Born & raised in Japan while his parents attempted to Christianize the Japanese people.
2024 U.S. Elections | Trump wins
- Thread starter Raoul
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Born & raised in Japan while his parents attempted to Christianize the Japanese people.
Are we allowed to call that racism, or is someone going to get terribly offended and hit us with a drive-by post about how the left calls everything racism these days, and how that's just a man with rational concerns regarding his culture?
Exactly
I think this is a very good point. Also the part @Pogue Mahone said abput 'wokeness fatigue' as well as the stuff with the Leopards Eating Face Party.
IMO, it all boils down to "the curse of being right" if you want. Liberals, scientists, environmental protectors, etc. around the world are far too idealistic in their communcation strategies because the facts are on their side. As a consequence, their attempts to convince people are very idealistic. In a perfect world, you show somebody facts and he surrenders to the unquestionable truth and admits he was wrong. But in reality, we all know how difficult it is to admit you've been wrong even if it's undeniably the case. Your first instinct is to look at it from different perspectives and find excuses for why you've not been wrong after all because in your head, it is not about the actual right or wrong but the consequences that being wrong implies. Maybe you have to apologize to somebody (e. g. a climate activist that you insulted), maybe you doubled down an somebody and are ashamed now, etc. It is much easier to tap into a narrative that prevents you from feeling this way.
Psychologists call that a "cognitive dissonance". It is basically an argumentative off-ramp that allows you to circumvent the painful "I've been wrong" admission. If somebody shows you that climate change is real, you tell him that there has always been climate change. If somebody asks you how the hell you can vote for a president who wants to turn your democracy into an autocracy, you answer that people don't get that Trump doesn't mean this stuff.
Populists all around the world have successfully made cognitive dissonances part of their campaigns because they had no other option. On the other hand, liberals don't use them at all because they deem the facts to be superior arguments. But they aren't. They are terrible at reaching the subconsciousness of people and that's where you need convince them. But basing your campaign strategy on millions of people admitting they were wrong is simply not very promising.
I don't know how such narratives could look like. Maybe the liberals need more politicians the populist voters can identify with. Instead of saying "we've been telling you to save the climate for 30 years now, the time is almost up!", you will most likely convince more people with an approach like "climate activists have been blowing problems out of proportion for a long time but the time has finally arrived to act. Trust me, I'm with you and can't stand them but the same way I will not let them dictate me when to start, I will not miss the right moment in time just because they're a pain in the ass!". Not true but who cares as long as it mobilizes support.
In the same way, people will have to accept that large parts of society are allergic to change and can only stomach it to a certain point. So even if in an ideal world every injustice deserves immediate solving, we will have to prioritize, like it or not. For instance, I'm not sure if the marihuana legalisation in Germany was a clever idea. I was for it at the time but when we think in terms of how much change we can push for without conservatives tapping out, I would rather have spent those capacities on more urging changes.
edit: Expanding on the last paragraph, I think liberals underestimate how much strain they can put on their core voters. They seem to believe that if they don't adress all the various problems they see, they won't turn up. But if Trump can get away with sexual assault, Jan 6 and so forth, then a democrat candidate can get away with not prioritizing every issue there is.
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Perhaps, but this is a boiler plate concession speech thing to say, and anything else can easily come across as petty at the very least. This makes sense for someone whose platform has been not being Trump.
I get the dissonance, but this is making hay out of nothing really. Politicians being playing it safe shocker.
Whether there is truth in it or not doesn’t ever matter. The finer points of economics can evidently not be explained to the electorate. Democrats better hope for a bad economy leading up to 2028, or they will have no shot.
It's an odd one, but I suspect there is a bit of an "elitist concern" thing going on there too. We sort of see the same thing in the UK, where the Just Stop Oil protestors are all caricatured as middle class types who can afford to indulge luxury beliefs.
Truth is, I have no idea how people overlook the paedo and rapist stuff, I suspect it is simply not believed.
Wow. Also an implicit admission that minorities aren’t in control of their destiny. So much for the personal responsibility narrative.
Cognitive dissonance aside, I think another huge barrier to the idealist left ever winning the sort of popularity contest that social media has turned elections into is the way the left holds each other to much higher standards than anyone on the right.
