AOC asked her Instagram followers who voted for Trump to give their reasons (cut/pasted above). She also answered a number of questions. Her explanation for the degree New York shifted red was because Trump campaigned there and Harris didn’t. (That’s an explanation, not a criticism, she made it clear that the Harris campaign was effective in slowing the red shift in states where they campaigned.). She also noted that many immigrants who could vote have family who couldn’t and they have been waiting decades for immigration reform, and as well they’re quite susceptible to messaging saying that the asylum seekers were unjustly moved to the front of the line (us vs. them works, she noted). Overall a pretty honest appraisal of the election, as far as I’m concerned.
Some of the comments from her followers are relevant to something Adam mentioned about conspiracy theories in his post today. The notion that we can spin some sort of election interference tale from undervotes is the stupid opposite of what we should be thinking about undervoters. People who voted for Trump and left the rest of the ballot blank were demonstrating their political ignorance and their belief that Trump alone is the savior — they don’t trust the down ballot of either party. I’d like to find a few and look at their media diet, not spin some grifter conspiracy. And they’re evidence for some hope when Trump isn’t on the ballot, since they probably won’t be voting.
Let’s move on to the dishonest takes by DC insider Democratic consultants. This piece is a good roundup of comments from a few of them. They’re the people getting invited onto CNN to spout off. Philip Reines, some Clintonworld advisor, went on CNN to say that Democrats’ kowtowed to the extremes of the party (including trans activists). Another blamed us cuddling up to the Columbia protesters. A third, anonymous Hill source, said it was because we didn’t give enough credit to Trump for his insights on the border. The piece ends with this:
The ugly truth for these people is that Kamala Harris ran as right-wing a campaign as any Democrat in living memory. She downplayed discussions of her race and gender. She bent over backward to welcome billionaires, corporate titans, and Republicans into the fold. She told Black men that one of her priorities for them was…crypto. She made her past as a prosecutor a cornerstone of her pitch. She bragged about owning a Glock and joked that she would shoot people who broke into her house. She stuffed the Democratic National Convention to the gills with cops and Border Patrol agents while crushing even the tiniest dissent over her support for the genocide in Gaza. She promised the most “lethal” military in the world. She was seemingly joined at the hip with Liz Cheney for weeks. She even praised Dick Cheney! It’s hard to think of what more she could have done to satisfy the people clamoring for her to pander to conservatives.
But admitting that would mean that the CNN favorites and the anonymous politicos had to confront an even more uncomfortable reality: that, ideologically at least, Harris ran the campaign of their wildest dreams, and got crushed.
Maybe this is a little harshly worded, but whatever you think of the Harris campaign (and I think it was pretty good), the fantasy “woke” campaign that these consultants are straw manning never existed. Harris didn’t say word one about trans folk. Walz was put on a tight leash and was coached to look for points of agreement with Vance in the debate, which was a huge missed opportunity. Harris’ Gaza position was pretty much Biden’s.
She really was the consultant’s ideal candidate, except for being female and black. These people need to be ignored the next time around, and we don’t need to listen to their fairy tales about how Democrats should become even more like Republicans to win.
Steve LaBonne
I wish we had more progressives with heads as level as AOC’s. And fewer goddamn grifting consultants.
trollhattan
An Afghan fellow at work on Wednesday, shared his hopes for peace at last in Gaza, based on Trump having claimed he’ll stop the war.
Don’t know whether to cry or laugh.
OId Man Shadow
Oh, FFS… those answers… Jesus fucking Christ…
Look your daughters in the eye and tell them you gave a rapist who ended their bodily autonomy supreme power because he was “real” and an “outsider”.
Give it six months, they fly to the scorched ruins of Gaza and tell the dead how great Trump was at stopping the massacre.
Party of war… neat… give it a year… then go visit the charred remains of Kiev and tell the raped, beaten, wounded, oppressed and dead what a fucking peacemaker, Trump is.
Go to Hell… all of you. I hope you personally all fucking suffer the full measure of the misery you’ve sown.
stinger
Happy Losers and Suckers Day to my fellow losers and suckers. I guess it’s not worth a front page mention these days.
Hey, BJ lawyers, what’s going to happen with The Convict’s sentencing hearing? Does it just automatically go away? Judge and lawyers now have an opening in their calendar?
Baud
Again, it appears that the only question these voters ask themselves is how good the Democratic Party is, and how evil the Republican Party or their candidate is means nothing. It’s the NYT’s world. We’re just living in it.
It’s reality, and people with a longer future ahead of them in politics have to deal with it somehow. I’m out. I see no reason to spend my remaining days on bended knee for the sake of others.
Hoodie
I’d caveat everything that follows by saying that Harris was significantly handicapped by having only 100 days to campaign, which made it a lot harder for her to gel with the public, including a lot of those policy positions you listed. I’d say the one way we might want to think about acting more like Republicans is to be more ruthless, including to our own. If the polls are saying the Biden is unpopular, you need to run against Biden, especially since you already took the risk of forcing him out. You can’t afford to be sentimental. Pelosi kind of gets that, probably because Joe got a lot of credit for policy successes that she may have been more instrumental in bringing about.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
These same people have been peddling this same shit since the 80s.
Watering down one’s politics is simply a strategy for losing. The GOP will lie with abandon about your politics anyway.
Omnes Omnibus
Our military is supposed to be lethal. That’s what it’s there for.
Baud
Also too, if you take these surveys seriously, then the common theme is that liberal policies created resentment. I’ll let smarter people figure out how to deal with that.
Old School
Compare: Both are filled with nonsense.
Contrast: One is doing it in hopes of being paid.
Bupalos
actually it left out that she just about got into a pissing match with Trump over who loves fracking the most.
Omnes Omnibus
@Hoodie: The sitting Vice President can’t really run against the sitting President.
ETA: The bet was that Biden personally was the problem. But I really don’t want to relive July.
Splitting Image
The important takeaway from many of these pundits is that they spent the campaign listening to what the Republicans were saying about Harris and not listening to what Harris was saying.
The important question people need to ask themselves is why that is.
Bupalos
@Omnes Omnibus: Not without a primary.
Ohio Mom
@trollhattan: I would be tempted to write down what your colleague said and make him sign and date it.
And then save it along with media pieces predicting Trump will allow Israel to finish destroying Gaza. Tie the whole thing up with a ribbon and a note card saying, “You might want to re-consider what news sources you use.”
I won’t claim that my sources are 100% accurate or that I haven’t been taken sometimes. But I am always looking to learn from my mistakes.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: I want one of those daisy in the gun barrel militaries!
zhena gogolia
So all the over-the-top elation about Harris-Walz really was a sugar high. As soon as people didn’t get what they wanted, they start shitting all over Harris and Walz. Good to know.
Did the Repubs do that to Trump when he lost? When he led an insurrection? When he was held liable for rape? When he was convicted of 34 felony counts? NO THEY DIDN’T
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: In the next couple of years reality is going to hit a lot of people upside the head good and hard. We’ll see if anything starts to shift.
Hoodie
@Omnes Omnibus: You’ve gone to the trouble of replacing him, you better have a better answer than that. The general public is not aware of any such “rule.” They don’t care about custom or decorum, they want results. You say something like “I I’ve been a loyal VP, but now I’ve been tapped to run, I’m going to do some things differently. He did great with what he was initially faced with, but he lost focus after that.”
Chris Johnson
All of this, and all of what AOC is learning, and all of what Adam was saying. (I’ve got whiplash from how hard I came around on Adam: guess there was a vibes clash or something, muddying my vision).
100% this is on media. It’s no accident. I saw it the whole time and I’ve been the one saying they’re entirely captured, controlled, state media. I tend to conclude the state is not OUR state, and I don’t have explanations for the exact whys and how this was done other than the why is stinkin’ obvious.
I’m going to be talking to a guy Wednesday who’s one of them. I’ve got reason to believe he is deathly scared I’m going to be hurt by the Antifa who hunt and destroy Christians wherever they show their faces, but he’s been hiding that until I talked openly about how I’d want to hook up with the local Episcopalians: apparently I can do that but have to hide the terrible secret or I’m in physical danger.
I’m sure he would be just as bemused if I suggest not reporting on the location of gay friends to just any old conservative friend… but one thing about it, we’d caught up in a Panera and he was the first to spot probably a wingnut lady and her daughter, behind us and our friends and our freewheeling conversation, and he picked up immediately that the wingnut lady was silently flipping out.
Since he’s the one who spotted her and got us out of there, I might suggest to him that she’ll probably end up having an app on her phone. For calling in an air strike on us, on suspicion of being degenerates and badguys. Gotta make it partly jokey, and yet… fuck yes, those people are going to have hotlines. We’re on Moscow Rules everywhere, baby! There is no safe place with this regime seizing power, and being good ain’t gonna automatically save you.
My friend who almost certainly helped vote Trump in (maybe he split his ticket too! No point asking now) senses this, but has no context for it. We shall see how people do, as things unfold.
Oh, also: this is the guy who sat in a meeting with his phone on airplane, and then afterwards all the ads were targeted towards what’d been said in the meeting. Stuff goes on.
Bupalos
@Splitting Image: This is largely true though a lot of the characterization here is about things Harris did put in her messaging at various points.
I think the bottom line is that we don’t know how to message in this environment. Trump does. You need stunts, you need hypersimplifications, you need to operationalize if not weaponize people’s fears and anxieties. You need to be an opportunist and a salesman.
You need to find the populist voice.
hrprogressive
AOC at least genuinely wants to listen, and learn. I don’t see her agreeing with those people, at least not in those screencaps.
The rest of the Democratic Party seems way more likely to run back into the arms of those same shitty consultants than to listen to people and see what they can change.
Anyone suggesting a change isn’t needed isn’t hearing what people are saying, irrespective of the fact that some of them clearly believe things that aren’t accurate to arrive at that position.
Splitting Image
@Ohio Mom:
Everyone has been rooked by a con artist at some point. It’s a hazard of living.
Normal people get angry when someone has conned them. The Republican coalition is made up of people who get angry at you when you tell them that they got rooked and sidle up closer to the con artist.
Fair Economist
The fundamental problem is disinfo. There’s a post on Hullabaloo with a cite to the relevant info. People who knew that the US has near record low violent crime rates, or that inflation is now basically at the target rate, or that Biden has brought border crossings down to a lower rate than they were under Trump, voted more than 2:1 for Harris (you have to process the presented data, but that’s about what comes out). People with false beliefs on those subject voted roughly 60-40 for Trump.
The problem is that people with false beliefs on crime, immigration, and inflation substantially outnumber those with correct beliefs. I don’t think there’s any fix when the media/social media environment can push people through the metaphorical looking glass to believe down is up and dark is light. Certainly there’s little to be gained by useful constructive policy when the other side can convince a large majority that none of the actual benefits happened.
The key to fixing this is to get the populace accurately informed about reality and I don’t have any bright ideas for that. Supporting sane media will help, but given the magnitude of false belief there’s got to be a manipulation campaign in social media and opting out of that doesn’t help.
Kirk
I’ve said it elsewhere, I’ll repeat it regularly.
The reason Kamala lost is that she is a woman and this nation has a misogyny problem.
It is not the only reason, not any more than slavery was the only reason for the first US civil war. It is, however, the keystone and influences almost all the other reasons.
Steve LaBonne
@zhena gogolia: I will always hold them in great esteem for having run a better campaign than I thought possible under the very difficult circumstances of Biden’s late dropout.
Belafon
I’ll give them one thing: The we want change crowd is about to get it good and hard as the saying about democracy goes.
If consultants were constraining the campaign as much as people think, then that part of the Democratic game plan has lived too long. I’m not sure she, or Biden, would have won. They changed a bunch of stuff (Republicans here in Texas are still fighting the overtime pay cap), but the administration didn’t change their stuff, so nothing changed.
She really could only go so far in running against Biden. Given that people kept asking why the administration wasn’t already doing what she said she wanted to do, any suggestion of difference by her would have been seen as her being an ineffective leader.
Maybe the next candidate – yeah, let’s for the moment, presume a next candidate, because it’s too early to already concede that their won’t – can promise more, and some how do it in such a way that the press doesn’t say they aren’t providing information on how they’re going to pay for it since the US debt in 2028 is $400T due to Trump’s purchase of Greenland from Russia to build White House 3.
Now that I have complained, I still want to know how this change is supposed to work that doesn’t actually hurt a third to half of the country and our global partners.
BR
@hrprogressive:
AOC should run in 2028. There were headwinds this year that won’t exist in 2028. Yes there is and will be bigotry against her, but that’s not a reason to shy away from it.
Bupalos
The ‘normal’ psychology of this is a lot more complicated.
SpaceUnit
There’s actually a word for these types of voters: morons.
stinger
@Kirk: This.
CS
@Omnes Omnibus: The sitting Vice President can’t really run against the sitting President.
This struck me as a problem with incumbency this time around. It’s not a parliamentary government; Harris had no room to step away from the administration’s/Biden’s stance on Israel. I didn’t get any indication that she had a different opinion on Gaza, and I don’t think she could say if she did without inviting more criticism.
The pro-peace and Muslim voters had a choice between someone who could maybe be persuaded to take action, without evidence that she could be, and someone who categorically could not be persuaded to stop the violence and bloodshed. It’s not a situation I could see a way out of for her as long as Biden stayed on his course.
Belafon
@Bupalos: As Splitting Image says a little later, they get angry at the people who point out that they’ve been conned.
WereBear
Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
My italics. He saw it as the inevitable effect of democratization.
zhena gogolia
@Hoodie:
And if that happens to be a lie?
Chris Johnson
@Bupalos: Yo, if I’m not turbo wrong, we don’t GET to message in this environment. It is not ours to message in. THAT’S the problem. Doesn’t matter what you message, if it gets twisted and reinterpreted by the same people who are studying the youth well enough to know where to aim the ‘Gaza invalidates the entire Democratic party as genociders’ cannons.
If they know how to do that they know how to turn off Dem messaging. For whatever values of ‘they’ it turns out to be. I admit I’m impressed how tuned in to American English and politics the Russians are, but then they have to be and it’s an existential fight for them: Ukraine holds some of their territory and they have to import North Korean soldiers. They HAD to win or go down for the last time.
Fair Economist
@Hoodie: The problem is that Biden is unpopular because the media system has tricked people about what he has done.
Biden was the first President in over 60 years to substantially improve working class wages, the first President in over 50 years to increase manufacturing jobs, and presided over the largest job increase in history. But the media environment has managed to convince people he was “bad for working people”.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Fair Economist:
From the thread below:
The modern GOP are masters of this.
It’s called “The Firehose of Falsehood”. A Russian-style of propaganda for an age of information abundance.
-High volume/multi-channel approach
-Shameless in its willingness to broadcast lies
-No commitment to, or requirement for consistency
-Rapid, continuous and repetitive messsaging
-Point is not to persuade but to confuse and overwhelm
-Assumes a low trust environment and lowers it further
-Number of arguments matters more than their quality
-Drown out competing messages thru sheer volume
Starfish
@zhena gogolia: I don’t think that criticizing how the the DC press corpse (totally intentional) is representing Harris and Walz is actual critique of Harris and Walz.
There is a tug of war over whether we should move left or right to get the votes we need, and I think that gets us into typically Democratic circular-firing squad nonsense.
Hoodie
@zhena gogolia: You’re kidding, right? Pols lie all the time, or more importantly, that’s what most people think. Dems seemed to have lost the killer instinct; LBJ would lie if he thought is was necessary and that lie is not particularly harmful to anything but Joe Biden’s ego.
Belafon
I would also like to find a way to make Populism as unpopular as Communism in this country.
Steve LaBonne
So many people are assuming that a “better” Democrat, or Harris being “better” in some way that usually translates as agreeing with the critic on their pet issue, would have won. I think the election returns tell us otherwise. I’m not convinced that even Obama could have overcome the headwinds.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@SpaceUnit:
That’s morans:
https://photoworks.org.uk/get-a-brain-morans/
Wanna bet, assuming he’s still alive, that he voted for the Orange Fart Cloud?
Hoodie
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: That’s the game now, it’s not going to change. Learn how to play it.
tam1MI
And alienate Biden voters more than they already were? It’s clear that defenestrating Biden caused the Harris campaign to lose demographics she could ill afford to (the working class, males… you know, the demos that Biden was strong in) without bringing in any to make up the deficit. Plus, she was Biden’s Vice President. Any time she tried to distance herself from Biden’s policies she would have been walloped for being disloyal and dishonest, because she had a hand in shaping those policies. The best she could do was what she did – talk about her plans for the future while staying mum on Biden’s policies.
Steve LaBonne
@Belafon: Trump and his minions are going to give it their best shot.
WereBear
SpaceUnit
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I hope these voters bear the brunt of what’s coming.
Bupalos
This is the kind of cautiousness that killed us. Absolutely no one thinks the VP has any power whatsoever, it’s basically a running joke. But consultants estimated that she needed traditional gravitas and so they ran with the thing everyone knew was a lie.
