#Time for democrats to start saying this was a

[deadpresidents]

Bill Clinton is remembered as a great orator but I can't think of one speech of his that stands out, can you?

President Clinton was a great communicator, but I never thought of him as a great orator with the soaring rhetoric that you got from the best speeches of President Reagan or President Obama (and Obama could be very hit-or-miss at times, to be totally honest).

What Clinton was incredible at -- possibly better than any politician of my lifetime -- was explaining things. Obama once called him the "Secretary of Explaining Stuff" (although I made that joke first when I wrote that Clinton was the "Explainer-in-Chief" and think Obama totally stole it from me) and memorably brought Clinton into the White House Briefing Room one time to help lay out some of Obama's economic policy. That's why Clinton was always so good as a keynote speaker at Democratic National Conventions (except when he nominated Michael Dukakis in 1988 and infamously bombed so badly that the arena full of Democrats cheered when he said "in conclusion"). He had a folksy -- but not dumbed-down -- way of defining policy that was otherwise uninspiring or complicated and connecting it to the everyday lives of the average American. It was the skill that made him such a successful campaigner.

To be sure, there were some excellent speeches that he gave. I think his best might have been the speech he gave at the memorial service following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He actually only spoke for about nine minutes, but it was a moving speech that was universally well-received. There was a commencement speech at Michigan State University he gave shortly after the Oklahoma City speech that has just as powerful of an impact today as it did then when he challenged the far-right anti-government militia movement that had helped breed someone like Timothy McVeigh and now has direct influence on the current Administration and Congressional majority:

"If you treat law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line for your safety every day like some kind of enemy army to be suspected, derided, and if they should enforce the law against you, to be shot, you are wrong. If you appropriate our sacred symbols for paranoid purposes and compare yourselves to colonial militias who fought for the democracy you now rail against, you are wrong. How dare you suggest that we in the freest nation on earth live in tyranny! How dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes! I say to you, all of you...there is nothing patriotic about hating your country or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government."

Another one of Clinton's great speeches was the 1999 State of the Union Address. He delivered that speech to a Joint Session of Congress at the height of his impeachment process -- a couple of weeks after he had been impeached by the House of Representatives and just a few days after his impeachment trial had begun in the Senate. Yet, Clinton went to the Capitol and absolutely delivered. It was like a pitcher playing Game 7 of the World Series in the other team's stadium under the worst possible conditions and then he not only threw a perfect game while torching everyone with 100 mph fastballs all night but also hit a grand slam. It was remarkable. He should have just dropped the microphone in the lap of the Speaker of the House and walked out of the Capitol with his arms raised victoriously.

Do any of my fellow old people remember others that I'm forgetting? His eulogies for Richard Nixon and Yitzhak Rabin are probably pretty high on the list. There was also a speech in Memphis in 1993 where he wondered about the things Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have approved of or been disappointed by if he was there that day. It started off slow, but when Clinton got rolling he got the whole church going.

[feski]

The blue wave guys…where is it?!?!?!? What is happening. I know I’ve been asking for something to push me over the edge, but I didn’t mean now. I meant like in a couple years.

[alagaisia]

This is true, and it’s especially true for the people that I think most is us probably encounter in our own social circles and daily lives. But I don’t think it’s true for everybody. Remember how there was that stat showing a spike in google searches for “did Joe Biden drop out” on Election Day?

I think it’s sort of like how you can’t know what you can’t know. If you don’t know that you’re missing information, you can’t go looking to educate yourself on it. And while most of the time when people talk about “living in a bubble” they tend to mean it in a bad faith, paradox of tolerance type of way, I’ve realized lately that it’s a concept that’s absolutely applicable in a lot of ways. Of course we make our assumptions about the world based on the very limited and biased sample size of people we interact with in our daily lives. You can’t talk about the benefits of being able to curate our dashes on tumblr and then say you think the people who interact with the same political posts as you make a representative sample of the American public.

I am someone who tries to be pretty aware of environmental issues in my personal habits. My family isn’t zero-waste, granola, organic everything, but we haven’t used a plastic shopping bag or water bottle since I was in first grade. As I start forming my own adult habits and thinking about having more control over my consumption, I’m identifying ways I could move towards more environmental consciousness. I know that I’m not doing the absolute most I could be doing, and that I think about this more than the people around me, but not by that much, right?

