#Swing Voter Alienation

[presidentkamala]

Rant about white leftists incoming:

As a progressive who's politically involved, I'm fascinated by the way that I see white leftists around me simp for and identify with white conservatives. I'm white too, but I'm trans and have lived in redder/purpler areas than a lot of these people have, and I just can't share their romanticism the same way. These white leftists often identify economically with rural white conservatives and do rightly point out that left wing economics would help these people. I also know a lot of liberals who would benefit from these things but curiously I never see leftists romanticizing impoverished liberals. The thing is, yes, sometimes conservatives will say things that sound very leftist. (Liberals will too, but I never see THAT discussed by them). And so they assume, then, that working class conservatives just need the Right Candidate to swing them over to the left. But as someone who's had to deal with these people (and has a political science degree, no biggie), white leftists fundamentally misunderstand these people on every level.

They want the benefits of good social services--*as long as not a single black person gets to have it*. These are the people who closed public pools so they didn't have to integrate them. They are willing to deprive themselves of anything as long as they don't have to share it with people of color. They are not with Trump because of "economic anxiety". They love the racism, the sexism, and are willing to suffer themselves if they're told an undocumented Mexican worker will suffer a little more. They were not duped into fascism, THEY ARE HERE FOR IT. When these people say they're alienated by Dem party elites they're not making insightful points about how the Dems are still too entangled in billionaires for my liking as well, they're talking about women, poc, and out LGBTQ people being successful when they're "not supposed to be" with some antisemitic overtones on top. These are people who have shot themselves in the foot so they can bleed on a liberal's carpet.

I don't want to believe anyone is hopeless--I don't! But deprogramming these people has to address their racism first. You are not going to cure these people by running Bernie Sanders. You are going to have to make them check their privileges and that 1950s America is never coming back, and that it shouldn't. They do not want leftism right now! They want privilege!

(Also these people will talk about how racist and imperialist this country is constantly, but when a black woman loses to a clown of a white man, suddenly America is completely blind to race and gender and Harris was just a bad candidate, acksually and what do you mean I need to check my racist and sexist biases I don't have those I'm Woke, remember? Because I own a hammer and sickle flag)

SAY THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Leftists will call liberals every bad name in the book and turn around immediately to lick cons' asses and try to woo them by throwing every single one of us under the bus. We need as many hands as possible to get us out of this quagmire but until leftists can make me understand how black women and jewish people are the "elite out of touch democratic establishment" i just dont think they have anything interesting to say.

And while almost all democratic voters have voiced criticisms of and conflicts w the party leadership, the slavish attachment to bernard is pure cult and grift and deceit from the left!! They're only just now realizing how badly they burned the rest of the anti-fascism coalition and are throwing the biggest tempy tanty ive ever seen. But you hit the nail on the head: they AND maga have the same problem which is a total refusal to grow the fuck up

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Michael Podhorzer at Weekend Reading:

But, as we will see, America didn’t swing rightward, but couchward:

The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA. Trump was no more popular this year than four years ago, while Harris significantly underperformed Biden 2020.

Most of Harris’s losses were due to anti-MAGA surge voters staying home.2 She lost the most ground in deep-Blue urban areas, where the dangers of a second Trump administration seemed most remote. About 19 million Americans who cast ballots for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024.

Anti-MAGA surge voters stayed home because they were less alarmed by a second Trump Administration than they were four years ago. A key to Biden’s victory was high turnout from less-engaged voters who believed they had something to lose under Trump. In 2024, however, about 15 million fewer votes were cast “against” Trump than in 2020.

As I’ve been saying for years, America has an anti-MAGA majority, but not necessarily a pro-Democratic one. In 2020 (and 2022, in part), alarm about Trump and MAGA was enough to overcome the cynicism and alienation of mostly younger voters who desperately want bigger systemic change, but who oppose the MAGA agenda. This time, their cynicism won out. This was in no small part because the media and other non-partisan civil society leaders were themselves more skeptical of the dangers, and because the inaction of the Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress against MAGA threats belied their rhetoric of existential dangers to the nation.3 This map, from the New York Times, does a much better job making clear where Trump’s “gains” came from – namely, from Harris’s losses.

Indeed, the defining feature of American politics this century is that neither party can “win” elections anymore; they can only be the “not-loser.” Only thanks to the two-party system can the not-loser be crowned the “winner,” since there is no way to fire the incumbent party without hiring the opposition party. Yet political commentators keep confusing shifts in the two parties’ electoral fortunes with changes in voters’ basic values or priorities. A collapse in support for Democrats does not mean that most Americans, especially in Blue America, are suddenly eager to live in an illiberal theocracy. Consider that only once before in American history have three consecutive presidential elections seen the White House change partisan hands, and that nine out of the last ten midterm or presidential elections have been “change elections,” in the sense that either the presidency, the House, or the Senate changed partisan hands,4 which is completely unprecedented.5

[...]

