Some things are now certain about the 2024 election:
1. Kamala Harris has set the record for the most votes ever cast for a losing candidate. She received more votes in 2024 than Trump did in 2020.
2. Donald Trump has been the Republican candidate three times and got more votes each time. That ties a record. (Surprisingly, Franklin Roosevelt does not own this record. He got fewer votes in 1940 than he had in 1936. Trump’s co-holder is Grover Cleveland, who ran three times and got more votes each time he ran. Like Trump, he won the first and third elections and lost the second.)
The final total will be about 75 million votes for Harris and 77.3 million for Trump. The total number of Presidential votes will be about 155 million, which is three million less than 2020. Harris dropped about six million from Biden’s 2020 count, while Trump picked up about three million.
Why were there fewer voters?
In a macro sense, that is easy to explain in one word: California. California is a Democratic stronghold where the Republican effort is a lost cause, so there are two possible sources of the massive decline from Biden’s count to Harris’s: (1) Democratic voters who felt their votes were not needed; or (2) Republican voters who felt their votes were not useful. At this moment, the true source appears to be the former. Trump’s 2020 and 2024 vote counts were almost identical in California, but Harris dropped almost two million below Biden’s total. In 2020, there were 25.1 million eligible voters in California, and Biden got 11.1 million votes. In 2024, there were 26.9 million eligible voters, and Harris received 9.3 million votes. If Harris had pulled Biden’s percentage of the eligible voters in California, she would have gotten 2.6 million additional votes, which accounts for nearly all of Trump’s national margin of victory.
Given some of the same apathy in other safe blue states, Harris probably lost three million votes nationally from lackadaisical voters who (correctly) deemed their Presidential votes irrelevant to the national outcome. Excluding those voters, the remainder of the 2020-2024 change is a shift of three million voters from blue to red, producing the final total of Harris down six million and Trump up three million.
Where did the shift come from?
The three million additional Trump votes were generated approximately as follows: Latinos +2 million, Whites +1.3 million, all others slightly down.
The most significant trend was the shift among Americans who are classified as neither black nor white. There was basically no shift in the preferences of black or white voters from 2020 to 2024, but a significant shift in all others.
| Trump 2020 % | Trump 2024 % | |
| White men | 61 | 60 |
| White women | 55 | 53 |
| Black men | 19 | 21 |
| Black women | 9 | 7 |
| Latino men | 36 | 55 |
| Latino women | 30 | 38 |
| All other | 38 | 46 |
Black and White voters represent 5/6 of the nation, and their enthusiasm for Trump was completely unchanged. One and two-point shifts are statistically meaningless.
On the other hand, Latinos shifted. In 2020, there were about 20.5 million Latino votes, and Trump received only about 6.6 million of them. In 2024, about 18.6 million Latinos went to the polls, and Trump got about 8.6 million of their votes. That change alone accounted for about two million additional Trump votes.
There was also a shift in voter turn-out. The exit polls estimate that the percentage of White voters increased from 67% in 2020 to 71% in 2024. That means there were almost six million additional White voters. Based on the percentages that voted for Trump in each election, he increased from a little more than 60 million White votes to a bit below 62 million, accounting for a gain of approximately a million and a half.
Among the voters who are neither Whites nor Latinos, Trump received a higher percentage of their votes, but because of lower turn-out, his absolute number of votes from this group declined slightly.
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Focus on the swing states
The fact that millions of Democratic voters stayed home in “sure thing” states helps us to understand why Harris lost the popular vote, but it offers no real enlightenment about why she lost the election, because the election is decided by the swing states, and the number of voters increased in every one of them.
I’m going to pick one of those purple states, Wisconsin, and use it as a microcosm. In both elections, each candidate received some 1.6 million votes and change in Wisconsin, with the total number of votes increasing slightly in 2024.
In 2020, Trump got 48.8% of the vote in Wisconsin and lost by only 20,000 votes.
In 2024, Trump got 49.7% of the vote in Wisconsin and won by only 30,000 votes.
Trump gained 0.9%. That’s a very small shift, basically 30,000 votes. A change that small in a state with more than three million voters is almost impossible to detect with sampling techniques, but the exit polls do give us some clues.
The voting by race shows us that the entire shift occurred among non-white voters.
- In 2020, Biden won 46% of white voters in Wisconsin. In 2024, Harris won the very same percentage.
- In 2020, Biden won 73% of non-white voters, but Harris dropped to 67%. Non-white voters are only 15% of the electorate in Wisconsin, but they were critical to the redshift. Democratic support in that bloc dropped 6 points in 2024. 6% of 15% is 0.9% – and that’s exactly the Trump gain in 2024 over his previous performance.
It’s possible to drill down a little bit deeper.
Among college-degreed non-white voters, a very small group in Wisconsin, Trump’s support was basically unchanged. He got 24% of their votes in 2020 and 25% in 2024, a statistically meaningless difference.
