So this morning it’s looking a tiny better. Biden now has slim leads in Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin. That would get him exactly 270 electoral votes. But only a 1 EC vote win by such slim margins is going to force recounts, court orders, lawsuits. Dragging on and on forever. Possibly going to the Supreme Court where the conservatives now have a huge advantage. Ugh.
Your concept of communities not caring about other communities is one of the reasons I think America should dissolve and become multiple separate countries more similar to the EU. There are just too many people here and many are extremely different.
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That is a very defeatist attitude towards it; rather I would like to imagine different parts of the country can accept that what concerns them may differ from place to place and that is OK!
Frankly, NYC liberals do not give a shit and look down on what the mid-west cares about, and in most cases - based on my own experience - they do it from a place of total ignorance and lack of education about it. We heard more about how Red states must all be racist hotbeds and science deniers. Like how is that healthy or true? Surely 60 million people who voted for Trump aren’t all racists or science deniers. Some just care about other shit, or simply don’t want to be told how to think or live - which is what Democrats came across like to many who weren’t 110% in their camp already.
Vice-versa, the Midwest, right or wrong, self-harming or not, doesn’t want to hear about lockdowns and stay at home orders because their regions are vastly different than metro centers that may require such measures, and get beat over the head about it, they don’t care. Will it come back to bite them or harm them - very possible - but I’ll relate it to my own experience: When I got to Florida in June for the summer, they hadn’t yet had spikes and it was obvious their experience with lockdowns and the Virus were just vastly different than where I had just been, NYC. When NYC was having 1000 deaths a day, Florida was having only 1000 cases a day. But the way it got hammered was that everyone was having the same experience and that experience was vastly different and created different feelings about it - why must we insist everyone feel the exact same about everything or be labeled wrong and the enemy?
Watching and tracking mainstream news you’d get the impression that only a handful of things matter to all Americans and any views counter are fringe, or outright baseless. While the severity of the issues may differ, the importance to the voter does not, but that is not something Big Media, Big Tech, and proponents of Big Government want to accept because their entire argument was a referendum on things they deemed to be more important than what the other side wanted to talk about.
Biden may still very likely win this thing, but I will be appalled if that is viewed as representing the kind of victory it was suppose to stand for. If the VOTE was suppose to be a rebuke of Trump, or a referendum on him, I think it is equally a referendum on some policy things that seemed to be more “mainstream”, as well as the behavior of BOTH sides and the media. This was not a one sided attempt to rebuke something and it was way to close to paintbrush the other side as once again not meaning anything. More than anything, some real reconciling has to be done with how and why the country is this divided an I am skeptical when people want to assert it is all because of a single individual. This is now 2 elections WAY closer than expected, and WAY different in reality than how it was narrated through the Media in the months leading up to it.
I don’t think Trump would have “won pretty easily if not for Covid”. The nation is still bitterly divided and partisan. It still would have still been close. And under a normal election cycle who knows how it could have played out. Biden may not have won the candidacy. Trump could have started an unpopular war with Iran (which it felt like he was on the verge of in February when he ordered the assassination of an Iran general in Iraq).
If there’s one thing that voters have shown they didn’t give a shit about it was the never ending investigation and eventual impeachment of Trump earlier this year.
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New post for this thought:
For 2 months the most important thing in the entire country was IMPEACHMENT! Remember that, it was actually in 2020. 9 months ago!!
And yet not a single campaign ad referenced Impeachment, not a stump speech, not a debate talking point.
Democrats impeached the president of the United States but when it came to an election, didn’t even think it was worth bringing up!! That alone should speak to exactly how there are these moments when all you hear about is 1 thing, and it feels all consuming, and yet reality is half the country doesn’t care and thinks it is stupid and once the moment passes, even the party who did it doesn’t think it was important. Bizarre how that didn’t wind up in the election whatsoever. In September I probably saw 100 campaign ads in Florida. Not a single mention.
We have to stop confusing what drives ratings and subscribers with what is really important to voters. And we also need to be real with ourselves over what is happening in Politics vs. what is legit issues. I’m sure impeachment hearings did great ratings or networks but it didn’t matter, and it was a tactic by Dems that I guess they didn’t find worthy of a place in their campaign. A lot of the quiet Trump voters who aren’t racist and aren’t deplorables didn’t forget what a joke it became to spend years on a Mueller investigation, or Impeachment, or recently playing a game with holding up stimulus, or even spending 100s of millions on absolutely failed campaigns down ballot. It’s a weird thing to see one side claim moral high ground and dismiss another side altogether because they view their issues more holier than the others.
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I agree with you on this. The results being so close and that its likely the election results will be contested for weeks will leave a lot of people feeling bitter. If Biden does win he could still have a Republican senate and no “mandate” or momentum for any big immediate changes or proposals. Although I think even democrats voted for Biden just so we could get back to politics-as-usual and weren’t expecting any extreme changes from Biden anyway.
But at least Biden I think will still at least try to be some kind of unifier. Whereas Trump in a second term will only go scorched earth on all his rivals and increase division within the country.
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Agree completely.
I know a lot of people close to me including family who were extremely hopeful this would be a bold message that the country doesn’t have a tolerance or a place for Trump. I feel sad for those people today as I tried to caution against that hopefulness and suggest there was so much more they were opting to ignore at play. And yet the insistence that the country would vote to send a clear message just kept being played out in circles of people who I fully expect to either act like that is what happen, or continue to ignore why it didn’t happen and that leaves us in an equally scary albeit less dangerous position with Biden in office instead of Trump.