This is what mixing in populism would look like: She absolutely could have talked about the VP role as a bullshit nothing, but one that made her wise by access. She could have explained that her role as “border czar” was to have zero power and collect input from think-tanks where eggheads did nothing but have luncheons, while serving as a convenient dumping ground for blame. She could have said she was pissed about that.
In other words, she could have weaponized the truth instead of trying to collaborate with noble (and transparent) lies.
Baud
I’m going to start calling every bad thing that happens to Trumpers God’s will.
Fair Economist
@Kirk: I agree misogyny and racism were part of the problem, but the polling indicated Biden would have done worse. The rightwing media/propaganda system managed to get *large* majorities convinced inflation went up over Biden’s term when it didn’t (there was a bump in the middle which is now gone), that crime is up when it’s actually way down, and even managed to get 45% of the population to say we’re in a recession when we’ve just had the longest run of job gains in decades and are currently seeing near-record increases in real wages.
Racism and misogyny are certainly big problems, but the ability of the other side to make the large majority of the general population believe complete falsehoods about the top issues is bigger.
Harris got all the people who are clued in about what’s going on excited and enthusiastic. The problem is those people are now very much the minority.
Lyrebird
The veteran and vet-adjacent front pagers usually post in the evening fwiw.
Chris Johnson
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: All of that. Exactly. That’s the media I see, especially now.
NobodySpecial
The ideal candidate for a lot of the Clintonites is guys like Heath Shuler. They are not serious individuals.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: Which would have been stupid.
trollhattan
@Ohio Mom:
Limited my responses to 1. we can’t know what’s been happening between Biden and Bibi in back channels, nor how much “restraint” has been applied (as horrifying as that is to contemplate) and 2. Because Trump and Bibi are buds, it seems likely the IDF will be given the green light to scrape the rest of Gaza away.
Bupalos
@Omnes Omnibus: Not in retrospect. It would have been a much higher risk play, but the stupidest thing that happened in this cycle is that we thought we better not take risks.
Belafon
@Bupalos: Then why was she held accountable for the border and Gaza?
WereBear
This time it seems like the red states will bear the brunt, more, since Project 2025 is already in progress there. They will become more of a hellhole than before.
We have to stop sending them money. They will bleed the blue states dry and laugh as they buy another yacht.
O. Felix Culpa
@zhena gogolia:
Yup. I’m disgusted by the blaming and finger-pointing from Dems and adjacent while the corpse was still warm. Looking at you, Nancy and Bernie.
I’m proud of what Kamala and Tim accomplished in the time that they had. Of course it will be important to analyze how we can do better next time, but nobody knows anything for sure yet. Just a bunch of pundits and politicos confirming their priors with incomplete evidence, and lashing out because they’re (understandably) unhappy with the results.
My theory is it’s a combination of anti-incumbency, biased MSM coverage and framing, white supremacy and misogyny, and right-wing disinformation ecosystems poisoning the well. Better minds than I will need to analyze and weight those factors, and figure out effective counter-measures.
In the end, though, voters have agency. Americans might not have known fully who they were getting in 2016, but that excuse doesn’t hold in 2020. The majority of voters affirmatively chose Trump, and we have to reckon with that.
Bupalos
@Belafon: Because she embraced the VP lie, that she had some power, and didn’t seek to separate from Biden in any way.
This added to perceptions of her (incredibly!) as roughly as dishonest as Trump.
Kirk
@Fair Economist:
Sure, and states rights and sectionalism and economic structures all were underlying parts of the civil war. But as the meme says:
eta, well, that image didn’t paste and I actually know better. so: meme
So – misogyny.
Hoodie
@Bupalos: Exactly. What’s the point of replacing Biden if you’re not going to separate yourself from him? He was getting terrible popularity numbers before the change. Voters viewed him as a nice but enfeebled old man who couldn’t deal with the problems he was supposed to deal with. It’s irrelevant whether that’s true or not. Harris’ popularity went up when she first became the candidate but she basically stalled thereafter by failing to further differentiate herself from Joe, so voters decided she wasn’t enough of a change. Now TBF, some of that may have been because she didn’t have enough time to develop her own image apart from Biden, but she did flub a few opportunities she had to do so.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: I disagree.
Omnes Omnibus
@O. Felix Culpa: I agree with this.
Hildebrand
Trump is such a singularly wretched human being that a dry piece of toast should have beaten him in this election.
Seems that me that this is not about the kind of campaign that Harris-Walz ran, it was about the fact that people looked at Trump’s cruelty, bullying, and bigotry and said, ‘I want that.’
O. Felix Culpa
@Baud:
LOL. That’s what my in-laws called his election. The logical extension is that everything bad that follows is also the deity’s will. I’m ok with that.
tam1MI
Here’s what elected Dems say about their loss:
So, apparently, the party line is to shit on Joe Biden and his supporters even more than they already have in a frantic attempt to justify their catastrophically awful decision to push him out. Sounds about right. (Gotta love Nancy Pelosi’s subtle shade on Kamala Harris with her “we should have had an OPEN PRIMARY” remark, the clear implication being that Harris would not have won said primary. Say you thought Harris was a shitty candidate without saying that Harris was a shitty candidate).
Old School
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I’d take that bet. The “Get a Brain, Morans” guy was holding the sign as a joke as I recall. He was spoofing right-wingers.
trollhattan
Trump’s secret administration staffing plan, revealed!
ETA, the nut-cutter reaches out.
O. Felix Culpa
@O. Felix Culpa:
Date correction:
WereBear
The thing that makes me the angriest — today, this hour — is that they don’t realize all the lifesaving medical treatment, communications technology, and such comes from smart people.
And they hate us.
When every car on the road runs like a Cybertruck, they will just claim that science doesn’t work and go back to reading chicken entrails.
stinger
@Lyrebird:
Yeah, but it’s L&S Day all day!
Bupalos
@Hoodie: I don’t blame Harris for one bit of this. She was put in the most difficult position an American politician at this level has ever been in trying to win an election.
The View answer, that in retrospect ended this election cycle and put Trump in power, was the result of her inheriting a campaign, and as you say, having no time to do that part of politics. She did what you do as a backup qb- execute the existing plays and game plan to the best of your ability. She blew that out of the water. She’s an incredible talent with a work ethic we’ll have a hard time finding again. The party and Joe Biden failed her.
Belafon
I will agree that ending “Weird” was a crime. Was it the consultants that suggested that? Mostly I just want to verify that it wasn’t seen as to have run its course, since there are actual limits on how far something like that can be taken.
piratedan
still wading thru my own emotional devastation on these matters… in a way, it’s almost if the nation needs a therapist to deal with these types of issues…
by most measures, DJT was an abject failure that for reasons unknown was given a mulligan by the pandemic in that people remember Biden having to land the plane during national emotional trauma, but forgot who was the pilot during takeoff. The economy was in shock, supply lines splintered and all of that restored, almost seamlessly and remodeled with infrastructure plans that the former always promised and never delivered. People are tired of immigration being an issue, yet the guy who kept it being an issue is front and center as to why nothing is resolved. The lack of cause and effect have been completely turned on their heads.
I have to look at the fact that the media refused, I mean REFUSED, to lay blame where it belonged, They refused to hold him accountable for his statements, policies, choices. If someone did something egregious in the 45 admin, there was no ownership, no introspection, in fact, more often DJT would just say something more outrageous, cross yet another line and into the morass is sank.
now that P2025 is going to be the methodology employed, getting REAL numbers, real information is going to be harder than ever, even less transparency and more ability to suppress and twist the truth.
not exactly the retirement I had planned….. alas, that’s small potatoes to what others will be facing in a very stark GOP vision.
bbleh
@Steve LaBonne: this x whatever they make
zhena gogolia
@Chris Johnson: Yes.
zhena gogolia
@O. Felix Culpa: Yes.
Fair Economist
@Hildebrand: A major part of the problem is that the RW propaganda complex convinced a lot of Trump voters he wasn’t going to do the things he’s going to do. Hispanics think he won’t deport, women think he’ll support abortion rights, Arab-Americans think he won’t help Netanyahu ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip (or worse), etc.
It’s hard to get people to vote against Trump when they don’t think he’s actually going to do anything bad, because of the propaganda.
zhena gogolia
@tam1MI: Oh, but I was assured that Kamala was Nancy’s plan all along! That stuff about “no coronation” was just fluff!
Belafon
@tam1MI: I suspect that AOC isn’t on the same side of the line as Pelosi.
Bupalos
@tam1MI: Nancy is not shading Harris there, she’s very clearly and openly shading Biden. He kneecapped Harris by dragging his feet (paging Dr. Campos!) and leaving no time to distance Harris from him. It’s amazing to me that folks are in denial about the electoral reality that Biden was, politically speaking, toxic waste. The numbers are there. The polling that was supposed to be so “broken” was accurate.
Either a real open convention or a managed fake primary leading to Harris was a Biden-laundering we needed. Obama and Pelosi practically screamed it at the time. Everyone here knew better and celebrated Biden’s brilliant maneuver.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Biden and Netanyahu haven’t talked much during this war. Most of the meaningful interaction between our government and theirs has been between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Austin and Gallant have talked extensively, almost daily. One reason is that Gallant is the only member of Netanyahu’s rotten government we respected and trusted to tell the truth. I’m using past tense here because Netanyahu finally fired Gallant last week.
In the course of the ceasefire talks that have gone on since February, CIA Director William Burns has talked extensively with the Israeli negotiating team. That would be the Mossad and Shin Bet chiefs along with an IDF general. But they are not members of the government and do not make policy.
PJ
@Fair Economist: Polls don’t vote, voters do. Polls also showed that Trump was really unpopular, and he still won. Abandoning Biden was the critical mistake that cost Democrats this election.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: Well, I guess we are all just fucking idiots who are privileged to have you hear to educate us.
O. Felix Culpa
@zhena gogolia:
I can’t tell you how disgusted I am with Nancy right now. Part of me wonders if her inability to STFU is from deteriorating executive function due to age. Regardless, I devoutly wish she would STFU.
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s been the case for a long time. ;-)
Hoodie
@tam1MI: What if she’s right? I’d tend to give considerable weight to what Pelosi says, given that she’s the most successful female politician in American history. IIRC, she’s always had a massive cheering section on this blog, but now she’s saying something some people don’t like, that changes things?
As for shitting on Joe Biden, he can join the club. Jimmy Carter got shit on, too. He lost as an incumbent, too. Bill Clinton got blamed for Al Gore’s loss. The risk of getting shit on for a loss comes with the territory.
tam1MI
@zhena gogolia:Oh, but I was assured that Kamala was Nancy’s plan all along! That stuff about “no coronation” was just fluff!
Oh, and we were assured that shitting all over the candidate we voted for in the primary and forcing him out in the most humiliating way possible was the One Weird Trick that was going to win the election for us!
We all see how that worked out.
And the assholes still are refusing to take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions.
Peale
@Fair Economist: On the other hand, and this is just kind of limited to my experience with the adult demographic dems who comment on blogs…we also tend to cut this candidate with “realism” to the point that if you’re not familiar with politics, a lot of Democrats are telling you her presidency would have failed and she wouldn’t have done much. Like she could have promised to single handedly solve climate change and give everyone a functioning EV made in America by 2026 and the response from Dems would have been “well, akshually, she won’t have the Senate so she won’t be able to do that.” Or “With full employment, where is she going to get the workers to build those cars?” Or “Elon Musk is a right wing nut and I can’t believe she’s caved into him to promise EVs…which I now hate.” If you’re a non-political normie, most of the Democrats you meet are probably enthusiasm killers.
zhena gogolia
@tam1MI: Yep.
Belafon
Part of the reason I couldn’t be a Representative right now is the urge to respond to most of the people in AOCs list and say “You’re definitely going to get your ‘change'”.
zhena gogolia
@Belafon: Tell it to Bernie, who said “the American people wanted change. And they were right.”
Too bad he probably won’t feel the brunt of it.
PJ
@Bupalos:
Just keep on romancing that chicken. Pelosi and the big money donors doomed the election when they forced Biden out. He beat Trump by 5 points and 7 million votes, but y’all decided that acting like ninnies and abandoning him was the way to go.
As a result, over 10 million Biden voters stayed at home – they didn’t vote for Trump, and they didn’t vote for Harris. How can you expect voters to have any confidence in your party when the party has no confidence in the President who is implementing their policies? Trump’s polling was worse than Biden’s at times, but Republicans stuck with him, and he won. There’s a lesson there.
Belafon
@Peale:“With full employment, where is she going to get the workers to build those cars?”
My favorite is people who say this won’t work because the electricity infrastructure isn’t there.
cmorenc
Among the things that helped undo Harris was that one of her most prominent campaign promises about giving $25K to young first-time homebuyers came across both as pie-in-the-sky unrealistic to actually deliver on (give that to 10 million people and the cost is $250 billion), as well as running into backlash from quite a few voters for the same reason Biden’s attempt to cancel student loans turned out to create lots of political backlash from folks who had paid off their student loans without such help (i.e. folks who bought houses without 25k government direct assistance).
True, these rationales are aside from other big factors like misogyny and racism that caused voters to balk at voting for her, but they gave these voters a way to rationalize that they decided on the basis of merits rather than racism or misogyny. True also that aside from hard-core true believer MAGAs, these voters were also aware that Trump is a lying sack of shit with a track record of failing to deliver on most promises other than tax cuts and attempts to mass-deport illegal immigrants, but they buy the lie that Trump is better on the economy, the most important issue to many voters. From the premise that Trump is better on the economy (and the border too) they rationalize a positive reason to vote for Trump despite his other deficits. The contradictary negative things about voting for Trump can thus be rationalized away without voters having to acknowledge the racism or misogyny factors if they can rationalize why she was not the better choice because some of her proposals did not seem realistically sensible.
Belafon
@PJ: Biden had a bad debate and Democrats ran in circles. Trump had a bad debate and Republicans went “What debate?”
zhena gogolia
@PJ: They stuck with him through
2 impeachments
an insurrection
adjudicated sexual assaulter
34 felony convictions
2020 presidential loss
TheflipPsyd
@piratedan: Maybe we should go after the elites on the Democratic side. Like the political consultants and the media. Isn’t the myth always that even though the corporations that own the media are conservative, the journalists lean left. This is only partially snark. Weird was working. Laughing at them was working. Do I think that is all that is needed? Probably not. But I am tired of the democratic consultant class who comes in and takes the wimp way. Maybe the Democrats need to hire consultants who have some passion for their beliefs. I’m tired of building bridges. I’m tired of taking the high road. I want a fighter. A take no prisoners fighter.
Bupalos
@PJ: polls were accurate. As in every election since Trump’s fat fugly face appeared in politics, they overestimated every Democrat running against him.
People are welcome to believe that Biden was the great white hope that would have beaten Trump. But he underperformed the polls by 5 points in 2020 and if he did the same thing this year, THE SAME PERFORMANCE AGAINST THE POLLS THAT HE MANAGED WHEN HE WASN’T FREEZING UP AND BEATING MEDICARE he would have lost by the widest margin since Jimmy Carter.
I don’t mean to escalate here, but as this thesis is essentially “Biden was actually electorally popular” against EVERY scrap of evidence that lies outside the fringes of your most optimistic algorithmic bubble, I feel the need to sharpen a pin.
Slightly_peeved
My follow-up question to anyone who says that Harris or Biden should have campaigned differently is: “so how would that have been reported?”
The New York Times is the reason the term sanewashing was coined. Bezos is openly squashing pro-Democrat stories, and the Murdoch family has been using the news media to push their personal agenda for over a century now.
I get that it’s a good habit to acknowledge your own failings rather than put the blame on others when you do badly at something, but that doesn’t always make it right.
tam1MI
And here’s the thing. THEY WON. They got their way. They forced this horrible thing on all of us, and now that it has ended in disaster they are wildly pointing the finger in every direction except at themselves.
I am so grimly amused at all those Democratic voters calling and calling and calling their elected representatives, begging them to push through judges in the lame duck session or do this or do that. Those assholes wouldn’t even stand up for their own fucking President, what makes anyone think they will stand up for them?
bbleh
@Steve LaBonne: I would like to think so. But consider Brexit, an unmitigated disaster, which by all accounts its most enthusiastic supporters, whom it has hit at least as hard as anyone, won’t admit was wrong.
It reminds me of the adage about a con: once a mark has bought in, they’ll stay bought in even when the con is revealed, because to do otherwise would be to admit they were wrong, and they won’t do that.
Citizen Alan
@trollhattan: to be fair, it’s reasonable to assume that I place troubled by violent ethnic conflict will become peaceful once one ethnic group has exterminated the other.
Hoodie
@zhena gogolia:
@Belafon:
@PJ:
Y’all are forgetting that there were Republicans who wanted to replace Trump (e.g., the 20% or so who voted for Haley). The difference was, unlike Joe, Trump never would have voluntarily stepped down. You may very well be right but, once the decision was made to replace Biden, then the only option was to shit on Joe if you hoped to win given what you knew about his approval ratings. Joe was part of that decision.
Suzanne
@Bupalos:
I agree with you.
We keep falling into this trap of thinking that the media should explain things more clearly, and if they did, we would win.
Can’t people just be DUM? That they are motivated to seek out information that makes them feel better? That they are doing serious wishcasting and self-delusion?
