#i remember the 2000 election

[cirrus-grey]

[bisexualbaker]

This this this, thank you. I was unaware of the mysterious behind-the-scenes sabotage, and I wish I could be surprised by it, but I know about several of the other attempts by Republicans to suppress voters.

For a lot of us, it can be as easy as taking a quick trip over to one's polling place when you have a moment, even on a break from work; some states even offer paid time off for voting, and I'm lucky enough to live in one of them.

But other places, people are living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't afford to take time off to vote and don't know how to get a mail-in ballot. Or the lines are so ridiculously long that, even if they can get time off to vote, it's not enough time, and also it's against the law to give people standing in line bottles of water. Or their names have been "mysteriously" purged from the voter registration rolls since the last time they voted, without informing them, and there's no same-day registration. Etc etc.

A lot of places in the US make it obscenely difficult to vote. It's deliberately unfair.

So if you're in one of the places in the US where it's easy to vote, for the love of all you hold dear, do so. With enough of us voting, we might make it possible for more people to vote in the future, and that will count for something.

‘why should I expend so much of my precious time and energy casting my vote? why should I labour so long and so hard to participate in this election when the candidate opposing the literal fascist isn’t entirely perfect?’

as a non-american I am fascinated by this us voting system whereby apparently you must scale ice-capped mountains, descend through dark and secret tunnels pursued by monsters of the deep, sail raging river rapids, navigate haunted marshes and walls guarded by the undead, until at last you must scale the perilous steppes of Mount Doom to cast your ballot into the firey depths. I was under the impression you just take twenty minutes out of your fucking day to put an ‘x’ on a piece of card.

[averagemrfox]

Whyyyyyyyy did I decide to go to Florida on fucking Election Day I hate it here

[orualpsyche]

.

[vaspider]

Tonight, the night before Election Day 2024 in the US, I am thinking about my stepkid.

I am thinking about the phone call they made to us earlier this year, the one where they told us they'd gone to the hospital thinking they had appendicitis and found out, instead, that a zygote - a tiny splodge of cells - had taken up residence not in their uterus but in a fallopian tube. The one where our kid said they were waiting for their partner to arrive, hoped that said partner would get there before the docs took our kid back to terminate that pregnancy, & assured us that they'd be okay.

After all, our kid lives in a state with choice measures embedded in state law. That pea-sized blot of tissue doesn't have more right to their health than they do. Nobody is standing between them and their doctors. They made a decision, and that was that.

In this tiny tragedy, the kind that plays out dozens of times a day at minimum across the country, we only had to worry about the small risk of surgery complications. We didn't have to worry about Ken Paxton threatening to charge their doctors with felonies. We didn't have to think, "What if the hospital's legal team doesn't think an ectopic pregnancy - which is never ever viable and must be terminated before it kills our kid - is really that big of a deal?" We didn't have to worry that they live in a state where ob-gyns are fleeing, leaving few experts behind, as has happened in Idaho.

We didn't have to watch our kid vomit up black blood before dying the day after their baby shower the way Neveah's mom did. We didn't have to pray in a waiting room (while doctors took our kid apart until their heart stopped because the doctors waited too long out of fear of anti-choice laws) until a doctor came to tell us we'd have to bury them the way that Amber's mom did. We aren't having to pick up our lives after fully treatable miscarriage-related sepsis took them from us the way that Josseli's husband and daughter must.

I could go on for far, far too long.

Listen. If you are a single-issue non-voter and have already decided that "both parties are the same" or whatever other thing you've told yourself so you can sleep at night, smug and secure, then I can't reach you and I can't help you. But if you genuinely think that your votes don't matter, if you're just suffering from a bout of overwhelm or apathy, if you're too young to remember the 2000 election and can't see that Dobbs is a direct result of that election and every one that's followed, please, I am fucking begging you.

I didn't really talk about this when it happened. I mentioned something briefly, maybe. The posts I've started writing about it are still in my drafts. It was too fresh, too frightening. It's not any less frightening now, honestly - because if this week doesn't end with President Kamala Harris, we're headed for a national abortion ban, at the minimum - but it's not about how fucking frightened I was or how sad and bewildered I was to realize that my kid was going through this crisis in a nation more hostile to them than when I needed a D&C for an abortion at 21, in 1998.

It's about stopping this chapter of this fucking bullshit and at least finding some new fucking bullshit.

Vote, dammit.

Do the other work on Wednesday. Tomorrow, the work is to vote.

