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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26869 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.

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What are some other factors that could explain Trump’s victory, besides “Kamala is unlikable”? It sucks that we can’t determine how Trump won as the pollsters are too inaccurate, but we can still make guesses.

I think that the rise in scrolling-based media (tik tok, reels) has made non-political social media content significantly more addicting than the political media of the 10s and news in general. This reduces the number of people engaging in online political content, and reduces the political engagement of those whose political information came via online spectacles. For a variety of reasons I think that Democrats have relied on more “addictive internet content” to recruit votes, as for instance the BLM / brutality / racism motif of Obama-Hillary-Biden campaigns. George Floyd can’t compete with Moo Deng. Consider that Northwestern study which found that BLM shifted swing state votes more than concern about the economy. If Dems rely on socially contagious hype more than Republicans then they need to fundamentally rethink their strategy in a post-2020 social media environment.

What are some other factors that could explain Trump’s victory, besides “Kamala is unlikable”?

It's simple: "I live paycheck to paycheck and can barely afford anything. Biden didn't improve anything during his tenure, and Kamala, a woman, didn't instill much confidence because she's more concerned with identity politics than helping me afford gas and groceries. Trump made the economy the focus of his campaign, so he got my vote."

Very few people actually live paycheque to paycheque though. The US economy has done really well and real wages, especially for the poor are up.

Very few people actually live paycheque to paycheque though. The US economy has done really well and real wages, especially for the poor are up.

Wages are up, but they have not kept up with inflation, putting people in a vicious cycle of barely affording daily necessities. Plenty of reporting has been done about this issue over the past year or two.

The economy is working for the wealthy, not for lower- and middle-class voters, who make up most of the electorate in the critical swing states that eventually gave Trump a second presidency. Polls determined the economy/rising costs as the #1 issue among those voters nationwide. That would not be the case if the economy worked for everyone.

They have kept up with inflation though. (And that's not what a vicious cycle is, by the way) Real wages have been rising. The less you earn, the more they've been rising. The poorest Americans have done extremely well in the last few years.

https://aneconomicsense.org/2024/10/03/real-wages-of-individuals-under-obama-trump-and-biden/

American workers are very rich by world standards. Claiming that they can barely afford necessities, when even the lowest paid among them make several times what people in other countries make or what the average American made a couple generations ago is absurd.

Even someone earning the minimum wage in the US, which is rare, makes far more than most people in the world and makes more than the average person did in the 60's, even after adjusting for the cost of living.

American workers are very rich by world standards. Claiming that they can barely afford necessities, when even the lowest paid among them make several times what people in other countries make or what the average American made a couple generations ago is absurd.

The original point was never to compare American workers to those across the rest of the world.

Even someone earning the minimum wage in the US, which is rare, makes far more than most people in the world and makes more than the average person did in the 60's, even after adjusting for the cost of living.

Wages are up, but the price of goods in the United States is outpacing that growth to the point that lower- and middle-class people making decent wages still can barely afford the necessities, e.g., rent, groceries, gas, childcare. Swing state voters said this was their biggest concern and hope (and believe) Trump and the Republicans will come to the rescue.

The original point was never to compare American workers to those across the rest of the world.

My point was that if the rest of the world gets by on much less, then they clearly get paid enough to keep up with basic necessities.

Wages are up, but the price of goods in the United States is outpacing that growth to the point that lower- and middle-class people making decent wages still can barely afford the necessities, e.g., rent, groceries, gas, childcare.

The word "real" means the numbers are adjusted for inflation, so if real wages are going up, that means that nominal wages are increasing faster than the price of goods. This is especially true for lower and middle class people. Their earnings have risen more than those of upper class people. The wages of the poorest have risen the most.

Swing state voters said this was their biggest concern and hope (and believe) Trump and the Republicans will come to the rescue.

If you look at polls that have been done over the last few years, most Americans say they're doing fine but believe most other people are not. These economic problems are completely imaginary. This has been the best period for the increase in the standard of living of the American poor in a very long time,

I agree with @Dean about "Democratic over-reliance on media shaping", but want to take it in a different direction. I don't have the numbers to hand (EDIT: I do now), but I saw an exit poll showing a staggeringly-huge swing among the under-30s - Gen Z, who are extremely online. And what happened online in the past four years? Elon Musk bought Twitter, which shattered SJ's consensus-astroturfing operation; up until then, they'd been seeing a false SJ consensus created by banning everyone who spoke out, but now they see something closer to reality. And I think that gave... call it "social permission" to not vote Democrat; SJ can no longer gaslight them into thinking that voting Republican is lonely dissent.

they'd been seeing a false SJ consensus created by banning everyone who spoke out, but now they see something closer to reality

This statement seems crazy to me. If there was an SJW consensus prior to Elon, all the same mechanisms and all the same incentives exist to create an equally false right-wing consensus. If your response is going to be, "well, my side is actually right!" then you're isomorphic to an SJW.

