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naraburns  nihil supernum  12d ago (text post)   26778 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.

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It’s not just the fact that turnout overall was higher in 2020. It’s specifically the fact that Harris underperformed Biden by 15 million votes and Trump underperformed his 2020 results by 3 million votes. Why the massive difference for the Dems but not for Trump?

3 different candidates vs 1 candidate? Two females vs one male? rederendum on Trump vs referendum on Democrats? Pandemic vs no pandemic? Trump telling people not to mail in votes vs not doing that? Height of BLM popularity vs. not? Sometimes people get more votes and sometimes less?

Harris is an awful candidate no one would have picked? She was not just personally awful at anything that requires charisma and communication, she was tied specifically to Biden's policy failures and the inherent cleavages they caused (e.g. Gaza) and lacked an ability to pivot away from them given she has no independent profile. Or, at least, not one she'd want to stand behind.

Nor could she explain why she shouldn't be held responsible for hiding Biden's condition, something that made him unpopular enough to drop out

In hindsight it doesn't seem that mysterious: Trump was supposed to win when it was Biden.

We were all just caught up in the media exuberance around Harris because Democrats went from a seemingly certain loss to having a chance and that breeds some Joy^(tm). Then the sugar rush ended.

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