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?
I had a short convo with a check out girl at Staples the day before election day. She saw my “I voted” sticker on my phone and started talking about how she was voting trump after work today because “we can’t give the white house to Biden again” She looked confused when I told her Biden wasn’t even running. The DNC fucked us. They waited too long to replace him and some people didn’t even know Harris was an option. They tried to prop up a corpse and then changed at the last minute. I voted for Harris but I knew she didn’t stand a chance.
How do these people not see any news? Like, at all?
It amazes me how people can be so unaware of anything going on.
When all you have time to do is work and sleep, this is the result (as intended).
The DNC has a lot of problems and blame to absorb, but at some point we have to look at the electorate. You don’t have to read the Sunday newspaper or be politically active to know who is running for president. She had two months to step outside and listen/read almost anything.
She is an ignorant, zero information voter, who is likely just regurgitating what she heard her father or boyfriend say months ago. This is the problem. America is now dominated by zombies with no critical thinking skills who crave being brainwashed by their mobile phones.
I hate to be so negative, but I simply don’t see a way out of it. The masses are being controlled more effectively than ever before and I don’t see what systemic change could magically appear to change our trajectory.
The easy answer is, money. Lots of it. With the deregulation of financial crimes (let’s see how badly the IRS gets gutted now), it doesn’t matter where the money comes from. But it will be necessary to invest heavily in the next midterm and presidential election to ensure JD Vance doesn’t automatically win.
How do you think the electorate becomes this way? It’s not because of some innate failure of humans. It’s because of the massive alienation that has systematically occurred over the past 50+ years (and really since WW2) as a result of deliberate policies that have decimated communities, destroyed public education, massively widened the wage gap, ruined the housing market, and is wiping out the environment. Among many other things
Policies that are frequently pushed by Republicans, but sometimes supported and often not repudiated properly by Democrats.
Yep. Trump has a fuckin merch line. Tiny little billboards reminding people every day.
And it will only get worse with Trump and conservatives trying to end public education.
Well she did have a decent chance judging by results. It’s not like it was a crushing victory.
How is it not a crushing victory? Trump won the popular vote and either won or is leading in all swing states. He fucking wiped the floor with the DNC.
California is still counting. Not sure he won the popular vote.
the fact that it’s even close is still disturbing.
I love how if Harris won everyone was ready to have the results drawn out with days of bullshit… And then Trump is called the winner overnight and it’s just accepted.
Yeah, I was told by a certain someone that the election would be rigged and stolen. For months. Where are the angry mobs marching down the streets?
Because of how the demographics are. The electoral college favors Republicans, and the popular vote favors Democrats.
A Democratic victory is expected to involve urban votes in typically contentious states, and urban votes take longer to count due to higher volume and more voters per polling location.
If the Republican candidate is getting enough votes from the quick to count low population density areas to win, it unfortunately means that the slow to count areas don’t really matter in terms of what the outcome is.
The thing is that the party conceding here actually trusts the election process. And Trump most definitely won the electoral college.
Even if he ends up losing the popular vote eventually, it doesn’t really matter. The system is rigged and has always been rigged in favour of land over people.
We the people have no power to challenge results. If the DNC is just going to accept it, then that’s on them, and it really shows how easily defeated they are.
Biden’s vanity thinking he was the only one who could beat Trump costed us dearly.
There should have been a primary. It sucks to say, but the misogyny in this country is strong. So is its stupidity. How can people think that guy is better for the economy? All his plans are about sugar high measures with disastrous consequences for the country’s future.
they think trump is better for the economy because Biden got fucked with the pandemic inflation fallout.
People vote based on what they feel is right for them and their families. Even though it may seem like it, most of their votes aren’t based on hatred.
I wonder how the Joe Rogan bros who voted for this guy will like it when Project 2025 makes porn illegal. I bet 99% of the dipshits don’t even know that is a thing.
a lot of bad people working together
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.
I’ll be very interested to see the objective agreed upon postmordem and what can be done (if anything) to save the patient going forward. This is pretty damning confirmation that the humans are not okay, Trump is like the virus government guy from the Matrix
This will probably be an unpopular take, but this my best guess at why Trump won.
