Yeah, same here, but that's because we live in progressive bubbles. Dem voters chose Biden over many other candidates that progressives preferred.

> We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.

You cannot imagine someone actually liking Biden without being soft in the head. And other people cannot imagine someone liking Trump without being racist. But these assumptions prove nothing except lack of imagination.

People need to understand how heterogenous the US is...in every way. We have to regain the ability to see the world from other people's perspectives and extract the grain of truth from those perspectives.

People have a tendency towards "visionary" politicians, who arrive with agendas and strive to make them reality. Politicians who "flip flop" are derided, because changing your position is a sign that you never had real ideals.

But I think we have this backwards—in a representative democracy, the job of a politician is to represent the electorate! The ideal politician, then, would be an empty vessel, who was willing to move to wherever the people are.

And that's exactly who Biden is. He's always been a centrist democrat, but his "center" moves alongside his party. Biden also believes that governing is fundamentally about building coalitions, not smothering the other side.

I am worried that Republicans may simply be unwilling to make any deals, no matter how hard Biden tries or what compromises he's willing to make. But, if anyone can do it—and that's a very, very big "if"—then Biden probably can.

Do I think a boring centrist president is for the best right now to deal with this pandemic and the upcoming recession? Also yes.

But it all has to get through Congress too.

A small observation: you know when we had more political compromise? When we had less (de facto) transparency.

Agreements bargained out in a dark room, with everyone announcing the compromise and expressing support for what's agreed, are how American politics worked best.

Radical transparency poisons compromise. By which I mean, non-comprehensive but absolute transparency: everyone knows details, but no one understands the greater picture.

In a largely uneducated democratic electorate (relative to our elected officials, their staffs, and professionals, and leveled as a non-partisan charge against all parties and independents), why do we try to completely usurp our elected representatives' ability to bargain on our behalf?

We, as voters, should judge our politicians on what they do, not what they reject.

The former results in functional compromises we're not thrilled with. The latter results in ideologically pure paralysis.

More depth: https://president.upenn.edu/meet-president/Mindsets-Politica...

America's political system—as it exists right now—is fundamentally broken. Politicians have discovered that it is not in the minority party's interest to compromise, and so they don't, and nothing whatsoever gets done.

I don't blame Biden for any of this, however. But I'm extremely concerned.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that we should have a robot! Yes, leaders need to listen to experts and advisors and make thoughtful decisions. But they should also stay in tune with the electorate.

Perhaps a politician is naturally inclined towards removing regulations so that it's easier to grow a business. That's a reasonable baseline position—but if there's suddenly an up-swell of support for strong environmental regulations to combat global warming, it's completely reasonable to change your position in response to the will of the country.

If everything is going well and on track in the government, there shouldn't be any news.The president of the united states shouldn't be the center of attention.

Recent history has shown the democrats are also unwilling to make any deals... See the last Stimlus where Republicans wanted to deal for doubling what was already the Largest government expenditure in US history, and the democrats would accept nothing less than 4x that plus several poison pills that had nothing at all do with the economic stimulus that was inside the so called "hero's act"

The problem with the division we have now, is Republicans / Libertarians and to some extend even Union/Blue Dog Democrats have a VERY VERY VERY different view of what the proper role of the federal government to the new "democratic socialist" democrats that have seeming taken over the democrat party (the Bernie, Warren, AOC democrats)

When one side wants 0 new spending but will "compromise" and agree to 1.5 Trillion, and the other side will accept nothing less than 4 Trillion in new spending but a fundamental shift in all aspect of American governance, I am not sure what kind of deal can be had there

But especially given his age and how much focus there has been on suggesting (perhaps falsely) that his health isn't good, a lot more weight has been given to Harris.

Harris did poorly in the primaries and I think even her supporters should be able to see why many people find her to be an extremely undesirable pick (it's not exactly the right political climate to nominate a self-described "Top Cop", and even Biden has a fairly "law and order" voting history, compared to typical for democrats).

I know people who hate trump who claimed to have voted for him or just not voted, because they believe that electing Biden/Harris would create a substantial risk of either Harris becoming president or forcing the dems to nominate Harris in the next election (and thus excluding viable candidates that actually reflect their views)... and that for all the find wrong about Trump, he's at least substantially ineffectual.

But then COVID hit, and I’m fairly certain that having coordinated, science-based leadership in the highest levels of government would have spared us from quite a lot of suffering. So much for rooting for ineffectual.

Yeah, COVID has really emphasized for me (a recovering libertarian) how important it is to have functioning and competent government institutions (along with other social institutions).

The COVID response by the government further illiterates why libertarianism is correct.

Having an authoritarian government is not a solution to a pandemic, and it is sad that once again people are willing to sacrifice essential liberty for promised safety

Ofourse as the truism goes, you will lose both in that deal...

The cult of personality that has wrapped itself around the office of President of the United States is down right terrifying.

The US COVID response doesn't illustrate that any more than Soviet elections [1] illustrated that voting is a sham, which is to say it doesn't illustrate it at all. A particular bad implementation, especially one that was arguably sabotaged, doesn't disprove a concept. A laissez faire response to an epidemic is a bad one, and the US response has been pretty close to that in many areas.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFjh8lBB6T4

Also Do you believe COVID concerns should out weigh all other things including Economics, and even other health conditions (for example people stopped getting screenings for almost all other health conditions during this time. Cardiologists have come out extremely worried about the drop off in their health segments)

Finally Do you believe all rights can be suspended provided the executive of the government declares a state of emergency? What if any limits on this declaration should there be or this the declaration the sole purview of the executive

> Finally Do you believe all rights can be suspended provided the executive of the government declares a state of emergency? What if any limits on this declaration should there be or this the declaration the sole purview of the executive

Of course not, but you're engaging in over-the-top all-or-nothing hyperbole, even if you don't realize it, so your question isn't reasonable.

Libertarianism seems far more reasonable than it actually is when you mainly compare it to straw men.

I don't disagree, but I also see how its easy to see how other voters don't agree: E.g. look at the performance of other nations. You can make comparisons where the US doesn't look bad (or even looks good) depending on what comparisons you make and what time windows you choose.

Similarly, if you emphasize the importance of the errors of science-driven bodies, the amount of flip-flopping in expert advice (e.g. over masks), or the specific state responses in states that have local administrations more like what we would have hoped for, you could make an argument that it would not have made that much difference. Maybe not a correct argument, but at least one where reasonable and informed people could have a debate over it.

There is a lot of noise in pandemic impact, a lot of noise in how people perceive pandemic impact, and there hasn't been much time to reach robust scientific conclusions on the impact of different policies. I wouldn't argue that differences between policies aren't real, but just that they're (currently) easily spun or discounted.

There is, also, I think a good argument to be made to cautious about science based leadership in general. The tremendous power of science is that it gives you the power to defy tradition, popular will, and even common sense and make the world dramatically better, because its predictions were right. But when science is wrong, it can also be used to defy reason and common sense and bring tremendously bad results. E.g. there has been more than one genocide carried out in the name of "science". Rejecting science is not the answer, but nor is blindly following whatever is passing for science in your civilization at any moment. :)

Keeping in mind that Biden hasn't been a senator since 2009, during his time in the senate he was dead center among senate Democrats in terms of liberal/conservative votes cast (i.e. both more liberal and more conservative than 50% of his fellow Democratic senators): https://voteview.com/person/14101/joseph-robinette-biden-jr . Of course as noted this was over a decade ago, and what passed for centrist back then might not today.

In case you're wondering how this metric pans out for the most recent Senate: https://voteview.com/congress/senate/115/text , which (according to this metric) lists the four most liberal senators (as shown by their senate votes) as, in order, Warren, Harris, Booker, and Sanders.

You can compare the financial reports on their website: https://www.state.gov/plans-performance-budget/agency-financ... and https://2009-2017.state.gov/s/d/rm/rls/perfrpt/index.htm

Kamala is very progressive in a way that's a huge liability in the general, but because she's a prosecutor she doesn't get as much credit as she should in the primary. And I think in that sense it can be a liability.

Biden is a stopgap, he was what was required to get rid of Trump, which was job #1, a P1 if you will. A "progressive bubble" or other media-created marketing phrase is not a factor, it's a pure transaction: Trump has to go. People rose to the occasion this time.

> You cannot imagine someone actually liking Biden without being soft in the head

This isn't a fair interpretation of what they were saying, nor realistic. People are going to lament that a big part of Biden's support was functional, in order to get Trump out, but people complain about unchangeable things all the time. It's not significant.

For him to be a "stopgap" at all must imply that some Democrats today see him as the best end-game option, and we just need to "convince" them to be even more progressive

Because the electoral college distorts what "someone better" means. Democrats picked someone more popular than Trump in 2016 and lost. Biden's home state is the swing state of Pennsylvania. Home state advantage is generally fairly minor, but in this case the margins are so close that it might have actually made the difference (obviously we'll have to wait for the final count, which we won't have for days).

> In fact, Mr. Obama would probably have won the Electoral College even if the popular vote had slightly favored Mitt Romney.

> If all states had shifted toward Mr. Romney by 5.3 percentage points, Mr. Obama would still have won Colorado and therefore the Electoral College — despite losing the national popular vote by 1.5 points.

Losing the upper Midwest produces an EC disadvantage for Democrats, but that’s not an impediment to a traditional progressive candidate in the Sanders mold.

Moreover, the EC gives an average of a few point advantage one way or the other. It’s not enough for a “much more progressive” candidate. You can see this by looking at the House popular vote, which is proportional (and not affected by gerrymandering). Republicans regularly win the House popular vote: https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/chat-...

Indeed, which is why one would hope that solutions for moving beyond this creaky, janky system would be embraced in a bipartisan fashion. Sadly, the approach that is furthest along in that regard, the NPVIC (which I have issues with, but is still better than the current system) has so far only been enacted exclusively by states that Biden carried this year. Regardless of the fact that the electoral college does not inherently benefit the Republican party in the long term, the events of the past 20 years have sufficed to make them adamantly against any reform here.

If next election they're up against an attempt for Trump to get back in, then yes, you could expect a large progressive turnout for a Biden re-election. But if he's against a more moderate republican, I don't think you'll see the turnout that happened this year repeat, which may turn out to be a problem for his supporters.

"Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term. While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital. According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president. “If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.” The adviser argued that public acknowledgment of that reality could help Biden mollify younger voters, especially on the left, who are unexcited by his candidacy and fear that his nomination would serve as an eight-year roadblock to the next generation of Democrats."

It seems the best we can hope for is a president who doesn't try to fire CDC experts and who doesn't appoint far right judges.

How can you claim that when Biden was one of the least left leaning democratic candidates?

If by "someone better" you mean more progressive, then you're exactly right: you need to convince a portion of the moderate majority to be more progressive. That is a difficult & long term process.

divisive within the Party, but not among the constituency.

I think you're right that some aspects of more progressive policies are not divisive for the country: I think most people would agree that everyone should have healthcare. I think most people would agree that everyone should have access to education. I'm not sure I even look at those sorts of things as "progressive". The progressive part is how those things are structured and how they are paid for.

As I think about it further, I think there's also a possibility that a majority of Democrats do believe in progressive policies on things like this, but when selecting a candidate they opted for one someone not as progressive because they didn't think the progressive one had as much chance of getting elected. Their calculation, perhaps a bit cynical, was that the less progressive person that gets elected can do more than the very progressive candidate that loses.

I agree establishment leadership is skeptical of more progressive policies, probably not for philosophical reasons but for a more cynical calculations that support isn't good for their political prospects.

Unfortunately, now that the election is over I also don't think it will be easy to get anything done. The GOP is not going to want to give Democrats an early "win", and will likely pivot to their "but the deficit!" talking points now that they're out of office. I think things will need to get much much worse before a compromise is possible.

"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

"I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years"

"We don’t want to just close police departments"

"People like me who want to abolish prisons and police"

take for example angela davis, the most prominent prison abolitionist today. she says in this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3q_qV5mHg0) that there currently isn't a model of a prison-free society, only hints here and there.

and if you're using a broad enough notion of divisiveness, then anything is divisive, including tan suits and dijon mustard. so divisiveness as you're using the term is not a property of the relation between the constituency and the political object (policy/slogan/etc.), but it's instead a tool that social engineers can use to create antagonism between populations.

for example, abortion appears to be an extremely divisive issue because of the way the issue has been socially engineered, but if you look at the data, a large majority of americans agree on the vast majority of abortion cases. it's the edge cases and disagreements on the rationale for/against abortion that are used to create the appareance of divisiveness.

Then I guess the abolitionists failed because slavery still exists.

So yeah, who ever wins party primaries is the candidate the parties base wants. Obviously, distorted by money, but still.

For GOP/Independents who voted Biden, his #1 quality was also that he was moderate and a close second was that he was not divisive.

A bit nitpicky, but I think it's important: "people" cannot be really considered responsible for the win. If just 1.5 voters every hundred had flipped side, Trump would have won. At this point, with the results so close, who wins the elections is basically a coin toss- which arguably isn't a terrible thing in democracy, as it means that the parties compete fiercely and almost optimally for votes. But still in the end the outcome of these elections seems due mostly to chance.

Bernie maintained a slight chance up until the outbreak of covid where he suspended his campaign specifically out of concern for spreading the disease.

It's amazing that in a world where we can all be connected that actual result was we all chose to connect with people who think just like us.

I got really turned off by some of the things Bernie was going for (like voting from prison) which are pointless if you have someone like Trump in office shredding the whole country. I like Bernie as a person but we would have lost Florida by a landslide with him on the ticket.

For this moment, Biden is great, I couldn't be happier.

If anything it shows that the party rules above all.

The lesson of Trump is that we have two political parties so immune to outside challenge it took someone of his level of money, fame, and more, to beat both parties and make no mistake, be beat both.

Hence going forward, when Congress tells you they want to pass laws preventing certain monies from entering politics always understand it is to prevent anyone challenging their two party rule

Didn't Joe Biden get most of the votes in the primaries? After Super Tuesday he was leading in delegates, and once the race came down to 1-on-1 with Bernie he did even better. This tells me there is significant support for very liberal policies like those from Bernie, but the party as a whole is still much closer to the center.

And if Biden - or Harris - don't take steps to address it by 2024, someone much worse than Trump will appear.

And they may well win.

The reality is voters on both sides vote how the various media outlets tell them to vote. There's plenty of media noise, but the available narratives are carefully curated, and voters don't get to generate their own from the grassroots upwards.

This has become far more dangerous as Facebook and the various other online platforms have moved towards microprofiling and microtargetting.

This was a huge issue during the Brexit campaign, when disingenuous single-issue ads aimed at very narrow demographics with specific vulnerabilities put the result over the top.

Trump spent more on social in this election than Biden did, and the result was a good collection of surprise wins in states like Florida, and the second biggest voter turnout in US history.

If Trump had been even slightly more competent and focused and if Covid hadn't been happening this would have been a bloodbath for progressives.

I think it's a viscous feedback loop. Media outlets construct & present narratives based on what they believe will get people to tune-in/click etc., mostly a financial consideration. That content guides the audience's beliefs in the direction of the narrative. Media outlets are then locked in to that narrative, and must present content that coincides with or pushed it even further, and the cycle continues.

America has a ton of issues, but I think some democratic reforms are critically important. Voting rights are being attacked, and I don't think most people are represented well by the two party system.

That's not true.

https://i.imgur.com/EnsuC7N.jpeg

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-presidential-delegat...

The field narrowed after the results of the contests on 3/3. Biden had the lead at the end of that day and it only grew after that.

It's more likely they endorsed him out of self interest because it was clear he would win and they wanted to be considered for the VP pick or other posts. Conspiracy is much less likely and viewing it through that lens (without evidence) is more a reflection or one's beliefs than the actual events.

However, I think a majority might not have wanted a moderate. They might have wanted a progressive, but voted moderate because their priority was to get Trump out, and they believed (maybe falsely, we'll probably never know for sure) that a more progressive candidate could beat Trump. The party establishment was certainly pushing that narrative.

I viewed it much the same. I also saw it as very similar to what President Trump did with the Republican party in 2016: Tracking his registered political affiliations and statements of political belief over the years put him all over the map. And he also faced similar pushback, probably more forceful, from the Republican establishment as Bernie did from the Democrats. I think that reveals a deep division between traditional the conservative platform and everyday Republicans, or at least that everyday Republicans were deeply cynical about the desire & ability of the Republican establishment to deliver.

Again, probably a similar mechanic was underlying support for Bernie. Which means (no surprise) that a very large group of Americans are completely disillusioned with the political establishment.

The way people in the US behave resembles atheists more than they resemble any religion. Generally people don't want to defund the police, including African Americans (people want police to be more accountable and empathetic), and really no mainstream politician is very close to socialism in this country. But its just the labels that stick.

In generally I think state government solutions don't receive enough attention in policy discussions.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so let us just rename the rose and get on with it.

The party did not decide, the people clearly indicated who they wanted. They wanted the person who could win the general election. Turns out they were a lot smarter than you give them credit.

This is quite wrong. Biden crushed Bernie in the primaries.

And then there are things like the Iowa caucus where Mayor Pete decided to crown himself winner before one was officially declared (gee, sound familiar?) because the Iowa Dem party crapped the bed.

Out of the 20 candidates, Biden was the most likely to defeat Trump. He is a realist compared to the other candidates. People realized that and voted for him. If Bernie was chosen as the candidate, Trump would have won a second term. The bet panned out.

I feel it’s so easy to live in a Democratic bubble in Washington state. I guess same goes to California. Middle America thinks in a very very different way than we do.

That may be half of the problem, but the other half is that I think most people think Bernie was just over promising and that they could never have socialized health care, even though most everyone else has it. Much in the same way that the UK couldn’t imagine a country without socialized healthcare, thus voting in Boris Johnson, the US can’t imagine a country with it. We’re just completely stuck. It’s a shame.

It is extremely notable that Biden is the first candidate in ~30 years to win the presidency and have what I'd call a "serious" career in US Federal politics.

There is circumstantial but somewhat compelling evidence that American's don't like Congressional experience. Congress is despised, their wins are thin, their lies are large and their missteps catastrophic.

Big citation needed. I live in Ohio which went red, you do live in a Democratic bubble but it is different than what you imagine it is.

I’d say give Biden a chance.

I've watched Biden live multiple times. He is not as skilled an orator as Obama was, and he indeed clearly has a speech impediment. None of that means dementia.

Either you fell for the old "youtube conspiracy hole", or you're seeing what you want to see.

That said, I am not sure Bernie would have done better against Trump, and the electoral college needs to be retired.

Biden is winning those key states with more votes than Trump did in 2016, and the margins are going to continue to increase.

This narrative is driven almost entirely by the fact several of these states are now allowed to count mail in votes until the start of election day or after polls closed on ED. Without that, the narrative would be talking about Biden's decisive victory in all these states.

GA and WI are probably going to end up with less than 1% difference between the two candidates, and PA might end up at 1 - 2%. Those aren't huge margins regardless of how they got counted.

Drug decriminalization and minimum wage increases are in the party platform already.

Biden beat Bernie when it was 1-1 in the primary, Bernie could only win with the moderate vote split. The voters picked.

Everyone knows that Biden isn’t going to follow through on any of the progressive parts of his party platform. We already had eight years of the the Obama bait-and-switch with him as VP. He’s expressed more interest in appointing actual Republicans to his cabinet than doing any of this.

Crucially, though, voter support for progressive policies and for Biden did not necessarily correlate — most significantly in Florida, which Biden lost and where the state Constitution was amended to raise the minimum wage.

It took a huge effort, a strong and widely palatable candidate, a safe platform, a great campaign, a pandemic, mail-in voting, all the pooled power of the tech companies, and a lot of luck to take him down. Seeing how difficult it was just cements it for me that I am in a bubble and that tens of millions of people have very different worldviews and values than I do. It is very hard to admit to myself that my core values might not be widely shared by others.

Here's a start. It's not an advantage to have these criminals try to tell everyone what to think.

Anybody with half a brain wants to see them in jail, rather than in a position to curate our realities.