Except I work now for an organization that sends plays on things like proper sorting of recycling to teach elementary students two counties from where I live. The county pays us to bring these programs, because the residents are simply not recycling. I’ve gone along on one or two of the programs and seen kids ten and eleven years old participating in the interactive “help us sort the recycling” activity in the show who were terrible at it. Because it’s just not something their community thinks about. These aren’t rural areas, these aren’t devoid of civilization or waste management infrastructure, this is a suburb 45 minutes from the largest city in our state.

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around it, too, but trump did not win because more people voted for him. He won because record numbers of people did not vote at all. And we can blame that on individual leftists becoming cynical and disillusioned, but something like a third of the country has never voted in any election. There are people who are and always have been disconnected from and disinterested in the government and electoral politics and anything happening in this country.

And it’s wrong! I’m not saying it isn’t. Each of us has a responsibility to our communities, and the civic responsibility of voting and being at least minimally informed on what’s happening in the country is a part of living in a fucking society. It’s disgraceful. But many of those non-voters didn’t consider all of the available information and then choose not to educate themselves and not to vote. It simply didn’t occur to them. Just like the kids I encountered who don’t know how to recycle, a lot of people have grown up in families and communities where electoral politics were somebody else’s business, or for any number of other reasons I can’t begin to guess at, something that just wasn’t a priority. I come from a very politically motivated family, and I’m sure most of you do too. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t vote. I don’t know why each of them didn’t. But there are millions of people who don’t.

These problems have been building since long before 2016, but at the very least that election should have been a wake up call for the democratic party on a national level. What we needed and still need is community and individual level action on a national scale to reach non-voters and educate them on political issues and why this shit does actually affect them and does actually matter. Democrats need to stop folding to random criticism on things like fracking and instead have some fucking backbone, stick to their morals, and work to get votes through education and changing people’s minds and convincing them that these values are worth voting for, rather than changing their policies every other week based on what they think might appease people who are not going to vote for them anyway without a concentrated effort for a societal change of mindset.

Yes, there’s lots of information available, and people do have a responsibility to use that. Obviously there are plenty of people like the ones OP alludes to who are shirking that responsibility due to apathy. But those of us who know all of that know it because we are part of communities that care about accessing and acting based on that information. There are people who don’t know and don’t care and to whom it would never occur to seek that information out, because in their community, it doesn’t matter. And those are the people who I think the democratic party does have a real responsibility to try harder to reach. Politicians also obviously live in a social bubble where everybody cares about politics. But somebody needs to look at the numbers and realize that that’s just not true for the country as a whole. And then they need to do something about it.

I STILL sometimes see people argue that Trump's victory is the fault of Democrats for not being good enough at messaging, and not making it clear enough to Americans all the good Biden was doing.

I knew. Lots of people I know knew. I don't have a secret line to the white house. I'm around average intelligence. I'm not excessively seeking out news, constantly getting news updates. And yet I knew. And so did many others. The information was there for you to get at any time. It found its way to me without my actively seeking it out. Kamala Harris cannot personally come to your house and slap the tiktok out of your hands. You have to take a crumb of responsibility here.

[princesssarcastia]

tumblr is really bad a politics actually. please don't form opinions about political systems on tumblr. oh my god. this made me literally blind with rage and confusion for a second there.

just because the mainstream democratic party has started using "threats to democracy" as part of its campaign strategy this election cycle doesn't mean this is untrue?? please don't let your hatred for mainstream democratic political messaging make you also hate that it has FINALLY cottoned onto the fact that the american right would like us to stop living in a multiracial democracy/pluralistic society. that is a good thing, actually. it's a good thing that mainstream politics are finally willing to acknowledge that one of the two major parties is only interested in trying to destroy the political system we live under, is only interested in shoving gravel down our toilets so they blow up.

we do actually have a democracy. it's not a total direct democracy. there are a shit ton of flaws in the system. this is in part because, in fact, it's a relatively young democracy! I agree with nikole hannah-jones' assertion that the u.s. has only been a democracy for real since the 1960s, when civil rights legislation Black americans fought and died for started going into effect.

which is why this moment, 60 years on, is so important. it's a radical stress-testing of a system that it's important to preserve so that we can continue to make more progress from this point. we have to prove that the system can work this way.

i get it. voting sucks. gerrymandering has backed so many of us into a corner. we've politically and legally incentivized imprisoning members of minority populations so that they can no longer vote. the supreme court actually gutted some of that legislation passed in the 1960s that made us into a real democracy, sending us into the period of backsliding that we're currently in.

do you know how many of the candidates I voted for in my last election won? zero. ZERO. every single one of them lost. I get it, okay? this all sucks! it makes you feel powerless! but you can't let that feeling win.

that feeling is a lie they're trying to sell you so that you give up. so that you stop fighting for the democracy we've got. "bourgeois democracy" get the fuck out of here. oh my god. shut up.