On the election coverage I was watching (ABC), the biggest point they kept coming back to were questions of if people thought that the economy is better now vs when Trump was in office, and if people feel like they’re better or worse off financially that they were during Trump years. If I remember right, the poll data they showed had twice as many people say that things were worse economy/financially then they were during Trump era, vs people who thought things were better financially now.
I know that matches with my personal experience, I live in a rural area, and my company primarily does work for other small businesses. The Trump years had a huge amount of negative news, but my business grew a lot over those years. In comparison, the last 4 years have been very stagnant in growth. We’ve picked up some new clients, but many of the small businesses we did business with have closed down or had to sell to new owners. I wouldn’t say our business is doing worse, but everything costs more and our company profit/wages haven’t kept up. And I know it’s worse for a lot other businesses, at least from seeing how many I’ve seen go out of business.
A lot of the economic troubles came from Covid, so it’s not fair to place them all on the Biden administration. But I think a lot of the country is unhappy financially right now, and they think Trump has a better chance of changing that. I’m guessing a lot of the “undecided voters” that decided the election picked the option they thought would help them financially over all other considerations.
People also have the memory of a fucking brain dead goldfish, and don’t even have the mental capacity to realize that Trump’s tax plan is what we are currently under, and have been under, since Biden took office.
I suspect US economy is in a much worse state than it’s obvious just looking at the numbers. Most of my contact with Americans is with relatively well-off people working in the tech industry. And even they are feeling serious financial constraints. I can’t imagine how the rest is doing.
“I’m unhappy, financially so I’m going to vote for the felon, racist, sexist, fascist” still doesn’t add up.
What does add up is that enough of the American people didn’t know or fully understand just how much of a racist, sexist, fascist and total scumbag Trump really is. Or they heard about his misdeeds and absolutely abhorrent statements/views but didn’t believe it; “fake news”.
They had all the time in the world to just pay attention or ya know, just look shit up but they didn’t do those things. Now those very same people are going to be surprised AF that their friends and family are being rounded up, arrested, detained, and/or deported. They’ll say they had no idea that Trump planned to do that or that “they didn’t think he’d actually do it.”
They suck. There’s no excuse at this point. Just like the article suggests.
Then there’s his actual supporters who like the awful things he says and nod in agreement. If anything, this election has revealed that your Republican neighbors absolutely are horrible human beings. Again: If someone is still a Republican at this point they’re saying to the world that they’re in tacit agreement with these things. They share the same values as the Republican party and Trump is the Republican party platform at this point.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
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.
Cause he’s awesome
Top 10 Tell me you’re a bigot without saying so.
Top ten loser over here
You dropped your
/s
Both times Trump won the nomination and ran against women, he won. The only time he ran against a man, he lost.
Clearly the Democrats should avoid nominating women until the electorate is ready for one.
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’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 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 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…
There are lots of reasons this happened. Fascism is very popular (as a whole we are not good), voter suppression is functioning as planned, destabilizing education from preschool to university makes people more susceptible to fear mongers and racism, vast amounts of corporate and wealthy influence on elections who favor the party of deregulation, the DNC shifting right instead of left, etc etc etc.
Also social media sequestering people in cozy filter bubbles that distort reality.
Social media, or more precisely, algorithms designed to create ever growing engagement by feeding into confirmation bias and only showing you stuff you like, have destroyed the ability of critical thinking in a majority of people.
This doesn’t only apply to the right spectrum either, as evidenced by all the “hopium” articles here and on r/politics that were trying to construct a blue win or even a blue wave when all polls pointed to a Trump advantage. I had fallen into that trap myself. And everybody was also smugly making fun of the articles in r/conservative predicting the same thing for Trump. Well, turns out they were right.
Less “fascism is popular” and more “people are so desperate for SOMEBODY actually promising change that they’ll vote for anyone offering it, no matter if it’s good or bad.”
Status quo politics is pretty much dead in the water and arguably has been since 2016. People don’t want “I’ll keep everything on a steady course,” they want someone who sounds like they’re going to take charge, and Trump provided that.