[fairuzfan]

Just for context I haven't been letting these people get to me these past few weeks cuz I didn't care but I heard a heard a doctor who went to Gaza (who has worked in multiple, multiple different warzones) talk about how what's happening in Gaza is probably comparably unseen in history (he made the comparison saying "we probably haven't seen something like this since genghis khan") based on population numbers and stats and what he experienced first hand. He said things like "this war is 30% more dangerous than being in Ukraine, this is the deadliest place to be a child in the world (600% deadlier than for ukrainian children), this is the hungriest population crisis since the 2000s" and told us stories of health care workers who were shot and bombed in Indonesian hospital writing their last words on OR whiteboards (something along the lines of "those who remain standing will tell our story and remember us"). Told us multiple stories of Palestinian health care workers taken and tortured by Israel and totally psychologically broken all before they turned 30. Told us multiple stories of dead health care workers from Gaza. He was not Palestinian btw. Wasnt even arab or muslim. So he had no stakes in the matter to tell us these things.

So seeing people argue about "not being given another option" and "being complacent" pissed me off so bad because I realize they don't understand the gravity of the situation. All of this arguing about elections and WHY people NEED to vote for Harris OR ELSE is a joke to me. Palestinians have lost everything. What are you doing here arguing? Go do something. Voting for my people's murderers is not doing something.

[qqueenofhades]

So I keep seeing people play the "Harris is a Cop, so I'm not voting for her because ACAB" card, and not even pointing out that she was a DA/Prosecutor rather than an actual cop seems to change their minds - as far as they're concerned, working with cops in any capacity makes you a cop. Do you happen to have anything that'd make for a good counterpoint to this argument (or, at the very least, something to make those of us who still plan on voting for her despite our dim views on Law Enforcement not feel so bad about it)?

....Not feel so bad about it?

First of all: these are laughably, incredibly unbelievably unserious people, and frankly, my first advice would be NOT to bother trying to engage with them at all, because there is nothing whatsoever they will ever accept in the way of logical proof to change their minds. First it was "you can't ask me to vote for Biden specifically because of [insert issue here.]" This changed a lot, from Roe getting overturned by the corrupt SCOTUS, to the train strike (hey anyone remember that?) to student loan forgiveness and then had settled firmly on Gaza. So now, lo and behold, they're given exactly what they asked for: a new younger candidate who is not Biden and explicitly more progressive on the Gaza issue (Harris was the first member of the administration to openly call for a ceasefire). So they turn their noses up, rush to their favorite 2020 disinformation founts that were first spouted when they were trying to sabotage her in favor of Bernie (who endorsed Biden pretty strongly before he dropped out), flirt with Jill "Actual Agent of Putin" Stein, and other equally expected and equally bullshit maneuvers. Lololololololol online leftists. Never change, or something.

That said: because their minds are so set that they will never vote for any Democrat ever, you can't really give them any logical information to separate them from this conclusion. I don't have the links on hand, but etc Google and Wikipedia are free: Harris's tenure as district attorney and California AG was progressive even by modern standards, and it was happening in the early 2000s: she refused to prosecute for low-level weed offenses, pushed for harder sentences for assault weapons, performed gay marriages LONG before it was legal even in San Freaking Francisco, refused to seek the death penalty, worked with restorative justice programs, etc. This was after she was a first-generation American child of brown immigrants who took advantage of equal-opportunity education programs to go to law school, and her parents were already high-achieving academics (one a cancer researcher from India and one an economics professor from Jamaica). Sure sure, she definitely seems exactly like Derek Chauvin to me. Critical thinking is great! #VoteJillStein! A literal puppet of Putin and unabashed Assad fangirl is definitely the pro-peace morally correct option here!*

In other words, the morons do not give a single shit about factual reflections of Kamala's record. They do not care about whether her time as a district attorney was progressive (it was) and whether she was actually a cop (she wasn't). They're so wedded at the hip to their braindead disinformation propaganda that now we're going to see the excuses change at lightspeed from why they can't vote for Biden specifically to why they can't vote for Harris specifically. None of it will be remotely tethered to reality and all of it will be in extreme and obvious bad faith. As I said, there are plenty of persuadable voters elsewhere who HAVE been energized by her elevation to candidacy. If you are indeed interested in winning voters to her side (as opposed to having to find reasons to justify yourself to the All Voting Is Evil crowd who will never listen to or believe you anyway), I suspect your time would be better spent elsewhere, and outside the echo-chamber leftist social media space in general.

Aside from that, I have gotten a few hand-wringy asks about Kamala and the election overall, and I gotta say, I am not going to waste my time and effort replying to them. We have about 100 days to win this election or become a fascist dictatorship. We are already in uncharted territory, but the replacement of Biden with Harris went UNIMAGINABLY smoothly, far, far more than anyone (including me) ever expected. It reminds me of the presto-chango that the French center, left, and center-left parties pulled off to replace candidates, IN FIVE DAYS, to better position themselves to defeat the fascists. Compared to that, three and a half months is a cakewalk, but we still absolutely do not, DO NOT, have time to sit around worrying and hand-wringing about this or that hypothetical Bad Thing. It deeply unsurprises me to hear that US Online Leftists are still throwing snits and pitching their toys out of the pram rather than getting on board, but the rest of us don't have any time to waste and need to apply our energy to where it will be best put to use. So yes.

