Doomscrolling the election results thread

[LordMortis]

I’m putting up a good front to those around me,

It's the next day and I'm not there yet. My front is still a wall, exercise, and Factorio. Maybe tomorrow.

[Grifman]

Why voters didn’t hold Trump responsible:

[Alefroth]

In case you weren't already feeling sick enough tonight, Kari Lake has been steadily gaining in Arizona and currently only trails by 36,000 votes with around 750,000 left to count.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-e ... te-results

Holy shit. It seems impossible she doesn't even get 5% of the remaining votes.

[Alefroth]

‘Beer before liquor, never sicker’
‘Liquor before beer, never fear’.

You don't really believe that, right?

[Smoove_B]

Make it make sense:

It’s a conundrum for Democrats, who expected ballot initiatives on abortion rights in those states to boost the prospects of their candidates, including Vice President Kamala Harris. But data from VoteCast, a large survey of U.S. voters conducted by The Associated Press and partners including KFF, found that about 3 in 10 voters in Arizona, Missouri, and Nevada who supported the abortion rights measures also voted for Trump.

“We saw lots of people who voted in favor of abortion access and still voted for Donald Trump,” said Liz Hamel, director of Public Opinion and Survey Research for KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.

...

The pattern of voters supporting abortion rights, but choosing Trump over Harris held true in all ten states with ballot measures to protect abortion rights on the ballot.

And this nugget:

When voters cast their ballots, they were more motivated by economic anxiety and the cost of filling up their gas tanks, housing, and food, according to the survey results. Trump won those voters as much in hotly contested states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as in reliably red states.

That classic chestnut of "economic anxiety". Definitely not racism.

[Zarathud]

People don’t understand economics and are terrible at judging costs.

[Skinypupy]

In case you weren't already feeling sick enough tonight, Kari Lake has been steadily gaining in Arizona and currently only trails by 36,000 votes with around 750,000 left to count.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-e ... te-results

Holy shit. It seems impossible she doesn't even get 5% of the remaining votes.

I don’t know what the makeup of the remaining votes are (I’ve heard they typically lean Dem, but who knows at this point), so it seems impossible to call at this point.

Oddly, I could have sworn I saw this race called by multiple outlets for Gallego on election night. Maybe I misread,

[Alefroth]

In case you weren't already feeling sick enough tonight, Kari Lake has been steadily gaining in Arizona and currently only trails by 36,000 votes with around 750,000 left to count.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-e ... te-results

Holy shit. It seems impossible she doesn't even get 5% of the remaining votes.

I don’t know what the makeup of the remaining votes are (I’ve heard they typically lean Dem, but who knows at this point), so it seems impossible to call at this point.

Oddly, I could have sworn I saw this race called by multiple outlets for Gallego on election night. Maybe I misread,

Yeah, I mathed wrong on this. I was pretty sure it had been settled also.

[pr0ner]

This is the kind of shit that does not help.

Republicans flipped THREE House seats in NC. And yet people are buying into shit like this.

Make it stop.

[Skinypupy]

That person shows up on my feed from time to time. She’s a professional engagement farmer, typically posting that sort of nonsense

[pr0ner]

That person shows up on my feed from time to time. She’s a professional engagement farmer, typically posting that sort of nonsense

She actually responded to someone I know in real life about whether people are escaping DC on January 20, too! That's what makes this shit more annoying.

[waitingtoconnect]

Why voters didn’t hold Trump responsible:

The exact same thing happened with Brexit in the Uk. Voters thought they’d be able to get a Norway or Swiss style relationship with the EU. Those who wanted a complete break with the Eu ended up getting everything they wanted even though it wasn’t what people wanted.

One thing the ultra rich have done very well is convincing the working class that the top 1-5% of income earners are the real issue , the real rich who are holding them back. Not them. Easy to convince someone that someone earning double they are are rich because perhaps they can’t comprehend living like a billionaire.

Boris Johnson is a member of the upper class elites yet he convinced people only he could stop the upper class elites. Trump is the same.

