#election postmortem

[tomorrowusa]

« [T]he albatross was not just Joe Biden; it was the longer-term perception that liberals constituted the country’s ruling class. This is something the otherwise inchoate conservative moment has emphasized consistently and effectively in recent years: that the Democrats were now the party of power and the establishment, and that the right was the natural home for anti-establishment resentment of all kinds — of which, it’s now clear to see, there is an awful lot. Most on the left haven’t seen it this way, frustrated by legislative stalemates and judicial setbacks and too-close-for-comfort elections seemingly every cycle, with a feeling all along that liberals were always swimming upstream. But in profound ways that the party’s voters rarely recognize, the Democrats have been the country’s incumbent political force now for a full generation. »

— David Wallace-Wells at the New York Times. (archived)

It was actually more than just an incumbency thing. In the eyes of much of the population, Democtats had become The Establishment. And whipping up popular grievances is always going to hurt The Establishment.

A problem is that Liberals are still not great at messaging – though there have been some minor improvements. Warning about Project 2025 and climate catastrophe had a little effect, though it wasn't that visceral.

Donald Trump's incompetence in the early months of the pandemic led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of additional American deaths and unleashed 2½ years of recession, unemployment, and inflation. Yet we hardly heard anything about this in the campaign.

Joy is nice. But if you really want to win over an unsettled electorate, you need to make them fear in their bones what the other guy would do if elected. Donald Trump personally created a real life dystopia in 2020. Reminding people of that in a visually graphic way would have offset Trump's unsupported claims about migrants on the prowl for your family pets for dinner.

If you are seen as The Establishment then you have to get voters to view the previous Establishment with greater trepidation. For five consecutive presidential elections, starting in 1932, Democrats successfully pinned the blame for the Great Depression on Herbert Hoover. Trump's pandemic disaster should have been good for at least two such cycles.

[npi]

Donald Trump's victory was powered by voters who felt that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn't care about them

Many Democratic strategists, activists, and voters thought that the 2024 presidential election would be similar to the 2016 and 2020 elections: the key to beating a deeply unpopular Donald Trump was finding the right candidate. In other words, the Democrats just needed to not blow it. After all, Trump famously won in 2016 because Hillary Clinton was nearly as unpopular as he was. However, this…

[paleolithique]

and listen. i get it. i'm a 25 year old commie burnout looking back with the benefit of hindsight and i don't get paid the big bucks to make the big decisions. i get that the DNC felt like they had to have a woman of color on the ticket in 2020. but did it really not occur to ANYBODY that the former attorney general of california might be especially effective in the attorney general cabinet seat.

i guess at the end of the day it was kind of a shame that pete "wine cave rat" buttigieg ran such a bad campaign that he had to be shuffled off into the department of transportation. bc in another world a biden buttigieg 2020 ticket probably would've got them to 270 all the same.

[qqueenofhades]

I don’t have any words right now for what’s happened. Where in the fuck do we go from here?

I don't know. I really, truly don't know. We can't sugarcoat how bad things are going to get, and we can't pre-emptively give into it anyway. This is going to be an unprecedented time in American history (if, sadly, not world history) and the forces conspiring to make you obey will gain much of their power from you doing so in advance, without a struggle. It seems fair to say that America as it has always been historically constituted is over, and may not return in our lifetimes, but we also do not know that for a fact. If nothing else, the fascists will find it very hard to cancel competitive elections, and we cannot sit back, throw up our hands, conclude that voting is clearly meaningless, and let them do that. There are a lot of other things that we need to do, but that's one.

There are various postmortems to be written and nits to pick, but Harris was thrown into an impossible situation and did the best she could in 100 days. Even her critics agree she ran a pretty much flawless campaign. But this country simply decided that a well-qualified black woman could not be preferred over the most manifestly and flagrantly unfit degenerate to ever occupy the office. They decided this for many reasons, not least because large swathes of the country now live in curated misinformation bubbles that, under Government Czar Musk, will only get much, much worse. They were helped by the cowardice and complicity of the "mainstream media" that could have ended Trump's career exactly like they did to Biden after the first debate, but chose to preserve the profits of their billionaire oligarch owners and did not do so, giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and normalization at every turn. They also hounded Biden relentlessly over the four years of his presidency, never reported on the good things he did, and drove him to the historically bad approval ratings lows for a president who was by any metric, quite successful (and will quite possibly be our last ordinary American president for a very long time). Along with the searingly ingrained racism and misogyny and misinformation, Harris could not overcome that.

