Trump Voters already having buyer’s remorse.

[finesse]

But she also never focused on a specific point in an attempt to break through. Instead she tried to focus on lightly tapping around all the spots of the wall in hopes that it would collapse.

I can't speak to that because, while I've never missed an election, I've never listened to a campaign speech. I look at who who I can stand as a person, who is most likely to move the country in the direction I think we should go and who has a chance to win and support what I think is the best combination of those. So, I don't know what she campaigned on. Otoh, from the things I've read, and I do read, the things you are suggesting aren't even strong in the middle.

 

[Paine]

Free college tuition was not on the list of that survey but her policy for tuition free community college and loan forgiveness was her policy in this campaign

Medicare For All was not on that list of that survey but development of a national single payer system for health care was a policy in her campaign

I think she pretty much addressed all of those issues listed in the survey in her campaign

Try to find single payer healthcare or tuition free public colleges and universities in her 2024 campaign platform or speeches. You won’t find it. I don’t care what policies she supported in 2019.

 

[Paine]

I can't speak to that because, while I've never missed an election, I've never listened to a campaign speech. I look at who who I can stand as a person, who is most likely to move the country in the direction I think we should go and who has a chance to win and support what I think is the best combination of those. So, I don't know what she campaigned on. Otoh, from the things I've read, and I do read, the things you are suggesting aren't even strong in the middle.

What do you mean by “aren’t even strong in the middle?”

 

[finesse]

Maybe I'm wrong because I certainly haven't done the research but if you arranged the registered voters in America in a graph and survey that middle 20% , how do you think the free tuition and one payer health care would rate? I don't see those as strong enough to move the needle or be breakthrough issues.

I'd support them, surely, but I'm some left of that.

 

[sringwal]

I think that is the gist of this miscommunic

Maybe I'm wrong because I certainly haven't done the research but if you arranged the registered voters in America in a graph and survey that middle 20% , how do you think the free tuition and one payer health care would rate? I don't see those as strong enough to move the needle or be breakthrough issues.

I'd support them, surely, but I'm some left of that.

I think the gist of conversations with Paine. His view of that 20% is so different from yours, and mine. It colors everything he does.

 

[Paine]

I think that is the gist of this miscommunic

I think the gist of conversations with Paine. His view of that 20% is so different from yours, and mine. It colors everything he does.

Yes, it seems like we’re talking about a different group of persuadable voter.

The much vaunted “centrist” voter that the Democratic Party has been perusing since at least 2016 broke for Harris. These are college educated, middle-class voters. Never Trump Republicans also are in this bucket. Harris went all in on this group of people.

The working-class swing voters who actually decide elections in this country broke for Trump. Their politics are much harder to pin down, but usually include elements of anti-populist, anti-elite, anti-establishment sentiment. These policies can come from the left or the right.

When the left isn’t offering an alternative anti-establishment choice, they vote for the right. This is especially true when Trump is on the ballot due to his persona. Voting for Trump is the ultimate protest vote for people pissed about the system and current state of affairs.

 

[finesse]

That protest vote has added another half century to the time before their ideas are accepted if the country lasts that long. Empowering the people who hate you the most because you're in a snit is pretty fucking stupid.

 

[superrific]

I stand corrected on her mentioning the PRO Act once. It’s not inaccurate at all to say she did not center her campaign on discussing unions, why they’re important, and how they help the working class. Telling people she’ll make it easier to join a union doesn’t move the needle when most people don’t even know what unions do anymore.

This stuff requires communication. She failed to communicate. Partially through existing factors beyond her control and partially through her campaign’s own strategy.

1. Now your argument is that people don't know what unions do? That is not a problem that can be addressed during a presidential campaign. Maybe the unions need to be doing more, then.

2. But I call BS on that. I saw yesterday that Michigan Democrats lost the state house. They won the state house in 2022 and proceeded to repeal right-to-work legislation. You cannot say that people don't understand that. Repealing right-to-work legislation has been the #1 legislative action item for unions for decades. In Michigan, they finally got it done. And then they lost.

And it's not hard to anticipate how the actual union members voted. Not only do we have exit polls and the like, but we have evidence from the unions. Several said, we're not endorsing you because our members don't really support you, Kamala. Those were not scientific surveys but they tell the same story. If union members had voted blue, the Michigan Dems would have kept the legislature.

3. Now I suppose this doesn't specifically prove anything. But you and I have competing narratives of the election, and these are the data points to which I look. I think the Trump campaign was a paroxysm of hate that attracted lots of working class people because they are hateful. And what happened in Michigan is easy to explain on my narrative. Your narrative requires a whole bunch of weird hoops. Sure union members didn't vote for Kamala but that's because they didn't understand the issues because she didn't talk about them and I guess nobody at their union talked about them either and nobody explained to the union members why unions were good and . . . . the Michigan Democrats repealed right to work and lost. There is no clearer test case than that.