Harris Lost Ground with Anti-MAGA Voters

As regular readers might recall, Biden won in 2020 thanks to a surge of new and less-frequent voters who hadn’t shown up in 2016, and who voted much more Democratic than 2016 voters. These surge voters were the critical “anti-MAGA but not necessarily pro-Democrat” bloc that Harris needed to turn out again in order to win. This year, based on VoteCast data (see chart in the previous section), we can estimate that about 19 million people who voted for Biden four years ago stayed home. (40 percent of those voting in 2024 had voted for Biden in 2020, and 40 percent had voted for Trump. From there, it’s simple arithmetic.16) Moreover, with the same caveats until the voter files are updated, both VoteCast and Navigator found that in the battleground states, a greater share of 2020 Trump voters than Biden voters cast ballots in 2024, albeit by a smaller margin than in the rest of the country. VoteCast also asked whether voters cast ballots “for” the candidate they chose or “against” the other candidate.17 The results show that about 15 million fewer votes were cast “against” Trump in 2024 than in 2020. That suggests a lot of missing “anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat” voters.

Michael Podhorzer at Weekend Reading delivers a prognosis as to why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump: Enough of the anti-MAGA vote chose the couch instead voting at all.

[writergeekrhw]

There's a Reddit screenshot going around (including here on Tumblr, Wil Wheaton reblogged a post about it) where a Trump supporter got whiny that at the Vegas convention this year, a couple of the Voyager actors were asked about their political beliefs by a fan, and they answered by praising Kamala Harris and condemning Trump and Trump supporters. This person on Reddit (not the same person who asked the politics question at the con) was upset because they felt they and their friends "learned that 7 of 9 hates them" and they were roundly made fun of for expecting that a Star Trek convention wouldn't contain anything that contradicts their MAGA beliefs given that, you know, it's such a progressive show where the future is LITERALLY luxury space communism, and where it has always spoken in favor of diversity.

This led to a bigger discussion about the place of politics in fandom spaces. I personally would understand not talking about electoral politics if we were in a normal election, like Obama vs. Romney, even though the Republicans even then advocated a lot of things that I think is at odds with what Star Trek says. But I don't think people who voted for them were necessarily hateful. I don't think they are people I can't share fandom with, you know? We can be friends. But I think with Trump people are hateful, or at the very least they're okay with hate, given how often he spews it and encourages it in his supporters. I'm a lesbian and I absolutely do feel less safe around people who wear MAGA hats in a way I just didn't around Romney or McCain or Bush supporters. My opinion personally is that it's probably a mistake and what got us to where we are today (sending this in late September 2024, where Harris is slightly up in the polls but it's still very close and Republicans are trying to ratfuck the vote in a bunch of swing states - maybe by the time you answer, the election will be over and we'll know?) that we didn't do enough to recognize that Trump support is either bigotry, or support for bigotry, in a way that should be socially unacceptable and treated as such. That we should have deployed more social shaming over it, especially in places that should be understood to be safe spaces for diverse groups of people, like the fandom of a series like Star Trek.

I was wondering what you thought about this topic. Personally, while I don't think American electoral politics need to be in every aspect of a convention, finding out that actors who played characters I like, writers who wrote shows I love, etc. are supportive of my basic civil rights, not just in broad platitudes but also in how they vote, is really heartening and makes me feel more "welcomed" in fandom. It makes me feel safer there. And the fact that Trump supporters feel excluded also makes it a safer space IMO, because I don't feel safe around those people. I have Republican friends - but none of them who have voted for Trump.

I commented on that while I was still on Xitter. I honestly worry Trump may pose an existential threat to our democracy. I think others feel similarly. I suspect Jeri Ryan, who's seen the rot inside the GOP firsthand, has particularly strong feelings about that as well. So it's no surprise she chose to speak out before the election. And it's certainly her right.

I think it's a bit silly for fans of a franchise that has a strong progressive POV to feel alienated when the artists involved in said franchise embrace its philosophy and choose to take a stand for it.

I worry for us all over the next four years, but the voters have spoken. We'll see how it goes.

[mitigatedchaos]

[ wilsons-hotlittleprettyboymouth ]

I feel bad that some of yall assume Reddit is just for republican neckbeards. it is currently fucking plastered in leftist posts, making fun of trump and musk, calling out trump for basically admitting to election fraud and musk for the fucking salute, people literally openly saying they wish these assholes would die. Some subreddits with broad other purposes have been largely converted into leftist communities. Believing tumblr is the only existing bastion of leftists or whatever WILL make you bitter and miserable lol

The left call redditors misogynistic alien neckbeards, while the right call redditors miserable soy creatures.

What can we learn from this?

A) Redditors are an-cap nazis, plotting to turn Earth into a Mad Max deathworld of murderously fascist microstates.

B) Redditors are gay anarcho-authoritarian commies, plotting to bring Earth under the heel of a single inescapable global superstate with only two rules: heterosexuality is banned, and crime is legal.

C) Redditors are moderate swing voters, with the approximate attention span of a goldfish, and switch their political allegiance based on the most recent political advertisement they saw.

D) Redditors are members of the involuntary human extinction movement, which makes them an enemy of all other political paradigms.

E) Reddit is considered so uncool that every other political movement likes to pretend that redditors are not associated with them.

F) Many politically-involved individuals attempt to create social leverage on near-groups that disagree with them by insulting them, implicitly promising to remove the insult in exchange for compliance.

