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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.

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What does a Harris loss look like?

Depends a lot on degree.

If it's tight -- one state under 5%, two or three states under 1% -- some amount of delaying is unavoidable. Literally, in some cases, like Pennsylvania where I don't think Harris could stop people from getting a recount if she wanted to. Some of the objections I might even agree with: there's a mess with Nevada signature verification that seems at least plausible. If it's not -- lose the popular vote by most of a percentage point, multiple states with multiple percent differences -- probably not.

I don't think we'll get a complete copy of J6, knock on wood. The Electoral Count Reform Act makes any challenge at Congress specifically to be exceptionally hard, requiring twenty Senators and over eighty Representatives. There's revelations about Trump I could imagine getting that level of cohesion, but I can't imagine any that wouldn't have been released long ago and needing (or wanting) a particularly boisterous riot at all.

There's still some place for ugliness toward the middle, though. I've mentioned the possibility of a blue governor in a state that voted red by a narrow margin and has the NPV Compact on the books doing something Interesting when it came to certifying electors for their state. I don't think it's likely, since neither Shapiro nor Whitmer seem to be Grishams, as bad as I think Whitmer's COVID response was, and that's why I'll describe it at all. There's a hilariously stupid loophole in the Electoral Count Reform Act related to judicial review, and it's one that's very hard to exploit, but there are some specific lines I could see the Baude/Paulsens of the world try to push, to serious destruction, enough that I'm not going to go into more detail.

Neither of these work at 300+ electoral vote splits. There's stuff that might, but it's... very far tail end, and very ugly. I'd be disappointed if the Harris campaign keeps trying to get blue jurisdictions to find ballots that can't close a 50-point EV gap, but that's just be embarrassing rather than destructive. There's gonna be people trying to come up with novel interpretations of everything -- Lawrence Tribe is still alive -- but they don't need conservatives wargaming for them.

((Wouldn't be surprised by some last-minute regulatory or executive branch bird-flipping, though dunno if anyone cares at this point. Probably will set the stage for a lot of legal fights afterward, though, both in terms of APA challenges to Trump and in making it hard for him to undo hits against himself or Musk; a CFPB-like established in the lame duck session is definitely on the table.))

Harris specifically almost certainly turns into one crux of any election post-mortem if she loses, especially by a large amount. A very tight race might be handwaved as racism or sexism, and I still expect to see a lot of ''racist v anti-racist'' tweets about the African-American male vote even as California brings it back closer to historical norms, but a large EV loss against Trump is gonna leave too much blame to go around. I don't think that's entirely fair, with the combination of general economic mess and everything Biden and last-minute swap (and, frankly, weakness from Walz), but the public relations people aren't going to put their own necks on the line. There's already gonna be a ton of outreach folk sharpening their wits for the tell-all books, and Harris being the nominee this year was always a bit about fear of that possibility from 'better' candidates like Whitmer or Newsom (ugh).

I'd like for there to be some more serious considerations among the broader progressive field about how it came to this, especially about emphasizing every tactical option but persuasion, but I... don't think it could happen.

((And, conversely, I'd hope that Trump et all does some actual giving on matters like abortion, like an 8-week safe harbor in exchange for requiring in-person consultations for oral abortificents, if only for tactical considerations like not getting absolutely crushed next election, but I'm not very optimistic. Even if it ends up a split House/Senate, there's gonna be too much temptation to take everything they can get.))

That said, I spent a lot of November 2020 sure that the Red Tribe Didn't Riot, so discount all this analysis as appropriate.