*extreme, extreme sarcasm alert

[unforth]

I keep seeing posts comparing this to 2004 or other past election losses and how this feels the same or similar to those past times.

As another Old who voted in 2004 (and I missed voting in 2000 by a month and was furious about it) I really can't even put into words how vehemently I disagree.

In 2008, I remember very earnestly sitting down with some friends and saying that if somehow McCain beat Obama, I'd have to join the fucking revolution, because I couldn't believe that this country would elect a Republican AGAIN after the previous 8 years of bullshit. I look back now and think how incredibly naive I was, but I also look back now and think, damn, why aren't I 25 NOW? I can't join the revolution now, I'm 41 and I own a house and have two young children and one old parent depending on me.

Because honestly, truly, as someone who has been studying American history since I was 7, as a Civil War buff with expertise on the years before the Civil War, as someone who has at least some memories of every election since 1988... guys, this isn't the same as 2004. I was furious then. Swift Boat bullshit I swear to fucking dog. And I was and still am fairly convinced that the 2000 election was deliberately stolen. But also I still had every reason then to believe in the rule of law.

In 2004, I still believed term limits would be respected.

In 2004, I still believed a person who wasn't elected would demure gracefully to the winner.

In 2004, I still trusted the courts.

In 2004, I still believed that we'd made progress on bigotry.

I could go on, and to be clear, my point isn't "I thought these institutions were ~good~" in literally any objective sense. Y'all are cynical but my generation was raised by, surrounded by, Vietnam vets and trust me, there was no way to be a kid, seeing what the 70s did to this country, and not come out as cynical and furious as the best of um. (My grandfather was a World War 2 vet, as were his close friends. My father and both his brothers are Vietnam vets, tho my dad didn't go overseas.) But I did believe that even corrupt institutions, even broken racist systems, even fucking Republicans, would follow basic norms of democracy. They said they believed in the constitution and I believed them. I believed that, like Nixon, truly getting caught doing something insane would at least force a mea culpa and turn public opinion. I believed...

Well, I guess it doesn't matter.

Because I no longer believe any of that.

I have watched the guard rails disappear over my lifetime. I have watched the party who once spent 2 years pursuing a guy over a BJ in the oval office elect a convicted rapist. I have watched and at times I've participated and I've voted and I've organized and I've protested and I've read the news more days than not and I've lived and I've grown and I've learned.

I have been an adult, legally, for almost 24 years now.

Guys... there are no norms remaining on the far right. The guard rails are gone. The Fascists control the White House, the senate, the Supreme Court, and things aren't looking promising for the House.

The bus has no brakes anymore. They think they have a mandate - and I can't blame them, as horrifying as this mandate is, because if things had gone the other way and Harris had gotten these results I'd also think it was a mandate.

Please sit with what this means: Trump and the Republican party said, "hand us the reins and we'll make everyone you hate hurt," and more than half the people who bothered to vote said "sure buddy, here goes." We don't have a usurper this time. This is the country that the majority of Americans said they wanted. Whether they come to regret that or not, they saw open Fascism and went "oh yes, count me in." And it wasn't because of the electoral college this time. It was because this country is so bigoted and misogynistic that they'd rather have this than a woman of color in the office.

I'm sick of "well she didn't run a good campaign." (Lie.) I'm sick of, "well we didn't get a primary." (Who cares?) I'm *extremely* sick of "well, Palestine." (Yes! Democrats actions have made the suffering there so much worse! It fucking sucks! You know what's about to suck so much worse?)

15 million people who showed up for Joe Biden couldn't be fussed to place a vote for Kamala Harris. Whatever their reason for not voting, we all knew the outcome if she lost. And seeing open fascism didn't fire them up enough to make the effort, and that's fucking pathetic. The consequences of the worst happening mattered so little to them that they couldn't be fucking bothered to make the minimum effort to stop it, and now millions of people will suffer as a result.

Because here we are: the huge swathe of the country who wanted a strongman now have one.

Look, I don't know what happens next. But I do know, and remember keenly: after 2016, Trump did, or at least tried to do, most of the things he said he'd do. When he was stopped, it was often because of career government employees: judges, bureaucrats, etc. And this time, he's said he's going to purge those people. I don't know if he'll succeed, but I certainly believe he'll try.

This is not 2004 again.

