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USA: What happened in the American 2024 Presidential election?
Like many people the results of the 2024 election felt like a punch in the gut. I've been a news fast since then. I'm ready to start looking at what happened.
I'm sure there are a lot of articles and videos.
Could anyone recommend a fact based analysis of why Trump won? Something in the style of The Economist versus hyperbole laden news videos. :-)
I agree with basically everything you said, but will push back on the idea that Harris moving center was overall a bad thing. Here's a quote from an Atlantic piece that touches on that:
My own take is that we don't know, like you said. Needs more data before I feel strongly on this.
I mean...one of the most popular things people "knew" about harris was that she wanted to tax unrealized capital gains, which is pretty out there economically speaking.
Did the average person really know about that, though? I don't think the majority of people would even know what that means.
Know about it? Sure. I believe literally everyone I knew talked about it, both in family and at work.
What it means, honestly I'm not even sure the Kamala admin knew "what it means", but that's a whole other issue.
Again, the problem is perception. No one I know is worried about the comfy living of the kind of people this law was targeted at. There was however a lot of discussion on if it would overall harm the US economy. Reasonable or not that is the discussion that plan generated.
I was honestly surprised by the number of people that knew about taxing unrealized capital gains. Amongst the young, stock trading and investing is increasingly popular, especially amongst men. I heard opinions on it unprompted from friends of friends etc. Americans broadly hate increased taxes, and they hate them even more when it feels unfair.
Ezra Klein has done a few interviews with more moderate and progressive wings of the party on why Kamala Harris lost. The international vibes answer is inflation was terrible for incumbents, so almost every incumbent party lost globally. A US specific answer is culture war issues are depressingly salient. Trump's messaging around "Kamala is for they/them" convinced a lot of Americans that she's "too woke" and out of line with an electorate that think trans rights have gone too far.
It's important to note Harris got more votes than Hillary Clinton, and this election had decent turnout by US standards. Any narrative that argues Harris just failed to turn out leftists in big cities is semi-accurate, but that's a small group that would not have affected the election result.
Ultimately, I value John Stewart's election night take the most. It's easy to be a pundit in retrospect and break down all the results then come up with things that anyone could've or should've done better. It's impossible to say if those would've actually changed anything, and the political reality will be different by the next election. I remember when people thought Biden would be crazy popular for presiding over a smooth COVID recovery and one of the best economic expansions in the world.
As far as pet issues are concerned, it's easy to blame high housing prices for most of the economic dissatisfaction amongst a huge share of the electorate. Unfortunately, the federal government has minimal say into local NIMBY policies that make shit-boxes in LA go for a million bucks. Housing is also the most sticky ongoing inflation in the US, and it's something the Fed can't really fix by raising rates.
Edit: One other thing that has to be mentioned is Democrats actually gained a seat in the House. Trump's base is extremely weird; they'll turn up to vote for him and otherwise leave their ballots blank. Trump's overall margin of victory was narrow. Democrats did okay overall.
I think one of the core aspects of success of the “They/Them” ad is that it wasn’t just about social issues, it tied Harris to supporting niche social policy while neglecting the economy. The one-two punch is important.
As a bit of the side bar, I actually think that trans issues (women’s sports aside) aren’t actually that unpopular. The bathroom bills in 2016/7/8 weren’t popular, and I think that’s one of the reasons trans activism really took off. Ironically, it may have made them overconfident. Ultimately, a plurality (maybe a majority) of Americans are apathetic or “live and let live” on social issues. They generally like letting folks live their lives, but they also do not like having views “shoved down their throat” so to speak. Finding the right balance on that will be important, especially since American politics trends toward big-tentism.
It's hard in the current democratic party because there's a lot of purity tests that drive candidates towards the borders. Like, from a purely political point of view, transgender participation in women's sports is a disaster of a political issue.
NYT/Ipsos. Only 31% of democrats support transgender participants in women's sports. 18% overall. 5% Republican, 10% independents.
That's absurdly horrible polling. But could you imagine a world in which Harris said "I do not support transgender athletes participating in women's sports"? The utter shitstorm that would proceed? Despite only having 31% supports in their own party?
That means that Trump can lob an accusation like "Harris supports transgender athletes in women's sports" and Harris literally cannot reply - the only thing she can do is to ignore it, because if she replies, she's stuck between taking a position that is deeply unpopular with Americans and riling up her own party if she takes up the other position.
