We (the public) also don’t definitively know that the Russians didn’t manipulate, say, voter rolls, leading to some voters not being able to cast votes. We DO know they were in voter roll systems across many states and could have done this while in there. We DO know there were many heavily redacted portions of the key intelligence reports that looked into these issues. I tend to assume that redactions in such reports probably do not cover up things of a banal nature, but hey, that’s me…
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That is the nub of it. There’s no question a lot of these people are only saying they believe the election was rigged, because they don’t want to encourage headlines like “95% of Republicans say Turmp is full of shit”.
But “belief” is more complicated than we like to admit. Saying something can make you believe it, and if your team [says it] believes something, you tend to accept that without asking whether you believe it yourself.
Pollsters know that. This is meant to bait Republicans into doing their little treasonous tantrums, which are such great clickbait. I don’t know what Republicans would believe if they were left alone, but I know that if you’re determined to jam a microphone in their face until they say something Turmpy and outrageous, then that’s what you’ll eventually get.
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Either we prosecute the crimes of the last four years or we’re condoning them and inviting more to follow.
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So the person who voted for Obama in 2008/2012, and then DJT in 2016/2020 is lost forever? What superpower did Obama have when he got their vote in the first place?
Sure, to us, dyed-in-wool liberals, that second DJT vote seems problematic (“How can you give him a second term? Look what he’s done!”). But it’s paradoxically less difficult to vote for him the second time than the first: you’re voting for the incumbent; you’re voting for the status quo out of fear, ignorant of just how terrible the status quo is. You’re already ensnared in the fallacy of consistency/commitment: to reverse course means you made a mistake the first time; to reverse course questions your own integrity/identity.
In 2024, it will be different because the GOP candidate will be Trumpist, but won’t be Trump himself (we pray), so that uneducated swing voter will have less resistance to voting Democratic. Kamala Harris will have to motivate them in the same visceral way Obama did. It’s possible because we know it’s already been done.
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I continue to believe that most of them actually do know that they are full of shit. I don’t think misaligned cognitive models explains this phenomenon. People who are whipped into this frenzy and get onboard the cult thinking do it for one main reason – it makes them feel GOOD. It gives them an endorphin hit, or something. It’s like an addiction, which creates (and is at its core) a feedback loop. IMHO.
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But will he appoint an AG who is actually interested in carrying out investigations of criminal activity by the previous administration, or will he appoint someone who’s as smitten with “unity” as he is?
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So this. The cultists, at this point, say the things they feel will drive the “libtards” most crazy – it has nothing to do with “rational beliefs” as us, er, libtards would envision. It’s oriented around causing pain.
This is nastiness for the sake of being maximally nasty. It’s what it is. It’s no good, but it’s not any more than that, either. Alas, it’s the totality of what one of the two parties in the United States stands for. One of my biggest pet peeves by FAR is contrarianism – and great, now half of us are in a cult of contrarianism. Pretty effin’ annoying!
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Do they actually, really believe that? Or is it just a mix of sour grapes that they did not win this time, and temper tantrums about how dare other people not let us have our way all the time? Plus a healthy dose of projection and not being willing to play by the rules the rest of us have to play by?
I don’t think we need to imagine Russian meddling, where we have documented Republican gleefully doing this.
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Obviously not, but they’re still write-offs. The kind of voter who isn’t bright enough to distinguish between the qualitative differences of those two candidates is not one the Dems should waste their time and resources trying to bring on-side. In 2024, as always, they’re going to vote according to their own moronic criteria.
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Honestly, I see the GOP (at the leadership level, and dribbling like loose stools downward) as largely a Russian intelligence puppet operation at this point.
This Neoliberal “time for unity” shit is why I was really hoping for someone besides Biden, even though I voted for him and am very glad he won. This is has been the Democratic Party’s strategy for my entire lifetime- play nice, compromise with the Republicans and let themselves be pushed more and more to the right while they’re in power, roll over and play dead when the Republicans are in power and let them wreak unimaginable damage. The Republican party needs to be utterly crushed into dust and swept into the bin of history or they will destroy everything and everyone we care about. The time for treating them as though they have any genuine interest in American values or a better future is long past. Having four years without Trump is great, but I’d rather have some actual fucking progress and justice.
