2024 Election Discussion General

[zurew]

3 hours ago, DocWatts said:

That said, Trump is %100 going to try to overturn this election should be lose, since the presidency is what's standing between him and a prison sentence. But this will likely happen through lawfare and scheming rather than an armed uprising.

Sure, but lets say that it fails.

Would MAGA and Trump just sit down and accept the whole thing, or would they actually do an armed uprising? I don't see a good reason from Trump's pov why would it be better for him to just go to jail and to not engage in an armed uprising after failing to overturn the election using scheming and lawfare.

[What Am I]

1 minute ago, zurew said:

Sure, but lets say that it fails.

Would MAGA and Trump just sit down and accept the whole thing, or would they actually do an armed uprising? I don't see a good reason from Trump's pov why would it be better for him to just go to jail and to not engage in an armed uprising after failing to overturn the election using scheming and lawfare.

Interesting point. If Trump's alternative is dying in prison, maybe he wouldn't hold back his supporters from trying to physically prevent that. Man, what a mess we seem to be in.

I think a lot of what ends up happening will be at least partially influenced by how the election's fairness is perceived. I've only noticed a couple events that could be seen as fishy, like the video of those ballots being burned and Dominion mentioning a flaw (which they claim to have fixed) in some of their voting machines. I'm not claiming any foul play; just that it can probably be perceived that way. Hopefully the list doesn't grow much larger.

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Sure, but lets say that it fails.

Would MAGA and Trump just sit down and accept the whole thing, or would they actually do an armed uprising? I don't see a good reason from Trump's pov why would it be better for him to just go to jail and to not engage in an armed uprising after failing to overturn the election using scheming and lawfare.

Mind you, I'm not saying that Trump's Cult won't be primed for political violence should he lose.

Any political violence will be aimed at sewing enough chaos to disrupt certification of the election, with the hope that either the Supreme Court or House of Representatives will overturn the results in Trump's favor. The basic aim is to create a chaotic environment which throws doubt on the results as a pretext for his next coup attempt.

Short of an historic blowout on election night, Trump is %100 going to try and declare victory before the bulk of ballots are counted. He'll be rely on the 'red mirage' affect that we saw in 2020 (where certifying ballots from high population density cities takes far longer than in rural areas) to claim that he 'won' before all votes have been counted.

To that end, Trump has been flooding polling aggregates like 538 with a slew of paid-for low quality partisan polls, which he will use as a pretext for the baseless claims that the polls showed him winning, and now the election is being stolen from him.

Edited October 31 by DocWatts

[integration journey]

So any predictions guys? Who do you think will win? 

[mojsterr]

Everyone knows who

[Yimpa]

[Hardkill]

According to latest Gallup, voter enthusiasm amongst Democrats/Democratic-leaning is the highest that it's been since Obama ran in 2008. It may even be higher than it was in 2008.

Also, voter enthusiasm amongst all registered voters for this election is arguably even higher than it was in both 2008 and 2020.

Edited October 31 by Hardkill

[hundreth]

16 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

According to latest Gallup, voter enthusiasm amongst Democrats/Democratic-leaning is the highest that it's been since Obama ran in 2008. It may even be higher than it was in 2008.

Based on what I've seen from the MAGA people in my life, they're ready to be shot out of a cannon. I wouldn't put much stock in this.

[Hardkill]

8 minutes ago, hundreth said:

Based on what I've seen from the MAGA people in my life, they're ready to be shot out of a cannon. I wouldn't put much stock in this.

I am sure the MAGA people are very pumped. 

However, I wouldn't underestimate the amount of women who will be coming out in droves because of reproductive freedoms. Also, the fear of another Trump presidency has become palpable amongst Democrats, most Independents, and anti-Trump Republicans throughout the whole country. 

Also, Harris seems to be generating a very similar level of enthusiasm that Obama either in 2008 or 2012 did. She's turning out to be no Hillary Clinton 2.0. Meanwhile, most of the general electorate is getting really sick and tired of Trump.

Edited October 31 by Hardkill

[integration journey]

4 minutes ago, Hardkill said:

I am sure the MAGA people are very pumped. 

However, I wouldn't underestimate the amount of women who will be coming out in droves because of reproductive freedoms. Also, the fear of another Trump presidency has become palpable amongst Democrats, most Independents, and anti-Trump Republicans throughout the whole country. 

Also, Harris seems to be generating a very similar level of enthusiasm that Obama either in 2008 or 2012 did. She's turning out to be no Hillary Clinton 2.0.

I hope this is true. 

[Hardkill]

Just now, integration journey said:

I hope this is true. 

Plus, Harris has Tim Walz! 