[the-voice-of-night-vale]

now im not saying anything about whether or not you ~should~ vote for the immigrant-hating palestinian-killer who happens to be a "democrat" but i swear if i see one more post about how "if everyone had just voted! trump never would have gotten in office and we don't want that to happen again!!" i'm gonna go chimp mode

trump didn't even win the popular vote, you idiots. am i the only one who remembers the weeks of protests because of it?

[comradecowplant]

something something upper/middle class settler queers something something weaponized victim complex something something............................................................................

[beesandwasps]

I am 100% serious with this: in the US we are not talking about it because it was bipartisan. If you go and examine the records of the vote for the AUMF (Authorization of the Use of Military Force) against Iraq in Congress in 2002 [House | Senate] you will see some very familiar names in the list of those who voted for it: Biden, Clinton, Feinstein, Lieberman, Kerry, Reid… pretty much the only Democrat who was in Congress at that time who was a major figure later who didn’t vote for it was Pelosi. (Obama was not in Congress at that time.) So right from the start the Democratic Party could not really blame the Republicans for the war, and were only halfheartedly interested in campaigning against it.

By 2006, it was obvious that the Iraq invasion had been a bad idea all along and the Democrats started to talk about how they had been misled by the Republicans. This was a hugely popular stance — so popular that in the 2006 midterms, the Democrats gained a majority in the House and a technical majority in the Senate (with Sanders and Lieberman, who by that time had split from the party and was nominally Independent; the way that the Democratic Party pandered to the creepy asshole Joe Lieberman is another major topic which deserves more attention), and almost immediately after the election, the Democrats announced that they weren’t going to take any action after all — impeachment was “off the table” (a favorite phrase of Nancy Pelosi) and funding proceeded.

Antiwar sentiment grew even stronger as the GWB administration failed to make any headway despite renewed funding. (It’s worth pointing out that there were no stated concrete goals for the US army in Iraq. The unofficial goal of the administration was to seize control of Iraqi oil for western oil companies — eyewitnesses report that they had a map ready to show which companies would get which oil fields — but officially there were no milestones by which one could say “okay, we’re done, time to go home”.) In 2008, the Democrats once again ran largely on an antiwar platform — and added in anti-Too-Big-To-Fail-Institution rhetoric when the economy melted down — but as soon as Obama got into office, he refused to follow up on either one. He asked Congress to fund another “surge”, and tried to negotiate an extension of the 2011 troop withdrawal deadline set by GWB.

(This is also worthy of note: the puppet Iraqi government created by the US signed an agreement not to accuse the US of war crimes. This agreement expired at the withdrawal date set by GWB in 2011. The government refused to renew this agreement, and that was the real sticking point which prevented Obama from extending the official US occupation. The US absolutely was committing war crimes in Iraq and the US government knew it and even planned them in advance, otherwise the agreement would never have been necessary and certainly would not have been negotiated beforehand.)

So… if you’re going to talk about the Iraq war, you really can’t do it without condemning it. But to condemn it means not merely condemning the Republicans for starting up — it also means condemning Obama for extending it and making it worse, Hillary Clinton for voting for it in Congress and then for extending it and making it worse as Secretary of State under Obama, Nancy Pelosi for refusing to take any action to end it early by defunding it or seeking impeachment, and Joe Biden for basically all of the above as a Senator and later VP. (The Democrats, incidentally, spent at lot of time insinuating, both in Kerry’s 2004 campaign and in Obama’s campaign and early administration, that the war was somehow “winnable” and that the only reason it wasn’t being won was that Republicans were too stupid and incompetent.)

