[rootusrootus]

I agree. People had already experienced one round of Trump before, and had every opportunity to see what he was planning for this term. There is no reasonable conclusion other than that they indeed wanted exactly what we got.

[angry_octet]

The US has very low voter turnout. Winning is mainly getting your voters to turn up, but usually apathy wins. Of course the media plays a huge part in this, but voter suppression is the US is fine art.

Personally I feel that non voters effectively voted for Trump, and they should own that as much as die hard MAGA types.

[bdangubic]

> The US has very low voter turnout

Don't disagree with you in principle but 2024 saw a very, very, very large turnout for US standards - the biggest one... Kamala's 75m+ votes basically are good enough (by very wide margin) to win any previous election (slimmer margin in 2020 than others but you get my point...)

[rootusrootus]

> the biggest one

2020 had about 4 million more votes cast.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter-turnou...

[bdangubic]

thanks for the correction, I keep forgetting just how awful 2016-2020 years were that 81 million people came out to vote for a senile grandpa (exactly the point I was making, you need strong against case much more than anything else)

[rootusrootus]

> 81 million people came out to vote for a senile grandpa

Yeah, people were getting fed up with the chaos. Biden owes his presidency to Donald Trump, for sure. He tried several times in years prior and could not win on the merits.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Weird, and why didn’t those people show up to vote for Kamala? How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?

[ahhhhnoooo]

Kamala was vocal about refusing to defend Gazans. It swung the needle for many. It's not the only thing that swing the needle, but it was significant.

[rootusrootus]

> why didn’t those people show up to vote for Kamala?

Enthusiasm gap. And not during COVID. 2020 was an interesting time as you may recall.

> How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?

You will be less likely to fall prey to grifters if you look past absolute numbers and realize that the voting age population tends to increase about 10 million every four years. And with turnout generally abysmal, under 60% most times, there is a lot of room for variation.

[angry_octet]

Both sides got more voters out, but it's still a low proportion of eligible voters.

Lots of people don't vote in mid terms, that's what Trump is aiming for.

[rootusrootus]

The Trump factor is interesting.

His whole schtick seems to be getting voters to show up at the polls who otherwise don't bother to put forth the effort. I've heard it said that this was also Mamdani's trick in NYC (heck, maybe that explains why Trump is so smitten with Mamdani).

So GOP politicians do significantly better any time Trump is sharing the ballot with them. I won't be surprised if the 2026 midterms go very poorly for the GOP. And given that Trump won't ever be on a ballot again, I won't be surprised if his control over congressional GOP members starts to noticeably erode even before the midterms. They definitely know how the game works, and they are going to start looking for ways to keep their jobs.

[bdangubic]

Running against a President (especially one that is not on the ballot) is much easier than people think, all you have to do is pitch that while I may be terrible, your alternative is much, much, much worse which is exactly what the Trump campaign was all about.

It worked because a lot of people bought that story (and many continue to buy it evidenced by DJT's approval ratings among the GOP voters). The whole campaign basically had no platform other than your cookie-cutter "migrant crime", "economy bad" ...

[rootusrootus]

It worked because as bad as the GOP platform was, the dems' strategy was just awful, and their tactical decision making was abysmal.

  * focus on abortion, which is an important issue ... mostly to evangelicals
  * focus on threats to democracy, which sounded shrill and got blown off
  * no real message on the economy, which was widely perceived as floundering under Biden, and was very important to a lot of swing voters

On top of that, Trump's approval ratings on the economy were pretty good when he left office. People remembered that and thought he'd do better.

Then of course there's the whole "hey, let's not tell the senile old man that he basically promised to be a one-hit-wonder, and wait until the last moment to switch to his running mate instead".

In a way, it's impressive that the dems didn't lose by larger margins. Trump wasn't that popular, the dems were just that incompetent. I hope they pull their head out of their ass for 2028. But I'm not counting on it.

[bdangubic]

I don't disagree but I don't believe there was any way Democrats would have kept power in 2024. They were unable to sell any positive news about the economy (DJT does not seem to have learned this lesson and is doing same stupid thing as Dems did in 2024). The no real message on the economy was real but economy was doing great in post-COVID world especially compared to the rest of the world and there wasn't a reputable financial outlet that did not agree with this (Economist, FT, WSJ, Bloomberg...).

While I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said I do not believe there was a way for Democrats to beat DJT. His machine was just too good and no matter the candidate and no matter the message I don't believe it would have mattered.