There’s a high burden of proof for such a statement. Surely you don’t believe every single Trump voter would do such a thing.

Certainly there is a contingent of his voting base that represents what you describe, but to ascribe those characteristics doesn't hold, not least of which because voters had two choices, not many.

Direct your ire at Trump all you want since by definition he holds all the views you describe, but leave the stereotyping somewhere else.

That is a really silly statement. What group are you talking about?

Ohh please, you do realize the calling 70 million people nazi's is one of the reasons they reject the democrat party right? and it is delusional to believe.

There is wide range of policies the people in the "evil red states" reject from the democrat platform that has nothing to do with race, sex, or sexual orientation no matter how much the identity politics people want to make people believe these are the only reasons they reject democrat polices

how about you take the some time to step out of your bubble and learn about some of the actual reasons people reject democrats, as a start take a stroll over to Reason Foundation... Read a Few things, start with https://reason.com/2020/11/06/socialism-2020-trump-biden-reb...

https://finepeople.org/

Here's a compilation of 38 times he condemned racism and white supremacy.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it appears you've been systematically misled on this issue.

The Charlottesville protest was a racist, bloody affair that ultimately resulted in a counter protested being killed after a white supremacist drove their car into the crowd of protestors. But, Trump felt it was very important to defend the protestors and in particular defend Robert E Lee, a man responsible for leading the war to keep a state's rights to slavery. The idea that this is somehow not racist and Trump is a man of equality, is again, absurd.

I also won't give a pass to the deeply ignorant. They are demanding a right to be treated like foolish children, somehow innocent of the decision they're making to remain ignorant of the fact Donald Trump is a racist. I mean come on, of all the difficult things to do on planet Earth, admitting Trump is a bigot is difficult? Grow up.

American society continues to give racists a pass. This includes Nixon's Southern Strategy as told by Lee Atwater in his 1981 interview. It's called plausible deniability. The idea some people are so ignorant they cannot be aware Trump is a racial bigot, and thus they can support a racial bigot while simultaneously denying they are one themselves. It's not believable. And I won't believe it. It's not my burden to take people's word at face value. Grow up. Stop being an infant, stop demanding that people treat you like you don't know better or can't know better.

I am 100% confident there is a Republican out there you can support instead, who has all the boilerplate Republican policies you like, without the bigotry.

Protesting the removal of a statue commemorating Robert e Lee is fundamentally racist, Trump defending this is racist. Equivocating it with Washington is an absurd statement that lacks any historical context or nuance.

And again Trump the thinking that it’s okay to protest and give support to Neo nazis by protesting with them, is a racist incredibly privileged stance to take. How do you watch this speech and come away thinking Trump is not racist here?

I will fully agree that tearing down a statue of Ulysses Grant is ridiculous. But Robert E Lee was a man who was willing to lead a nation into a civil war for the right to own black people. And Trump thinks the people who want a statue to this man to commemorate him are very fine people?

When people tour Dachau they are not exhibiting support for Nazis.

When I was growing up in the South and all my black friends and schoolmates were wearing "No Fear" brand shirts with confederate flags on them, I doubt they were supporting slavery.

To your other argument, Dachau was never a monument to the Nazis. It was left standing as a testament to the horror of the Nazi regime and is a historical place.

The Robert Lee statue was erected sixty years after the end of the civil war. And this statue was erected as part of the historical revisionist “lost cause” movement, that has tried to frame the south’s decision to secede from the union as just. So, the origin of the statue is racism, the man the statue represents is also racism. And this is entirely consistent with the kkk and Nazis protesting the statues removal.

To compare this to a person of color who has reclaimed a symbol of hate, such as the confederate flag. Makes no sense. In order to make your argument you need to explain what the statue means to these people. And how that can possibly be worth it, given what this statue represents to people of color and the fact that they’re supporting Nazis and the kkk while protesting this.

The "lost cause" is an uncivil demand to remain an infant, and an uncivil demand that others shoulder a disproportionate burden of coming to terms with the sins of this country.

Being stupid and insensitive is when you complain you’re not sure how to spend your bonus to your cash strapped friend. Protesting with Nazis and the kkk to defend a statue of the leader of the confederate army, is a blatant act of white supremacy. I see there’s a fundamental disagreement here, where you think this act is not racist and I do. I don’t think either of us are going to be convinced by the other ones argument.

To add some more color here anyway. These people marching through Charlottesville were also chanting “Jews will not replace us”, again I don’t see how a very fine person hears people around them chanting that, sees people carrying nazi flags, sees members of the kkk and continues to protest with them. This is not stupid and insensitive, this is white supremacy.

White nationalists do not typically advertise themselves as such. They recruit by gentle indoctrination. If you look at the posters for the event, they seem pretty innocuous if you weren't already woke to the names of the speakers. You're taking information you know after the fact and assuming that everyone there had that information at the time they showed up.

There were more than two groups there. It was a public event. While there were Nazis there, it wasn't advertised as a Nazi event. Nazi flags doesn't make everyone there bad in exactly the same way Hammer and Sickle flags and some Che Guevara shirts don't make everyone at a left wing rally bad.

It also doesn't matter if you threaten to kill me once, then say you didn't 38 times, I still won't believe you, I just know you're a lying.

His worst response on this issue was the debates where he said "sure" to whether he'd condemn white supremacy. And then he was asked about the Proud Boys which are a multi racial group with a black leader.

>According to a transcript of a press conference on 15 August, President Trump did say - when asked about the presence of neo-Nazis at the rally - "you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."

During the same press conference, Mr Trump went on to say "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally."

Trump just suddenly throws this in that line at a totally unrelated contractor permitting press conference for one sentence. It's really crazy, if Trump says one thing to the people of Charlottesville and a totally contradictory thing later in the most obscure circumstance, are we to give him the benefit of the doubt? I don't, there is no doubt.

The idea that literally dozens of times he directly and clearly denounced white white supremacy, that he practically couldn't shut up for four years about all the great things he was doing for black people, that he passed the criminal justice reform bill, that he funded historically black colleges more than any administration in history, that he created opportunity zones to bring investment into black communities... He's going around the country bragging about these things constantly, but his off the cuff response in a press conference where he reaffirms his belief that there were some non-racist statue supporters... That's when the real truth came out, that was his big signal to the white supremacists that he was on their side in spite of significant policies and repeatedly proclaiming the opposite. That's a wild belief.

Where are these opportunity zones? Where are these educational opportunities, where was the crime reform, a fantasy. You are taking a known lier at face value. Why? I can just easily dismiss anything you say because Trump accomplished nothing all empty words.

https://www.eda.gov/opportunity-zones/data-disclaimer/

Signed a bill instituting permanent funding for HBCUs.

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-12-19/tru...

>And under the Trump administration, federal funding for HBCUs has increased by more than $100 million over the last two years, a 17% increase since 2017.

https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-09-...

The criminal justice reform bill was called the First Step Act.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Step_Act

Use your critical thinking skills.

Listen to yourself talk. He a 100% said Nazis are fine people, you were debunked. As Trump would say "You know it, I know it, everybody knows it!"

Because of what Trump has done regarding Yemen he is a war criminal who deserves to be in prison for the rest of his life.

Also, he never once said Nazis are fine people.

That's a good website, I had literally never seen that video before. That's kind of what I mean by my comment, it's downright hilarious to come here onto forums and watch people argue about their respective perceptions of reality, while the vast majority of people think they are actually arguing about reality itself (which is what your video shows). That it has zero effect on most people (well, maybe makes them even angrier) is what is so mysterious about the working of the mind.

1) I'm being misled systematically

2) I've been misled since school

3) They are fully aware of what they are doing

4) Given the choice, they would prefer me dead over defiant

In my estimation this is clearly establishing 1 & 3. The people arguing on this forum are victims of their trusted information sources. But there is no way the Biden campaign and professional media whose job it is to suss these things out had no idea.

The hard part is not falling into Gell-Mann amnesia. We saw this with our own eyes and know they misled us. When the next news story comes out, will we just accept it as fact? Most will, I admit I catch myself struggling with this.

> But there is no way the Biden campaign and professional media whose job it is to suss these things out had no idea.

That's what's so hilarious about reading forums, especially populated with intelligent people. It's like, do you guys really think not a single politician or member of the media can spot the gaping holes in these stories? Or, does it seem plausible that almost half of voters opted for reelecting Trump because they're racist, cult members, etc? But then those questions are answered on the regular in comments and voting.

> The hard part is not falling into Gell-Mann amnesia. We saw this with our own eyes and know they misled us. When the next news story comes out, will we just accept it as fact? Most will, I admit I catch myself struggling with this.

I am really looking forward to the drastic swing we're going to have in narrative, and observing how the masses react to it. Reddit is already well underway, but once the momentum gets going it will be awesome. Will be interesting to see how long it takes before we need to engage in some regretful military intervention in the middle east. Seems like street level terrorism has suddenly reappeared out of nowhere in Europe, seems like a decent enough base for some narrative spinning.

Michael Malice on Youtube

http://michaelmalice.com/ - a few of his articles are here

I have some predictions:

1. Covid is not a big deal anymore. I'm already seeing articles with the narrative change.

2. Assuming Biden is sworn in in January, BLM and police violence against blacks will disappear from the national consciousness before April.

3. 100% agree with you about regretful military intervention

4. Russia definitely did not interfere in the 2020 election

BLM (or at least media coverage of it) died right before the presidential debates got underway, in magical coordination across all media. I don't expect to hear much about the topic again either, depending on the quality of the Republican ticket in the next election of course. Malcolm X explained how that works to us all in the past. That's another weird quirk of this whole production, why were none of the historic speeches of serious black intellectuals entered into the public discourse? I guess not a single person thought of it.

I hope you are enjoying your silent downvotes as much as I am enjoying mine. What a time to be alive! :)

A quote from the ad states "Many New York families — White, Black, Hispanic and Asian — have had to give up the pleasure of a leisurely stroll in the Park at dusk...", so there's reasonable inclusion there.

It does go onto say "Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers.", which can be interpreted a few ways. Nobody was murdered, so it could be referring more generally to murders which have degraded a sense of public safety as a trend since the death penalty was abolished. Still, it would have been better phrased to temper the trend of guilty until proven innocent to prevent reactive unjust violence, but at the same time you don't want everyone to be so apathetic about reported crimes that nothing gets done.