There should be room for more nuanced opinions. My read on things is this. We have two categories in most sports. The performance category where anyone can participate but they need to be the best of the best. That effectively means only cis men ( there are some sports where there isn’t much of a sex gap and teams could be mixed). Then you have a separate category that is intended to allow only people without extra testosterone (which plays the role of a performance enhancing drug) so that they can compete against those like them. They compete and train just as hard but are held back because of physiology.
On top of that, there are many low stakes games where players aren’t the best in their category and just want to have a good time. They want to win but it’s mostly just a team activity. Shifting the definition of who is in the non-performance category isn’t as much of an issue. There’s no money on the line.
But the big issue comes from the now shaky definition for who enters the professional non-performance category. It used to be only cis women. So they called it “women’s sports”. Here comes the curve ball of a redefinition of what a woman is. Trans women rightly see the name of this category and want to join in. But it complicates the nature of the category. When there are real stakes it’s a group with a specific handicap and not a gendered group at all.
So I see valid points for and against trans women’s participation in “women’s sports”. I don’t have a solution overall. But when it’s more of a social club then in those situations it’s wrong to exclude certain types of women.
I'm reminded of how Obama handled gay marriage:
Now, obviously that's wrong, but politically, maybe it was the right move at the time?
By the time he was running for reelection, he had changed his mind.
Obama was absolutely fantastic and is by far the most politically savvy president the US has had in recent history. This is a good example of that.
But he was nuanced, and social media has since trained Americans to hate nuance on both sides of the aisle. So now we have only extremes. Obama would lose today if he ran on the same platforms or even with the same attitude as before.
The US isn’t the only place this is the case. And it’s no accident that there is a far right movement across the world: nuance is dead so it’s open field for populists. It’s the same here in Europe, but thankfully less pronounced because we have a few more checks and balances (and a less capitalistic-by-default society).
Blergh. I honestly think the US has embodied this “racist emo teen you don’t want to hang out with” phase, and my gut feeling is it’s best to just .. leave for a while, let it blow over and be far from the blast. Come back in ten years.
The UK had that phase too and is starting to recover from it now. Slowly.
That rang a bell. Saddleback Church is one of the major bastions of Christian conservatism in southern California. If Orange County is the California headquarters, Saddleback, at least as far as I remember, was one of the lynchpins (the other being Calvary Chapel, which I attended as a child, I went to a few sermons at Saddleback that were all more political rants about Israel than actual religious content around Passover.) At that event I'd bet dollars to donuts that Obama had to pander hard there, and focus on personal belief over what he felt the law should be.
I'm not sure I'm contributing much, but think the additional context may need consideration. Retrospectively, however, even Democrats at the time were playing the Christian card pretty hard to keep up with Republicans in the late 00s.
I dont know if finding a "balance" is really possible anymore. I agree with your take that a lot of people dont really care about social issues and just dont like having them shoved down their throats. But theres no controlling that anymore, because politics has become much more decentralized since social media became ubiquitous.
I dont think Joe Biden or Kamala Harris had much of a problem with being too provocative, in fact they were pretty milquetoast. Its the average person who is doing the shoving down throats, because the average person isnt really risking anything. If youre getting in arguments online or speaking as part of a protest its easier to be loud or aggressive in arguing with people and not feel like theres any harm in it.
This puts Democrats in an unfortunate position where theyre getting the worst of both worlds. The mainstream candidates come across as uninspiring, but individual interactions are still resulting in people being infuriated by the "woke left" or whatever abstract term you want to use.
Im not really sure how youd fix that though. You cant give directions to millions of random individuals who arent really taking orders from anyone to begin with.
From what I’ve seen/read, many Dems were seen as mildly ignoring very progressive/online activists or hoping they’d go away, rather than actively/forcefully breaking from them. For that, you’d need to be open in your disavowment, but also ensure that all politicians in the party broke from the most difficult groups, such as denying campaign funding/assistance to politicians who don’t disavow them, preventing those activists from running or having influence in the party, etc. Basically blackball them. Ultimately, you need to make it clear that the activists are not affiliated with the party in any way, shape, or form.
I think you have that backwards. After Obergefell, the entire country started to pretend they'd always supported gay marriage and that they hadn't been calling everybody fags a year earlier. That had two effects that I find relevant: (1) SJWs could basically declare victory in that fight and turn to the next, and (2) the modern-day "anti-woke" crowd needed an even bigger, eviler, more confused boogeyman to rally their side behind because they'd just lost the fight they had been fighting for 20+ years.
