It’s literally 2016 but worse somehow.
One source close to the Harris campaign tells Rolling Stone they reached out to several staffers in and around the campaign to voice concerns about the candidate embracing Dick and Liz Cheney.
“People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil,” says the source, speaking about Dick Cheney. They say a Harris staffer responded that it was not the staff’s role to challenge the campaign’s decisions.
A Democratic strategist says they warned key Harris surrogates and top-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that campaigning with Liz Cheney — and making the campaign’s closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris — was highly unlikely to motivate any new swing voters, and risked dissuading already-despondent, infrequent Democratic voters who had supported Biden in 2020. The strategist says they also attempted to have big donors and battleground state party chairs convey the same argument to the Harris campaign.
Another Democratic operative close to Harrisworld says they sent memos and data to Harris campaign staffers underscoring how, among other things, Republican voters, believe it or not, vote Republican — and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states. “We were told, basically, to get lost, no thank you,” says the operative.
It wasn’t more than half the country, in total 65% of the country voted for any candidate. Trump got about 55% of that, or a bit over 36% of the country. That’s still way higher than it should be, but well below half. There’s a bunch of possible explanations for why the remaining 35% of the country didn’t vote, and only some of those explanations would be tacit support of Trump.
The 35% of the country did vote. If you choose not to vote for any candidate, you are voting, “both these options are indistinguishable to me, I’m good with either.” Not voting is still voting. You’re just endorsing whatever the people who do vote decide. You’re basically saying, “I consider this race irrelevant and don’t care about the outcome.” That is what you are voting for if you don’t vote.
Good point. More than half of voters would have been accurate.
That reduces the sting of disappointment in my fellow man a tiny bit.
Yes, but there was unlikely to be 100% turnout of horrible people. Some good people voted for Trump, in what we see as misguided but tolerant of racism. However many more racist people stayed home and didn’t vote and many more didn’t care about racism enough to vote.
Trump in the USA and people’s response to covid (worldwide) really highlighted selfishness of humanity to me. I’m a less hopeful person because of it but that doesn’t mean I won’t fight for what’s right.