Democrats clearly had a messaging problem, but it's also true that the country, quite simply, does not care about "democracy" when the economy is perceived to be at stake. Not to over-egg the Hitler parallels, but yeah. This is how Hitler returned to power in 1933 -- on the backs of widespread economic collapse of the Weimar Republic; voters decided they just didn't care about the overtly fascist stuff, which he then proceeded to you know, do with genocidal vigor. Except the American economy in this case was actually doing well, which makes it even more baffling and indefensible. Enough people simply memory-holed Trump's crimes (aided at every turn by SCOTUS, Mitch McConnell not convicting him after January 6, Merrick Garland being far too slow and timid, the corporate media), liked the racist fascist behavior or felt that it wasn't a dealbreaker, and decided that in this election, he was the "change" candidate. It's insane by any metric, but that's what happened.

The country is deeply sick. We do not know what will happen. It's going to get bad. Barring a miracle, we will not have federalized abortion rights again in my lifetime, and there will be widespread attacks on public health, women's rights, immigrants, transgender people, and other vulnerable people. Even and especially the ones who voted for Trump. Never Thought Leopard Would Eat My Face, etc. Alito and Thomas will swiftly step down and allow their seats to be replaced by 40-year old wingnuts hand-selected from the worst the Federalist Society has to offer. SCOTUS is gone for the next generation at least. There is very little prospect of it being ever fixed in the foreseeable future.

Trump will never face a scintilla of consequences for his previous crimes; all the open federal cases will be closed as soon as he takes office and fires Jack Smith. The best we can hope for is that he dies in office, but then we get Vance and the cadre of alt-right techno billionaires ruled directly from the Kremlin. Putin is celebrating this morning and with good reason; he's gotten everything he wants. Trump will egg on Netanyahu in Gaza and abandon Ukraine. Democracy across the world will remain even more fragile and badly under threat. Authoritarians will be empowered and American withdrawal from international systems will percolate in very dangerous ways that cannot and will not be fixed in the short run. I really hope all the leftists who celebrate this as the "defeat of the genocide candidate" will enjoy all the genocide and suffering that's about to come. And yes, I do think the Israel-Palestine war fucked us in a large way. Jewish voters perceived the Democrats as insufficiently pro-Israel due to the presence of far-left antisemitism, even as the far left attacked the Democrats relentlessly and never targeted the Republicans. Arab voters abandoned them, possibly deservedly. What would have happened without the war? We don't know. You get the historical period that you get. Netanyahu and Trump can now do anything they want. Hope it was worth it.

As I said, I can't sugarcoat it. We are going to be paying for this in some form for the next decade, and probably longer. I'm not as absolutely shattered as I was in 2016, but I am much, much angrier. We all thought, we all hoped, America was better than this. It isn't. That, however, is something that has also happened before. What we decide to do next will shape how the next chapter unfolds.

This would be a great time to stock up on needed medicines, renew your passport online, and anything else you need to do in preparation for next year. Many of us simply do not have the wherewithal, whether financial or otherwise, to leave the country. I don't know what will happen with me. I don't know what will happen to any of us. This was utterly avoidable and yet, America didn't want to avoid it. At some point, there's nothing else you can do. You can point to media cronyism, Russian influence, etc etc., but the fact that two of the most qualified presidential candidates who happened to be women have now lost to Trump twice makes it unavoidable. The virulent rightward shift of young men (of all races) in particular paints a grim picture as to how the reactionary misogyny of the 21st century is going to essentially undo most of the progress for social and gender equality in the 20th. The patriarchy has been a problem for most of human history. Doesn't really seem like it's going to change.

The end result of this, however grim: we're still here. We are still living within our communities. If (and this is a big if) Democrats can retake the House, they can put some checks on the process for the next two years. At this point, we are in full-out buying-time, trying-to-prevent-the worst mode. We could have continued fixing things, but we won't be doing that. We will only be trying to preserve ourselves and our friends and our smaller spheres of influence. It sounds very trite to say that we have to have courage, but we do. There's not much else.

It's going to be an awful winter. We have two and a half months to see this coming and know how bad it's going to be, and... yeah. I don't know how soon the buyer's remorse will inevitably set in, but it will. Tough luck, people. You voted for him. You get the country that you decide to have. But the rest of us are also here, and what Gandalf says is still true. We wish the Ring had never come to us, we wish none of this had happened, but we still have to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.