If your response is going to be, "well, my side is actually right!" then you're isomorphic to an SJW.

Regardless of what Musk does or does not do with Twitter, he cannot create a false consensus by himself, because he doesn't own Alphabet (including Google Search and YouTube), Meta (including Facebook and Instagram), Reddit, or Hollywood (or TikTok, but lol TikTok's a Chinese op and will push whatever's most destructive). Most of these people consume at least one of those.

My point is that having all of the major platforms do the same censorship (and Hollywood and the most-respected legacy media push the same line) creates a false consensus effect.

I understand your point better now-- you're talking about global (across the internet) rather than local (on twitter) consensus. I still disagree with it, but that's because I don't think a consensus ever existed. facebook and whatsapp have been notorious for right-wing behavior for a while, and of course reddit and twitter got trump elected in 2016. Andrew Tate and the manosphere have been popular on youtube for quite a while too.

or TikTok, but lol TikTok's a Chinese op and will push whatever's most destructive

This is true.

If there was an SJW consensus prior to Elon, all the same mechanisms and all the same incentives exist to create an equally false right-wing consensus.

Okay. Show the high-engagement Progressive accounts being banned from X through arbitrary application of platform rules. That's the mechanism that dominated prior to Elon, so according to you it should be the mechanism dominating under Elon.

Likewise, community notes didn't exist prior to Elon, and are a significant improvement to the function of the platform.

Show the high-engagement Progressive accounts being banned from X through arbitrary application of platform rules.

I'm sure that regardless of whether censorship is actually happening, I could do that. It wouldn't be proof either way, because anecdotes aren't data-- and similarly, any proof of twitter's previous institutional leftist bent is subject to the same fuzziness. That's why I'm referring to mechanisms and incentives. The actual, technological infrastructure of the site either does or doesn't allow for systematically influencing public opinion. The owner of the site either is or isn't incentivised to use it for that purpose-- and either is or isn't empowered to incentivise their subordinates to do the same. Everything else is downstream of that. Either twitter has always been and still is pushing a particular viewpoint, or it never was and still isn't.

The left has become too dogmatic to be appealing. When each comment has to be approved by committee it becomes hard to be adaptive, participate in podcasts or even have humor. There was a post yesterday about how Tucker was talk about UFOs being demons. There are probably lots of people in the left with equally far out ideas but they don't say them because the self censorship is much stronger.

The left not doing long format podcasts isn't just an American phenomenon, it is noticeable here in Europe as well. Their speech is too curated allow effective campaigning. It also makes them rigid and slow to adapt. Boomers with though control won't attract young people.

SJ?

Social justice?

Steve Jobs, a lá Metal Gear Solid 2?

Social Justice.

Yes, yes, I know most people here refer to that movement as "woke". I don't like using that word. You can, indeed, search theMotte and find that it only shows up in my posts before now as direct quotes. As for why: part of it's that the time when I was semi-on-board with said movement was back when "social justice" was still the usual term. The greater part is that I'm an Australian linguistic snob, and "woke" is grammatically-incorrect African-American slang - i.e. a vulgar term from a demographic that doesn't even significantly exist in my country - so I consider it inherently cultural contamination and also beneath me. I suppose that makes me...

...a Grammar Nazi.

I assume they meant social justice.

I suspect that this broke strongly along gender lines.

Politically disaffected men broke for Trump, because Kamala is the epitome of everything they fear: lionization of female selfish incompetence. Kamala made no attempt to disabuse them of this her entire campaign.

It looks like turnout was the major factor. Trump more or less repeated his 2020 performance whereas Harris is down 15 million from Biden's numbers. There's been some coalition shuffling but I can't imagine it changed things all that much for Trump; I would presume he alienated and attracted in roughly even numbers. But it's hard not to look at Harris's results and see anything besides a deeply uninspiring campaign and candidate. Democratic voters simply did not turn out; not just in swing states but across the board.

Just a personal data point: I was leaning Harris when she was first selected, but she lost my vote when all the neocons from the Bush administration came out of the woodwork to endorse her, and she started doing joint events with Liz Cheney. I'd be curious to know if that decision overall helped or hurt her, though I suppose we'll never have hard data on it.

