2024 ELECTION THREAD

They aren't a monolith at all, but they swinged a lot more than most other groups. And they are a more selected specific group than latinos are, which you mentioned.

Trump gained 3-4% broadly, but like 13% with under 30 men. That means his campaign/message resonates with them particularly well, and/or Harris campaign/message (or what both candidates stand for anyway) was particularly disgusting for them (vs Biden's)

do they try to make health care and education more affordable? my understanding is that they try to improve quality and accessibility, which will sometimes be more expensive and sometimes not.

I’d say removing the individual mandate could probably be deflationary (repubs) but removing the ability to discriminate against preexisting conditions is probably inflationary.

housing in general if people didn’t want to live in blue states then housing affordability would never be an issue so I do think it’s strange that people whine about housing in CA and NY that seem to say they hate liberal values in general. in that case they should just move. and to the people getting rent control they probably don’t feel the inflation as much.

I do think housing policy is bad but it’s hard to say it’s the fault of democrats. when I go to city council meetings it’s a mix of democrats and republicans that are arguing for inflationary policies for different reasons. fact is homeowners love inflation in the housing market and don’t care who they screw over because they see their home as an investment vehicle.

WSJ Exclusive: Trump Whale Scores $85 Million Windfall on Election

The mystery trader who made a successful bet on Donald Trump winning the presidency earned about $85 million in profits, tens of millions of dollars more than previously reported, according to a blockchain-analysis firm and the trader himself.

Research by Chainalysis shows the trader known as the “Trump whale” had 11 accounts on Polymarket—more than the four accounts that were earlier known. Polymarket is a crypto-based betting platform whose popularity surged in recent months when bettors piled into its contracts on the presidential election. Americans aren’t permitted to trade on Polymarket.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/finance/trump-whale-...

Yes? they literally subsidized normal income americans to buy healthcare lol. Covering more people as well is deeply inflationary, physicians and nurses are the same and bottlenecked, every time you cover one more person, or you cover it better, everyone else who already had access is objectively worse off.

It's a scarce resource which you make impossible for the market to supply in higher quantity so all attempts to increase "quality" and access are inflationary (and the reduce the quality of those who are already in).

Well they did for everyone who get ACA marketplace subsidies. They work with all plans including the cheapest ones.

I am saying they subsidized it to try to make it cheaper and they caused it to be more expensive.

They throw your taxpayers money at the problem, they make it worse. It's like if they never existed life would be exceptionally better for literally everyone

I honestly am starting to wonder if I could craft a focus group of people I know who could more accurately forecast election results than most polls do. The focus group would consist mainly of people I know and trust who follow politics and who live in areas (or move in circles) where they are the political minority. I'll give some examples.

My brother lives in Florida and works in a very customer facing job. I would describe his politics as rickroll adjacent. He voted for HRC and Biden, but he voted some third party or other this time around. He was adamant that Kamala was drawing stone dead in Florida and that she would do much, much worse than Biden did. Even before the debate debacle, he was adamant that Biden's age was a hugely winning issue for the GOP.

A few days before the election, I called a friend in Texas who is a diehard Democrat and asked him who would win the election. He said that he was confident that Trump would win. When I asked why, he said that he knew too many otherwise rational people who were going to vote for Trump, and that many of those people had voted for Biden in 2020.

I had a few friends who are Jewish (and solid Democrats) tell me that they were highly confident that Kamala would do worse with Jewish voters because of anger about campus protests, etc.

I had another friend in Florida who has voted for Democrats his entire life tell me that he was voting Trump because he thought the Democrats had lost the thread on a lot of issues.

I could give another five examples, but the overall point is that I heard a lot more anecdotal pessimism from people who historically had voted Democratic and who lived or moved in red/purple circles than I did in 2020. And I didn't know a single Democrat in a red/purple area who was confident that Kamala was in better shape than Biden.

My experience was the opposite in 2020. Those same people (or types of people) were pretty confident that Biden would win. In both elections, the polls were relatively close which caused me to largely discount the anecdotal information. But I think I'll be more sensitive to it in 2028.

Rococo you are ALMOST THERE, drop the "otherwise rational" AND YOU ARE THERE

Almost there to what exactly? Being a better predictor of election outcomes? As you probably recall, I wasn't confident that Kamala would win. For that matter, I wasn't especially confident that Biden would win either. I did expect a close election in both cases, but that was mainly because the polls in swing states seemed close.

Needless to say, I'm not arguing that the majority of the country got it right by voting for Trump.

Except the kids who got denied for insurance because they had asthma or the cancer patients that lost their coverage because cancer is a preexisting condition.

I’m not big on subsidies though I’d rather just make a public option that is reasonable and do caps on certain products.

To understand how normal people think, which is kinda useful to assess political outcomes probabilities.

It wasn't a surge in "irrationality" that caused trump to perform a little better than we thought.

If trump even after Jan 6, with a decent economy going (yes one that makes some people miserable, but a smallish minority) improves in almost all states, in almost all demographic groups... Only one thing can be obviously true (ex post).

Harris was simply one of the worst candidates in American history. Not even blaming them for picking her either, I agree there wasn't enough time for anything else.

I did believe polls and i actually think they performed decently. Market odds gave us an even better signal and that's something to accept for the future.

But normal people with normal households and normal income shifting pro trump even after more objective elements of him being kinda trashy came out, isn't irrationality, if you accept the idea Harris was disgustingly bad.

Sure the poor kids.

Fact remains that with constrained supply, anything you do to cover more people or cover then better is going to REDUCE the quality of service people already in are getting.

And those are a majority of voters.

I am arguing they mostly weren't irrational doing so. At all. They assessed risks. And thought Harris was a bigger and worse risk.

There might be very irrational trump voters but those paradoxically are those who would vote him regardless,not those winning him this election.

At the end we will never have the Harris counterfactual but we might have some elements to try to understand if Trump did terribly or not. You might end up being right, or not.

But it wasn't and isn't irrational to think Trump is less dangerous for america than Harris.

I think you’re trying to finagle a disagreement or correction out of this when there isn’t really much to say. Your prescriptions will be hated by voters so I hope the Republicans do run on gutting social security, medicare, and the ACA. Have fun with that.

I reject out of hand the idea that you have a better understanding of how "normal" people think than I do. And I am 100% positive that I know more Americans who you would describe as "normal" than you do.

It just seems mental in a country like the US that one person can have so much power as to be a danger to the country. It's actually uncanny how much stuff the president can do over there. You don't really hear much about that sort of thing during elections here, it's as much if not more about the party as about the individual, and I doubt our PM could single-handedly do much to be a danger to the country, other than maybe launch a nuke I suppose (no idea if the PM can just do that).

I never attributed the 2024 election outcome to an overall surge or decline in irrationality.

Harris wasn't the worst candidate in history. That's an extreme exaggeration.
Not in modern history. Hillary was by far the worst. Probably in world history.
Harris got more votes than Obama did in both elections he won. It's just that she needed to surpass Trumps 75 million votes to win but couldn't.
She was bad, but not as bad as people are making her out to be.
Her biggest shortcoming as a candidate is that she was too meek and weak, and not authentic. Like liberal politics.
The Democratic party is in a lot of trouble, and they haven't yet realized it.
Don't want to make this post longer than it has to be so I'll just say they need to learn how to communicate and better market themselves.

Ok, so what about the "otherwise rational" people your friend saw moving toward Trump a lot? Maybe that was what attracted actually rational people at the margin?

I was simply reporting the exact words he used.

She was terrible, she did worse than almost every other democrat candidate on the ballot almost everywhere.

Ircc the only famous name she over performed was Sanders in Vermont lol.

Hillary didn't do worse than democrats did in 2016. Check Florida for example, or other (at the time) purple areas.

Turnout is structurally higher now that early and mail voting is much easier in a ton of places so you can't compare total vote amounts.

Democrats aren't in trouble for 2026, the house will be easy to gain back, lower turnout and no trump on the ballot will help them.

2028 is too far away to call anything about it though

Ah sorry I thought that was your added comment on that.

And yet the margin in popular vote is extremely small compare to many other elections ….

She must of been extremely bad seems a decent reality ……

Ps: without saying if trump would have loses you would have probably called Americans irrational pulsion to explain trump defeat but since he won , irrationality disappeared right ?

She is bad because she did worse than almost all other democrats in the same election.

I would have preferred Harris to win and the republican senate to refuse to let her govern blocking every single action of her administration, including not letting her nominate any secretary, ambassador, judge and so on.

That would have been perfect for me, complete paralysis of government

Yup like trump promise if Biden won they wouldn’t had a country anymore ?
And Biden would end the US ?