Republicans don’t want to talk about it because it was their team’s idea. Democrats don’t want to talk about it because they enthusiastically supported it, and when they took it over they couldn’t make it work despite bragging that they would manage to do that. Since essentially all US media is partisan to one party or the other, there is no discussion.

I missed most of the Iraq war due to being a baby, but every time I read about it I start wondering why we aren’t all talking about it all of the time

[bibleofficial]

where is my fat husband

[grimcatician]

“OUR MOST VULNERABLE WILL SUFFER IF TRUMP WINS!!”

WHOS FAULT IS IT

Who’s fucking fault is it that these two evil bastards are our “only two” choices!???

I hate you motherfuckers I HATE y’all so goddamn much

Marginalized people have BEEN suffering.

Under every single GODDAMNED president and I’m sick of y’all only ever getting angry and upset over it when the Clear Bad Guy™️ for you liberals is up on the ballot too

Democrats have blood on their hands they ALWAYS have. Obama is called the Deporter in Chief for a goddamned reason. How many atrocities have been committed by liberal, “progressive” presidents and politicians.

LOOK AT LOS ANGELES RIGHT NOW

LOOK AT WHATS HAPPENING WITH THAT CITY blue as FUCK and we’re trying to ban masks and started the wheels moving on criminalizing homelessness the DAY after the Supreme Court ruling.

And yes oooo project 2025!! Ok well what do we do NEXT election? The one after that?? Bc that shit is LONG TERM plan, it is made so that it can be put into action at ANY time and with ANY rep president and I hardly see shit about that.

You all upset and disgust me so much tbqh y’all dismiss ANYONE on the fence about this not realizing that most of the ppl who don’t want or won’t vote for Biden have been suffering for fucking years decades LIFETIMES and continue to see a party that proclaims they care but CONTINUE to do Jack shit to actually dismantle the instructions that perpetuate harm bc THEY DEPEND ON THEM

GAH

ITS THE LACK IF EMPATHY FOR PPL YOU DEEM AS “STUPID” AND UNINTELLIGENT FOR FEELING AT ALL EVEN A LITTLE ON THE FENCE ABOUT THIS

Fuck y’all

[bleuberrygliscor]

i know its 90% venting at the bleakness of american politics but like...

it really fucking blows to know that most people are probably not gonna vote this year. i cant wait for the fallout of that.

[jomiddlemarch]

My approach to online activism is to lean heavily into sharing specific ways to take action IRL and sharing articles/posts which I find inspiring/reassuring/clarifying the minority of the time. Maybe a 70/30 split.

From what I can tell, I've had the most impact by responding here and on FB to specific posts mostly by people I know or friends of friends who are saying something like "what can we even do?/what is there to do?/I don't know where to start!" with a specific form of action including a link and some info about how it works. I can't say for sure that everyone who says they started making calls or text banking or writing postcards is doing it, but I have to assume some of them are and I'm often surprised that people I thought would already be aware of a way to take action...aren't.

Here's 5 Calls, which helps you call your members of Congress and provides a script on different topics + the phone numbers: https://5calls.org

Here's Jessica Craven, who has daily actions including calls, Resistbot letters, phonebanks, donation suggestions: https://chopwoodcarrywaterdailyactions.substack.com/

Here's Field Team 6, they focus on registering Democrats: https://www.fieldteam6.org

Hi Hilary, thanks for your efforts and deeply informed political posts. I appreciate them and have learned a lot! I have a sincere question if you have the bandwidth for it - why is posting not considered activism? I think it should be. I mean sure it isn't getting out in the world and protesting or working at a soup kitchen and such but isn't sharing information and building community also part of activism? I've learned a lot from posts shared by yourself and others online (and further research they pointed me to) and I'm a better, more progressive person for it. Education is important and that's part of the road that leads people toward those more material acts in the world, isn't it?

There is an important clarification that I should make here, which is that posting cannot be substituted for activism. Too many people, especially on the left-leaning side of the spectrum, think that the only thing that counts as activism is constantly and loudly posting the Correct Opinions on social media, and that's it. There are several fascinating analyses that have been made about how living in late-stage capitalism means that consumerism is the primary actionable force, so you have to make sure that you only "consume" (i.e. post and mindlessly repeat) "morally pure" or "ideologically correct" content, and that if you do that, there is no other action necessary.