Among non-white voters without college degrees, however, Trump support increased from 26% to 35%. While this group is only 11% of the Wisconsin electorate, a 9 point increase accounts for a change of 0.99% in the state total (9% of 11%), and again that’s basically the entire shift we were looking for.
The moral of the story, if there is one: American elections are so close in the swing states that they can be decided by a small shift in a small segment of the population. There are only about 350,000 non-white, non-degreed voters in Wisconsin, and Trump is not popular with them, but he is more popular than he was in 2020.
And that was enough to transform a small loss into a small victory – and color the entire state red.
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What about the future?
What’s good for the red team?
The implication of the increase in the absolute number of white voters is that there was a significant drop in the number of non-white voters, from about 54 million to about 45 million. That’s always bad news for Democrats, and it was made far worse by the great Latino shift. Joe Biden had received about 38 million votes from non-white voters, but Kamala Harris could gain no more than 29 million. This immense decrease more than offset the fact that Harris slightly outperformed Biden among white voters. The fact that there were fewer non-whites going to the polls and that more of them shifted to the red team was a fatal 1-2 knockout blow in 2024 that the Democrats will have to turn around in the future if they hope to win national elections. The Democrats absolutely need to maintain their hold on the non-white vote, and to promote high turnout from that group, given that their former hold on the White working class has disintegrated.
Additional bad news for the Democrats comes from the fact that celebrity endorsements seem to have negligible value. The Blue team had every celebrity of significance. Name the biggest stars in the world – the ones that can sell out the largest venues in minutes: Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Beyonce – all supported Harris. The most significant celebrity influencer, Oprah, was also in Harris’s corner, as were all of the late-night hosts. Those endorsements did not seem to mean much.
Was there any good news for the blue team?
Yes, but you have to dig deep into the demographics to find it in America’s movement toward secularism.
- The Democrats are taking an ever-increasing share of the vote from people with no religion (65% in 2020, 71% in 2024). Equally important, the size of that voting bloc is increasing. It consisted of about 34.8 million voters in 2020 and increased by about three million in 2024.
- The size of the Democrats’ least-favorable bloc (white evangelicals) is decreasing. Nearly 30 million voters identified as part of this group in 2020, and that number dropped below 25 million in 2024. A continued decrease is critical for Democrats because an astounding 82% of these voters cast their lots with Trump in 2024.
The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation is now one of the most important voting blocs. As a percentage of the electorate:
- Traditional Protestant denominations are 27%
- People with no religion are 24%.
- Catholics are 22%
- Evangelical Christians are 15%
- Other religions are 10%
That snapshot of the electorate reflects the dramatic change in the country in the past 70 years.
| ADULT AMERICANS | 1956 | 1967 | 1990 | 2010 | Today |
| Christians | 96 | 93 | 83 | 77 | 68 |
| Other religions | 3 | 5 | 6 | 5 | 7 |
| No religion | 1 | 2 | 9 | 14 | 22 |
As it turns out, the Democrats are on the right side of those changes. This is perhaps their greatest hope to offset their loss of the working class.
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The great education gap.
The natural tendency among media pundits is to portray each American election as a single close race. I tend to view them as a tug-o-war between two landslides.
In 2024, white voters with no college degree cast approximately 39 million votes for Trump, compared to 19 million for Harris. Landslide.
All other voters cast approximately 56 million votes for Harris and 38 million for Trump. Counter-landslide.
The greatest achievement among Trump’s ground forces in 2024 is that they got far more of the “white no college” team to the polls. Among whites without college degrees, there were about 3.6 million more at the polls in 2024 than in 2020, while the “all other voters” group shrank in that same period.
The big lesson – you can fool enough of the people enough of the time – just means future elections will be longer, more expensive, and click-baitier. Yay?
Two other factors
1.For New York, California and Illinois, and I’m surprised this wasn’t mentioned since it’s fairly obvious, they’ve had population declines from 2020 to 2024. The numbers for 2024 are still an estimate and maybe some of the ‘return to the office’ reduced the decline, but Illinois’ population is estimated to have declined by about 300,000 from 2020 and New York’s by about 600,000.
California’s population declined by also about 600,000 to 2023 from 2020 which is nowhere near the decline in voter turnout, but anecdotally anyway, there has been a much larger decrease in American citizens in California that has been somewhat offset by an increase in non citizens. These are not necessarily all illegals either. One of the underreported stories of the Biden Administration was the enormous increase in legal immigrants into the United States, something like 2 million a year.
2.The increase in Republican voter suppression of mostly Democratic, especially black, voters. I know that for many Americans any mention of vote suppression is dismissed by everybody when it comes from Democrats (Republicans believe Republican voter suppression even though it’s supposedly comes from space lasers) but there are valid reasons to believe Republicans have long engaged in voter suppression of Democrats and that that has increased slightly. The Republicans weren’t just making it harder to vote for certain groups in 2021 for fun and 6 hour long lineups to vote on election day in Atlanta are certainly more valid evidence than claims of space lasers.