There’s a valid case to be made that unhappy people do more wishcasting, but it’s still wishcasting.
Fake Irishman
@trollhattan:
Given what could be, Ernst wouldn’t be terrible. Despite the infamous ad, she hasn’t been a show pony and generally quietly done real work on armed services.
She even sponsored a useful bipartisan bill to ensure that sexual assault in the job couldn’t just be shunted into binding arbitration.
bbleh
@Kirk: yeah this in a big way. Look whom the Orange Thing has won against and lost against. It’s a BIG part of the “headwinds.” A lot of Americans simply will not vote for a woman for President.
Bupalos
@Slightly_peeved: I don’t know and I’m not sure it couldn’t have gotten around The Media altogether. Basically just confused them.
If Harris said “turns out the vice presidency is kinda bullshit as far as influencing anything, kinda wish I hadn’t taken it” and The Times tries to say ZOMG HARRIS HERSELF ADMITS SHE HAS NO DEEPSTATE EXPERIENCE SHOCKED WE ARE SHOCKED!!! … dunno. Better I think.
People really can’t seem to accept that politics has changed. We are not in the Obama era. Without us changing to meet it.
Slightly_peeved
@Suzanne:
i don’t think it’s about the media explaining things clearly, or about Trump being a messaging savant. People were leaving his rallies early for a reason.
The media explained things perfectly well to achieve their desired outcome. Which is what the US has now.
Steve LaBonne
@bbleh: Enough of them have come around that the narrow Brexit win would turn into a narrow loss if rerun today. And that’s all we really need.
Old School
@Bupalos:
I guess disinformation worked.
Geminid
@trollhattan: I would not say Trump and Netanyahu are buddies. Trump complained a lot about Netanyahu while President because Netanyahu is an even bigger liar than Trump is. Plus, Trump was furious when Netanyahu called Biden to congratulate him after Biden won in 2020. A year later, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid famously got Trump on tape saying “Fuck Bibi” over that phone call.
The two “leaders” have patched things up since, but I don’t think either one trusts the other. That’s a very rational posture on both their parts.
On the other hand, a lot of people in Trump’s orbit are pro-Netanyahu, and some big donors gave Trump scores of millions of dollars on the promise that Trump would greenlight settlement expansion in the West Bank, and maybe even annexation.
There could be a strong countervailing force, though. The Saudis and Emiratis swing a lot of weight with Trump and they despise Netanyahu. They are also adamantly opposed to annexation. This could be an interesting dynamic.
Steve LaBonne
@Slightly_peeved: Are you reading the crazy stuff people are hearing from dumbass voters? Those people are not getting their “information” from any media any of us ever see, let alone from FTFNYT and CNN.
Belafon
But what about the future? How do we punch through the RW noise? and I suspect that only a small fraction of those Trump/Dem voters actively watched AOC. Let’s toss out the misogyny voters – I do also think that the fact that we’ve run both women as the incumbent party candidate makes the anti-woman vote larger than it actually is – what message would work if 2028 is exactly like 2024?
Bupalos
@Slightly_peeved: I think about 90% of the “leaving rallies early” or decreased attendance was just supply and demand. He was saturating a fairly limited geographic area with rally after rally. Leaving early was because 1. He scheduled them such that he was an average of an hour late to them. 2. He’s fucking senile now and rambles forever. People have babysitters.
none of that has to do with his political hold on that base. Pure hopium.
O. Felix Culpa
One of the things I’m saddest about is that Kamala is probably lost to us as a future candidate. She demonstrated so much talent and capability. I doubt she’ll get a second bite at the apple, and we are the poorer for it.
EZSmirkzz
News Flash: Best Team Looses Sporting Event! Fans Demand New City, New Stadium, New Team And Different Fans.
Electoral analysis is not a form of pithy calculus, unless you have something to lose or gain from engaging in it on that level. One thing is for certain, and that is the people who voted for Harris are not the reason she lost, so lay off one another. Shooting up hill is hard.
Maybe quit reading the corporate media. Just don’t be a candy ass.
Bupalos
@O. Felix Culpa: So much this. The biggest thing that shocked me was how she rose to the moment. I know she was working, hard, to get better. Every day, every minute. She cared.
Slightly_peeved
@Steve LaBonne:
I was going to add a point in my previous comment that “the media” now includes assholes like Joe Rogan and Twitter as news sources. Should have in hindsight.
Suzanne
@Slightly_peeved: Eh. I guess I just think that lots of people are fairly unhappy — which is reasonable — and so they voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party — which is dumb as shit.
jonas
The American electorate is the equivalent of the Itchy and Scratchy focus group on the Simpsons that produces “Poochy”:
Man: How many of you kids would like Itchy & Scratchy to deal with real-life problems, like the ones you face every day?
Kids: [clamoring] Oh, yeah! I would! Great idea! Yeah, that’s it!
Man: And who would like to see them do just the opposite — getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers?
Kids: [clamoring] Me! Yeah! Oh, cool! Yeah, that’s what I want!
Man: So, you want a realistic, down-to-earth show… that’s completely off-the-wall and swarming with magic robots?
Kids: [all agreeing, quieter this time] That’s right. Oh yeah, good.
We’re fucked. We can’t have both a democracy and an electorate where half the voters still think Trump is just a slightly wacky “outsider” and peace-loving mensch who will “clean things up” in Washington.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Fair Economist: I read the Home Depot reddit and can’t tell you how many times I year fellow associates over there say that “we are in a recession”, “inflation is really high”, or “our bad economic times”. This was a change election.
tam1MI
I’ll be honest – I’m not sure Biden would have won. Thanks to the Coup d’Etat Caucus, no one will ever be able to say with certainty whether he would have pulled through or whether he would have lost worse than Harris did, because that is all conjecture now. What I do know is that the areas where Harris lost her biggest amount of support is the areas where Biden was strong – men and the working class. I know that Joe Biden got more than 14 million votes in the 2024 primary, a primary where he was running virtually uncontested in, which means those 14 million people made the effort to vote for him when they knew full well they didn’t have to. I know that the number of votes Joe Biden got in the primary is awfully close to the number of people who stayed home this election cycle rather than vote for the beneficiary of his ousting. I know that, for the most part, the Dems in swing states such as Tammy Baldwin and Elissa Slotkin were the ones who refused to call for Biden’s ouster managed to survive the rout (and pulled more votes than the top of the ticket) while Dems in Red or swing states who joined the lynch mob, such as Sherrod Brown, went down in flames.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assert that that when the Dems ousted Biden, especially the way they did, they lost votes. And that Harris was unable to make up the deficit, and that is why she got clobbered.
Ksmiami
@Old School: eh American democracy is over. I don’t exactly know what will replace it but the next years will be incredibly dark
Lyrebird
@stinger: You are quite correct!
I don’t have the same rights to complain, but I can add my grievance that my new workplace does not close for Veteran’s Day, and it is a state-funded workplace, what the heck?
I hope you are having a meaningful Veteran’s Day!
Thank you for protecting all the rest of us!
zhena gogolia
@O. Felix Culpa: I know, this is what I think about at 5 AM. So sad. I also feel so bad for Walz. I loved him. But I guess he gets to be governor for a while.
Belafon
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: I want to know what the forum says on January 22.
Bupalos
@Old School: Biden underperformed the polls in 2020 by 5 points. He was polling 7 points behind Trump when the cane finally snagged him and drug him off in 2024. Do the math.
And he did freeze up on multiple occasions well prior to the debate causing aligned politicians and donors to express concern…and he did mumble off into never-never land on live TV claiming to have finally beaten Medicare. When you do this disinformation thing with the term “disinformation” you help disinformation.
piratedan
@TheflipPsyd: yeah… there’s a rabid part of me that wanted to go all Aaron Sorkin on these folks and hit them right between the eyes on immigration, healthcare and climate change policy.
Ask the public, who do they think is working in construction, the trades, healthcare, childcare, senior care? Who do they think is harvesting the crops? Do you honestly believe that people doing the work shouldn’t share in the opportunity?
I want to sit down and address the lies…. immigrants do NOT get Medicare. Immigrants do not get Social Security. CITIZENS do. That’s it.
What do you prefer America… homeless people camping out by the river, under the overpasses or in the public parks or in low cost or even free housing to be given an opportunity to start again? Deity forfend that you have to rely on a church that could deny you based on your gender, skin tone or beliefs.
Slightly_peeved
@Bupalos:
2 was my point. How much of Trump’s popularity is now based on the things he does, and how much is based on the second-hand reporting and social media around him?
i think the Republican strategists who have a shred of honesty left (ha) would describe his rally speeches about Hannibal Lecter as an unforced error, just one that didn’t lose them the game because their candidate being a deranged lunatic wasn’t a particularly big issue.
Old School
@Bupalos: The disinformation is that Biden was cognitively repaired. You seem to be hinting at it, so I assumed you believed it to be true.
My apologies if you didn’t.
Baud
I wish Biden had stayed in so Trump could have won 50 states and produced a working class nirvana.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: Your counterfactual here is based on the idea that the numbers for Biden were immutable. We don’t know what would have happened. We do know that what did happen didn’t work. The rest is speculation.
tam1MI
Yeah, her electoral career is done for. The one thing that all the competing theories of why we lost have in common is that Harris was the one left holding the bag when the shit came down. She is either a scapegoat for the Biden’s administration’s unpopularity or a scapegoat for the interparty backlash from Biden getting forced out. Either way, she ended up being a scapegoat.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
Stop forgetting Mitch The Coward McConnell. He could have easily gotten tfg impeached. That would have been the end of tfg electorally. Mitch chose not to because he’s a big fat coward. His wife was in the cabinet and resigned. Don’t tell me she didn’t tell Mitch what a shitshow the WH was. He had senators who were retiring.
Bupalos
It’s not dead yet!!!
(link to Monty python “bring out your dead” scene)
tam1MI
Walz can probably make a Senatorial run or a House run. He’s in a better position to salvage something from the debacle, since people tend to forget who VP candidates are. Losing Presidential candidates are stuck with loser stink forever.
RevRick
@Steve LaBonne: I must confess I was clearly fooled by how much energy and enthusiasm was being generated by the Harris/Walz campaign versus the tired, old, grievances, fascist, shit factory that was Trump’s campaign. I really feel like I have stepped into some alternate universe, because what seemed like victory became defeat, and what seemed like a dead end became the portal to our hideous nightmare.
Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo says that Harris ran what was as close as possible to a flawless campaign. It just turned out that a fundamental 7% shellacking was held to a 3% loss in the swing states.
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus: Agree.
Archon
Thousands, tens of thousands went to their Covid infected grave believing that NOT taking the vaccine was a good idea.
Forget misinformation on crime, inflation, or the border. What do you do when a large cohort of voters are so misinformed and ignorant they are prepared to DIE to protect their beliefs?
The Audacity of Krope
Just wanted to see that again.
tam1MI
No, we should have wasted all August having a Thunderdome primary to replace Biden at the top of the ticket. We surely would have gotten Johnny Unbeatable at the top of our ticket then! And he would have done it with no hard feelings on anybody’s part!
Bupalos
@Omnes Omnibus: Sure. We also don’t know if I would have done better against the high inside fastball last year than I did in my last year of college ball. Despite the fact that I can’t handle good JV softball pitchers now. It’s a similar counterfactual.
it’s also governed by biological physics.
Kristine
@tam1MI:
Except for you know who.
Seanly
I understand why Harris went for Republicans who didn’t like Trump. I do remember thinking if I could tell her one thing it would be to dance with what brung ya. The campaign just assumed they had Democrats wrapped up but there seems to have been a lot of softness in the Democractic base. Reaching out to Republicans is fine, but I don’t think low information Democrats were hearing what they needed to hear.
On the flip side, the people who split their ticket between Trump & down ballot Dems are idiots. Some seem like they just want “outsiders” or to watch the world burn. No realization of that the Dems need executive and legislative branch victories to enact the legislation that helps people.
As for the Gaza thing, any item where Harris was more the moderate choice, Trump will take the most extreme rightwing position he can. Harris too soft on Isreal? Trump will visit Isreal to engage in the Most Dangerous Game sports hunts with Netanyahoo. Etc etc
Sorry but the time of being able to vote one party for some candidates and the other party on for the rest is over. One party went off the deep end into insane, authoritarian talk. If that’s the policies you want then f*ck you and the swaybacked horse you rode into town. I’ve gotten to point where I only vote for an R if the only other candidate is worse like Constitution party or Ammon Bundy (yeah I am in Idaho…)
Bupalos
@tam1MI: we would have dominated the media and separated from Biden. That I can tell you.
i find the idea of Democratic schism PROFOUNDLY. unrealistic in any circumstance, but I guess I won’t say it’s impossible. But really, in retrospect it’s fine to say “we shouldn’t have played it safe.”
you say that, and I’ll say “it’s perfectly understandable why we thought we could play safe since the polls were biased towards us again.”
tam1MI
@Kristine: I should have said “losing DEMOCRATIC candidates”.
Ksmiami
@Bupalos: I firmly believe that without Harris, Baldwin, Slotkin et Al would have lost and as bad as the senate looks rn, it can be fixed in a few cycles.
oldgold
There was no one thing. There were many things that accounted for this. Some unique to this campaign and others that are structural.
One thing that I thought was missing in the campaign was a concentrated frontal assault on Trump’s handling of Covid. It would have exposed the myth as to his competence and that 4 years ago we were better off. Instead, the campaign chose to feature January 6th, which I believe by 2024 had lost its saliency.
Going forward we need to pound the economic issues. To fight for policies that will more equitably share the fruits of this economy. To attack the new gilded age of oligarchs.
The Audacity of Krope
The dumb risk I wanted happened, but didn’t pay off and the only solution is bigger, dumber risks.
K-Mo
@Fair Economist: I’m with you.
tam1MI
We DID dominate the media. All July long, all we heard was how horrible Biden was and how the Dems were all in a panic. Then, when he stepped aside and Harris took over, all we heard was about Harris and her awesome campaign and her joyous convention. Trump and his crazed rantings get pushed off the front page. (The trash Harris stuff started up after the convention).
In retrospect, it should have been a tell that Harris won plaudits all the way up to the convention, the convention was a triumph – and Harris’s numbers didn’t budge after.
Archon
@PJ: At the time I thought it was a mistake to abandon Biden. Turns out internal polls after the debate debacle had Trump winning New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. In other words Biden was going to lead DEMS off a cliff if he stayed on the ticket.
Kamala should get a statue from turning Armageddon into just a bad electoral night.
catclub
also lazy non-voters.
My guess is that all the outreach via Cheney gained zero votes. They had already not voted in 2020.
bbleh
@RevRick: concur. I won’t complain one bit about the campaign.
The Audacity of Krope
After years of being slandered by the media and some of the more opportunistic Dems? Who’d have thunk?
The lesson here is stand by your people not dump them faster.
tam1MI
Honestly, being a Biden supporter in 2024 felt a lot like being a Remainer when Britain lurched towards Brexit. You keep telling people and telling people that what they are contemplating is a bad idea and will end in disaster, and you either get ignored or shouted down. Then, when the bad idea gets implemented and the disaster happens just as you warned, you get attacked whenever you point out to others that they were warned this would happen. Like it’s all your fault because you didn’t clap hard enough for Tinkerbell or something.
zhena gogolia
@Archon: Good point. Horrific but good.
zhena gogolia
@Kristine: Should have used the “Dem” modifier.
Archon
@The Audacity of Krope:
Fair or not, Biden was terribly unpopular. Maybe there is a universe where the Democratic elites hold ranks with Biden and he somehow pulls off a miracle.
Theres also a universe where Democrats hold ranks with Biden and we lose 40 states.
Another Scott
I don’t have any great insights, but I’d caution folks that it’s not even a week since the election.
We don’t even know who controls the US House yet. And I’m sure we all remember that Johnson couldn’t pass much of anything in the last Congress without Democrats’s support.
We don’t know what’s coming with Judge Merchan’s sentencing of TCFFG on 11/26.
We don’t know what’s coming with the end of the CR (December 20).
We don’t know what the electoral landscape will be like in the Virginia and New Jersey elections next year.
Has anyone sensible done a breakdown of the pre-election polling vs results yet? Why should we trust the exit poll stuff that we’re seeing now? Is that polling broken or slanted like much of the other polling we saw, or is it suddenly trustworthy? Does everyone remember the exit polling that said that intentionally ambiguous “moral values” were what mattered (at 22%) in Bush v Kerry in 2004?
We don’t know lots and lots of things yet.
Hang in there. Rest, recharge, and be ready for the important battles ahead. Don’t burn yourself out so quickly. It’s going to be a slog.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Hoodie
@Omnes Omnibus: True, but speculation based on some market research. Dissatisfaction with Biden was cited by a lot of voters, a lot of whom said they don’t like Trump but think he’d be better for the economy. It’s dumb, but that’s what they think and that’s what needed to be addressed, mostly by acknowledging that Biden didn’t do enough. In some ways, he didn’t. He got caught flat-footed on immigration and didn’t even acknowledge “yeah, I should have taken those executive actions earlier.” Clinton was much better at that type of thing, which is probably one reason he was so resilient.
