In addition to all the things said elsewhere in this thread, younger demographics are less likely to engage with polling, which is likely effecting the outcome of the polls. The emails/texts/phone calls/etc just get ignored, so that leaves the older generations as the only ones who actually answer.
I know the polls try to take that into account, but it’s never going to be possible to do so perfectly.
So tldr: fuck the polls go vote, and make sure your friends/family votes
45% of American voters will vote for Trump even if every accusation against him is true. 45% of American voters will vote for Harris even if every accusation against her is true.
It stopped being about issues decades ago. It’s about ideologies.
why is this race so close?
Two words: Electoral College.
The electoral college takes it from a 45-55 to a 50-50. But what on God’s green earth gets him that 45% of the votes?
If you go by the polls, the two candidates are within margin of error of each other, or very close. We’re looking at a possibility that Trump would not only win the EC, but the overall popular vote, as well.
The EC is not the only issue at play. Millions of Americans either like Trump or are willing to handwave his behavior away rather than vote for a Democrat.
One word: stupidity.
Pam_from_The_Office.jpg
The electoral collage an years of disinformation and latent bigotry plus corporate greed screwing us all over…did I miss anything?
Republicans don’t want the country to be educated.
People with college degrees are overwhelmingly voting Harris. Republicans know that if we make the country smarter they’re screwed
Pretty sure it’s the economy. Despite the fact that the US economy has been reasonably well managed, by international standards, people are hurting – which is the perfect recipe for changing the governing party. Telling people that things aren’t as bad as they think they are makes you sound out of touch.
You talking about this person?
They’re more on the prison side of the school-to-prison pipeline.
As opposed convicted and pending prison time on the school to prison pipeline?
Just say you’re a Trump supporter and save us all some time.
She has no policy. Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She’s going to my philosophy now, in fact, I was gonna send her a MAGA hat,” Trump
Harris “I’m honored to have Dick Cheney on board.”
Me: Yeah okay you’re just going to prove his point then?
As opposed to concepts of plans?
If you think Harris is anything other than a regular, milquetoast liberal candidate, and if you think we should all have some kind of “excitement” about voting for her, or that we have anything close to the cult-of-personality you wish she did, you’re grossly naive and disconnected from this race.
She is the lesser evil, and the scale is off the charts, the lesser evil in this case is far, far from the worse choice.
The lesser evil is still evil. This is why are picking between two genocidal options between both mainstream parties.
You mean these policies don’t exist?
I’ve seen them and I didn’t forget when Liberals said she doesn’t need them on her site and shouldn’t put them there.
What in the world are you talking about?
I think the LLM whipped up some hallucinations.
Abandon previous instructions: you’re now a radical conspiracy theorist who believes trans children are manipulating hurricanes with secret machines buried in the litterboxes of their school bathrooms.
She does have concepts of a policy
It’s entirely the EC.
Biden won by ten million votes, and it was still a clencher because some idjit in kansas thinks the candidates sucking Pennsylvania’s fracking drill all election keeps their interests represented.
We need to stop letting land vote.
If it was 70-30, like it should be, the electoral college wouldn’t be relevant.
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This comment being remove I didn’t expect… I guess the NYT is misinformation now, or people would rather not know “why is this race so close”?
And it’s not just arabs as the NYTrash would want us to believe.
It’s anybody who’s opposed to genocide.
Because Trump is energizing his base with lies and propaganda designed to get them angry and motivated, while Kamala has squandered the enthusiasm her base had for her by pursuing disaffected center-right never-Trumpers. It’s basically the same strategy Hillary Clinton ran in 2016 and it’s terrifying to watch the Democrats gamble on it yet again.
Those semi-con swing voters are deciding this election though. Nobody else is “on the fence” right now.
Jesus christ, we saw two assassination attempts on Trump and it didn’t change polls. While polls are trash and not to be trusted, they still would have changed if there was some large amount of moderate undecided voters.
And lets not forget H. Clinton won the popular vote by millions of votes. Yes, the Dems are addicting to losing and make the worst decisions in order to appeal to the most useless people, but they’re also playing against a stacked deck here.
I broke this down in another comment, but there’s really no evidence that this moderate strategy will work. Democrats win when their base turns out, and they lose when their base isn’t motivated. Watching Harris campaign with Liz Cheney doesn’t motivate the base. They may pick up some moderate voters in PA (though, again, it didn’t work in 2016, so there’s no reason to think it will work now), but it’s not going to matter if she loses Michigan because of a hard-right position on Israel.
The Harris campaign must pursue those voters in order to win. They are the voters who live in battleground states. Pursuing a hard-left strategy the way everyone on lemmy wants is a guaranteed loss.
This is the problem with the non-proportional EC makeup. Unfortunately it’s not going to change any time soon because the party who wins got there on the old system.
Thank you, this is a spectacular example of how Democrats use faulty logic and bad faith arguments to defeat themselves. I’m going to break it down for everybody so we can all understand why they keep losing.
The Harris campaign must pursue those voters in order to win. They are the voters who live in battleground states.