For example, Georgia had an increase in raw vote in 2020 to 2024, but when taking into account the population increase in the state over that time, it’s very likely the overall turnout of eligible voters will actually decline slightly.
That Governor Brian Kemp cheated his way to winning in 2018 is not some ‘conspiracy.’
I think there is at least as much reason to believe that there is Republican voter suppression in all states dominated by Republicans and that this especially impactful in large states like Texas and Florida.
Of course, the math simply does not add up to Kamala Harris winning in the electoral college without this Republican voter suppression of Democrats, but it is likely the primary reason for the decline in raw votes from 2020 to 2024, and not any of the other media narratives.
At the very least, without this voter suppression, the popular vote would have been a virtual tie.
Population decline has nothing to do with the number of eligible voters, or to the number of voter registrations, where California had INCREASED by 600,000 from the 2020 election to the 2024 election.
In 2020, California reported 22.05 million registered voters, compared to 22.60 million in 2024.
27% of registered voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2020, as they did in 2024. The decline entirely was in people voting for the other team. In 2020, 50% of the registered votes in California showed up to cast a Biden ballot. In 2024, only 41% showed up to vote for Harris.
If Kamala had pulled Biden’s percentage of registered voters (actually 9.27% more), she would have received an additional two million votes.
In terms of eligible voters in California, the increase was even more dramatic. There were 25.1 million in 2020, compared to 26.9 million in 2024, which was actually a massive increase, despite the state’s population decline.
In 2020, 44% of the state’s eligible voters trudged to the polls to vote for Biden. Only 34% were willing to do so for Harris. If she had pulled the exact same percentage of eligible voters as Biden, she would have received 2.6 million more votes in California – erasing pretty much the entire margin of victory for Trump.
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The number of registered voters in NY State was unchanged.It went from 13.56 million to 13.58 from 2020 to 2024.
Your point about Illinois was correct. Voter registration dropped from 8.37 million to 8.10 million. I dropped any mention of it from my post.
Interesting. You are correct about California. I was referring to the (estimated) eligible voting population and not to registered voters. On that basis, looking at the new democracy maps website for 2024 and the US Elections project for 2020, New York’s (estimated) eligible voting population has declined by about 300,000.
Anyway, certainly the decline of the vote in California explains much of the decline in vote nationally.
The estimated number of eligible voters was much higher in California in 2024 than it had been in 2020.
Interesting. Thanks.
Exactly what are Republicans doing to suppress Democratic votes? I watched a bit of MSNBC on election night and learned that Texas leads the nation in suppressing Black votes, but the woman who said that didn’t explain how they accomplished it. I can tell you that New York Democrats engaged in voter suppression prior to this year’s election. As a Trump-despising Republican, I have gotten in the habit of voting for the Libertarian candidates for president. I wouldn’t have been able to vote for the Libertarian ticket this year if I hadn’t happened to see a sample ballot before I went to vote. I discovered the Libertarian Party, along with almost every other third party, had failed to qualify for the ballot. The Working Families Party and the Conservative Party qualified, but they had nominated Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, respectively. If I had gone to the polls without knowing I would have to write in the Libertarian ticket, I wouldn’t have learned their names in advance. Since the last election, the New York State legislature (100% controlled by Democrats) changed election law to make it much harder to earn ballot access. I think that is an example of voter suppression.
On the other hand, requiring a government ID to vote seems like a reasonable precaution against voter fraud. If NY had required a government ID to vote in 2001, the person who signed in at the polls, as my late father, wouldn’t have gotten away with it. While that one vote didn’t affect an election, I have no idea how many dead people voted that year. I am sure most of us agree that our president-elect lost the 2020 election, fair and square. However, just because the people who believe Trump’s B.S. are gullible doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to reassure them that future elections will be free of fraud by passing reasonable ballot security measures like requiring an ID.
OK, if I hadn’t known I needed to learn the names on the Libertarian ticket before I voted, I could have probably looked up their names on my phone.
“Exactly what are the Republicans doing to supress Democratice votes?” Michael, have the Republicans elected in November taken office yet? I didn’t think so myself, but maybe you know something I don’t.
1.Various courts if not the Supreme Court have ruled, as was made clear when the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump could not be removed from the ballot for his insurrection (I believe the Supreme Court made a preemptive ruling that even if he had been convicted over this that he could not be removed, but that he certainly could not be removed without a conviction – I think this was the Supreme Court that made this ruling), other courts at certainly the state if not the Federal level have ruled that legislatures have the right to set ballot access for political parties including making it harder for smaller parties to get on the ballot such as in terms of requiring signatures.
The harder ballot access, i.e candidates not receiving equal protection for ballot access was something a number of Democrats brought up with the court on Trump ruled that it was not equal protection for Trump or his voters to be deprived of ballot access in one state but not others. What the Democrats argued them made sense to me and I agree on that it’s wrong to make it harder for third parties to receive ballot access, but the courts have made this distinction, so, no the New York state legislature was not engaging in voter suppression. Of course, had the LIbertarian Party received 5% of the vote in 2016 that would have made it easier for them to get ballot access in at least 2020.
