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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Based on past performance, I would guess the worst case is the most likely one with a lot of confidence. However, past performance isn't always indicative of future performance, and I do have some hope that something like the best case will happen. Political success plays out almost entirely in votes, much like business success plays out almost entirely in profits, and if some tactic keeps losing you votes or profits, well, you can only keep following that tactic for so long before you run out of your accrued capital. 2024 may be the indication that this tactic has started to hit that breaking point; the sheer number and financial losses caused by the "woke" nature of a lot of media has added up to the point that some companies have begun to figure out that simply calling fans bigots isn't a viable corrective tactic. Perhaps the Democrats will also begin to figure this out about the electorate.
Depressingly, even taking into account all that, I'd still guess that the worst case is the most likely. It's so easy to see that any political party that actually cares about winning would choose the best case and avoid the worst case like the plague. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist, everyone knows that blaming people you don't like for your own failures is extremely seductive, even more seductive than blaming external circumstances, which is already very seductive, and everyone knows that blaming anyone other than yourself doesn't help much when it comes to improving oneself for the purpose of not repeating some failure from the past. Thus if people you like and respect are telling you that it's all the bad bigots' fault that you failed, you should be highly suspicious of the possibility that you're in an echo chamber that genuinely believes and tells you things that sound really nice to you, but which don't help you win in the future.
Which, I doubt the Republicans are any better on this, but the point of the Democratic party is that it's better than the alternatives. It's supposed to be the party of the educated and the empathetic, so much so that it actually knows the best interests of a significant portion of the population even better than they themselves do. If it can't even figure out its own best interests enough to know that any sort of blaming or placing of responsibility of failure outside of oneself is counterproductive for winning elections, then it calls into question why it's any better than the alternatives outside of simple sectarian allegiances.
More options
Context Copy link