This is 2024. The Republicans have ripped the mask to shreds, shredded apart the book of political norms, and empowered hate, and they've been handed a governmental mandate for stamped "have at with our blessing!" in exchange.

And now they'll use that mandate to make everyone they hate suffer: people of color, queer people, trans people, immigrants, non-Christians.

Don't assume the worst can't happen. I am a Jew, and I have a photo album full of black and white photos of dead people that constantly reminds me: the worst has happened and it can happen again.

Do not despair. Despair is enervating. Be furious. As we should be. These douche bags are repulsive. Be prepared to fight. Be prepared to flee. Be prepared to defend. Don't assume you simply can't do something. There's always something to do, and even the smallest act of defiance can help. There's never any knowing until after which acts of resistance will end up galvanizing the good and just out of their apathy. But that apathy is the enemy.

Because none of this is normal. None of this is "just like when..." Please stop saying it is.

And before anyone screams "privilege" at me, yes, I am in many ways. I'm white. I have access to some generational money even tho my own family lives paycheck to paycheck - we won't be rich but have enough of a support network to be comfortable. I live in a blue area of a blue state. But I'm also a woman (legally speaking, at least) married to another woman - since before Oberkfell, and yes I remember exactly what steps we had planned any time we wanted to leave our state. My wife has physical disabilities. We have two children. Both are biracial (half black). One is trans. We are caring for an elderly parent. I am Jewish and as my kids' birth parent, so are they. I own a publishing company that publishes the exact kinds of queer and kinky lit these people intend to ban. We tick so many boxes of what these people hate.

I know ya'll are scared. Trust me, I'm terrified. But fear is paralyzing. And that won't help. Whatever happens, don't lie down and take this shit.

When Gore lost I was one month shy of my 18th birthday and already in college. I have been fighting my entire adult life, and I'm exhausted. I'm much less able to fight now, much more tied down with responsibilities. But the fight isn't over. I'm checking our passports. I'm packing a go bag. I've convinced one vulnerable friend to move here and I have another who wants to and we're figuring out how to make that happen. I'm protecting who I can, starting with putting on my mask first. I don't know what will happen but if in the end all I can do is uproot my entire life to protect my children then I am preparing to do so. I can at least save them if no one else.

None of this is normal.

And I'm not sure, after Trump's in office, that anything will ever be normal again in the US. At least not the old normal. And there are ways that's a good thing, so many ways that the old normal sucked for so many people, and I'm optimistic that there's a bright future ahead, but man it looks far away right now. I don't want to go back to the old normal, and I want to be part of establishing a kinder, more just, more equal new normal, but we're a long way from there.

Whatever happens, we must endure. We must survive. We must support each other. We must find our allies and be prepared to compromise with them. Don't try to save everyone. You'll fail. Help even one person and you can change the world. Everyone things they can't do everything and so do nothing. That's insane. Do a single thing and it will be better than nothing. One phone call. One letter. One act of defiance. Very few people get the opportunity to grand gestures that matter, and the rest of us will die waiting for that moment. But the secret is that what makes those moments - the time when one person is in the right place at the right time for their action to matter - is built on millions of small moments by millions of people doing what little they can to make things slightly better. Think of every iconic photograph of a Sole Resistor you know of and think about every single tiny thing that had to happen for that moment to occur. Most of us will never me that one person, but that one person is a myth anyway. Countless tiny unseen moments create those myths. Doing literally anything is better than doing nothing.

And tooth and nail, quietly and loudly, in our homes and our towns and cities, during protests or when they come for our neighbors, we must fight.

[foone]

* foone@91verse has logged onto Dimensional Nexus chat.

<foone@91verse> hey has anyone noticed their visitor counts going super high? I've got like 2000 visitors at the moment

<s.rah@bssr-forever> what year is your world up to?

<foone@91verse> ce2024

<s.rah@bssr-forever> oh my sweet summer child

<karim@toothpaste> first time doing the ce2024 election huh?

<foone@91verse> uh, yeah? Why?

<s.rah@bssr-forever> theyre photojournalists. someone has to document this

<karim@toothpaste> yeah. hang on tight, keep an eye on your 6, and stay out of boston just in case

<foone@91verse> what

<foone@91verse> what happens in Boston?

<chao@tornado> spoilers :p

<dietrich@hasselblad> I remember back when I started we used to use 2024 as a sort of training/hazing ritual. Eventually we had to stop, HR said it was too much like the latter. Especially if we left them in NC, near the tower.

<foone@91verse> hey wait I'm in north carolina right now, what tower?