2.Voter I.D is one form of mostly Democratic voter suppression in that it is used essentially as a poll tax. Very long lineups are another and simply removing voters from the voter rolls is a third. This is how Jeb Bush cheated to help his brother win Florida in 2000 with Florida Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris and how then Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp won in 2018.
In regards to the first point, since you’re supposed to be a lawyer, I think you would have known that especially since it was in the news not that long ago. I suspect that you’re not the same Michael McChesney.
Adam, that was quite a first sentence. It was almost worthy of William Faulkner.
On whether a state could remove Trump from the ballot because of January 6th, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that they could not. The ruling that only Congress – and not the states – can enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was 5 – 4. The four (technically) concurring justices thought the Court shouldn’t have reached that question.
I never claimed that New York State didn’t have the power to make it hard for third parties to get on the ballot. My point was that by making it difficult, they were clearly suppressing the number of votes third-party candidates would get. I am reasonably certain that Chase Oliver would have gotten more votes if he was on the ballot. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right. I am also reasonably certain someone will throw that line back in my face.
As for the assertion that requiring a government ID is a poll tax designed to suppress Democratic votes, I’m afraid I have to disagree. It is my understanding that to avoid the ID requirement being challenged as poll taxes, every state that requires a government ID to vote makes such IDs available at no cost. Given the way voting demographics have shifted in recent years, I am not sure whether the ID requirement suppresses more Democratic or more Republican votes.
As for very long lines at the polls, you are right; that will suppress the number of votes at that polling site. However, I am honestly not sure which party is more responsible for those lines. For instance, I saw reports of very long lines at polling places in Philadelphia. That would have likely suppressed Democratic votes. But were those polling places overseen by Republicans? I doubt it. Long lines were also reported in Atlanta. Obviously, the Republican Secretary of State would have ultimate responsibility for all of the polling places in Georgia. However, were the poll workers hired by the Secretary of State, or were they hired by Atlanta officials? Who determined how many voting machines are located at each site? I honestly don’t know the answer to these questions. Remember Hanlon’s razor, “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.” Without knowing the answers to those questions, I don’t know if the long lines are deliberately caused by Republicans to hold down Democratic votes or if they are the result of incompetent county or municipal workers.
You brought up the 2000 election in Florida. Remember, Democrats created and approved the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, which almost certainly won the state for George W. Bush.
I almost forgot. Why the hell would anyone be impersonating me? For the record, I identify as a recovering lawyer. That means I haven’t practiced law since 2002, when I accepted a job as a legal recruiter. Today, I am retired on disability. I follow some legal news out of curiosity. All that said, I was not really able to understand your first point. What does the insurrection clause have to do with third-party ballot access?
1.There is a distinction made between what are regarded as ‘bookkeeping’ issues like party ballot access (and write in ballot access) and a candidates ability to run. Historically various courts have ruled that the state has an interest in not allowing, for instance, 200 people to run for President, so this practicality makes it necessary to place reasonable limits on the need for third parties to gather signatures. I can understand these practical realities however, I think there is no question that a number of states, maybe including New York I don’t know, have made it unreasonably difficult for third parties to make the ballot, however, my understanding is that no court has been interested in taking this up.
While this does not necessarily explain the imposition on independent candidates seeking write in ballot access, I assume a reason for this is that the courts regard the right to run for office as an individual right and not a party right. In some states, the major parties can not even block people from running in their primaries.
2.On I.Ds that is definitely not the case. While the I.D itself may have to be issued for free, many states still make it into a defacto poll tax by requiring the individual to pay for their own photo which is made to need to be a high quality photo and other such expensive paperwork. In the past when Democrats thought the Republicans had more sincere reasons for voter I.D, Democrats offered to vote in favor as long as the I.D was issued completely free. Seems reasonable to me.
3.On who is to blame. This isn’t difficult. It’s the state legislatures that provide the funding. In Pennsylvania the Republicans have control of the state house and have blocked greater funding that would prevent long lines. This is the way that the Republicans in these states deny they’re at fault by saying that the county officials are incompetent, by simply not funding them to the degree required to avoid things like 6 hour line-ups. Again, the purpose for Republicans doing this is clear: to suppress the votes of mostly Democratic voters, especially black Democratic voters.
4.Despite the claims that Democrats stole elections 60+ years ago, it was the Republican National Committee that was placed on a consent decree in 1982 after stealing the New Jersey governors’ race (no evidence Tom Kean himself was aware of this.) But, Roger Stone was a major player in this. Although the stealing of the election in Florida in 2000 occurred while the RNC was still under this consent decree, it’s probably not a surprise that pond scum like Roger Stone floated back to the surface after this consent decree was liftedin 2016.