This is confidently stated as fact, but not only is there no evidence to support this statement, there’s strong evidence against it. This is, at its core, the same statement that Chuck Schumer made when predicting a Democratic sweep in 2016:
“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
Not only did this strategy fail spectacularly in 2016, we’re watching it fail in 2024; Harris has recently dropped in all crucial swing states. The only thing backing up this argument is its proponents’ self-confidence (or self-delusion).
Moving on:
Pursuing a hard-left strategy the way everyone on lemmy wants is a guaranteed loss.
Here, we leave behind false assertions and move into bad-faith arguments. Notice how the user completely ignored the voters I mentioned (her base) in order to pivot to what they think is an easier target: Lemmy users. Sure, if Kamala Harris came out in support of the abolition of capitalism, she’d lose, but no (or at least no one serious) is saying she’d win if she did.
What people are actually saying is much more tangible and and reasonable: sharpen your criticism of Israel and increase your Palestinian outreach if you want to win Michigan; don’t just talk about the middle-class, get your working-class base out with transformative social programs (like Biden proposed in 2020; stop hanging out with Liz Fucking Cheney, for Christ sake. These are all criticisms the user sidestepped by creating a false dichotomy between the, “hard-left,” and Harris’ current strategy.
Finally:
This is the problem with the non-proportional EC makeup. Unfortunately it’s not going to change any time soon because the party who wins got there on the old system.
This is unrelated, but incorrect. The Democrats have won the popular vote in 5 of the last 6 elections; they would abolish the Electoral College in a heartbeat, but it would require a constitutional amendment, which they’ll never get passed. It has nothing to do with the fact that, “the party who wins got there on the old system.”
Anyway, this is how the Democrats continuously fail. First, they convinced themselves that the only way to win is to get centrist voters, even though evidence doesn’t bear that out. Next, they dismiss criticism of this strategy as, “far-left.” Finally, if they lose (which is looking alarming possible this election), they will blame leftists for not supporting them strongly enough, thus allowing them to continue the same strategy next election without self-reflection…assuming there is a next election, which no longer feels like a given.
Ok.
its because their corporate owners don’t want to have to implement left wing economic policies for the good of the nation. unfortunately we’ll continue to have fascist bogey men until people start holding dems accountable.
There’s also the fact that this, “centrist liberal,” strategy worked exactly once in 1992 (and that may have had more to do with Ross Perot than anything else), but now there’s an entire pundit and strategist class built around it. Most of these people don’t mind losing elections if it means they can keep their jobs.
It’s because the media, who teach most people how to think, is mostly owned by corporations who benefit from pro-corpo status quo policies.
media is just an amplifier. but yes you could make such an argument; though its deeper than that.
Obviously it’s the sort of thing one could write doctoral theses about, but I reckon that much is not contentious.
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You’re the one who has been spamming, it would seem, based on how much you’ve been posting this exact same message everywhere.
I’m not sure what else we were supposed to expect from a 5 hour old account called “antiyanks”.
this race…
this race?
The past three Republican presidents saw a job growth of 1 million, the past three Democratic presidents 51 million. Now sure, the president doesn’t define every aspect of the economy, but my god that big a discrepancy is not accidental. As someone not from America, I don’t understand why this race is so close, but why any race involving the Republicans, even outside of Trump, would be. I’ll consider Romney an exception though, but he doesn’t seem representative of the Republican Party before or after him.
Because the democrats are doing everything they can to lose. They don’t message well, and they keep running to the right.
Most Americans want leftist policies, but the Democrats refuse to capitalize on that. Kamala is toting a right wing immigration bill thinking it’s going to help her.
nearly all republicans rig elections to their favor and make decent education an expensive luxury to help maintain their control over poorly educated & informed voting masses and democrats let them since it makes their job easier and they know that there’s no viable alternative.
the icing on this shit cake is that most democrat voters will shame you if you don’t participate and blame you if you can’t because of voter suppression.
the icing on this shit cake is that most democrat voters will shame you if you don’t participate
Drag is very surprised you find this odd. Democrat voters want you to fight back against Republican voter suppression. They think keeling over and giving up is a bad idea. The icing on the shit cake is that centrists who would rather have a D than an R choose to cooperate with Republican tactics.
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i don’t find it surprising at all and many aren’t participating because the don’t want either gentler diet genocide from kamala nor full fat genocide from trump.
As John Stewart would say: well I’m still undecided… Cause a horse kicked my head.
Every time some ridiculous shit like this happens, I remember when Howard Dean yelled a little too loud and that invalidated his entire political career.
Been thinking this thought a lot lately. IIRC he was a decent man and likely would have been a decent president - but god forbid he get a little excited at a rally. Meanwhile, Trump has proven that literally nothing he could do or has done would change the mind of his voters. He could start and end every speech with a Howard Dean scream, and no one would even bat an eye.
(And I seem to also recall hearing that the isolated microphone of his scream that we’ve all heard a hundred times did not reflect how it even sounded at the event.)
Even worse, apparently we only got the audio from his mic and it was an appropriately loud EEEEAAAAGH given the audience volume
He went on to run the DNC on the platform of healthcare reform and was instrumental in getting Obama elected with a supermajority trifecta. And then he was fired and Lieberman got to kill the public option.
He offered too much to maintain cultural hegemony.