G) Show Results / I just like polls.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 18, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 19, 2025

On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the Trump administration stop deporting anyone from the United States under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and that the planes carrying individuals to prison in El Salvador be turned around. Despite the order, the administration declined to bring the planes back, and administration officials appeared to mock the order, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposting the message of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele that read, “Oopsie… Too late,” along with a laughing emoji.

On Sunday, lawyers from the Department of Justice suggested that the planes were outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. when Boasberg issued the order, or that the order didn’t take effect until it was entered into the electronic docket, although his verbal order that he said had to be “complied with immediately” came about 45 minutes earlier, before at least one of the planes landed.

On Monday the Justice Department unsuccessfully asked a federal appeals court to remove Boasberg from the case. In a hearing, Boasberg asked the administration to clarify its actions after it appeared to defy the court by rushing the planes off the ground and to El Salvador. In response to the Justice Department’s claim that the judge’s orders had no authority over the flights once they left U.S. airspace, the judge noted that the power of the federal courts does not end at the end of U.S. airspace. Boasberg also appeared to reject the claim of the DOJ lawyers that there is no judicial order until it is published in a written filing. The DOJ also refused to tell Boasberg anything about the flights, saying that even their number was a question of national security, although the administration had talked extensively about them on public media.

Boasberg scheduled another hearing today to get the DOJ lawyers to answer the questions they had refused to address.

This morning, President Donald Trump took to social media to call Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President—He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

Trump’s post sounds as if he is nervous about the increasing unrest over his policies and is trying to convince people that he has a mandate although in fact more people voted for other candidates in the 2024 election than voted for him. But it was his suggestion that any judge with whom he disagrees should be removed that sparked pushback from Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, who issued a statement saying: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Roberts wrote the Trump v. United States decision of July 1, 2024, establishing that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of their official presidential duties, and it seems likely that Trump did not expect a rebuke from him.

U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang also sought to stop the administration’s power grab. In a scathing 68-page decision, Chuang found that the actions of Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” to destroy the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways.” Chuang explained that the destruction of USAID hurt not only the 26 current or recently fired employees and contractors of USAID who had filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” That destruction also hurt “the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”

While the question of who is in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is such a mystery that it has spawned its own social media hashtag—WITAOD, for “Who is the administrator of DOGE?”—Chuang clearly identified Elon Musk as the person in charge. Trump “identified Musk as the leader of DOGE,” he notes, and “Trump and Musk held a joint press conference in the Oval Office to answer reporters’ questions about DOGE.” Chuang noted the many, many times when Trump called Musk DOGE’s leader.

In the lawsuit, USAID employees argued that Musk has acted as an officer of the United States without having been duly appointed to such a role. The Constitution provides that the president can appoint such officers, who exercise “significant authority,” but that they must be confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. Musk, quite obviously, was not. The White House has tried to get around this issue by claiming that Musk is only an advisor to the president, but Chuang wasn’t buying it. “[B]ased on the present record,” he wrote, “the only individuals known to be associated with the decisions to initiate a shutdown of USAID…are Musk and DOGE team Members.” Musk therefore “exercises actual authority in ways that an advisor to the President does not.”

Chuang ordered that parts of USAID must be restored, although what effect that will have is unclear since the agency has been destroyed.

Trump continued his attack on the rule of law today when he fired the two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from collusion and anti-consumer practices. The firings leave only two Republicans on the commission and leave it without a quorum to do business. Beginning with the 1935 case of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the courts have established that the president cannot fire officials in agencies created by Congress without a serious reason like neglect of duties. Legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern wrote: “Trump’s action here is brazenly illegal under any interpretation of the law as it stands.”

Trump held a phone conversation today with Russian president Vladimir Putin, allegedly about a proposed ceasefire in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump boasted that he would end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day, and he is now eager for any end to the hostilities. But Putin seems less eager to reach a solution than to demonstrate his dominance over Trump. Today, when the phone call was scheduled, Putin was on stage at an event. When his interviewer asked if he needed to go because he would be late for the call, Putin dismissed the question and laughter broke out. Brett Bruen, president of the Global Situation Room public relations firm wrote: “Making leaders wait is an old Putin power play. But, this is pretty brutal. Putin is publicly mocking Trump.”

While Trump’s team portrayed the conversation as productive, Putin maintained that Ukraine was the aggressor in the war, although it was Russia that invaded Ukraine. Putin also demanded that the U.S. and allies must stop all military aid and the sharing of intelligence with Ukraine, conditions that would hamstring Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion.

Finally today, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed addressing the H5N1 bird flu that is decimating U.S. poultry and cattle farms by simply letting the disease run rampant. He suggests such a course would permit scientists to discover birds that are immune to the disease.

But veterinary scientists say that letting the virus sweep through flocks is “a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” as Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times. Chickens and turkeys don’t have the genes to resist the virus, and every infection is a chance for the virus to mutate into a more virulent form, one of which could mutate so it could spread among humans. If H5N1 were permitted to infect 5 million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen told Mandavilli.

The danger of this shoot first, ask questions later attitude of administration officials was on display today in articles about the men deported to El Salvador. A Washington Post article by Silvia Foster-Frau followed the story of four Venezuelan friends who had come to the U.S. illegally. They shared a townhouse in Dallas, where immigration officials picked them up last Thursday. The men signed deportation papers, expecting to return to Venezuela, but although there is no record that the men committed crimes in the U.S. and their families insist they are not affiliated with the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang whose members White House officials claim were on the weekend’s deportation flights, the men are shown in the videos of those deported to prison in El Salvador.

