things. It’s forgivable that she’d think her primary concerns were representative of most people’s primary concerns, and why she’s thinks people that are heavily focused on other topics are kind of weird.

[scarface_74]

The presidential debates were the most watched tv last year beating out football. Trump was in office for four years. No matter how filtered the news is, people knew exactly who Trump was.

[DrewADesign]

And one hundred million more people voted than watched that debate. And of the people that watched it, I’ll bet most people couldn’t name half the topics discussed that weren’t in their list of top voting issues. I’m not saying they were deceived or didn’t have access to the information, I’m saying that the things they didn’t care about were easily drowned out by what they did. That’s how the human brain works. Nobody’s seeking out reasons to dislike someone they’re excited about and being emotionally validated by. Saying someone supports something just because it didn’t stick out enough to kill their support for someone doesn’t make sense. That’s no different than saying anyone that voted for Harris because trans rights were extremely important to them also supports Israel’s massacre. The world just isn’t that black-and-white.

[raw_anon_1111]

We see that Trump is about a cult of personality. They didn’t care about the “issues”. He hates the sane people they hate

[DrewADesign]

For a decade, the mainstream left has painted them like simple-minded maniacs foaming at the mouth driven by blind hate with no valid concerns or perspectives, while also fruitlessly attempting to not challenge them too much in the legislature, assuming that some day they’ll be kind and return our civilized decorum. We’ve simultaneously been marginalizing any populists that bubble up on the left, in a futile attempt to return to the Obama era status quo. We’ve seen where this approach takes us— repealed rights, messed up economy, etc etc etc.

Time for mainstream dems to challenge their assumptions.

[GenerocUsername]

Well then maybe it's time to cut some dead weight from the left platform... Many centrists want clean water and sane society and bathrooms and woke ideology maybe needs to take a back seat in discourse for a while

[giraffe_lady]

Isn't this what they have been doing? What nationally prominent democrats are vocal proponents of progressive social policies now? I certainly don't remember harris running on any of the things being implied here.

> cut some dead weight

This "dead weight" is the rights of minorities to participate in public life plain and simple. This is exactly why leftists are so skeptical or even hostile to "centrists." Once you're calculating whose rights you can drop for political convenience you share a lot more ideologically with the far right than with historic liberalism.

[GenerocUsername]

The motto of the forest service is 'do the most good for the most people for the longest time'

Reality is you sometimes have to drop some dead weight for 2% of people to protect and further the lives of the other 98%.

Turns out it would have been better to find alternative solutions for those 2% back when they were only 0.2%, but instead Dems made them the center of attention and is now staking the future of our country on continued pacification of an increasingly violent 'underserved' social blight.

Drop the T. Protect children. Enforce laws in our urban murder cities... Or continue to lose the culture war. If you turn to violence during this process it will be worse for many more people than the 2% being staked for protection currently.

[tastyface]

"If you turn to violence during this process it will be worse for many more people than the 2% being staked for protection currently."

You should know from history that real human beings won’t cower before this sort of unhinged saber-rattling.

So if that’s the take of your political cohort, you might as well just skip the niceties prepare for the worst. Things will get really, really bad for everyone. Perhaps your kids will get to live in a pleasant country again. Maybe the blood-rendered lesson from our grandparents that didn’t seem to stick to our generation will be able to stick to theirs.

"continued pacification of an increasingly violent 'underserved' social blight"

There is one demographic that is implicated in the vast majority of shootings, comprising far more than the 2% you’re hatefully denigrating.

[giraffe_lady]

> Drop the T. Protect children. Enforce laws in our urban murder cities... Or continue to lose the culture war.

Protect children from what? Our what cities? What do you believe is centrist about these stances? These are straight up verbatim right wing talking points. Stand up for your beliefs and join your actual allies instead of pretending to be mine.

[dawnerd]

But then you alienate some of the most vocal part of the party and end up like in 2016 where they blame the Bernie bros instead of the dnc leadership.

[nozzlegear]

Harris lost the popular vote by less than 2%. I know that popular vote is not what gets a president elected, but you make it sound like nobody voted for Harris and the entire American electorate liked Trump's views and voted for him.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

That's the thing. Trump would be eminently beatable if the democrats bothered running good candidates and had the courage to stand for something. But they are perfectly content collecting tons of money which probably goes to connected "consultants" who then spend 20 million on figuring out how to talk to people.

[raw_anon_1111]

It all started because Biden didn’t announce he wasn’t running again after the midterms and the Democrats tried to hide that he wasn’t losing his mental faculties.

[nozzlegear]

I think Harris was a good candidate who did stand for something, but she didn't get enough time to run her own campaign :)

But I'm not interested in having a "she wasn't pure enough for my brand of politics" debate, I was only pointing out that almost half of those who voted did in fact vote for her – not Trump.

[tstrimple]

It’s actually the opposite. Immediately after Kamala got the nod there was an enormous amount of energy surrounding her nomination that she managed to entirely squander. If Kamala had less time as the main candidate she would have done better. She ran a shit campaign and bled support the entire time. I can’t imagine why anyone wasn’t impressed with her promises to maintain the status quo and her ability to campaign with war criminals from the Bush era.

[nozzlegear]

Opinions are like assholes, I've got mine and you've got yours. Like I said, I think she was a good candidate who didn't get to run a full campaign like her opponent did – and the one she did run was micromanaged by Biden campaign staffers until the last minute – so I guess we'll never know :)

[vjvjvjvjghv]

If Harris had been a good candidate she would have gone on different podcasts without hesitation. That’s where the audience is these days. Her TV interviews were so scripted and inauthentic it wasn’t even funny. Despite all these she almost got half of the votes so imagine how a more likeable and authentic candidate would have done.

[nozzlegear]

I'm personally unconvinced that getting her on Rogan and other manosphere podcasts would've won her the election. It's easy to look back and attribute little misses like skipping an interview with Rogan to her loss, though it lines up with the popular misconception ¹ that young voters voted for Trump over Harris.

Instead all signs point to her loss being something as mundane as the economy:

> Further, nonvoting Democrats were more than twice as likely as voting Democrats to report feeling the economy is worse now than a year ago (46 percent vs. 22 percent) or that their incomes had recently decreased. And, perhaps not surprisingly given their economic precarity, Democratic nonvoters were substantially more likely than voters to support increased state welfare spending (61 percent vs. 52 percent). These class characteristics show nonvoting Democrats’ economic attitudes in a clearer light.

Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democratic-nonvot...

¹ Have young voters really abandoned the Democrats? https://sites.tufts.edu/cooperativeelectionstudy/2025/04/17/...

Edit: I think we both dislike Trump and would have preferred anybody would have won over him, so all of this speculation on what she could have done differently is probably just navel gazing now. If going on podcasts could have won her the election then I'm all for it.

[tomrod]

She was no Obama or Bill Clinton. At best a weak 80s style Democrat.

Dan Carlin says it best. Political parties are built to win, and Democrats sometimes forget that.