I don't have a lot more. I'll probably be logging off for a while. I don't need to look at the internet for.... yeah, a long time. (Will I do it anyway? Probably.) I don't know what else to leave you with, aside from again:

Do not obey in advance. Do not act as if everything is foreordained and set in stone. Fascist regimes end. They always do. We are going to have to figure out how, and it will suck shit, but the alternative is worse.

Take care of yourselves. I love you.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The housing emergency and the second Trump term

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveill ance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

Postmortems and blame for the 2024 elections are thick on the ground, but amidst all those theories and pointed fingers, one explanation looms large and credible: the American housing emergency. If the system can't put a roof over your head, that system needs to go.

American housing has been in crisis for decades, of course, but it keeps getting worse…and worse…and worse. Americans pay more for worse housing than at any time in their history. Homelessness is at a peak that is soul-crushing to witness and maddening to experience. We turned housing – a human necessity second only to air, food and water – into an asset governed almost entirely by market forces, and so created a crisis that has consumed the nation.

The Trump administration has no plan to deal with housing. Or rather, they do have plans, but strictly of the "bad ideas only" variety. Trump wants to deport 11m undocumented immigrants, and their families, including citizens and Green Card holders (otherwise, that would be "family separation" and that's cruel). Even if you are the kind of monster who can set aside the ghoulishness of solving your housing problems by throwing someone in a concentration camp at gunpoint and then deporting them to a country where they legitimately fear for their lives, this still doesn't solve the housing emergency, and will leave America several million homes short.

Their other solution? Deregulation and tax cuts. We've seen this movie before, and it's an R-rated horror flick. Financial deregulation created the speculative mortgage markets that led to the 2008 housing crisis, which created a seemingly permanent incapacity to build new homes in America, as skilled tradespeople retired or changed careers and housebuilding firms left the market. Handing giant tax cuts to the monopolists who gobbled up the remains of these bankrupt small companies minted a dozen new housing billionaires who preside over companies that make more money than ever by building fewer homes:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91198443/housing-market-wall-streets-big-housing-market-bet-has-created-12-new-billionaires

This isn't working. Homelessness is ballooning. The only answer Trump and his regime have for our homeless neighbors is to just make it a crime to be homeless, sweeping up homeless encampments and busting homeless people for "loitering" (that is, existing in space). There is no universe in which this reduces homelessness. People who lose their homes aren't going to dig holes, crawl inside, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. If anything, sweeps and arrests will make homelessness worse, by destroying the possessions, medication and stability that homeless people need if they are to become housed.

Today, The American Prospect published an excellent package on the housing emergency, looking at its causes and the road-tested solutions that can work even when the federal government is doing everything it can to make the problem worse:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-tackling-the-housing-crisis/

The Harris campaign ran on Biden's economic record, insisting that he had tamed inflation. It's true that the Biden admin took action against monopolists and greedflation, including criminal price-fixing companies like Realpage, which helps landlords coordinate illegal conspiracies to rig rents. Realpage sets the rents for the majority of homes in major metros, like Phoenix:

https://www.azag.gov/press-release/attorney-general-mayes-sues-realpage-and-residential-landlords-illegal-price-fixing

Of course, reducing inflation isn't the same as bringing prices down – it just means prices are going up more slowly. And sure, inflation is way down in many categories, but not in housing. In housing, inflation is accelerating:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-03-08/inflation-housing-shortage-economy-cpi-fed-interest-rate

The housing emergency makes everything else worse. Blue states are in danger of losing Congressional seats because people are leaving big cities: not because they want to, but because they literally can't afford to keep a roof over their heads. LGBTQ people fleeing fascist red state legislatures and their policies on trans and gay rights can't afford to move to the states where they will be allowed to simply live:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/business/economy/lgbtq-moving-cost.html

So what are the roots of this problem, and what can we do about it? The housing emergency doesn't have a unitary cause, but among the most important factors is fuckery that led to the Great Financial Crisis and the fuckery that followed on from it, as Ryan Cooper writes:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-housing-industry-never-recovered-great-recession/

The Glass-Steagall Act was a 1933 banking regulation created to prevent Great Depression-style market crashes. It was killed in 1999 by Bill Clinton, who declared, "the Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate." Nine years later, the global economy melted down in a Great Depression-style market crash fueled by reckless speculation of the sort that Glass-Steagall had prohibited.

The crash of 2008 took down all kinds of industries, but none were so hard-hit as home-building (after all, mortgages were the raw material of the financial bubble that popped in 2008). After 2008, construction of new housing fell by 90% for the next two years. This protracted nuclear winter in the housing market killed many associated industries. Skilled tradespeople retrained, or "left the job market" (a euphemism for becoming disabled, homeless, or destroyed). Waves of bankruptcies swept through the construction industry. The construction workforce didn't recover to pre-crisis levels for 16 years (and of course, by then, there was a huge backlog of unbuilt homes, and a larger population seeking housing).

