I legitimately did not believe it was possible for this to happen. There’s always a hateful minority but I believe people as a whole are good. How did this happen?
Palestinian people got Trump elected. You should ask them why there’s so much hatred in the world.
The real question is how do you end up in a situation with two terrible candidates that will be happy to commit genocide with no consequences. It’s a mutlistep issue.
no, no more questions.
I’m done questioning. I want results.
I want these red hat Nazis out in my fucking country. I want the 15 million Americans that withheld their vote this election to suffer. To suffer like they’re about to make every minority and LGBTQ+ American suffer.
Don’t you fucking dare look away. Your apathy or sense of justice or some other bullshit reason made this happen. You don’t get to look away.
First they come for the LGBTQ+. Then they come for the minorities. Then they come for the educated. Then they come for all of the people who ever spoke out against him.
And while I’m rotting in some mass unmarked grave with my friends and family, I’ll be holding onto a truth you can’t see through your own hubris.
they will come for you too.
imo propaganda. memeship. education policies.
propaganda is easy because all the mainstream media is about Trump doing unhinged things. Free PR.
memeship is likely a product of propaganda where the internet regurgitates controversial topics to milk more engagement.
As others have said, a lot of people already have almost zero critical thinking and the elections are just a test of who they remember the most.
Lots of reasons. Left-leaning Canadian’s take:
- Biden/Kamala have acted against the American majority for months now in Gaza. This isn’t a sabotage take, it’s as close to fact as can be determined of national attitude. Look at my post history before you accuse me of “both sides”. A lot of Dems and especially young people are very vocal about hating support of the ethnic cleansing of Occupied Palestinian Territory. Millions of people chose to stomach it until the election, but I think other millions felt unrepresented and betrayed by protest suppression and bipartisan condemnation.
- I don’t want to insult anyone, but even moderately detailed political plans may not work in America. Trump’s campaign was run on vague promises and angry rhetoric that was emotionally engaging. Clearly people don’t know how much Trump’s policies like tariffs are going to hurt them personally, but like promises of a strong “America for Americans”. Kamala ran on a detailed platform that took effort to understand and clearly it failed to motivate enough voters.
- “Try to please everyone and you will please no one.” Instead of solidifying support and inspiring hope among the Dem base, Kamala’s campaign assumed their support due to fear of Trump and went after undecideds and Republicans. Republicans aren’t going to switch and many undecideds are that way due to apathy.
- No Dem primary meant people couldn’t choose the candidate they might actually want to support. They were given Biden then Harris without being asked for input.
- Related to that: Biden’s campaign soured voters, and Kamala wasn’t able to climb out of the hole left to her. His low approval rating didn’t help given Kamala felt like a younger version of more of the same.
- Misinformation and propaganda by foreign and domestic right-wingers kept a lot of people from switching sides.
NPR was just discussing this a few minutes ago.
The Democrats put the majority of their push behind abortion thinking that would be the turn out vote and it didn’t seem to be.
More people voted for Trump because of the economy based on exit polling and (surprisingly) more women voted for him this time as well.
There was also more votes coming from younger people who hadn’t been through a recession before and were just basically voting ‘opposite party’ because they were tired of their money going nowhere. The voting trend was something that had been seen in several other countries recently.
I think one factor is that Democrats and Republicans actually hardly differ in many fundamental positions. I think the fact that an unscrupulous business man like Trump, who was once a member of the Democratic Party, can switch party affiliation just like that illustrates what I mean: there are no real alternatives, which is why election campaigns in the US need to be emotional rather than rational. That favors baseless fear mongering and empty finger-pointing that misses the real problems. I supect that many US citizens have become so accustomed to these empty election campaigns that they lost the ability to identify the lesser evil in this charade of mutual accusations far away from rational discourse. So in short I think Trump was just the better demagogue which is pretty much all that matters when reason or actual arguments are not part of the “election show”.
It looks like Trump still got ~70 millions vote, like before, but Harris got 66M while Biden got 81M, so the problem looks like Democrats failed to get people to vote.
Maybe because Democrats were often lefties, workers, unionized, lower salary, lower education, etc, and they do not recognize themselves anymore in the Democratic party.
We had the same things in France with the “gauche caviar”, basically the “caviar left”, all traditional factories workers who voted Socialist for decades, didn’t recognized themselves in this caviar left so voted elsewhere like right-wing, go figure…
I mean… look at the number of people who still, to this day, believe Joe Biden has dementia.
He’s an elderly man with a speech impediment, and anyone with reasoning skills could tell he’s still lucid. But the right’s centuries-long war against education has paid off, and now reasoning skills are scarce.