Look at the way Biden and Harris were constantly being attacked by left leaning folk throughout their campaign. It didn’t matter that they might do good with their approach to issues like gun control, healthcare and education, their attitude to the Middle East made them genocidal enabling scum and that was all that matters.
When your own side so openly loathes you then you’re right up against it from the get go. Couldn’t be more different to the unqualified support the republicans get from right wingers online.
I see we’ve reached the middle age dad who spends too much time on Twitter section of the thread.
Yes, that's true as well. Partly, that's surely down to the typical persona of their target group but it could also have to do with the last paragraph. It seems to me as if the political left is trying to solve everything at once and that leads to the expectation that every injustice absolutely requires immediately solutions. But that is impossible. People who scrutinize them because they aren't tackling the issue they want tackled right away will eventually still vote for the lesser evil from their perspective. Because whatever you criticize is a dozenfold worse when the other side is elected.
If you look at her senate voting record, you will see - she is perhaps even closer to the left than Bernie Sanders
Which is absolutely wild to me because these types of voters have shown time and time again they have no issue with voting for and being ruled over by the elites and their "betters". Just as long as they have the same sort of views I guess.
So with Trump returning to power - what are the odds that besides records being released in Epstein having a chance of less than zero now - that P Diddy who's parties he also attended - will somehow have a very different cup my which he s measured?
The volume of court cases out of people with ties to him from anything ranging between the topics of sexual assault, ethics violations, campaign finance law, foreign agents (Hi Mike Flynn and co), you name it - many will be sleeper much more comfortable since yesterday. Not to mention he himself of course.
The volume of court cases out of people with ties to him from anything ranging between the topics of sexual assault, ethics violations, campaign finance law, foreign agents (Hi Mike Flynn and co), you name it - many will be sleeper much more comfortable since yesterday. Not to mention he himself of course.
There is a point to this, but I would also say that all the left leaning commentators I follow provided that criticism and strongly advocated for voting for Harris anyway. You also see the most prominent elected leftist doing that - Bernie and AOC were even among the last to call for Biden to drop out.
They did do that but it still creates an atmosphere where only one candidate is being openly criticised by people from both sides of the political spectrum. So a very online electorate is inevitably going to be exposed to more negativity about that candidate. And that can influence votes, whatever the electorate are told to do. More so in terms of people not turning out to vote, rather than changing their vote to Trump. But that's what did for Harris in the end.
The right also has people who feel let down by Trump. It was said that he was losing support from Evangelicals over his inconsistent views on abortion.
I do agree though, that many on the left are far more idealistic and more importantly, have a much loader megaphone. The right fall in line and the left have for fall in love with their candidate.
Regardless, it wasn't the Middle East or lack of support from the progressive left that lost it for Harris. As sad as it is, Gaza is way down the list of issues for the majority of voters.
“Actually it’s all the activists and woke people that the Democrats very purposefully DIDNT align with as much as in 2020 that are at fault….because these are the people I always blame”
Despite the fact Harris & Trump both got less votes than in 2020, only Harris lost way more by running a more conservative campaign, and that Democrats in general only win when running as hopeful change candidates rather than uninspiring status quo enablers. Despite Biden winning by being pro-Trans directly after wide scale rioting and the BLM movement. Yeah, it’s the people they very obviously triangulated to win without this time who are at fault for them not winning. Never the triangulation itself.
It’s not even about left and right it’s about change and a tangible feeling the system is rigged against the ‘average joe’… running on “we will smash the system” has been an entirely reliable vote winner since 2008. She ran basically the same campaign as Hillary - a famously terrible losing campaign! - at times often WITH HILLARY ACTUALLY INVOLVED! and they’re blaming fecking activists and woke people!!?? FFS.
Nothing will change with these fecking Gen X losers dictating how much more moderate everyone has to go to claw back the dead liberal hegemony. The US, the UK and France were all given a brief reprieve from far right slide and a chance to do something with it, and so far 2 of the 3 have fecked it by trying to continue everything on as normal as if the anti-establishmentarianism was just a blip.
Completely convinced Labour are fecked in 4 years, cos they’ll be convinced they can run exactly the same campaign again. And it’ll be the woke activists fault then too.