<karim@toothpaste> yeah you should evac to somewhere safer before it goes down. like, november 2 at the latest. basically anywhere but boston and that one town in wisconsin, I forget the name

<s.rah@bssr-forever> fond du lac. ive helped with the cleanup before. ghastly mess

<foone@91verse> is it worse or better than boston 1919?

<karim@toothpaste> worse

<s.rah@bssr-forever> easily worse. youll never get it out of your clothes, i had to just burn them and assemble some new ones

<foone@91verse> I'll have to remember not to wear my sunday best.

[mornington-the-crescent]

I am old enough to remember the 2000 election, when the idea that you could wake up the day after the election and not know who the president was, was considered strange and unprecedented.

[kanagenwrites]

So. Tuesday sucked.

We've all had a chance to come down from the "what the fuck" of it all, and we're starting to see the usual circular firing squad. Lots of lib centrists are doing everything they can to throw trans people, minorities, and basically anyone who isn't a finance bro under the bus, as is (very tiresome) tradition after both victories and defeats in the Democratic Party. I will be 42 years old in a few months, so this is far from the first time I've seen it, and sadly, I'm sure it won't be the last. To the lib centrists and those carrying water for them: This never works. Please stop trying it. Trans issues were not a major motivator; I'll get into that below. Sit down, kids, it's time for Auntie Kana's Fireside Dialectics.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of my followers are significantly younger than me. (Imagine that, an audience that skews young on Tumblr.) A lot of you folks probably haven't been following politics for very long, and you've been able to participate in them for even less time than that. For some of you this is probably your first election as an adult, and it kinda feels like everything blew up in your face, doesn't it? I was about your age for 2000, when the election was nakedly stolen by George W. Bush, and not much older for 2004, when despite his disastrous presidency Bush the Younger rode a wave of 9/11-brained racism to the last popular vote victory the GOP had prior to (likely) this year. So I get it. I really do.

If you're living in the USA you have probably had a subpar education in politics and civics. This is largely by design - education is horrendously underfunded and there is a sustained attack on the ability of teachers to even discuss things like the Civil Rights Movement, the legacy of slavery in the United States, the genocide this country was founded on, and so on and so forth. Economic education isn't much better; you very likely got a short lecture on basic supply and demand and an argument-from-authority that "socialism doesn't work." All this combines to leave a lot of folks totally baffled as to how something like this election happens.

But it's pretty simple. It's just material conditions. That's it. What the media isn't telling you (because there's no profit in it, and the media is nothing but a clickbait engine when they aren't open propagandists) is that there has been a massive anti-incumbent wave of elections across the world. How massive? Japan's LDP, which has held power almost uninterrupted since the establishment of Japan's postwar democracy, managed to lose their recent election.

And why are material conditions so shitty? That's a complicated question, but a lot of it is the fact that we had a lengthy period of low inflation followed by a period of extremely high inflation due to the absolutely botched response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A bag of Doritos used to be 2.50, and now it's like 6 bucks. That's worse than all the inflation (and naked price-gouging, because there's a lot of that going on too) I experienced in my life prior to 2020, squeezed into the space of a year or two. This smacks everyone in the face every time they buy groceries, and while the government and the Federal Reserve were doing everything they could to manage inflation (and understand what a big deal it is for me, the anarcho-communist, to say that the US actually did an extremely fucking good job of doing it, because every other country on Earth had it worse than we did), they did fuck all to actually improve the material conditions people were experiencing. Wages were not keeping up with the cost of living, and price-gouging wasn't being dealt with.

Remember the 600 bucks Joe Biden still owes you? The American electorate sure the fuck does. Invisible backrooms liberal wonkery does not connect, regardless of whether it works or not, but going back on a promise? People remember that shit.

It's a rare incumbent that could win in an environment like this, especially when tied to a track record of doing exactly fucking nothing to actually help people from the perspective of the vast majority of the population. Kamala Harris was not that incumbent. She was a singularly uninspiring candidate who failed to connect with voters so thoroughly that she was on track to lose her home state in the 2020 Democratic primary. Nobody liked her (except a few very eager and very loud fans in the K-Hive), and speaking as someone who lives in California, I am not surprised she ate shit. She was a terrible choice for VP and a terrible choice of successor for Biden, but because Biden('s handlers) insisted on pretending he wasn't obviously declining before our very eyes, Harris, a singularly uninspiring candidate, had three months to build and run a campaign.

And it was still weirdly close.