This is why we have had the online keyboard warriors who have yelled so loudly at the rest of us and then are absolutely dum-dum-diddlysquat amount of use when the rubber hits the road and it's time for even the smallest amount of practical action -- whether it is voting for Not A Fascist (literally the lowest imaginable bar and one at which they repeatedly and spectacularly fail) or just taking a small action to resist, call their representatives, or do so goddamn much as post "hey it's not all doomed and maybe we have a chance to fix this." That is because accelerationists (the kind who think that everything will get really bad and then The People Will Rise Up and Gloriously Revolute, The End) depend on these kind of constant logical fallacies and displacements, and in some sense, it's beneficial for them to keep feeding the "just let things get a little worse and then this time the Revolution will definitely happen!!!" line, because it keeps them relevant even when they do literally nothing. So. Yeah.

In short: spreading information, awareness, and action tips online, because so much of our socialization and community-building takes place online, is indeed a valid form of activism. But when it's taken to mean "you only have to post the correct opinions and do nothing else because that totally counts as activism," or "actually taking concrete and flawed action outside the black-and-white neo-puritan stricture of an online leftist echo chamber is actively bad and evil," then that's where we run into problems.

[qqueenofhades]

With full acknowledgement of the general shitty stress of the times, and a very deep appreciation for your steadying words over the last couple of years: I've been somewhat conflicted about volunteering with my local Democratic Party infrastructure; since it feels like at the Federal level, some of those representatives are at best incompetent and/or out of touch; verging on malicious incompetence. Especially with the most recent cycle, for them to sit there and harp on the danger Trump presented and then be caught apparently flatfooted after his inauguration.... is it even worth considering, at this point in time, the responsibility(?) of all parties involved, whether its voters who sat out this cycle, sloppy behavior from the party at various points over the last couple of years, Republicans for being bad actors; or is setting aside that degree of analysis and focusing on just pulling through the next 2-4-6-8 ish years the way to go? Focusing on what can be changed vs. what has come before? If you do not want to answer or don't have the bandwidth, totally understandable. :) Thanks again for all your hard work in this regard.

There are two things I can say here, which is that one, the federal-level Democratic Party kind of makes a habit of being unprepared, behind the eight-ball, pre-emptively cowed, generally disorganized, constantly alarmist followed by crickets, or pretty much anything else you can think of. They have already started the "stop Trump!" fundraising emails, and plenty of us, me included, are like "brother you aren't getting money from me until you POINT OUT what the fuck you're doing and start doing it, this ain't the first rodeo, GET WITH THE PROGRAM."

The second thing to say is that at least the Democrats will respond when you push them and can generally be bullied into doing the right thing eventually, and that there is no way they will learn that, get their heads on straight, or figure out a cohesive stop-Trump action plan unless we help them do that. Some of them are more successful than others; witness Democratic state AGs being blitzingly fast off the blocks and filing a barrage of lawsuits to stop the worst executive orders, while Democratic senators and House reps (at least initially) seemed passive, confused, fearful, or just content, per Chuck Schumer, to just "sit back and wait for Trump to screw up." Like, if that's your big plan to stop fascism after you spent the entire election season telling us (rightly) what a threat to democracy Trump posed, then you deserve to get your complacent ass primaried, Chuckie m'boy. Which someone can in fact do if they want to! If nothing else, it might give them a scare!

The good news is that after the grassroots Democrats started making an enormous stink, the national party woke up somewhat more and started acting more proactively. We understand that they are out of power in all three branches and cannot do anything to substantially stop Trump if all the Republicans continue to march in MAGA lockstep, but they can at least look like they give a shit. Which Senate Democrats did with their all-night opposition to Vought (the Project 2025 guy who got confirmed to OMB). They could not stop him from being confirmed, but they could make a high-profile stink about it and show that they were responsive to people going HEY GUYS SO ARE YOU GOING TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS OR. Which they will need to do, because it will maintain grassroots energy to get the House and hopefully the Senate back in 2026 and put the brakes on any substantial or legislative-related Trump BS.

The point is: the Democrats, especially on the federal level, are often chronically behind the curve and need to be kicked hard to get moving, but once that kicking happens repeatedly, they do generally tend to get the message. And if you want to make the most difference and have an active hand in shaping and discussing that effort and pressuring them to keep going, then yes, you should go ahead and volunteer. As ever, doing something is far, far better than not doing it. So yes.