Of course, it’s hard to pinpoint what might have made a difference between winning and losing, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at the things that might have cost you votes, especially things that are more tactical than policy based. Dems shouldn’t give up everything they stand for, but they should look at the ways they execute things. This happens all the time in sports. You can have a great team and great game plan and still lose because you don’t execute at critical times. I love the guy, but Joe probably made a big error in not bowing out earlier, especially since he ended up bowing out later instead of sticking it out (which is what Trump would have done). Some of that blame might be placed on his advisors, who may have been blowing smoke up his ass. When he did bow out, that kind of cast the die that Harris needed to run against him, irrespective of whether it’s true that “a VP can’t run against a sitting president.” Even if that’s true, she needed to try. She was running as a “new generation of leadership” but that was about all she did to differentiate herself from Biden.
The Audacity of Krope
@tam1MI: As a person who wasn’t sold on Biden until after he became President, I felt my experience was nigh on invisible in the media landscape. He did great things, I was wondering over. I was sure I couldn’t be alone in that, but the media only talks to people who got their narrative.
Which is usually old, white Trumpers.
zhena gogolia
@tam1MI: That was when I got a sick feeling about it. The convention couldn’t have been more successful. But — nothing.
Bupalos
@Ksmiami: I think that’s right. Running Biden was dragging us off into “WTF is this party thinking” mode for dumb normies.
This was just a normal loss in the end. If people can stop fixating on the idea that people are binary:
50% +1 sheeted klansmen drooling to drink mudblood, that can never be fixed and should never be spoken to
50%-1 cosmopolitan freethinkers filled with the spirit of Gaia that only need a postcard to remind them to avert the apocalypse…
If we can get back to a somewhat ugly reality we need to inflect… we can make it somewhat better, again and again and again. Let’s do the small stuff, everyday.
tam1MI
I don’t believe a word of this “internal polls” bullshit. Unless somebody produces the actual “internal polls” they are just another made up excuse to justify a disastrous mistake.
And I hope all those people championing “internal polls” will be happy and comfortable when “internal polls” tell the Dems they need to throw trans people under the bus or need to throw immigrants under the bus or need to move sharply to the right to get a win. Live by the “internal polls”, die (literally, in some cases) by the “internal polls”.
The Audacity of Krope
@Archon: Failing to hold ranks was the reason the polls showed so poorly. How can voters have confidence in a leader while their supposed allies artfully avoid showing confidence in that person?
bbleh
@Steve LaBonne: except, of course, the Brexit proponents wouldn’t run the same campaign again. It would be similar — similar themes, similar resentments, etc. — but different enough that the people to whom those themes and resentments appeal could convince themselves that THIS time it’s DIFFERENT and vote for it again.
How many times has the Orange Thing sold utter crap to people at wildly inflated prices, which turns out to be … utter crap, and how many times have they eagerly bought the next offering?
The notion that Republicans will finally somehow “overplay their hand,” and that’s the key to Dem victory, is absurd. I mean, they MAY indeed crash things SO hard that even the Stupids realize something has gone badly wrong, but that’s a strategy of despair, if indeed a strategy at all.
As long as the Reps keep selling resentment, a HUGE chunk of the race-conscious and status-anxious population will buy it. Actual economics are, I’m pretty well convinced, an excuse rather than a cause.
Geminid
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: McConnell might have persuaded 16 other Republicans to vote to convict, but I do not it would have easy. It’s tough to get a Senator to do anything they don’t want to, especially if it would put their own political career at risk.
I think the reason McConnell didn’t try is he believed convicting Trump would blow up the Republican Party, that would create a rift between the Republican base and establishment that would taken the rest of the decade to mend. Personally, I think that would have been a wonderful outcome, but Mitch McConnell did not see the matter as I do.
At the time, we did share a common misconception though. I thought Trump would fade as a political force once he was out of the White House, and I suspect McConnell did also.
Bupalos
@zhena gogolia: scariest part of this for me is how this was the best version of the best campaign in the best conditions with the best candidate we’re likely to see in a lotta years. No one even remembers, Biden pulled off a parliamentary miracle with the IRA which was potentially transformative.
bbleh
@Archon: concur. Have seen reports that internal polling for Biden showed the Orange Thing winning 400 EV. He did the right thing, albeit perhaps too late, but that’s Monday-morning QBing.
@Another Scott: agree 100%. Grieving is necessary, and out of all this morass likely will be distilled some useful insights, but it ain’t like the Martians have conquered. And the holidays are coming, which will help everyone to recharge.
As noted in a previous thread, start by caring for yourself and for your network. Solidify, check on the vulnerable, and stay frosty. We SHALL overcome.
The Audacity of Krope
And dumping him provoked the same reaction in people with any sense. You chose to piss off people who show up to vote instead of people who need to be reminded when elections happen.
Anecdotal, but I knew 5 people in real life pushing for Biden to leave because of his age. They got their way. Only two even showed up to vote, one for Trump.
Archon
@The Audacity of Krope: I’m prepared to accept that counterfactual as a possibility. I’m also prepared to accept the idea that keeping Biden on the ticket would have been a catastrophe for Dems in ways that would have made Harris’ loss look like a mild electoral rebuke.
Steve LaBonne
@bbleh: There are no guarantees, but frankly, enough people wising up from the coming disasters is the only chance we have. The people who find Democrats too culturally alien aren’t going to change any time soon. The other thing we have going for us is that they are not likely to find another Trump.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
This.
I don’t blame you. And here, I am not trying to persuade you, I can only speak for myself. Ultimately, that is all each of us can do. And for myself, all I know is, I may not be young, but I might still be here 30 years from now. I’m not ready to walk away for that long. The pain of a world gone wrong cuts deep, but abandoning it to its fate, as if that won’t affect me somehow, would cut even deeper.
trollhattan
It’s not pronounced “buck.”
The Audacity of Krope
This is after the pageant of no confidence. The fact of the matter is you and others like you created this situation.
You lost any shred of integrity in the process. Good job.
Bupalos
@The Audacity of Krope: this just isn’t how voters think. You’re externalities your experience.
Electorally speaking, the number of voters we would have added by The Democratic Party refusing to admit that “defeating Medicare” wasn’t problematic but rather an intentional and a sign of strength…. That number is -6.
The Audacity of Krope
@Bupalos: You just have no moral core.
Bupalos
@The Audacity of Krope: WE JUST NEEDED TO CLAP HARDER.
That’s how tinker bell lives AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN TRY!
come on. We’re going to need you for what comes next. ESPECIALLY you folks who know how to go WAY TOO HARD like this.
Seriously, I admire the loyalty.
Archon
@The Audacity of Krope: Wait??? People who acknowledge the possibility that Biden was likely to lose even worse than Kamala are the problem?
That’s weird.
Kelly
John Rodgers, among others, has pointed out repeatedly that the USA was not a multi-racial democracy/republic until the civil rights laws of the late 1960’s. Women’s rights a little after that. I was a child when these things happened. I had a child’s faith that the good people had won. Justice for all. Instead I now believe defeating injustice is like like defeating bindweed.
TBone
@Another Scott: 👍 I had Deadline Whitehouse on for a minute and then I heard Claire McCaskill mewling about something so stupidly that I could barely believe what I was hearing. I don’t even remember what she said now, I think I blocked it from memory.
I said the other day I’m not going to take anyone seriously who is advising (bloviating) about all of this while we’re still counting votes. I’m hoping I can wait until at least six months have passed before I care why we lost, and that intention only grows stronger every day with every word about it that I see.
I don’t care how or why right now. To me, preparing for and girding against the coming onslaught, while doing radical self care and care for others, are the only things that matter in this moment. So I’m only thinking about getting through this next four years while fighting back.
bbleh
@The Audacity of Krope: No. In fact I consistently argued AGAINST dropping Biden and FOR allowing HIM to decide what to do. I mention the polling only to suggest that, if true, it influenced HIS decision. So, just for the record, your accusation is utterly false.
Bupalos
@The Audacity of Krope: I hear that. I’m not talking in moral language here. I can see how that might hit for you. I respect that.
The Audacity of Krope
@Archon: We ran an election on protecting Democracy then threw out the results of, what, 54 elections? You don’t see at all why the actions taken by party cravens undermined all the other messages?
Face it. Your gambit was attempted and it lost. Period. And all you fools are on here trying to blame anyone but yourselves.
RevRick
Yesterday, Tom Sullivan posted a graph at Digbysblog.net that illustrates just what we’re up against:
People who thought violent crime was at near record levels voted R+26; those who knew the truth voted D+65
Those who knew the rate of inflation has fallen back to historic averages voted D+53; those who didn’t believe that voted R+19
Those who knew the stock market was at all time highs voted D+20; those who thought it wasn’t voted R+9
People who knew unauthorized border crossing was now at the lowest level in years voted D+58; those insisted it wasn’t voted R+17.
All those R voters inhabit a separate information sphere of Fox and its companions, X, Reddit and podcasts like Joe Rogan. D voters still consume newspapers and the like.
NotMax
@TBone
So a day with a “y” in it.
The Audacity of Krope
@bbleh: Sorry, I don’t recall the positions taken by everyone here all the time, I just drew that conclusion for the tenor of the one particular comment.
So, sorry about that, but I’ll stand by the rest of it, just not the part that included you, personally.
Archon
@Kelly: America has been an experiment since 1776. The post-1965 American political order has been a RADICAL experiment.
West of the Rockies
I did not live through McCarthyism, but I ponder the seeming parallels: a con man but true believing narcissist with cognitive issues (alcoholism) spewing lies and disinformation…
How was he defeated? Can we use anything learned from that dark chapter in American history?
Bupalos
@TBone: You know, you just consistently offer posts here that I don’t know how to respond to, that I can’t even figure out whether I agree or disagree… but that I just think “yeah, that needed to be said, I’m glad that got represented” or “yeah let’s listen to THAT song.”
japa21
It’s is absolutely amazing to me that so many people are absolutely positive that they, and in some case, only they, know exactly what would have happened if the situation had been different. Such knowledge is impossible, no matter how they liken it to athletic endeavors.
Pie time.
TBone
@NotMax: this was special though. Really special.
It’s not often that I block things from memory immediately! And it’s never done consciously – my subconscience is in “protect” mode, apparently.
Michael Bersin
@Hoodie:
That certainly explains why Mike Pence was on the ticket.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Belafon: There are already concerns on what tariffs will do to sales.
Suzanne
@Bupalos: It’s weird to me to talk in moral language about this topic. Like, IMO, political parties exist to serve voters, voters don’t owe the party or any of its leaders anything. The Democratic Party owes us the best chance possible to win. I don’t take any loyalty oath.
TBone
@West of the Rockies: it was “women’s work”:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/senator-who-stood-joseph-mccarthy-when-no-one-else-would-180970279/
The Audacity of Krope
@japa21: I don’t personally suggest that I know, what I’m saying was it was simply the wrong thing to do either way. I’d rather lose with integrity than give it up. Losing the integrity then losing anyway, kinda made me give up on Democrats as a viable vehicle for positive social change.
bbleh
@Steve LaBonne: I think “the only chance we have” is just too narrow. There IS a substantial chunk of the population who are sold on “Dems are Satan incarnate,” but I’d be willing to bet that’s a substantial minority that overlaps heavily with the 27% “crazification factor” and the 25-35% hardcore reactionary/authoritarians that exists in all industrialized nations, none of whom would be reachable by a liberal-democracy party, even the “Third Way” / Bill Clinton kind. Politics is a MUCH more fluid thing than that. For heaven’s sake, Barack Obama won the popular vote twice in a row, which nobody had done since Eisenhower, and that was only 16 and 12 years ago — hardly long enough for some kind of fundamental and inalterable change in the landscape.
We got a while to distill lessons and plan next steps. Do not despair.
Bupalos
@West of the Rockies: someone said “have you no shame” and it turned out that’s what 50mm people had wanted to say.
there’s some similar sentiment brewing here on our side if we can just find the person that wants to say it. I’m going to guess AOC, while also knowing, as a historian, it’s never the person you’re thinking.
I’m kinda fantasizing that it’s Harris, and she’s gunna do a thing about how the Democrats set her up and she’s going to tell you how this actually is….and do “revenge and retribution” on Trump and the RNC and the DLC.
Archon
@The Audacity of Krope: What you are saying is nonsense, Biden was likely a dead man walking, in fact I’d argue Kamala’s problem was she had no wiggle room because people like you were telling everyone who would listen that Biden was not only the “greatest President of our lifetime” but some combination of George Washington and Cincinnatus for dropping out in an election he was likely to get slaughtered in.
Kamala probably would have done better if she politically cut Biden’s throat but you go ahead and sleep at night thinking the real problem was lack of loyalty to Biden.
Splitting Image
@Archon:
Harris ran such a good campaign it is likely that any other Democrat would have lost worse than she did, including Biden.
The trouble is that talking about this now the way many people are talking about it – high ranking Democrats blabbing to the New York Times and CNN, for example – are playing the blame game. And that really is part of the reason Trump won.
The narrative in the legacy media is that A Bad Thing Has Happened, and the only question to ask is which Democrat is to blame for it. Here on our panel are three Democrats to explain why the patsy is someone other than them…
The Audacity of Krope
@Archon: The standing up for Biden needed to start in March of 2021. The older class of Dems have approximately zero convictions. The only people in this party who showed leadership while there was practically a global Jihad against our President were Kamala Harris, AOC, Pramila Jayapal, and Hakeem Jeffries.
They knew what rejecting our own leader would get us.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Chris Johnson: The people who don’t get their news from actual media, voted for Trump! Legacy media does not have the influence you think it does. This endless drum beat of bashing organizations that may have crappy editorials and opinion sections but provide real and necessary reporting is BS. The right-wing, Russia, etc want us not to trust reporters.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@NotMax:
You beat me to it. My former Senator!
Sad to say, too bad she’s not somebody’s current Senator. I’d take good ole Feckless Claire right about now.
TBone
@Bupalos: please see my comment at #200.
Omnes Omnibus
@japa21: We know one thing that didn’t work. We don’t know if anything else would have. Maybe, due to worldwide rejection of incumbents because of inchoate rage, no Dem could have and Biden should have stayed and taken the fall. Maybe the old man could have pulled it out one more time. After all, he’d come back from being written off before. Maybe smug certainty that one course or the other was right is stupid right now. What do I know?
Bupalos
@TBone: I’m going to follow up on that.
this is (embarrassingly) new history to me. Thank you.
bow howdy you do not disappoint..
steve g
I hate to see this every time I see it, here from the CNN pundits:
Harris ran the campaign of their wildest dreams, and got crushed.
Harris was not crushed. That was a perfectly ordinary victory by a smallish margin.
My reference point: Reagan, 1984: 58% to 40% vote, 525 to 13 EV. That is what crushed looks like.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Hey, look at that…. I agree with you.
TBone
@Omnes Omnibus: 😊
Salty Sam
My state as well. Wife fwded this one to me, it encapsulates my feelings perfectly:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCH8t6SODww/?igsh=MXFlZzI4eDl3b2RmNg==
TBone
@TBone:
– Margaret Chase Smith
Baud
@TBone:
That means voting for Democrats.
prostratedragon
@trollhattan:
Suite Punta del Este, Intro
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TBone:
From the same declaration:
Hey Margaret, be glad you didn’t live to see this come to pass.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/senator-who-stood-joseph-mccarthy-when-no-one-else-would-180970279/
Steve LaBonne
@bbleh: I absolutely positively am not going to despair. That’s exactly what those mofos want us to do and I mean to be noncompliant in that as in other ways.
TBone
@Baud: yessiree
Always has, in my lifetime.
It was her prescience that I admire.
WereBear
Yes. Beautifully said.
Likewise, I can’t just pull up the drawbridge and hope for the best, long term. There is a way for everyone to contribute, and I continue to seek ways that won’t wipe me out. (Burnout.)
ColoradoGuy
100% for radical self-care, along with finding community in the real world. Colorado is going to become an Underground Railway state very soon, as the nation partitions into Free states and Hate states.
TBone
@Steve LaBonne: 🎯
Starfish
@ColoradoGuy: We really are. There were people scoping out the local reddit communities asking us about what it is like to live here.
Gvg
@CS: You are assuming she could gain more voters than she would lose by changing our policy on Israel. I don’t think we are there yet. Jewish Americans outnumber Muslim Americans, neither are all of the same opinion, and most Americans are (proven by this election) not that knowledgeable. They are going to think we should do what we have always done. They are not aware of all the things that have gone on. Most of them just sort of vaguely want peace with no idea how to get there.
it’s going to take some prep to get the public ready for a harder stance with Israel and that will be hard with the republicans actively sabotaging it plus various foreign interests using propaganda on our population. We have got to get control of our own news.
Suzanne
@ColoradoGuy: Spawn the Elder moved to CO for that reason. His rent is exorbitant but it makes me feel better knowing he’s there.
He and his partner had their car stolen and crashed into a gun store four days after they arrived, though.
