site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1d ago (text post)   14391 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Looks like Kamala Harris will not win the south end of Dearborn, an area 90+% Muslim that Biden won with 88% of the vote 4 years ago.

This may not end up mattering in the end, but still hilarious.

Muslims didn't vote for a woman

Absolutely shocking, I say. Maybe the democrats will finally learn their lesson about pandering to this particular demographic

I haven't seen it discussed much, probably because Harris didn't lean into it, but the elephant in the room is that maybe America just doesn't want a woman president?

I think we'd elect an Iron Lady, but Harris and Clinton are the opposite of that.

Clinton seems to me to fit an iron lady archetype very well. (Kamala the Brat, less so.)

I can see the headlines now:

Trump beats women

I'm following Ken White and some other usual suspects on bluesky. If she does lose they're already prepping that narrative hard. Lots of "the votes of racist misogynists aren't valid expressions of democracy"

I’ve been watching NBC, and they just talked about that too. (Paraphrased) “If Harris loses, it might just be proof that Americans won’t vote for a black female president.”

There have been two notable female candidates for the American Presidency in the last half century. One was a clearly ambitious, unprincipled, anti-charismatic party member with debatable interest in legality who ran because it was her turn and the party machine cleared the way. The other was Hillary Clinton.

There are jokes about which was the better role model for young women, but the key point is that neither ran or rose the position on the power of their popularity. This is something of an obstacle in democratic elections, which are basically weighted popularity contests.

I think Hillary would be the better role model. Harris is just as venal but a lot stupider.

I'd like to be able to contradict you, but I don't actually know anything about her, and it looks like I'm going to keep it that way.

I think the Democrat coalition contains a lot of small but important demographics (Muslims, evangelical blacks etc.) who are very firmly opposed to a female President, for many of the same reasons that they're opposed to LGBTQ stuff. This fact makes DNC staffers uncomfortable, so they ignore it, but if they want to win elections, they won't be able to ignore it forever.

I actually don't think the idea of the Republicans putting forward a successful female candidate in the next decade is completely implausible.

A republican woman President is completely plausible, but the problem is that there aren’t many matronly Republican women in senior state positions, the default look seems to be a bimbofied Fox News anchor (just look at what they did to Kristi Noem) which I don’t think people see as particularly presidential.

The odds that the next Democratic presidential nominee is a white male are 100%.

I recall seeing a couple articles about this leading up to the election (eg, from the BBC). I expect to see a whole lot more if Trump wins.

This is an angry special interest group casting protest votes in a safe state. The message is that Democrats are eventually going to have to choose between appeasing Jews, and appeasing Muslims--and for the forseeable future, a lot more Muslims will be born into or emigrating to the U.S., than Jews.

But this potentially feeds into the larger possibility of Trump winning the popular vote, which would be quite something to see.

It will be interesting on how this plays out in internal democratic party politics over the next few years.

This election has definitely shown the limits and the breakdown of the Obama wing of the party. I forget who first made the comparison of Obama's having a Chicago political machine approach to national politics, but this election had so many of the tropes of a machine-led political campaign. Starting from the efforts to build a controlled-opposition via Cheney's wing in the 2021, to the organized lawfare campaigns, to the heavy media influence efforts, to the Democratic candidate switch and even harder narrative efforts. Even these last few weeks of polling and polling coverage have been weird- not just the outliers, and what I now suspect were attempts to paper over / prevent a despair spiral, but coverage of topics not actually matching to voter sentiment. It was a political machine trying to do what a political machine does.

It's also clearly broken down without Obama's star power to drive it, and Obama's technocratic wing of the party always hinged on the argument of 'we're the best at winning.' It's kind of clearly not, a lot of the Democratic old guard is on the way our if not already done so, and so a lot of the party is going to be up for competition going forward.

One thing that is going to matter, though- and one of the things that keeps a political machine working as a machine and is why the Democratic Party is one of the oldest political parties in the world- is the role of loyalty to the machine. The muslim wing voting as a block made a point about power, but it also made a point about reliability. That, specifically, will not be resolved so easily as some accommodation, especially when the anti-Israeli opinion is still a minority position for most of the American electorate.

population is less relevant here. Jews have more influence and spillover compared to Muslims. Policy that pisses off Jews means losing support of some Christians, negative media coverage, other ripple effects

But this potentially feeds into the larger possibility of Trump winning the popular vote

If this happens it'll chiefly be because Trump narrowed his margins in places like NY and CA by 10+ points

This is an angry special interest group casting protest votes in a safe state.

Safe state?

Oh, good catch, sorry. No, not a safe state at all.

If true, this is incredibly fucked up. It means they are voting as a block.

Also, you have to LOL at the incompetence. The Harris campaign let those people exercise veto power over their VP pick, and then lost their vote anyway.

Notably, (caveat about hindsight 20/20 of course) it doesn't currently appear as if Pennsylvania alone would have delivered Harris the presidency, so this is a moot point. Shapiro vs Walz was only ever going to deliver a single state at best, VP picks just don't do anything beyond that.

The Harris campaign let those people exercise veto power over their VP pick

Uh, when has Walz ever openly opposed Kamala on support for Israel? Wasn’t he boldly (some would say falsely) proclaiming his military background/support for the global American empire?

The rumor is that Shapiro was nixed for being Jewish

One of the frontrunners for Kamala's VP pick was Jewish.

Ah yeah, I forgot about that guy. Good point; I stand corrected

Block voting is the optimal thing to do when you're a relatively small minority. Even if you're 10% of the population if you consistently block vote and no other groups do you can be the kingmaker effectively every single election. Main party A and Main party B may get to win half the time each but through promising your votes off to the highest bidder (the party that pledges to give you the most stuff) and effectively guaranteeing your chosen side victory you get to win basically every single election. Pretty sweet, isn't it?

This is just the correct way to play the democracy game under the ruleset of the 21st century. Don't hate the player, hate the game. If you don't like it, do away with "democracy".

This is the wages of identity politics, unfortunately.

There was a huge campaign throughout the election cycle by the Palestine crowd to punish Biden and/or Kamala electorally for their concessions to Israel, which is kind of funny given that Israel much prefers Trump.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats