US election 2020 thread
- Thread starter petee
- Start date
Correct attitude. Trump, like Sanders with the Dems, is an outsider to the party machinery. The nature of this stuff means that occasionally they have to tolerate an outsider being placed at their head (or side) by voters but they're not necessarily accepted universally.
From what I can make out, the process grinds on today
ska invita
back on the other side
The same process is happening in the UK with its level-up northern MP intake narrative - and for now thats all talk and no action. The problem with “the future is clear: we must be a working class party, not a Wall Street party” is that these people don't know how to do that. When it comes to the crunch its eat-out-to-help-out for those who can afford to go to restaurants and fuck those surviving on free school dinners. But this new far right mainstream politics project is realistic about the new techno-social landscape and genuinely interested in strategy and adapting - unlike Labour/Democrat establishment who only have one gear and are stuck on repeat.
You do need some kind of front man who can connect with the working class on some level - Trump was a great orator on that level! But if even Boris Johnson can do it (to some extent), I'm sure they can dig out another Republican who can.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
This is a very good piece
bimble
floofy
If you read the small print underneath it explains that whilst half your donation will indeed go to STOP THE LEFT WING MOB, the other half is going to help them pay the debts they incurred in the run-up to the election.
'50% of each contribution, up to a maximum of $2,800 ($5,000), to be designated toward DJTFP’s 2020 general election account for general election debt retirement until such debt is retired'
sad.
Dogsauce
I’ve got Skol but I’m not a Scholar
I guess Northern Ireland is the more historic example in the U.K. of where the right has a significant working class vote - pretty much all on cultural grounds. Trump is playing the same game courting white nationalism. The culture war stuff works, forget class.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
The anti-politician politician
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
I think that's true, but democrats still have a significant working class vote especially in Georgia and places where voter suppression is routinely carried out, Biden's likely victory in Georgia will be down to local organisation to defeat voter suppression efforts.
However there's definitely a right wing/corporate element to the Democrats' support, I'm thinking of stuff like Prop 22 being passed in California and minimum wage laws being passed in Florida for instance.
The Tories try to make a song and dance about appealing to what they think are 'working class values' but invariably fuck it up with the school dinners etc. I don't know enough about American politics to know what the equivalent is but there's bound to be something.
However there's definitely a right wing/corporate element to the Democrats' support, I'm thinking of stuff like Prop 22 being passed in California and minimum wage laws being passed in Florida for instance.
The Tories try to make a song and dance about appealing to what they think are 'working class values' but invariably fuck it up with the school dinners etc. I don't know enough about American politics to know what the equivalent is but there's bound to be something.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Personally I find his style to be the perfect antidote to the incumbent arsehole.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
America Still Thinks It’s the Election Police
After the 2020 election, who would bother to listen to the U.S. about how to run a vote?
I've been thinking about this a lot the last few days
Yossarian
Get thee behind me, Santa
The author is part of a free-market think-tank so his assessment is probably a little skewed. While this election might have gone some way toward correcting perceptions of Latino Americans being a monolithic group - conservative third-generation Cuban-Americans probably don't feel any particular kinship with new arrivals from Honduras - I'm not sure how big of a multiethnic working class coalition the Republicans are going to be able to build without abandoning the kind of policies that make affordable health care etc. harder to access for working class Americans.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent
Trump was ineffective and easily beaten. A future strongman won’t be.
teqniq
DisMembered
This is interesting, concerning populism:
threadreaderapp.com
Thread by @EmporersNewC on Thread Reader App
Thread by @EmporersNewC: 1. So, why does it matter that Joe Biden’s electoral college win does not rely on Pennsylvania? 2. You will notice that Trump’s focus on electoral fraud is directed at places like Philadelp...…
threadreaderapp.com
ska invita
back on the other side
-If everyone acted politically in their own material best interests we'd be living in a socialist utopia by now
-that coalition only need be big enough to win an election
?
hippogriff
Imposter
November 5, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. GMT
Thirty-six hours after election night, the results suggest that Joe Biden will win both the popular vote and the electoral college. That said, those 36 hours have been a journey, from losing Florida to having hopes dashed in Ohio and Texas, to Biden starting out way behind in the Rust Belt states.
Follow the latest on Election 2020
What is striking about the past 36 hours is not just this narrative, but the other one: Despite a pandemic, despite a highly polarized electorate, a record number of people voted without incident.
Indeed, if one considers not just the mechanics of the election, but also the way the news media and others have framed the election, one begins to see a foreseen disaster that was averted through considerable effort by the relevant gatekeepers.
In the weeks and months before Election Day, there were widespread concerns about how everything could go wrong. There was talk about Trump supporters engaging in voter intimidation. Cities were boarded up due to fears of violence. Numerous lawsuits were anticipated. And President Trump telegraphed that he would probably declare victory even though he had not actually won a sufficient number of states.