[cyarsk52-20]

"Free Palestine" "Tariffs" "Eggs" and you upset that black ppl will never march with you guys on January 18th because yall were warned and you ignored the warnings. Keep your freaking marches and your blue bracelet. Until you hews stop being hewish and call out the problems in your race, you’ll never be trusted. Not even the good ones

[scrollypoly]

Ok, so with all these posts going around aboht election interference and calling for a recount, i wanted to find evidence that weren't twitter screenshots

Tl;dr - bomb threats yes, 3 fires at ballot boxes (1 had damaged ballots and theyre fixing it), 20 million unaccounted votes is FALSE, this shit takes time to count so be patient, cuz they are STILL COUNTING

Bomb threats at polling places:

This claim is legit, as well as the source being from russian email domains. No actual bombs were placed or set off.

Burning ballot boxes:

3 incidents of burning ballot boxes have been confirmed for this election in Portland, Oregon and one in Vancouver, Washington, both of which are suspected to be from the same individual. Republican and Democrat officials have spoken out against this, ballot boxes were guarded after the incidents started, and fire suppression systems inside the ballot boxes saved the majority of the ballots, except for one box where 488 ballots were damaged due to a malfunction of the fire suppression system.

Fires were also confirmed in Arizona by a man who apparently just wanted to be arrested and had no political motivations.

No fires were confirmed in Georgia, despite repeated claims that most of the fires were in Georgia. Georgia changed their election laws in 2021 in regards to absentee votes. Ballot boxes have been notably targetted for election conspiracy and mistrust. Take this into account when you see outcry about ballot boxes in any way.

Votes not being counted:

The screenshots im seeing particularly note California, which is the state with the largest amount of registered voters. California is also dealing with massive wildfires rn. Its gonna take a couple days, and the election isnt officially over yet. Calm down

20 million unaccounted votes:

Yall . . .

This shit takes time. Theyre not "throwing your ballots out" or "deliberately not counting votes". Be so for real

Some of this shit is valid, and should probably be known. Some of this shit is making yall sound like trumpers in 2020. Be smart. Have critical thinking.

If youre gonna reblog or comment with claims i better see credible evidence to back your claims up or youre getting blocked

Edited to add a TL;DR, no other changes

[traegorn]

while i completely agree with your assessment of realistically what a trump vs harris presidency will look like, i think the issue me and a lot of other leftists have is that there is no need to tell people (and effectively tell harris) that oh ofc we are gna vote for her despite these issues because trump is THAT bad and if you say you don't want to vote for her because her party is pro-war, pro-genocide, then you are condemning americans to a trump presidency. we know trump is worse! i don't want him to win AT ALL, but why would harris even consider even changing the language she is using (i'm looking at the absolutely stupid speech she was giving in michigan, given the large arab & muslim-american population there and given its a battleground state) if she thinks she is going to win on a not-trump basis? i know who i'm voting for on nov 5th if it comes down to it, but we need the democrats to THINK they are going to lose until the very last minute, we need them to feel like they can't just rely on being the lesser of two evils if we want any chance of a shift on palestine. because they very well might lose, for this exact reason (and i'm speaking again more to the votes of the arab & muslim-american population which is far more demographically meaningful than the votes of leftists) and if that happens, they have no one to blame but themselves.

So I'm going to tell you something important: You don't have the leverage you think you have.

Political campaigns are a machine that's been operating the same way for a long time on the Democratic side. The Republicans may have abandoned a lot of the old ways of doing things, but the Democratic party hasn't. And you've got people running these campaigns who are steeped in the "wisdom" of how you win.

And when a block of voters says they're not going to vote for their candidate, they tend to believe them. So they decide to go court the people who they think will vote for them. That's why you've seen the Harris campaign trying to court moderate Republicans who might be iffy on voting for Trump a third time.

Right now one of the reasons Netanyahu is refusing to commit to a cease fire is because he thinks Trump can win. If Trump wins, he has no reason to ever agree to one. One of the reasons he thinks Trump can win is because the polling is so close.

If you want to know why they've gone to the right recently, it's because they think they've lost the left. And since a lot of those leftists are claiming there's a line in the sand that they don't have the power to appease (because -- again -- they can't get Netanyahu to do shit right now), they're going to go for the centrist Republicans.