Combine that with Caitlyn Jenner being the media's anointed heroine who all the world had to declare the bravest athlete of all time or else you were the devil (never mind that a couple months earlier, everybody would have said "trannies" were a disgusting, albeit harmless and inconsequential group), and they suddenly had a cause that was perfect to crank up the culture war rhetoric to never before seen levels.
So I really do believe that the activism is what led to the bathroom bills, and that without all that came after Obergefell, trans people would probably be essentially an afterthought for both parties.
Specifically the ad re trans prisoners plays also on public disdain/dislike for prisoners as a group and resentment over tax money and 'unnecessary health care'. I think most reasonable people wouldn't be bothered by a prison clinic providing hormones as gender affirming care, assuming they thought about it at all. However, the idea of tax funded surgery to reshape the body and genitalia, for prisoners, when many people in the US generally can't afford surgery of any kind, is set up to not sit right with a lot of people. Democrats are generally more ok with tax for services than Republicans are, but when the dollar amounts get high and the recipients are few and people don't understand why it is absolutely necessary or why the person hadn't handled it themselves while free, it is fodder for attack ads like the one we saw.
It was also a democratic/leftist own-goal, though. The only reason it came up, at least with the same effectiveness, is because Harris DID commit to supporting gender-affirming surgery for prisoners and detenction camps.
Why on earth did she did she do that on the record? Seems kinda random and irrelevant? Because the goddamn ACLU decided to pass every democratic candidate in 2020 a questionnaire asking if the candidate would support it, with the implication that if they didn't they would get purity tested out of the race.
Hello? ACLU? Foot to gun? What the fuck? Can you not muster one iota of strategic thinking?
Pepperidge farm remembers when the ACLU defended Nazi's rights to free speech, but they've had a pretty big cultural shift since then per internal sources.
Yet the real conditions for transgender prisoners in the US are insanely bad, and Trump's executive order to house all transgender women in men's prisons will undoubtedly make things worse. I recently learned about the practice of V-coding which is literally, unironically the organized practice of putting trans women in cells with violent inmates to placate them by giving them a sex slave.
It's awful and stomach churning.
It is awful and stomach churning. I am speaking strictly in the context of political strategy and needing to win elections with voters some of whom don't know and some of whom won't care. It's important to separate strategy from tactics from overall objectives. And prisoners rights generally is an important issue that doesn't win national elections. People are emotionally invested in revenge for bad acts and in being stingy with tax dollars and ok with neglect for people in government care.
I don't know which politicians who achieved significant gains for civil rights after their election also ran on a civil rights platform. However I know that Jimmy Carter ran very softly about segregation in the governors race for Georgia and then after being elected he publicly called out segregation and used his power to increase civil rights. Carter later went on to appoint a much higher percentage of minorities and women to judgeships and other appointed positions than anyone ever had. Obama ran without supporting gay marriage, but gay marriage happened on his watch.
Right wing media circulate the stories of the rare occasions when transgender women in women's prisons commit rape. People believe it because they generally believe that penis owners will rape people with vaginas at any opportunity, especially if they are prisoners. They also believe that prisoners lie and call themselves trans to get access to women. These are the same people who believe that mixed gender units in the military inevitably lead to rape and that the solution is to keep people with penises entirely separate from people with vaginas. The problem is that the people who believe these myths are a significant percentage of the electorate.
Ironically people on the whole also think that men in prison deserve to be raped and that men who rape women didn't really mean rape and probably don't deserve the consequences for it.
It's logically inconsistent on every level. But we knew that.
Trans folks and trans women are far more likely to be victims of crimes, even in prison, than perpetrators.
I agree, but rage bait is effective. We need to learn how to fight propaganda on a faster more certain time frame than we currently have. To do that, at least some of us need to dig into the muck to see what they are doing and how it works.
I think that:
These are good points.
The reason Trump is not in jail is because there was foot dragging for several years before going after him properly. This is related to your #2 and #4 above.
(This is your #2 above) First of all, the democrats saw Trump as a useful foil. He's a uniquely polarizing candidate so it's easy to raise money and motivate a lot of people to show up and vote against him. I think that the Biden people and the democrats in general thought that they were more likely to win against Trump than any other candidate. So why not let Garland fart around and do nothing for a few years, Trump is never going to win. Right?