[Isgrimnur]

Gallego defeats Lake in Arizona Senate race

Gallego, who has served in the House for nearly a decade representing a Phoenix-based House seat, will succeed outgoing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.). Sinema opted against reelection after changing her political affiliation from Democrat to Independent last year, as Sinema faced steep odds in getting reelected.

[Smoove_B]

This is certainly interesting:

The exit polls did not ask about media consumption, so we need to look for indirect clues. NBC asked the question in April when President Joe Biden was still in the race, and the results were dramatic. Among people who got their news from “newspapers,” Biden was winning 70-21. Among people who got their news from “YouTube/Google,” Trump led 55-39.

...

The reliance on social media as a news source among those groups is probably a bigger factor in 2024 than in 2020, in part because a new cohort of voters raised on social media as teenagers entered the electorate, and Latino voters are disproportionately young. In 2020, 23 percent of adults got their news from YouTube; in 2024, 32 percent did. The portion turning to TikTok jumped from 3 percent to 17 percent.

...

These studies reveal an interesting fault line. While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, Pew found. This confirms that men and women often act on different sources of information. Yet while we spill many words analyzing whether New York Times headlines normalize bad behavior, we know very little about what news and information rises to the top on Reddit and YouTube.

Yes, it's older information (when Biden was still running), but I'm guessing it's part of the puzzle as to what's happening.

[msduncan]

Reuters has called the House for the Republicans.

[Kraken]

Kari Lake lost in AZ. Thank the gods for small favors.

[El Guapo]

And hey, at least we're done with the Krysten Sinema experience.

[Smoove_B]

It took a few months, but this is an excellent overview of what happened:

First, to keep in full view what I wrote earlier in “Is This What Democracy Looks Like?” – that Trump’s candidacy was only viable because the justices he appointed to the Supreme Court: (1) disabled the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment (which should otherwise have barred him from holding office again) and (2) shielded him from standing trial before the election for trying to overturn the 2020 results or for hoarding classified documents (which would have kept his criminality in full view of the electorate, and possibly rendered his candidacy a non-starter due to a jail sentence or loss of support). In any other country, we would understand that as part of an autocratic takeover, not a democratic victory.

Second, as this post will show, the results are best understood as a vote of no confidence in Democrats, not an embrace of Trump or MAGA.

His argument:

But, as we will see, America didn’t swing rightward, but couchward:

The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA. Trump was no more popular this year than four years ago, while Harris significantly underperformed Biden 2020.

Most of Harris’s losses were due to anti-MAGA surge voters staying home.2 She lost the most ground in deep-Blue urban areas, where the dangers of a second Trump administration seemed most remote. About 19 million Americans who cast ballots for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024.

Anti-MAGA surge voters stayed home because they were less alarmed by a second Trump Administration than they were four years ago. A key to Biden’s victory was high turnout from less-engaged voters who believed they had something to lose under Trump. In 2024, however, about 15 million fewer votes were cast “against” Trump than in 2020.

There's quite a bit to unpack with lots of supporting data, so for those that want to just skip to the end:

When we use the wrong tools, we might not just fail to diagnose an illness – we might misdiagnose it, and prescribe a treatment that is actively harmful to the patient. When Flatland analysts argue that America “moved right,” the prescription tends to be that Democrats should also move right, or at least play nice with Trump to avoid alienating the Americans who supposedly granted him a decisive mandate. The same prescription will be dispensed to civil society and the media.

But that diagnosis completely misses the life-threatening illness America is really struggling with: a billionaire-captured system that doesn’t work for most people, and justifiable disaffection and anger at this system. Americans are fed up, and people are perpetually in the mood to throw the bums out, whoever the bums in charge are. But with only two parties to realistically choose from – plus a democratically illegitimate Electoral College that makes most Americans’ presidential votes all but irrelevant – all of these “change elections” add up to little more than a seesaw that most Americans don’t want to ride in the first place.

And so, nearly 250 years after putting forth the then-revolutionary aspiration for governments “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” we deploy election procedures that can claim no more legitimacy than the seething resignation of the governed.

[Holman]

Interesting read. Thanks.