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Wednesday copium

Which candidate trashed the other side more?

Right.

Stop being such a low-IQ individual.
Trump trump trump trump… that’s all Kamala talked about. Much like this board. If she answered a question and didnt blame Trump for everything she could’ve had a chance.
Enjoy the beautiful day! Life will go on, I promise.
 
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I was just going to ask this same thing.
Apparently he is saying the formerly illegal immigrants that have gotten citizenship the are now "safe on base" are now saying nana nana boo boo to others trying to achieve the same thing.
 
My thoughts certainly don't deserve its own thread:

- Disappointed but not surprised. Polls showed a toss up, margin of error clearly allowed it to swing Trump's way, betting markets indicated a right lean, all Summer the polls - Biden or Harris - showed a tight race and a Trump win as possible.

- Glad our guardrails around democracy and 'STOLEN ELECTION' isn't going to be tested. Guess the D's didn't try and steal it this time. Fortunately the systems won't be tested by an actual attempt to overturn the results if Trump had been on the other end.

- Desegregation-ish of the parties. I think it's a good thing that the two major parties aren't bifurcated so severely by race. I think it's a good thing that Republicans aren't just working class whites, angry whites, old whites, Christian whites. I think it's good that the Dems aren't just the educated whites and then minorities group. It's becoming more class/ideology based and less identity based.

- Incumbent parties have suffered losses to nativist, populist, strongman type stuff across Europe, it's not just us, going through this movement.

- There is a deep rot in the GOP that allowed someone like Trump to be the nominee in the first place. Even if Harris wins, that rot still exists, and it's still unfortunate and it will be even harder to address in victory. The fact that people are so angry that Trump is viewed as the remedy, is sad. I can't help but pity these people.

- Like the last two elections, I can't condemn all the Trump voters in the general, like I would his primary voters. Inflation occurred on Joe's watch, and Kamala is from the administration. For lots of people it can be simple as that. Causation doesn't matter. Out with the current and in with the alternative, and Trump was the alternative. Like others, I suspect someone like Haley or DeSantis would have won by even more.

- Biden really should have stepped down far earlier. I know Kamala was elevated for practical purposes and the party rallied around her, but she wasn't the ideal candidate. I didn't follow the campaign closely and I'm sure her strategies will be picked apart, but I didn't think there were many terrible blunders, again didn't really follow it closely.

- I like many of the MAGAs was also dissatisfied with the state of the country, and still am. Similar to the comments in the rot in the GOP. Some people are so angry and all they wanted to do was stick it to the libs. What a sorry existence.

- Will be interesting to see what will transpire in the next Trump regime. Will he be competent? Guardrails or restraints? Follow through on some of his wilder claims and proposals? Guess we'll see.
 
Trump trump trump trump… that’s all Kamala talked about. Much like this board. If she answered a question and didnt blame Trump for everything she could’ve had a chance.
Enjoy the beautiful day! Life will go on, I promise.

He couldn’t answer a policy question if his life depended on it!!
 
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.

- There is a deep rot in the GOP that allowed someone like Trump to be the nominee in the first place. Even if Harris wins, that rot still exists, and it's still unfortunate and it will be even harder to address in victory. The fact that people are so angry that Trump is viewed as the remedy, is sad. I can't help but pity these people.
It's like people should actually start listening to me instead of sticking their noses up and squeezing more tightly to their political bibles..........................
 
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Didn't Hilary do pretty well though? Won't the popular vote by a good margin. As I've said since I first saw her in the 2020 primaries, Kamala is a lousy POTUS candidate. Boring, mediocre speaker, struggles to cultivate any sort of identity candidate. (granted, not a lot of time in 2024)
Oh, yes, Kamala was a terrible candidate. I realized that for certain after her debate with Pence. Definitely a lightweight. Honestly, so was Walz. These were by far the two worst tickets in my lifetime, and probably the worst in our history.

But the gender gap among minorities was enlightening.
 
He couldn’t answer a policy question if his life depended on it!!
He doesn't need to. Most voters aren't actually paying attention to policy and certainly don't understand anything that requires nuance. They experienced inflation and just want change. Following Trump's first term they experienced COVID and they wanted change.
 
Agree generally. They put out a back up QB that had never really won a big game.