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At least you lot have a limit of number of terms. We don’t even bathe that to save us.
True enough. Fair to say Harris completely failed to separate herself from Biden. That would be my biggest criticism of the campaign. Not that it was the difference between winning and losing though.
I keep accidentally hitting quote, my bad!
Biden wasn't a "hopeful change candidate" in 2020. He was picked in the primary because voters though that we needed a return to normality after the madness of Trump's first term. I guess though that it still a change of sorts, even if the change back to the status quo. Trump is exactly that too.
Inflation was the number one issue. Given that Harris was a part of the administration that voters blame for price rises, she was on a hiding to nothing. She had no way combat that with her messaging, thus turned to abortion and Trump being a threat to democracy.
This election was more about the price of bacon and eggs than anything else.
Any Democrat that ran against Trump and his message of "you were better off under me" was always going to find it an uphill battle. For me, they only way they could have beaten him was by picking an outsider with no links to the administration and perhaps someone without a D behind their name. That would have been seen as true change.
No chance. He's president elect. They will bury anything they found at all cost
Political theater how? Stealing documents and then moving them to prevent the FBI from taking them back? Is that not a crime?
You have obviously not been following the cases or know the details behind them, but Trump lawyers have been delaying for years. The documents case was thrown out on the most ridiculous technicality by Trump appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, who is in line to be his attorney general, with the assist from Clarence Thomas. Had he not been elected, the appeal against this would have continued.
Trump is clearly a Democrat deep state agent that forced Trump to do that at gunpoint.
Why don't lefties just act more like conservatives so they can win?
just how unpopular Kamala Harris is?
Even Joe Biden would've put up a better fight providing he took his meds
Even Joe Biden would've put up a better fight providing he took his meds
Policies inflationary, but was slightly surprised by how dovish a lot of the notes sent out by banks and asset managers today were. Certainly not a time to be sat in cash, so I need to get my arse in gear and shift things around.
He was the change candidate by default and he ran a far more ‘progressive’ campaign than either Harris or Clinton. He was vocally pro Trans rights and embraced “The Squad” of new young multi-cultural representatives (pretty much all but AOC were ostracised this time) He was also running in the direct aftermath of the George Floyd riots and BLM, which he balanced well to not alienate. In short the idea that “woke activists” have counted against Harris this time and not a pro-Trans Biden directly after wide scale rioting is insane.
Absolutely it was. I agree. I’m aiming this squarely at the centrists dads whinging about woke people and activists, who were not only way down the list of reasons Trump won, were almost certainly amongst the 14m votes Harris lost from last time out that could’ve actually helped close the gap if not treated with insane contempt. Instead they doubled down the the exact thing that painted them as the status quo. Even roping in old members of the losing right wing status quo from 20 years ago even more people hated. What a strategy!
I mean, yeah… this is the point. They should have done this. This is their fault for not doing. Not the voters (it’s always the voters when they fail a centrist but the candidate if they aren’t centrist enough!) Something they possibly could’ve done if they’d gotten rid of Biden early and held primaries. Though knowing them and their hubris they would’ve probably just picked Hillary again or something. Instead she literally went on TV and said she couldn’t think of a single thing she’d do different than Biden.
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Life was much more enjoyable in America before 2015. I miss these days. Trump has taken a lot of the joy.
It had been a pleasure talking to you all here these past few months. Thank you.
It had been a pleasure talking to you all here these past few months. Thank you.
This is all true, but unfortunately, most voters don't look that deeply into it.
It would frustrate me that Harris wasn't better able to explain this in a neat tidy package for voters. But obviously her consultants didn't think it was a good idea to lecture voters on the causes of inflation. Especially when they already blame Biden for it.
Yes, she could have said that all nations have experienced inflation post COVID and the US have recovered faster than most. She could have also pinned it on the stimulus, but no one wants to hear that the free money they received was the problem.
I would have loved her to stand up for a lot of the positive policy that were passed under the Biden administration, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, The Bipartisan Infrastructure bill and the Chips and Science Act, but she seemed reluctant to do it. She should have been more bullish about the stock market and the fact that the US COVID recover was the best in the world under Biden and that inflation is now down to low levels. She should have been able to communicate that the Biden administration was all about COVID economic recovery after Trump's mess and hers would be about building on that to lower prices.