[Stovo]

It's possible that Dems refuse to accept the result too, though less likely. 

[zazen]

 

[What Am I]

Just now, Stovo said:

It's possible that Dems refuse to accept the result too, though less likely. 

They're in a scenario where to do so now would look quite bad optically.

[zazen]

Bret Weinstein (swung from Dem to Rep) was asked if he fears Trumps team will implode due to Trump being difficult to work with:

Bret: That’s the fear that I have, believe me. I have all kinds of fears. I also have a good deal of hope based on a number of people who I now know, who know the man personally, and do not have this experience. So I’m hopeful that he is wiser than he was and that he sees that he has a historic opportunity. I fear what might unfold, but I think we have this incredibly powerful force in the unity movement that simply needs to figure out what happens post-election and exert the right kind of pressure.

If Trump is moving in the direction of rescuing us from the peril that we find ourselves in, then the unity movement is an incredible tool that he should be able to utilize to do that well, because no president understands all of the issues that are downstream of their decision-making. So seeding the right people is obviously the way a great president is going to function. On the other hand, if he dispenses with, you know, Elon and Bobby and Tulsi and the rest of us, then this force is the most useful check you’re going to have, because frankly, we retain our ability to speak on behalf of, frankly, not just the American people, but the world has such a stake in our election.

And most people do not have the privilege of being able to signal their consent or lack thereof, so the world is really depending on us to reign in the out-of-control forces that have taken over our ferociously powerful system. And I really see the unity movement as well-positioned either way.

Tom: What do you make of the way that the political parties have flipped? Is there a game being played? Is this just sort of a natural ebb and flow? Because seeing Trump in a McDonald’s is just… for somebody that was, you know, growing up in the 1980s, like, that was not the vision of the Republic. Republicans were Gordon Gekko, and the Democrats would have been in McDonald’s. So what has happened?

Yeah, I actually did a pretty good job, I think, on the last DarkHorse podcast of describing the dynamics that led us here. So I’ll do a quick version. What I think happened is the Republicans were the corrupt corporate party. They effectively represented management, and in the world that you and I grew up in, the Democratic Party represented labor, which was not without its corruption. Labor was a corrupt force too, but roughly speaking, the red team was management, the blue team was labor. The blue team was powerful because labor always outnumbers management by a huge margin, but management has a power advantage based on the concentration of wealth, and these two things were battling in our political landscape.

Clinton, whatever it is that he may have been thinking, changed the Democratic Party. He effectively cut labor loose and made the Democratic Party into a second corrupt corporate party, which was superficially coherent because the way that some corporations want the body politic corrupted is in conflict with the way other corporate entities might want it corrupted, right? Do you want a workforce that you are entitled to make sick with bad drugs, or do you want a workforce that you’re entitled to exploit by virtue of their ability to generate wealth and be frozen out of the product of it?

Those are two competing corruptions, so we had two corrupt parties. Labor was completely cut adrift. Anybody who wanted to get out of the corruption racket could have embraced the now-politically homeless labor force, but it never happened, and it was prevented from happening through the wielding of the idea of what I call the Lesser Evil Paradox. Anybody who tries to walk into this too-corrupt corporate party system with a party that just simply addresses the needs of average people is accused of electing the greater evil, and so nobody survives that accusation.

Okay, so you’ve got two corrupt corporate parties, labor is unable to find a representative because the first-past-the-post voting in our system creates a two-party system, and if they’ve both embraced corporate greed, there’s nobody to speak for the people. And then you get a hugely unusual creature like Donald Trump, and what Donald Trump did was he effectively collected a large fraction of this now politically homeless labor movement and brought them over to the Republican party. So he was not a traditional Republican in any way, and he’s not an obvious working-class hero, but because he’s politically adept, he was able to capture this energy that existed in these now-betrayed laborers and to create MAGA and to bring them over to the Republican party.

The Republican party now had a choice, which was to accept this and become a powerful political force at a substantial cost to their corrupt owners. Now that, of course, played out, and what’s happening now is that as this, as the Republican party now becomes a home for this homeless force of labor, it is driving all of the concentrated corruption, which is no longer just corporate. This now involves the Deep State and the neocons, and these are not inherently corporate corruptions; these are other kinds of corruptions, but it’s driving all of those things onto the one team.

You now have Dick Cheney embracing the Democrats, signaling that this is really a pole flip in the political landscape. And now the question is, will the Republicans embrace their new role as a populist party and jettison the last of their corporate corruptors, which would make the transition complete?