I do however disagree that the party couldn't have done more to find a different option. That would have required them and the media to be honest about Biden's condition. They weren't going to do that until it became too late / obvious.
that's fair - but it would have absolutely have had to happen sooner. And that is a very, very, very difficult conversation to have with a sitting president of the united states.
 
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My take....Covid response in 2020 was the reason Trump lost.

Then four years later, that shitty Covid response led to product shortages and the ensuing price gouging that flamed inflation and voters blamed the Party in the WH.

Two elections affected by Covid.
Voters rewarded the original culprit.

Ain't Merica great?

“rewarded the original culprit”

Accurate
 
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The abortion thing is interesting. I was looking at Arizona, and their abortion amendment passed overwhelmingly but Trump was leading last I looked. Which suggests that people split their vote there and that abortion wasn’t the huge driver for Harris that the campaign was counting on.
Makes sense. It may well be that Dobbs was much more ingenious than given credit for, politically, particularly given the legislative results last night, in that it gives federal reps plausible deniability to just say "go fight your state battle first." As it is, if R's take the house, no one at the federal level may have to vote on any federal legislative proposals relating to abortion.

At the state level, if r's had brain one, they'd double down in spending for new moms and adoption as part of a pitch for some middle ground. But they wont because it's an absolutist issue.
 
I'm going to take it further, very religious people won't vote for a women. And that can be any religion, Catholics, Jews, etc.
interesting hypothesis; not sure if i've ever heard data one way or the other on that (particularly whether people are graded on their 'religiosity'). Again, VA could be an interesting laboratory to test those things in 2025
 
Oh, yes, Kamala was a terrible candidate. I realized that for certain after her debate with Pence. Definitely a lightweight. Honestly, so was Walz. These were by far the two worst tickets in my lifetime, and probably the worst in our history.

But the gender gap among minorities was enlightening.
If she added Shapiro it would have given her a punchers chance as I think they could have had enough to possibly pull out Pennsylvania. The Hamas / Jewish conundrum that the party was in put her in a bad spot on that.
 
If she added Shapiro it would have given her a punchers chance as I think they could have had enough to possibly pull out Pennsylvania. The Hamas / Jewish conundrum that the party was in put her in a bad spot on that.
They needed a non incumbent candidate to have a chance. People wanted "change" she was never going to be able to sell the voters on that.
 
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I can't think of anything other that maybe a different VP that Harris could have handled better as a candidate. Maybe Sapiro would have delivered PA, but given the results of the election I don't think it would have won her the Presidency. Voters seem to want the "miracle" fixes Trump promises.
i agree; let's be honest, plank one of any strategy against trump is to let him shoot himself in the foot, which he seemed to do multiple times. Plank two for her was to recognize that between her tendency to word salad and the fact that she was jumping into the deep end of the pool without the time to prepare her own positions, etc., to stay out of the spotlight as long as you could until you were better prepared. She did that extraordinarily well. Plank three - Her 'final' closing was actually pretty good too -- the ads actually conveyed, imo, a real sincerity about unity. The week or two before the final closing was a little bumpy. Ultimately, the inability to develop, test, and refine message made things tough.

As to trump, i mentioned somewhere else that his "genius superpower" in terms of communications is to make things completely binary, and in the most simple terms humanly possible (trump good, harris bad). The average drug rep gets about 30 seconds with a doc to provide information about their product face to a face to a doc; i suspect that the political attention span of a voter might even be less. As juvenile as it seems, and as much as it tempts one to think that the listeners are "stupid" and it's just a little too close to the movie "Idiocracy," the reality is thats what a modern/tech audience is, and you ignore it at your peril.
 
The threat Trump poses is way too abstract a notion for most Americans and can't easily be distilled down into a 30 second ad.
Fundamentally, you're right (and what i'll be watching most closely is weaponization of government against 'enemies'), but if you're thinking in 30 second increments, you've already lost. that's way too long.

hitler and fascist weren't the right words, due to their historical loadedness. Something with more of a mafia/mobster angle would have been better (and indeed, that was the power of the somewhat archaic word "crooked" as applied to clinton years ago).
 
I can't think of anything other that maybe a different VP that Harris could have handled better as a candidate. Maybe Sapiro would have delivered PA, but given the results of the election I don't think it would have won her the Presidency. Voters seem to want the "miracle" fixes Trump promises.

