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I voted for Harris and I'm annoyed that I have to deal with 4 more years of Trump, but I'm mostly fine. I am even looking at the silver lining a bit since he has some interesting people in his orbit.
But all of my liberal friends are so bummed. I'm not sure what to do about it. I kind of want to take them and just shake them a bit and say look everything will be fine. Stop believing the propaganda. We're not descending to Christian fascism! We're not going to have a national abortion ban! This will almost certainly not affect your life in any way! Nothing ever happens!
But I think that might be the wrong approach.
I guess I'll let them process their grief and come out of their shell when they're ready.
In the meantime, my urge to troll right now is 11/10 since a small part of me uncharitably considers these displays as very histrionic grief vanity. But I am resisting, for now.
This is a good message. I've called out more-liberal friends on this one, at least when the propaganda is really obviously objectively false, to good effect. I don't think I've completely convinced anyone that "the fact that someone as smart as you falls for this stuff so easily once you identify it as being on Our Side is also why you should cut Trump voters a little more slack about the stuff they fall for", but at least there's motion in the right direction. I think this comes easier from me (Libertarian voter, can steelman Trump but would still pick Harris for "lesser of two evils" if I was in a swing state) than it would from an actual Trump supporter, but if you actually cast your vote for Harris then you're in an even better position to insist that you're offering constructive rather than malicious criticism. When the Boy Who Cried Wolf finally gets eaten, IMHO it's perfectly fine to point out that his prior lies were part of the problem and that you don't have to be Pro-Wolves-Eating-People to notice.
Also probably true, and personally I'd note the "we have to take away Musk's companies" and "we have to ban The Misinformation" style left-wing fascism while I was pointing it out. But I've never gotten the chance, since I'm not friends with anyone this panicked, and if you do then being very careful about how you try to calm them down might indeed be the way to go here for the sake of the friendships.
Maybe not? Probably not anything sweeping. But I wouldn't be surprised to see something relatively weak, third trimester with rape/incest exceptions or something. With a decent Republican lead in the Senate and probably a small lead in the house, there's at least a chance.
And this is almost certainly wrong. It won't be the most important thing in most people's lives, but the federal government writes laws by the thousand and writes regulations by the million and spends dollars by the trillion. Even the second and third order effects on people not directly impacted can be huge.
I should say, won't matter in any legible way versus the counter-factual.
Like, obviously inflation affected people but it is debatable whether this would have been worse than high unemployment, and it's not clear at all that Biden would have done one and Trump would have done the other.
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