2024 ELECTION THREAD

All the polls, for both Bernie and his policies show he would have crushed Trump. A well as the polls that showed nobody liked the DNC choices who lost, or barely won.

And, while it's not rock hard evidence, Trump showed us what is fairly obvious intuitively. A grass roots campaign that fills arenas with enthusiastic supporters who have been persuaded by a message gets better turnout than a manufactured campaign with a pre-selected candidate.

Blue MAGA isn't interested in such things and will never change their views according to information, which is one reason for the nickname. They'll find some ad hoc historical trend that MSNBC cooked up and use it to "prove" people don't really want bettet health care, better working conditions, etc even if they say they do.

I absolutely agree with you that in terms of candidates harris isnt the strongest one the democrats have fielded( I could go on and on on this but we seem to agree) but they had no choice really. You CAN say how weak or how indept the republican party is that they put forth the candidate to lose to her if he ends up losing. They couldnt beat one of the weakest politicians democrats have jotted out. Now I actually thought clinton was a good politican and was proboably going to beat trump and would have been a decently fine POTUS but that should tell you what I think of candidates fwiw. I didnt completely hate her or thik she was an absolute villain like many seeemed to have.

as for your bolded, this is why I think people with your line of thinking on sanders clears trump or does better than biden is not from this planet.

I brought up clinton, many people here and off internet think the democrats could not have picked a worse candidate to run into trump. but she figuratively face ****ed bernie in the primary and ive said this multiple times over the years you need to be more closer to moderate than progressive in the national. its obvious. sanders policies were vastly differant than hers or bidens

sanders would be lucky to even get to 60-62m votes where he would be shy of 4-5 mil to even win the popular vote. I say this becuase of what I keep saying, the same party rejected his ideas,they rejected him in 2016 and 2020 moderates and many democrats arent going to spite vote trump once they hear about his policies and his platform, they just arent going out to vote for him on a ntional stage even with the **** trump vote. Biden was safe, he had alot of policies close enough where people can comofrtably vote for him as opposed to sanders who was labled by some and platform was still far left of what even that base wanted. he wasnt going to get thoise extra votes in swing states to beat trump. or any red candidate for that matter.

there is no way you seriously think the national general voting population is going to be more hyper into progressive and far left ideas for sanders and his platform moreso than bidens and THEN win all the swing states because more people are going to be more attracted to sanders and **** you vote than trump. its just not happening. its so easy for me to say because of look at how many of sanders type politicians are in office than not.

harris compared to 2020 has ****ing definitely tightened up a bit more than her takes that I remember back in the primaries before she bounced off, and even back then she had the same 3 lines and didnt have much substance the only candidates that had substance was sanders and biden. those two had more of a fuller playbook than the "we need to beat donald trump" lines that took half their time. what she has talked about and on her website her border policy and immigration is hell of a lot tougher than what it would have been in 2020 or first year or two of biden admin.

If Harris wins I think most will agree that you could say this twice.

Kamala is getting huge rallies that Biden could only dream about. Do you think it’s only people voting against Trump?

I think people see Kamala as someone who united the party and reinvigorated this presidential campaign, which is why they are excited to vote for her. What people value in her is her leadership qualities and good character. She changed her positions because she listens to people and has learned from Biden how to be bipartisan and make compromises.

As far as policies, she made it clear what her agenda is going to be on day 1, and that’s not to be a dictator but someone who values legislation as an avenue for change. She truly respects the separation of powers probably because she is a former senator. And on foreign policy alone I think her and Trump are night and day as far as values and approach. She wants to support our allies abroad and Trump wants to squeeze them for our benefit. As a liberal who is big on international relations, why would I ever give Trump my vote when you consider her as a whole package?

ES2 you dont have to reply back to me and hope you dont since I might be too dumb to understand what you have been saying or cant wrap my head around the points and its passing by me. I think I understand what youre saying but the truth of the matter to me is that if the polls and popular things you say people want would be are obvious and poll well. then we would have seen way more of that type of candidates in office. like way more. like I said we would have seen way more blue candidates with heavy sanders politics. but we havent to the affect we thought we would. if it those policies and talking points were more popular we would have way more republicans losing in red districts. my issue with some progressive candidates are the same with republicans especialy with healthcare , sure it sounds great on paper but how are you going to enact that plan?

ofc people want more vacation time and paid vacaton etc but the truth of the matter is when you get into the weeds of things sadly it doesnt pan out. I would ****ing love to have more PTO and weeks of vacation, sign me up but I also understand tons of business cant afford that and on a mass scale it would be different. some life is different in american than in europe. that and tackle on other things more progressive candidates want, they dont get. but yeah im always going to want more vaca and more paid leave. I will vote that way but also every SALARY job ive had give you PTO and I wish I got more.

this is missing the mark but to me I think there is a cast difference between a Warren and shaheen theres a differene between welch and hassan. all democrats but still diffrent on the scale.

