So Trump won. Next few years are gonna be rough, I know. What happened, and where can the Dems go from here?

James Carville said it best: It’s the economy, stupid (even if he predicted the wrong candidate). Inflation was a big concern among voters, mostly driven by gas, groceries, and housing. Rightly or wrongly, many voters tied this to Biden, and through him to Harris. They viewed Trump as being likelier to fix things, with a big bold plan (tariffs, deportations, tax cuts). I suspect some (many?) voters wanted to punish Dems for inflation. Others probably thought Harris would worsen it. While she had a long proposal, she didn’t seem to talk about it much, nor boil it down to soundbites. Many of the demos that swung were hit hard by the price increases.

We saw swings among Latinos, young voters, and rural voters toward Trump. Some of this was due to depressed D turnout (Harris got 15 million fewer votes than Biden), but in other cases it was due to genuine swings. Starr County, TX went Republican for the first time in decades. New Jersey only went for Harris by single digit percentages. Black voters had a small 2% decline of the share of the electorate.

I think non-immigration identity politics played a smaller role. I do think Harris/Walz could’ve talked more about men’s issues specifically (suicide, the academic gap, poor job prospects), although they are hard to soundbiteify and not sound forced. They likely could've approached it from a universalist angle. Trans issues might’ve driven some voters to Trump, but I believe it was more localized (e.g., reduced margins in Loudoun County). Latinos likely weren’t particularly turned off of Trump because they aren’t a cohesive bloc, and in many cases not even the same race (you’ve got whites, indigenous, blacks, mixed, even Asian Latinos). Between the countries the cultures can be very different, to the point of each country hating the other. They can be more socially conservative as well, especially those in their 40s and older.

Immigration was definitely a bigger issue, dovetailing with economic issues (housing costs, “why are migrants getting help but not me”, homelessness). The migrant bussing by Gov. Abbott will be viewed as one of the greatest political maneuvers of the 21st century. It brought the issue to voters outside of border states. The number of people coming to the border was frustrating/scary for some voters.

Abortion didn’t play as big of a role, I suspect because many women don’t think they’ll need one, or because they don’t view care that legally may qualify as one.

The state of democracy didn’t motivate enough people for the Dems, in fact, some people who thought it was important voted for Trump.

Foreign policy didn’t play much of a role, although Israel/Palestine probably was significant in Michigan. But that needle would’ve been hard to thread for any candidate, and probably would’ve been less of a problem if other points were addressed.

I think the fact that Harris is a biracial woman did reduce votes, but I don’t think it was necessarily decisive in her losing. The right woman can definitely win (Thatcher won the U.K. in 1979, so it should be possible in the U.S. in 2024). I would probably hold off in 2028, but I don’t see an issue with running women long-term.

So, what are the takeaways for Dems?

1. Suburban white-collar voters are not the end-all be-all. They are a good bloc to have (reliable voters in many swing states, including in off-years), but they are not enough to outweigh the others.

2. You cannot take minority demographics for granted. They will not stay with you forever. They are not monolithic.

3. Social policy can only go so far. Its salience can be quite limited compared to the economy. Negatives can be very negative, white positives may be “meh”.

4. Running against someone, rather than for yourself only works so many times.

5. You can only have so many issues stacked against you and be able to win. If it was just the economy, it might’ve been closer, but you had the economy, and immigration, and social policy, and Israel/Palestine.

6. The average voter does not account for lag in terms of policy. Trump got credit for a good economy even though Obama did a lot of the work.

7. Places that are or have been “safe” are not guaranteed to stay like that forever, especially when paired with point 2, without work.

8. NatCon populism is here to stay. The combination of left-ish economics and social conservativism, propelled by apathetics and the hard right is a winning one, and needs to be countered accordingly.

9. Many folks view Democrats as being the “mom” or “Karen from HR” party. That is not the kind of reputation that wins elections.

10. It’s the economy, stupid.

Based on that, what would my strategy be for Dems in 2026/2028?

1. Clean house. The folks in charge lost 2024 and only barely won 2020. Care needs to be taken to ensure replacements have sufficient political/management experience.

2. Don’t be the party of why/if. Be the party of do. The former implies insecurity, the latter confidence.

3. Bring back the 50-state strategy. Open offices in rural areas. States viewed as safely blue came awfully close to flipping for Trump this year. But the reverse can also be true, especially with a good candidate (cf. Indiana in 2008 ). And even if the presidential candidate loses, downballot candidates can still win, especially in off-years. I think the Dems had a good ground game, and while it cannot make up for everything else, it’s usually better to have it than not. Local elections matter a lot because they have stronger day-to-day impact, and they are the breeding ground for future politicians. North Carolina had several good Dem victories.