It was decisive enough that she didn't have a chance. None of the micro issues mattered really. I don't think Shapiro changes it, although I think Waltz was a terrible choice.

All in all, I think she did pretty well given her natural limitations and the fundamentals against her.

But you just can't overcome the extreme unpopularity of her administration, and inflation. She didn't effectively distance herself from an administration that people can't stand. Most of the country looks at the Biden administration as a failed administration.

Maybe, probably, it was impossible, but she didn't separate at all. Maybe because they just keep insisting that it's been awesome.

And inflation, they spent 2-3 years telling people it wasn't true and wasn't a big deal. Then last minute she threatens price controls.

I mean at some point Democrats just have to accept reality. They have to be able to say "You know, I'm not feeling inflation at all, I don't mind the extra costs for me and my cat. And I don't think it's our fault anyway. But boy oh boy it's clearly upsetting a huge amount of people. We better have something for this."

But convincing people there is no inflation, that they're being lied to if they think their expenses are up, and that if there IS inflation it's a good thing AND not the Democrat's fault...not a good strategy.

If enough people believe something you eventually have to deal with the reality of it.
 
It was decisive enough that she didn't have a chance. None of the micro issues mattered really. I don't think Shapiro changes it, although I think Waltz was a terrible choice.

All in all, I think she did pretty well given her natural limitations and the fundamentals against her.

But you just can't overcome the extreme unpopularity of her administration, and inflation. She didn't effectively distance herself from an administration that people can't stand. Most of the country looks at the Biden administration as a failed administration.

Maybe, probably, it was impossible, but she didn't separate at all. Maybe because they just keep insisting that it's been awesome.

And inflation, they spent 2-3 years telling people it wasn't true and wasn't a big deal. Then last minute she threatens price controls.

I mean at some point Democrats just have to accept reality. They have to be able to say "You know, I'm not feeling inflation at all, I don't mind the extra costs for me and my cat. And I don't think it's our fault anyway. But boy oh boy it's clearly upsetting a huge amount of people. We better have something for this."

But convincing people there is no inflation, that they're being lied to if they think their expenses are up, and that if there IS inflation it's a good thing AND not the Democrat's fault...not a good strategy.

If enough people believe something you eventually have to deal with the reality of it.
That's probably right, but was the me and my cat comment necessary? What point were you making with that comment?
 
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That's probably right, but was the me and my cat comment necessary? What point were you making with that comment?

Little jab there...but the truth of the comment is that the Democratic zeitgeist is being driven by white college educated single women. They don't have to have a cat, but the condescension with which wealthy single liberals dismissed the inflation concerns of families with three teenagers was astounding.

Constant, constant ridicule about "who can't afford $2 more for milk?"

The Democrats just have NOTHING in believable messaging for working and middle class families right now. Trump, even when it's bullshit, does.
 
Deleted my Twitter already and having an HBOT ignore party today.

Best advice I can think of for handling what happened is to worry about controlling what you can control. For those of us in this nation who can see Trump for the awful awful human being that he is and the grave threat to our democracy, which he stands for now, we really can only stand back and watch.

So the only thing to do is try to control what you can control and begin self reflecting on what needs to be done and what went wrong so that just doesn’t happen again. The truth is the Democrats have made a lot of mistakes these last eight years.

First and foremost to me is they have learned nothing about what is going on and how Trump got it in 2016. They have no answer for the disinformation machine and the ability to try to combat that despite knowing this has been going on for nine years now.

Joe Biden well forever, have his legacy diminished by trying to seek a second term when he was so clearly unable to lead the country for another 5 1/2 years. The result was, we had a rushed replacement candidate that was weaker at stopping MAGA even than Hillary Clinton.

It was very foolish to think in these times to think that a black woman could beat Trump. It’s just a fact and sad. She was the only choice due to timing. Any hope she had would have had would have been dependent on Shapiro pushing her to a slim victory in blue wall so that was a catastrophic mistake we can all see now. Walz did nothing.

The Democrats are going to have to figure out how to run better candidates for president in this new entertainment politics era. Substance matters little. Charisma and looks and TV time matter a lot. And they have to figure out how to combat disinformation or perhaps fight back the same way, sadly.
I think step one for the left is to stop with the disinformation messaging. It failed.
 