I would also point out, though, the final thing here is that originally, when MAGA was captured and named and brought over to the Republican Party by Donald Trump, it was largely a white movement. It is now, because of various forces, increasingly picking up a wide diversity of people, and it’s welcoming to them. What I’m really describing is that there are game-theoretic dynamics in our system which will actually, through relatively natural processes including corruption, cause this inversion of the parties. And it’s not the first time we’ve seen it; I mean, don’t forget the Republican party was born under Abraham Lincoln in a fight against slavery, right?

So the party that fought slavery was dragging its heels during the Civil Rights Movement. Party inversions happen, and we’re watching it happen in real time by a mechanism that I think is surprising but relatively straightforward.
 

Tom: All right, great explanation, knowing that we’re about to go through this adaptive valley. What is your pithiest appeal for people to vote in a way that will see us through this adaptive valley?

Well, I think they’ve done us a favor by making this simple choice. It’s Nature’s way of telling us that that’s not the Democratic Party we remember and the diversity in every meaningful way of what’s taking place under the red banner does not tell us that the Republican party is going to become something honorable, but at least it opens the possibility of our moving forward in a way that is consistent with our open embrace of people across all sorts of demographic lines. So the concentrated evil on the one side makes the uncertainties on the other side unimportant. We should move forward in the one direction that can be defended, and then we should do everything in our power to make sure that it behaves as well as it can.

We should be realistic; we can’t hold it to standards that it can’t meet, but we should offer our help, and we should pressure it to move in a direction that actually matches the values that all reasonable people actually share. This was really part of the message of “rescue the Republic.” When you get right down to it, we’re told we can’t get along with each other, but the amount that we agree on so completely dwarfs the part we disagree on that it makes things simpler than we are allowed to understand.

[integration journey]

Genuine question, Does my vote matter in a state like California where I know it’s going to be blue regardless? 

[What Am I]

5 minutes ago, integration journey said:

Genuine question, Does my vote matter in a state like California where I know it’s going to be blue regardless? 

It'd count towards the popular vote, which would matter if you want to improve the perception of your preferred candidate.

[Joshe]

@zazen If Harris filled her administration with her children and her besties and had an axe to grind against anyone who didn't bend the knee, wouldn't that wreak of corruption? 

If George Soros donated 150 million to Kamala and then Kamala granted Soros full control over reshaping government agencies and institutions and he could hire and fire anyone and even scrap entire agencies, wouldn't that be another indication of corruption? 

Of course it would. It would be overt. I would be a fool to think that the people who do nepotism and give control of the government to the highest bidder, all out in the open, would clean up our government. 

All of this wishful thinking by Brett and his kind is absurd. It sounds like his argument is that with Trump, maybe they'll have a chance of influencing him if he don't go off the rails. The only problem is, the most corrupt person in politics cannot and will not decrease corruption. Every member or hero of the so-called star-studded cast of integrous intellectuals such as Vivek, Tulsi, Tucker, JP, Elon, RFK, Vance, Peter Thiel, etc., will not help or save America because they're all corrupt elites treating America like it's their play toy. 

I'm not saying they are worse than the Dems. I'm just saying, people like Brett act like these people are integrous and not corrupt and that's just a load of obvious shit. To think they'd decrease corruption is absurd AF IMO. 

[Hardkill]

1 hour ago, integration journey said:

Genuine question, Does my vote matter in a state like California where I know it’s going to be blue regardless? 

If you live in a blue state, then your vote for the presidential and your vote for the US Senate California race really won't matter, because those candidates are guaranteed to win that state. Also, if you live in a safe blue district in that state, then that Democratic congressional candidate for a US House Seat is guaranteed to win that seat.

However, your vote absolutely matters when it comes to all of the other down-ballot races because the Democratic candidates in those more state or local level races are not necessarily guaranteed to win their elections. If you live in a competitive congressional district, then you really need to vote for the Democratic candidate for that US House Seat because there's no guarantee that that Democrat will win that seat.

[Hardkill]

1 hour ago, integration journey said:

Genuine question, Does my vote matter in a state like California where I know it’s going to be blue regardless? 

If you live in a blue state, then your vote for the presidential and your vote for the US Senate California race really won't matter, because those candidates are guaranteed to win that state. Also, if you live in a safe blue district in that state, then that Democratic congressional candidate for a US House Seat is guaranteed to win that seat.

However, your vote absolutely matters when it comes to all of the other down-ballot races because the Democratic candidates in those more state or local level races are not necessarily guaranteed to win their elections. If you live in a competitive congressional district, then you really need to vote for the Democratic candidate for that US House Seat because there's no guarantee that that Democrat will win that seat and the Democrats ABSOLUTELY NEED to win back control of the US House in Congress.