Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning. She’s been holding rallies nonstop with Tim Walz & not making her talking points about her race or gender like Hillary. She’s offering expanded healthcare, reinvestments back into public housing, wants to take on corporate greed, protect reproductive rights and chose a pro labor, pro education running mate.
Yet, she’s either barely leading or ties in most polls with a guy that:
Is a convicted felon.
Liable Sexual Predator.
Gets sentenced in November.
Has several more pending cases.
Increased Drone Strikes by 300%. (Joe Biden dosent use drones anymore).
Illegally killed an Iranian General unprovoked with a missle strike.
Increased tensions in Israel/Palestine with the Abraham Accords.
Wants war with Mexico (his words).
Tried to coup Venezuela.
Will bend the knee for Netanyahu’s potential war with Iran.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
Told people to drink bleach during the pandemic.
Is the main driving force for America’s current division.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
Tried to steal the 2020 election (Find Me 11,000 votes in GA).
Did Fake Elector Slates to pressure Mike Pence to not certify the 2020 election.
Caused a riot on the capitol that lead to his OWN supporters dying.
Just got washed by Harris in the last debate, was completely unprepared on anything but immigration (“I have concepts of a plan”).
And so much more. So seriously what is it? Is it just the attraction to bigotry/racism? Is it to end “wokeness”. Is it because Kamala is a woman of color? You can’t use the both sides argument like Hilary or Biden, Kamala is the obvious better choice. Could you imagine if Kamala had as much baggage as Trump? The media would lose their minds.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
It’s simple. Bigotry and greed. Trump plays to people’s fears that “others” will soon have the same rights they do while also assuring his rich handlers that he will make them richer. He’s convinced the poor to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Conservatism is a mental illness, it can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning
it can’t be defeated with logic and reasoning
YouTube channel Knowing Better made a video about the Seventh Day Adventist. Basically the same conclusion.
Trump could be rolled out drooling and leaking brain fluid from his ears and 40% of voters will fully go behind him cause he’s a republican. And the “undecided” voters will somehow see it as a strength. By the way, anyone still claiming to be undecided on Donald Trump in 2024 is full of shit
This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.
There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.
To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.
Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.
An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.
The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.
Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.
Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.
A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.
There’s a difference in attitude when they keep doubling down and proving their critics right. That’s how misbehaved children act. Except when you’re not a child but full grown adults who refuse to budge like when mommy used try to give you that cough syrup you don’t want it so you twist and turn your head with your mouth sealed up tight. Yeah of course people are going to laugh at you. People laughing at you on social media is no excuse. What the hell even is this logic. This is not much more than a thinly veiled reddit tier pseudo-intellectual reply. Complete with the “ill be downvoted but”, “btw I’m actually voting liberal”, and the pièce de résistance using Black people as a rhetorical cudgel.
Btw I’ll get downvoted for this reply but whatever.
And there you go from the moral/intellectual high ground, mocking them as toddlers and saying it’s right and normal to laugh and make fun of them.
I can’t stand vaccine hesitancy and anti-science bullshit. I’ve had to deal with this becoming a Fox News thing in my own family, and lost too many people from alternative “Eastern” medicine over “Western” medical science. But the mockery and ridicule only feeds into the Christian persecution complex most of that rural white population already embraces, and causes the wagons to circle.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
That’s all his financiers hear.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
That’s all his voters hear.
Everything else goes in one ear and out the other, muddied up with enough “whataboutism” and “both sides” rhetoric from the financiers to keep the voters from actually considering alternative options.
While there may be “No stupid questions”, there are many, many “Stupid answers”.
I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we’d caught with each other.
At the time I thought…who would buy Trump’s conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?
I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.
When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they’d talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump’s antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. “They’ll never let him win”, one of my co-workers said. I was stunned…who are “they”? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?
It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).
Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought “if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought”. And we undoubtedly are.
Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to “why is he still in the race?” ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.
He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the present, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of “others” instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.
Did everyone just collectively agree to forget 2016? The polls were all favoring Clinton by a dramatic margin. CNN famously had a headline where they predicted Clinton had a 99% chance to win off of the polls.
And what ended up happening? 538 (before bought and neutered by ABC) gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton’s favor. Trump ended up winning that 35%. This year, according to polls, Trump’s odds are better than in 2016. Kamala has the upper hand, but
A) lots of things can change suddenly before the election (like the Hilary emails thing)
B) polls are not the ultimate arbiter of who will win an election- actual real votes are
C) Trump more than likely has some “extracurricular plans” in store, much like Jan 6th, that has a chance of working.
Tldr: don’t get drunk on positive news. Keep a level head and you’ll see this election is still very close to a coin flip
You’re in a media bubble. It feels like there’s no way anyone could see it differently. The people who disagree with you are also in a media bubble and don’t understand how you could believe what you do.
For everything you said they
- don’t believe happened
- think it was a deep state plot
- believe it’s good actually and believing anything else means you want to kill babies or destroy the economy
- have never heard of it
Reality may have a leftist bias but most people don’t live in reality. Most people live in a reality constructed by corporate media. Social media is largely derivative of it.
