“Real Election choice was between a psychotic, irrational, criminal, racist, old man, and a middle-age, intelligent, black woman with governmental experience”
Posting of a comment by J.P. McJefferson to the earlier post “American Idiot(s),” Angry Bear. J.P. hits the same note I have been discussing in earlier commentaries about voting here and here. To add to J.P.’s comment on Angry Bear; “73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote.” And 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.” The key here is far fewer voted in 2024 than in 2020, If they did vote many voted for candidates who could not possibly win, their family pets Disney characters (2016), etc. If I remember, far more voters turned out in 2020 than in 2016 or 2024. What issues does America have against a woman as the president?
J.P. McJefferson adds a dimension I did not take on. The reality of choices people made and voted for in 2024. Read on . . .
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J.P.: We keep talking here about, “A choice between a senile old man, an empty suit, and a fascist is a choice among evils.” THAT WAS NOT THE CHOICE. The real choice in the election was between a psychotic, irrational, criminal, racist, old man, and a middle-aged, intelligent, black woman with years of governmental experience, who specifically warned of the evils to come. The real choice was between the Rule of Law & Corruption.
And, I remind. To win the 270 electoral votes, Harris only lost by 231,646 votes out of 155+ million cast — WI by 29,417 votes; MI by 80,618; and PA by 121,611, and some 90 million potential voters didn’t vote, and 10% of them said they didn’t think their vote would count.
Since the election, Republicans and the media have attempted to portray this narrow victory as an overwhelming mandate and reflective of deep-rooted problems with the Democratic Party. With only a 100-day campaign, it was difficult to overcome a decade of lies, backed by the GOP, Fox News, and the richest man in the world.
While there are certainly problems, mostly with communications, I maintain that: PROGRESSIVES + CENTRISTS = WINNERS. Democrats must learn the lesson of separating critical issues from others. Democracy, the rule of law, less money in politics, separation of powers, & equal rights. We need to FOCUS ON CRITICAL ISSUES, WIN ELECTIONS, & save the many other worthy issues for later.
And, we must also remember that it only takes a very few GOP Congressional Members who have remained complicit to stop the madness, insanity, and corruption that is now the government of the United States.
I’m one of the ones who remain hopeful for a better future for the U.S.
The real issue is high information voters versus low information voters and non voters with a healthy dose of racism, sexism and own the libs thrown in. Personally, I think the issue in the midterms has to be the utter corruption of Trump and the entire GOP that goes along with it. Talk all you want about immigration and the economy and trans athletes etc, but the one constant is that Trump and his family are the bandits here and nothing else really matters to them including the destruction of the world’s beacon of hope.
JohnH:
Thank you for reflecting what you and many voters thought. Oh my god, it’s a woman running for the presidency. Oh my god, it is a woman of color running for the presidency. We can’t have any of that. And she put the screws to Trump in the debate. Now hat are we going to do?
Well we pretty much know what happened. During the first debate Ms. Kamala beat the crap out of Trump and it showed. He was flustered by her rebuttals/ He did not have answers. He could have turned it right around in a second debate. Trump knew he would lose as he is not that quit in a debate and her knowlege base surpassed his. Superficial showman ship was all he had.
As J.P. states: ” The real choice in the election was between a psychotic, irrational, criminal, racist, “white” old man, and a middle-aged, intelligent, black woman with years of governmental experience, who specifically warned of the evils to come. The real choice was between the Rule of Law & Corruption.
I agree with J.P. to a point. He does state “To win the 270 electoral votes, Harris only lost by 231,646 votes out of 155+ million cast — WI by 29,417 votes; MI by 80,618; and PA by 121,611, and some 90 million potential voters didn’t vote, and 10% of them said they didn’t think their vote would count.”
Why didn’t millions of voters not go to the polls? I think it is more than just believing their vote would not count. There are many people who would not want a woman as a president. In 2016, we had the Mickey mouse and Pluto vote with Clinton. in 2024, voting for others was also prevalent. Trump failed twice to get greater than 50% of the vote, I wonder why? In 2020 a senile old man beat him and left a sound economy for the next president, That being Trump, he is slowly destroying it to benefit the upper income citizens. An that is your man?
As J.P said: ” Harris only lost by 231,646 votes out of 155+ million cast — WI by 29,417 votes; MI by 80,618; and PA by 121,611, and some 90 million potential voters didn’t vote, and 10% of them said they didn’t think their vote would count.
Since the election, Republicans and the media have attempted to portray this narrow victory as an overwhelming mandate and reflective of deep-rooted problems with the Democratic Party. With only a 100-day campaign, it was difficult to overcome a decade of lies, backed by the GOP, Fox News, and the richest man in the world. I have better detail and have cited it.”
And again John, you are wasting everyone’s time with your nonsense. And again, we are not discussing the last election in Moore’s brief thoughts. We are discussing the destruction trump and Republicans have wrought on the nation. It will take years to fix and be more than a knowledge of economic. You are wearing on my patience John.
@Bill,
Exactly. Trump wins because too many Americans don’t want a woman in the Oval Office, particularly a woman of color.
Nonsense. High information voters saw the election as between a Raving Fascist and Fascist Lite. Low information voters saw grass roots campaigning (signs along the road, television adverts) that showed a “clear choice” between a woman who would continue the policies of the current Administration and someone who claimed millions of immigrants were stealing jobs and property. Do Nothing v. Do Something. If you liked and benefited from the previous four years, your default was to vote for Harris. If you started driving for Uber to make ends meet, it wasn’t.