It's no secret that Trump was not a fan of the Central Park Five which is something he was free to express, but when the guilty charge for rape was lifted there still existed other significant evidence of wrongdoing that makes it harder to justify them being rebranded primarily as victims themselves.

More controversially it states "They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes." The Central Park Five did not kill and as a result, bringing back the death penalty would not have caused them to be executed. It seems more geared towards suggesting the reinstatement of the death penalty as a stronger disincentive to those who would commit violent crimes that could result in death.

The better argument against the ad in general is that the justice system is imperfect and while intense anti-crime passions are understandable, there may be enough noise in the system that the ability to formally execute people is probably something it shouldn't be trusted with.

It's one of those cases where I disagree with a central point the ad is making, but also disagree with people's claims about the ad.

There exists compilation videos of him condemning white supremacy.

> or “very fine people on both sides”.

This is a hoax that has been debunked and can be easily debunked again by anyone who cares by looking up that video, rewind to a few seconds before that quote and listening to a few seconds after the quote.

So this is actually a good proof of what was mentioned above: while Trump wasn't a nice guy he's been under constant misinformation attacks on top of that. No wonder he looks like a really bad guy!

You’re claiming that his racist remarks prove he holds racist beliefs. It’s possible that his racist remarks are driven entirely by his desire to appear blasphemous and be divisive.

> Trump was among the first group of Americans to be given the award, which recognized people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who have made significant contributions to the country, Otto Coca, communications director for the Ellis Island Honors Society told The Associated Press Monday. But Trump was honored for his work as a successful developer in New York City and his German heritage, Coca said, not for helping inner city youth.

From: https://apnews.com/article/2601590439

Why would the NAACP give a racist anything?

Trump was different: he really did say outrageous things, like "hell, yeah we should torture them", or saying "Mexicans are rapists", or calling McCain a loser for being captured. Or think about his dismissal of Covid. That's not propaganda. Or his self-dealing in the White House. None of these things were invented.

There's a liberal mainstream establishment in the US, which will always want to bash conservatives. Trump presented a very large target to them. They quite fairly took aim at it.

Not really. They twisted his words into the worse possible interpretation and then took aim at that. Like your Mexicans are rapists quote. That's not what he said. Here's the quote:

>The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems. Thank you. It's true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Thus, when Mexico 'sends' people across, they are, indeed, 'sending you', in that the crowd of presumably-legal Americans he's talking to are just as likely to have rapists among them as a group of illegal immigrants. He's playing on peoples' notion that it's self evident that a bunch of brown people crossing the border will be rabid criminals.

Sure, he's willing to downplay his beliefs to the press, but even mainstream Republicans found his retention of Stephen Miller in a primary influencer position to be abhorrent. If you aren't racist, you don't put a racist in charge of immigration.

Illegal immigrants aren't a race so being anti-illegal immigrants isn't racism.

As to whether or not it's true there's evidence on both sides. Here is a good summary:

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/is-illegal-immigration-lin...

But you and I are not having the same type of argument that Trump is having. You are taking a reasoned and skeptical position. Trump is not. Trump is not going in front of his rallies and saying, "While the evidence doesn't yet support it, I believe for this and that reason that Mexico is sending rapists and such across the border." As far as Trump is concerned, no research is required. He already somehow knows, and he knows with such certainty that he will happily make unmoderated statements to thousands of people, over and over. To him it is self evident that the Mexican illegal immigrants are largely rapists and assaultive criminals. If he paid attention to the same evidence you do, he would moderate his statements--which he does not.

That fundamental disconnect with factual or consensual reality is why I find Trump abhorrent.

I'm not from the US, nor do I live there. As an outsider looking in I felt Trump and all his crazy ramblings to be a real fall from grace for America. I felt very much like "wow, America has really lost its way electing this guy".

Exactly. I think Trump marked the end of America being seen as any kind of "shining city on the hill" (to use Reagan's phrase). He was and is a giant embarrassment for America, even if many Americans don't realize it or don't care. I say that as a relatively nonpartisan American with many immigrant friends.

And that's insanely dangerous, for everyone else too.

BTW, they did change the launch codes, right?

I wonder, have you ever actually listened to him? Have you seen and heard the things he himself has been proud of? Have you seen how he ran his own businesses?

Also grossly incompetent, ignorant, and incurious. It seems the only talents he ever had were inherited wealth and marketing himself.

One of those isn't a talent, but yes. Although he also married wealth, so that might be a talent of sorts.

His business record is a string of failures, lawsuits and bankruptcies, his greatest cultural notoriety prior to election was playing parodies of himself on television, his greatest political accomplishment was running for President in 2000 as a Reform Party Candidate and losing, and he didn't even write The Art of the Deal.

I know. I was making a bit of joke there.

> Although he also married wealth, so that might be a talent of sorts.

He did? I was under the impression he just married models, who I assumed where in to him because of his reputation for being rich.

Calling someone a racist always involves a degree of mind reading that’s impossible to prove.

You’re claiming that his racist remarks prove he holds racist beliefs. It’s possible that his racist remarks are driven entirely by his desire to appear blasphemous and be divisive.

In other words, he was willing to pander to racists for power.

Some examples include:

* Calling Haiti and African countries as "shitholes" * Calling NBA players "very dumb", etc.

His words speak for themself.

Thank you for speaking up.

I actually liked a good deal of his policies and some I found ridiculous and others awful.

But how you speak matters. He set himself up to be mocked and ridiculed. He picked fights as much or more as they came to him.

I get it - he was “playing to his base”. But I don’t think he was. In fact I think it got to a point his base controlled him. He just couldn’t help being repulsive to a lot of people, media or not.

It’s sad too because he could have been great. He was independent and free from obligations to either party. But he couldn't get out of his own way. He couldn’t act “presidential”.

He should have picked his battles better instead of making everything into one. It gets tiring.

And that is why he lost.

Stop giving a single person that much power. The US is huge, it made sense back when news took a month to make it across the country, but now it doesn't.

Many of the best-run democracies in the world have a history of unappealing presidents, prime ministers, and so on. You don't need better candidates, you need the President to matter less. You want the seats in the houses to dominate the media, not the figurehead.

(free bonus: it'll also help you get rid of that ridiculous two-party system)

I really want to know the truth. There were some really vocal never-Trumpers like Graham who flipped to become extremely loyal supporters. Why? What makes someone become that fiercely loyal to a man they absolutely know will not show any loyalty to them? It has to be power, he knows something, I guess. In the case of Graham, it can't be proof that he's gay, that wouldn't surprise anybody, even his own constituents. So it's got to be something far more devastating.

I had no idea that there were rumors about Graham being gay. That may very well upset his constituents. They may be fine as long as they can pretend it's not real, but with overwhelming proof or even a confession that could spell disaster.

I dunno. I am intrigued, though.

Trump never was the leader of the GOP, was he? He turned people like Cruz and Graham into devote followers. Mostly, I think, out of fear of Trumps base. People like McConnell were never swayed, these people pushed their policies through. Yes, Trump has his stable 40%. But with him gone, that number will decrease. The GOP will make sure of that, because continuously embrassing Trump after he lost will only hurt them.

Maybe that's wishful thinking, but for now I, as a European, am grateful that the US internal problems are again internal ones and don't affect every country on Earth anymore. I am also glad that the incoming admin already now seems a lot better prepared and organized to fight COVID-19 and its effects. Because that alone will safe lives. And maybe a couple of years of America's absence from Western leadership was a necessary wake up call for the world in general.

Personally, so I hope Biden finds a way to sort stuff like healthcare, police violence, voter suppression, gerrymandering out. Because that can only be good.

Ah, and before I forget, I hope Harris as VP is a sign that they intend to legally clean up Trump's legacy. Letting him get away scott free because he was president once would do as much harm to Democracy than 4 more years of Trump.

You are about to see how important this confirmation veto is.

Regardless, does this even matter in terms of how politically powerful that single person is?

In this context, the electoral college is an implementation detail. American voters put a checkmark next to their personal preference for president, UK voters do no such thing.

> Regardless, does this even matter in terms of how politically powerful that single person is?

Yes, it makes a huge difference! The PM of the UK stays prime minister as long as they have the confidence of a majority of the House of Commons. The president of the US can only be prematurely removed if they are convicted of serious crime.

No, House impeachment and Senate trial do not require a serious or indeed any crime. Impeachment is entirely a political matter akin to losing a confidence vote. It carries no penalty besides removal from office. Serious crimes and misdemeanors is not specified and drunkenness has been used (although it was around 1800 or so).

Because the federal government collects so much of the tax revenue they have so much of the power. Politics is mainly deciding who gets the money. I’d prefer if my state and my town had more to do with it than pols from places I have nothing in common with.

Yea, so if you could let the media know, that would be great.

The media will report on who has the power, simple as that.

Sounds like they are the problem then to me. They could just be giving airtime to local representatives instead. Even your local mayor. Fortunately local news isn’t god awful about this, but the media decides what it wants to report on. If they want to report every Tweet that comes out of Trump’s account that is a decision they are making. They could just as easily report on numerous other topics.

You say this like Clinton did badly: she got 2.9M more votes than Trump!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

Most of the voting public rejected Trump in 2016. It's just that 77K of those votes were in the "wrong" places (MI 10K; PA 44K; WI 23K).

My point is that many of his 2016 votes were "anyone but Clinton." If he had a more appealing opponent, it wouldn't have been close.

The reality that's hit me this year is that most Americans will vote for anyone who wins "their" party's primary. Everything else is rationalization.

It is denial to say they don't want Trump. They truly do want him.

I think he did 62.9 million last time and is at 70.5 now.

More people got out and voted, and more people voted for trump than before.

I think this also explains why more partisan rhetoric wins. It gets more people mobilized, while not really hurting you with moderates. It only hurts you with people who think. Who're a tiny minority. (I'm not convinced I'm one of them.)

I agree in principle, the majority of people will just vote party line. But there is no doubt that Trump supporters came out in force in 2020 far greater than 2016. I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people think Trump is an ideal choice for President, but I do continue to try and listen, maybe I will finally get hit with the clue bat. I've got Trump fans as friends, but they can never really articulate why I should agree with them other than 'democrats bad'. And that doesn't resonate with me, because I need something more than simple tribalism to guide my choice.

> A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath

* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/large-port...

The middle class in America paid for globalization in a way that the lower and upper classes have not. I spent enough time in other countries to truly appreciate that there are 1 billion less people in poverty because of globalization. But they are also very many angry people who will point out that globalization has not been great for them. The only politician who They felt they could turn to was Trump.

I can go on and on and on. While America could never return to the post WW2 position, there were ways to make the current position bearable which were not taken due to ideological and political reasons.

Eventually, China will use its huge manufacturing edge to create a military advantage - this is already starting to happen - and then it could bully all of East Asia to give its trade massive advantages, while absorbing Taiwan.

The US must rebalance before it is too late. Hopefully latest technological development might make this rebalance easier.

And also not to forget, that the social systems, that we have built to make up/downs in the cruel nature more bearable, they have not been globalized. It is, when one looks at each country, still very local. If everything is more distributed and in different political zones, i think, they will fall apart, as the money went somewhere else, where production happens.

We will see.

It's also an economic choice: the suits could have shared the economic benefits more (or politicians redistributed more), but in Capitalism excess 'created value' tends to go to the owners (Capital), and so we got a rise in the concentration of wealth over the last forty years.

The divide between the have and have not could be stronger, though, when you dont have, maybe that is still a lot more to what you have today (e.g. medical progress), it is just not as much as the ones at the top.

And then the cycle continuous, the divide will be used to form agendas, and so on.

I think what hinders us the most in installing a proper system for globalization, that all these areas have grown for centuries and it is definitly not easy to unify and agree on something. I hope, people have answers for that. I definitly do not want a system like communist china for that, i just "escaped" one myself, even though it probably has many advantages too. :-)

Hillary Clinton had a very long history of antagonizing anytime she could people on the right. For example remember her slut-shaming of bull Clinton’s accusers, or her attack in the “vast right wing consipriacy” trying to defend her husband from the totally untrue charges from Monica lewinsky. The reality of it is that the Democrats have to appeal to more than just their base to be elected. They seem to of learned that lesson this time.

You say this like Clinton did well. This is a sub 5% advantage over a racist game show host.

That's because a few blue states have huge population such as California.

If states don't have an ability to have a voice for themselves as states, what's the point of them at all? They gain this small but important nudge towards autonomy from the electoral college.

I really think the president should be by popular vote, but don't see any way this would ever get changed.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

I personally disagree with a state choosing to sacrifice its voice in such a way, but it's its right to do so, to award its votes how it sees fit.

This is true even if we got rid of the senate, the EC, and every federal body had purely population-proportional representation (which I am in favor of).

Making the president of the whole country be elected directly by the whole country would not make states redundant, far from it.

The Three-Fifths Compromise is intrinsically related to the electoral college, because it instructed how to count slaves when determining how many House seats a state would get.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only one. Another problem is that electors are allocated to the winner of the state popular vote no matter how close it is.

> Without the senate the electoral college is just a popular vote.

Even if you didn’t count Senators for the purposes of electoral votes, you could still end up with one candidate winning the popular vote and another winning the electoral vote.

https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/

> Are you implying that each Californian should count for less than one vote?

In a federalist republic, yes that's exactly what that means. The country was deliberately designed as a collection of independent states, and not a single population whose diversity is merely geographic.

Hmm... Couldn't it be argued that this haven't really been the case since the civil war?

When I lived in SF, most Americans I met weren't originally from California (not had they lived there long).

* https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-engine-blue-america-1...

> There's a decisive break between Democratic and Republican support at a population density of 800 persons/per square mile.

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-01/how-the-d...

In 2016, California had the 3rd most votes for Trump, with 4.5M.

Similarly, despite losing the state 52/43, Texas contributed the 4th highest count for Hillary.

With Trump I feel like we dangerously moved towards having super celebrity presidents that are more interested in being King. I don't think the US should have a King. It should have someone that "PRESIDES" over governments boring ass functions.

The best thing I can say about biden at the moment is that he’s phenomenally unlikely to continue this cult of personality presidencies that we’ve had.

I tend to think he was right.

The point that GP was making, was that perhaps a president should not be the only one in the spotlight, and that his interventions should be more "rare". And I simply pointed out that a similar discussion had taken place in France.

However, if you compare the number of interviews, speeches, or other public interventions, they have been greatly reduced since the hyperprésidences of Sarkozy and Hollande.

As Dominique de Villepin predicted at the time (2010): a president that is omnipresent, managing everything directly, ends up being isolated, and paradoxically powerless since he is overloaded.

If you don’t know anyone who likes Biden you live in a bubble. My parents like Biden and they dislike the Squad. The riots scared them. They’re older, and immigrants, and they think Carter was really swell. Biden is exactly who they wanted. And there are a lot of people like them. They’re the kind of people that turned northern VA blue.

On the other hand, I know lots of people who voted him on his own merits which and they listed them as - he is centrist, he was a senator/VP which means he has the experience and knowledge to navigate congress, he has good ethics/morals (which means they could tell their kids to look up to him), he is a Christian, he believes in climate change.

I know lots of Democrats who are moderates/centrists and preferred Biden over Bernie and Warren.

Personally, I also found him to be a good candidate and not a 'he is not trump so automatically he is better'

I am a huge proponent of ranked choice voting, and I donate to https://www.fairvote.org/. Politics have a wide spectrum of opinions and choices, and our government should represent that.

Score voting or approval voting is simpler and has none of the non-monoticity of instant runoff.

We also need to undo the damage conspiracy theories have done in the red parts of this country -- many extremely blue collar meat and potatoes should-be-core-of-the-democratic-party people wince when they hear that you are a democrat because they have been taught by fox news and facebook that democrats are evil coastal elites who don't care about the working class and are part of the deep state.

Right now everything we say to them tends to push them further away (e.g. the voter fraud court cases getting immediately thrown out in court because they were without merit will be seen by these voters as PROOF of the deep state). To win over voters like this, we have to actually _watch_ the media they consume to figure out how to inoculate them from the cult-like conspiracy theories they have become vulnerable to.

This sounds like you suggest there is/was fraud or cheating, which you shouldn't be doing. Not sure if that was what you intended.

I agree with the rest of your post though. Joe here won because of the division in the democratic party. He would have lost to most Republicans. He gathered the most votes ever for obvious reasons. People didn't exactly stay home this year. There has never been more enthusiasm for voting, whether it was for or against something.

If Trump voters are really upset about it, states can audit the vote and show that fraud was a very small percentage, and didn't change any outcomes. (Both sides commit fraud, so they tend to cancel each other out.)

When I see Trump talk, I wonder if he really believes what he says or if he knowingly and willfully lies.

What this man has done in four years has put a great damage to the democratic culture in the US, and he badly harmed the reputation of the US around the world, especially when it comes to old allies in Europe.

Edit: If Trump was not a narcisstic egomanianc („I WON THIS ELECTION BY A LOT“?!? Wtf?!), he would have stepped up in dignity, conceded his loss, congratulated Biden and wished him well. The US is confronted with many challenges in the midst of a huge pandemic, the nation is divided, and all he has to say is he won by a lot (in big letters)?!? This is it?

When they say why, it becomes understandable. "I came here with $7.23 in my pocket and didn't even speak the language. I'm making a living. Get off welfare and get a job."

The Dems are painted as the party of handouts and the handouts torque the immigrants off. The immigrants are working extremely hard,sending money home to their families and so on.

Oh, wait…

A lot of hispanics voted for Trump in this election.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/14/florida-latinos-dis...

Pretty sure Hispanics can think for themselves, with factual references at hand. I believe the linked article paints them in an unfairly gullible light, while it does nothing to discredit what it claims as being conspiracy theories. They point to current developments happening in their home countries, only becoming discreditable 'theories' because of the absurdity in which they are framed (in the article).

To name an example, The Open Foundation (associated with philanthropist Soros) has been funding parties and congresspeople all over S.A. who are looking to advance certain social causes. This is part of funding declarations by the recipients, and since it's not unlawful, and not a secret, it's not a conspiracy; and since it's not fiction, it's not a theory (in the sense of supposition). One of such causes is the decriminalization of abortion, an issue that's been traditionally (fiercely) opposed.

Considering Trump's aim to defund Planned Parenthood, and the appointment of a fitting (Catholic) judge to the Supreme Court, couldn't they not lean towards him in this aspect on the grounds of a proven track record, rather than just propaganda?

We should all be so lucky to "fail" that badly...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...

That sounds like you believe parties don't always adjust to the electorate. No major party can have a platform that doesn't allow them to get a majority of the vote. So if demographics means the country becomes liberal, then so do both parties. That doesn't mean the conservative party isn't the more conservative one. It might mean that they want single payer healthcare or, for example.

That’s patently false: one Republican president in 28 years has been elected with a majority of the vote.

On the local level, gerrymandering and vote suppression are both tactics to get around the need to appeal to a majority, and the GOP has embraced both.

If it weren't winning the presidency, it would be compelled to be more competitive. No major party exists nationally without winning presidential elections.

Republicans will become a minority party with no power at all. Democrats will get mad that there are Republicans on the ballot, so the rules will be changed to allow two Democrats on the ballot, a progressive one and a "liberal"/moderate one (and no Republican). This allows progressive policies to continue, and the legislature ends up being a supermajority mix of progressive Democrats and liberal Democrats, with some useless Republicans from a few low-population counties.

There's absolutely no reason the US won't follow this same pattern: it works.

(You can also see the Democratic Party's progressive/liberal split today with the DSA. That's just the CA dynamic going national.)

Also why would that happen? There are tons of republicans in California. Obviously, California republicans running for state offices should have a platform that might resemble a D platform. Because as I said - you adjust to the elctorate. What parties stand for isn't written in stone. Parties that think it is will become irrelevant. Annd no, not because they are banned from running.

If they bothered to break democracy, why hold elections at all? There is no legitimacy coming from a one party election. Multi party and ranked choice I hope will bring some sanity to the system.

Republicans work about as hard keeping more right-associated candidates off the ballot (e.g. libertarians).

CA voters approved the change. Who's being divisive here? If voters want more relevant choices on the final ballot, and vote for the change, that should be fine in a Democracy.

Or maybe you prefer some other kind of rule?

I thought you were speculating about what a party would do which you disagree with. If this is indeed something that happened (despite your use of future tense) I apologize.

> If voters want more relevant choices on the final ballot, and vote for the change, that should be fine in a Democracy.

If they decided to simply not have elections, because people want all D so what's the point, would that be OK in a democracy? (Answer: No, because it's not a democracy any more then).

I feel this discussion has sidetracked a bit. I think the conclusion is this: in a 2 party system, if opinions shift (due to time/demographics/fashion/talk radio...) then if both parties don't adapt, you risk ending up with a de-facto one party rule. And that's not the fault of the party that didn't need to change, but the fault of the party that needed to but didn't.

Imagine a district with the following breakdown: 35% Progressive D, 35% Liberal/moderate D, 25% Republican, 5% Other. So overall, 70% D.

CA used to mandate that on the final ballot, you got one choice per party, e.g. one D, one R, and N "Other".

Here's what would happen: the D primary would have a Progressive and a Liberal/moderate. But because Progressives were a lot more "activist", they got out and voted in the primary and their candidate would win. So the final ballot would be: Progressive D, moderate R, N "Other".

In the election, enough Liberal/moderate Ds would NOT vote for the Progressive D, so the moderate Republican kept winning, despite only being 25% of the electorate and not voting with Democrats in the legislature, even though 70% of their district were Democrats.

The change was to have the top two candidates of any party on the ballot. This resulted in a Progressive D and a Liberal/moderate D (and no R). R's (of course) vote for the Liberal/moderate D in this scenario on the final ballot, and they win (and vote with the Democrats in the legislature). This, more or less, is why Democrats have a supermajority in CA, but it's really two wings of the same party, and they have to negotiate much the same way that Democrats and Republicans in the US Senate have to get along.

Just not in California. But it would be different federally, right?

As long as there are conservative Whites living in California in sufficient numbers, there will be a Republican Party to represent their interests—that's how a "representative democracy" is supposed to work. Republicans lose when there aren't enough Whites with conservative beliefs to elect them, and win when there are enough.

Republicans today remind me of the Confederacy in a lot of ways, and I expect them to fade away over time in a similar manner. The US can no longer support an effectively White-only national party.

I think this is a gross oversimplification (and demonstrably false if you look at some other countries), but OK, for the sake of argument let's say that one party represents one core demographic. Then one of these is true: 1) their core demographic is a majority or 2) they can attract enough share from other demographics without alienating their core demographic. or 3) they are, and should be a minority party.

I think a big part of the problem is that the US is a big and diverse place politically, so having parties with a huge national identity like the donkey and elephant is always problematic at the edges. R's simply have to attract more minority voters, more women voters, more young voters etc.

> I expect them to fade away over time in a similar manner. The US can no longer support an effectively White-only national party.

Well they will adapt or fade away. That of course goes for any political party, anywhere. A party can't please everyone. But it also can't perfectly please only a tiny core base. They need to broaden their support. But are they capable of that? It's like they think that "Attract voters from demographic X" means "Tell people in demographic X how good Republican policy is". What it should mean is actually change policy to attract that demographic.

Now: this state discussion misses a big point with the US political climate and it's that the divide isn't really between states, nor mostly between demographics like age or ethnicity, but between city and rural. I honestly don't quite understand why that divide is so pronounced.

He will literally say anything it takes, truthful or not, to win the current argument.

Anybody familiar with the church has encountered this sort of "playing both sides of the fence" before.

In both cases, the Holy Man has all the answers, and it sounds like they know what they are talking about-- even if their answers are contradictory.

Questioning that leads to circular logic you can't unravel, and in the end you give up and accept that they know better than you. Institutionalized gaslighting, in both cases.

Trump formed a committee to find voter fraud and for years it failed. It silently disbanded. The heritage foundation has researched voter fraud too, and it has found little to no evidence.

If that doesn't satisfy them, what will? You're basically saying we have to convince a group of people that fucking unicorns and dragons don't exist.

Don't repeat disinformation. This never happened.

Poll watchers were required to stand 10 feet away to protect workers from COVID-19. The court ruling required that they be allowed to stand 6 feet away.

Citation: https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2020/11/05/philadelphia-co...

It seems to me the counting authority should have set up some 4K CCTV gear, and/or 4K webcams on an internal network, for the duration. The pandemic gave them ample warning that physical distancing measures would be required.

The earlier post's premise--as pushed by Trump over Twitter--that Republican poll watchers were specifically targeted for exclusion, however, is factually wrong.

Can you read a ballot from 6 or 10 ft away? Does that affect the ability of observers to observe whatever it is they are responsible for observing?

Does COVID justify relaxing the rules on observation of a vote count?

There was a lawsuit filed by the Trump with regards to the distance requirements for safe viewing of vote counting. The judge overturned a lower court decision on what safe distances would be, and enabled observers to observe from 6 feet instead of 10.

The first source listed corroborates this story (although I haven't found any primary sources or what the exact contents of the complaint were, abcnews seems to be the source that most outlets are referencing https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pennsylvania-judge-permits-c...).

There doesn't seem to be any truth to observers being removed from any tabulation rooms (or at least I can't find any trustworthy sources). The second source, while claiming this in the headline, is also just referencing the complaint discussed earlier and has twisted that into the headline.

People could have more faith in the process without more legal cases like Florida 2000 (which kept Gore out of the White House despite him winning the vote in Florida), the Brooks Brothers Riot[0] and its 2020 replicas, the 2019 Georgia governors race (where the Republican candidate was also the secretary of state responsible for counting the votes; needless to say, there were 'irregularities.'), pervasive efforts to prevent demographics that historically do not vote Republican from voting[1], manipulation of the postal service to disenfranchise likely Biden voters[2], the continuing myth of 'voter fraud' that the GOP spreads[3] to justify disenfranchisement, and the constant drumbeat of 'it's rigged if I don't win' emerging from Trump's Twitter account and replicated by Facebook and other right-wing media outlets.

There's no clear way to restore faith in the electoral process without removing disdain for democracy from the Republican Party's DNA.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-is-the-brooks-b...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/05/usps-late...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/24/fbi-has-not-seen-evidence-of...

The preponderance of partisan, Republican, judges on the supreme court is very much part of the problem.

Take a step back, take a deep breath, and remember that issues are more complicated than "my team good, your team bad."

Or perhaps we shouldn't investigate foreign election interference?

The DoJ very much found signs of Russian election interference. They just couldn't prove that the Trump campaign actively conspired with Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report

The 'Russia hoax' produced multiple criminal charges, both of Russians for interfering in the 2016 election, and of several Americans for obstructing the DoJ's attempts to investigate the possibility of people in the Trump orbit conspiring with the Russian government.

It has been factually established that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. The only question -- which cannot be answered because people in the Trump orbit lied to investigators and concealed evidence -- is whether the Trump campaign actively conspired with Russian entities beyond Trump openly asking for their help to access H. Clinton's 'emails.'

Take a step back, take a deep breath, and remember that some issues are a lot clearer than intentionally obfuscatory Republican narratives make them out to be.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report

If the process results in electing white supremacist like Trump, shouldn't that cause people to "lose faith in the process?"

Biden's historic turnout and election is proof the US doesn't want fascism. If that doesn't restore faith in the process, I don't know what would...

They need to believe. So they follow those that help them do so.

But I am in favor of investigating all (legitimate) allegations of fraud, not just the ones that DJT wants to investigate. And counting all ballots.

Of course. Which is why it's really only worth mentioning in the context of fraud actually changing anything significant.

Not sure why either side has anything to do with fraud in this election (I got that undertone from the post).

As always extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Now as someone who makes judgement not completely off facts but from what I see and feel, my eyes squint and my mouth pouts discerningly because I feel we are not much better off.

[1] https://youtu.be/XUnuLFIXWv4?t=267

> Likewise this time around, nobody I have talked to seriously voted for Joe Biden on his own merits. They voted for him because he's not Donald Trump.

That might just be a function of your bubble. Biden was probably the Democratic candidate with the broadest appeal, which is in fact his own merit. Biden wasn't running for President of California. He might not have deeply appealed to this or that demographic or ideological slice of the electorate, but if you go too far in that direction with a diverse electorate you risk getting either electable failures that bully the rest of the country (like Trump) or unelectable failures (like some of the other candidates in the primaries).

Political game theory favors appealing to the margin and the margin is moderate. The margin doesn’t take an extreme stance on social issues a la San Francisco. Quite the opposite: they hear things like “defund the police” and liberals shouting down “all lives matter” and they feel rightfully as if Democrats are threatening their place in society. The progressive politics of exclusion and contempt are totally unfit to the task of winning the electorate just as much as the equivalent conservative extreme.

Affirmative action strives to achieve top down equal results at the expense of privileging certain people on the basis of their biological character. The right solution is bottom up economic stimulus to create equal opportunity, and it should support poor Black/Hispanic Americans as well as poor White Americans (of which there are a sizable and growing number).

You need look no further than the failure of Prop 16 - which sought to remove language from the California Constitution that provides equal protections and consideration to all Californians irrespective of race, gender, etc - to understand how deeply unpopular these sorts of strategies to rectify societal imbalance really are.

While I am personally largely socially liberal, I’ve never understood how Democrats unironically adopted a policy agenda that explicitly preferences certain people on the basis of race, which is quite possibly the worst way to address racial injustice.

That’s very interesting (but not surprising) to hear. I’m in a conservative bubble, and many people I know voted for Trump because he’s not a Democrat and opposes policies of the modern Democratic Party.

There were many discussions among conservatives on how to set up criteria for what feels to many like a choice between good policy and good character — though others argue that’s a false dichotomy to begin with when most of the job in question is policy (i.e. policy is character in this case).

I mistakenly thought the line was way further back than it actually is and I just wonder where the line actually is. Trump wasn’t the line, the population could stomach worse.