A Reuters story by Sarah Kinosian and Kristina Cooke reported that family members who suspect their loved ones have been sent to El Salvador have launched a WhatsApp helpline.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[kineticpenguin]

One thing that gets lost in all the blaming of nonvoting leftists and third-party voters is that nobody seems to blame the normie lib/centrist guys who didn't show up either.

There are a number of liberal commentators who will talk about the importance of the Harris campaign maintaining its coalition and how she risked alienating important parts of it by breaking too much with Biden. But I think it's very clear that that coalition was weak, and that hoping the suburbs will deliver victory to you by being centrist enough is a fool's errand. That is, unless you think the Reasonable Suburban Republicans showed up for Harris and over 6 million Smug Leftists stayed home.

IMO, the only sensible conclusion is that Harris and Trump were both effectively running against Joe Biden, and Harris tacking to the center and insisting that she was going to be just like Biden is the exact wrong move in that situation. Trump was already coming at Biden from the right, Harris had nothing to lose by swinging to the left.

There's this weird liberal fear of being seen as too liberal. One common complaint I hear from Democrats when I bring up that their politicians should advocate for more progressive positions is that "they'd call him a communist!" And I'm just like, newsflash, asshole! They have a -D after their name, they already get called Supercommiesocialisticextrapinkodocious! Despite being boring centrists, Clinton, Obama and Biden have all been slapped with the commie label. Why do you even care at this point? Aren't you tired of giving into this weird McCarthyist, fascist fear that deep down, the Republicans really are more patriotic than you?

Why is it "crying wolf" to call Republicans fascist, but cries of "communist" are taken seriously, no matter how ridiculous?

Why is it always the reasonable, sensible adult position to try and pander to people who will never, ever vote for you?

[newtonsheffield]

Ok but now i need to know the backlash that will probably happen when the public find out about her and edwina, do you think it bothers edwina or she’s doesn’t care at all? and how does edwina handle her first politician event/gala?

I don’t know that there’d necessarily be backlash. I think there’s probably people Josie’s advisors feel would be less likely to possibly alienate moderate and swing voters but people online have been shipping Edwina and Josie ever since Edwina commented on Josie first video using her music.

“You have some bloody balls! Stop using my genius against me!”

In think Edwina probably mostly feels a little awkward when she attends Josie’s work events. A little out of place. But I don’t think Josie really lets her feel it too much.

“What about this dress?”

Josie raised her eyebrow at her girlfriend, “Did you raid my Mum’s wardrobe?”

Edwina gave her a sarcastic look, “It’s… modest.”

“It’s hideous. And I can tell you hate it as well.”

Edwina’s face twitched before she sighed, throwing the dress on the floor. “Okay, yes. I hate it. I just don’t want to embarrass you.”

“And you… dressing like yourself would embarrass me?”

“Yes! There aren’t that many heavily tattooed people in parliament you know?”

Josie sighed tugging Edwina against her chest. “I don’t care. People know who you are, you don’t try to hide it and I don’t want you to do it for me. Wear a sexy dress.”

“You just want to stare at me and get under it on the car ride home.”

“I’m not a perfect person, babe. I never claimed to be.”

[nyxnoxxx]

people blaming non voters and third party voters for the outcome of the election need to understand that it's the PARTY'S responsibility to win over voters, it's the PARTY'S responsibility to listen to their base and adjust their policies based on what they call for, it's the PARTY'S responsibility to not alienate their constituents

the dems refused to listen to people calling for an end to the support of israel and for an end to funding genocide. the dems chose to swing right and appeal to conservatives and treat leftists and palestine supporters with outright contempt. they ran the worst presidential campaign they could have, and WE will be suffering the consequences

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Corey Walker

Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, said in a new interview that Democrats’ general support for Israel’s defensive military operations against Hamas in Gaza contributed to their poor performance in last month’s elections.

Clayton made the remarks while appearing on the media outlet Zeteo this week to explain why she believes her party lost big across the US, most notably in the presidential election. Speaking with Mehdi Hasan, a journalist and outspoken critic of Israel, Clayton argued that the Democratic Party “abandoned” wide swaths of its voter base, adding that the party’s support for Israel likely alienated many younger voters.

When asked by Hasan whether the Israel-Hamas war resonated with the electorate in North Carolina, Clayton argued that the ongoing military conflict in Gaza “absolutely” eroded the Democrats’ standing with young voters.

As The Algemeiner reported, a survey of swing voters by Blueprint, a Democrat-leaning research firm, found the issue of Israel and the Palestinians barely registered as motivation for choosing Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris in the presidential race. Voters were more worried about inflation, immigration, and certain cultural issues. Among those voters for whom it was a factor, the survey found more people concerned that Harris was too “pro-Palestine” than those upset she was too “pro-Israel.”

Nonetheless, Hasan, citing anti-Israel protests at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, suggested that Democrats’ support for Israel disillusioned and enraged many young voters. 