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It’s not a cognitive decision for many/most of these people. It’s an emotional decision. They choose Donald Trump because of how he makes them feel. And they like it. Lizard brain, not cortex/neocortex.
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Focusing on how to win the votes of people who went from Obama to Trump or who voted for Trump because Bernie Sanders didn’t get the nomination is kind of like trying to win the support of a magic 8-ball. Except half the 8-ball’s responses are also racist now.
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In other words, we should not attribute to stupidity what has clearly been malice all along.
MAGA’s simply enjoy seeing other people get hurt (especially those that they perceive as different from them) and will gleefully cheer on any leader who promises to give them the blood they crave.
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You are describing a group that also believes in a god and they drink his earthly son’s blood and eat his flesh. They are programmed to ignore truth in the pursuit of their needs and transgressions are written off with a wave of the hand.
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In a sense, yes, but still, I think it needs to be understood from the perspective that this is mostly about how being in the cult makes THEM feel. I would submit that many of these people aren’t (edit: I had a typo and said are, I meant are NOT!) exceptionally empathic, outside of maybe their direct friend and family networks. I don’t think they are the type of people who often feel empathy for wholly other groups of people who do not resemble themselves, for instance. So while it is about malice, it’s mostly to reinforce that they are in the “in group” and there is an “out group” and the people who are in it, used to be the ones in the “in group,” so all is now well with the world, because they feel “in.” It’s about them them them – not really so much about anyone else, we are mostly collateral damage. Again, I will relate this to other unhealthy feedback-oriented behavioral problems – being a heroin addict might really hurt your family, and you know it is, and at the end of the day, yourself, but you know what – you may very well just keep using, because you like how it makes you feel, and you are stuck in the feedback loop.
This is not out of nowhere, remember. Ever since Reagan turned “liberal” into a dirty word and weaponized the phrase to create an “elite out group,” this has been going on. Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, now Trump and QAnon. These poor saps have been getting a constant stream of literal mind control cult bullshit for DECADES. We’re not going to fix the problem by targeting them and trying to convert/unify IMHO – we simply have to take out the leaders (send them to prison) who are part of the corrupt, likely illegal-in-many-ways scheme.
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Well, I’m not an atheist in any traditional sense, and I think Jesus was pretty cool and misunderstood by most of the people who have claimed to follow his creed (I see him very much as a nondualistic yogi, as do many nondualistic yogis).
But I’m certainly not a Bible literalist. Nor were many Christians throughout many eras, mind you – this is a relatively recent phenomenon, and many Christians don’t read the Bible this way today, they just tend to be a lot quieter, go figure. But my main question is – why do so few of these people ask themselves, what belief system was Jesus’, and shouldn’t I make that my religion? Jesus obviously wasn’t a Christian…
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beyond not conceding, trump is out there saying he won the election. so yeah, there is a big difference between saying that there was voter suppression ( with evidence ) and that trump is not “my” president versus biden isn’t “the” president and that there was voter fraud ( without evidence )
nobody was trying to overturn trump’s 2016 win afterwards. instead people have been talking about things like abolishing the electoral college, allowing people who have served their time to vote, the southern states needing a return to federal election oversight, and being able to properly audit votes
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I realize that there’s probably not any better way to report on things like this, but I think the problem is deeper. Most people don’t actually have anywhere near a strong enough model of the world in their head to connect the political things they hear to what they actually would mean in terms of object-level reality. It’s not necessarily a problem of intelligence or education (though those are huge factors); a habit of not thinking things through is enough. For someone like that, saying something obviously untrue isn’t a mistake and isn’t a lie: their words literally have no truth value, they’re pure symbols symbolizing other symbols, demonstrating group affiliations and changing with the prevailing wind.
In other words, this poll doesn’t study what people believe, it studies what people say they believe, when asked by another human. They may even believe they believe it, but they don’t really act like they do. If they did, if that many Americans believed our elections were that corrupt as a factual matter, we would have a civil war starting. I find it much more plausible that for most people, politics is far enough from daily life that they think of it as a separate magisterium of symbols of group identification and nothing more.
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