Now, there's two possibilities: Either she actually ran an amazing campaign and it's incredible that it was even this close, or Trump is just so loathsome that even in a massively anti-incumbent environment he didn't bring anyone new to the table. Given that Trump is on-track to receive less votes this time than he did in 2020, and how many of those votes seem to have been cast for Trump and no one else down-ballot, I think it's more of the latter than the former. Trump brought the usual suspects, while Kamala successfully drove away voters that even Joe fucking Biden and Hillary fucking Clinton were able to bring home. Not on the left, not in minority demographics, but across the board. After all, if things are horrible and you're being promised that "nothing will fundamentally change," (literally an early-presidency quote from Joe Biden, whose agenda Kamala Harris 100% aligned herself with) and keeping in mind that the average American voter is not nearly so plugged into the minutiae and the day to day of politics (as evinced by the sudden peak in google searched for "Did Joe Biden drop out?" on Tuesday), why the fuck would you bother to vote?

Hopefully you have a better idea how we got here now. The question, of course, is where do we go from here? I will probably continue posting about this from time to time, especially if there's interest, but my advice is this:

We are still here. We will be here tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and so on. Plan accordingly.

Things will get fucked up. Things will always get fucked up. That is the nature of things no matter who is running the government. Plan accordingly.

Organize. Develop parallel structures of power and assistance, because the government is likely going to be even more useless to directly assist you than it already was. Our greatest strength is each other, and our ability to care for and help one another.

I have been here before. You will be here again. It always feels like it's the worst thing ever to happen. That never really goes away, but your ability to deal with it, to plan around it, to endure it, and to rise up again on the other side of it and say "No, fuck you" is entirely under your control and within your capabilities. And you will get better at it as you do it. And you are not doing it alone. None of us are.

Do not give up. Do not surrender. This isn't the end, or the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning: it just is.

Now go watch a video of a cat doing something cute, or read some smut, or whatever gives you joy. You can't take care of others unless you take care of yourself. That's General Order #1: Take care of yourself.

Solidarity, y'all.

[eugenedebs1920]

I was going through my pictures from 2020, I’m a little embarrassed to say that there’s probably more memes, posts, articles, and pictures taken of whatever I was trying to make a point of on the tv, than there is actual pictures.

This is a Tweet (remember those!? I don’t know what they’re called now. Hates?) from Robert Reich ( no sh*t Eugene!? Get to the point!)on the morning of Election Day 2020. It’s the same plan then, as it is now.

Donald Trump has no respect for America, it’s institutions that have endured 248 years, our systems of government or democracy in general.

This will be Americas 60th presidential election. You know how many of those were accused by one side or the other of being “rigged”? Three!!! Before a single vote had been cast in 2016, the election was said to be “rigged”. The 2020 election there was accusations of fraud and a stolen election that were prominent. The other election that had claims of being “rigged” is this one, the 2024 election. What is the common variable in all three of these elections? 🤔

I can already see the comments now, ‘People said that Hilary won’, and ‘Democrats said the 2000 election was stolen’, and to an extent they’re not wrong, but they’re not right either (well they’re right wing but, you know). The Florida recount in 2000 was a bit interesting how that conclusion came, to be to say the least, but, Gore went on television and conceded (I would recommend looking up Gores 2000 concession speech on YouTube, THATS what class looks like. THATS what politics used to be before reality tv people became involved.). In an utter display of class he told the American people that the Supreme Court had ruled, and that it was time, for the sake of Americans good, to move forward. He went to the inauguration of George W Bush. The 2016 election, I think everyone was in shock that Hilary was defeated in the electoral college by a failed businessman and two bit reality tv personality. Hilary won the popular vote by over 3.5 million votes but that doesn’t count (no pun intended) for whatever reason. (I know the reason, but it’s too much to go in to at this moment) Yet Hilary conceded when the counting was finished, and had the grace to show up at the inauguration of Trump, which I sure was utterly painful.

We all know how the 2020 election went. Trump and his allies doing everything they could to stop the vote before all the ballots were counted. That’s not how it works. That’s like a sports team getting a lead in the game and saying, ‘we won! Games over!” It’s not how real life works. You “play” till the end.

Trump is going to do the same thing this time. Because Democrats work (😉) Trump will be up in many states throughout the day and early evening. As the night goes on, Kamala’s numbers will continue to rise until her eventual victory, which will take several days to count and officially be over.

I want to say this now, to liberals, Republicans and especially MAGA. THE ELECTION ISNT DONE UNTIL ALL THE VOTES HAVE BEEN COUNTED. THATS HOW IT WORKS, WE ALL HAVE A VOTE AND IT IS ENTITLED TO BE COUNTED. DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD, MIDNIGHT IS NOT WHEN ELECTION DAY IS OVER, IT IS OVER WHEN EVERY SINGLE VOTE HAS BEEN TALLIED AND IS COUNTED FOR ITS RESPECTIVE SIDE.