Clayton defended the “Uncommitted Movement” — an effort launched by anti-Israel activists to persuade the Democratic Party to officially endorse an arms embargo against the Jewish state and not support outgoing US President Joe Biden — as “using political power in the right way.”

She added that Democrats should be “embracing” anti-Israel efforts like the Uncommitted Movement, saying “that is something that we want so see more of in our party.”

The North Carolina Democratic Party has been plagued with accusations of antisemitism in the year following Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel last Oct. 7. Members of the state party refused to support a resolution condemning the terrorist attacks in Israel, sparking outrage among Jews within the state.

[stupidjewishwhiteboy]

Assuming it’s actually true that only 56% of Jews voted for Kamala this time, it feels like a real oversight that non-Jewish media sources never seemed to ask whether a seeming indifference to antisemitism within the Democratic Party and/or suggestions about stopping aid to Israel might alienate Jewish voters in swing states, in the way that a similar question was asked about Muslim/Arab voters constantly. To be clear, any Jews who voted for Trump should be ashamed of themselves and I feel they’ve almost certainly shot Jewish rights in the foot for the next 2-4 years, but I feel like rumblings of this happening have been talked about in Jewish spaces for a while and apparently the Gentiles didn’t notice

[justinspoliticalcorner]

By now, every pundit in America has their own 2024 election take, mostly confirming their prior opinions. Every Republican has a take, too, which is that Americans voted resoundingly for — well, for whatever policy that Republican cares about, from opposition to transgender rights to support for prayer in schools. And of course, progressives, especially younger ones, have every right to feel afraid, angry, or alienated. But the data tells a specific story, not a choose-your-own-adventure. And that is that swing voters voted mostly out of economic insecurity and discontent. They actually liked Kamala Harris more than Donald Trump (Harris’ favorability was 48 percent, compared to 44 percent for Trump). But Harris was the incumbent, and incumbents don’t win elections when people think the economy is bad. This is not just an American phenomenon. As the Financial Times reported, in every developed country in the world, the incumbents lost this year. This is unprecedented. If, like me, you’re being kept awake at night thinking about this election, this explanation helps. Yes, people were willing to put up with Trump’s criminality, coup attempts, and extreme xenophobia, and that is still terrible. Many were also on board with scapegoating immigrants for our economic woes, which is as factually preposterous as it is morally offensive.  But they didn’t vote for MAGA. They didn’t vote against women, or wokeness, or coastal elites, or climate regulation, or government regulation in general, or queer people. Not directly, anyway. They voted against the incumbent party, like every other developed country in the world this year. The shock waves from the Covid-19 pandemic — inflation, empty shelves, housing prices — are global, and this is a global trend. Everywhere in the world, voters have chosen to throw the bastards out because of the economy.  In fact, if you look closely at the Financial Times data, Trump actually did worse than most other non-incumbents. Yes, he won a clear victory. But it was not as big a victory as parties in France, Italy, or even New Zealand.  [...] So what happens when the emperor is revealed to have no clothes — or even worse, the garb of the same financial “elites” he claims to be against? Obviously, the MAGA faithful will stay with Trump no matter what — after all, his failure to bring about revolution in 2017 spawned the QAnon conspiracy theory, which said he was really about to do it, any day now. But the economic voters that gave him his victory could abandon Trump if he can’t deliver results. And he cannot. While Trump is busy trying to throw his enemies in jail, he has no plan — not even “concepts of a plan” — for the kitchen-table concerns that actually put him into office. Maybe, just maybe, voters will see they’ve been conned. That is the best we can hope for.

Jay Michaelson for Rolling Stone on Donald Trump and how he'll make America worse off (11.11.2024).

Jay Michaelson wrote in Rolling Stone that some of who voted in Donald Trump due to “muh economy” or “muh grocery costs” could be in for a shock.

[captain-stretch-nuts]

Well this sucks. Sucks a lot.

I can't say the result surprises me though. Ultimately this loss is the result of severe Democratic party resource mismanagement as well as Republican infiltration of Democratic party ranks. I can't blame anyone except the upper ranks of the Democratic party because voter engagement isn't a problem anyone can solve alone. If an entire organization dedicated to getting millions of people to vote for them fails to do so, that is their fault.

The biggest mistake the DNC made was having Kamala puff her chest about supporting Netanyahu instead of going all-in on a ceasefire for the sake of preservation of life, respect for human dignity -- values that dem voters young and old traditionally hold high. Supposedly they continue to entertain that nonsense because of the value of Israeli intelligence in the region of the Middle East but how useful is that data when Netanyahu is the one handing it to you? Is it worth alienating your most energetic voterbase? It definitely isn't.

That is the act of mismanaging the most useful resource as a political party: willingness to vote for you. Energy. Dems got it when they replaced Joe as the candidate for Kamala, and they completely hamstrung themselves because someone way up high in the DNC, perhaps multiple people, are bad faith actors who are convinced that swing voters are everything. They aren't. Politics has become too complicated of a topic for the average voter so even if the older swing voters recognize voting as a civic duty, they will vote for their personal best interests instead of moral issues, geopolitics, or even basic policy decisions. More importantly there are comparatively fewer of them than there are left-leaning youth, who grow in number every day. Even the Republicans are appealing and pandering to their young white male voterbase which is hilarious because that is a shrinking percentage of the youth.

It comes down to the DNC being too scared to appeal to a new voterbase who would love to vote for Dems if they would only stop trying to appeal to the worst members of their party, within and without.

[corporationsarepeople]

Mainstream news organizations suddenly became more blunt about Trump’s decline – and derangement. “Trump’s age finally catches up with him,” the Washington Post wrote Saturday. “Trump kicks off Pennsylvania rally by talking about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia,” AP headlined its coverage of the Latrobe debacle. “Donald Trump’s vulgar rally ramble fuels questions about his state of mind,” the Financial Times wrote.

As always, the New York Times immediately “sane-washed” the story. On its breaking news politics page, a short report said Trump told “golf stories” about Palmer without mentioning his lewd remark. But shockingly, after wide social media outcry, reporter Michael Gold told a critic to direct his questions to senioreditor@nytimes.com, because “I filed something that included the thing you mention as omitted, but I’m not given the power to publish what I say.”

Maybe the pressure worked. Later in the day, the Times ran a longer piece by Gold, headlined “At a Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity,” which included the Palmer story verbatim, and warned that Trump’s crude talk could alienate “swing voters.”

- - -

If Trump does win, I’d expect him to step down fairly quickly. He will refuse if he has enough mental faculties left to know the difference, of course, but his cabinet could remove him and his major donors will insist on Vance replacing him as soon as possible. Vance is their guy.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Sometimes a political backlash doesn’t take the shape you expect. Though there are times when it goes off like a firework, as young men’s TikTok-fuelled surge of enthusiasm for Nigel Farage did last summer, sometimes it’s more of a long, slow burn. The most underexplored form of revolt against mainstream politics right now is the second kind, involving not angry young men lurching rightwards but anxious young women turning, if anything, more sharply left.

Almost a quarter of women aged 18 to 24 voted Green last July, roughly double the number of young men who voted Reform, though predictably it’s the latter who have since got all the attention. While the big parties chased avidly after so-called Waitrose women, well-heeled home counties matrons considering defecting from the Tories, they had little to say to their daughters. So it was the Greens who ended up cornering the market in a certain kind of frustrated gen Z voter: typically a middle-class student or graduate in her early 20s, whose conscience is pricked every time she opens Instagram by heartrending images of orphans in Gaza or refugees drowning in the Channel, and who can’t understand why nobody seems to care. She’s angry about the rampant misogyny of some boys she knew at school, Donald Trump, greedy landlords and a burning planet, and the Greens’ more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger social media posts attacking Keir Starmer for choosing welfare cuts over wealth taxes strike a chord.

But deeper down, perhaps, she’s angry that despite slogging diligently through school and university and possibly a master’s (the Greens do best among the highly educated) she still can’t count on a lifestyle like her parents had. For all the girls who put their heads down and worked at school while the boys kicked off and absorbed all the teachers’ attention, there may be something grimly familiar about a Labour party that seemingly takes them for granted while bending over backwards to placate noisy Reform voters.

Why isn’t this quiet form of female political alienation ringing more alarm bells?

The obvious answer is that there aren’t enough of these young women to swing an election, but young Reform-voting men caught the public imagination despite being an even smaller drop in the electoral ocean. And though it would be dangerous to get complacent, detailed research on so-called “Reform-curious” voters to be published next week by the thinktank Persuasion counters some of the wilder assumptions about gen Z men’s politics, finding that while it’s true they are more likely than older male voters to think favourably of Farage, they’re less likely to actually vote Reform. Strikingly, they’re also less likely than middle-aged gen X men now to say that feminism has gone too far. Maybe it’s not just schoolboys who should be sat down and made to watch Netflix’s Adolescence, as MPs keep arguing, but their fathers. The growing consensus meanwhile among political scientists is that if young men’s and women’s worldviews are (as polls suggest) becoming ever more starkly polarised, the driving force behind that split is women becoming sharply more liberal, not men becoming radically more rightwing.

Rosie Campbell, professor of politics at King’s College London, is one of surprisingly few academics to have dug deeper into younger women’s political choices. For a start, it looks as if earlier waves of feminism have been the left’s unexpected recruiting sergeant: the historic trend is for women to become more liberal as more of them go to university or move into the labour market, and 57% of British university students are now female. But Campbell’s hunch is that young women’s radicalisation also has a lot to do with Brexit and its unfolding consequences. Women are noticeably more anti-austerity and pro-remain than men, she points out, which suggests they’re likely to have found the past nine years more frustrating.

As the two biggest parties fell over themselves to embrace Brexit and then to rule out big wealth taxes, these women are likely to have been pushed further and further out to the political fringes. Alongside her colleague Rosalind Shorrocks, Campbell traces the start of the Green surge back to a pool of young female voters attracted by Jeremy Corbyn’s promise of a “kinder, gentler politics”, who backed Labour in 2017 and then voted Green in the following set of European elections, and are unlikely now to be enthused by Starmer explaining why he no longer believes trans women are women. The final piece of the jigsaw, she suspects, may be social media: are the same algorithms blamed for leading young men down rightwing rabbit holes similarly reinforcing young women’s anger at social injustices, by feeding them an endless diet of the content they seem to click on most? If so, the gap between gen Z men and women is likely to grow, with consequences not just for politics but for the lives they may end up living alongside each other.