Yes - Harris' grand strategy was to build the largest possible anti-Trump coalition, rather than to present a positive vision of her centre-left (or left) plans for America. If you thought (as I did) that the biggest groups of persuadable voters were NeverTrump conservatives and double-haters then this would have have been the right approach. But it appears that it wasn't. I say appears because of the strong possibility based on polls and betting markets that essentially nothing has affected this election since the Dems nominated Harris, and that it has always been 51-49 for Trump with us just not being able to read the runes with the polling technology we have.

At the time, it was widely predicted that the first assassination attempt against Trump had secured him the election. As polling data seemed not to reflect this prediction, it was quietly discarded. But I genuinely think the attempt and Trump's reaction to it might have cinched it for him. Within 24 hours, everyone knew that this was the most iconic photo of the year, if not the decade (a decade which has already given us J6, Covid, probably the worst American riots since '92 and the invasion of Ukraine).

man the 2020s have a LOT more in them than the 2010s. The 2010s were a mostly boring decade all things considered, Cell phones and the economic rise of china were the 2 big news stories of those times

2020s have

AI, COVID and the invasion of Ukraine!

The housing bubble crash was 2008.

Brexit, Trump's first term, invasion of Crimea, the Great Awokening, Arab Spring (leading to the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis).

♪♫ We didn't start the fire! ♫♪

I've heard that The 1975 intended this song to be a "We Didn't Start the Fire" for Millennials, your mileage may vary on whether they pulled it off.

Also Elevatorgate, Gamergate, Atheism+

I was thinking of those under the "great Awokening" umbrella, along with the Ferguson riots in 2014. August 2014, as I've noted before, was a busy month.

Noted. It basically started with Trayvon Martin in a real sense.

Would I be right in saying there were no riots after Trayvon Martin's death? I honestly don't know either way.

I don't think there were violent riots, only protests, but the whole scandal was a harbringer of things to come, especially the ludicrous levels of media bias on display.

If you were paying attention to fringe left-wing politics, the Great Awokening dates back to the failure of Occupy in 2011. Trayvon Martin is when it got big enough that the establishment left wanted to play ball with it. Gamergate was when it became obvious that there was no adult supervision and that wokestupid twentysomethings were, at least in left-wing spaces, in charge.

Democratic over-reliance on media shaping to paper over party weaknesses that might have been detrimental to acknowledge in the short term, but which are important in the long term.

Trump's victory is fundamentally a turnout victory, but his margin of victory- including the popular vote- was because Harris underperformed Biden's 2020 performance. This wasn't just in relative terms, but apparently in many cases absolute terms, which is significant because when Trump lost in 2020 he had more actual votes than in 2016 and in 2024.

This difference between 'we have a larger number of votes, but smaller share' and 'we have a smaller number of votes, and a smaller share' has different implications and political compensations. To pick a non-US equivalent, this was the issue with the Corbyn-Labour party in the UK, when Labour Party membership swelled but Corbyn was so politically toxic that Labour was trounced amongst their own historic voting base. When Corbyn was booted, many of those he brought in were lost as well... but this increased relative percentage, despite losing absolute numbers. Increasing the base matters, but not as much as its relationship with how that base change changes the relative standing.

In the last week(s) of polling, there was likely a deliberate effort by the Democrats to try and lead the electorate rather than reflect the electorate. Polls showing things closer than they are both might encourage turnout (we still have a chance!), but can also prevent self-fulfilling doom spirals (don't show up to the polls because you're going to lose which leads to actually losing). In the short term (last week(s) of campaigning) this is understandable / normal, but as a long-term strategy (over months / years) this is detrimental because polities need accurate information to accomodate for reality (such as what more people actually feel over time).

And for the Harris campaign this was a long-term strategy, because it was one well underway in the Harris-Biden strategy when Democrats were pushing against uncomfortable awareness of his age, or inflation, or progressive policy implementation. The Democratic party machine was focused on trying to control the perception of reality, to the detriment of creating a worse reality (that they were out of touch with).

The mechanical means by which this happened are many- overly-strong political alliances with major media groups, the creation of parallel information institutions in X and the Republican social media spheres, the nature of the Democratic centralization of party control in party elders like Biden himself- but ultimately it was a knowledge-acknowledgement issue.

You're overthinking it. It's the economy, stupid. Inflation was the worst ever under Biden, and when pressed, Kamala couldn't identify a single policy difference between herself and Biden. In the counter-factual where everyone feels richer than 4 years ago, we'd have president Harris.