Meanwhile, the collapse of every part of the housing supply chain – from raw materials to producers – set the stage for monopoly rollups, with the biggest firms gobbling up all these distressed smaller firms. Thanks to this massive consolidation, homebuilders were able to build fewer houses and extract higher profits by gouging on price. They doubled down on this monopoly price-gouging during the pandemic supply shocks, raising prices well above the pandemic shortage costs.

The housing market is monopolized in ways that will be familiar to anyone angry about consolidation in other markets – from eyeglasses to pharma to tech. One builder, HR Horton, is the largest player in 3 of the country's largest markets, and it has tripled its profits since 2005 while building half as many houses. Modern homebuilders don't build: they use their scale to get land at knock-down rates, slow-walk the planning process, and then farm out the work to actual construction firms at rates that barely keep the lights on:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder

Monopolists can increase profits by constraining supply. 60% of US markets are "highly concentrated" and the companies that dominate these markets are starving homebuilding in them to the tune of $106b/year:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3303984

There are some obvious fixes to this, but they are either unlikely under Trump (antitrust action to break up builders based on their share in each market) or impossible to imagine (closing tax loopholes that benefit large building firms). Likewise, we could create a "homes guarantee" that would act as an "automatic stabilizer." That would mean that any time the economy slips into recession, this would trigger automatic funding to pay firms to build public housing, thus stimulating the economy and alleviating the housing supply crisis:

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialHousing.pdf

The Homes Guarantee is further explained in a separate article in the package by Sulma Arias from People's Action, who describes how grassroots activists fighting redlining planted the seeds of a legal guarantee of a home:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-why-we-need-homes-guarantee/

Arias describes the path to a right to a home as running through the mass provision of public housing – and what makes that so exciting is that public housing can be funded, administered and built by local or state governments, meaning this is a thing that can happen even in the face of a hostile or indifferent federal regime.

In Paul E Williams's story on FIMBY (finance in my back yard), the executive director of Center for Public Enterprise offers an inspirational story of how local governments can provide thousands of homes:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-fimby-finance-in-my-backyard/

Williams recounts the events of 2021 in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a county agency stepped in to loan money to a property developer who had land, zoning approval and work crews to build a major new housing block, but couldn't find finance. Montgomery County's Housing Opportunities Commission made a short-term loan at market rates to the developer.

By 2023, the building was up and the loan had been repaid. All 268 units are occupied and a third are rented at rates tailored to low-income tenants. The HOC is the permanent owner of those homes. It worked so well that Montgomery's HOC is on track to build 3,000 more public homes this way:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

Other – in red states! – have followed suit, with lookalike funds and projects in Atlanta and Chattanooga, with "dozens" more plans underway at state and local levels. The Massachusetts Momentum Fund is set to fund 40,000 homes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

The Center for Public Enterprise has a whole report on these "Government Sponsored Enterprises" and the role they can play in creating a supply of homes priced at a rate that working people can afford:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-fimby-finance-in-my-backyard/

Of course, for a GSE to loan money to build a home, that home has to be possible. YIMBYs are right to point to restrictive zoning as a major impediment to building new homes, and Robert Cruickshank from California YIMBY has a piece breaking down the strategy for fixing zoning:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-make-it-legal-to-build/

Cruickshank lays out NIMBY success stories in cities like Austin and Minneapolis adopting YIMBY-style zoning rules and seeing significant improvements in rental prices. These success stories are representative of a broader recognition – at least among Democratic politicians – that restrictive zoning is a major contributor to the housing emergency.

Repeating these successes in the rest of the country will take a long time, and in the meantime, American tenants are sitting ducks for predatory landlords, With criminal enterprises like Realpage enabling collusive price-fixing for housing and monopoly developers deliberately restricting supplies to keep prices up (a recent Blackrock investor communique gloated over the undersupply of housing as a source of profits for its massive portfolio of rental properties), tenants pay more and more of their paychecks for worse and worse accommodations. They can't wait for the housing emergency to be solved through zoning changes and public housing. They need relief now.

