When Puff Daddy was doing his whole “Vote or Die” campaign he was clearly ahead of his time.
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Similarly, I’ll admit I did a bit of a doubletake in '04 when Cameron Diaz said “If you don’t want to be raped, vote.” It absolutely always had meaning, but came off a bit non sequitur when she just tossed it out there without any context. But now? I mean, we’ve crossed the “killing black people in the street is your duty to the president” and campus reporting of rape has been attacked and dismantled. I just can’t imagine the stress of being in any vulnerable demographic right now.
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1 in 5 is worse than Russian Roulette odds O_O.
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Not to mention that the president himself is a credibly accused serial rapist and self-admitted abuse enthusiast.
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Yes, as others have put it, Trump isn’t running against Biden, Trump is running against the election.
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That’s kind of why I feel better. It will be contested. There is no doubt about that, IMO. If people take it upon themselves to be aware and informed, call their congressional reps, prepare to protest, etc we may have a chance. If everyone keeps assuming everything is fine until after the shenanigans have already gone down we are well and truly fucked.
It happened in 2000.
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I’ll be voting. And watching very closely at the results. I have high hopes that our democracy rights itself, and I’m prepared to bail water to keep us afloat. Because there are literally a million other things I’d rather do than fight a civil war over a coup.
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This is exactly the analogy I used here back in 2016 when Silver was giving similar odds, and I was told to calm down, that Hillary had it in the bag. I hate saying I told you so.
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Even Silver was cautioning against reading too much in to Hilary’s win probability. He was telling us that probability is just that and only that right up to the day of the election. And he was about the only one.
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Not buying the “dwindling chances” until the election is over and done with and Biden is declared the winner. Until then, assume you can’t depend on your fellow citizens for anything. Don’t just vote- donate, volunteer, pressure everyone you know, do everything you can to get the bipedal sea cucumbers who “don’t care about politics” to get their asses to the polls at least this one time.
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Another possible scenario: Trump concedes, in exchange for pardon/immunity for any troubles he could get in, whether tax related or not.
All that noise, including the call to the Proud Boys to get ready, might be a giant distraction device intended to hide his real motives from the beginning, which essentially consisted in using his POTUS superpowers to cover his big orange ass.
Never forget that George W. Bush was re-elected (with a larger margin!) after a disastrous first term. Seems like the milquetoast while male centrist was unable to energize the base in that election and ended up losing.
One of the most dangerous things I’ve seen is people saying that politics has become such a mess with both sides being terrible that they plan to sit out. This is absolutely the Trump campaigns primary tactic this year, to make people so disgusted that they sit out. This is also why he takes every opportunity to pander to the base and goes to great lengths to avoid angering them, even so far as to not take a stand against nationalist white supremacy. Keep the base energized and everyone else demoralized. It worked gangbusters in 2016 and he’s hoping for a repeat performance in 2020.
Trump’s primary weakness this year is that he ran hard on his “outsider” status in 2016, but having been in total control of the government for 2 years and mostly in control for the other 2 it’s pretty hard to make an “outsider” label stick.
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Overwhelming number of postal workers, who recognize that their pensions will be “privatized” (read: transferred to the 1%) if the plan works:
“oops, I think I made a mistake. Again. Oh well. Guess I’m just another incompetent public servant. Oops. Again. Oops.”
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As encapsulated in the “Make America Great Again!” slogan and the fact that he’s trying to pin a whole slate of current events on a guy who wasn’t holding office when they happened.
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It worked in 2000. No difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush?? What where we smoking?
But we keep falling for it. Perfection is maliciousness’s best friend.
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FAY CANOES!!!
FUCKEN’ OOZE!!!
(something, something)
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note–my italics.
from 02-04 the recovery from the march 01 recession had had really gotten in swing with two years of better than average gdp growth. the worst failures of the george w bush presidency mostly happened in the second term, especially since he and the republicans managed to turn the worst disaster in his first term into a net positive for them (9/11).
that is not true. that isn’t pretend true.
in 1996 clinton won with 47,402,357 votes, in 2000 gore “lost” with 50,999,897 votes, and then in 04 kerry lost with 59,028,109 votes. kerry got more votes than any candidate, winning or losing, had gotten prior to the 2004 election. bush got more than kerry that year but one would be hard pressed to describe any of the bush voters as demotivated democrats.
eta–
despite the 2,000,000 votes for nader, gore still had 500,000 more votes than bush. the electoral college screwed us. it wasn’t as bad as the screwing we got in 2016 when clinton won the popular vote by almost 3,000,000 votes, but it was still a tragic result of our process.
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This is so key, and I always wonder why nobody brings up Bush v. Gore in these conversations? Look what happened back then. Gore won the election, Bush raised a fuss to get some ballots thrown out in a blue county in Florida, a lawsuit happened, then his college roommate (or whatever it was) was the judge in the case and ruled for Bush. It was a bloodless coup by a local judge and I feel like way too little fuss was made about that.
Trump has way more levers of power to pull now, and can do much worse.
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The 2000 election in Florida was a trainwreck for multiple reasons. Hanging chads. Deceptively designed butterfly ballots. The aborted recount. It is interesting to note that post-election recounts sponsored by news organizations agree that Bush won the election.