4. Focus on economics. Moderate suburbanites aren’t enough to win on, and many people like Trumponomics. Go for smart tariffs, universal policies (e.g., Child Tax Credit, universal Medicare, etc), targeted tax cuts and increases along with tax code simplification, and one other oddball policy (withdrawal from the WTO? Annual gas tax holiday?) likely to be popular with voters.

5. Social moderation/tolerance. The party is a big tent one, and there’s going to be friction over social issues. This doesn’t mean abandoning core constituencies, but being smarter about rhetoric and candidates (you won’t win the Georgia governorship with an Everytown candidate). Candidates should be allowed to have differing views on social policy (especially if it is personal and doesn’t extend to the political realm), and there should be a mechanism to allow dissent on an issue an individual is out of touch on. Related: get the loudest social progressives away from the party. They frequently clash with it but manage to tie the party to an unpopular viewpoint with something they said on Xitter/Tik Tok. I did like the initial message of freedom the Harris campaign was putting out, but it didn’t seem to be used much.

6. Turnout still matters. You need to be able to turn out more people for you than the other guy.

7. (My weird, hot take-ish view) Go on an offensive cyber campaign. You’ve got Russian operatives shilling for Trump and the GOP. Hack them. Make it so they can’t just continuously pump out disinfo. Even a few million should be enough to establish a unit dedicated to fucking up Russian troll farms.

8. (Courtesy of @EgoEimi) Go for the reality TV angle. Lots of rallies, some political stunts, and bring loads of energy.

One final thought: Trump is a sui generis candidate. He energizes people who aren’t into politics normally. Thus far, the GOP hasn’t been able to translate that into off-year elections or non-Trump POTUS candidates. Nobody wants diet Trump, they want the real deal. When he passes away, it remains to be seen whether someone (Vance?) can take over with the same level of success.

Timasomo 2024 is now officially complete!

Over the next few days, participants will be posting their creations and efforts in this topic to showcase their work to the community.

Comments and feedback are both welcome and encouraged.

Let these creators know what an awesome job they've done!

Creators: In posting your showcase:

• Give your project a title, and use the # markdown to make it stand out in the showcase thread!
• Link to your project in whatever way works best for it.
• If you like, give a "creator statement" that contextualizes what your project is.
• Add anything else you consider relevant! The showcase is yours!
• If you need examples, take a look at last year’s showcase.

Community:

• Treat this thread like a walk through an art gallery or a museum where you get to see different works on display.
• Simple appreciations for the creators are not noise—they are valuable community support!
• Make sure any feedback you give is constructive and meant to help.

A place to collect articles about what happened in all the other contests.

Edit: please post what the election results were (with a link to the article) at top level and then we can discuss them underneath it.

I've spent the past months with an unhealthy obsession with "the news", due to both an election in my own country and the one in the US. Maybe it was an attempt at being in control of a situation I have absolutely zero control over, despite it shaping aspects of the world I really care about. But that control is an illusion.

I've rediscovered an older article by Rolf Dobelli called "Avoid News – Towards a Healthy News Diet". It argues against the value of high-frequency (daily) news consumption in 15 points. It does not vilify journalism as a whole, however, arguing for replacing a daily feed of online news with individual, high-quality, in-depth articles consumed weekly or so.

I know that I probably can't resist having some idea of what is going on in the world (and I have some niche interests that I genuinely find productive to keep up with). So I'll try something simple: No "news" (quotes because I include random social media feeds in this) during weekdays. No news websites, no tildes, no reddit. There's ways to filter for the top posts of the "last 7 days". I never use this feature since I look almost daily, anyways. Well, I'll try and make that my default way of consuming social media. On weekends I can decided to use some of my precious free time to read up on the "big" events of the week. I hope this will make me realize that most weeks go by without producing any information that I can use to improve my own life (both privately and at work) or that of people I care about.

There is stuff I'm looking forward to: This sounds depressing but I have this huge list of non-critical things I wanted to accomplish that I kinda stopped even considering because every damn minute of free time I had was spent doom-scrolling. I hope the "touch grass" people are right and spending more time focused on my own environment will also help me get a better sense of what is important.

I also feel slightly guilty about the thought that this will make me less compassionate towards people who live outside my own bubble and whose stories I would not hear just talking to friends and family. This is an attempt to put my head in the sand and pretend that large parts of the world do not exist. But the truth is: There is only so much I can do, effectively. I can maybe join a group dedicated to fixing a specific wrong or raise awareness. Maybe two. But I could never address that whole laundry list of problems from my news feed that left me paralyzed with fear. I will have a more positive impact on the world if I focus on less.