ArchTeryx
@Starfish: My state will as well, though it will transit through another border state. I will not say where, not any more.
lowtechcyclist
“It’s hard to think of what more she could have done to satisfy the people clamoring for her to pander to conservatives.” Oh that’s easy, she could have underbussed LGBTQ people, she could have advocated for some sort of compromise on abortion rights, she could have limited her support for gun control to background checks or some other relatively innocuous issue, the list goes on.
Show me where she gave ground on any core value, on anything that mattered much. Seriously,this is bullshit. “She bent over backward to welcome billionaires, corporate titans” – show me where she did this, because I sure missed it, along with saying Black men could benefit from crypto. Sure, she welcomed Republicans who’d realized how awful Trump was, but what policy concessions did she make to them? Nothing, AFAICT. This was the mirror image of, say, “Democrats for Nixon” in 1972, only without their having to be coerced.
And sure, she made a big deal about her past as a prosecutor, because she was going to take that skill set and aim it right at Donald Fucking Trump. That wasn’t clear to everybody? How was this pandering to anyone except people who wanted to see that fucker behind bars??
I could go through the rest of it line by line, but you get the idea: this analysis was bullshit from beginning to end. Hell, one more: “She downplayed discussions of her race and gender.” Of course she did! You want people to know you’re more than that. Not to mention, how did emphasizing (hopefully) becoming the first woman President work out for Hillary? How did not emphasizing his race work out for Obama? QED.
Gah.
TBone
@Bupalos: 💙
Starfish
@Gvg: The state of Michigan was important for her to win. There are a lot of Muslims there, and instead of courting them, the party set up their convention in a way to troll them.
WereBear
@West of the Rockies: McCarthy was successfully shamed by one brave fellow, interceding when he slandered his young assistant: “Have you no shame, sir?” and he stopped.
So, no.
The Thin Black Duke
Americans had a choice between kindness and cruelty. Trump won because voters liked what he was selling. All of this useless speculation is just white noise.
glc
@Kirk: As it happens, slavery was the only reason for the first civil war.
Not that this affects the gist of your argument in any way
Re OP: Duncan Black points to
https://www.discourseblog.com/p/what-election-do-these-people-think
Baud
@The Thin Black Duke:
Correct.
WereBear
@ColoradoGuy: But can we live half MAGA and half free?
zhena gogolia
These threads are not helping anything.
zhena gogolia
@The Thin Black Duke: Exactly.
Starfish
@WereBear: If you want to move to Pennsylvania, you can do that. Take some friends with you and try to flip it.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Starfish:
I’m guessing they’re not looking at attractive CO communities (for libtards like us) like Limon, Burlington, La Junta or other garden spots in the godforsakeneasternplainsofcolorado (as my grad school advisor always lovingly called it). :)
Having an old friend who came out (trans) a year ago and literally just went thru surgery, Denver does have a robust support network. Rest of the state? Won’t see it in fundamentalist country in the Springs and the further one goes north along I-25, it’s also not Liberal Canaan.
Of course the week after Labor Day, we were up in the mountains outside of Tin Cup 4-wheeling and over two days ran into some wonderful white supremacists. How did we know? When we’d wave, we’d get hand signals in return. And some clown flying a “5-30” flag from his UTV. All white, 20-50somethings.
And to think, places like Tin Cup back in the day were basically hippie havens.
frosty
I’m with you there.
Geminid
@West of the Rockies: My McCarthy take is that so long as Truman was in the White House, McCarthy was a problem for Democrats. Once Eisenhower was elected, McCarthy became a Republican problem and they helped cut him down to size..
There were other factors including McCarthy’s performance at the Army hearings and his alcoholism, but the change in the partisan political dynamic was a potent underlying factor in my opinion.
Hamlet of Melnibone
Can someone post the Balloon Juice starter pack link for Bluesky again? I just signed up-
@hamlet10.bsky.social
Betty
@tam1MI: Perhaps she was one of those people who did not believe the country would elect a Black woman. That dye was set when Joe promised to choose a Black woman as VP. To abandon the VP even with a primary would have alienated Black voters. Joe had more faith in the American people, believing that would not be a handicap for a qualified, competent candidate. Nancy is more practical or cynical.
Starfish
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: You know, I have met the most trans people here in Colorado and have also been gender-policed by a rando in a pick up truck.
We are in such a weird place.
TBone
@WereBear: please see my comment #200 – it was a woman who FIRST stood up.
She rocked his world – the history is fascinating.
The Thin Black Duke
@Betty:
O. Felix Culpa
@The Thin Black Duke:
ISWYDT.
WereBear
Let me share a story about red states vs smart people.
In first grade I was eager to “advance my reading” because I’d been reading since I was three. My godparents, retired teachers, loved to read to me. I picked it up just by being read to, I gather, because everyone was surprised when I claimed I could, then read an article in the paper to them to show that I wasn’t just pretending.
Kindergarden was playing games and coloring back then, so when I sat at my first real desk and got my first real school book, I was anticipating a harder skill level than the “baby stuff” at home.
So imagine my shock when I opened the book and there were no words. I was freezing in place, my little world rocking. What sick game where they playing here?
I paged ahead, and slowly words appeared, until I found a page that had actual paragraphs, and eagerly started reading about someone with a puppy. Now the world made sense again–
And a hand grabbed the book out of my hands and a giant angry lady demanded to know what I thought I was doing. I was supposed to be on the first page like all the other children.
“But there weren’t any words there.” Once again, I had to prove I could read. But I was scolded for — learning without a license? — and I was sent to the principal’s office.
Basically been treated like a mutant ever since. So no, on some level, this shit does not surprise me at all.
lowtechcyclist
@Splitting Image:
Too fucking true.
RevRick
@zhena gogolia: I fully concur. Basically, we’re hurling our opinions at each other, as if that ever changes anything.
What these threads do measure is the level of our anxiety. Anxious times are dysfunctional times.
What would probably be far more helpful would be each of us to talk about our pain and grief. Naming, not blaming.
Me, I am sickened by the thought about what sort of world will be left behind for my kids and granddaughter.
TBone
@frosty: there are so many better things to do! Why don’t we hear what the plan is LIKE MORE ABOUT ELIZABETH WARREN SAID, the FIRST woman to stand up in this regard?!
Not yelling at you, sorry! Amazed that more people don’t know about Margaret Chase Smith and instead focus on a sound byte by a man.
Liz Cheney was standing on Margaret’s shoulders.
tam1MI
Given that Jewish people are one of the few demographics that stood strong for Democrats when other demos broke for Trump this year, a hard eyed political analysis of the type favored by some here suggests that Dems pursue stances and policies that favor them and not those of Muslim-Americans. We can’t afford to lose any more demographic groups.
japa21
@The Audacity of Krope: Wasn’t referring to you
Bill Arnold
Somehow, Trump returned.
Somehow Palpatine Returned
Somehow Palpatine Returned (YouTube, 0:24)
(Yeah, this is a joke about The Scriptwriters.)
Gvg
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: not all parts of the country got Biden’s economic benefits. Florida has never had manufacturing and is not seeing increased wages at the ordinary level. Rents have gone up and stayed up and there are new catches where they charge extra for electronic funds transfer with all kinds or rules that force things like money order and end up with late charges. It sounds like regulations are needed. I was lucky enough to buy decades ago so I hadn’t really known but my coworkers have been talking after the election. This area has reason to think the economy sucks.
WereBear
@TBone: Yes, what I related was the end game.
Shame doesn’t work on what we got now.
Baud
@Gvg:
I read GA and AZ are booming, but they credit their governors rather than Biden.
Voters don’t have to be fair, but I don’t have to pretend they’re fair.
TBone
@Bupalos: thank you. I appreciate your compliments very much.
TBone
@WereBear: too true.
kalakal
@The Thin Black Duke: Fully agree
Starfish
@Baud: This is going on in a lot of states. Voters are blaming the government they don’t like for the things going on that they don’t like and crediting the government that they do like for the things that they like.
A lot of states that didn’t do ACA because their governors were jerks were blaming ACA for increased drug prices.
Baud
@Starfish:
People believe what they want to believe.
Betty
@lowtechcyclist: Some Democrats are doing it too. Looking at you, Chris Murphy.
VFX Lurker
Agreed.
Geminid
@Bupalos:
This sounds like a feature, not a bug!
randy khan
The “Dems are too woke” argument is now a favorite in right wing circles, despite there literally being no evidence for it. So far, in fact, I haven’t seen much evidence for any proposition other than that people were convinced the economy was bad*, and voted against Harris because she was associated with the Biden Administration.
*This is different from the economy actually being bad, and frankly driven almost entirely by inflation that subsided more than a year ago. Except for some of the right wingers in my social media, who insist that all of the good economic numbers were made up. They’re the same people who circulate memes supposedly showing identical WalMart shopping baskets from 2020 and 2024 with the total cost doubled in 2024, though, so I have a hard time taking them seriously.
Starfish
@Baud: I think we are in a postmodern, post-structural political landscape where everyone has their own truth, but I don’t know enough about postmodernism and post-structuralism to bore people with an expanded essay on this idea.
Suzanne
@Gvg: Lots of the older people around here scoff at it — lots of comments about “these kids expect to live in a cool city center, they’re entitled” and other blah blah blah that sounds suspiciously like “KIDZ AND THEIR AVOCADO TOAST” — but housing prices are indeed fucken nuts. They have climbed much faster than wages. And housing is, for most families, the largest line item in their budget.
Came across this today, and maybe someone will be convinced:
The Worst Housing Affordability Ever?
Again: a record-high percentage of people are officially rent-burdened. It’s not a stable situation. It should not be acceptable to liberals.
Jay
@Gvg:
Bill is in California, and works at the Orange Satan,
which has been doing record profits and sales all across the US and Canada, since Covid and beyond.
That any Orange Employee would think that there is a Recession on, when they are run ragged every day and guys coming in for a new lawn mower don’t go for the $350 Lawn Boy push mower, but instead the $4500 Ride On with all the options.
Just remember, 50% of the population are of below average intelligence, and in the US is 98, which is closer to “Borderline Mental Disability” than “Intelligent, Bright”.
eemom
@The Thin Black Duke:
I’ve shared this here before, will keep doing so.
Trump Is Not a Fluke—He’s America
trollhattan
@WereBear:
Wow.
Similarly, my older brother taught himself to read very early, two or three, and the day mom first took him to kindergarten in rural northwest Iowa, the teacher told my her in no uncertain terms to take those books home, reason being something like “we’ll supply the toys and he can have books once he can read.” Did not accept mom’s telling her he reads already.
Family doctor told her in no uncertain terms he needed to get out of there to somewhere he could be properly taught. That took another several years and I came along in the meantime.
Iowa was in mostly Democratic hands back then but more recently, our little town was in Steve King’s congressional district. Happy shiny people everywhere.
Quinerly
@TBone:
But did you listen long enough to hear the brilliant and insightful Eddie Glaude?
eemom
@zhena gogolia:
so why do I keep coming here and reading them, is what I’ve been asking myself. Misery loves company is the only explanation.
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia:
I doubt he’ll be affected by it in any way.
Maybe by protesters, but then the bastard can just shout at them and wag his finger.
zhena gogolia
@eemom:
Sorry, I got this far:
Bull. shit.
I never turn into that after a few drinks, and neither does anyone I know.
zhena gogolia
@eemom: Yes, that is indeed the only explanation. I don’t think I’ve ever been so miserable except after deaths of loved ones.
tam1MI
And yet “lowering housing costs” was an explicit campaign promise that Harris ran on and emphasized (and Trump never mentioned), and she got pounded anyway.
Slightly_peeved
@Archon:
the main reason Kamala had very little wiggle room was that Biden’s presidency has been a massive success for the country and that saying that it was terrible is not only a lie, but a lie that validates the right-wing framing of it.
(Also, how do you think people who aren’t keen on voting for a woman of color react to her shivving the genial old white dude who stood aside for her?)
schrodingers_cat
Affordable housing is the economic anxiety of the 2024. Curiously these issues only affect T voting snowflakes or horseshoe leftists and makes them vote for fascists or stay at home.
tam1MI
Hell, there are a bunch of people out there who believe that he stood aside BECAUSE she shivved him!
schrodingers_cat
@tam1MI: She did. She in question is Nancy Pelosi not Kamala Harris.
Suzanne
@tam1MI: I never said that the turnabout to Trump was the right response. In fact, I have said many times that people have reasonable discontent, but are also dumb and voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party.
But, like….. what dumb fucken strategy. People are telling you they think the economy sucks and the response was that we have the best economy in the world? That is…. not the correct answer.
prostratedragon
@The Thin Black Duke: Don’t need to discuss much. I look at misogyny as the biggest marginal factor, but I mean really. One look at the opposition should have given Harris a landslide convicted, indicted, insurrectionist, rapist, fraudster, treacherous, … But them folks seem okay with zll that.
Jackie
Off Topic: Dan Newhouse (R) CD-4 beat TCFG’s endorsed MAGAt Jarrod Sessler, thus keeping WA State Representatives MAGA free.
Baud
@Jackie:
Nice. WA seems to have won the competition for the best state this year.
Geminid
@tam1MI: I think that if Jewish voters stood strong for Harris, it was because they were more acutely aware of the danger of Trump’s fascism than the average American.
The administration’s policies relating to this war cut both ways. Biden did in fact give Israel strong support, but there was an extensive propaganda campaign intended to persude Jewish Americans that the Democratic Party was hostile to Israel, and that the “Pro-Palestinian”* protest movement represented the views of most Democrats.
This propaganda was all over Twitter (and other platforms I expect), and I was relieved to see that Jewish voters did not buy it.
* I used quotation marks here because I think the protesters were terrible allies to the Palestinians.
Baud
@Geminid:
Very proud of both Jewish and black voters. They were under a lot of pressure and propaganda to vote more Republican this year.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: High housing costs affect a ton of people you purport to care about. Again, again, over 40% of renters in this country are officially rent-burdened. That is a record-high percentage, and is likely to be disproportionately racial minorities, disabled people, children, etc.
Again, it is a significant social problem.
WereBear
@trollhattan: My mother did get us out of there. We wound up in Florida. Where, at the time, I did get a good education.
And I think my contemplated horror novels would lose some spice if I hadn’t had that exposure, so it’s all good!
WereBear
@zhena gogolia: I can get affidavits. I’m a happy inebriated person!
Jackie
@Baud: I have no doubt we’ll be punished for that honor ☹️
Fake Irishman
@Baud:
And given the coalition that elected him, Newhouse might be a good target for pressure when large objectionable bills come up….
ColoradoGuy
An awful lot of this GOP/GQP hatred is based on sexism and anti-LGBTQ, which are aspects of the same thing. Anyone who threatens conventional sex roles, or conventional sex acts, gets the full medieval treatment.
It’s not just irrational at the individual level, but gets amplified by religious sects every weekend, amplified by social media on every screen, and shouted from FoxNews and local right wing radio. It’s been around for millennia, and only in the last 150 years has humanity made much progress, a steep uphill struggle the whole time.
This is where real-world allies, in progressive Left churches, and LGBTQ alliances are so critical right now. These organizations will save lives when the most vulnerable are under attack.
zhena gogolia
@WereBear: Me too!
Citizen Alan
@Fake Irishman: which is why I don’t think she’ll be offered the job. The republican party is the rape party. A woman who forcefully opposes sexual assault will not be put into a position to prevent sexual assault.
WereBear
@Geminid: And they have centuries of pogroms before.
Baud
@WereBear:
@zhena gogolia:
When I’ve had too much to drink, I like to kidnap children.
Bill Arnold
@Suzanne:
Interesting charts and article, thanks. That recent spike does not look natural. Wondering what has happened since that article/2023.
FWIW, the two house purchases I’ve made were at the two previous peaks (plus a sale of the first house during 2009/crash) in the two most honest graphs there, inflation-adjusted mortgage payments, and mortgage payments as percentage of median household income. (Not clear what happened prior to 1989; there might have been a higher peak there.)
I might have lost the house if laid off in the Great Recession. Wasn’t, though, and stayed employed except for 2020.
zhena gogolia
@ColoradoGuy: Yes. I was trying to “distract” myself by watching Wicked Little Letters with Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, two of my favorite actresses, and although it is somewhat amusing, I was utterly depressed to see that the oppression of women in the 1920s depicted in the film is alive and well in 2024 U.S. And (white) women are going along with it.
WereBear
@Baud: Well, who hasn’t kidnapped a child here and there… but that sounds like drinking and driving!
Jackie
@Fake Irishman: A LOT of Dems voted for him – given the option. R vs MAGA.
Tim in SF
Image is too small and the text is blurry. Where is the original posted?
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia: I don’t even want to know what a few drinks does to Elie Mystal. That opinion piece is deplorable.
Geminid
@WereBear: I read Trump did poorly in Utah, although he still won the state. My guess is that Utah’s Mormon population shared some of the apprehensions Jewish voters did. Trump also underperformed in Utah in 2020.
Archon
@Slightly_peeved: As far as I’m concerned this is an intellectual exercise because I truly believe the age of normal electoral politics is over and it will likely take mass mobilization (on the streets) to push back against what Republicans have in store for us BUT how anyone can look at the wreckage of the Democratic Party and say the Biden Administration was a massive success is astounding to me.