4. I see also that the GOP took Elissa Slotkin's old House district. I did a little bit of looking at this Curtis Hertel fellow who could pull 46% of the vote. He was an architect of the Gotion battery plant in upstate Michigan. The ads against him "hammered" him on that. Literally the GOP was running ads against the guy who helped bring a massive manufacturing plant with thousands of jobs to Michigan. To a rural area where unemployment is high.

Literally the Gotion plant is everything the "economic anxiety" folks say they want. Good manufacturing jobs in a rural area to provide steady middle class employment for people regardless of college degree. If you could shape something in a laboratory to appeal to rust belt white men, this was it. I mean, duh, that's why they did it.

And the GOP rejected it. The GOP's WWC voters rejected it. Now again, maybe you can come up with a whole bunch of reasons why they didn't know what it did or understand it (I doubt it; there were lots of rallies and either Trump or Vance campaigned near there in opposition to the factory IIRC). I can't prove anything.

But when you look at these results, and you look at the campaign Trump ran, and you look at the GOP across the nation, and you think about the campaigns that Trump previously ran, and you think about the history of racial politics in places like Michigan . . . well, Occam's razor man. It literally sounds like racism, talks like racism, looks like racism. Hey, maybe it was racism!!!!

 

[Paine]

1. Now your argument is that people don't know what unions do? That is not a problem that can be addressed during a presidential campaign. Maybe the unions need to be doing more, then.

2. But I call BS on that. I saw yesterday that Michigan Democrats lost the state house. They won the state house in 2022 and proceeded to repeal right-to-work legislation. You cannot say that people don't understand that. Repealing right-to-work legislation has been the #1 legislative action item for unions for decades. In Michigan, they finally got it done. And then they lost.

And it's not hard to anticipate how the actual union members voted. Not only do we have exit polls and the like, but we have evidence from the unions. Several said, we're not endorsing you because our members don't really support you, Kamala. Those were not scientific surveys but they tell the same story. If union members had voted blue, the Michigan Dems would have kept the legislature.

3. Now I suppose this doesn't specifically prove anything. But you and I have competing narratives of the election, and these are the data points to which I look. I think the Trump campaign was a paroxysm of hate that attracted lots of working class people because they are hateful. And what happened in Michigan is easy to explain on my narrative. Your narrative requires a whole bunch of weird hoops. Sure union members didn't vote for Kamala but that's because they didn't understand the issues because she didn't talk about them and I guess nobody at their union talked about them either and nobody explained to the union members why unions were good and . . . . the Michigan Democrats repealed right to work and lost. There is no clearer test case than that.

4. I see also that the GOP took Elissa Slotkin's old House district. I did a little bit of looking at this Curtis Hertel fellow who could pull 46% of the vote. He was an architect of the Gotion battery plant in upstate Michigan. The ads against him "hammered" him on that. Literally the GOP was running ads against the guy who helped bring a massive manufacturing plant with thousands of jobs to Michigan. To a rural area where unemployment is high.

Literally the Gotion plant is everything the "economic anxiety" folks say they want. Good manufacturing jobs in a rural area to provide steady middle class employment for people regardless of college degree. If you could shape something in a laboratory to appeal to rust belt white men, this was it. I mean, duh, that's why they did it.

And the GOP rejected it. The GOP's WWC voters rejected it. Now again, maybe you can come up with a whole bunch of reasons why they didn't know what it did or understand it (I doubt it; there were lots of rallies and either Trump or Vance campaigned near there in opposition to the factory IIRC). I can't prove anything.

But when you look at these results, and you look at the campaign Trump ran, and you look at the GOP across the nation, and you think about the campaigns that Trump previously ran, and you think about the history of racial politics in places like Michigan . . . well, Occam's razor man. It literally sounds like racism, talks like racism, looks like racism. Hey, maybe it was racism!!!!

Your complete ignorance of any material analysis is just as stupid as people who claim race and gender wasn’t a factor at all.

 

[superrific]

The working-class swing voters who actually decide elections in this country broke for Trump. Their politics are much harder to pin down, but usually include elements of anti-populist, anti-elite, anti-establishment sentiment. These policies can come from the left or the right.

You missed something in those list of adjectives. And on that one, the politics isn't hard to pin down.

Look, if you don't want to agree with me that racism was the #1 factor, surely you have to admit that it was a big factor. The hoops you go through trying to avoid the obvious implications of what we saw -- it's just crazy.