(This is related to your #4): Second, I think the democrats were constrained a bit by "procedurealism" like you say, but not really because they are such nice upstanding people. It's because they were very afraid of becoming the kind of party and the kind of country where people who lose elections go to jail. This is a very scary Rubicon to cross. I think it is totally valid for Trump to be in jail right now, but once you put a former president in jail it means that if you lose the next election the other party is going to try very hard to get revenge.
Of course the problem is that letting Trump hang around was a classic case of a "Tiger by the Tail", and now there is a decent chance he'll pursue political opponents without restraint. This is on top of all the other unimaginable damage he'll do to the country and the planet while turning himself into a trillionaire.
The Democrats have mistakenly believed Trump was easy to beat twice. Once was perhaps understandable but they should have listened to Michael Moore in 2016.
Democratic leadership should be listening more full stop.
I agree heavily on all of these, ESPECIALLY 6, which isn't just a "dems running for office" issue but an entire party problem anywhere in the pipeline.
I'd probably also throw a 7. on there which is just-
The dems have excuses. I'm sorry the world isn't the way you want it to be. So now what? You can talk about inflation or racism or sexism or the youth or the south or the elderly, but it's literally a contest. Your goal is to win. You don't have to become the opposition to do so, but fucking hell it feels like since the runup to 2016 they've changed nothing. It's always framed as "well the reason we didn't win is..." which doesn't really matter if you don't adjust or change. Even Biden was the literal "fuck it we've got nothing" candidate.
Very good birds eye view situation. I would overbuy on #2 and it not just being a Dem year (at the executive level), since a lot of countries are having a rebound on post pandemic governments, and there was chatter back in 2020 that Trump could have easily one reelection were it not for Covid, so he had a decent shot of running again and winning once we put it into the rearview mirror.
Additionally on #5, Biden was the stable hand on the wheel in a time of crisis, while Harris was stuck with the border issue. If Biden is not running for president next term, (but also not resigning?) and you forcibly push Harris as his successor, you don't get to wave Biden criticism, and Harris criticism at the same time on the border, by saying it was actually Harris' presidency the whole time.
#5 ties into #6, but it's more of an annoyance with Dems not wanting to get their mud on their chosen champion while the progressives fight it out in the primary. Ironically that turns the bloodsport participants into the celebrities that then have to endorse the milktoast moderate.
#3 is eternal, not much to say there.
#4 is on the Democratic party for trying to make an event out of Trump doing business fraud and focusing on the event of the January 6th riot over the conspiracy to overturn the election because they thought they could prove accountability and spectacle on the other two. Focusing on subversion of the election maybe would have been a better idea, but politicians are loathe to charge other politicians for playing politics too hard.
As far as #1, I think it's secondary to #2, in that the Harris campaign wasn't really testing well after the initial excitement of trading out Biden. All of their problems didn't go away when they put a new name on the administration and no matter how they pivoted, they could only distance themselves from Biden so far while he was still an active president. They moved too slow, and I'm not sure they're was anything to be done without it falling apart at the seams, especially since the Biden campaign primary draw was "at least it's not Trump."
I was deeply invested in this campaign and followed it closely.
There are a set of factors that I think contributed to Harris' loss and I can't weigh which ones are more or less important. It's also not a complete set, just things I noticed or saw someone mention and agreed with.
She was thrown into the race 100 days from election day. There wasn't even a contested convention, never mind a primary.
She didn't separate herself from Biden's record. When asked what she would do differently, she said she couldn't think of anything.
She was a woman who grew up in an immigrant family against Trump whose campaign persona is built on resentments including anti immigrant and anti feminism.
Her campaign messaging relied on people thinking, doing research, being well informed, being aware of history, specifically about January 6 and about abortion rights. Trump speaks at about a fourth grade level. Harris i would say spoke at an eleventh grade level.
She is a Californian and she doesn't get the rust belt or the South.
Neither she nor Hilary had ever faced a contested high stakes election where the other party was a legitimate challenge.
I believe any woman who successfully runs for president will need to be a near genius level politician. She will need charisma and an understanding of what the people want to hear and how to connect with them.
Perceived inflation and resentment over COVID restrictions by voters.
Twitter and possibly Joe Rogan were in Trump's corner along with Fox news.
The religious fundamentalist won.
Well at least a bunch of billionaires hijack a bunch of online media targeting religious people of various flavors. Bombarding them with messages that convey apathy, fanaticism, and hate, to galvanized or depress voters in various key areas.
Or we just stupid.
I'm just hopping that all the people around him actually improve things instead of the just grifting but trump is endorsing a scam meme coin so yeah...