One more academic point, just because. Total turnout in the 2020 elecdtion was around 160 million, but about 158.4 million voted in the Presidential race. Some of these are provisional votes that get tossed and this likely increased in 2024 over 2020 (see the Republican suppression of Democratic voters) but around 1% of people who vote in Presidential elections do not vote for the Presidential race.
Some of these people probably can’t make up their minds, as hard as that is to believe, but many others are likely only interested in local races, referendums or state races.
In 2020, turnout was almost precisely 160 million of 240 millon eligible voters which is virtually exactly 2/3.
You left out the most important cause of this election turnout. Kamala was an AWFUL candidate. I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on, she is a terrible, vapid, mindless human being who kept failing upward until the country put a stop to it. The Harris/Walz ticket was laughable. Why did those voters stay home? Because they hate Trump, but not enough to vote for Harris.
It’s certainly very likely that brain-dead sexism like this is one of the main reasons why Trump won.
Please provide a list of her accomplishments. I’ll wait.
Less awful than Hillary. WAY less awful than Rump, whose biggest accomplishment was not building a wall and not getting Mexico to pay for it. Followed closely by cutting taxes to fund a bunch of stock buybacks.
Actually, Trump’s biggest accomplishment is that he was President of the United States of America. Funny how that gets lost sometimes.
Speaking of paying for the wall, according to a story on Fox News’ Special Report, the Biden Administration has been selling construction materials left over when Biden stopped construction of the wall as scrap for pennies on the dollar. The reporter said that he had been told approximately $1 Billion worth of materials had been or was in the process of being sold. If that story is true, the taxpayers will end up buying all those materials again, probably at a higher cost because of inflation. What pisses me off about that story is that this won’t inconvenience Trump in the slightest. He’ll get Congress to appropriate as much money as he tells them to appropriate (for at least the next two years). All the Biden people have done is screw over the taxpayers.
Mexico was supposed to pay for the wall, don’t ‘ya know.
Whereas it was true in 2016 approx 1/2 of voters knew Trump was a pathological liar, but they didn’t care, eh. Trump voters “reasoned” all politicians are liars so wtf!
“Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen” ~ Winston Churchill
Apologies to Churchill comparing him in any way to Trump. 😮
and so it goes …
I think they’re comparable. Same body shape.
I’ll do that if you’re sincere in getting a response. I’m familiar with brain-dead Trump supporters especially you noxious sexist types who don’t believe anything that goes against their feelings no matter how well sourced but who demand that all their idiocies be taken at face value and that feel aggrieved in even being questioned.
Trump is a terrible, vapid, mindless human being who kept failing upwards in life. Also a convicted felon. Yet somehow he managed to win.
The tears are delicious, please keep them flowing!!!
Are you quite literally retarded? No one was crying. Your inability to comprehend reality paired with your access to the internet is unfortunate.
Hey! We’re Democrats, we don’t use that type of language. People are going to think we’re hypocrites or something.
Yes, Trump is a convicted felon, but I think that actually helped him win. There were four different groups of criminal charges against Trump. There were the federal classified documents cases, the federal January 6th cases, the GA election interference cases, and the Stormy Daniels charges. The charges related to paying off Stormy Daniels were B.S. He was convicted, but even if the trial judge doesn’t throw out the convictions, an appeals court will. Falsifying a business record is a misdemeanor with a 2-year statute of limitations. To turn that into a felony, they had to prove he falsified the record to hide another felony. They decided to allege Trump listed the payment as a legal expense to hide a campaign finance violation. However, we know from the John Edwards case that candidates may not use campaign funds to pay off their Mistresses. How could the payment to Stormy be a campaign expense if he wouldn’t have been allowed to use campaign funds? But the DA and the judge were out to get Trump, so the case was brought, it wasn’t dismissed and the jury convicted. The whole time, Trump was crying about how they were out to get him. How was this different than the other cases? In this case, Trump was right, and large numbers of people saw that. The infuriating thing about that is that it made it easier for Trump to lump all his prosecutions (persecutions?) together as Lawfair. THAT is why the NY prosecution helped Trump win. Thank you, Alvin Bragg.
Or more accurately:
1 – GOP causes a problem (inflation).
2 – Dems fix the problem (inflation)
3 – Dems don’t fix the problem (inflation) fast enough. Get kicked out of office.
The default position of your average conservative is someone is out to get them. They didn’t need Bragg to think that. They assume its the case regardless.
I agree that Trump didn’t need Bragg to show him prosecutors were being unfair to him. But he lied about many of the charges, claiming they were all politically motivated. But then Alvin Bragg came along and indicted Trump on charges every observer could see were politically motivated. While Trump’s most avid followers would have dismissed any and all charges as Lawfair, there were other people who were, lets call them, potentially persuadable. If such a person wasn’t a lawyer or hadn’t followed the indictments closely, that person might still have been persuaded to vote against Trump because of the seriousness of the charges. But by bringing Trump to trial in a clearly biased proceeding, that person might instead have been persuaded all the charges were like the ones Bragg brought. I don’t know if it would have made a difference if he hadn’t indicted Trump, but what he did made it easier for Trump to win.