Starfish
@Baud: We are never going back to Comet Ping Pong again.
Hoodie
@Suzanne: Insisting that the electorate is wrong is a sure-fire way to lose elections. This is true even if the electorate has somewhat distorted perceptions. There is often some kernel of truth in what they believe. There is a housing shortage and it is driving up costs for housing, in combination with crap like computer-aided pricing algorithms, which are really cartel-like price fixing mechanisms. Same with inflation. Yes, inflation has flattened to a desirable level, but there are a lot of people who do not have assets (e.g., IRAs, 401ks, houses) that lost ground relative to other people who do have such assets in the brief bout of post-pandemic inflation. Relative status is a huge driver of resentment.
tam1MI
If I were a elected official in the state of Washington, I’d be looking for a way to set up a State Disaster Recovery fund, to offset the inevitable moment when a wildfire or flood event hits and Trump refuses to authorize aid.
Belafon
Trump’s voters were older, wealthier, and about equally white as 2020:
https://bsky.app/profile/pbump.com/post/3lagr33g4t225
Baud
@Archon:
Because he accomplished a lot of what we wanted him to accomplish.
That the public rejects it suggests it is us who need to demand different things from our politicians.
mrmoshpotato
@Archon:
I want more info on this “wreckage.” What are you talking about?
zhena gogolia
@mrmoshpotato: It certainly gives short shrift to millions of Americans.
Gretchen
Josh Marshall has a good piece about how a lot of people telling Democrats what we did wrong seem to be coming from a place of contempt for Democratic voters. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/reckonings-of-contempt
Michael Bersin
@WereBear:
Your tale dredged up a long-forgotten memory.
I was an advanced reader in elementary school. Also, very fast.
The education program at our local university asked our school’s teachers to identify students who were completing classroom school-work faster than other students (and, hence, sitting idle for long periods of time).
Over several sessions we were pulled into an extra classroom, serving as lab rats for an education professor and his students – getting advanced lessons in a variety of subjects. One such subject was Venn diagrams and logic.
And that opened my eyes in the same fashion as Toto pulling back the curtain…
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Reminder everybody: the people nationally and in here pushing this market urbanist bullshit as it pertains to housing are pushing something that was originally started as an astroturf group in CA funded mostly by Peter Thiel. They are essentially a propaganda arm laundering far-right, libertarian economic theory intended to create wealth through increased commodification of housing. It’s pushed by the most powerful financial actors on the planet, promoted by the biggest newspapers & enacted by every big city mayor & loads of electeds.
Glibertarians wound up a crop of mostly young, white, entitled bros (or gals if the pelaton fits), who were already predisposed to be pricks and told them they’re doing the work of MLK Jr on housing.
Market urbanists are either people on the real estate industry payroll in one form or another (planners, construction, real estate, architects, etc) or people too stupid to know that the only folks who say these things are being paid.
And the developers are laughing at them from their mountain homes in Telluride, or Aspen, or a yacht.
That’s right, people in an almost Top 10000 blog who will join in bashing glibertarian billionaires like him actively promote an agenda he and others (the Kochs are also big players) have massively funded since the beginning.
“I can’t afford an Audi, therefore, there must be an Audi shortage”. Yeah, I remember when I was in my early 20s and wanted to move into a central location in a superstar city because of the magic of a deregulated housing market.
It’s done as cover for their deregulation, buildbuildbuild bullshit on behalf of inner city developers that has the exact opposite outcomes from what they’re pitching. And when that’s pointed out, it’s always some variation of “you’re not doing it right” because in their world (it’s a cult) market urbanism never fails, it can only be failed. The Big Tobacco and Opiod messaging tactics used by them help push this agenda. An agenda that’s all about developer profits, nothing more.
Now, the entire “rentership society” push by Wall Street is a very real and hurtful thing that I outlined a couple of nights ago. We have a housing affordability crisis but you never see market urbanists respond to the issues raised in that other than their trickle-down talking points. It’s always some version of SQUIRREL! that deflects from the underlying issues of income inequality and the commodification of housing.
Some links for casual reading:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10511482.2024.2334011
https://twitter.com/pmcondon2/status/1812889900636922174/photo/1
Everybody should read Zelda Bronstein, former chief planner in Berkeley who’s seen the growth of this crapola up close:
https://48hills.org/2024/04/the-yimbys-think-they-rule-but-there-are-some-serious-signs-to-the-contrary/
Stevo
We have to be more like republicans on messaging. We have to be as in your face as they are and counteract every message all the time. And it isn’t that hard. And then one up them on how they will f stuff up. Biden ignored Trump way too much, Harris’s ads were way to milqutoast. The republican ads were nasty and over the top. I luckily live in MA, but the ads from repubs in NH were nutso. Nothing at all equivalent from the Dems. NY the same. I am from Lawler’s district and it was in your face all the time. Leaning into the nutso.
I really don’t get the whole “she ran a good campaign” thing. She so didn’t. She never explained a tariff. it would have taken two sentences, and one more to say how it screws you if you care so much about prices. There is no “China will pay”. it is not a thing, just like Mexico is not paying for a wall.
Eggs: Birdflu you dipshitz. The birds died.
Bacon: wait until they deport everyone chopping up the pigs. Then let’s see what bacon costs.
There was one moment they almost did it: Couch humper. That was the only time. Finally they got a taste of their own bs. Did we keep it up. nope. just a half assed “they’re weird” thing. They are worse than weird, they’re Nazis. The mind your own business thing was good, but give examples and keep it up. Instead it was more boring. Harris had to be screaming and repeating all the insanity from Trump and what it will mean. none of that happened
They are going to deport your uncle, and you if you happen to be there having a beer.
I really don’t get it.
Aussie Sheila
@tam1MI:
Except trump wasn’t covered in loser stink was he?
TBone
@Quinerly: regret that I missed Eddie, he’s one of our very favorites. Hubby said after the first time he ever saw him speak “Damn, that Eddie is one smart man.”
I truly don’t yet care why or how this loss happened though.
Baud
@Gretchen:
Good. People respect him. Maybe it’ll sink in.
Suzanne
@Bill Arnold: A lot of things have happened, some slow-moving and some faster-moving:
1) New housing starts fell off a cliff in 2008 and took sometime like 15 years to get back to a normal rate. But then we are still missing a lot of capacity.
2) Various design and zoning fuckery in municipalities and states all over the country has made it very hard to build in places where people need to live. In many places, zoning rules essentially make smaller homes impossible to build profitably, and protect the interests of wealthy single-family homeowners.
3) Urbanization of jobs continues, so the population continues to concentrate in relatively fewer cities, driving up costs in those cities.
4) Average American household falls to 2.5 people, a record low, meaning we probably need many more but smaller homes than our current housing stock has.
5) AirBNB makes it a profitable business venture to essentially become a hotel and leads to property speculation.
6) Investors look to park their money in real estate because it’s doing better than other parts of the market. Some large-scale investors buy up entire neighborhoods and raise rents.
Lots of other factors. None of them good for normal people.
Nukular Biskits
Mucho late to this thread but here goes:
There are a LOT of uniformed, misinformed and outright fucking belligerently ignorant people in this country.
WereBear
@Geminid: And now he was running on “Forced conversion to Christian Nationalism.”
Part of the loyalty oath to get a job in TrumpNation.
I’m waiting for all the people who didn’t vote Dem to find THAT one out.
Especially since the coalition comprises hardcore Catholics and Protestants.
No reason to think those two wouldn’t get along, though, right?
Starfish
@Michael Bersin: You know, Kamala Harris’s defeat is a rejection of her love of Venn diagrams.
Archon
@mrmoshpotato: Losing voters literally everywhere, having no power in all branches in Washington, with a President-elect promising massive pain to his domestic enemies doesn’t constitute “wreckage” to you?
Quinerly
@Suzanne:
This!
WereBear
@Michael Bersin: My first exposure to computers was in jr high, part of a gifted program.
My first career.
CaseyL
Over at Defector, a lively political discussion is happening and has turned inevitably to Blaming Democrats (because Defector is lefty so of course they have to Blame Democrats).
But some of the comments are jarring, because they might actually be true:
The whole article and comment thread are worth reading. Here’s one on the end result of the Democrats’ eliminating the judicial filibuster but retaining the legislative one:
Why, for example, did Dick Durban re-institute the blue slip tradition – which the GOP had ended – when Democrats took the Senate in 2020?
Why haven’t the Senate Democrats bestirred themselves to fast-track, say, judicial nominations in the remaining two months?
These supremely cynical takes may explain why; by which I mean, they may be supremely cynical and they may also be correct.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Deleted.
Quinerly
@TBone:
His segment gave me a lot to think about.
zhena gogolia
Deleted.
tam1MI
The Biden administration was the most left-leaning administration since LBJ, probably even more left leaning. If it was a dismal failure, then what you are saying is that progressive policies are dismal failures. There are plenty of elected Dems who believe that that to be true. I don’t.
Which is why I am convinced that elected Democrats are going to move sharply to the right, because that is where the country as a whole went in this election. After all, if the most progressive administration since LBJ (or maybe ever) was a dismal failure, and the country has rejected progressive policies in such huge numbers, and the lectorate is never wrong… Well, there is only one conclusion to take away from all that.
Come back, Joe Manchin! All is forgiven!
KatKapCC
There are a few House races in California that need help! This Bluesky link has the details and links, but I’ll copy/explain here too.
In CA-13, Adam Gray is behind by 0.5%, and they need canvassers out in Modesto.
In CA-41, Will Rollins is behind by 2.6%, and they need phone bankers.
In CA-45, Derek Tran is behind by 2.2%, and they need phone bankers.
I’m over 200 miles from Modesto, so that’s out, but I’m going to help with some phones. If anyone else can do so, that would be great!
zhena gogolia
@Gretchen: That is good, I just signed up.
Hoodie
@Stevo: You’re on the right track. The thing about Trump is that he drives the narrative instead of reacting to it (the way he does that is a different issue). Dems often act like they’re answering questions in a job interview, telling people what classes they made A’s in and their experiences as an intern. They look to pop stars like Oprah and Beyonce to validate them instead of being the popstars themselves. That can work if the other side’s candidate is doing the same thing, but not against someone like Trump. Obama was different because he was the pop star.
Jay
@Suzanne:
Wall Street has been buying up Homes and Apartments, jacking up rental rates and using a software program to collude on rental rates. Sen. Warren has taken steps to address this.
Part of MVP Harris’s proposed platform was a $25,000 credit to first time home buyers.
Anybody who voted against the Democratic Party Candidates in 2024 because of housing costs, is a moron.
pajaro
Biden was a good President, the most pro-union of modern times, and one on whose watch manufacturing jobs increased. harris had detailed plans for addressing concerns about affordabiity, while Trump had nothing more the the concept of a plan. It’s troubling that we didn’t do better with working class voters, but it’s not as if we failed to address concerns they might have had.
Harris was a good candidate, which we know because she did several points better than the baseline election in the states where she spent the most time. As with Clinton in 2016, a huge proportion of the hot takes about her failures accuse her and her party of saying things she never said and of failing to say things that were the center of her convention and stump speeches and were a part of her messaging.
No one with the slightest bit of modesty can claim to know with any certainty how things might have gone had Biden stayed and the party had closed ranks behind him.
Nancy Pelosi was a brilliant legislator, whose knowledge of and ability to manage her caucus were incredible. She also represents one of the most liberal districts in the country. She’s never run a. national Presidential campaign, so maybe she’s not the world’s leading authority about how we might have done better.
Baud
@CaseyL:
I debunked this lie two years ago. He didn’t reinstitute anything. He kept what the Republicans had.
I don’t agree with the filibuster although I hope the Republicans keep it now. But litmus tests that Dems must do X to prove they really stand for something are a dime a dozen.
Another Scott
@Archon:
Has September, 2024 been cast into the ancient mists of time already?
Axios.com (from September 18):
Democrats, and people who oppose MAGA, are not powerless. Republicans are not unified undefeatable ubermenchen.
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Hoodie
@Jay: Of course they are, but those are the voters you have. However, the biggest morons are the upper middle class people with assets who voted for Trump, who is a direct threat to their wealth because he wants to steal it.
tam1MI
Like I said above, I forgot to specify DEMOCRATIC politicians.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
My piece on the commodification of housing from the other night:
Everybody should read up on the issues of the Commodification of Housing and The Rentership Society. This was first pushed in a paper in 2011, typically found at Morgan Stanley’s web site.
The guy who wrote the first piece revised it in 2015 after he formed a private equity group to buy up houses:
https://sylvanroad.com/wp-content/uploads/Rentership-Revisited.pdf
Companies like Blackstone now own 300-500K SFHs that they in turn only rent. There was a piece earlier in the year on this effort in Atlanta. 8 years ago there were no companies involved in buying houses and converting them to rentals, now there’s at least 10 and it’s starting to have an impact. It’s replicating itself nationwide.
Compound that with the Short Term Rental issues that are choking home ownership availability (good piece on Canada that’s no different than here):
https://thewalrus.ca/airbnbs-canadian-housing/
away from people, and it’s a real problem.
We bailed out the banks, and then the banks and developers realized they could buy up all the foreclosed property as commodities. And it is not just the foreclosed properties that have fallen prey to the speculators. Lotsa neighborhoods in “hot” cities have been a workforce housing neighborhood for 120 years because of the relatively small houses 800-1500 SF (typical). However these small footprint houses exist on standard city lots (3000-6250 SF). Since we have shit zoning with no design/development standards and no control over unit size, speculative developers have commoditized neighborhoods. They buy relatively affordable houses with cash, competing and winning against residential buyers who need mortgages. Then they scrape and build tacky tasteless abominations at 4x the existing Floor-to-Area-Ratio, and sell them for in excess of $1.2M.
Then there’s this asinine market urbanist movement fueled by the Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase set screaming about how we need to tear down all the single-family housing and build multifamily. Single family neighborhoods are low risk development areas with high ROI. That’s why the banks want to redevelopment them. It is not because it will lead to true sustainable redevelopment. The blanket upzoning battlecry against SF neighborhoods overlooks the areas where we should prioritize that kind of residential development: transit station areas, rapid transit corridors, planned growth areas which are frequently tax sucks compromised of auto-oriented big box and single-use commercial development.
There is a thoughtful way to do it, Minneapolis, (at least on paper). They achieved that paper goal with significant regulation of design plus enormous political commitment to design focused neighborhood plans and policies. And even then, pretty much nothing has changed in terms of what kind of new builds occur or any downward trend in rents or sales prices.
So we lose attainable housing stock and neighborhood character, while the market urbanist Lords of the Flies dance around the fire of neighborhood commoditization. To quote a former chief planner in Madison WI:
Enough housing never gets built, but the developers and real estate interests make money off of what does get built because when the profit margins get too low, they stop building–it’s not like building widgets. And the commodification of housing continues which is the entire point.
Market urbanists have controlled Auckland NZ for a decade. They enacted tons of market urbanist theories and it didn’t change the number of new places built since and it remains one of the most expensive markets on the planet. I’d encourage people to look at this analysis:
https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/p/the-auckland-upzoning-myth-response
Finally, Patrick Condon, a noted market urbanist for years, has a new book out basically saying he was wrong all this time and that the data shows that:
https://48hills.org/2024/09/vancouver-study-shows-how-the-yimby-narrative-has-failed-in-real-time/
Finally, if anybody’s gotten this far, the Urban Institute of all people (they typically push a lot of neoliberal, market urbanist orthodoxy) came out with a long piece on *a* way to maybe help decommodify housing:
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2023-02/Decommodification%20and%20Its%20Role%20in%20Advancing%20Housing%20Justice.pdf
But, as others have mentioned, there’s a shitload of capital out there looking for a place to sit and since 2012, it’s increasingly getting parked in real estate…and the result is the commodification of housing. And who loses? The poor and middle classes.
If we taxed the rich more/better, well, that’s a start short of affixing their heads to the ends of pikes.
Baud
The people who don’t stand for anything are those who spend all their time tsk-tsking everyone else for not being good enough for them.
KatKapCC
@Jay:
Fixed.
Nukular Biskits
@CaseyL:
Damned good question
swhich, IMHO,havehas no sensible answers.ETA to reflect Baud’s debunking.
Hoodie
@pajaro: Geez, Pelosi has been around forever and headed up the Dem House caucus, working to get Dems elected all over the country. Her dad was a ward healer from way back. She is not a clueless SF lib, you’re basically repeating a GOP caricature of her.
Suzanne
@Hoodie:
Yes, it’s Messaging Malpractice of the highest order.
Arguably the #1 thing.
But graphs about the number of people saying they were struggling to pay for necessities have indicated a consistent and steep climb since 2020. And credit card debt has spiked. We have every reason to think that many people are not feeling the benefits of a good economy in their personal financial lives.
Baud
@tam1MI:
My fear also.
WereBear
Excellent point. I would say Harris was, too. But not a man.
Back in 2008, a friend asked who I thought would be the nominee, HRC or Obama, and I said, “They will vote for the man. Sexism beats racism.”