Let's see where this goes.

Hello all. I feel like our US election upset (or victory depending on viewpoint) has really run wild on Tildes. I appreciate all the solidarity and encouragement from the non-US folks. I know for better or worse it affects many of you as well.

While knowing these are special circumstances, I was thinking maybe folks feel a little left out or overshadowed by our drama.

Back before I had to go on a podcast diet, I really enjoyed the weekly updates from American Prestige because they would discuss important or interesting political/social developments and explain their implications.

So what's something happening where you are? How do you feel about it? What do you wish more people knew about it? It can be big or small. It does not have to be something political, just something important to you.

I'm looking for something to keep me busy / focused on with minimal actual concentration, planning or learning required. Things that you can't look away from while playing or you lose what you're doing. Nothing that involves interaction with other people.

Things that have worked for me for this in the past are Bejeweled 3 lightening mode, Insaniquarium, driving around mindlessly in Forza Horizons.

I'm kind of terrible at anything that requires twitch reflexes, so anything that punishes you for slowness isn't great. Bejeweled it's not a problem because the game is basically identical no matter how you score.

I've long enjoyed Foxhole and X4 and was wondering what other games has similar logistical systems. Both give the same satisfying feeling when you look at the big picture of how the games are a complex interplay between the immediate gameplay, and what is being simulated "behind the scenes" to enable it.

The descriptor in the title is a bit of a mouthful, so let's break down what I mean.

Complex
To exclude typical resource game mechanics, where you "just" mine resources which gives you resource points that you can spend directly.

Required & Supporting
In Foxhole the main objective is to push the front and win the war. And players can focus on that and never have to really think about how they get their weapons and ammo. But at the same time the logistics is the entire reason they even can fight.
In X4 you can fly about and do stuff and acquire ships while relying on the AI empires economies. But there has to be some alive economy for the game to not go to a standstill.
In short, logistics systems that are required by the game, but not necessarily by the individual player.
This excludes games where the logistics system is the game, like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory, etc.

Real end-2-end
To specify that there should as little cheating as possible. Though obviously there is always some cheating in games. Both in X4 and Foxhole, every resource is tracked right from harvest, to refinement, to the end product. And all steps require real moving of goods by AI (X4) or players (Foxhole) between factories, other intermediaries, and end users.

So what other similar games are there? I was thinking of EVE Online, but I think only the player orgs in null-sec have real economies in that game, and you could still play it if they all suddenly stopped.

Solved

I was idiotically installing a legacy driver instead of the current driver. I installed the current one and it is now working.

Background on Tildes

For background I posted about distro recommendations a few weeks ago: https://tildes.net/~tech/1ji6/switching_to_linux_looking_for_distro_recommendations. I settled on Fedora KDE Plasma.

Steps taken before the problem

I installed Fedora onto an unallocated space on my SSD, alongside Windows 10. I have tested that Windows 10 is currently working, and that Fedora starts normally. I have also used the boot media to install onto my laptop with no issues. However, on my desktop before installing GPU drivers for my GTX 970, I found Fedora to be quite buggy. This would include the session freezing and needing to be restarted , or my screen would go black with text saying something along the lines "desktop session cannot be unlocked, press ctrl + alt + f3 and login and run a command (I cannot remember the command)" and then I could switch back to my previous session. Overall, it was a buggy mess. My thought process was that it may be a GPU driver issue, and so I started the process of installing RPM fusion and installing the driver from there. I have a GTX 970, so I followed the section titled "Legacy GeForce 8/9/200/300" on this page: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryHowto%5Cb%29. The commands I ran after installing RPM were: sudo dnf update -y and sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-340xx akmod-nvidia-340xx and followed all the prompts provided as necessary. I would then leave my computer for about 30min, before returning and restarting (thinking that a restart may be necessary to be fully using the drivers).

Current Situation

After going through the process listed above, I turned my computer on and booted into Fedora. My screen would hang on a black screen with a flashing white underscore at the top left corner. The computer would not get past this point, no matter how long it was left. Hitting "ctrl + alt + f2" would give me a working terminal that I could interact with, showing the basic CLI of Linux working. I did not play around much with the commands, but I do know the basic shutdown now command was working.

Troubleshooting Steps Tried

I was thinking that it may be due to the driver being X11 and I am running Wayland. I searched online and results seemed to indicate that this would not cause an issue
(I will add more steps here when people recommend them)

So I've been playing a lot of Helldivers 2 recently, and was wondering if there would be much interest in the community for a Tildes LFG / Discord situation to find pick up games.

Anyone else have an interest in the game still?