(It is not coincident that the states that didn’t rebound well from the pandemic are low-tax and therefore low-G(invest) states, but try pointing this out to the residents of those states and they’ll talk about how their 2017-2019 below-GDP growth was going so well until things got closed down just because people were dying.)
What none of you are dealing with–though you acknowledge the data, obliquely–is that about 8% of U.S. voters consistently say they will not vote for a woman for President. Now you can claim–I’ll think but possibly not say that you’re an idiot, but you can claim it–that all of those are solid Republican voters.
Assuming you were correct–as I said, you would be an idiot, but as a finger exercise/corner solution/best-case scenario we can make the assumption–the result isn’t that nothing changes. It’s that a decent (size not morality or ethics) portion of the electorate is MORE motivated. They put up lawn signs, they donate, they canvas, and most certainly, they vote. So if all of the anti-woman voters were Republicans, you would expect R turnout to be up and D turnout to be flat.
It’s not. R turnout was up in 2024, but overall turnout was down massively. Even if some of that was voter suppression–either deliberate or in reduced opportunity–it suggests that decent (same parenthetic) portion of the D electorate are in the “No Gurls Aloud” club.
The “close” states in 2020 were the close states in 2024. Iirc, Trump(2020) would have won if Rs had flipped only about 80,000 votes–despite losing by over 7,000,000 votes–so if you’re downplaying the belief that our votes don’t matter, the only question is what are you smoking/ingesting or which county in Wisconsin is your home.
Yes, a white male Democrat–the Democratic Party scuttlebutt was for Sherrod Brown, who couldn’t keep his Senate seat that year, but Ohio is lost to Democrats anyway–probably would have won. Certainly flips Wisconsin, probably flips PA, and doesn’t have to suck off Biden the way Harris did, so there’s a good shot at MI, and a chance at NC. (I don’t see any other state that realistically might have gone D but didn’t.)
That’s the reality; the question is whether your “solution” is to only nominate Males. (I would say White Males–as noted above, Obama won in 2008 for the same reason Carter did in 1976; Republicans explicitly screwed the pooch in a way that could not be ignored–but your mileage may vary.)
That said, both HRClinton and Harris OVERperformed. Harris outpolled Trump(2020); third highest popular vote total ever. And that was with being a drag on the Senate candidates in PA, MI, WI, NC, etc. Clinton received about 2.75 million more votes than Trump(2016).
There was only one way Harris might have won, and that’s if Biden had had the good sense to resign after the 2022 midterms. That he didn’t, and decided to fuck over his running mate instead, is his legacy. As with Obama, the only way to move people toward being more willing to vote for a female Presidential candidate and reduce that 8% is to either have one in office or have a disaster where She is the opposition-party option.
@Ken,
“What none of you are dealing with–though you acknowledge the data, obliquely–is that about 8% of U.S. voters consistently say they will not vote for a woman for President.”
LOL! I not only dealt with that, I dealt with that on this. very. thread.
Ken:
High Information Voters would not have voted for a shithead like Trump; but they did. They chose the worst of two (?) evils. They voted for trump because they did not want a women much less a black American. It is amazing how the Covid epidemic was conveniently placed upon Biden when Trump was the one who fumbled around with it in the beginning. Amazing how food prices went up when the costs to supply such did not. Did a Quart shrink by 2 ounces? Amount of cereal in the box shrunk too. Prices went up . . . Corporate certainly took advantage to claim shortages when they were minimal or did not exist. It is amazing how the supplicant Republicans lost all their courage. Three months before the election, Trump rebukes Fauci for Trump’s failures to take covid seriously.
And you are saying Biden is responsible for this and what resulted after Trump left office? Trump is a semi-coherent loon with half a brain. We were better off with Biden being led by others than Trump. That is, if Biden being so bad. We would have been better off with Harris or Clinton than Trump. That is if you did not like Biden.
Here, some voting stats for you. You have to look at more than just citing your particulars. I did a more detailed commentary in the past. I did the state thingee a while back. I am not going to recreate for you again because you are having a hissy. People did not turn out for “women.”
You know Ken:
Six months before Dan’s death, I was one of the few who stood by Angry Bear and made sure it had an existence. I do not know where you and some others were; but it was not here.
In 2023 and before Dan died, he could no longer write. I wrote using Dan’s name for him. He could not even tell me the topics. The cancer drugs he was on were taking their toll on him. He was my friend and I met him once while working in Boston. We conversed constantly via phone
Dan died July 17, 2023
Linda Crawford gave me a letter transferring the site to me so I could keep it open and pay for it. Any income I pay the taxes for it. Extra funds are set aside to pay for internet service and name protection. The site recently paid to have upgrades improved so AB does not suffer downtime. A mismatch of sorts.
I am legally listed as the owner also. Without doing so, AB would have died also.
Since June of 2024, you commented ~15 times. Since April of 2024 Ken, you posted ~8 times. It doesn’t matter to me how many times you comment or post. Although a good post by you and Robert does get read, The site reports on the number of hits on posts. You may not get comments, but you are read.
You do not have to like me. I do not care.
People do not have to say they will not vote for women. They just will not show up at the polling places. If they do show up, they will vote for others or Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck or the family dog, etc. That is what happened in 2016 and also in 2024.
You can talk rings around me, I am supply chain and was very successful at it globally having worked in many countries.
I am done talking to you.
Eric:
Angry Bear does not do innuendo, supposition and conjecture or hearsay for that matter.: