Paywall removed: https://archive.is/mUb1H
My one coworker, a former Trump supporter, asked me today “Are you still 100% positive Trump will lose? Please tell me he’s going to lose.” She was visibly worried. Actually sounded upset, and was practically begging me to tell her yes. Never seen her like that before…
This has become a very confusing time in our political history. I’m nervous, if not outright afraid, because I can’t tell which way the scales are going to tip. We need everyone to do their duty as a citizen, now more than ever.
Yep.
I’m in a red state full of Trumpers.
It doesn’t even feel like an election year. There’s no signs or new bumper stickers like the last two. But they all still hate Biden.
A lot of people are just voting against the other candidate this year.
I hate to say it, but voting against the other guy has been going on a long time, and I think it has a lot to do with why we find ourselves in this situation. “Vote for me because I’m not the other guy” is one of the oldest political strategies there is, and Democrats have been using it for a long time; even going so far as to donate to the campaigns of the most extremist candidates in their race to set themselves up with an easy win.
However, as my boss when I was a teenager would say - and my grandfather decades before him - “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee.” There’s a core block of Republicans who don’t care who the Republican candidate is. They’re gonna vote for him regardless of his policies just because he’s the Republican. He could be Trump, Biden, Putin, or Stalin himself, risen from the grave to destroy the specter of capitalism once and for all. And the Democrats have never accounted for these people voting against them rather than voting for a candidate they like, which has led to this slide further and further towards right-wing extremism as the craziest candidates get propped up by Democrats looking for an easy win - to the point that even the old Republicans have lost control of this core group of voters who became the MAGA cultists, and the party as a whole along with them.
It’s unfortunate, but all we can do at this point is vote against the crazies and hope that the Republicans clean out their party of extremists. But I don’t think we’ll see that happen any time soon. The rot is rampant.
I was wondering about that. I’m in California, and there are basically no political signs this year. I figured it was because they thought we would forget whose signs were in their yards in 2016 and 2020
The wild part is that both sides think this, but for totally different reasons. The center all the way over to semi-Left we have in the US sees the danger Trump posses to democracy, his weaponization of the courts (even without being in power), and his disdain for the rule of law.
The Right (minus Republicans that aren’t MAGA that I would put more center thanks to the shifted Overton window) think that the “radical Left” is trying to replace them with “brown people”, and trying to make everyone “woke”, and somehow make everyone a pedophile by having a drag queen read them a story.
The Right uses “FUD” to control their base, with only wanting power over people and having zero desire to actually govern (as seen with congress currently), and everyone else that is paying any attention is afraid of what that means for everyone in their lives that will be affected by this cult. And even once Trump is gone from this earth, it’s going to take years of mental health crisis to try and bring these people back from a cult this large and powerful. This is the kind of thing that Scientology looks at just goes “sploosh”.
I want to first say thank you, this looks very interesting! But to help people of the future I want to point out that you have a typo in his name, Hari Seldon which was no doubt a thwarting by auto-correct.
Then vote…
I’m going to but either party winning the election is not going to stop America’s decline
Sure, but note that these 80% are described as about equal between Republicans and Democrats. Meaning 80% of people are afraid the ‘other side’ is going to lead to catastrophe, but they don’t agree on which side is the threat, and probably a fair share that believe that both of the likely “sides” will end in catastrophe.
If four out of five people voted, then I think we’d be in a lot better shape as a country. Civic engagement does not seem to be on the uptick, would love to see some better stats on that.
Look, I agree with you. And almost everyone agrees ranked choice is the best solution.
But like nuclear fusion, we can’t make decisions based on what we WISH we had. We have to make decisions based on what we HAVE. When ranked choice advocates start pushing harder in campaigning for reform in off years instead of lamenting what we don’t have every time an election comes up, maybe we can make some progress. Alaska and Hawaii managed it.
One in five Americans enjoy the country sliding into chaos.
I haven’t been stockpiling all these canned goods and pornography for nothing!
In the after days, may I barter for a nice Sears catalog? Preferably spring edition?
Five out of five Americans ain’t seen nothing yet
