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?
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.
Fascism is popular, I’m sorry but it is true. That being said your counterargument can be true, and is true, at the same time. They share the same space.
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.
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.
And it will only get worse with Trump and conservatives trying to end public education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 fact that it’s even close is still disturbing.
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).
We’ve been seeing a see-saw effect for awhile, where without incumbency, the party last holding the Presidency loses. This reflects a general, vague dissatisfaction with the status quo, mostly felt at the emotional level instead of intellectually reasoned. The world is too complicated for the average person to really figure out, and they don’t like that. While you can distract yourself from this in innumerable ways, or paper over it with something like religion, it’ll surface when it comes time to consider new leadership.
Then, in addition to the various issues people will discuss, I think being a woman hurt Harris somewhat with latinos, where the culture prizes a more Trumpian machismo.
Yeah, misogyny def played a part, but, to be fair: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Sheinbaum
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Yeah there is a ton of analysis to be done, but I really think the average undecided voter looks at the one choice they have and basically just asks themselves “am I doing ok right now?” If yes, they stay the course. If no, they pull the lever and flip to the other guy.
The bad economy killed them. Kamala breathed some life into the campaign but it wasn’t enough. Is the bad economy their fault? Not really, inflation is bad worldwide post-COVID. But when people can’t feed their families, they blame the people above and use the only tool they have to punish them: cutting off their nose to spite their face.
The real question is, where are all the Democrat voters who didn’t show up, that did show up for Biden? I think a combination of deep rooted misogyny, racism, and a weak message watered down to cater to “centrist” Republicans really hurt them.
The Democrats tend to focus on the undecided voter. They shouldn’t, because those people are basically just motivated by their personal good fortune at that exact time. They should focus on the occasional voter, because that’s who wins them elections.
I somewhat agree, though I’ll point out people were doing quite well at the end of Clinton and Obama’s presidencies. They flipped to the other party anyway.
I’ll be very interested to see the objective agreed upon postmortem 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
it’s really easy to exploit the worse parts of human psychology en masse when you have money, and its incredibly hard to undo that
She outspent him by around $600mn. So I don’t think this is it.
Canadian observer. Two things, and I think they’re related effects.
Harris is a minority and a woman. The Democrats were convinced they were the party that minorities would automatically vote for. But what they failed to realize was that those same minorities are misogynistic as hell. Like, have you ever been to a Baptist wedding? If you ask them what the role of a woman is…
The US is also the only first world country where the birthrate is above replacement. But if you look at who are having children, you’ll find that it skews conservative. And they’re passing those values along.
But if you look at who are having children, you’ll find that it skews conservative
Just like Mike Judge predicted in Idiocracy.
The system is what it does, and what it does is decay in to fascism.
Welcome to the system. Everyone’s a victim. Doesn’t matter. Black or white, it hates you all. Here inside the system, violence is a symptom, fighting for what’s right, but somehow everyone is wrong.
Thomas MacDonald (born September 21, 1988) is a Canadian rapper and singer. He is known for his anti-establishment subject matter in his music, in which he also criticizes “woke” culture, herd behavior and groupthink. In 2024, he emerged as a figurehead of “MAGA rap”, a Trumpist subgenre of hip hop.
They all decay to fascism, if you haven’t noticed.
The average lifespan is like 70-80+ years. All the shitheads have plenty of time to pass down their hatred and humans tend to be tribal so easily willing to accept propaganda that blames ‘others’.
The old trope about the racist uncle is relatable because of how many racist people there are.
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.
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.
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
“I’m unhappy, financially so I’m going to vote for the felon, racist, sexist, fascist” still doesn’t add up.
sure it does. people are not 100% rational. they will use motivated reasoning to justify whatever they need to vote for (what they perceive to be) their best interests.
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 agree, I think it’s 100% inflation related which has nothing to do with Biden or Harris. And inflation is already back to normal, so Trump’s economy is going to look better having done nothing at all.
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.
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…
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 hateful minority have run a campaign championing selfishness and ignorance and the vicarious absolution thereof.
it’s much easier to be selfish and ignorant than it is to be considerate and responsible.
conservatives are selfish and ignorant and their party is very successfully campaigning selfishness and ignorance.
on the other hand, the democrats have to convince people that childish short-term desires are not always the best decision for themselves and others.
Trump is telling everybody that if you want to steal a cheeseburger from somebody else and eat it, then you should.
Harris is telling everybody that stealing is wrong and counterproductive, and cheeseburgers are not healthy.
or, since Trump is a rapist:
Trump is telling conservatives it’s good to rape people If they want to rape people.
Harris is telling people that it isn’t good to rape people because it violates their dignity and free will.
Money. Donors. Ad campaigns etc.