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My thoughts certainly don't deserve its own thread:

- Disappointed but not surprised. Polls showed a toss up, margin of error clearly allowed it to swing Trump's way, betting markets indicated a right lean, all Summer the polls - Biden or Harris - showed a tight race and a Trump win as possible.

- Glad our guardrails around democracy and 'STOLEN ELECTION' isn't going to be tested. Guess the D's didn't try and steal it this time. Fortunately the systems won't be tested by an actual attempt to overturn the results if Trump had been on the other end.

- Desegregation-ish of the parties. I think it's a good thing that the two major parties aren't bifurcated so severely by race. I think it's a good thing that Republicans aren't just working class whites, angry whites, old whites, Christian whites. I think it's good that the Dems aren't just the educated whites and then minorities group. It's becoming more class/ideology based and less identity based.

- Incumbent parties have suffered losses to nativist, populist, strongman type stuff across Europe, it's not just us, going through this movement.

- There is a deep rot in the GOP that allowed someone like Trump to be the nominee in the first place. Even if Harris wins, that rot still exists, and it's still unfortunate and it will be even harder to address in victory. The fact that people are so angry that Trump is viewed as the remedy, is sad. I can't help but pity these people.

- Like the last two elections, I can't condemn all the Trump voters in the general, like I would his primary voters. Inflation occurred on Joe's watch, and Kamala is from the administration. For lots of people it can be simple as that. Causation doesn't matter. Out with the current and in with the alternative, and Trump was the alternative. Like others, I suspect someone like Haley or DeSantis would have won by even more.

- Biden really should have stepped down far earlier. I know Kamala was elevated for practical purposes and the party rallied around her, but she wasn't the ideal candidate. I didn't follow the campaign closely and I'm sure her strategies will be picked apart, but I didn't think there were many terrible blunders, again didn't really follow it closely.

- I like many of the MAGAs was also dissatisfied with the state of the country, and still am. Similar to the comments in the rot in the GOP. Some people are so angry and all they wanted to do was stick it to the libs. What a sorry existence.

- Will be interesting to see what will transpire in the next Trump regime. Will he be competent? Guardrails or restraints? Follow through on some of his wilder claims and proposals? Guess we'll see.
I have been saying for months that Kamala was an awful candidate, bad in every way but not one single liberal on here agreed with me.
 
Yeah, I totally 'get' why she became the nominee. The D's really didn't have any other practical choice.

Bullshit.
They could have run a genuine, democratic nomination process and exposed his obvious frailties.
Instead they chose to try and gaslight the public that he was fine and prevent any real choice, so whomever is actually running shit behind the scenes could stay in power.
 
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Bullshit.
They could have run a genuine, democratic nomination process and exposed his obvious frailties.
Instead they chose to try and gaslight the public that he was fine and prevent any real choice, so whomever is actually running shit behind the scenes could stay in power.
to be clear, i mean they really had no choice once the debate occurred. there was simply not enough time, and i can't even imagine the process of vote-gathering across the nation. The reality is that any 'primary' they had stood up at that point would have been a primary of insiders anyway.
 
Well it evidently worked a bit more successfully than calling the opposition fascists, Nazis and the ever so eloquent POTUS calling them garbage, amirite?
Trump has quite literally made it a hallmark of his brand to call people names. Voters have become desensitized to any of it (see the "Puerto Rico" non-fallout) unfortunately.
 
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Trump has quite literally made it a hallmark of his brand to call people names. Voters have become desensitized to any of it (see the "Puerto Rico" non-fallout) unfortunately.
So you’re saying that a bad comedian has influence that Trump should be held to account for but the POTUS calling OVER half the country shouldn’t?
 
interesting hypothesis; not sure if i've ever heard data one way or the other on that (particularly whether people are graded on their 'religiosity'). Again, VA could be an interesting laboratory to test those things in 2025

We have christian friends that believe the man has the final say and the women has to follow. If you've ever been around Orthodox Jews you'll find the women are second class to the men. Just look at it this way, the guy that won has admitted to grabbing women where ever he wants, he has lost lawsuits for rape, he's cheated on his wife multiple times and even with a porn star, he physically abused a past wife, I could go on, and yet people will still vote for him when he's running against a women. The only time he lost was when running against a man. Honestly if you don't care about how a man treats women, you must not have much respect for women, so why would you be willing to vote for a women.
 
