Before around October 25th, I gave Trump about a 65% chance of winning. I just couldn't say it here, because a lot of DU tends to think I'm too negative, and I would have gotten roasted for that. However, his last two weeks were beyond abysmal, and that MSG rally was the climax. Even still, I predicted that she would only win with 286 Electoral Votes.

I'm convinced that early voting hurt us this time around. My theory is that many voters (especially in super-early PA) held their nose for Trump and voted early (before the 25th or so). I think the MSG rally may have changed some minds, but it was too late. They already voted.

changes, PACs change, targetting changes, strategies change so you can't rely on the previous patterns of elections to gage. I forgot that.

I have a feeling I will be waiting a looonnnggg time.

where you post something in support of Democrats

We Georgians know that first hand from 2018 when Kemp stole the election from Stacey. Abrams. Along with fighting against the RW propaganda machine, we need to fight against voter suppression. Raffensperger, continued where Kemp left off. Although they would not go along with trump's scheme in 20, they are no heroes of democracy.
The question is, did the purges affect the outcome? It did in 2018 for the GA Gov race.
I do think that the media at large should be doing serious investigative work on this issue.

Unfortunately, it's hard to quantify. I agree it may well have changed the outcome of the 2018 Governor's race. While voter suppression could have been the difference in 2024, Palast fails to provide any verified or even verifiable data to support the claim. He throws around a bunch of scary looking numbers without sourcing or other evidence that they are true and accurate. If Palast or anyone else could actually prove his claims, I think it could go a long way towards stopping a lot of the voter suppression from happening in the future. Without proof, it won't be taken seriously by people that matter.

rigged the election in order for Trump to win.

not disputing.

Last edited Tue Jan 28, 2025, 08:46 AM - Edit history (1)

Claim: 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
Proof Needed: A link to the US Elections Assistance Commission which actually shows that data.

Claim: No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
Proof Needed: A link or reference to a source for this data. He provides no source for this. This info would have to come from state and local governments as they'd be the ones disqualifying the ballots. Maybe some organization aggregates all the state and local data. Anyway, I'd need to see a legitimate source reporting these numbers.

Claim: At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
Claim: 1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
Proof Needed: same as the mail in ballots being disqualified. A legitimate reliable source reporting those numbers.

Trump won. We need to understand why his message was more attractive than ours. That is the only way forward.

And that Trump won ALL the swing states floored me.

by gaming the mail in ballots? It seems there was a Democratic undervote that has no explanation.

I think it all comes down to cost of living. It would have been difficult to separate herself from Biden. The same thing is happening all over the world for the same reason. When people feel economically stressed, it’s easier to start scapegoating minority groups and such.

More than once. The campaign had to know this question was coming and were still unprepared with a reasonable answer. She could have answered in a way that wouldn't have thrown Biden under the bus and wasn't able to do so.

Who would have thought a softball question on "The View" would have been so damaging.

Seriously, Trump is in the White House.

If given the chance to replace him with Harris by saying a few mean things about Biden, would you take it?

Just stating it would still be possible to answer that question in multiple ways. IMO, it was inept of the Harris campaign to not be prepared to answer a question that they had to know was coming.

are too misogynistic to vote for a woman, especially a black woman. Period.

a poster who posited (and I think gave examples) of how tweaking just enough, no big moves here, and there to throw the votes in some of the Swing States.

was skullduggery - without a doubt in my mind. But if all the motherf**kers who stayed home cause they couldn't vote for a woman hadn't, the skullduggery might not have been successful.

Honest to goodness! 🤬😞🤬

We live in an Idiocrocy.

when Biden was elected. If the people who couldn't vote for a woman but thought she was going to win anyway and stayed home had voted, the idiocracy would not have mattered as much.

but it won't matter. People see what they want, so they can believe what they want.

I need a re-set. Hopeless and helpless looks terrible on me.

