US Election 2024

Undecideds are undecided at this point because they are completely disconnected from everything related to politics and what is happening in the race, meaning the next thing they learn about it may well be the first thing. The idea they are paying enough attention to have a coherent threshold they are waiting to see if Harris meets is fanciful.

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What makes you think this?

100% a feeling. I think they were always going to unless they saw something different from Harris. I donā€™t think independents love or hate Trump, and probably dislike his character however not to an extent that it shapes their vote significantly. I would assume the vast majority vote more on issues rather than popularity, and not issues from a statistical/numerical pov, but more from a what I can see/feel/remember.

What I keep coming back to in my head is that there wonā€™t be as many people show up to vote against Trump this year as there was 4 years ago. Trumpā€™s been out of office and out of a lot of peoples thoughts, so not as many will be showing up to vote the man out. He took a nice long break from Twitter, and so the population that wasnā€™t MAGA stopped seeing him for a while. The memory kind of fuzzes and you forget just how fing crazy he is.

There isnā€™t the same sense of urgency to show up and get the guy out of the white house (even though there probably should be). A lot of the on the fence types or independents that showed up to have a say against trump last time might not show up this time. The dem base will show up and vote, but not sure the people that showed up just to vote against Trump will be as strong.

In 2020, 66% of the population showed up and voted, which is the highest % turnout since 1900. I think the #s were up to vote the man out. I donā€™t think weā€™ll see same % this time, and that worries me. Nobody really voted for Biden, they all were just voting against Trump.

Trumpā€™s base isnā€™t going to change. Say anything you want, but he has them riled up and there is not doubt they are going to show up and vote. It has me worried. If you could get 66% of voting population to show up and vote again, I think Trump loses by a landslide. I donā€™t think itā€™s going to happen though. I think we slide back into the normal voting %s, and Trump might win.

Iā€™m not sure how Harris mobilizes the anyone but Trump crowd, but I think thatā€™s the key to her winning. This higher the % of population votes, the higher her margin of victory becomes. If voting % is down, I think Trump walks it. Thatā€™s why all the voter suppression and purging of voter roles is a Republican tactic. If they can stop people voting, they win. If 100% of population voted, I think itā€™s a huge victory for Dems. Unrealistic, but probably the truth.

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Understood. I guess that works if thereā€™s political apathy on a very large scale. But man heā€™s been in court and so on. You just couldnt avoid that.

It does, but one of the striking things about that stock is that it has almost no non-insider institutional holders, making it very much a proxy for retail sentiment about Trump. Of course, that also makes it prime for manipulation.

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https://x.com/shannonrwatts/status/1846869792344412397

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Iā€™ve no idea when sheā€™s going to rule , but even if Smith gets his way would it really affect the election at this late date ?

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/10/17/2024-elections-live-coverage-updates-analysis/donald-trump-jack-smith-evidence-00184133

For the life of me, I cant with any certainty say if the court cases helped or harmed him. It seems like it helped. I think if there was maybe 1 it would have harmed, but with 4? I think it really resonated with people that everyone was out to get him, especially with the impeachment attempts on top of that.

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I guess it only goes to show, you should never just commit the one crime. You should commit so many of them that people canā€™t even keep track.

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To it defies all logic that heā€™s still in with the race let alone having a chance of winning it. But i dont see the US media unless its posted on here.

To me Trump is not even a strong candidate. Heā€™s utterly useless and while I appreciate each is allowed to form their own opinion I cannot for the life of me get my head around why anyone would choose Trump.

I just cant see it.

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And keep saying Hunterā€™s laptop

Give the people what they want: 1/3 chum, 2/3 bile, 5/3 lies they can hang on to.

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For me the laptop was a failure on most of the media, social media, however they can be partially (tiny) excused due to the intelligence bureaucracy that subverted the truth by signing a letter labelling it as disinformation. I donā€™t think it was really relevant to the election, yet handling it in that way was sketchy at best. Itā€™s a nice stick to beat someone with if you are trying to convince them that bureaucracy and establishment are/will be deceitful. If the opposite was true and it was shown to be fake, you can definitely bet the democrats would remind everyone about it at every opportunity.

