2024 US Presidential Elections Megathread

[The Minsky Moment]

A couple of months ago, the last time I was in a subway car with a homeless person walking around terrifying passengers who were all frozen, I had a though that a couple of Trump voters were born that day. 

As a regular rider of the NYC subway going back decades, there is nothing new about that.  I had regular experiences like that during the Obama years and yet Obama won 2 elections comfortably; the word woke did not even exist in the political lexicon.

The last mayoral election in NYC, the super liberal New York democrats picked a cop running on a law-and-order platform and rejected more lefty alternatives.  Woke was not a factor.  Maybe it should have been, maybe we should have woke up to the fact that the man was corrupt.

Whatever you want to say about Kamala Harris, she did not run a woke campaign. Every appearance again and again she went on about being a prosecutor and putting away drug gangs.  Not one Palestinian-American was allowed to show their face in the entire campaign, but Liz Cheney was everywhere. If anything, assuming the final tally confirms that Democratic turnout was down, the facts would seem to suggest that she erred by trying too hard to chase the middle and didn't do enough to keep her own base happy.

DG I get that you don't like the rhetoric and you have a gut feeling it is impacting elections, but you are a data driven guy.  Where's the data?

[garbon]

Please give examples of how "woke dogma" has majorly impacted people's lives. Shit made up by conservatives doesn't count.

I live in a NYC area.  A whole lot of stores have a lot of their merchandise locked away behind glass these days.  That used to happen only in very dangerous neighborhoods.  I've had several incidents just in the last year where I'm stuck in a subway car with a clearly aggressive homeless person, and all I'm thinking is "please don't draw his attention, make him harass someone else", because I'm stuck in a metal box there.  That gives a very clear feeling that something is not right in the society.

Why did that come about?  Because wokedom suppressed balanced adult discussions about policing, and eventually because of a thumb on the scale of discussion policies were enacted that essentially gave up on enforcement of petty crimes.  A couple of months ago, the last time I was in a subway car with a homeless person walking around terrifying passengers who were all frozen, I had a though that a couple of Trump voters were born that day.  People really value not being scared above almost everything else.

But NYC had elected a tough on crime mayor...

[DGuller]

So Iowa went Trump 55, Harris 42.  I guess that poll everyone was going on about (which had Harris up by 3 points in Iowa) was just a good old-fashioned rogue poll.

I guess that poll, and the guy with 13 indicators, once again shows the fallacy of champion coin-flipper argument.  It also shows that Nate Silver is pretty good at this, no matter how annoying you find him.  He was pretty much on point predicting that despite close polling, the most likely scenario is either Trump or Harris sweeping every battleground state, and that's exactly what happened.

[Barrister]

Pre-election I was listening to a podcast that had James Carville on it.  He is always an entertaining listen, and he can have some good insights.  He's the one who came up with "it's the economy, stupid" during Clinton's 1992 campaign.

He was saying (and I'm paraphrasing here) that one of the things voters care most about is order.  So it's not quite so much that "wokeness" hurts democrats, but disorder.  So the massive 2020 protests, the campus anti-Israel protests, very visible homelessness and lawlessness (Canada, but I visibly saw people shoplifting twice in the last week who were called out by clerks, but otherwise made no attempt to stop them).

[Barrister]

So Iowa went Trump 55, Harris 42.  I guess that poll everyone was going on about (which had Harris up by 3 points in Iowa) was just a good old-fashioned rogue poll.

I guess that poll, and the guy with 13 indicators, once again shows the fallacy of champion coin-flipper argument.  It also shows that Nate Silver is pretty good at this, no matter how annoying you find him.  He was pretty much on point predicting that despite close polling, the most likely scenario is either Trump or Harris sweeping every battleground state, and that's exactly what happened.

So the "13 indicators guy" is just a whole bunch of totally subjective factors with little to no rigour to them, so I would totally agree.

The Selzer Iowa poll was very rigorous with fairly minimal "smoothing", which is why it's supposed to be such a high-quality poll.  But polls just sometimes get it wrong.  It's the whole "+/- 3 points, 19 times out of 20".  This seems like it was just the 20th poll.

[DGuller]

The last mayoral election in NYC, the super liberal New York democrats picked a cop running on a law-and-order platform and rejected more lefty alternatives.  Woke was not a factor.  Maybe it should have been, maybe we should have woke up to the fact that the man was corrupt.

Woke was a factor in that a backlash to tone-deaf wokism made New Yorkers elect someone who was anti-woke, even if it was fairly obvious that he was going to be a shit and corrupt mayor.