Kamala got 19 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. Mostly younger people who didn’t vote as a protest vote over the Gaza genocide. Trump’s numbers were closer to what he got in the past.

Biden votes in 2020 = 81,283,501
Harris votes in 2024 = 75,019,230

Difference of only 6,000,000 votes

our government, is capable of stealing an election. I find it extremely hard to believe he won every battleground state.

… is how Dump gets away with cheating every goddamned time. How can someone fail upwards to the extent that he has?

Every. Goddamned. Time.

Is death.

I never want to live through another assassination, but his lifelong diet, his mercurial personality, and the consistency of his truly pathetic lifestyle are all pointing to his demise, sooner rather than later.

He truly believes he can do no wrong. When you add in greed, the lack of intellect, and psychological problems (minimum, sociopath, maximum, psychopath) when there are a few major setbacks, and it could be all over in a relatively short period of time. Stability is not a strong point with T****.

Then we have another loon to deal with in Vance.

He does not look well. He is nowhere near "normal". Maintaining pressure on him will take its toll. A few nations telling him to "Fuck Off" might be too much for his carcass to take.

was not the best day to have to go to my clinic for a scheduled blood pressure check! I told the doctor that I was feeling unusually anxious and he was quite sympathetic in a way that indicated genuine empathy, while neither of us verbally “went there”.

I know people joke about egg prices but grocery bills did increase significantly these past two years and people felt it. It wasn’t Biden’s fault, of course, but I think maybe Harris should’ve addressed it head on instead of just repeating that the economy was good. Maybe announce that she would encourage a commission to look into corporate gouging or something like that.

Inflation gave voters the excuse they sought to steer away from the Black woman and Harris did nothing to dissuade them.

For almost all policies, voters preferred the Harris policies. So how des this square with the results? Obviously, voters did not choose Trump on policies but on other factors such as racism, ant-immigrant sentiments, and misogyny.

It’s an interesting read.

https://wapo.st/4gmVKVs

You left out religion, which was a huge factor. Trump got most of the Christians' votes - 63% of Protestants and 59% of the Catholics, according to the exit polls.

I still had my doubts about our chances, especially considering what happened with Biden being forced out at the last moment.

I knew we lost right there.

Leadership had no faith in Biden and somehow managed to get him to quit behind closed doors. No time for a primary. Harris was plan C. As VP she polled low. In 2020 Dem primaries she polled less than 1% among Democrats and dropped out before it began.

I still think if Biden had stayed in we had a better chance than the last second switch up that happened. Political historians will be disecting that for decades.

Unfortunately, Biden's chances were damaged by the media's constant harping on his supposed decline, and many democrats joining in. No wonder his poll results plummeted and he had to drop out.

even Trump shot him a look of "what the hell..."

It was that moment when my heart sank. Something was terribly wrong with our President...

Everybody would have forgotten about the debate if press didn't spend so much time harping about it, and if democratic party members didn't join in.

and I say this as an 85 year old Democrat whose first vote was for JFK. We were dealing with a monstrous individual with trump. I had never seen such a vicious threat to our democracy and I feared he would be able to exploit the living hell out of that moment. My first thought was "what happened? Is he going to be OK?"

with our President. Yes. We all saw it happen.

was it the microphones or was Biden sick with Covid ?

I would have bet on it, but now I am convinced that this country will not elect a woman president. How in the hell could we lose to Trump? Its the only logical answer. One day but not any time soon im sad to say.

But about 46% of young people voted for Trump and a majority of white women voted for him

THE WAY FORWARD (DU sub forum)

I got my hopes up with all the positive funding & energetic rally news.

strategy and lie about everything and everywhere. Make promises you will never keep. And never give a straight answer regarding your plans . Maybe next time. Tell the people what they think they want to hear.

I wasn't surprised, although I did have her winning with 286 Electoral Votes.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219659138

press and democratic party turned on Biden. Harris was neither more popular than Biden, nor was polling better than him.
So it didn't really make sense to me that replacing Biden with Harris was going to work. And it the end it didn't.