Perhaps there will never be enough of them to count electorally. Or perhaps their furious idealism will simply fade with age. But the failure even to be curious about what it is young women are trying to say, just because their chosen revolt against the mainstream takes a less aggressive or destructive form than young Reformers’, feels profoundly unfair. Sometimes it pays to listen to people sitting quietly at the back, not just the ones screaming in your face.

[misfitwashere]

March 18, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 19

On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the Trump administration stop deporting anyone from the United States under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and that the planes carrying individuals to prison in El Salvador be turned around. Despite the order, the administration declined to bring the planes back, and administration officials appeared to mock the order, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposting the message of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele that read, “Oopsie… Too late,” along with a laughing emoji.

On Sunday, lawyers from the Department of Justice suggested that the planes were outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. when Boasberg issued the order, or that the order didn’t take effect until it was entered into the electronic docket, although his verbal order that he said had to be “complied with immediately” came about 45 minutes earlier, before at least one of the planes landed.

On Monday the Justice Department unsuccessfully asked a federal appeals court to remove Boasberg from the case. In a hearing, Boasberg asked the administration to clarify its actions after it appeared to defy the court by rushing the planes off the ground and to El Salvador. In response to the Justice Department’s claim that the judge’s orders had no authority over the flights once they left U.S. airspace, the judge noted that the power of the federal courts does not end at the end of U.S. airspace. Boasberg also appeared to reject the claim of the DOJ lawyers that there is no judicial order until it is published in a written filing. The DOJ also refused to tell Boasberg anything about the flights, saying that even their number was a question of national security, although the administration had talked extensively about them on public media.

Boasberg scheduled another hearing today to get the DOJ lawyers to answer the questions they had refused to address.

This morning, President Donald Trump took to social media to call Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President—He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

Trump’s post sounds as if he is nervous about the increasing unrest over his policies and is trying to convince people that he has a mandate although in fact more people voted for other candidates in the 2024 election than voted for him. But it was his suggestion that any judge with whom he disagrees should be removed that sparked pushback from Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, who issued a statement saying: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Roberts wrote the Trump v. United States decision of July 1, 2024, establishing that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of their official presidential duties, and it seems likely that Trump did not expect a rebuke from him.

U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang also sought to stop the administration’s power grab. In a scathing 68-page decision, Chuang found that the actions of Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” to destroy the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways.” Chuang explained that the destruction of USAID hurt not only the 26 current or recently fired employees and contractors of USAID who had filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” That destruction also hurt “the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”

While the question of who is in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is such a mystery that it has spawned its own social media hashtag—WITAOD, for “Who is the administrator of DOGE?”—Chuang clearly identified Elon Musk as the person in charge. Trump “identified Musk as the leader of DOGE,” he notes, and “Trump and Musk held a joint press conference in the Oval Office to answer reporters’ questions about DOGE.” Chuang noted the many, many times when Trump called Musk DOGE’s leader.

In the lawsuit, USAID employees argued that Musk has acted as an officer of the United States without having been duly appointed to such a role. The Constitution provides that the president can appoint such officers, who exercise “significant authority,” but that they must be confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. Musk, quite obviously, was not. The White House has tried to get around this issue by claiming that Musk is only an advisor to the president, but Chuang wasn’t buying it. “[B]ased on the present record,” he wrote, “the only individuals known to be associated with the decisions to initiate a shutdown of USAID…are Musk and DOGE team Members.” Musk therefore “exercises actual authority in ways that an advisor to the President does not.”

Chuang ordered that parts of USAID must be restored, although what effect that will have is unclear since the agency has been destroyed.

Trump continued his attack on the rule of law today when he fired the two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from collusion and anti-consumer practices. The firings leave only two Republicans on the commission and leave it without a quorum to do business. Beginning with the 1935 case of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the courts have established that the president cannot fire officials in agencies created by Congress without a serious reason like neglect of duties. Legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern wrote: “Trump’s action here is brazenly illegal under any interpretation of the law as it stands.”

Trump held a phone conversation today with Russian president Vladimir Putin, allegedly about a proposed ceasefire in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump boasted that he would end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day, and he is now eager for any end to the hostilities. But Putin seems less eager to reach a solution than to demonstrate his dominance over Trump. Today, when the phone call was scheduled, Putin was on stage at an event. When his interviewer asked if he needed to go because he would be late for the call, Putin dismissed the question and laughter broke out. Brett Bruen, president of the Global Situation Room public relations firm wrote: “Making leaders wait is an old Putin power play. But, this is pretty brutal. Putin is publicly mocking Trump.”

While Trump’s team portrayed the conversation as productive, Putin maintained that Ukraine was the aggressor in the war, although it was Russia that invaded Ukraine. Putin also demanded that the U.S. and allies must stop all military aid and the sharing of intelligence with Ukraine, conditions that would hamstring Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion.

Finally today, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed addressing the H5N1 bird flu that is decimating U.S. poultry and cattle farms by simply letting the disease run rampant. He suggests such a course would permit scientists to discover birds that are immune to the disease.

