There’s a big fucking difference in my mind between voting for Trump and not voting. I know the electoral math makes those choices roughly equivalent, but in terms of personal motivations, there is a difference.
This is, to be frank, a big step in viewpoint for me. Before the election, I was all “staying home is a vote for Trump”. I was doing my best to be pragmatic. But I cannot deny that the DNC shit the bed SUPER HARD here. And thus, I cannot deny the fact that there’s a BIG difference between “I’ll vote for the party that’s gonna fuck me over more rapidly” and “I don’t want to vote for either party that’s been fucking me over for close to two decades”.
There’s not one single reason when the election went the way it did, just like there is not one demographic that made the election go the way it did.
But the argument “It wasn’t the economy. The economy is great, just look at these numbers [published by the government]!” is just politicians falling for their own rhetoric.
The US governments have been skewing official statistics for decades. I’ve lived through decades of “Oh, X is fine” when my lived experience has been quite the contrary.
I suspect that a significant source of D’s sitting this election out is similar to a lot of R’s thoughts: “You’ve ignored us for decades telling us that things are getting better, but they never do. We’re done. Burn it down.”
Maybe they don’t expect things to get better after this election, but maybe their hoping that spreading the suffering will prompt more people to demand change as well.
Just a thought.
I’m angry about how bad the economy is, so I’m going to vote to make it substantially worse.
If they really cared about fixing the economy they’d be progressives.
Every bad thing their own president does to them is justice. Every bad thing he does to others is injustice.
Unpopular opinion: blaming the voters is counterproductive. It’s important to understand why they voted (or abstained) the way they did.
Yes, some percentage of voters are indeed racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. But hypothetically, another percentage are people who were unhappy because of economic reasons and felt they were presented with two bad options:
- an unreliable candidate who acknowledged they were unhappy
- an unknown candidate who said they were wrong and should just be happy
Is this hypothesis correct? I don’t know, but just assuming the voters are ignorant, or just saying that leopards will eat their faces, isn’t productive.
But the ongoing theme is that “voters voted on the economy” and if you do just the smallest, tiniest bit of research of on one of those magical rectangles we all have in our pocket it’s blindingly obvious that Trump is probably going to screw it all up.
It’s like everyone turned on Fox News for half an hour and went “yup, this is our guy.”
We can blame crappy education, but my barely functional public school at least taught us to do our own research at least to some degree.
I’m not saying the campaign was perfect, but we have to assert at least some effort on the part of the voters — how do you vote for someone only having seen the news or a manufactured social media feed, c’mon.
I remember my girlfriend, just staring at the TV when that female rapper was literally twerking at one of Kamala’s democrat conventions… and was like “what the fuck is this?” I mean, I get it that celebrities can and do help candidates, but the messages being sent by the Democrats were just crazy… like, it’s all a party and not that serious. And for the record, my lady is Mexican and very liberal…
No, most people decided neither option was good enough. Trump destroyed the economy, Biden finished it off. Harris lies to voters and said they were better off than they were under Trump, which isn’t true for any group of voters.
So if Harris doesn’t even see a problem, she’s not going to help. Trump is a liar but at least sees there’s a problem. At worst nothing changes regardless of who gets in office using this reality. At best maybe Trump accidentally does something good.
Harris, by deciding to lie about the Biden economy and ignore the economic reality the majority of Americans are experiencing, effectively eliminated herself as a candidate. She explicitly and implicitly stated she doesn’t care about and will not improve economic conditions.
Harris ran the same campaign as Clinton, plus genocide. She failed worse than Clinton. It was predictable, guaranteed really.
Well the economic reality will be improving in the next 6-12 months, right after Trump takes power.
This is what always happens: some Republican becomes president, trashes the economy then when Democrats take power they’re on cleanup duty. But of course the results take longer than four years, so another idiot is elected into office and the pattern starts all over again. Republicans take credit for their predecessor’s economy and people shit all over Democrats.
This pattern has been happening for as long as I can remember (I’m 35); it baffles me that no one else sees it.