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So you’re saying that a bad comedian has influence that Trump should be held to account for but the POTUS calling OVER half the country shouldn’t?
Huh? You inferred that because the Dems said some mean things that they had a bad strategy. Those comments had no bearing on the election, mainly because Trump has been saying foul things about innumerable people/Americans for 10 years now and has normalized/desensitized the behavior.
 
I hope trump ships them all out, but he won't. This is just another "build the wall" joke that does nothing but feed the anger of people. I have no skin in the game when it comes to immigrants so ship em out, I don't really care.
I think realistically & financially, the immigrants that have a legal record and/or on some terrorist “watch list” will be the only individuals initially rounded up/sent back to their countries of origin. After that, it will be in more of a case-by-case basis.
 
to be clear, i mean they really had no choice once the debate occurred. there was simply not enough time, and i can't even imagine the process of vote-gathering across the nation. The reality is that any 'primary' they had stood up at that point would have been a primary of insiders anyway.
And I can assume from this that they shouldn’t or couldn’t have prevailed on Biden and his team of handlers to realize that they could not camouflage his state from the electorate last year, thus allowing new candidates and real primaries? My gosh I think Shapiro and/or Beshear could have changed where we are today. But not Kamala. Who was taken out in 2020 by another FEMALE!
Damn that misogyny.
 
^^^^^Lots of taking your ball and going home syndrome going on today.

I'm still here. How about you @RileyHawk @ISUBryce ? ;)


You've all had your fun. Now it's my turn.................enjoy what's to come. 🤫

Dude this constant tagging me in posts is just weird.

You seem to think I absolutely loved Harris or something, which is just not true and I said it on here many times.

I'm personally completely fine, so if you want to have some weird fantasy about me crying in my beer you're wrong. I went and took my middle kid to play basketball last night until about 9:00 and when I got back it was basically over to anybody who wasn't trying to find some reason why Harris won. I posted on here a few times and played some 2k and went to bed. I woke up and am working today. Life goes on.
 
Huh? You inferred that because the Dems said some mean things that they had a bad strategy. Those comments had no bearing on the election, mainly because Trump has been saying foul things about innumerable people/Americans for 10 years now and has normalized/desensitized the behavior.
But Joe Pudding is the sitting President who insulted over half of his countrymen. I don’t blame the VP for that but lots of voters apparently did.
 
People want to blame misogyny and racism. They just don’t want to admit that she comes across as unlikable and, uh, not smart.

Bad message and bad messenger = double whammy.

Does Trump come across as likeable or smart? I'm always just confused by these pot shots taken at Harris. I don't think it's mysogyny or racism either, FYI.
 
Nothing to do with any of this. A majority of Americans stopped thinking and put an authoritarian strongman in power to fix everything. Even though his "fixes" don't make any sense.

Republicans are always going to find more bullshit "issues" like the trans to flim flam people. The border will now disappear as an issue until it becomes convenient to raise the rascist flag again.

If it really is about inflation (gas/grocery prices), Trump's declared agenda is just gonna make that issue much worse.

Democrats have been trying to appeal to the population with "common sense" positions for decades now and it's gotten them nowhere, they have a messaging problem, not an issues problem.
You still don’t get it. The border wall will be completed and the former remain in Mexico policy, etc will be re-enacted, thus the border “issue” and problems will organically diminish.
 
But Joe Pudding is the sitting President who insulted over half of his countrymen. I don’t blame the VP for that but lots of voters apparently did.
No, they didn't. Trump called half the country "enemies" and worse. It's a terribly tired take to think people marched into the polls saying "I'm voting for Trump because the departing President maybe called me garbage!" Particularly when these same people have been saying for four years, "do you miss the mean tweets guy?"
 
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Don’t disagree.
What’s also eye opening is clearly many Latino voters are fine closing the door behind them once they’re here.

I guess the practical message is Dems can no longer count on automatic votes.
I think what it says is that legal immigrants that live near the border and came into this country the right way…also had to deal with huge influx of illegal immigrants & just got fed up with it.
 
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