But veterinary scientists say that letting the virus sweep through flocks is “a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” as Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times. Chickens and turkeys don’t have the genes to resist the virus, and every infection is a chance for the virus to mutate into a more virulent form, one of which could mutate so it could spread among humans. If H5N1 were permitted to infect 5 million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen told Mandavilli.

The danger of this shoot first, ask questions later attitude of administration officials was on display today in articles about the men deported to El Salvador. A Washington Post article by Silvia Foster-Frau followed the story of four Venezuelan friends who had come to the U.S. illegally. They shared a townhouse in Dallas, where immigration officials picked them up last Thursday. The men signed deportation papers, expecting to return to Venezuela, but although there is no record that the men committed crimes in the U.S. and their families insist they are not affiliated with the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang whose members White House officials claim were on the weekend’s deportation flights, the men are shown in the videos of those deported to prison in El Salvador.

A Reuters story by Sarah Kinosian and Kristina Cooke reported that family members who suspect their loved ones have been sent to El Salvador have launched a WhatsApp helpline.

—

[coochiequeens]

How the democrats alienated another voting block

Supporters of former President Donald Trump watch as he holds a rally in the historical Democratic district of the South Bronx on May 23, 2024 in New York City. The Bronx, home to a large Latino community, has been a Democratic base for generations of voters and the rally occurred as Trump looks to attract more non-white voters. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Donald Trump made significant inroads among several traditional Democratic Party constituencies, cutting into Democratic margins among Black and Hispanic voters. A new paper looking at his gains among Hispanic voters puts forward a provocative argument to explain some of that movement.

It contends that Hispanic voters who hold socially conservative, anti-LGBTQ views but might otherwise have voted Democratic have become turned off by Democratic politicians’ use of the gender-neutral term “Latinx,” which is being used “to explicitly include gender minorities and broader LGBTQ+ community segments.”

Based on their analysis of a set of population surveys conducted in recent years, Marcel Roman, an assistant professor of government at Harvard, and Amanda Sahar d’Urso, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, say Latinos are less likely to support a politician who uses the term “Latinx” in their appeal to voters.

They say the move away from Democratic candidates using the term appears to be driven by the subset of Latino voters who hold negative attitudes toward the LGBTQ community and is not based on a broader reaction against the new term, which first began to appear about 20 years ago.

“We find that backlash is not driven by concerns related to respect for the Spanish language or anti-intellectual beliefs – that Latinx is a bourgeois, coastal, white imposition on working-class Latinos,” Roman said in an interview. “The reason why it generates backlash against some aspects of the Democratic Party is it’s a signal of inclusivity toward LBGTQ+ and gender non-conforming” members of the Latino community.

Their paper also digs into Hispanic voter patterns in areas where they say the use of Latinx has had particularly high “salience,” measured by the level of internet search activity, which Roman and d’Urso say serves as a reasonable proxy for its presence in the political discourse of local candidates. Among Hispanic voters with negative views toward LGBTQ people, they found that there was greater movement toward Trump from the 2016 election to the 2020 election if they lived in areas with higher Latinx “salience.”

Nationally, there was about an 8 percentage point swing toward Trump among Hispanic voters from 2016 to 2020. Biden still captured a majority of Hispanic votes four years ago – 61%, according to one estimate – but if the movement by Hispanic voters toward Trump continues in the current election, it could be ominous for Democratic chances.

The paper says use of the term among Democratic politicians surged in recent years. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both used it in the 2020 presidential campaign, and Joe Biden used it in a 2021 speech on Covid vaccine compliance. Among Democratic members of Congress, the study says, just 10% used Latinx in social media posts during the 2015-2016 session, but by the 2019-2020 session fully half had done so. By contrast, they say, not a single Republican member of Congress has invoked the term on social media.

Amid his harsh rhetoric toward immigrants, Trump has nonetheless won support among Hispanic voters who don’t see themselves in those attacks.

“The us-versus-them framing has long characterized political alliances, across the ideological spectrum,” the New York Times said in a story Tuesday on Trump’s appeals to Black and Latino voters. “But Mr. Trump has been far more direct than any recent presidential candidate in inviting Black and Latino voters to be part of the ‘us,’ so long as they acknowledge that there is a ‘them.”

Underscoring the findings by Roman and d’Urso on the power of anti-LGBT views among a swath of Hispanic voters is Trump’s explicit attempt to win support on the issue.

“In one of the Trump campaign’s most widely broadcast Spanish-language television ads, attacking Ms. Harris for her support of transgender medical care for immigrants, it closes with ‘Kamala Harris is with them. President Trump is with us.’”

Roman said Democrats appear to have recognized the electoral costs that may come with use of the term Latinx. “The Democratic Party has kind of course corrected,” he said, with Harris and Biden not using the term since early 2021. “The Democratic Party at the national level recognized it may do more harm than good,” he said. But Roman said some “damage may be done” already in terms of the association of the term with Democrats.

Based on his findings, Roman said abandoning the term Latinx is a strategically smart move by Democrats. For his part, however, Roman sees the term as a welcome evolution in language precisely because of what it signals. “I think, in general, inclusive language is good,” he said. “It’s not the phrase that’s the problem. It’s that people hold queer-phobic attitudes – that’s the problem.” Shifting that reality, he said, is “a much larger undertaking.��

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.