But the issue is, people are not seeing the price of their bacon and eggs drop. More people are voting based on this than any other metric. Trumps message of "you were better off under me" was too simple and too compelling for those unwilling to look any deeper.
Plus, the old adage is that if you are explaining, you are losing. So maybe the Harris team just didnt want to go there.
Despite being a similar age to you and both of us dads (I think?) I guess I’ll go in to bat for the middle aged men you want to distance yourself from. I’m almost certain that not one redcafe member has tried to claim those factors are anything other than low down the list of reasons for the Dems failing. But it is ok to discuss all the possible reasons, right?
The “woke fatigue” tangent only started as a spin off discussion from a couple of words in a list of reasons for the Trump victory, almost all of which are obviously more relevant to the result. And all of which have already been discussed at length in this thread.
Agree with all, but I think at the end of the day, the inflation headwind, plus the mess at the border, were too strong for Harris or any other Dem to fight.
As you say, the only chance would have been to move Biden on post the midterms and have a primary, but he had pretty decent results then, so probably felt he was the best man to take on Trump again. In the last two years, if feels like he aged by 10 years though.
The only person that could have beaten Trump with only a 107 day campaign, i believe, is Mark Cuban. An outsider. Not tied to the unpopular administration, which had a 40% approval rating. An authority on the economy. A brilliant communicator and already a household name. He may even have even been able to bring over some of the Dallas Mavericks fans and flip Texas!
Perhaps not massively relevant to your overall point but Trump almost certainly got at least as many votes as in 2020. He's at 72.6m right now, with 40% of California still to be counted, which should be another 2-3m votes for him.
Pretty much. If I wanted to give advice to the Democratic Party (and I'd gladly be a disgustingly overpaid consultant but alas, no offers have come my way just yet) I'd probably tell them to stop trying to handpick their own candidates from the party establishment. Hold actual open primaries and let the voting base decide who they want, without any sort of meddling.
Oh, and for the voting base: if the DNC deigns to actually grant you that elusive fair primary, don't try to calculate electability and balancing your preferences with some perceived potential appeal to moderate Republicans. In primaries, just vote for the candidate who actually stands for issues important to you. Find someone you can vote for without holding your nose, if possible, regardless of how electable you theoretically expect them to be - don't try to predict the general election a year in advance.
She had a net favorability rating once her campaign started. Her popularity wasn't the issue.
Biden has been underwater for years.
If Biden had run, the Dems may have even lost Virginia or New Jersey. There was zero enthusiasm for him.
If that’s the case, then fair enough. It is precisely what a lot of centrists and/or members of the Democrats are saying this morning though. Hence why it’s so annoying.
Centrists need to be able to grasp that they might finally have to compromise with an agreeable counter-acting populist to get out of this, just as much as the left needs to hone its message discipline.
There’s a whole strand of liberal think pieces this morning about how Liberals need to find their own Joe Rogan if they’re ever going to win back male voters… which I feel is willfully obtuse of the fact the actual Joe Rogan literally endorsed Bernie Sanders last time around! Trump is only the inevitable “smash the system” candidate if you take all the others off the table. And if we continue to do that in this new World Order, it’s the centrists who are intransigent, not leftists against genocide
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So as someone who is late to the last few years ongoings in US politics, I just read that Trump was judged to have sexual assaulted Jean Caroll. It only fell short of rape because she wasn’t able to prove penetration.
I know he has 25-30 accusations against him and given the absolute shitbag he comes across, I have no doubt at least many of those are true. But to think that a court has judged him to have committed that crime and now he soon will be US president again is something else. Shameful.
I know he has 25-30 accusations against him and given the absolute shitbag he comes across, I have no doubt at least many of those are true. But to think that a court has judged him to have committed that crime and now he soon will be US president again is something else. Shameful.
2015 was the year when I moved to the US. My personal circumstances have improved since then so it's hard to compare how enjoyable it is, but I definitely agree that the mood of the country at large felt better for the first 12 months I was here than it has since.