Iā€™m sure there are tons of people out there that still believe the laptop was fake.

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Simply by virtue of posting here, you pay more attention to the race and are more informed about it than the average American is. Our information system is just not set up for people so disconnected to get any real sense of the issues or stakes.

People who are still considering who to vote for likely will encounter limited information about him or his campaign. What they do encounter will be far more likely to be right wing ā€œmasterful performance, sirā€ type coverage of him than partisan criticisms from the left. And then what they see from the legacy media, or even what trickles down to them from their framing, is very much that both sides type ā€œAt Detroit speech, Trump accuses judge of political vendettaā€ coverage. In that framing, the NoBluff perspective that the investigations were political hit jobs becomes an understandable one to take.

This speaks to two issues raised by @jgw_geneseo and @peterroberts in their posts. Enthusiasm to vote against Trump is likely lower than in 2020 and that is a bad thing. But it exists because we havenā€™t just memory holed how bad his administration was, most people who have done so barely paid attention in the first place. And then to Peterā€™s point, the issue that would prevent what is in Smithā€™s filing moving the needle is not the lateness in the campaign, but the lack of seriousness we would see from the mainstream press in covering it, in contrast with the way they cover anyone else in politics. See coverage of Comey publicly declaring they had reopened the Clinton server investigation on 28thOCT2016. This cycle has been chock full of stories that if covered with anything like the seriousness and persistence they pretended to think the Clinton server story deserved, the entire narrative on Trump would be different. But the press wont cover him like that because they think telling the truth about him is putting their finger on the scale and they have to pretend that there other more important things about the campaign to talk about.

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You have repeatedly shown you have no idea what the actual story was even about.

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Mainly about naked pictures, hookers, smoking crack, e-mails and texts loosely suggesting Joe was getting kickbacks. Or is that another laptop? Not sure Iā€™ve really mentioned it that much that it could be considered repeatedly. As I said, it shouldnā€™t really matter to an election as it has been unproven that it was directly related to Joe. (Even after 4 years)

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Why does Ben inhale helium before reading boring weirdo talking points.

Weirdos.

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From The Hill:

Donald Trump blamed Russiaā€™s war on Ukraine on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ā€” an escalation of a pattern of sympathetic rhetoric toward the warā€™s aggressor, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

ā€œHe should never have let that war start. The warā€™s a loser,ā€ Trump said, referring to Zelenskyy, with conservative commentator Patrick Bet-David published Thursday.

Worst case, at least it will be fun seeing Vance and Weirdos invoke the 25th amendment.

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LOL you have raised it repeatedly as part of defenses of Trumpā€™s side of the story.

When I said you donā€™t even know the story, I am talking about is why there was a debateā€¦why the refusal of the press to cover it was a supposed controversy, a framing you have been very credulous in repeating.

The issue is not whether the laptop was real, it is whether the data Rudy claimed to have obtained came from the laptop and the laptop alone. Hunter has claimed he didnt think it was his, but critically whether it is his or not is a distraction.

When the story first broke it happened with the intelligence community already on high alert for a Biden related Russian hack and dump operation designed to portray Joe as being on the take in Ukraine and had already warned the press to be very careful dealing with any such data that gets shared with them. What such schemes do is to obtain real data through illegal means, often a hack, but sometimes by stealing a physical device, and then releasing those real data intermingled with fake data created to push a narrative they want out there (Joe is on the take). Rudy then showed up with an incredible story that looked exactly what the IC had already been saying such an operation would look like. Everyone was rightly highly skeptical

When the press are given data like this they have a responsibility to vet it. It is basic journalistic standards to require its authenticity be verified before they report on what the information says. What was universally determined is there were critical gaps in the chain of custody and some forensic issues that made it impossible to say where the data came from. Verification that Hunter did indeed once own the laptop doesnt address that issue with the provenance of the data Rudy and co claimed came from it. That made it impossible for anyone to report on it, and they only did so once it became a meta story about why they didnā€™t cover it initially. The only places that did cover were RW rags that have no standards.

The SM aspect is more complicated, but that is really just a story of Facebook and twitter having no coherent policy for dealing with that stuff. Critically, Trump was actually president when any throttling or blocking of stories occurred.

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