Amerikkkans.
Judging by some of my distant acquaintances it’s something along the lines of HURR DURR GASOLINE WAS CHEAPER 8 YEARS AGO. They focus on a global commodity of all things.
Seriously, the only stuff I’ve seen from them that even approaches a policy comparison rather than “lol black lady is a ho” caliber stuff revolves around money. And some of that might actually be a valid discussion if it were correct and if it weren’t for the absurd amount of other issues.
It’s just a low-information team sport, regardless of how insane reality is.
Nothing I’ve read has ever explained Trump’s appeal like this article.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
Nothing in there makes a cute soundbite. “They’re racist!”, is far easier than having to digest what the author lays down.
Seriously, read it. It’s important.
It’s a good article. It explains rural America. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in Huntington Beach CA. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in suburban Inland SoCal. It doesn’t explain rich privileged shitheads like Musk and Thiel.
Exactly. I get the frustrations of the son and grandson of factory workers that finds it hard to imagine anything more than working at Walmart wanting to tear it all down. What I don’t understand is my neighbor in Dana Point.
I mean it’s definitely an interesting read. I’m just not sure what to actually do with this information. The fundamental problem feels like a generally small bubble, and at times a specific disinterest in venturing outside of it. If anyone’s whole worldview is shaped entirely by their tiny rural hometown, it’s easy to understand why others with radically different backgrounds feel scary.
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to drag the rest of the country through rigid christofacist moral dogmas and support the industries that prop up those small towns at the expense of the planet as a whole. But as long as those people aren’t interested in venturing outside their communities and meeting other different people, im not sure how to convince them of this.
Maybe if the cost of living becomes too untenable in major cities and work from home continues in certain industries rural areas will see more growth and this will improve somewhat? Idk
What to do with it is to act understanding and empathetic with people like that instead of standoffish and hostile. You still insist on the better way of doing things, but there’s no actual need to attack anyone that doesn’t support the better way of doing things, even if their reasons aren’t rational or even morally questionable/bad. It only serves to further entrench them in their positions, while the opposite might have a chance to happen in a more cooperative approach.
I feel like this is just gift wrapping being a dumb racist hick in prettier paper. They are scared of cities because their full of black people, gays, and Mexicans. They like assholes who show the same level of hate as they do - who will keep the black people, gays, and Mexicans away. And they like someone who justifies hiding behind religion so they can tell themselves that God made them this dumb and rascist. So they can delude themselves into thinking they are really the good guy.
Funny how you made exactly the comment the article predicted within itself xD
If the race were between The Literal Devil ® and Jesus Christ (D), the vote total would be 45%-55% just based on the letter they choose to run after their name.
Policy doesn’t matter when people base their entire personality on their political party identification.
Jesus was a socialist Jew. We had one of those run for President, too, but couldn’t make it past the Democratic primary.
But see how evil he looks…
/s
If you completely forget everything about Bernie; who he is, what he’s done, how he speaks, everything; he does look like a CEO who would lay off half his staff for a discount on a sandwich. But thats more because he’s an old white guy in a suit and they all look like that
I live in Taiwan and met a guy yesterday who is moving to Taiwan because Austin is a “liberal hell hole”.
When pressed on any issues about Trump, his answer was that Biden is worse than Trump. When I asked about Harris, he just mentioned she will just copy Biden.
The funny thing is that Taiwan is by far more liberal and more progressive than Austin Texas. He seemed to like the universal healthcare and the many social services. He didn’t mind the high corporate taxes companies have to pay.
My assessment is that he is only basing his vote on vibes and feels alone. Judging from the conversation, he is more of a Bernie supporter.
Have you considered that you actually found a tankie in the wild?
i feel like a tankie would just refer to joe as genocide joe, but maybe i’m too internet pilled?
Tankies praise China and the Soviet. He’s from Texas. I think he’s just brainwashed.
i know that part, that ones a classic, i think there are a lot more tankies or “pipelined” tankies than we think on the left, but i also don’t know shit so that’s just conjecture lol.
People from texas are really goofy though. Something about that state. It’s the florida of the inland states. Even though it’s technically not inland.
My brother in law who was ultra pro China moved to Houston and turned into an American fundie. The entire state should just leave.
damn, what a fucking weird place down there hey?
At least that’s where they all go to violate OSHA rules, and make us more money. I’ll take what i can.
Seriously. I feel the same way about Florida
You have to remember that the voters are human beings, complete with areas of ignorance, prejudices, and logical fallibility. Trump certainly is aware of that and exploits it to the maximum extent.
Fascists aren’t people though
Why is it so hard for blue maga to understand nobody is excited for the party whose whole platfom is not being trump? the dems haven’t accomplished anything for working class americans in over 30 years. dems legacy is no universal healthcare, war on drugs still raging, police violence out of control, unliveable minimum wage, lack of workers rights, extreme warrantless government surveilance, and ongoing support for a palestinian genocide.