There is far more credible evidence that Republicans engage in Democratic voter suppression than there is of this ‘lawfare’ nonense.
There is also far greater evidence that Donald Trump and the Republican Party along with the fascist federalist society Supreme Court will turn the United States into an authoritarian dictatorship. Can’t say you don’t deserve it.
If you get cut off from disability (assuming you’re on disability) as a result of the Republicans winning the election, can’t say you don’t deserve that as well.
Adam, I have been pretty clear that I think the Lawfare charges are bullshit. The point I have been trying to make is that by launching an actually politically motivated prosecution on a trumped-up (pun unintended) charge, Alvin Bragg made it easier for Trump to convince, at least, some people that all of his complaints are valid. Then Joe Biden, in a bid to justify the pardon of his son after 4 years of denying he would pardon him, claimed the charges against Hunter were politically motivated by his own Justice Department. If Biden had just claimed that he changed his mind over Thanksgiving because he loved his son, I wouldn’t care about the pardon. Instead, he effectively gave Trump a huge Christmas present.
Finally, I am curious about what you think I did that leads you to believe I deserve to lose my social security. I didn’t vote for Trump. I didn’t vote for a single Republican in or about to join Congress. What I have done is post opinions you don’t like, and for that, you believe I deserve to be cut off from social security. And you claim that the Federalist Society is fascist?
To be perfectly honest, the fact that Trump will not be taking the advice of the Federalist Society on his judicial nominations is one of the things that really scares me about Trump’s second term. The reason Trump won’t follow Fedsoc’s advice this time around is that none of the judges recommended by FedSoc and appointed by Trump helped him “stop the steal” in 2020. That’s because they are loyal to the Constitution and the law, as they should be, not Trump. Who or what will his next round of judicial nominees be loyal to? I really worry about that.
1.On Trump and ‘lawfare’ with Alvin Bragg. Bullshit, Bragg and Bragg’s office did not get to charge alone, it had to be cleared, even if just on Trump’s appeal by the trial judge as well as the New York State Supreme Court. The same things that the prosecution in Hunter Biden’s case said in pushing back on President Biden’s claims.
It then needed a conviction of 12 jurors, and, for what it’s worth, New York City trended Republican so it’s hard to imagine at least one of those 12 jurors was not willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
You report on the case the way that the media in general reported on it, but, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t remember the details, but I recall I asked other lawyers online about this at the time, about how Bragg managed to get through the ‘unique prosecution’ aspects of the case and they told me that that Bragg actually made the case in a very different and conventional way that put those aspects aside.
2.If you think cutting people off from social security is fascist, then you must believe the Republican Party is fascist. This isn’t just Trump, it’s the fascist Republicans in Congress who you support. So, that’s one thing. The other thing is that even though you don’t support Trump personally, you are often posting here B.S in support of Trump like this Bragg ‘lawfare’ nonsense. So, ultimately you are responsible for your actions and deserve the consequences of those actions.
At a personal level, I don’t want to ask about your personal life but I find it odd that you aren’t wealthy given the company you’ve kept. The Federalist Society was founded about 45 years ago by far right appalingly greedy wealthy businessmen who pushed for a far right interpretation of the Constitution that promoted, among other things, making the Friedman Doctrine into the defacto business law of the United States (publicly traded businesses have a sole fiduciary duty to their shareholders including arguably to breaking the law to maximize quarterly profits – quarterly was not part of the original interpretation.)
It is certainly true that the Federalist Society has also promoted other things than business interests like an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment, but, while I genuinely dn’t like to make broad brush claims and while I certainly think that a number of American businesses and businesspeople have done a good job innovating new products and services, the American CEO class collectively, in addition to being appalingly greedy and believing that it’s even their duty to lie and break the law to maximize shareholder wealth (including their own), it seems to be the case that many of them are also adrenaline junkies who love the idea of the casino economy, and that many of them are gun nuts. So, from that perspective, that the Federalist Society promoted an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is not a surprise.
I saw a video recently which I hadn’t thought of, this notion that Trump and his billionaire backers want other Americans to become wealthy like them, and this video argued a person has to be a fool to believe that. These wealthy people want this private club for themselves.
A couple other points, my grammar has been slipping lately and I’ve made other small blunders in real life as well. I might be getting dementia or something.
On guns and CEOs I was not trying to bring up Brian Thompson whose situation seems to have been carefully avoided here. That said, in regards to people being responsible for their actions, even if it’s a collective responsibility. It certainly shouldn’t be a surprise that even wealthy CEOs can’t completely wall themselves off from all the guns in the United States. Oh well, sending thoughts and prayers to The Thompson family.
One last point since this bothered me.
I get sick of hearing this stupid talking point “I just posted opinions that you don’t like.”
Yes, and one of those opinions is to support the Republican Party which wants to cut (gut) Medicaid if not Medicare and, although not mentioned lately, to cut/privatize social security.