Last week, in a tweetstorm, my friend and colleague Jacob T. Levy foresaw the upside of all these warnings. He suggested that the 2020 election had many parallels to the Y2K event: Because it was a predictable disaster, it could be avoided. As Levy noted, “So many institutions (pollsters, TV network decision desks, state election departments, etc.) have so thoroughly gamed out and prepared for so many outcomes ranging from weird to catastrophic that it all turns out surprisingly smooth and straightforward.”
Y2K20 did not crash the system for a variety of reasons. Let’s start with the actual voting. A record number of people voted in Tuesday’s election, and the percent of turnout was the highest it had been since 1908. This is extraordinary given that it happened during a pandemic. The huge number of early votes made this possible. As a Massachusetts poll inspector on Tuesday, I noticed that same-day turnout was light compared with a normal general election, but it vastly exceeded expectations given that 61 percent of my city’s registered voters had cast their ballots early. This appears to have been indicative of the entire country.
Despite the record number of voters, the New York Times reported that “voting for a vast majority of Americans proceeded smoothly on Tuesday, with … few major problems.” CNN reported that everything went well in the battleground states: “In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Tuesday that ‘precincts are islands of calm.’ In Florida, the spokesman for the Broward County supervisor of elections said the day was ‘boring.’” And NBC News reported that Department of Homeland Security officials did not detect any hacking. “Despite fears of the threat of intimidation or even violence around polling places, watchdog groups like Common Cause said it had seen no major reports of either.” Yea, no hacking!
Not everything went smoothly. The U.S. Postal Service appears to have ignored a court order. Ex-felons in Florida were supposed to be enfranchised based on a referendum from two years ago, but Florida Republicans were having none of that. Still, contrary to fears, the election was free and fair — even according to international election observers.
Those same observers were harsh in their judgment about Trump attempting to prematurely declare victory early Wednesday. Here, however, the news media and social media networks framed Trump’s efforts as they should have. None of the major networks, including Fox News, gave Trump’s claims any credence. Even Fox News’s legal guests criticized the president’s statements.
Similarly, Trump’s efforts to tweet about wins in states where votes were still being counted did not really work:
The media also framed the state-by-state election returns pretty well given the surprises compared with polling expectations. They stressed that early Biden leads in some states were due to mail-in votes being released first, whereas in the Rust Belt trio, Trump’s initial leads were expected to be ephemeral because of the huge advantage of mail-in votes for Biden.
It is also worth noting that senior GOP officials clearly expected Trump to act out like this and refused to play along. Even toadies like Chris Christie and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) criticized the Trump campaign’s “Stop the vote!” nonsense.
It’s unlikely that the American people will buy Trump’s malarkey, either. As the Election Integrity Project’s Rosa Brooks noted in this newspaper, Americans are more sophisticated about the process of voting and vote-counting than in the spring: “Today, there is far less reason to fear a catastrophic political outcome than there was in June, for the simple reason that the many efforts to ring warning bells about Trump’s likely efforts to undermine the election results were successful.”
Clearly the 2020 election results surprised and disappointed many observers. In other cases, it simply reconfirmed their priors. However, it is worth stressing how many of the worst-case scenarios did not pan out. This is not because fears were misplaced. It is because election administrators, elected officials not including the president, and media organizations gamed out what to do — and did it well.
Thirty-six hours after election night, the results suggest that Joe Biden will win both the popular vote and the electoral college. That said, those 36 hours have been a journey, from losing Florida to having hopes dashed in Ohio and Texas, to Biden starting out way behind in the Rust Belt states.
Follow the latest on Election 2020
What is striking about the past 36 hours is not just this narrative, but the other one: Despite a pandemic, despite a highly polarized electorate, a record number of people voted without incident.
Indeed, if one considers not just the mechanics of the election, but also the way the news media and others have framed the election, one begins to see a foreseen disaster that was averted through considerable effort by the relevant gatekeepers.
In the weeks and months before Election Day, there were widespread concerns about how everything could go wrong. There was talk about Trump supporters engaging in voter intimidation. Cities were boarded up due to fears of violence. Numerous lawsuits were anticipated. And President Trump telegraphed that he would probably declare victory even though he had not actually won a sufficient number of states.
Last week, in a tweetstorm, my friend and colleague Jacob T. Levy foresaw the upside of all these warnings. He suggested that the 2020 election had many parallels to the Y2K event: Because it was a predictable disaster, it could be avoided. As Levy noted, “So many institutions (pollsters, TV network decision desks, state election departments, etc.) have so thoroughly gamed out and prepared for so many outcomes ranging from weird to catastrophic that it all turns out surprisingly smooth and straightforward.”
Y2K20 did not crash the system for a variety of reasons. Let’s start with the actual voting. A record number of people voted in Tuesday’s election, and the percent of turnout was the highest it had been since 1908. This is extraordinary given that it happened during a pandemic. The huge number of early votes made this possible. As a Massachusetts poll inspector on Tuesday, I noticed that same-day turnout was light compared with a normal general election, but it vastly exceeded expectations given that 61 percent of my city’s registered voters had cast their ballots early. This appears to have been indicative of the entire country.