Either way, I think voting for Biden on the “not Trump” basis is fine, and ultimately the blame for the what some voters see as an empty dichotomy lies flat at the feet of the short sightedness of the Republican Party.

My assumption is that the Cold War and fear of anything vaguely “commie” pushed the US that way as the gov in the 50s and 60s seems (from anecdotes) to have been very progressive.

I would love to see what would happen if you had single transferable vote (or similar) that picked the single issue voters away from the GOP. You might find a situation where the dems become everyone’s second choice because they are firmly in the Center and it would show just how unprogressive they really are (or at least how they appear to be to an international audience)

It still blows my brain that there isn’t wide spread single payer/NHS style health care in the richest country in the world.

And don’t get us started on gun control, I’ve travelled to dozens of countries around the world and nowhere have I felt less safe than SF/Buffalo/NY/Miami/Jackson.

And the odds are good it won't ever happen. It is deeply ingrained in the culture of this country that the gov't is bad, and private corporations are good. So we willingly accept death panels as long as it's some faceless insurance company, because hey, it's not the gov't.

Nevermind that we arguably have more control over the gov't than we do a faceless corporation. Short of changing jobs, I don't really have any leverage over my insurance provider.

I weigh more on the culture side, and I'm abhorred that institutions can blatantly teach racism like critical race theory, which discriminates an entire race. I don't believe ACAB. I'm disgusted that Pelosi thinks that people can topple statues if they want, and AOC says "Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? ", and the media kept spreading hoaxes like "fine people on both sides". I certainly don't agree that different political views should be moralized. Well, none that that matters now, I guess. American people have decided that left view is what they want, and we should respect and accept the decision.

I was telling my friend the other day, why is it that the presidency is a competition between retiree geriatrics of the same generation? Biden and Trump have 4 years difference in age. Where's the representation for people significantly younger than post-retirement age? Even Bernie Sanders, a favourite, is hitting his latter years, and it seems the Democrat candidate is just chosen by the DNC rather than what their voter base would like.

So, it's great news that Trump avoids a second term, but I don't see a progression in the political system yet.

I mean, I'm not thrilled it turned out that way this election, but that's not really the rule for Presidential elections; Carter, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama were 52, 46, 54 and 47 when elected.

Okay, I did, so you can't say that anymore. I didn't vote for him in the primary, but I voted for him in the general. There's good stuff here:

https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/

He's a centrist. I expect him to be right in the middle of the Democratic party. It's not as bold as I would like in some places and has things I don't like in others, but it's progress. It's substantive policy proposals to try to make headway on climate change, healthcare, covid19, jobs, and on and on.

That said, the reason Biden, despite his substantive proposals, isn't well-liked by Dems is because there seems to be broad disappointment with the Democratic party's failure to nominate and elect someone who is representative of the future we all want. There's a comment in this thread to the tune of "why are only 70 year old men running and winning the presidency in the USA" today. Indeed -- there's so much political failure in our government across the board that it's hard to believe in Biden and the party.

They both voted for Biden in the primary. I asked them why. Both said “because I thought he had the best chance to win the general.”

The Democrats keep picking centrists because we’re a centrist country, I guess.

I was going to vote for Buttigieg in the primary and voted Warren after he dropped out, but that was a symbolic vote since Biden had already locked it up.

I’ve recently shared my thoughts on how I think we got here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25004795

In a way his tough on drugs/crime history was necessary to pull in the hand-wringing boomers and fingers crossed he's flip flopped there and wants to be the cool grandpa who gets to legalize it before he croaks as his legacy or whatever.

I'm paraphrasing and streamlining several people's opinions on the matter here.

I always hope that some moderate politician will come along in deemphasize the power of the bases. A strongly pro environment Republican, or a true honest pro life Democrat. Unfortunately what we’ve seen, and continue to see in this election is at the wings in each party are all powerful.

We need to rebuild institutions that have been shaped by decades of imperial President rule. I agree with the chaos engineering example that was given earlier. We now know what part of the system don’t scale. Something that we cannot permit if we want to continue having a democracy is presidents acting like they can ignore law, make appointments were not in recess, pass executive orders with the force of law. We also need to stop excusing his behavior because of parties and links. Obama gave trump the weapons that he used in office with a national Labour relations Board debacle and his immigration orders. Trump orders were simply the flipside of that coin.

It’s time to re-factor America. we may want to consider going as far as making the presidency more of a Prime Minister role, as opposed to an independent position. The country and the stakes are now so high that we cannot afford to have another Donald Trump.

Me too. When I was a kid, I lived in a conservative farm state whose federal representation was 100% Democratic (just like most of its neighbors). Things just seem a lot more dysfunctional now, because the polarized conformity doesn't allow for enough heterodox party members who can help forge compromise on issues that actually have broad support.

IMHO, what the country really needs is a truce in the culture wars, and forget this winner-take-all battle for countrywide conformity.

It works in situations where there are few voters and their votes are all publicly visible.

Voters do not as a rule have a mathematical score for a candidate, excluding the case where they score equivalently to Approval.

Take a candidate which you did not vote for but do not hate, is your score for the candidate 1, 2 or 3.141529? Can you give an explanation for your score and why it is that exact value and not a bit higher or lower?

Asking people for information they do not have (a mathematical score for each candidate) leads to GIGO - unless just about everyone does Approval, in which case Score's just a more complicated, worse version of Approval.

Score's tactical logic leads to most voters giving the extreme scores to every candidate, and psychology means all these voters will end up justifying it to themselves - leading to extreme polarization when the losing side is convinced the winner has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The last presidential term showed what happens than, now repeat that for all levels of government all the time.

Worst of all, some very few people will actually give partial scores. Why is that bad? Well, what's the most common way to calculate scores today? There are various single-issue and ideological organizations which put out scores measuring representatives. Just about all these organizations represent absolutist POVs regarding their single issue or ideology (e.g. the NRA has a score for every representative). So to get a high score, representatives are pushed to extremes.

In the general election, using plain score voting is a bit dangerous; if you consider a Trump vs Clinton race where all the Trump voters give him a ten out of ten, and most of the Clinton voters give her a six or seven, then Trump wins by a bigger margin than he did in 2016. (STAR fixes this with an immediate runoff of the top two after maximalizing everyone's vote.) But in a primary election, it might be good to get the candidate with the most enthusiasm behind them.

One difficulty in implementing something like this for the Democratic primary is that it isn't very compatible with the delegate system. Maybe that's not entirely a bad thing and delegates should be done away with, but sometimes it's good to have a group of people at the convention who can make decisions if something unexpected happens to one of the candidates.

You could have individual states adopt different voting systems for their primaries and just use them to allocate delegates. For instance, instead of allocating delegates proportionally to anyone with more than 15% of the vote using first-past-the-post ballots like we do now, allocate delegates proportional to their candidate's total score, perhaps with some cut-off (like, no delegates awarded if your score average is less than 4 out of 10) or a rule that only the top N candidates are awarded delegates.

(One of the reasons I prefer approval voting over score voting is that there's less of a gap between strategic voting and honest voting. Everyone is forced to give a maximalized yes/no vote for each candidate rather than casting a lukewarm vote.)

You're right that score voting does better in that simulation when everyone votes honestly. But if everyone votes strategically, then score voting and approval voting are the same. (This makes sense because tactical score voting is mostly just score voting with maximalized votes, which is basically the same as approval voting.)

Using approval voting basically forces everyone to use tactical voting. Which might be less good in some metrics but it ensures that all voters have basically the same amount of influence, as opposed to tactical voters having more influence than honest voters. I think having equal influence is pretty important.

I'm not sure if this simulation that everyone likes to cite has been run more recently with STAR voting. That would be interesting.

[1] https://ncase.me/ballot/

What are the incentives for someone not to vote 99 for the candidate he wants to win, and 0 for all others ?

I think we’ve proved that FPTP works badly a lot of the time, time to try something else

I think that what people don't want to admit is that Trump is what half of America wants. He is the right kind of masculine man and has all the right approaches.

Fun fact I recently learned, but a 2013 Quinnipiac University poll found Hillary Clinton to be the most popular US politician with 61% approval.

I was shocked when I learned this, but it makes me wonder if the idea that Clinton is broadly unpopular is mostly just a meme?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-clinton-idUS...

What Trump got right and why he won against Hillary back in 2016 is that US is on the brink of losing its hegemony. Nationalistic Americans flocked to his appeals to close off borders, to renegotiate trade deals, back out of agreements that hurt the US, and promise bringing manufacturing back into our borders.

Biden is a career politician so he knows how to say all the right words to appeal to as many people as possible, but where those words fail is in their over-promise in that the sum of policies put forth simply don't add up. Not that trump hasn't made promises he couldn't keep, but he has taken and put into motion a lot of things that represent a very nationalistic ideology.

Personally I think that even with the dysfunctional pathologically lying brain that Trump had, he was on the side with the better economic playbook. Regardless of what one may think about him, Trump is the one with business experience, and Biden is the one with political experience. And as much as I would love to believe that we live in a world where we can make allies, and negotiate, and hand out financial aid, and work together to green the earth, the reality is we live in a Corporatocracy, and that even Biden came to power by its merits.

I was very much on the fence. Lets just say I wasn't feeling very positive about the next four years even before the election was called.

Ah, yes, the "fiscally conservative" move to give permanent tax cuts to billionaires, while giving small, temporary tax cuts to everyone else. And without a plan to cut spending.

> Trump is the one with business experience, ...

45 has experience... losing money. A lot. And having his businesses going bankrupt, several times. The next bankruptcy will be interesting, as he is personally on the hook for $400M USD.

IMO the democrats did themselves a big disservice by having such popular alternatives to both trump _and_ biden.

eg: yang was popular, sanders was popular, harris was popular. People wanted their candidate to be running for president, and were left with re-evaluating who they'd vote for (trump or biden) when their favorite was cut.

I really think the presidential election needs the following reforms:

Electoral votes map to popular vote in each state.

Runoff voting allowing parties to run multiple candidates without fearing the dilution of a "leader" (eg One could have voted "Yang, Sanders, Harris, Biden" and still be generally assured their vote benefitted their party.

Minor parties such as green + libertarian need to be invited to debates.