These ‘opinions’ you are expressing are for things that have real world consequences.
This is such an obnoxious talking point.
I don’t think that position squares with the facts. We kinda know why people were apathetic in California. Apart from that:
(1) More white people went to the polls in 2024 than 2020
(2) A slightly greater percentage of them voted for Harris than had voted for Biden
So, excepting the very special case of California, it was really only the non-white vote that made the difference. (1) Fewer non-white voters went to the polls, and (2) specifically among Latinos, fewer voted for Harris (far fewer in the case of Latino men).
So if the Harris/Walz ticket was so bad, white people didn’t notice it.
But clearly it was lacking in appeal to non-white voters, at least in comparison to previous Democratic tickets.
The Democrats really need a strong and enthusiastic non-white turnout to be competitive, so the big question is this: why were non-white voters either hostile (Latino men) or apathetic (other non-whites) about Harris/Walz – a ticket headed by a non-white candidate. That is a case for much deeper study than anybody can perform with exit polls. (For example, nobody asked questions to determine how people feel about a woman President in general and a Black woman in particular.) I have some theories, but they would only be idle speculation:
Among Latinos, the Catholic vote may be important. In 2020 the Blue ticket included a devout Catholic. In 2024, it was the Red team. I am willing to listen to an argument for the importance of the Catholic shift because it was substantial. Biden, who is a Catholic, took 52% of the Catholic vote, while Harris took only 41% against Trump and JD Vance, who is a Catholic. My problem with this argument is that the Catholic vote and the Latino vote are too closely correlated, raising the problem of multicollinearity. Did the Catholic vote move so much because of Latinos, or did the Latino vote move so much because they are Catholics? In response to that question, I got (almost) nothin’.
In terms of non-white voter apathy toward the ticket, Obama seemed to feel that many non-white men are simply not comfortable with a Black woman as president. Of course that’s only one guy’s opinion, but he’s a guy pretty close to the action. And, well … why would non-whites have any special enthusiasm about Tim Walz? He’s a nice enough guy, of course, but that guy is so white he makes me look like Wesley Snipes. In a world of Tim Walzes, Conan O’Brien would be their Black Panther.
Yes, I think this is great. It’s just that the method of sifting out deltas ignores everything that might have happened in the larger sets that we sifted out. It’s true that, eg, Catholics & Latinos being persuaded not to vote might’ve been a way to flip the election, given how cards were dealt. But reality is complicated, & the niggles that mattered in the past aren’t the niggles that will matter in the future.
I am not sure if there was anything Harris could have done to stop the Trump wave, but as wide as it was, the wave was also pretty shallow. Harris made some poor campaign choices. I think her biggest mistake was choosing Tim Walz as a running mate. As several of Trump’s ads pointed out, she is a San Francisco liberal. The smart thing to do would have been to choose a moderate Democrat as a running mate, like perhaps the incredibly popular Pennsylvania governor. Instead, she reached to her left and picked a running mate that really excited her base. I think they were most likely looking at the race as a base election and thought exciting the base would increase turnout. Harris talked a big game about reaching out to disaffected Republicans who had supported Nikki Haley, but they never gave disaffected Republicans a reason to support her other than she wasn’t Trump.
I had actually decided to vote for Biden this time around, but Kamala lost my vote when she said she supported nuking the filibuster (just to bring back Roe v Wade). First, once the legislative filibuster is nuked for one thing, it’s gone forever. Second, removing the filibuster would destroy what little bipartisanship exists in Congress. I realize the president would have nothing to do with changing rules in the Senate, but the VP might, and I doubt Walz would have refused to support her policy. That statement is how Harris lost my vote. Of course, I live in the Bronx, so my vote doesn’t matter, but I imagine some people think like me in swing states, too.
Then, there was this campaign ad. It might be the most effective campaign ad of the last thirty years.
I have to think that she erred when she said she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently. That might have been a good time for some honest evaluation on the issues that were going against her. And she could have pleased both sides, I think. “I believe we missed the boat and should have taken faster, stronger executive action on immigration.” And “I believe we needed an Attorney General would would do less thinking and faster acting on the January 6th case.” And “I think we needed to do a better job explaining to the public what would happen after the pandemic and how we were going to deal with it.”
Of course all of this is quite meaningless as both parties will continue to change moving forward to make sure the voting is always about 50/50. Statistics are probably the biggest problem with our political system. These parties don’t care about doing what’s right, they will only continue to shift a few things to get that percentage point they need. They will continue to be right around 50/50 as they have been for a long time. Anyone trying to predict a future trend is wasting their time. And both parties are perfectly fine with it being 50/50. It ensures they both will continue to have power in a system that requires at least 2 political parties. What neither of them wants is a 3rd.
While I don’t go along with your main point, I agree that the slicing & dicing is inclusive & prediction is about useless probably indefinitely wherever numbers really matter.