Michael Bersin
@Starfish:
You win the Internets today.
Ksmiami
@ColoradoGuy: I have a name: the western states alliance
Hoodie
@WereBear: She didn’t have enough time to become a star. Obama started in 2004, when he first got national recognition, then a lot of attention when he was a senator, not to mention two years of campaigning for president. Harris pretty much labored in obscurity as VP, where she got less exposure than Biden did as VP. Of course, a lot of that is sexism, but that’s not the only thing. One reason Biden got a lot of attention as VP is because he sought it out, doing things like frontrunning Obama on some issues and being the dude from the Onion.
Geminid
@Starfish: On the other hand, the Comet II restaurant in Santa Rosa, New Mexico is well worth a visit still. I rate their Chile Verde highly.
Archon
@tam1MI: Policymaking and legislative accomplishments is an important but not sufficient matrix to judge successful administrations. Messaging and optics is another piece and I think sometimes progressives forget that. The messaging piece of it was an unmitigated disaster for the Biden admin. Most people in my life couldn’t even name a piece of legislation that Biden passed, much less how it helped them. We can get mad at the gatekeepers like the media but at a certain point a President has to go out there and explain the problem and how he helped fix it and Biden couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.
Suzanne
Since someone brought up Minneapolis, it should be noted that they knocked out single-family zoning and supported new construction, and they have held rents essentially level for most of the decade. Austin, TX, has seen average rent come down a bit due to increased supply.
The population grew, the number of small households grew, and we did not build enough to keep up. Lack of supply is by no means the only culprit, but it’s a big part of the story.
mrmoshpotato
@Archon: And that’s Biden’s fault?
Ruckus
She really was the consultant’s ideal candidate, except for being female and black. These people need to be ignored the next time around, and we don’t need to listen to their fairy tales about how Democrats should become even more like Republicans to win.
Don’t you mean rethuglicans? OK let’s start over…. To me we seem to be the side that ACTUALLY wants to govern – for ALL. rethuglicans seem to want to vote for some concept of a conservative dictatorship, where no one but them gets to decide or rule. This is supposed to be a democracy, where the government is supposed to do what ACTUALLY helps the people. ALL THE DAMN PEOPLE. Not just the rich, not just the poor, not just the middle class. rethuglicans do not want anyone but them to do, be and be paid in any way, shape or form. They do not seem to understand the basic concept of democracy. That’s why they seem to like shitforbrains, if they had started with what his father left the family, from being a slumlord (both commercial and residential) they would be all for one and all for the wealth. Oh Wait. Many humans believe that money is equal to god, or at least a very good substitute. Because that’s what is seen and heard on commercial radio and TV, that money is everything. I really can’t recall any TV program that actually was about the most basic life, food and someplace to sleep. It’s always at least in the background, who, what, when, where and how and it revolves around money. No matter the concept of the money, currency, land, a rare skill, like being a doctor 75-100 yrs ago, it’s about money. Be it a western sheriff stopping bank robbers or carrying a loaded pistol or rifle everywhere, or warfare to claim land and or production of human needs. Hell when I was 12 I started working part time making tools that made plastic or aluminum things, I worked on tooling to make Barbie dolls when I was 14. I can’t remember all the tools I helped build or built myself that made many, many things that that many or even most would recognize. Toys, tools, housewares, bottles, diving equipment, medical equipment, building hardware and on and on. And no, I’m not close to the only person that’s done this, a lot of the process takes different specialty skills to be good at it and a lot has changed in my lifetime. It is just a part of modern life, which really started to change about 80-85 yrs ago. Teaching, medicine, production, plastics. Take the telephone. They existed, but compare them to today. I don’t even have a landline phone and haven’t for over 20 yrs.
Hoodie
@Suzanne: Absolutely, and a lot of people think they’re richer than they really are because of inflated stock and real estate values and are willing to spend it, which drives the market created by producers, which caters to the people with perceived wealth. Look at EVs. Arguably, middle class and lower would benefit from a cheap EV, but they’re not available because the market is geared to serving wealthier consumers who buy EVs as a lifestyle statement. The same is happening with real estate, e.g., luxury homes and Airbnbs. Bigger margins.
3Sice
The lack of affordable housing… in white neighborhoods.
It’s a hustle. The goal is to take from the bottom 1/3 of homeowners by income, the only multigenerational capital they are likely to accumulate, and give it to Peter Thiel.
Chester
Bernie? I just can’t.
Redshift
You’re reading way too much into that. Anyone who’s volunteered on a non -presidential campaign has heard about the vast pool of presidential-only voters who are always a target to try to turn out. I very much doubt most of them “saw Trump as a savior” or have any thoughts at all about downballot candidates.
I’d need to see a lot more evidence to be convinced most low-propensity voters had reasoning more complex than: the presidential election is the most important, and things kinda sucked so I’m going to vote for the other guy.
Suzanne
@3Sice: There’s pretty much a lack of affordable housing in every urban neighborhood. All those dying industrial towns? The people that get out go to nearby cities.
Shit, in my not-very-nice neighborhood, where I had a meth-head break into my house while naked and all manner of other insanity….. home prices and rents have doubled since 2020.
jayne
@Archon: I suspect that Biden knew that if he called attention to what he was doing and it got reported in any positive light, Trump’s flying monkeys would find some way to hold it up and stall it out, just like they did all the failed legislation that the MSM did report on. One could argue that it would have been worth the risk, or that there was some sort of publicity middle ground that could have been reached, but unfortunately showmanship was never really Joe’s strength.
A potential silver lining is that since most of the legislation passed without fanfare or drama, Trump would have to bring attention to it in order to gloat about axing it, which is more effort than he likes or needs to go to when there’s student loans to unforgive.
WereBear
Matching what I’ve read about QAnon cultists, and the terrible news of just how UNinformed people are about where their true grievance should lie. The author said something like, “Imagine if the John Birch Society had a mimeo machine the size of Chicago.”
And that’s just Q. Mr WayofCats has a chronic illness and my autoimmune stress flareup was very serious. We are both doing better thanks to our doctor. Just like our old one, we can bring in research papers and see if he agrees with us.
Along the way, though, I saw all the scam “cures” and fake doctors and for a while — outright MLM madness, right next to actual doctors I subscribed to, and gave good information. But we would watch a video and check any papers cited. If they didn’t cite a paper, what are they talking about?
But he and I know that. I learned to read papers, and I know online sources who can explain the math. Maybe what we need is classes on “How to Know What You Know That Ain’t So.”
It is hard for me to tell, but after sixth grade, where a bully tried to throw my bike off a bridge (there was one ravine in Florida and this future MAGA found it) I was kind of tracked through places where my classmates were more… academically inclined. Have no idea what people are learning, or if they care, but all my teacher friends tell me it is dire.
But they do their own research, refuse the vaccine, live in a place with dwindling health care and a brain drain.
And every pregnant woman gets an ankle bracelet.
I’m going to feel sorry for them. But it’s not the quantity it might be, when they constantly reach for the hot stove and kick us in the ankles when we won’t let them.
Captain C
@WereBear: Hell, I figured the same back in ‘07 when it looked like Obama and Clinton were going to be the front runners and I heard a retrograde friend of a friend exclaim “I’d vote for the [clang] before I voted for That Bitch Hillary. That conclusion was further reinforced by the success of movies and TV shows with Black men as President and the failure of the same with white women as Prez.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Couple of other things because this is why I started commenting frequently after all these years of mostly lurking, namely to push back on years of poor information being provided.
Look closely at census data like Denver. Our city population is declining and yet, we keep being told about the masses of humanity moving here. The kicker is that people are moving to a *metro* area, not necessarily a city center. That’s only amplified post-Covid although the push-pull between workers and management on going into the office could impact that.
From a rental/apartment perspective, there are tons of pieces out there on that, some from actual reputable places (unlike the so many places that follow the Big Tobacco/opioid messaging structure), that show the *massive* construction boom on apartments. Guess what? It’s not doing anything. In Denver we have 23K units currently vacant with 48K more coming online in the next two years. And yet, all everybody reports on here is how rents aren’t falling. That’s because landlords have amazing power over the rents they can charge.
And they won’t fall despite what market urbanists have been saying for years. Since that’s been proven wrong, they’ve moved the goalposts saying that rental *growth* has slowed. Nope white people pushing this, that’s not what you’ve been saying, can’t have it both ways.
Another issue is the type of housing. Most people want a Single Family Home (I can’t find the numbers at the moment) but market urbanists are saying nope, SFH’s are evil…unless they own one. Scratch one of those people and you’ll find out they live in a spacious, SFH, garage, etc. “Picket Fences For Me But Not For Thee.”
And in lots of places where the myth of blanket upzoning has occurred, the precious market typically speaks in that not any additonal rates of new builds occur. See my Auckland reference above and the same has happened in Minneapolis: regulatory capture doesn’t lead to massive buildings unless the prices the developers want are reached. That’s when the market urbanists shriek that something must be wrong with all the things they’ve pitched so UPZONE HARDER BITCHES or some other nonsense to make the market do what they want despite the market telling them no thanks.
And places that are recently being trotted out as “success stories, read more carefully and you’ll see that how that’s presented is disingenuous:
https://twitter.com/ProfDavidFields/status/1798767538916168115
Some things we do agree on are things like fucking AirBnB, the distortions that finance (Wall St) have brought into the system, ie., buying up SFHs to rent them en masse, etc. Where we differ are solutions and the extent of the specific problems.
Chris Johnson
So this is fun: https://bsky.app/profile/ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lapjxmvtc22f
If it’s true, it’s a public yank of the chain. It purports to be a statement from Tass, a Putin aide stating outright, “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces, to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
Like I commented, “Looking forward to one day hearing what it was like in the Joint Chiefs meeting when they were briefed on THIS one.”
WOOF. Did not expect to hear THAT quiet part out loud.
Unless the site is spoofed, that seems to be them: https://tass.com/politics/1870713
WereBear
@Hoodie: Yes, I’m saying she campaigned well and her personals with those on the campaign trail were charming.
Old white men without charisma might have had their day. Heck, the Republicans should keep hiring actors and pitchmen and wrestlers.
That’s who their voters want. They always do fakery anyway.
“I am not a crook.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Imma born again Christian.”
“Electric bible shark.”
tam1MI
Let us not forget, the Legacy Media had a field day painting her as a unique failure and the Worst VP Ever.
mrmoshpotato
@Ruckus:
Fixed. :) Fuck the GOP.
Suzanne
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I think the issue I have with this is that some people would like to build ADUs on their property, to either rent out or house an aging parent or a multigenerational family…. and yet the NIMBY crowd would limit that. They interfere with and overregulate property they don’t own to protect the inflated value of their own assets.
If you want to live in a single-family home, be my guest. Mind your own business and your own property. It’s profoundly meddlesome to control what others do. That’s HOA Karen behavior.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@trollhattan: this makes Melania the first AND second First Third Wife.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
All I know of this cycle is, to paraphrase our blog master, the election this year was another date split by one side wanting Italian, and the other demanding tire rims and anthrax and brandishing Guy Fieri’s recipe that says you can use Enkei rims to achieve the ideal flavor.
dnfree
@The Audacity of Krope: People within the White House knew Biden was losing it (spottily, but that’s how it goes) and were covering for him. The debate was appalling and scary. I figured he could finish this term, but he did NOT have another four years in the tank.
Nancy Pelosi and others knew the situation. Sometimes the person getting dementia doesn’t realize it, and the people closest to them don’t realize it either.
Here’s what was scarier than the debate to me. A couple of days later, an interviewer asked Biden if he had watched video of the debate. He pondered a moment and said hesitantly “I don’t think so, no”. That’s a very dementia kind of response. You or I would know if we had watched the tape. People with dementia often forget what they did yesterday.
My husband’s family knew their mother had dementia when, the morning after they had gone to a movie, a son asked her how she had enjoyed the movie, and she said “What movie?”
Edited to add that I haven’t lost any shreds of integrity in the process.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Hoodie:
We in the EV world (I own a Bolt) basically say that the EV market (outside of our humble Bolt) is for the “gentrifying class”, ie., it’s a “gentrified product”.
That being said, looking at the average price of a new car that was posted earlier today, new cars period fall into that same labeling given their average price is now $48K. JFC.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Chris Johnson: in a sane world, this would be an immediate disqualifier for public office.
But it seems that the modern GOP is quite comfortable with the US becoming a vassal state of the Kremlin.
CaseyL
@Baud: You are correct; my apologies.
Another case of accepting conventional wisdom as fact, when it’s often neither wisdom nor factual.
Baud
@CaseyL:
I appreciate that.
trollhattan
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: EVs don’t retain value and can be had used, like any other car. Still need a place to charge, but they’ll lack the accelerating maintenance costs of a high-mileage ICE car.
Will note seeing a sprinkling of Teslas in our NC trip, not a single EV from anybody else (not that all are instantly identifiable). With that said, my work parking lot contains more Teslas than I saw in nearly a week there, a state of 10+ million.
Fair Economist
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Right now there are approximately 3 times as many people who want to live in a dense walkable neighborhood as there are places in such neighborhood. That’s why they command such an extraordinary premium.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Market urbanists always trot out the NIMBY trope if anybody opposes their agenda, they love debating a strawman instead of an old black lady looking at being displaced….and the glibertarian “BUT MAH PRAHPURTEEE RAHTS”; zoning protects property rights and yet, market urbanists want to abolish that too. And just look to Houston to see how properties inside the Beltway there have skyrocketed despite being a Market Urbanist Canaan.
The myth of blanket upzoning bringing about some affordability nirvanna haven’t happened either. No data anywhere. Just one example is Berkeley. They allowed for blanket ADU construction and few have been built much less reducing prices overall home prices. I have a great link to a presentation by Dr Condon on the myth of upzoning doing anything to reduce prices on my other computer.
An observable reality here in Denver (where our market urbanist City Council is about to enact the same thing Berkeley did): nobody can afford to build one, hey, that pesky market speaking again. And when they do get built, people quickly discover that being a landlord sucks and don’t want to do it. Then when they try to sell, the learn that the ROI on the ADU sucks in that they get a meh % back on the cost. And houses here with ADUs are harder to sell because owners think they’re worth more and nobody wants one, thus, they keep cutting the price and discover that meh %. You’re better off building a new garage that can house the Suburban Panzer and Gentrified EV, than an ADU…thus, few get built.
Soooooo, enter corporate finances. Corporation buys a property, scrapes it, puts a SFH on the front and an “ADU” in the back and rents both because they have the capital to do that.
“Regular” people can’t do that.
Hoodie
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Margin retreat. Mfrs are chasing higher margins rather than the old Henry Ford idea of a Model T for every family. It’s a reflection that there are a lot of Americans who are “wealthy” and will pay 60-80k for a vehicle because they nominally can afford it. Low interest rates drove a lot of that, but so do inflated stock and real estate values. People don’t really contemplate the downside risk of those holdings, especially since we’ve had decades of government intervention to prop those up. However, a lot of that wealth is somewhat contingent on keeping the game going, which is now in doubt with Trump in charge. The billionaires will always be ok because they have more capital mobility; most did fine during the Depression, even got richer. That’s why the real idiots are upper middle class people who voted for Trump. I can more easily understand non-college educated people voting for him simply out of resentment.
Suzanne
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Funny, I live in a neighborhood with a ton of duplexes and triplexes and broken-up houses and ADUs, and they sell like gangbusters. I live next door to one, in fact.
If you don’t want to live in one, don’t. Stop interfering in other people’s lives for your own benefit, and then gaslighting people into calling it housing justice.
ETA: There is no reason to give even half of a crap if your neighbor wants to build an ADU, or a shed, or a treehouse, or an art studio, or an effigy of Baal.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Hoodie:
Agreed. I have friends of friends who fall into that former category. Morans.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: What about the people with giant statues of Gritty in color?
Another Scott
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I appreciate your perspective on this topic, but I feel like I’m listening to a conversation at the table two spots over.
Please define “Market urbanists” for us and give us some representative examples.
How are they different from the usual cabal of realtors who are always working to churn the housing market to get their vig?
Is this a critique you would agree with?
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Chris Johnson
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): I want to check tomorrow to see if anyone fell for it. I have rightwing friends who were super jittery on Sunday. If they were being primed to put down a lefty uprising, they weren’t happy about what they’d been hearing. Now here’s ’cause’ for walking into the line of fire. NOPE. Stay home be good!
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: LOL.
It’s fine with me. One of my neighbors put up a Halloween werewolf that was so large that my dog freaked out about it from a block away.
I think the desire to control what your neighbors do is really gross.
spoot
I love that she did not pontificate about why the Democrats lost. Instead she asked her followers, those that voted for Trump and Her, why they voted that way. Respect for her response!
Interesting that people said they voted for Trump and Her because they were both not part of the Establishment. Strong vibes of deep alienation and anger against the Old Guard. Getting close to nihilism, which is scary. I mean this is not pre-HItler Germany with it’s famine and runaway inflation. Things are pretty good in America.
Of course I can pay all my bills and afford steak and wine, can afford travel and dining out. So the wolf is not at my door.