In the case of such polarized racial politics, the Democrats needed a white male to try to not further inflame the white base and pick off as many white voters as possible. That left a nonrepresentative candidate for the almost-majority minority "everyone else".

Racial politics have underpinned presidential elections since... well, slavery. This one was no different, it just had the sad spectacle of overt racism rather than at least SOME window dressing overlaid on the "Southern Strategy" since the civil rights era.

> We need better candidates who generate real support and appeal other than just not being their opponent. Not sure how to get there.

This is in great part due to First Past The Post voting method[1] employed. The US isn't interested in democracy if they can't at least move from FPTP to something at least as good as Approval Voting. (Which is one of the simplest alternatives)

Some criterions FPTP does no meet from Wikipedia[1][2]:

1. Mutual Majority Criterion: if a majority (more than 50%) of voters top-rank some k candidates, then one of those k candidates must win.

2. Condorcet Winner Criterion: if a candidate would win a head-to-head competition against every other candidate, then that candidate must win the overall election.

3. Condorcet Loser Criterion: if a candidate would lose a head-to-head competition against every other candidate, then that candidate must not win the overall election.

4. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Criterion: the election outcome remains the same even if a candidate who cannot win decides to run.

5. Independence of Clones Alternatives Criterion: the election outcome remains the same even if an identical candidate who is equally-preferred decides to run.

6. No favorite betrayal: Can voters be sure that they do not need to rank any other candidate above their favorite in order to obtain a result they prefer?

At least consider how 2, 4, and 6 affect alternatives like Howie Hawkins, Bernie Sanders, or Gloria la Riva to name some examples. I find it hypocritical when US government officials criticize 1-party states when the US is a 2-party state and as if that was a big qualitative difference.

[1]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/First-past-the-post_voting#/Effe...

[2]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#...

Republican voters don't seem to have the same problem. I mean, Trump was probably the least "electable" candidate of all time. But he got a lot of people excited about voting.

To compare Clinton, who had been a senator and Secretary of State, and cast her as a bad choice compared to a billionaire heir and reality tv star who had no experience is sort of absurd. Politics is a popularity contest and heavily influenced by media and irrational thoughts and behavior.

Among those holding highest office across the planet - how many can you name that you genuinely love and respect? Maybe a handful? In a sane world, how can people like Trump, Bolsanaro, Duterte etc hold the highest office in their countries?

Business world isn’t that great either.

Somehow we have reached a situation where it is getting harder to find good leaders

The argument would be that there's a strong elitism that manifested in the Democratic Party, which abandoned some of its core Progressive principles with things like NAFTA (and the never-ending wars). H. Clinton echoed this, with a haughty campaign that called people she should be wooing 'deplorables,' skipping campaigning in key battleground states, and blaming sexism for some of her campaign failures ("it's about me") instead of self-reflection ("How could I have had broader appeal.") Even today you'll often find people reminding you that Trump appeals to people without college degrees. Outside of a pure data context, saying that over and over again suggests that somehow people with degrees are better capable of selecting the leaders of everyone, which is an extremely elitist perspective. So Trump comes along, attacks NAFTA and free trade, speaks plainly and so forth.

Was he making false promises about returning jobs overseas, helping workers and other Sanders talking points? Absolutely. But the self-reflection that needs to happen here (given the loss of two dozen House seats and numerous local upsets) is, what are we doing wrong, here.

To wit:

Exit polls, which can be unreliable, pegged his national support at 32%-35% of the Latino vote. More tellingly were results in certain counties. Starr County, Texas, the county with the highest percentage of Hispanic or Latino voters — above 95% — voted for Hillary Clinton by a 60-point margin in 2016, but gave Biden just a five point win in 2020.

Even more amazing was Trump’s performance among Black voters. The man whose 2016 message to “the blacks” was very nearly a parody of long-ago New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino’s pledge that “My heart is as black as yours” must have found a new way to connect. Trump doubled his support with Black women, moving from 4% in 2016 to 8%, while upping his support among Black men from 13% to 18%. Remember, this was after four years of near-constant denunciations of Trump as not just a racist, but the leader of a literal white supremacist movement:

[...]

Trump’s numbers with the LGBTQ community were a stunner also, jumping from 14% to 28%. In September, a dating app for queer men called Hornet ran a survey that showed 45% support for Trump among gay men. Ever since Trump jumped into politics, media observers have rushed to denounce any Trump-related data that conflicts with conventional wisdom, and the Hornet survey was no different. Out magazine quoted a communications professor from Cal Poly Pomona as saying, “To tout a Hornet poll as evidence of LGBTQ support for Trump is clickbaity, sloppy journalism.” Even the Hornet editor scoffed at his own poll, before it all turned out to be true in the election.

Trump even improved his standing among white women, 53% of whom were already pilloried in 2016 for voting for a man who bragged about how you “grab ‘em by the pussy, you can do anything.”

(Matt Taibbi, Which is the Real "Working Class Party" Now?, Nov 2020)

If you're educated, if you're middle class, like most people here, you want a president - any politician really - to be better than you. You want people smarter than you running the country, because you understand that governing is a boring job that requires skill.

But the second job of the president is to be a role model, to be a good example. And if the president is too good, too perfect, too clean, there's a bunch of people who are going to feel alienated or inferior. And that turns into resentment and hate.

So then Trump comes along. A sexist, racist, buffoon who ignores political correctness. And for a lot of people, having him as a role model makes it easier to keep up, to compare yourself. "He says it like it is", they say. His terribleness gives them permission to be equally terrible. If the president can grab women by the pussy, they can grab women by the pussy.

I don't know if splitting the Head of State from Chief Executive would help solve it, a lot of other countries have split the role, it's not like they have to go together. But it's clear that the governing job has to be moved away from the idiotic popularity contest that is the presidential election so that we can ensure we get people capable of governing in the role.

And you've also threw in "not politically-correct" into sexist and racist. As if, political correctness the correct approach, and it's on par with sexism and racism. That actually bothers me a lot, because sexism and racism are often actions, political correctness is speech, and speech is considered on par with action. But it bolsters the arguments that elites don't understand what the polling is saying, many Americans don't like political correctness. It skews right-wing, but there are a large number of economically left-wing people who, also, don't like political-correctness. The polls show it. And the two journalists I quoted above also reference this, and I can send some data if desired.

The educated "elites" use competency as a criteria, and the last four years clear show of incompetency and inability to govern seals the deal for them, and they don't understand how anyone could come to any other conclusion.

Meanwhile, the other camp is using relatability. They see all his flaws, and think that it makes Trump more human, and therefore a better president. They think Biden lacks "energy", and don't understand how anyone could want to vote for him.

Both sides are voting "correctly" according to their own criteria, which is why they're both so incredibly bewildered by how the other side votes. The disconnect isn't because one side is "better" at picking than the other using shared criteria, it's because both sides are using different criteria completely.

I think that there's a different argument, though, to explain the two-camp phenomenon. One clue is the locations of the red v. blue voters, and another is in the shifting of certain demographics I highlighted in the comment you replied to above. To recap, we noted that Trump's support among EVERY group that are not white males has gone up, not down. Among white males, Trump's support dropped by 4 points, but among blacks and especially hispanics, it went up.

I think there's a Left and a Right stance on cultural issues, and there's a Left and a Right stance on economic issues. Did you know that if you ask the question: Do you think racism is the most important issue facing America today? .. that the answer Yes is more likely to be seen the higher the degree of the person? So that's a good example of a Cultural Left issue of the present.

Let's take an Economic Left issue, minimum wage. I'm going to cherry pick one from a right-wing state, Florida. They voted to increase the minimum wage this week, which should come as a surprise.

Then you have the polling showing that Americans in large majority support a government healthcare option.

So clearly there is a shift going on here where Democrats are representing Cultural Left issue but, aside from a few Progressives within them, are still Economic Right. Trump had Economic Left talking points, even if he wasn't honest about them. That's why he won those people over. Much of the DNC are Cultural Left but Economic Center or Right, as evidence by Jeff Bezos happily putting BLM slogans on AWS console pages and dedicating much of the Washington Post to race and gender issues.

In summary: upper class liberals favor the establishment DNC because of their focus on the Cultural Left issues, like gender and race, and less educated / poorer and for sure rural cultural groups often favor a Trumpian set of politics. Should we even talk about the right-wing attitudes about hands-off Silicon Valley and Wall St. among mainstream Democrats? And how else would you explain the Republicans suddenly talking anti-Wall St. rhetoric (Tucker Carlson), opposing NAFTA (Trump [ stealing Bernie's talking points ], and taking an economic Populist approach to tariffs and trade?

I think Biden prevails on one thing: the public don't believe Trump will contain COVID.

Sanders would have lost too, once Trump begun to paint him as a socialist commie. Oddly, O'Malley would have won easily.

Voters like users of a software application are hostile, irrational and often unqualified to use the system.

The question is what will we do and how will we improve our form of government now that the stress test of Trump’s presidency is over?

How do we make a more perfect union in the face of often uninformed, unqualified voters?

How do we really ensure that our officials are ethical and responsible individuals seeking to serve?

I have no clue.

And they're weren't making a joke, they were dead serious.

And a portion of dem voters were pissed off about how Sanders was treated by the DNC, though I have no idea if that caused any meaningful portion to abstain or vote for Trump.

Did you talk to the black voters in Clayton county, Atlanta or Philadelphia? Because it was them who put Biden over the line and put the election results beyond doubt.

I voted for Biden because although I didn't always agree with Team Obama/Biden, they weren't 10% as divisive as Donald Trump.

Anecdotes aside, I'd love to see any real data you have on this topic.

Also, my dad was able to get healthcare under the ACA, at a time we really needed it. I don't know how much credit for that belongs to Biden alone, but he was a part of it. He's passed away now, but I'm thankful my mom didn't have to mortgage their home at the time.

My family lived about 15 minutes outside of Stillwater, OK. Thanks to DJT's rhetoric, my black in-laws only saw open racism and derogatory comments, because of both their race and religion.

I'll pick lifelong politicians over any candidate that wants to make me a third-class citizen.

Yeah, he stands and works for people that have been underestimated, as you've just done.