That's where tenants' unions come in, as Ruthy Gourevitch and Tara Raghuveer of the Tenant Union Federation writes in their piece on the tenants across the country who are coordinating rent strikes to protest obscene rent-hikes and dangerous living conditions:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-look-for-the-tenant-union/

They describe a country where tenants work multiple jobs, send the majority of their take-home pay to their landlords – a quarter of tenants pay 70% of their wages in rent – and live in vermin-filled homes without heat or ventilation:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/terms-of-investment/

Public money from Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac flood into the speculative market for multifamily homes, a largely unregulated, subsidized speculative bonanza that lets the wealthy make bets and the poor pay their losses.

In response, tenants unions are popping up all across the country, especially in red state cities like Bozeman, MT and Louisville, KY. They organize for "just cause" evictions that ban landlords from taking their homes away. They seek fair housing voucher distribution practices. They seek to close eviction loopholes like the LA wheeze that lets landlords kick you out following "renovations."

The National Tenant Policy Agenda demands "national rent caps, anti-eviction protections, habitability standards, and antitrust action," measures that would immediately and profoundly improve the lives of millions of American workers:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JF1-fTalW1tOBO0FhYDcVvEd1kQ2HIzkYFNRo6zmSsg/edit

They caution that it's not enough to merely increase housing supply. Without a strong countervailing force from organized tenants, new housing can be just another source of extraction and speculation for the rich. They say that the Federal Housing Finance Agency – regulator for Fannie and Freddie – could play an active role in ensuring that new housing addresses the needs of people, not corporations.

In the meantime, a tenants' union in KC successfully used a rent strike – where every tenant in a building refuses to pay rent – to get millions in overdue repairs. More strikes are planned across the country.

The American system is in crisis. A country that cannot house its people is a failure. As Rachael Dziaba writes in the final piece for the package, the situation is so bad that water has started to flow uphill: the cities with the most inward migration have the least job growth:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-10-18-housing-blues/

It's not just housing, of course. Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the rich world and get worse outcomes than anyone else in the rich world. Their monopoly grocers have spiked their food prices. The incoming administration has declared war on public education and seeks to relegate poor children to unsupervised schools where "education" can consist of filling in forms on a Chromebook and learning that the Earth is only 5,000 years old.

A system that can't shelter, feed, educate or care for its people is a failure. People in failed states will vote for anyone who promises to tear the system down. The decision to turn life's necessities over to unregulated, uncaring markets has produced a populace who are so desperate for change, they'll even vote for their own destruction.

[darkmaga-returns]

There have been extensive postmortems on Kamala Harris’s failed campaign and the absolute drubbing she received from Donald Trump.

Democrat strategist James Carville said the moment he knew the campaign was doomed was when ‘The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin asked Harris, “If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”

Kamala answered, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

But legacy media keep gaslighting voters with polls showing Harris neck and neck with Trump and even leading in some surprising places.

Recently, Harris campaign advisor David Plouffe sat down with fellow Harris campaign alums Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter on Pod Save America to discuss what went wrong.

The junk polls pushed by the legacy media were an overt gesture to help Democrats and influence the mindset of the electorate.  Case in point:  Ann Selzer’s shocking poll suggesting that Kamala Harris was leading Donald Trump in Iowa by 3 percent.

Leftwing outlets used the Iowa poll constantly in an attempt to embolden Harris supporters and suppress Trump supporters.

Selzer’s poll was precisely as it appeared: junk. Ultimately, Selzer was 16 points off. President Trump won the state of Iowa by +13.

Despite all the polls legacy media used to gaslight Americans, Plouffe admitted during the podcast that the campaign’s internal polling never actually had Harris ahead of Trump.

“We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” he said.

“I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”

The Harris campaign knew what was likely coming on election day.  Legacy media knew.  If they were actually journalists rather than the unpaid marketing wing of the DNC, they would have reported the facts.  But their motivation to shill for leftists outweighs their desire to deliver the truth.

[tanadrin]

regarding transphobia: I also think it can't be stressed enough that it was a panic ginned up in 2011 because the right-wing had lost so hard on gay marriage. Even now if they strike down that court case, they won't undo the social acceptance of same-sex marriage (and many states will specifically and explicitly allow it).

while the prospects of a similar event for trans people in the near future in the US are not... good, they actually can't legislate popular opinion, and what little I've seen on postmortems for the election suggest this really was not a victory fueled by hatred of the they/thems

Yeah, in the very long run I'm quite optimistic on trans rights, but in the short-to-medium term there's so much harm that can be done, especially to trans kids, that it's hard to focus on what attitudes will be like in ten or twenty years.

[mariacallous]

The postmortem part of elections always makes me want to die. Everyone so certain in their particular theory of why a candidate lost and *shocker* it's always what happens to line up perfectly with their own personal beliefs -- like the leftists still arguing Harris lost because of Palestine.