I think we better listen to the voters out there, sounds like they don’t want what we are selling anymore.
I know that a country is not healthy if the cities and suburbs are blue and the rest of the country is red. We need to see more purple.
pajaro
@Hoodie:
Pelosi predicted that the Democrats were going to take the House just last week. I don’t think she’s a clueless lib, she couldn’t have been and have been as effective as she was in the caucus. but the idea that she knows the country better than Biden, for example, is one that I don’t feel the need to accept. It really galls me that she is piling on now. If she thinks he should have announced, in 2022, that he wasn’t going to run again, why didn’t she have the courage to tell him that to his face at the time?
The idea that this would have been better in an alternative timeline with an open primary in a lame duck administration is a nice parlor game, like what would have happened if the South had won the Civil war, but it’s one I choose not to play.. We don’t know what would have happened. If Biden had said he was going to step down, he would have been faced with the question of whether the was going to endorse his VP. If he did, he would have been accused of anointing his successor, if he didn’t it might have been regarded as stabbing her in the back and also undermining his administration. In the end, any democrat running would have been stuck with having to defend or not defend Biden’s record. We have no idea if the losing side would have had hard feelings. (Remember how rosy things were in 1968?) In the meantime, Biden would have had to govern as a lame duck, which would have made getting things done potentially more difficult.
Ruckus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I bought my first new car in 1968. It cost just over $2200. I bought my current car new in 2016 and it cost $24,000. The 1968 had a V8 this is a 4 cylinder. The 2016 is a dramatically better car, primarily because manufacturing has changed and gotten a hell of a lot better, while NOT at all cheaper. I owned a machine shop for decades and the cost of the first new machine I bought was just under $20,000. The last one, bought in the first half of the 1990s was $255,000. It did a hell of a lot more and was about 10 times more accurate, and could run by itself for days. But that is one reason why things have gotten better. As well as more expensive. That and wages, like everything else has gone up. When I started working, as an early teen, minimum wage was $1.25. Today in CA it is $16. That’s minimum. I worked in a gas station during HS, gas was $.35/gal, that was a 76 (Unocal), today local gas is $3.79-$3.97. It was of course higher last year. Everything goes up in price over time. Economies move, they are not a fixed anything. What did gas cost last year?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Another Scott:
I have a ton of links to send you. All explain the Theil-funded movement’s origins and what they do.
https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/08/why-socialists-must-reject-the-yimby-nimby-binary/
https://48hills.org/2022/08/are-yimbys-the-new-progressives-only-in-a-bizarre-wonderland/
https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2022/06/urban-planning-theory-is-ripe-for-a-revamp-as-2040-court-decision-and-the-pandemic-show/
https://catalystsca.org/the-yimbys-are-wrong-suburbs-are-better/
I only have 50 more. :)
Basically think of it as “pro-developer” advocates doing exactly what you describe. And if it’s one thing you learn is that they really desire to control what you do with your property, ie., screw you with rezoning, and gaslight…and then bring up strawmen about decorations. I’ve lived this in Denver since I moved back and network internationally (UK, Canada, Australia) with other housing justice advocates. Again, seeing it here was appalling, hence why I’m commenting and pushing back when it comes up.
And one think at work here is what housing justice people I deal with nationally call on twitter the “reply guy” approach, meaning they always get the last word in, essentially trolling. I’m sure that will be the case after this post.
pajaro
@dnfree:
There is no evidence that Biden is suffering from age related dementia.
I know something about this. i’ve lost my mom to alzheimer’s and I just buried my dad (at age 100), who suffered from dementia. Because of my family history, I’ve taken some of these tests myself, I contribute to non-profits doing research, and I’m familiar with some of the research. Biden is old, he has a stutter that affects his speech and he was suffering from a cold and fatigue the night of the debate. I have second-hand knowledge of what some people in the West Wing thought of Biden’s mental acuity, and they do not support your view.
Bill Arnold
@Suzanne:
I have neighbors up the street (cul-de-sac) who sometimes shoot off hundreds of rounds on Sundays when national politics gets exciting. (I.e. D.J. Trump in trouble for some reason.)
There are limits to tolerance. Also, no political signs; fear of armed wingnuts.
At least they don’t do the shooting practice at night.
YY_Sima Qian
There has been discussions about the impact of inflation on the election outcome, & what policy tools the federal government & the Fed could have employed or employed better to combat it more quick. I find Claudia Sahm’s take quite useful:
Monetary policy via raising interests rates, even if done earlier & less aggressively, is still a blunt instrument that works slowly, negatively affects broad swathes of the economy, & is not targeted toward addressing the root causes of COVID-induced inflation: supply chain disruptions & “greedflation”. All it does is decreasing overall demand, & cannot catch up to the relatively rapid pivots in nature of demand (from services to physical goods during social distancing, & back to services as restrictions were lifted). The US were also caught short ion housing stock when a demand shock hit, driven by real demand from people wanting to live w/ greater social distance (& probably speculation from the massive monetary easing).
More policy & regulatory tools, beyond standard monetary policy, are necessary. Building up economic resilience means stockpiling larger strategic reserves of basic necessities & major industrial inputs (not just oil & gas), but things like grain & meat. Instead, both Dems’ & Repubs’ idea of “supply chain resilience” is forced “de-risking” or “decoupling” from the China-centric supply chain. While reducing concentration & dependence is certainly desirable, doing so rapidly, against economic gravity, feeds inflation & increases supply chain complexity, fragility & opacity, while not actually reducing dependence on the PRC.
Chinese dynasties have maintained state run/regulated grain reserves going back 2 millennia, it is one of the core functions of the Chinese state.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: I’ll admit that I don’t like yard decorations (aside from a few Christmas lights), bumper stickers (usually far less clever than the car owner thinks, or message t-shirts (unless it’s a cool band).
spoot
I keep forgetting an anecdote that stuck in my mind from this past campaign.
I was helping to man a booth for the Democratic party during a festival in our town this fall, speaking to lots of people.
I had two conversations with Trump voters, both civil and friendly. One was a full one MAGA supporter with hat and T-shirt who mostly criticized Harris.
The other was a local farmer ( I live in a rural area). He talked about the dramatic increase in the price of fertilizer, which went from $12 dollars a bag to over $30. He said he couldn’t afford to buy as much as he needed, he was afraid he might face bankruptcy. I didn’t have an answer or solution for him.
This is what is happening in every part of this country. After decades of no inflation it hit like a Tsunami and left a huge mess in it’s wake. And it happened under Biden’s watch, doesn’t matter who’s to blame or what really caused it.
I don’t have answers, sometimes you just gotta acknowledge the pain.
YY_Sima Qian
@Suzanne: Rent increasing by a 3rd since 2020, in the little corner of small town Upstate NY where I used to live, is one of the reasons my parents finally decided to move permanently back to China. w/o pandemic travel restrictions, they will spend most of their time w/ us in China. Why pay through the nose for an apartment that will be unoccupied most of the time?
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: There’s a lot of things about other people I don’t like. It still isn’t my business.
Human habitation and city-building have followed broad observable patterns since basically forever. One of those patterns is densification. Literally, you can go into Cairo or Istanbul or Rome and many of the streets there are in the same location when they were built thousands of years ago. The buildings change. It’s fine. It’s how we’ve accommodated growing populations and increased commerce.
Americans seem to be allergic to the idea of their neighborhoods changing. Which, IMO, is your prerogative on your own property (my house, my choice, maybe?). But when you use the mechanisms of local government not to protect health or safety, but instead to prop up your home values through scarcity…. which, of course, is a strategy with a long history of trying to keep poor minorities out of one’s neighborhood….
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: I didn’t say it was any of my business. I just quietly judge.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, absolutely. Quiet judgment is, like, how we have all endured other people for all of human history.
YY_Sima Qian
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Here in China, BEVs & PHEVs from local marques are now cheaper than ICEs (whether foreign marques made in JVs or domestic brands), apples to apples at the same vehicle classifications. A full sized sedan can be had for less than RMB 200K, or < US$ 30K. Chinese BEV & PHEVs also have much better tech than foreign brand models (imported or made in JVs). This has forced foreign legacy makers to slash the prices of their ICE (& BEV) models, & they are still rapidly losing market share.
During the ICE age, high import tariffs meant that foreign brand could price their vehicles, even those made in the PRC at JVs, at 50 – 100% mark up compared to their home markets, BBAs (Benz, BMW, Audi) especially. Now BBA models are priced at ~ 30 – 50% discount in China compared to Europe. Tesla models, too, are much cheaper in China. In fact, the PRC has probably by far the lowest priced personal auto market in the world, w/ far greater choices, better tech, & faster speed of tech advancement, all due to the cutthroat competition. Chinese branded BEVs are selling at 50 – 100% mark up in foreign markets (due to transportation, tariffs, dealer margins, high profits for themselves), & they still come in 15 – 25% lower than the legacy automakers.
By banning Chinese competition both in EVs, batteries & mature semiconductors that go into EVs, the Biden Administration has pretty much foreclose any short to medium path toward affordable EVs in the US. I think high tariff is actually good policy to prevent Chinese imports from quickly demolishing the domestic auto industry, but then one should invite Chinese companies to set up JVs in the US and force them to transfer tech, just like the PRC did for the past few decades. Instead, Biden has severely limited Chinese investment in the EV supply chain on natsec grounds, & the Repubs are even worse.
PJ
@Hoodie: Pelosi was very effective as majority leader, but she has never won a statewide election, much less a national one, yet she has spent this election dismissing Democrats who have. Her actions this past year have demonstrated why she should have retired a while ago.
Layer8Problem
@Suzanne: And understanding. Don’t forget understanding.
YY_Sima Qian
@Geminid: I think many of the Pro-Palestinian protestors in the US & Europe, even though sincere, were also ineffective & sought to make themselves the story, rather than the victims they were protesting for.
OTOH, who else have been advocating for the plight of the Palestinians w/ any force? By the time Bibi finally deigns to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, northern Gaza is likely to have been effectively ethnically cleansed, who knows how many Gazans are still buried under the rubble, the remaining population kept on the brink of starvation for a year, & regularly terrorized & brutalized by the occupying IDF. Any other country committing these crimes (even the US) would have faced broad condemnation & likely sanctions/boycotts.
Dems failing to put distance from Israeli conduct, & effectively supporting it by expediting military supplies (something Ukraine has benefitted less from), not only makes the US complicit, but also further degrades the credibility of the Establishment when it talks of “defending democracy”, “oppose Fascism”, “maintaining international order”, “pursuing values based diplomacy”.
TBone
@Quinerly: I just watched part of the Rachel Maddow show, she’s not doing any look backs, but preparing us with a clear eyed look at what’s developing so far as preparation (so things don’t come as a surprise).
Kayla Rudbek
@WereBear: I am looking forward to those Opus Dei bastards getting reamed over by the Evangelical Protestants. Absolutely no historical memory that the Baptists, the holy rollers, etc etc are NOT friends to the Roman church. The only reason the Evangelicals tolerate the Opus Dei Catholics is because they are too damned ignorant to get through a first-tier law school so they rely on the Catholics to supply them with judges, Missy Coathanger Barrett and many Georgetown Law and Notre Dame Law alumni (and Georgetown and Notre Dame undergraduate alumni) being the prime examples, and I say this as a Notre Dame alumna and Jesuit law school graduate. I know far too many of these Catholics who have always been sold out to the right wing.
SFAW
So I got some e-mail from Bernie. In it, he talked, once again, about the Demoncrap Party abandoning the working class, or at least not showing that they’re helping the working class, etc. He cut-and-pasted his op-ed from the other day.
As I said the other day, I’d been semi-agnostic on Bernie; hated his Bern-or-bust Bros, but was not prone to the hatred of the man himself, as some jackals have been.
Notice that I’ve used the past tense above. Here was my reply to the e-mail (said response will doubtless get ignored, but who cares?):
Fucking useless piece of shit.
[OK, in fairness to that asshole: he did talk about how President Biden didn’t talk up all the great things they (Bernie and Biden) did for workers. But then he goes on to quote some asshole from the Painters Union, who apparently was taking cues from Sean O’Brien. Asshole.]
Geminid
@YY_Sima Qian: It’s true that there were no large numbers of people protesting war in Gaza besides the “Pro-Palestinian” movement I spoke of. That’s one reason I said the protesters were terrible allies. Instead of attracting the many millions of Americans equally appalled by the destruction and death on Gaza, the protesters repelled them.
That’s because the haters took the lead early on, and they were not interested in organizing a broader coaltion. They reveled in their isolation as if they were a cult, which they were.
It wasn’t a peace movement movement, it was a hate movement. And I’m not talking about anti-Semitism here. I’m talking about hatred of Israel and hatred of Israelis as a nationality. They do not accept Israel’s right to exist. Most Americans do even if they believe Israel’s policies in this war are wrong.
Saudi Arabia hosted representatives of most Muslim nations for a meeting today to discuss the conflict. The Saudi Crown Prince strongly denounced the Israeli governments conduct in Gaza and the West Bank. He also strongly insisted that the only viable solution to the Palestinian question is a Palestinian state alongside Israel, not in place of Israel.
That to me is the responsible and realistic position here. It is shared by other nations in the region including Israel’s neighbors Jordan and Egypt, as well as Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Azerbaijan among Muslim nations.
Hakan Fidan, Turkiye’s Foreign Minister has also reaffirmed Turkiye’s commitment to a Two-State resolution to the larger conflict. Turkiye recognized Israel in 1948, and they figure Israel is there to stay. And like the Arabs, they know this problem better than Americans do; certainly better than the protesters wearing keffiyas and and carrying Palestinian flags.
This is also the position of EU countries, Japan, China and just about every other nation in the world besides Iran.
The clerics running that country believe their “Axis of Resistance” will grind Israel down to the point where it is no longer a viable nation, even if it takes the rest of this decade and all of the next. They’re willing to subject a region of 700 million people to many years of conflict and turmoil in order to expell 7 million of them who live 800 miles from Tehran.
This is a bad deal for everyone who lives in that region, including the Iranians and especially the Palestinians. But the protesters and their sympathizers buy this bullshit.
YY_Sima Qian
@Geminid: Thank you for the response. However, you have been speaking of multilateral negotiations to end the Israeli war of vengeance in Gaza for nearly a year now, & it does feel we are any closer to the consummation of a deal. By the time a deal is reached, what is left of Gaza? Plenty of reporting out of Israel have shown that Bibi has zero interest in a deal, & has done everything possible to sabotage negotiations.
At this pointing time, Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” has been severely weakened, to the point that it no longer has much of a deterrent against Israeli attack of Iranian nuclear & oil export facilities. It is Israel now driving the events in the region, into the ditch. At the same time, what is Israel’s end game here? Israel has created deep wells of ill will among the Palestinians, & increasingly Lebanese. Until Israel offers them (being by far the dominant part, even after 10/7) a better future, there will be continued resistance to Israeli occupation & domination. One can only hope that their violent resistance will not be as nihilistic as the Hamas’ or the Hezbollah’s.
Everyone outside of Israel knows that 2SS is the only possible path out. Some in Israel, too, but support for the 2SS among Israeli elites & populous is the lowest ever. It seems the Israeli elite, not just Bibi, believe that they can keep the Palestinians cowed & brutalized indefinitely, until the extremists realize their maximalist territorial ambitions through slow motion ethnic cleansing. Given Israeli conduct against the Palestinians that do accept a 2SS & Israel’s right to exist, those in the WB, & tell me there is much good faith to be found on the Israeli side. Booting Bibi out does not change this.
goethean
@hrprogressive:
@BR: Agreed. Then after she gets her ass handed to her, maybe Berniecrats will shut up for a few days.
Geminid
@YY_Sima Qian: Right now there is no appetite for a Two-State solution on either side. Under these circumstances, how could there be? In the words of Macron advisor Ofer Bronchtein:
This is from the recent Times of Israel article “Macron’s point man on Israel-Palestine says ‘now is not the time to think about peace.’ ” I’ve intended to bring this article up here, and I hope to this coming weekend. It’s worth reading for the material on the Macron-Netanyahu relationship alone.
I realize that this is not resposive to many of the questions you raise here. But in my defense, I originally spoke to a narrower question, which was the efficacy and relevance of the “Pro-Palestinian” protest movement. A comment ten times as long would not have begun to cover all the other problems involved including the Israeli political mess. I couldn’t even address that one in a comment ten times as long.
I also realize that a solution to the immediate problem- the destructive kinetic war between Israel and Hamas– does not appear to be in sight. I’ve followed the ceasefire negotiations as closely as I could since February, when they commenced with a meeting in Paris betwen CIA Director Burns, the Egyptian and Israeli intelligence chiefs, and Qatari Prime Minister al Thani who has on effect acted as Hamas’s attorney in this matter.
I’m no student of diplomacy, so all I’ll say is that this process has been frustrating as hell. The elements for a durable ceasfire have been in present ever since January, but the negotiations stalled in early May and have gone sideways since.
But each one of Israel’s wars has ended in a ceasefire ratified by a UN Security Council resolution, and I believe this one will be no different. The questions are when, and whether it will be a durable ceasefire that allows a path to a resolution of the long-term conflict.