[wat10000]

If you find the arrogance abhorrent, I wonder how you characterize some of the actually bad stuff that politicians get up to.

Personally, I don't expect people on the right to come around. I am mystified by people on the center who looked at Trump and Harris and decided Trump was the way to go, or even just didn't care. If you'd like to enlighten me why they did that, I'd be interested.

My real confusion is people on the left who did this. They decided that Harris didn't say the right things about Israel, or they were upset at not having a primary, or they were still upset about Bernie, and decided to stay home. That is baffling.

[BurningFrog]

One factor was that Trump was a known quantity.

He already was president for 4 years, which - aside from a lot of crazy talk - was a pretty stable and prosperous time.

OTOH, Harris had no track record to talk about, and hardly impressed anyone in any way.

[bdangubic]

> already was president for 4 years, which - aside from a lot of crazy talk - was a pretty stable and prosperous time.

you did NOT just write this seriously???! :) I hope you are being as sarcastic as one can be or did you sleep through it. just check how much of the total national debt comes from his first term… it is arguably the least “stable and prosperous” 4 years any American who is alive has ever seen

[wat10000]

I think people forget when in the year the election is held and associate 2020 with Biden. Certainly much of that year's craziness was not Trump's fault, but his absolute uselessness was on full display, and he was the guy in charge.

[bdangubic]

we want Presidents who step up when the shit hits the fan, not take our kids out of schools and lock everyone up in their homes and then add trillions of dollars of debt they will eventually have to pay up.

It is easy to be the President when shit's easy. I don't follow politics at all anymore, stopped right around the time someone like Donald was able to get a nomination for a political party in the United States so this isn't a liberal bashing Donald, these are just facts that he was about as worse of a President in his first four years as we've ever had. The jury is still out for these 4, we'll analyze that in 2029 :)

[tacitusarc]

I would characterize a lot of the behavior of politicians as despicable, antisocial, and un-American.

The short answer to your question is that the Democratic establishment in general and Harris in particular repeatedly lied throughout the Biden administration, culminating in the bald-faced lie that Joe Biden was completely competent. This was done with the attitude of “well what are you going to do? Vote for the other team? Don’t be ridiculous.” There were so, so many other things throughout the Biden administration, it felt (feels) like a race to the bottom.

So Trump, who is notorious for lying, won. To be fair to Republicans, Trumps lies are more like crazy exaggerations sprinkled with outright bullshit which somehow is more palatable than being gaslit.

If the defense of the Democrats is “Well look at how bad Trump is!” it should at least be acknowledged that is one of the worst defenses possible. And in general, if my options are to be stabbed by person A twice, or by person B once but person B expects me to be grateful, I might just go with person A.

The end result is we will keep toggling between the two parties until one of them decides to run using sane people. I sincerely hope that will be the Democrats this year.

[wat10000]

Befuddlement at the choices of the American voters is not a defense of Democrats. They could do so much better. But even with the choices we have, I don't understand how people come to the conclusions they do.