And if the Media opts to ignore the signs of this election and have a victory lap after Biden is declared winner it will only embolden and further entrench the other side which is pretty much what happen since 2016. Media didn’t sway people with the kind of coverage we saw for 4 years, instead it entrenched people strongly so that when it finally got to a point where lives were at stake with COVID, they had already been so pushed into one camp we wound up extremely divided and polarized despite our own best interests.
All of this.
People from Washington State and Oregon have much more in common with people in my province of B.C. than anyone in the southeast or Midwest.
Separate countries would work well for everyone because at this point the US is trying to be something impossible.
It’s almost automatic how some states are voting so why bother putting them against each other and inevitably leaving one side angry?
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Question for all of you, The Rock teased running for president, whether he is serious or not, what chance do you all think he’d have had against Trump and what kind of chance will he have in 2024 if he runs?
Same as Biden or anyone else against Trump (I previously thought he’d do very well but I think anyone against Trump would wind up in the same position because it’s less about the candidate and a deeper cultural issue at play which I’m trying to speak to above)
And 2024 is going to be extremely challenging for Dems once they start primarying against themselves and split the party back up after uniting against Trump. With no Trump, it will be hard to get on the same page and there are some huge chasms in the Dem party. The advantage Republicans have is they at least agree they generally want to be left alone. Oddly that becomes a benefit to them against a party who is hell bent on telling you exactly what is important and needs to be done in a forceful manner.
CAN WE PLEASE NOT START TALKING ALREADY ABOUT 2024. We don’t even know who won in 2020 yet!
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Chill the fuck out bro. It was a simple question.
@MJfromNJ I have to say you make a ton of very great points, but unfortunately some will refuse to hear them.
I went to bed very late last night thinking the election was over, I have to say it’s been a very pleasant surprise waking up to hope.
Regardless of the result, I think the Democratic Party needs to look at how in the hell did this ever got so close, this should have been very one sided. To use a wrestling analogy, this should have been a squash match.
Personally I think they need to change their messaging. Telling people “vote with us or your a racist piece of shit” just doesn’t work. I said this in the AJ Styles/CM Punk thread a while back, shaming people into thinking or in this case voting a certain way doesn’t work.
Obama won in 2008 and 2012, I just don’t believe that America is more racist today then it was then. I think that Obama was a very charismatic man (my fav president ever) who did an awesome job at bringing people together (think his I don’t see red or blue states, I see America speech), something the current Democratic Party sucks at doing.
I have my fingers crossed, let’s hope Bidden pulls this out.
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@kliq Thank you; I’m sure I’m annoying or pissing off some people but I think it is extremely important to raise these topics as it is something people choose to not hear for whatever reason, or don’t hear in their echo chambers. Listening and having civil discourse is the only way to ever improve our situation (my opinion at least). Also I know a lot of you are not in America, so I’m trying to share my own lived experience in two very different places this year alone, and also what actual Americans say, not just what Media covers which hopefully is obviously a difference.
The Red State / Blue State thing got silly and is very divisive. Yet at the same time, to @TheBenjamin suggestion about being their own states, the reason that would never work is because you do have states that would be entirely upside down left on their own and while NY may want major reforms, it would be entirely impossible to afford them and be anything like America. You’d be talking about taking 10 steps back with clear understanding on how to ever get 1 step forward. Also, people would just leave (see California).
Personally I don’t think that many people anymore are hoping to be “like America”.
It’s done. The country had a nice run but it’s time to move on. This election result proves that. Iron the details out later
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My impression is that the founders intended the colonies to essentially function independently in most ways, and we have become increasingly federalist. I’m certainly not for 50 countries. But having NYC liberals deciding what is best for the Midwest isn’t great, neither is the opposite. It is just my personal opinion that the larger the population the less effective the government.
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As for people leaving states, part of the problem is that right now Red states cut taxes abut rely on money from blue states. If they were on their own they couldn’t maintain current standards by cutting taxes.
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This is where I get caught over-thinking it; is it that NYC liberals truly want to tell people in the Midwest what is best for them or that they can’t help but try. Because they probably would agree they don’t think they know what is best there, but that doesn’t stop them from doing it? If the argument is they should stop doing it, well then that is pretty conservative in practice because power goes to the States. Yet that is largely blamed when discussing COVID. So they either want to tell people in other regions how to live, OR they don’t but they are confused over what they want. I scratch my head on this all the time.
It’s funny because when you talk to immigrants it’s still the best place in the world to live and work and not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. This one always made me think twice in the run-up to the election. How can America be SO BAD, when immigrants and foreigners want to come to live here and build lives and families here. This was something I kept coming back to when trying to figure out where things stood. Like what happened in Miami is not shocking in the least - Cubans and Venezuelans despise the hint of socialist policy. At the same time, we saw rappers coming out to support Trump and that seemed like a joke or something but they are kids from the streets who made something of themselves only achievable in America…so like is America as bad as portrayed, or what? I kept coming back to that in the build up as I took in more news and listened to more smart conversations.
The immigration part is that most of those people come from even worse places. America still has a lot of opportunities available and is a wealthy nation. It is better than lots of other countries, but it isn’t the best of them. Further better countries are typically harder to immigrate to.
“If not for Covid” is a pretty huge variable. Who knows what would have happened in the last eight months without Covid?
Also, as contentious as the “vote by mail” thing turned out to be politically, I think the ability to vote without leaving the house – whether because of Covid or just general indifference – definitely played a role in boosting voter turnout across the board.
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