If only we had offered free college tuition! Oh, wait, did Big Gretch do that? Was that one of her signature accomplishments? So Dems cleaned up in Michigan? Oh. And Medicare For All? Well, the choice was presented during the election -- and it was in the much-watched debate, so it's not as if this was some nook-and-cranny issue. Continue and strengthen Obamacare, or go with Trump's "concept of a plan" on health care. We literally lost to "concepts of a plan." So what makes you think a robust Medicare If You Want It would have made a difference? Evidence, please.

The problem is that you keep waving your hands and talking in hypotheticals, and some of us more experienced hands keep bringing actual evidence. It cannot be contested that a central appeal of Trumpism to the WWC was the racism. Social scientists have looked at this issue and it's just not open for debate. You can argue, well what about the intensity -- fine, but we now just had a campaign where Trump ran on racism and then a bunch of other goofy shit and he won bigger than in the past. His secret sauce this time was jettisoning all that other crap to focus almost entirely on his cult of personality and the extraordinary xenophobia and racism.

And I mean, look around. Southern states have been waging open war against Black history for the past three years. "Go woke and go broke" is a thing. Why? They were doing all that for shits and giggles? Or because their WWC voters love that shit and can't get enough of it?

 

[Paine]

You missed something in those list of adjectives. And on that one, the politics isn't hard to pin down.

Look, if you don't want to agree with me that racism was the #1 factor, surely you have to admit that it was a big factor. The hoops you go through trying to avoid the obvious implications of what we saw -- it's just crazy.

If only we had offered free college tuition! Oh, wait, did Big Gretch do that? Was that one of her signature accomplishments? So Dems cleaned up in Michigan? Oh. And Medicare For All? Well, the choice was presented during the election -- and it was in the much-watched debate, so it's not as if this was some nook-and-cranny issue. Continue and strengthen Obamacare, or go with Trump's "concept of a plan" on health care. We literally lost to "concepts of a plan." So what makes you think a robust Medicare If You Want It would have made a difference? Evidence, please.

The problem is that you keep waving your hands and talking in hypotheticals, and some of us more experienced hands keep bringing actual evidence. It cannot be contested that a central appeal of Trumpism to the WWC was the racism. Social scientists have looked at this issue and it's just not open for debate. You can argue, well what about the intensity -- fine, but we now just had a campaign where Trump ran on racism and then a bunch of other goofy shit and he won bigger than in the past. His secret sauce this time was jettisoning all that other crap to focus almost entirely on his cult of personality and the extraordinary xenophobia and racism.

And I mean, look around. Southern states have been waging open war against Black history for the past three years. "Go woke and go broke" is a thing. Why? They were doing all that for shits and giggles? Or because their WWC voters love that shit and can't get enough of it?

I’ve routinely acknowledged that her race and gender were a factor. I don’t believe it was the primary factor in her loss. If you think I’m hand waving, you haven’t read what I’ve said. You routinely ignore the analysis I’ve offered in other posts in order to address specific points I’ve made in individual posts.

It’s clear you aren’t going to convince me and I’m not going to convince you.

It’s about a way forward to win. You think that way forward is that we should…??

 

[korgguy1971]

This seems as good a place as any to post this: shout out to @sringwal on your avatar

 

[superrific]

Your complete ignorance of any material analysis is just as stupid as people who claim race and gender wasn’t a factor at all.

And there it is. Where was I rude to you in a way that would justify this sort of attack?

Here's my advice. Stop claiming, against all reality, that the election that we just saw play out as the most racist POS thing in our history was really about economic policies that would have carried the day if only Kamala had done a better job.

The better play is some combination of:

1. We don't really know exactly what happened. Let's see what happens when all the results are in, researchers look at the best exit polls, etc.
2. Whether or not this election was about racism, material policies are our way forward. We can't fix racial attitudes, but maybe we can offer an alternative. I'm skeptical of that, because I've seen very little evidence of that over the last two decades, but maybe.

Claiming that Kamala or Dems would have done much better if only she had more fully embraced legislation that most people have never heard of just seems weird. Democrats actual legislation doing exactly the things you think they should do did not help Kamala win. Democrats didn't do better in MI than the bordering states, despite Gretch's big pro-labor program.

 

[superrific]

I’ve routinely acknowledged that her race and gender were a factor.

It's not about HER race and gender only or primarily. It's about an American electorate that is more motivated by hate than anything.

And guess what? In addition to hating brown and black people, they hate us too. You and me both, brother. They were running against us. That can be interpreted in multiple ways and each interpretation suggests different paths forward, but first we have to be clear on what happened. MAGA hates successful America. That's why Trump lost no points by running on "America is a trash can." Everything happening in America right now at the sub-college level is negative partisanship and hate-based. They even say it. We hate the right people.

