site banner

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.

15
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Kamala Harris was a good candidate who ran a good campaign.

No she was not. She was a horrible candidate. She was universally unlikeable - which has been demonstrated many times before when she tried to get elected. She had no consistent message and vacillated between "All Biden did is also mine" and "I'm going to fix everything" - which looked completely fake. In fact, almost everything about her looked completely fake - from her demeanor to her positions to her personal history. She was unable to coherently speak on policy like politician, and she was unable to speak like a human being to other human beings. She did not attract any audience except one that would vote for an open can of surströmming if it had "D" written on it, and turned away many audiences who traditionally were Dem's strongholds. She pandered hard but it didn't work. She played "I was born in a middle class family" but nobody bought it. She made both workers and billionaires hate her. She got both Jews and Muslims endorsing the other candidate. She went all in on the Hitler thing when it should be obvious it doesn't work anymore. She was a crappy candidate who ran a weak campaign. The Party Machine is powerful, and it held what it could, and provided the money, the resources and the bodies, but turns out the Machine alone can not win, at least not yet. Our Democracy (TM) is not in a self-driving autonomous mode yet. It still needs a popular person at the helm to drive it. And Democrats chose very poorly.

I would argue they chose very poorly when they didn't oust Biden in 2023, but instead waited to the very last days and then were doomed to nominate Harris. If they did the smart thing, they could field a convincing candidate, and a convincing candidate plus the Party Machine could trounce Trump. I am so glad they did what they did instead. I am also so glad they do not seem to understand what happened to them. I wish them many happy returns.

I am also so glad they do not seem to understand what happened to them.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

Money in elections is such a curse, sometimes.

But for a lot of Democrats, the money is in winning the elections, not losing them. And yet, they are doing everything to avoid understanding why their popularity declines and people turn against them. Even if they are paid by Soros or any other deep pocketed entity - I doubt this entity would pay them for long if it sees they can not produce more power and more wins, and most of the power in the US, luckily, is still gatewayed through voter consent, so pissing off voters is an uniquely bad strategy. Yet, the left insists on it again and again.