Despite the record number of voters, the New York Times reported that “voting for a vast majority of Americans proceeded smoothly on Tuesday, with … few major problems.” CNN reported that everything went well in the battleground states: “In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Tuesday that ‘precincts are islands of calm.’ In Florida, the spokesman for the Broward County supervisor of elections said the day was ‘boring.’” And NBC News reported that Department of Homeland Security officials did not detect any hacking. “Despite fears of the threat of intimidation or even violence around polling places, watchdog groups like Common Cause said it had seen no major reports of either.” Yea, no hacking!
Not everything went smoothly. The U.S. Postal Service appears to have ignored a court order. Ex-felons in Florida were supposed to be enfranchised based on a referendum from two years ago, but Florida Republicans were having none of that. Still, contrary to fears, the election was free and fair — even according to international election observers.
Those same observers were harsh in their judgment about Trump attempting to prematurely declare victory early Wednesday. Here, however, the news media and social media networks framed Trump’s efforts as they should have. None of the major networks, including Fox News, gave Trump’s claims any credence. Even Fox News’s legal guests criticized the president’s statements.
Similarly, Trump’s efforts to tweet about wins in states where votes were still being counted did not really work:
The media also framed the state-by-state election returns pretty well given the surprises compared with polling expectations. They stressed that early Biden leads in some states were due to mail-in votes being released first, whereas in the Rust Belt trio, Trump’s initial leads were expected to be ephemeral because of the huge advantage of mail-in votes for Biden.
It is also worth noting that senior GOP officials clearly expected Trump to act out like this and refused to play along. Even toadies like Chris Christie and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) criticized the Trump campaign’s “Stop the vote!” nonsense.
It’s unlikely that the American people will buy Trump’s malarkey, either. As the Election Integrity Project’s Rosa Brooks noted in this newspaper, Americans are more sophisticated about the process of voting and vote-counting than in the spring: “Today, there is far less reason to fear a catastrophic political outcome than there was in June, for the simple reason that the many efforts to ring warning bells about Trump’s likely efforts to undermine the election results were successful.”
Clearly the 2020 election results surprised and disappointed many observers. In other cases, it simply reconfirmed their priors. However, it is worth stressing how many of the worst-case scenarios did not pan out. This is not because fears were misplaced. It is because election administrators, elected officials not including the president, and media organizations gamed out what to do — and did it well.
ska invita
back on the other side
its 5am in the US tbf
If right wing think tanks are thinking this, then its all the more reason to believe this is where right wing parties are going to be encouraged to go by the strategists
StoneRoad
heckling from the back!
Hopefully, someone slipped him a mickeyfinn or plain sleeping pills so they could get some peace and quiet themselves.
either that, or his phone is up the creek as the battery's gone flat, perhaps the screen keyboard has given up in disgust (and self-protection)
Mation
real life adventure worth more than pieces of gold
This is entertaining.
www.vanityfair.com
It Sure Sounds Like Trump May Barricade Himself in the Oval Office and Refuse to Come Out If Biden Wins
The president has reportedly told allies he’ll never concede.
Spymaster
Plastic Paddy
Hopefully not.
His meltdown tweets and press conferences have been the most entertaining part of all this. If it weren't for the prospect of the next one, I wouldn't be following anywhere near as closely.
Buddy Bradley
Pantheistic solipsist
This is just brilliant:
moochedit
I'm not feeding seagulls
Thats never stopped him before. Some of his best work has been done in the middle of the night!
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
Christ, had to stop that before I was sick.
This is the stuff redsquirrel was warning about guys. It’s pathetic.
Guys, the culture war was coopted for electoral purposes in the South especially decades ago. Trump and the GOP are expanding it in different ways now but its not new and w/c White voters in Georgia and elsewhere haven't voted Dem for some time.
West Virginia was a Democratic hold out for a while but solid R now and the rest of Appalachia - from PA on South - has followed. Trumpism may have expanded this but it ain't new necessarily and its aided by some quite specific US history on race as well as the usual industrial decline that we're familiar with here
West Virginia was a Democratic hold out for a while but solid R now and the rest of Appalachia - from PA on South - has followed. Trumpism may have expanded this but it ain't new necessarily and its aided by some quite specific US history on race as well as the usual industrial decline that we're familiar with here
ska invita
back on the other side
eoin_k
Lawyer's fees, beetroot and music
Is it a right-wing think tank? It looks more like a liberal centrist free market think tank at a glance.
Yossarian
Get thee behind me, Santa
It's certainly possible that the Democratic and Republican parties could end up switching roles again - but if a campaign in which Trump only got 8% of the Black vote and killed his highest-profile Black supporter is being hailed as the GOP's best performance in 60 years, it seems like it'll be a while before the party's appeal becomes truly multiethnic.
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