Also, there seems to be this weird notion that the only way to move the Democrats is during the election. That's not how you move people. You keep pressuring them during their term and it works. Like Biden is continuing to work on forgiving student debt even though he doesn't have an election ahead of him. Because they know that what he does reflects on the future of the party. Voting doesn't end this game, it's the start of it.

But none of it will matter if Trump wins.

[alex51324]

Useful article from CNN on election-night misinformation.

Key takeaway is that pretty much whatever happens, Trump will claim it's evidence that the election is being rigged against him.

Some additional things to keep in mind--particularly if you haven't been through many of these before:

The winner may or may not be projected on election night. How long it takes depends on a bunch of factors, having to do with the logistics of ballot-counting and how the statistical analysis comes along. Getting a projected winner by midnight and the count taking several days are both well within the range of normal, and neither one suggests that anything nefarious is happening.

Counting of votes always continues for several days after the election, until every vote has been counted. This happens regardless of whether or not the media have "called" a winner, or a candidate has conceded.

Media outlets project election winners based on the data that has come in and their statistical models--they do not "declare" or "decide" who won. The major outlets are very motivated to avoid an incorrect projection*, so if they make a call, it's because they're really sure they have enough information to accurately predict the outcome of the final count.

Usually, when this happens, all of the major media outlets are making the same projection around the same time--within the same hour, at least, and often in the same 10 minutes or so. If there's an outlier, there's a good chance they're either guessing or propagandizing.

Candidates do not get to call the race in their own favor. There's a decent chance Trump will try, but also it's also normal and expected for both campaigns to talk like they're expecting to win; e.g. introducing their candidate as "the next President of the United States" when appearing before supporters at events. (My guess is that if he does try, the mainstream media outlets will simply sanewash it as typical election-night bravado, which is actually fine.)

The only thing that means anything, coming from a candidate/campaign, is a concession. This will often happen after the media has called the race for the other candidate; it usually isn't a surprise. A normal campaign will often go quiet--stop sending people to talk on TV, etc.--when they're getting ready to concede. (Trump arguably** still hasn't conceded 2020, so no one is particularly expecting him to concede any time this coming week.)

It's normal for the numbers to change a lot. There are always some surprises, but there are also standard patterns: results from the southeast usually come in a clump, and put a lot of electoral votes into the Republican column, early in the night. Democrats usually pick up the west coast states, which of course are the last to close their polls and start reporting results***. For the swing states, where we'll probably see a lot of reporting on very incomplete vote totals, results will start coming in first from the rural areas, which lean red; cities take longer to count their votes--because there are more of them--and lean blue.

The more uncertainty there is about the outcome, the more you'll hear about the evolving numbers--news networks have airtime to fill, and there's only so many ways you can say, "Still too close to call." Try not to obsess over these numbers; the news networks have people specially trained to analyze this exact kind of data, and if they can't say how it's going to turn out, you're not going to know, either.

If it ends up being too close to call for several days, there will probably be reporting on small, county-by-county vote dumps. It's important to realize that this is all still the original count of the votes, not a recount or "finding new votes." We only hear about it when the election is so close that these relatively small numbers of ballots are likely to affect the outcome, but it happens every single election. In 2020, Trump repeatedly claimed that ongoing counts were some how irregular, and sometimes demanded that counts be stopped when the current total showed him in the lead. This is, to be clear, nuts; the full & complete count of the votes always takes more than just the one day, and it's a bedrock principle of democracy that every valid ballot is counted.

(* Back in 2000, the Bush-Gore election with the whole Florida debacle, several major news outlets did project winners too soon, and then had to walk back their projections.

This definitely contributed to the chaos that night, and may have also contributed to the widespread perception that Bush was the "real" winner and Gore was dragging the country through multiple recounts, in those first few days when the initial count of wasn't even complete in some states.

As a result, responsible media outlets are much more cautious these days about election-night projections.)

(**On January 7, 2021 he made a statement that was taken as indicating his understanding that Biden had won, or at least that he knew he wouldn't be staying in office, but he never stopped saying he won.)

(***This often looks like the Republican being miles ahead, and then suddenly California reports in and they aren't anymore. Expect Trump to pretend that this is somehow shocking, even though the last time a Republican won California was 1988.

Similarly, he will also pretend to be surprised when, for instance, Philadelphia turns in their first big batch of results, and Harris's numbers jump up.)