If sanders positions were all slam dunks people would have voted for him in 2016, 2020 and also way more candidates would have been pushing for that in the house and senate.

well tbh republicans should get memed hard if trump loses. they also got decimated in 2022 when you look at the expectations , they underperformed hard wrt polling expected of them to be.

I am going to be honest here. The harris I saw in 2020 was beyond horiffic and from what she has done in the last 2 months her and her PR team deserve a ton of credit for being ahead in national polling or making this closer with trump and republicans not being able to capatilize on this. When I look at biden, harris and clinton, there is an absolute ****ing clear night and day outlier.

I am going to say somethign that people disagree with or dont want to have a discussion about becuase they are emotional but 2015/2016 political trump wrt his focus polls better than he does now and makes this a legi 50/50 rather than currently harris with a slight edge

harris has grown so much she should get a MIP with politicians if such an award existed. also trump was way way more focused on talking points and policy than he is now. check back the 2 clinton debates and its clear hes lost the plot and bought into his caricature persona. trump and clinton actally got into the weeds of policies(yes they both did even with the russian hoax takes bs he was spewing) as opposed to what he did with biden and harris its actually quite wild the difference.

he couldnt stay focused or on message and learn from his mistakes and republicans legit slam dunking taking someone who lost in 2020 and couldnt build it up is hilarious to see the results. he still could win, but it didnt have to be this hard against this type of democrat candidate.
which is why I think its a loss for republicans regardless. they legit wont beat harris two elections running if she wins. if he does win, dems wont really need to evaluate much imo

No problem. I'm not saying you're dumb. But I, myself, am not the brightest tool in the pack. I majored in polisci and econ and an undergrad. Polisci completely deserves its reputation as an easy discipline and this is part of why it drives me crazy when people who speak about politics for a living do not spend a weekend reading Wikipedia articles and learning terminology and stuff.

I don't think there's much question that it would be feasible for Americans to have some guaranteed vacation time, even if the amount was below average. It would cost businesses, I'm sure. The costs could be passed to the consumer, especially with every business facing the same requirements. I don't know all the economics of it TBH, but the fact that every other country does it is compelling evidence that we could. It's not just Europe. Japan, Canada, Brazil, Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, South Africa, Singapore, etc.

While I don't know it for a fact, I would be flabbergasted if the 28 million people who lack this guarantee, suddenly going from 0 days off to at least 2 weeks, did not result in many of them voting for whatever politicians made it happen. I believe much of Obama's popularity came from him giving us better HC, though it still lacks. If you'd been without any for years and finally had some, that's a pretty good reason to vote for him.

Why we don't see more politicians like Bernie is an interesting question and I'm sure the answer is complicated. I strongly suspect part of it is that they need to rely on campaign contributions mainly from regular people, rather than special interests. Such politicians might also be filtered out early in their careers. Which state senator will be tapped to run for the federal House of Representatives? One who plays ball, or one who goes his own way? But I don't really know much about this, just making educated guesses.

On balance is Harris really a worse candidate than Hillary, first-term Obama, or first-term Bill Clinton? No question she lacks the charisma of the latter two but her resume stacks up pretty fairly against each, and she has less baggage than either Clinton had.

However unremarkable I might consider Harris going back to the primaries, ffs she took over as nominee barely 3 months ago. Polls were bad and funding had fallen off a cliff, but that flipped quickly, she raised over a billion in 80 days which is insane. She needed to go out and not make any horrible "I created the internet" level gaffes and did ok. She needed to pick a running mate that didn't hurt her, did that. She needed to hold her own a debate and more than did that. She had to try to meet all these other standards too (while Trump can give head to a microphone and be due a sentencing).

If she can now beat the Electoral College on top of all that, I will kind of have to give her some kind of credit, charisma or not. And if so, god forbid there might actually be a 2028 candidate that Biden couldn't have been.

The electoral college map hasn't changed much for many months. If there is a change, then maybe Iowa (IA) is now also a swing state instead of slightly leaning Trump and therefore gives Harris a few more winning combinations.

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Also, this is a fine looking man, even in a tan suit.

