Yeah. 2016 was traumatic AF. Let’s be careful out there!

The race is significantly tighter than in 2016, at least per the polling. Mostly, people are excited because its such a vast improvement from the Biden polls that had Trump winning in a landslide.

But folks on Lemmy don’t realize how hard-in-the-paint rightwing talk radio is currently going for Trump. The degree to which “Haitian migrants eating your dog!” and “Venezuelan terrorists have seized a condo in Colorado!” rhetoric has inundated the discourse can’t be overstated. People are taking this shit seriously and sincerely thanks to the breathless bombardment of migrant panic stories crashing over the news networks like a tsunami.

If I didn’t know better, I might suspect there’s a collaboration among arch-conservative megadonors and media organizations to saturate news networks with this fearmongering. I can’t think of any instance in which a news network spewing anti-immigrant sentiment to whip locals into a panicked frenzy has ever happened before, or what the consequences were, but I’m sure that’s not what is happening this time and even if it is everything will be fine.

Hillary wasn’t focused on the electoral college, she cared about beating Obama’s vote totals to “prove” she should have beat him.

She came up about 8M votes short from Obama’s big 2008 win. If she’d been aiming for that high bar, she missed it by miles.

Ironically, it was Biden who cleared it handily (with Trump coming in at historic-high second place) in 2020 thanks to mail-in voting boosting turnout nationally by nearly 20M votes. Of course, both parties immediately shut that shit down, lest Americans get used to the idea of convenient, accessible popular voting. The Trump/Biden Post Office under DeJoy has been dismantling the very idea of mail-in voting for the last four years.

I suspect 2024 turnout will be significantly lower across the board.

We need to get rid of all those people who haven’t understood American politics for decades

I totally disagree. We could use a lot of new blood, with people who aren’t resigned to the cynicism of the bi-annual election cycle. The folks who don’t simply submit to the psychic pressure of this heavily propagandized and chronically demoralized election waves are exactly the kinds of people who could break it.

Trump’s biggest triumph in 2016 was bringing out conservatives who had otherwise never voted. People who were too depressed by the duopoly to show up came out in droves during the GOP Primary to support their Big Wet Boy. That kept Ted Cruz out of the White House (which I’d argue would have been far worse for the country in the long run) in 2016.

Sander almost replicated the feat against Hillary that same year, but got kneecapped by a media that was hostile to the very idea of Socialism. But if you want any kind of progressive change in America in your lifetime, you need to see Democrats undergo the kind of change that the GOP has undergone, but from the left.

You need more people who aren’t consigned to voting Joe Biden mechanically every four years, even as he’s falling apart in front of your very eyes. You need more people who want to shake up the party establishment and vote out the rotten incumbents. You need people who actually believe what these candidates are saying, rather than accepting a basket of lies at face value and shrugging when the candidates fail to deliver.

But we can’t go into 2030 with a population of voters who just accept the status quo as the best they’ll ever do.

Do Americans even realise that in other countries that isn’t north korea or russia, the president or representative of the country isn’t treated like a popstar?