We would probably still have President Biden. If he hadn’t been sinking in the polls in May, he never would have done the debate and could have campaigned from the basement as in 2020. The unpopularity of his policies and poor economy forced him to play his hand, which turned out to be a pair of senile 4s.

That line where she couldn't name anything different was absolutely killer. However, didn't happen in a vacuum! I called that specific aspect back in ~August when she missed the window to roll out an actual set of policies, especially important given that a second debate did not happen... she filled the void of news with a grand total of one singular policy (at-home medicare).

Interestingly enough, guess who she actually performed pretty well with? Yep, the 65+ crowd. The data's not strong enough to draw a straight line but it's still suggestive. Personality matters. Policies matter. Money only provides a nudge, it can't replace these two aspects.

Yep, the 65+ crowd.

Harris was, ironically, the more conservative pick of the two. 65+ made out like absolute bandits through Blue team's response to the uncommon cold; they have the most investments, generally own their homes, and have a more negative impression of factions that can't claim the moral high ground.

Maybe, but at least one big study found that “declining assessments of personal economic well-being also failed to change voter preferences.” I’m wary of the typical explanations. Do we find that people whose economic position increased in recent years are more likely to vote for the incumbent, and those whose decreased are less likely? Eg, if we look at an industry that “randomly” got more earnings on average, are they more likely to vote for the incumbent?

Inflation in part drove me to go back to big tech from startup land. I’m now making my old salary, barely budged from pre inflation numbers. It’s double the pay for 10X the effort and stress.

I considered relocating to a cheaper home, but rising interest rates make that a nonstarter.

I don’t assign 100% of the blame to Biden, but I definitely think that the Biden stimulus exacerbated the impact of the Fed’s loose money policy, and when they passed it everyone knew it wasn’t necessary.

Isn’t the more direct causation that big tech has replaced you with cheaper foreign workers? Workers who are habituated to a lower quality of life and who may intend to return home with greater purchasing power than you possess with the same wage? Who sometimes live illegally in shared accommodations to reduce the housing burden and who don’t mind being overworked because of cultural differences and who sometimes practice nepotism at your expense? Who may not have the same college debt because they fib about their education? Not that this doesn’t absolve Biden, but the reason (say) FAANG doesn’t pay more is because they don’t have to. We could have had an upper middle class utopia where FAANG sponsors high school and college programming courses and recruits homegrown talent while increasing wages but… no.

I blame the free market fetishists.

I think you are imbibing media narratives. The downward pressure on tech salaries and employment came in the summer of 2022 when banks collapsed, startups imploded, and VC money became tight.

Big tech hires from abroad because there aren’t enough top quality engineers here. We do have programs to grow talent in our own pipelines for non traditional candidates, and internally we say it’s because we’ve literally exhausted the market for engineers that can meet our standards. Google, Meta et al are largely engaged in zero sum struggles for the same relatively small pool of talent.

There’s approx 580k h1-b employees, so it’s impossible that these are all “top quality”. Even if Amazon couldn’t find workers as efficient as the h1-b’s (has this been studied?) they can hire two for the work of one and still have gratuitous profit margins left over. If there are more high wage jobs available to the middle class then wages increase. From BlackRock —

A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labour shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages

Two C players means you’re just dragging down your A players even more than if you’d hired the one. We don’t want them, it would be better to just not hire.

There are apparently employers like Accenture that play games with H1-B to bring in bottom tier talent to work here and grind out garbage tier code. Big Tech is not doing this.

All 8k h1bs that Amazon brought in just last year are “A players”? How do you see two people doing the work of one “dragging down the A players”?

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I doubt you'd be able to find any signal like that, because inflation affects everyone similarly.

It really doesn't in this case. Inflation was very heavily tied to a handful of goods, particularly housing and briefly transportation along with services, while barely touching other goods like consumer electronics or clothing. And wage increases were very concentrated in a handful of jobs, rather than being spread evenly, with union jobs seeing 50% pay increases and non-union government jobs going unfilled or poorly filled because the salaries became uncompetitive.

Someone who worked in a field where pay scaled with inflation quickly, and who owned a house and car which they still own, did pretty well, even if groceries or McDonald's got more expensive. Someone in a similar social class who happened to work as an admin in a government department and needed to buy a house and a car in the last four years, got fucked.

I somewhat doubt that most voters are looking at objective metrics of inflation rather than “how am I doing financially”. The inflation theory also doesn’t hold true across demographics, I don’t think? Why would elderly women, a demographic which is keenly aware of shifting prices at stores, shift even further toward Kamala? But a “social media environment” can explain this shift, because they aren’t on the new environments but stuck in the old news cycle + newspaper environment.

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