Whatever you want to say about Kamala Harris, she did not run a woke campaign. Every appearance again and again she went on about being a prosecutor and putting away drug gangs.  Not one Palestinian-American was allowed to show their face in the entire campaign, but Liz Cheney was everywhere. If anything, assuming the final tally confirms that Democratic turnout was down, the facts would seem to suggest that if anything she erred by trying too hard to chase the middle and didn't do enough to keep her own base happy.

No, she didn't run a woke campaign at all.  I think both her and Joe Biden understood what poison wokism was.  The problem is that the people on the left that were lost were already lost and unreachable by her.

DG I get that you don't like the rhetoric and you have a gut feeling it is impacting elections, but you are a data driven guy.  Where's the data?

I am a data guy, but I'm the rare data guy that understands that data can't answer everything, and that it's a catastrophic blunder to try to answer with data something that can't be answered with data.  For example, I am a very firm believer in "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

My opinion is definitely driven by my experience, not data.  My experience is this:  I know several liberals like myself who are actually as anti-woke as I am.  According to people here, such people shouldn't exist in significant numbers.  There is also another gut feeling adding to my opinion.  When we discuss our anti-woke liberalism, we do it much like my parents' generation would: quietly, after looking left and right.

[The Minsky Moment]

DG basically you are saying that the problem is not the leading Democratic Party politician and operatives, who are savvy enough to avoid woke rhetoric.  The problem is ordinary Democrat voters or supporters or fringy minor office holders who come into contact with decent Americans and turn them off.  What then is the solution?  Mass self-censorship?  Hakim Jeffries to form vigilante squads to gag Park Slope progressives and hide their $1000 strollers? The Cone of Silence to be deployed on college campuses?

I'm being facetious but seriously.  What is the equivalent in Trumpworld.  The Proud Boys.  MTG and her space lasers.  Nick Fuentes and other genuine rah yeah Hitler Nazis. The Christian theocrats who want to criminalize all abortions no exceptions and deploy bounty hunters to hunt down teenage rape victims who leave to state to terminate.  You are saying that people see all that and are prepared to live with it, but if someone says the terrifying words "structural racism" it reduces those same people to unreasoning hysteria?  Perhaps you are right and I can't see past my bubble but I genuinely don't get that.

[Barrister]

Can I also suggest that Harris was also just kind of a boring candidate, and would have been unlikely to survive the nomination process?

I heard her speak a few times.  I mean she was 'fine', but she didn't have the huge charisma of an Obama (or Trump), wasn't running on any particular inspiring policy or platform, and just didn't give people much a reason to vote for her?

In fact - should we be blaming Jim Clyburn for today?  He famously saved Biden's campaign for the nomination in 2020 by endorsing Biden before the South Carolina primary which shifted numerous black voters.  In exchange though Clyburn wanted Biden to pick a woman of colour for VP.  That wound up being Harris.  And then precisely because Harris was a woman of colour Biden had no choice but to keep her in 2024.

If the 2020 Veep candidate had been Pete Buttigieg how differently would things have turned out?

[Tamas]

Ok DG trying to understand your point. Rise in petty crime is because of wokeism preventing police to tackle it by making them afraid to act.

It's not wokeism that prevents police from acting, it's the policies and the direction from above.  Police are afraid to act against policies (and should be).  The policies are enacted as a result of a debate that is devoid of critical thinking.  Social justice arguments get uncritical acceptance, and a lot of arguments in favor of status quo policing (as of then) wouldn't even be made because you could get canceled making them (even if they're factually correct).

A week ago I watched a John Oliver video about traffic stops, and the element of race involved.  I had to stop watching because the lack of good faith in the statistical arguments presented was just too much.  Frankly I don't want to get into the details of why I found his arguments to be in incredibly bad faith, because tI'm not comfortable talking about that publicly.

Please give examples of how "woke dogma" has majorly impacted people's lives. Shit made up by conservatives doesn't count.

So here's the thing - sometimes people vote on issues that DON'T majorly impact people's lives.

You wouldn't tell a man they shouldn't care about abortion because it doesn't impact them, would you?  Or tell a white voter they shouldn't care about racism?

We know a certain number of people made up their minds because of "wokeism".  Telling those people that "wokeism" doesn't exist is not going to convince them to change their vote, because they certainly think it does.

Ok. Certainly I am not on the cutting edge of current liberal thinking on everything. Trans rights vs. protecting women for example, I am not JK Rowling but I am still uncomfortable with the whole thing.