I hate to bring up UFOs, but when I was in second grade, everyone (except the teachers) claimed that Martians had invaded our school. Everyone was seeing Martians in the cafeteria. Everyone could see them but me. It was the strangest thing. I came home crying for days. My dad tried to convince me that "everyone" was making it up. But I responded, "Everyone?". I never saw the "little green men" that they saw.

My dad would tell me about "War of the Worlds". He still couldn't convince me that there weren't "little green men" running around our school. However, for some strange reason, the Martians never invaded the classroom, hence the teachers never saw them. It was just the strangest hysteria....

Insulating oneself with overly sympathetic media isn't a very realistic view of the landscape

... economy is great was the wrong move.

The economic numbers were great for the 30% not for those where the RWI was out of sink with 2019 trajectory.

Then telling people you won't do much of anything different to alleviate the pain was missing the point.

WhiteHousr.gov said the labor share didn't go up with profits, I would r focused on that as the bad guy instead and pointing to Benedict Donald as one fo their friends much like Obama did to rMoney would have hit home

as unfair as it was to Joe Biden.

In 2020, I was CONVINCED that Joe Biden was going to win. I didn't feel that in 2024 for Joe Biden and then for Kamala Harris.

Joe Biden got dealt a shitty hand, and he navigated it the best anyone possibly could. Joe Biden (and then Kamala Harris as sitting VP) got unfairly blamed for it all. We didn't exactly have a media and messaging strategy to counter that narrative once Kamala Harris became the nominee.

I was not convinced that she was going to win. I was cautiously hopeful, but I was always wary that Trump might get in. I was advocating as far back as Spring last year that we need to develop a contingency plan should Trump win, but no one seemed interested in that. I felt like a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

...T-shirts that I can't even bear to look at now, and don't know what to do with. They say Kamala on them, so I can never wear them again.

I'm thinking of ceremoniously burning them.

It is going to be a shit show. I feel good throwing it back in their faces that they voted for this.
I've seen them with cat designs

…most certainly get a shirt that said that.

I didn’t wear anything red during TCF’s first administration, and I won’t during this one either. I don’t want there o be even the slightest hint that I might be a Republican. I may need a new car during these next 4 years (mine is 16 years old) and if I do, I won’t choose a red one.

they were never gonna let Hillary to be president so someone who is both female and a POC - what we are missing is that America is just as racist and sexist as we suspected all along - doesn't matter that both Hillary and Kamala were far more qualified than the fascist POS Trump

even more powerful than racism.

Twice we've run women and twice they have lost to the literal worst person in the world.

There will never be a female president of the US. Too many men hate women far too much.

People make a big deal about more Black and Hispanic men voting for Trump...misogyny. That's why they moved toward him, with the message "we'll take rights away from minorities and women and give everything to men!".

And he's doing it....soon, companies will just hire whatever mediocre white dude walks through the door and keep women relegated to bringing coffee...they want to go back to a time when sexual harassment was just the right of any man and where rape was always the woman's fault.

Activist democrats and candidate skew toward middle age and older.
Our party leadership is even older.
That is a large part of the problem.
That's reflected in how inept the party is at exploiting social media and their apparent ignorance of the attention economy.

On the other side the right finds and grooms college students as they did with Ann Coalter and Dinesh D'Souza as far back as the 90s or earlier.
Or they fund intertube talking heads like Turning Point USA or their co-ilk.
These are relatively young people with more like them in the pipeline.
They know how to use social media and they serve to churn up the muck for new ideas or new rhetoric for the old ideas.
At the very least they keep their talking points in peoples faces and keep the conversation on the boil.

Democrats could be doing that, but the change has to start at the top.

election They knew the fix was in.

we knew there was a good chance he could win, especially with everything going on and the way the polls were going. But I still hoped of course she would win at the end….my brother was telling me she’s going to lose for about three weeks before the election. I had stopped watching the news for the most part and wasn’t paying very much attention.