Plus, ever since TikTok, there are now millions of people who get their “news” from five-second clips / soundbites. So if your “message” can’t be summed up in what is essentially two pages of a picture book, in a way that can be digested without critical thinking, you are no longer a viable candidate.
Put differently, the winner from now on is whoever better pulls the gullible vote.
It’s quite simple, and aligns with why he got in in the first place.
The economy and cost of living is still in the toilet. Trump is a protest vote because competent public servants have failed to even acknowledge that everything costs 2-3x what it did a decade ago. Sad to say, but most people don’t give a fuck about LGBTQIA+ rights, Israel, Ukraine, or anything outside of this.
Call it apathy if you want, but it’s ultimately a failure of moderates to acknowledge a better social net for people (I.e. left policies) or propping an economy by improving lives for regular people so their money goes further.
I types out and deleted twice multi-paragraphee answers. I don’t think a tldr is better. For reference, I’m barely gen-x and voted.for harris. my immediate family, whom I will reference, are boomers from the late 40s to 1960. I don’t know that they all voted for trump, but at least two said they planned to (I have step-parents as well, so it’s not just a pair above me).
Although there are groups and people they hate, particularly in the context of evangelical christianty in the case of at least two, that was not the motivating factor. The motivating factor to all of them (at least so far as I can interpret it) was a combination of fear and loss of power and purpose when I try to boil it down.
Some of my direct family live in a place that got famous for its.immigramt population this cycle. When I visited I summer of 2023, their complaints were about systems not being able to keep up and unlicensed and uninsured drivers in those groups. Even one of my super evangelical baptist family members didn’t comment on the different variety of Christianity. Had many not been Christians, that might be different
Ok, this is several paragraphs again already. What I think, reading this rambly mess, is it is less hatred at a group (though that does exist), it is fear-based but also based on placed whose systems can’t keep up with the issues they face.
Though, having grown up not far from said place, there are hateful and racist people so that factor’s weight is also non-zero. Even then, I think the erosion of the middle class and their loss of status was the cause rather than direct hatred.
I guess, at my 4th or 5th attempt at this post, my point is that those folks mostly did not directly or intentionally vote because of hatred, but more out of fear and loss.
Trump got about the same amount of votes, but Harris got way fewer than Biden did. It wasn’t hate that won the election, but apathy that lost it.
The conditions required for fascism to flourish have been building up since the freaking 1950s.
Labour laws getting systematically stripped, unions getting crippled, corporations exploiting workers like fucking battery hens. Wages stagnating for decades, social programs stripped bare, people starting their careers with a lifetime of crippling student debt, Corporations and investors pricing housing completely out of reach, education systematically defunded, ongoing militarization of the police into armed gangs accountable to nobody, weird creepy fetishization of the military pushing unconditional support for increasingly brutal and cynical invasions and regime-changes, apologia for and allegiance to fascists like Netanyahu…
it’s literally everything that Cyberpunk 2077 was parodying, for god’s sake.
People are poor, they’re exploited to the bone, they have no secure income, they’re drowning in debt and can’t afford housing. They feel un-represented by the government, they have fuckall education, the corpo media piped into their home keeps telling them that immigrants and deviants are the cause of all their problems, they’re constantly shown how their government bombs hell out of Evil Brown People overseas and that this is a good and righteous thing, so they want more of it at home. They hark back to a mythical Good Old Days they’re constantly told about when things weren’t as bad and brown and/or LGBTQ people weren’t a thing (or could be freely lynched) and women weren’t so uppity, and they want that back; let’s try that last part and the first part will surely come with it.
You get these people, you show them a political outsider who says screw all the rules and bureaucracy, I’m going to take charge, sweep all the red tape out of the way and do all the things you know you want…
Of course they’ll get sucked in.
And of course it doesn’t matter that their figurehead is worthless and incompetent and clearly evil.
It’s not about results, it’s about emotion. People are fed up, worn out and sick of the way things are.
Trump and his degenerate shitgibbons promise to trash everything, and hurt the people their followers believe are the problem. And that’s deeply emotionally satisying.
but I believe people as a whole are good
Well there’s yer problem!
Because of uninformed voting. Doesn’t matter now. There won’t be another one.
At this point we can only really guess. It’ll probably be days or weeks before people can dig through the voting data and do substantive post-mortems on the 2024 campaign. Th economy seems to have played a big part. People are angry at high prices and they naturally punish the incumbent party even if the President doesn’t realistically control how much eggs and gas cost. Along with that it’s looking like there was a collapse in Democratic turnout in the Rust Belt while Republican turnout stayed steady, handing Trump narrow wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It also looks like the Harris campaign’s bet on Republicans who didn’t vote for Trump in the primary breaking for her failed to pay off.