This is going to be an ongoing issue until, somewhere between the 7th and the 10th. This is perfectly normal. This has happened in almost every modern election. It’s Trump and his narcissism, Republicans grasping on to relevancy, and powers that wish to benefit themselves, not the nation that will be pushing the narrative that it’s “illegal” or the “election is being stolen behind closed doors”. In all actuality it’s professionals, doing their job, to ensure every Americans voice is heard.

Trump is going to lie and lie and lie some more. He will throw wild accusations out there, he already is, he will tout crazy conspiracy theories, he already is, he will whine and b*tch and complain, he already is. Don’t listen.

For 57 presidential elections, our system has been the envy of the world. The most accurate and fair system developed. It’s only 3 that have EVER has accusations of fraud, or being rigged or stolen. The common denominator in those 3 elections is Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a traitor, a selfish human being, and a terrible person. He does not deserve to be anywhere near the White House. Let’s keep it that way and vote for a real leader, Kamala Harris.

[batboyblog]

hey thanks for not being super doomer over these anti-trans bills. i kept on seeing so many people being defeated over them and it messed up my mental health for a while, like nothing could be done. but you did bring up some good points and shed some light onto people who are actively fighting for us so i thank you again

The queer movement, in the US any ways, has always been cyclical, we make big gains and push forward, then there's a super scary backlash. We're right now at the hight of a really scary backlash thats focused on trans people in particular but is anti-queer more generally. It's intense but its important to remember these backlashes don't generally last very long, they are scary, but each time they've happened, the mid to late 1970s, the 1980s, the early 2000s, the tide has gone out and gay rights, LGBT rights, and society's acceptance of LGBT people has been farther along than before they have never ever managed to turn us back in the years since Stonewall.

And as intense and scary as this is in some ways it's better than last time, when I was a gay teenager. in those days... in 2004 and 2008 the Democrats running for President were uniformly against gay marriage (the big issue of that time) they were trying to get us to settle for the not marriage alternative of civil unions. Only a handful of Congresspeople (some of them gay themselves) in DEEP! blue districts dared to support gay marriage outright. Today the Democratic Party is the most pro-LGBT major political party in the world, you had the President and every Democrat of any note making statements for TDOV a few days ago and you're not seeing even red state Democrats back down and agree to be "a little transphobic" for votes. It felt a lot more lonely last time when it was us and a handful of allies fighting the backlash with most of the Democratic Party on the side lines handwringing and saying "well can't you wait?"

any ways this movement is and will always be a struggle, the rights we've won, the acceptance we've received has never just been given, it's been won, through hard work. Everyone has to dedicate themselves to work in their corner of the earth to the best of their abilities and to push themselves past what they think they can do. That means hooking up with LGBT rights groups on the ground to protest, to rally, to try to support and comfort those queer people who are down and out in whatever way right now, it means digging deep and having hard and awkward conversations with the people in your life, if you're gay or trans or whatever and you got that one aunt/uncle/cousin/whoever in your life that loves you to bits but you know still votes Republican and you just don't bring it up because you don't want to hurt the relationship... have the talk keep having the talk as many times as you need to. Tell your grandparents if they don't know, tell your parents (if its safe or if you don't need their money any more) tell co-workers who don't know etc, they vote for us 2 to 1 if they know they know one of us. Finally register to vote, make sure all your friends particularly if you're young are registered and vote, vote in every election. Trust me it's AMAZINGLY easy to find the email of candidates for school board or city council and it's amazingly easy to ask questions. Last election I emailed every school board candidate about Holocaust education, and the state rep candidate about trans rights, she wrote me back a lovely note and mailed be a sticker she'd picked up from a trans rights group. It's amazingly easy to get involved, I volunteered with my local democrats for one election and they offered me the #3 spot in their local party, I have the phone numbers of my state rep and state senator without trying really, you can get in the room with these people, with candidates for governor, congress, I have my picture with 3 US Presidents? its not hard to do, and you can use chances like that to talk to them and show them your humanity and leave an impression that really matters in the long run.

sorry to RAMBLE but it's important that everyone do their part, pick a little something, a project to push this thing forward, people doom scrolling, particularly posting about how its hopeless does not help, posting in general doesn't help much even if its not doomerism, I think in the years after the anti-gay marriage Bush backlash we got very online and we got very "progress just happens" and a lot of people fell out of the habit or came of age without the habit of protest and without a local queer community or local progressive community and its very important in the face of this to find or build those and also understand in some places its gonna be years of work to get where we want to go, but we will and it'll be worth all the work.

[porcupine-girl]

Dear Principled Third-Party or Non-Voter,

This is one last-ditch effort to reach out to you. I understand that you want the Democrats to move left, and you think that voting third party will do that. I fully understand this because I felt the same way in 2000!