Pointing out a numerical coincidence of a 50k swing while discounting a “wash” of 800k sample size is, well, what is your point? If that right there was the full & complete answer, then what was that nonsense at the end where we go back to looking at national numbers that we previously debunked as don’t affect the outcome? I mean, the advantage there is we’re playing with millions of votes on that turf. Looking for our keys where we didn’t lose them because the light is better there.
inclusive => inconclusive. Shucky darns.
Your point assumes that the Republicans are not going to end democracy under Trump, and have any election they care about declared for the Republican candidate by Republican election officials or Republican judges, or the Republican Supreme Court.
I really hope I am being a foolish doomsayer here. That would be wonderful. But I think it is what the oligarchs who own the Republican Party want. It’s what John Galt would want, anyway, and even if they have not read the book or seen the movies, it is how they think of themselves. As the wealth creators and true mainspring of human progress, on whom the rest of us are just parasites.
Elon Musk = John Galt
Elon Musk = Elton John on a rough day.
Galt wouldn’t be taking government money, taking the DOG E position, or using it to spike his competition.
Both parties will change, but I believe the GOP is going to change more. One thing the last 8 years have shown us is that Trump voters are loyal to Trump, not to candidates that sound like Trump. Trump may continue to hold rallies after he leaves office, but he won’t be running for anything. I am honestly not sure what the post-Trump GOP is going to be like. I hope that the majority of GOP politicians abandon populism and embrace Reagan-style conservative governance. I expect that I will be largely disappointed. If I could pick the next GOP standard bearer, I’d choose Paul Ryan. He was a speaker at The Dispatch Summit last month. He had some interesting things to say.
Do you see the G.O.P. turning to a rational, thoughtful traditionalist like Ryan?
Tim Walz is vastly more thoughtful than the mindless Randian Paul Ryan.
Ryan was only after $$$ ~ shocking!
TBF like most, if not all, politicians and once you have “enough” $$$ you can afford to be rational, eh.
One of the main reasons the average voter is totally sick of American politics. ✔
Indeed, potus is gonna make $$$ regardless, during/after so quoting HRC again, what’s the fucking difference? Pacs/lobbiests, etc etc etc.
btw, re: Harris/Dems $1 billion +++ down the drain. ✔
Indeed, Brits take a couple mos to elect a new PM and there is spending limit. 😮
U.S. campaigning is never ending 24/7 ie another reason for voters to tune out! ✔
Ryan could barely do the job of Speaker. What makes you think he can handle something with more responsibility?
He’s also a seething hypocrite. He’d loudly whine about government spending but gleefully voted for any budget the GOP would put forth. He loudly trumpets the virtues of Ayn Rand but ignores her feminism and pro-choice beliefs.
He was never anything but a lobbyist for big business.
Ryan was the next coming of Churchill’s Boneless Wonder. Hardly someone to build around.
If I’m not mistaken Paul Ryan was an empty suit creation of the Koch Brothers, who are either from Wisconsin or have significant connections to Wisconsin. The former governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker was also owned by the Koch Brothers.
I wouildn’t say this is true for every Republican U.S Senator, not that either Ryan or Walker were U.S Senators, but it does seem to be the case that many Republican Senators have a billionaire owner unless they’re a billionaire themselves like Rick Scott in Florida (I think he’s a billionaire.) For instance, Tim Scott in South Carolina is owned by Larry Ellison. I’m not trying to make any slavery allusions here but because these things aren’t reported nationally unless the Republican U.S Senator makes a name for themselves nationally by such as running for President as Tim Scott (allegedly) did, and he was the only Republican U.S Senator in 2024 to (allegedly) run for President.
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I know Sheldon Adelson (or now his wife) owns at least one Republican U.S Senator and there are many more. That said, I”m not sure that Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson is owned by the Koch Brothers. Johnson married his way into wealth (though not billionaire status) and might be owned by his parents in law.
Should add:
1.Billionaires who back (own) the Republican Senator are reported more that’s how I know there are many more, but I don’t remember unless I see it mentioned repeatedly as Larry Ellison’s backing of Tim Scott was mentioned repeatedly.
2.I think it’s fair to say that Tim Scott sleep-walked and not ran for the Presidency.
Quoting HRC ~ what difference does it make? Yielding back the balance of my time …
Since I forgot to mention, the actual utility of Scoop’s analytics is in ruling out most of the plausible stories about which trends are important & should guide changes in the strategy, tactics, & raft of policies to restore the old world order. The U.S. is broken. It was always a kind of zombie. We just didn’t have a diagnosis of its approaching doom.
Now we can see the markers of doom clearly. Unfortunately, their hallmarks are deep flaws, in essence immutable facts about our way of life.
Being the 1st to say the U.S. is in no way perfect indeed, “we” are really struggling economically compared to the rest of the world, eh.
IOW feel free to expound re: “immutable facts.” Have a lovely day!
Mutatis mutandem. IOW my exposition: fuck you. Have a lovely day.
Indeed!