But look it happened once and I knew for sure it could happen again. I knew that he was going to run again and I knew there was going to be nothing done to stop him. Once you have somebody running about 40% of people usually vote for them and he still had a lot of support.

Remember that Biden did beat him. Don’t forget that. It was a mistake to run women against him in my opinion however HRC still won the popular vote and I’m not even sure about this election. I think things happened and nobody’s even investigating at all.

Rec

We volunteer for all the candidates in our own local space. We generally don't leave the county. But I'm in Texas. So I'm in my own local space, not necessarily and unrealistically "trying to flip Texas", but trying to get all Democratic candidates elected. However, this always includes the top of the ticket: We always emphasize top of the ticket as a means of lifting up down ballot.

At first there was so much enthusiasm for her. And she crushed him at the debate!! I was too busy doing all the local work to realize how that she had plateaued. I just kept doing what I was doing, but what else could I do? I saw the polls slipping, but I also kept busy and didn't dwell on it. I thought she would squeak out a win. I just couldn't picture him winning again. But here we are. Sometimes intuition is wrong.

I was imagining all kind of horrors if he won. And it turned out even worse than I imagined.

During the 2016 campaign, I kept trying to picture Hillary taking the oath of office and I would draw a blank. Then, I would say, "OK on an emotional level, Hillary is not winning, but on a rational level, voters will likely come to their senses"

I just pictured Kamala taking the oath of office. I just felt like Trump was too old and a "has been".....Kamala just seemed like a "winner", with her personality and everything....
I was wrong.

Up until the weekend prior to the election . Here in PA, it was becoming clear that her message of joy wasn’t resonating. She never ran an ad touting the economy. She should have. All along, I was saying that people were not voting for him. They were all looking for a reason to vote FOR VP Harris. Her campaigns response was to ignore the booming economy and bring in celebrities, while criticizing the rich.

My wife and I voted early. Our vote was banked.

On Election Day, I had a business meeting in a very red area. I drove past a few polling places. It was then that I became worried. I saw lines that I’ve never seen before. This was 9 or 930 AM. It was obvious his turnout was going to be large. So large that Bob Casey, so liked in PA, also lost.

Many think our way to win in the future is to call people nazis and campaign only to the far far left of our party. Perhaps that’s the correct strategy. Time will tell.

Once Musk got involved I was concerned, I don't think most people fully appreciate the power social media weilds when it's used the way it was. Then when he won and Zuckerberg came out of the woodwork, it became clear to me, Harris had no chance.

And TikTok was a pawn too. Trump used the ban to work with them behind the scenes in a promise to save them if they helped him. Wouldn't surprise me if we find out Youtube was also part of the con.

Dems had no plan to combat this, they thought they could just run normal campaigns on social media when it was really all about corrupting the people running social media to control how many people and which people get to see your and the opponent's ads. I still don't think people really grasp the power of it all. If one team's message is being seen by 50,000 random people and another is being seen by 50 million people, it's not a fair fight. And that's just 1 aspect of it, Trump's campqaign was likely given unfettered access to user data to use AI to tailor messaging. Dems brought a knife to a nuclear bomb fight. Musk was open about using X to throttle Biden's message and promote anti Biden content, that was 1/50th of what happened.

I don't get it either. I thought it was in the bag.

do you honestly think they were going to say, “Okay, fine by us!” ?
They have been building back their power since the Great depression.
.

Am I wrong in that?

It felt like she disappeared. It was all Rump all the time.

• Only once before has an incumbent sitting president withdrawn from re election (LBJ) and that was not that close to the election. In both cases, their sitting VP lost.

• There has only been one sitting VP (Bush in 1988) elected president since 1836 (VanBuren)

• Only once previously has a president been defeated in re election and then gone on to win a second term (Cleveland)

• Failed assassination attempt a few months before election

• Harris chosen without winning a primary

• A felon has never run for president