[chamerionwrites]

“Democrats have to stop pandering to the left” would be a hysterically funny postmortem election take if it weren’t so old and predictable and tiring. Pandering where. Show me the policies. Remember when Biden slightly airbrushed Trump-era immigration law, and Fox News went right on characterizing him as an unhinged open borders commie regardless? Remember when Harris literally campaigned with Liz Cheney?

[coffinup]

Writing tips for death/funerals/bodies from someone who has worked in the funeral industry for over 3 years

-Bodies actually feel warmer immediately after death due to a condition called postmortem caloricity. This briefly raises the body temperature as bacteria within the gut start moving.

-Rigor mortis has three stages: primary flaccidity, active rigor, and secondary flaccidity. Active rigor starts around 3-6 hours after death. Active rigor will make the body stiff, but not immovable. Secondary flaccidity starts around 30-50 hours after death. This is when decomposition will start to be visibly noticeable. In lower temperatures, active rigor may last longer.

-The first sign of active decomposition is a green tinge in the the lower abdomen

-Funeral Directors NEVER read out a will. This is the duty of a probate lawyer

-Hearses never pick up bodies from their place of death. Hearses are used to ceremonially transport casketed bodies from the place of the funeral to the place of final internment. Funeral homes and mortuaries will use unmarked mini vans or transport vans to pick up bodies from hospitals, nursing facilities, homes, etc.

-a dead person’s eyes shouldn’t be cloudy soon after death unless they already had cataracts. Eyes stay relatively clear until a few days after death. If a body was refrigerated or in cold temps, eyes might become cloudy sooner.

-Perfectly frozen bodies will tend to look essentially the same as they did in life, sometimes including having flushed cheeks and fingers. This flush will turn darker and more gray over long periods of time.

-The body of someone who died from asphyxiation (choking, hanging, suffocating, drowning) may appear blue/gray in color briefly after death.

-The body of someone who died from carbon monoxide poisoning will exhibit cherry read discoloration in their face and extremities, and sometimes their whole body.

-Often times people who were older, who had a liver condition, were obese, or were an alcoholic will be severely jaundiced (yellow) after death

-livor mortis is a postmortem condition that consists of blood settling into areas from gravity. For example, someone laying on their back during death will have a purple/gray/red “staining” in their back, butt, backs of their legs etc, parts of the body that are close to the ground.

-For the love of God, organs are not removed during embalming. This is not part of the embalming process. Autopsies may remove visceral organs for examination. If you search “modern embalming process” on youtube or google you should get a run-down on how modern embalming is done. Embalming in most cases is also NOT permanent. The body will start to decompose after about 2-5 weeks.

-“Clinical Death” is a term used for the cessation of hearbeat function, where life can still be restored through intervention. When writing about someone who briefly died but came back because of hospital intervention, you can say they were “clinically dead”. “Brain death” is when brain function has ceased but organ function is maintained through life support. “Biological death” is cessation of organ and brain activity due to lack of oxygen. This is irreversible. “Legal death” is when a medical professional has declared someone as dead and a death certificate is issued.

-NOT ALL STATES HAVE CORONERS. If you are writing a story in a particular US state, do some quick research to see if they have a coroner or a state medical examiner. Coroners are an elected position and don’t need a medical license, they examine evidence from crime scenes and autopsied. Medical examiners perform autopsies and do need a medical license.

-If someone dies under unknown circumstances, they will be subject to autopsy. This can be as benign as having a heart attack or slipping at home, or as malignant as being murdered.

-this is tangental but Cancer does NOT cause your hair to fall out. CHEMOTHERAPY may cause hair to fall out. Not everyone that has cancer or gets chemo will lose hair. People that have cancer in their upper body (breast, lung, throat etc) are more likely to lose hair than people with cancer in their lower body (genital, rectal, colon, intestinal etc)

If anyone can think of anything else let me know!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Michelangelo Signorile at The Signorile Report:

There have been many postmortems on the outcome of the election for Democrats, looking at how certain minority groups voted—and how they supposedly shifted their vote—but there’s been very little written about one particular minority group: LGBTQ voters. And yet, in context, LGBTQ voters displayed the kind of influence as a bloc that politicians should be paying attention to moving forward. I suspect part of the reason they’ve not been focused on is because these voters don’t fit an overwhelming corporate media narrative that positions Donald Trump as having broadened and diversified his coalition—because LGBTQ people actually went the other way. According to the NBC News Exit Poll, LGBTQ people doubled their share of the electorate, from 4% in 2020 to 8% in 2024, which is nothing to sneeze at. (Researchers have shown the percentage of the LGBTQ population appears to be roughly equal in all of the states.) And 86% of LGBTQ people voted for Kamala Harris—well over 10 million voters—a big increase from the 71% who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Donald Trump saw a sharp decline in support from LGBTQ voters, from 25% in 2020 to just 14% in 2024.