What I propose to consider is: I think what you are doing is taking what is the difference between you and what you think is the liberal/progressive mainstream, and label that woke. Maybe those difference instead are the things where you are more conservative than the progressive side you consider to be part of.

This sounds like a trivial non-difference but it actually is a difference. "Wokeism" implies something new and radical that can be stopped. While in fact it is just the natural drift of cultural and political norms with age. You are not forced to agree with it but also it is not just a switch that you can just turn off and get back to the mid-90s version of liberalism that you and I spent our formative years in.

[Caliga]

Can I also suggest that Harris was also just kind of a boring candidate, and would have been unlikely to survive the nomination process?

I agree.  She wouldn't have.... look how quickly she got bounced out of the 2020 primaries.  I content a Tim Walz-like candidate would have prevailed in a 2024 open Democratic primary, and then had a better shot against Trump.

[Solmyr]

Please give examples of how "woke dogma" has majorly impacted people's lives. Shit made up by conservatives doesn't count.

So here's the thing - sometimes people vote on issues that DON'T majorly impact people's lives.

You wouldn't tell a man they shouldn't care about abortion because it doesn't impact them, would you?  Or tell a white voter they shouldn't care about racism?

We know a certain number of people made up their minds because of "wokeism".  Telling those people that "wokeism" doesn't exist is not going to convince them to change their vote, because they certainly think it does.

I'm not talking about a certain number of people, I am talking about DGuller who I thought was smart but who seems convinced "wokeism" exists.

[Barrister]

DG basically you are saying that the problem is not the leading Democratic Party politician and operatives, who are savvy enough to avoid woke rhetoric.  The problem is ordinary Democrat voters or supporters or fringy minor office holders who come into contact with decent Americans and turn them off.  What then is the solution?  Mass self-censorship?  Hakim Jeffries to form vigilante squads to gag Park Slope progressives and hide their $1000 strollers? The Cone of Silence to be deployed on college campuses?

Harris definitely did not run on an identity-based campaign.  I doubt very much she ever uttered the word "woke".

But she never denounced it either.  She never had her "Sister Souljah moment".

And yes - Trump never denounced the Proud Boys or space lasers either.  But apparently he didn't need to.

[The Minsky Moment]

FWIW misdemeanors in NYC are lower than they were in 2017 and at a very low level historically.  I.e. it was 374,000 in Obama's re-election year of 2012 and 287,000 last year.  I suspect numbers would be pretty similar in other cities.

The low point in NYC misdemeanors (pre COVID) occurred during the mayoralty of the notoriously woke Bill de Blasio who presided over a continuous and very significant decrease in offense levels over the course of his term in office.

I get the argument that facts don't matter only perceptions but at a certain point the cognitive dissonance becomes ridiculous.

[DGuller]

DG basically you are saying that the problem is not the leading Democratic Party politician and operatives, who are savvy enough to avoid woke rhetoric.  The problem is ordinary Democrat voters or supporters or fringy minor office holders who come into contact with decent Americans and turn them off.  What then is the solution?  Mass self-censorship?  Hakim Jeffries to form vigilante squads to gag Park Slope progressives and hide their $1000 strollers? The Cone of Silence to be deployed on college campuses?

I'm being facetious but seriously.  What is the equivalent in Trumpworld.  The Proud Boys.  MTG and her space lasers.  Nick Fuentes and other genuine rah yeah Hitler Nazis. The Christian theocrats who want to criminalize all abortions no exceptions and deploy bounty hunters to hunt down teenage rape victims who leave to state to terminate.  You are saying that people see all that and are prepared to live with it, but if someone says the terrifying words "structural racism" it reduces those same people to unreasoning hysteria?  Perhaps you are right and I can't see past my bubble but I genuinely don't get that.

I don't know what the solution is besides just a culture shift in discourse on the left.  I do recognize that a lot of the worst elements of the left come from grassroots, not the party. 

That said, one thing the party can certainly stop doing is saying "My VP will be a woman" or "The next Supreme Court justice will be a black woman".  This stuff did come directly from a Democratic politician, the highest profile one at that, and it sent a clear message that racism and sexism has been normalized as long as it's against the right race or sex.  In fact, the lack of any pushback from Democrats against such statements can also be interpreted that Democrats see it as not only okay, but even virtuous.

I think Democrats vastly underestimated just how poorly such identity politics play, and not just among white men.

[Legbiter]

I agree.  She wouldn't have.... look how quickly she got bounced out of the 2020 primaries.  I content a Tim Walz-like candidate would have prevailed in a 2024 open Democratic primary, and then had a better shot against Trump.

Yeah a competitive primary process instead of "her turn" would be one suggestion.