 

[Calheel]

We can't fix racial attitudes, but maybe we can offer an alternative. I'm skeptical of that, because I've seen very little evidence of that over the last two decades, but maybe.

2008 and 2012 were within the last two decades.

 

[sringwal]

This seems as good a place as any to post this: shout out to @sringwal on your avatar

Thanks. I’m keeping it up as an infinitesimally small form of protest.

 

[CFordUNC]

Though it is probably of little consolation, I do think it’s a silver lining that it’s appearing that Trump really didn’t get anymore votes this time than he did last time. The election wasn’t decided by some unforeseen wave of *new* Trump support. It was decided by one party not being able to turn out the base it needed to win, and the other party being able to do so. Hindsight is obviously 20/20 but I now realize that shouldn't have been so optimistic, since the polls really were quite literally as tight as they could possibly be, which meant that Trump had as good of a chance as Harris, and possibly slightly more so. I think many were not prepared emotionally for what we knew intellectually that we should have been prepared for. Personally, I have not had a negative emotional response to the outcome because I’m just past a point in which I’m going to let something outside of my control negatively impact my emotional or mental wellbeing. I do think that ultimately the deciding factor was inflation and increased prices- and with the benefit of hindsight, I think we probably lost this presidential election in 2022 as much as we did in 2024- with perhaps a touch of racism and misogyny on the part of *some* voters (but not nearly a majority of them). I think it would be foolish to dismiss racism and misogyny as *a* potential contributing factor, but I think it would be equally shortsighted to believe that racism and misogyny were even close to being *the* contributing factors.

Many people who ended up voting for Trump are not MAGA; Trump would have gotten crushed if it were only MAGA voting for him. And only ~30% of eligible voters voted for him anyway. It’s like Simon Rosenberg said: despite the initial shock, the election was a very close one, with Trump narrowly winning in the battlegrounds. The Senate will be 52-48 or 53-47 and the House to be decided by a seat or two. While Democrats lost the Presidency, they had many important down ballot wins- including in the Senate and the NC governorship- in these same battleground states. This was not a massive win, a wave election or some big mandate for MAGA. It was a narrow win in a closely divided country.

Dems need to do a lot of introspection, figure out what went wrong where and how to change it, and get ready for 2026 midterms. The Senate map in 2026 is significantly more favorable for Democrats than was the 2024 one, and if the House only has a 1-3 or so seat Republican majority, it too should be easier to flip. We need to let Trump and the GOP simply be Trump and the GOP, and the conditions should be very favorable for a positive midterm election cycle.

 

[Paine]

And there it is. Where was I rude to you in a way that would justify this sort of attack?

Here's my advice. Stop claiming, against all reality, that the election that we just saw play out as the most racist POS thing in our history was really about economic policies that would have carried the day if only Kamala had done a better job.

The better play is some combination of:

1. We don't really know exactly what happened. Let's see what happens when all the results are in, researchers look at the best exit polls, etc.
2. Whether or not this election was about racism, material policies are our way forward. We can't fix racial attitudes, but maybe we can offer an alternative. I'm skeptical of that, because I've seen very little evidence of that over the last two decades, but maybe.

Claiming that Kamala or Dems would have done much better if only she had more fully embraced legislation that most people have never heard of just seems weird. Democrats actual legislation doing exactly the things you think they should do did not help Kamala win. Democrats didn't do better in MI than the bordering states, despite Gretch's big pro-labor program.

It’s no surprise that you think there’s nothing she could’ve done to win.

You thought before the election that she would win, you claimed Michigan was a “mirage” for Trump and he would never win Michigan. You were proven to be wrong, just like the consultants in the Democratic Party who preached all the same things you have.

IIRC, you said that the strategy of appealing to Republicans and campaigning with Cheney was a good one. You said that, if Harris won, any progressive who criticized her for campaigning with Cheney should be laughed out of the party.

Now that Harris has lost, of course you’re turning to other factors for some explanation. You were, and have been, convinced that the Democratic Party is full of smart people who just want to win.

It’s much easier to say that the country was just too racist to elect Harris rather than having to acknowledge the flaws and blind spots about how you think about politics.

So spare me the stuff about y’all “knowing better.” It doesn’t matter what lessons you’ve learned from your age and participating in past elections if the wrong lessons were taken away.

 

[CFordUNC]

Lol. Trump voters and the Taliban- the fucking Taliban!- are on the same side, huh?

 

[CFordUNC]

Can’t be having none of that communism!