[...]

But regarding LGBTQ voters, the shift in the national exit polling is big enough—and the growth in the percentage of the electorate is large enough—to assume that something happened. While many other groups moved toward Trump a bit—or saw less turnout in some places—LGBTQ people went in the opposite direction. I believe a few things came into play. The toxic masculinity that marked the Trump campaign was as threatening to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as it is to many women. (Harris overwhelmingly won Black women, and, though Trump won white women, Harris did better with white women than Biden did in 2020). The Trump campaign’s bro culture on steroids, exemplified by the white supremacist elements of Trump’s base as well as among the many young right-wing and even independent male podcasters Trump courted, often telegraphed homophobia and transphobia. Even when it wasn’t overt, it sent a message that you’re not included if you’re queer. And the blatant anti-trans messaging from Trump and the GOP—and the vicious ads they aired in media markets—horrified almost the entire LGBTQ community.

[...]

First off, as far as many in Trump’s base are concerned—including the aggressively anti-LGBTQ Christian right—there is no “normal” gay anything. They believe we’re all abnormal—freaks and sinners. Secondly, the idea that some great majority of queer people—or the “normal gay guys”—would vote for Trump because they were eager to throw trans people under the bus is clearly false. I’m not saying all cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual people support all trans people—there are fissures, as there are in any movement—but I believe most do, understanding the clear connections we have about our bodies and our privacy and about how those who hate us view us.

Beyond that, Trump and the justices he put on the Supreme Court are a threat to marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws protecting gay, bi and lesbian people, especially in public accommodations. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was marrying gay couples going back to 2004 as a district attorney in San Francisco—before being shut down by the California Supreme Court—and enforced protections as California attorney general while being outspoken as a U.S. senator. The other thing I would say is that queer people know a fascist when they see one. They know what it’s like to be scapegoated. And, if they know their history, they know the brutality and violence LGBTQ people experienced in the past at the hands of strongmen. So do Jews, of course, who also voted overwhelmingly for Harris—by 79%—which must have angered Trump, who demanded their vote at rallies and even berated them, claiming they owed it to him for his support of Israel.

While most demographics moved to the right this election to varying degrees, this key demographic swung left: the LGBTQ+ community.

This is due to the fact that LGBTQ+ issues got more attention this election, thanks to the GOP’s hate-fueled anti-LGBTQ+ (and especially anti-trans) campaigning.

[crazy-pages]

A) If this reporting is correct, Harris turned away from economic populism because her brother-in-law, Uber's chief legal officer with a $60,000,000 net worth, told her it was needed to win CEO support.

B) Biden's team things he would have won if he'd stayed in because he would have been more explicitly dismissive of trans people.

We need. To fucking eat. The Democratic establishment.

Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she does.” And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.

In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to hear their postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.

Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.

One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”

While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.

Another Bidenland critique takes Harris to task for failing to navigate the backlash against identity politics. Not that Harris ran a “woke” campaign. To the contrary, she bathed herself in patriotism. She presented herself as a prosecutor, a friend of law enforcement, and a proud gun owner. But she failed to respond to the ubiquitous ads the Trump campaign ran claiming that Harris supports sex-change operations for prisoners. She allowed Trump to create the impression that she favored the most radical version of transgender rights.

Biden, allies say, never would have let such attacks stand. He would have clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports. Of course, he never staked out that position in his presidency. But it’s true that Harris avoided the issue, rather than rebutting it, despite the millions of dollars poured into those attack ads. And in the end, those ads very likely implanted the notion that Harris wasn’t the cultural centrist she appeared to be.

A sour irony haunts Biden aides. In the coming months, Trump will use executive power and unified control of Washington to wreck many of the administration’s proudest accomplishments. But the ones he doesn’t wreck, he will claim as his own. Biden helped build the foundations for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments enabled by all three of those bills will take years to bear fruit, Biden never had the chance to reap the harvest. Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could bolster his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor.

[azazelsazaleas]

Worth taking a look at in the midst of the postmortem.

A few interesting takeaways:

- Latino men and white women voted majority Trump.