I'll believe Iowa when I see it. Hats off to Des Moines Register for not playing it safe and putting the result out there just the same, but I expect it's just a polling aberration. It could be a bellwether that Harris overperforms there and still loses sure, but without anything else corroborating that result I'm not cherry picking it.

Will check back on election day out of curiosity but I think it's just one poll in one state. Plus I know **** all about Iowa.

PA scares the hell out of me because I know PA, both the cities and the Pennsyltucky parts. Polls are close but my feels are bad.

We can tell Harris a terrible candidate just by looking at how democrat candidates for congress (or governor) do in polls.

Democrat senate candidates are all polling better (or a lot better) than Harris in purple or red areas.

That said they had to pick her anyway for campaign funds and structure, no time to pick someone else, because they made the insane mistake of not dropping Biden far sooner.

Any state with restrictive abortion bans is vulnerable to "unexpectedly" turn blue tomorrow. Keep eyes on Montana, Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Iowa, in addition to the obvious ones like Florida and Texas. I'd be surprised if at least one of those isn't blue.

More and more people are saying today what I've been saying for weeks: women and minority turnout is being underestimated and will be the difference. Ann Selzer and the early voting data is waking people up.

I don't think it's going to be close.

What's your prediction for the senate?

I predict a bunch of ****s.

Has any economically progressive democrat tried to be anti abortion (or at the very least not brag about how good it would be if more abortions were easily available), never mentioning "trans issues", and be fully and unapologetically against illegal immigration?

oh wait some did, like Manchin and Brown and Tester ...

Look, I hope Harris beats Trump, but this Iowa poll is obviously nonsense, and Kamala has no more than a 1% shot of winning Indiana, Florida, Alaska, or MONTANA (bro, Trump is up 18.5 points in Montana per 538. EIGHTEEN POINT FIVE), and no more than a minute chance of winning Kansas, Texas, and Iowa.

Over/Under on these combined states for Harris is probably around 0.2

This election is, extremely obviously, going to be at least somewhat close. Seems like a straight coinflip to me.

I tend to agree. .2 might be too high.

I wouldn't describe Tester or Manchin as a progressive on economic issues, certainly not Manchin.

Brown is probably closer, and as Ohio gets redder and redder, his position becomes more and more tenuous. Unfortunately, he probably will lose his seat in this election.

Trump says he ‘shouldn’t have left’ after 2020 loss

unleashing a profane, conspiracy-laden rant asserting U.S. elections are not legitimate in the first place

The overarching answer is that Bernie (as an example) is a socialist (kind of), and the entire national media complex is existentially opposed to that economic system.

Why do so few legit left-wingers win Democratic primaries in red states? Well, surely that has to do with the fact that Democrats in said states lean (relatively speaking) to the right. Many Dems in red states (and elsewhere) tend to be of the Pete The Rat, Nat Sec, war-hawk types that are often correctly described as pseudo-Republicans.

And in general, this is a heavily right-wing country. The Democratic Party would be a centrist party in most developed nations, arguably center-right. Even a milquetoast group like UK Labour is easily to the left of the Dems.

Any Democratic politician that strays too far from the Democratic consensus quickly finds that the party apparatus is suddenly OPPOSED to their candidacy. They lose all funding from the national party, and typically also from local branches of the party. The entire system is designed to exclude all of those whose politics could be described as radical.

To use a current crisis as an example:

- The Democratic Party, as an institution, wants to continue to ship bombs and tanks and drones in perpetuity to the Israeli state. Many prominent Democrats receive significant funding from AIPAC for exactly that purpose
- Any progressive/leftist worth anything is deeply opposed to our continued funding and support of genocidal actions of the IDF in Gaza
- The Democratic Party, now held captive by AIPAC and other powerful lobbies, work to marginalize and/or replace the aforementioned pro-Palestinian politicians

You're on this forum more than I, so I could be wrong, but I'd be surprised if 20% of this forum is certain that Bernie's policies are very popular throughout the nation. Personally, I am under no such delusion.

In my opinion, this is exactly why we need the heavy hand of the state to appropriately govern for all of us. People are dumb and naturally reactionary; we can't govern ourselves on any kind of individualistic basis without falling into exploitation and/or mass poverty and/or violence.

I hope 538 isn't including any ridiculously biased polls in their metrics, then!

Look I get that some are long shots, but I also get that women are way more pissed than these polls understand, and they are going to come out in way bigger numbers than people expect. I stand by my prediction that this will not be close. Every day I get more sure of it.

20% is probably too high if you only count people who have posted in the last month. Several people with the attitude I describe left the forum after the 2020 election.

So what time tomorrow do we reckon Trump will declare victory?