I voted for Ralph Nader because even though Al Gore did a whole documentary about climate change, I thought the Democrats overall didn’t care about the environment enough. Plus he wanted exoneration for drug-related non-violent crimes and all sorts of other things that I thought the Democrats should be pushing for. I didn’t really think Nader could win, and didn’t even particularly think he should win-I wanted to send a message. To tell the Democrats “hey, I may only be 21, but I’m onto you and I think your platform should be more like this guy’s.”

So. What happened? Bush got elected. And here’s the real point:

Did losing due to people voting for Nader push the Democrats left?

Well, if it had, you’d probably be planning to vote for them this year.

Now, maybe, maybe there was a chance that it could have done that. But then 9/11 happened less than a year into Bush’s term, and suddenly they’re dealing with terrorists and war, and an American public that veered to the right* - they did not have the time, energy, or resources to think about the far left, plus it was no longer advantageous in an election.

“But that was 9/11!” you cry. “That was a major historical event that hasn’t been repeated! We won’t have another 9/11!”

Well, maybe not (and the pandemic, while a major historical event, had entirely different effects). But the thing is, if Trump wins, it’s basically 24/7 9/11 mode for the next four years.

Do you actually remember the Trump years?

Democrats were NOT busy moving left. No, they were busy constantly scrambling to mitigate the worst of him.

Talking John McCain (who, remember, IS DEAD NOW and cannot repeat this act) into voting with them so the ACA didn’t get repealed. Trying to get the impeachment for intimidating and blackmailing our ally to stick. Filibustering (unsuccessfully) the appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, to try and prevent him from doing all the shit he did.

THAT is what you will get if Trump wins, only with event more crazy MAGA sycophants in Congress than last time. Democrats won’t be going “oh gosh, we could’ve picked up 1% of 18-35-year-olds if we’d taken a stand on Palestine,” they’ll be too busy going OH FUCK HOW DO WE KEEP TRUMP FROM TALKING NETANYAHU INTO LITERALLY NUKING GAZA????

So please please please, on behalf of all the Nader voters whose third-party votes did absolutely fuck-all to move a party that was trying to deal with Bush, don’t repeat our mistake.

If for no other reason than the fact that if Trump does win, there is absolutely no way you will get what you want. While if Harris wins, it will be much easier to push the Dems left - Biden has been pushed left on several issues!

* Fun fact from a psychology professor [me]: When people are scared they tend to agree with more conservative points of view than when they’re not scared! This is one reason things like terrorist attacks and wars tend to gain votes for conservatives.

[elbiotipo]

Also, this has already happened, several times. The US supreme court awarded the presidency to George Bush in 2000 (and we all know what happened after), even though Al Gore had a lead on the popular vote, small lead but lead nonetheless, the (unelected) court said the whole state of Florida would go to Bush and that's that. Worth noting, like always, that the electoral college awards entire states to a single candidate, so even if those states had people voting for others (as it happens everywhere) they are completely unrepresented.

Same, and worse, happened in 2016, Hillary had 48% to Trump's 46%. In ANY other democractic election, a 2% lead is a clear win. But because of the electoral college, Trump won nonetheless, and there was also a bunch of bullshit where some representatives of the electoral college didn't even vote for the candidates they were supposed to vote for. Again, in any other democracy around the world, this would have been a scandalous rigging.

Even in 2020 I remember that people were still thinking Trump could win, even as Biden led a 4% lead in the popular vote, just because of some electoral college shit. If you dive in US history you can find many other such cases.

This isn't even news to anyone who follows US, or indeed, world politics, but I still point it out because even for the standards of liberal democracies, the US is incredibly undemocratic and anachronistic. Not to mention the institutionalization of two parties (a two-party state, we could say) and the suppression of third parties, there are very, very few countries that claim to be a multi-party democracy and only have two parties. From an outsider persepective from a flawed but relatively working democracy, watching US elections is something bizarre.

[goatsandgangsters]

a very specific memory I have after the 2000 US presidential election is that

so, I had just turned 7 years old. and my parents hated Bush and voted for Gore. and so Gore losing the election was confusing to me, because I was 7, and my earnest question was “but if Gore is the right choice (which I know because my parents like him) then why did people vote for Bush? why didn't they vote for the better one?”

now, cartoon network had done a whole thing where you could vote for your favorite powerpuff girl, and bubbles won. but my favorite powerpuff girl was blossom

so, fortunately for my mom, she had this to fall back on instead of having to explain differing political opinions, the electoral college, and everything else Going On with that election

and she said to me: “You know how Blossom is the smartest powerpuff girl and she's a good leader, but people still voted for Bubbles because she's silly and cute? Well. Sometimes that happens.”

and I will always remember this as one of my earliest political memories. having president george w. bush explained to me by comparing him to bubbles powerpuffgirl