- Gen X was (roughly speaking) the generation that voted most Republican.

- Lower-middle economic classes ($30k-99k) voted for Trump more than the poor or the upper-middle and wealthy.

- By religion, Christians went overwhelmingly for Trump. Everyone else preferred Harris, with Jewish and non-religious people voting strongly blue.

- Parents and married couples were more likely to vote for Trump.

- Despite what some weirdos on Reddit have been saying, LGBT communities still voted overwhelmingly blue. There’ve been a number of people attempting to claim that a large number of gay, lesbian, and bi voters broke off and supported Trump due to concerns over trans issues; the numbers do not support this.

- Almost 2/3 of first-time voters picked Trump.

- The largest two main issues driving voters where the economy (32% of respondents listed, mainly Trump voters) and the state of Democracy (34% of respondents, mainly Harris voters).

- 82% of Trump supporters said that US support for Israel is not strong enough.

- The majority of Trump voters were voting primarily for their candidate. The majority of Harris voters were primarily voting against Trump.

[cosmicretreat]

Biden has cleared a lot of student debt, but the Supreme Court blocked his attempt to clear it all, and 🍊 is just going to reverse an executive order. I’m also seeing a lot of demands that Biden pardon non-violent drug offenders; more needs to be done, but does anyone else remember when he pardoned thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession last year? And frankly, no one is reporting on his brokering a ceasefire in Lebanon, which is a first step.

In all the election postmortem takes I’ve seen, a lot of people seem to think Democrats lack messaging. These are the same people who didn’t know what Harris’ policies were, despite them being repeated and online to look up. The Dems don’t lack messaging, they lack access to anything similar to the trillion dollar right wing propaganda machine. It’s not messaging that’s the problem, it’s the media’s (including social media) unwillingness to question maga lies and uninterested in reporting on any Democratic accomplishments.

You chucked a recovering economy in the toilet over nothing.

[redistrictgirl]

2024 House Forecast Postmortem

My final House of Representatives forecast projected a median outcome of Republicans holding the chamber with 219 seats. They won 220 seats last month.

There was your warning sign for a red wave, I suppose.

It's also a sign that my House model is actually pretty damn good compared to the other equally-insufferable data nerds. I got the House composition dead-on in 2022 and only one seat off in 2024. (For reference, David's Models missed by a combined fourteen seats and FiveThirtyEight a combined eleven across both elections.)

Those two elections were very different - one was a midterm, the other a presidential year; one had deceptive circumstances, the other had deceptive polling; one saw pundits overestimate Republicans, the other saw pundits overestimate Democrats. It speaks to some genuine versatility with an admittedly small-ish sample size.

Also worth noting that, except for Carl Allen giving Democrats a 62% shot, everyone's probabilities were grouped fairly close together this cycle. A 55-45 vs. 45-55 difference can be meaningful but is hard to use for proving accuracy when reduced to a single binary winner. It's kind of cool (in a Pyrrhic way) that I was the only one to have Republicans as the favorite, but it doesn't mean as much as correlation statistics or seat counts at this level.

And clearly, something different happened with my Presidential forecast - I had the ultimate loser ahead for the entire cycle and wound up missing four states out of fifty. So where did the difference lie? I believe it was in my polling averages. It appears that I did not overestimate Democrats' share of the generic ballot, while I did overestimate Harris' share of the popular vote. I'll get more into those details in my other postmortems, but I suspect generic ballot polls tend to avoid pushing too many true undecideds in a way that presidential polling just doesn't. It may, then, be worth expanding my use of this polling average in my other forecasts.

But there's a lot of good signs for my general methodology here.

My r-scores saw a MASSIVE leap from 2022 - 0.86 for polling, 0.88 for fundamentals, and 0.89 for a combined score. Fundamentals outpacing polling was quite surprising, but a few district-level polls whiffed HARD this year, and with the overall low amount of data, it could have very well made the difference. That's why you include both in your model.

I had the wrong candidate in the lead for nine races, which is actually a little high compared to other forecasters, but I think is more than reasonable enough given that my model gave the average favorite about a 5-in-6 chance of winning their competitive House district - in a normal year, we'd expect about 20 whiffs by that metric!

Adjusting for undecideds was the biggest change I made to all of my models this year, and it definitely helped in the House, bumping up my polling average's r-score by 0.03.

Overall, I'm very happy with how my House model performed. Aside from a few possible minor tweaks, I don't plan to mess with it - not only am I happy with current performance, I don't want to risk the model getting pummeled in a cycle because I overtuned it for prior elections.