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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Looks like Harris did lose by about 79,000 votes in Michigan.

    Comparatively, about 44,500 went to Stein.

    We don’t ultimately know how the uncommitted movement voted. If they were a monolith throughout, we’d expect 100k for Stein. If some abstained and some voted for Harris or Trump, that would’ve split the movement.

    If all of Stein’s voters went to Harris, however, that wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Harris would have still been short ~34,400. So if you wanted to make the argument that the uncommitted movement was a voting block, then the entire ~44k block voting for Harris wouldn’t have changed the outcome.

    Overall I don’t see Michigan outcomes changing my argument. If Dems were more persuasive, even if they lied about Gaza, they could have sweeped the nation. And even if the uncommitteds chose the lesser of two evils, Kamala still lost all other swing states. You can’t chock the outcomes of those states up to the uncommitteds, because the largest organizational presence was in Michigan.








  • Currently on Windows 11 (yuck) and have a Galaxy S23.

    Next devices I’m looking at are a Framework laptop and Fairphone.

    The QR code sounds super easy which is a good sign. I guess most of my complaints rest with what a full FOSS and pro-privacy cyber-system would look like overall. I come from a Windows world so I have those household names stuck in my head, like Word, Outlook, etc. I guess I’m really looking for a guide that has a 1:1 for the entire OS from Windows to Linux, and maybe more if it improves people’s lives. Thinking Jellyfin and Bitwarden and all those purpose-driven applications.

    At this point I don’t know what I don’t know, and I just wish that some of the awesome devs on Lemmy would post a guide to all of this, soup to nuts style. Maybe one day


  • I just have realistic expectations of my elected representatives actually advocating for my interests in government.

    Dems could sure accelerate our energy transition away from fossil fuels towards green energy with more initiatives like the IRA and GND.

    Dems could sure undo Reaganomics and Citizens United, audit our contracts with corporations so they work for us, break up monopolies, and a heck of a lot of other things to get us moving in the right direction.

    Truth is that a growing portion of Americans support these. Leftist populism is on the rise. And we might have a good chance to organize this time around because Dems have stopped telling those comforting lies to their base. Kamala didn’t do what Obama did. The Dems’ true nature was seen far and wide.

    Dems are the ones smothering themselves with comforting lies, and the disappointint truth is that they’ll keep losing elections in favor of elected representatives who actually listen to their base: Republicans.



  • One angle that might explain the lack of media coverage on a win for the working class against the interest of capital owners is that the media itself, at least the mainstream slice of it, is owned by the capitalist class.

    MSM will cover things if they think it’ll bring in more ratings. You see it with how many news outlets are treating the upcoming Trump administration. For Cons, they’re banking on a viewer base that’ll be more interested in Trump coverage. For Dems, they’re banking on a viewer base that’ll be more hateful and agree of Trump coverage.

    So when you have wins for the working class that Biden’s administration directly helped with, and when you have a media industry that just won’t cover it out of their own self-interest, you have to wonder if the administration will spend Americans’ on advertising or just keep it and move on.

    One might say that the best time to do that advertising is during an election campaign though. And that begs the question as to why Biden nor Harris brought this up in their campaigns.

    Might it be that those groups are also subject to the capitalist class?



  • Bro it’s perfectly normal for Americans to do this too…

    I swear, the Twitter snowflakes want to use the lamest of dunks to own the Libs. Then they fail to realize that they might do this themselves.

    Aww, who am I kidding. Twitter shills don’t engage in family functions, or have kids for that matter.


  • I’ll agree with you on the 2020 voting laws carrying forward (although I haven’t looked into the state laws, especially the red ones to see if those have been repealed yet because that’s what tends to happen).

    Also agreed on the DNC’s and Harris’ messaging. I also blame Biden because if we wanted to prepare to fight against Trump in the election where he was his most popular, the Dems would have ran an actual primary.

    Definitely agreed too on the general sentiment of Americans supporting leftist policies. We see this with Bashear in Kentucky, and recently the middle wage and abortion policies in Missouri. Although you might be able to balance that by Florida’s outcome with their referendums as well as California.

    Ultimately it comes down to messaging and optics. Democrats need to figure out a way to package progressive policy in a way that capture the imaginations and hopes of their base while at the same time not scaring those towards the center into believing those same policies are socialist or communist.


  • I have to admit that I haven’t delved into the exit polls and analyzed which social groups migrated right or not.

    But one thing that’s different about the 2024 election compared to 2020 is that COVID wasn’t happening to the same degree. There were a ton more mail-in ballots 2020 due to social distancing, which helped both parties as a bump in votes.

    Why use 2020 as a data point though? Why not 2016? Why not 2012 and 2008? Might those elections be slightly different because a 1-in-100-year pandemic wasn’t happening?

    If you compare those numbers, does the Dems’ numbers compare to those elections?

    I want to say someone on Lemmy already posted the numbers recently in one of these posts. From what I recall, Dems’ votes returned close to pre-COVID levels albeit a degree lower, yet Reps’ votes were above pre-COVID levels. Why?

    Might the explanation be the societal shift towards the right?

    And how can you not see the national shift to the right in how the Democrats speak to rallies and voters? We are considerably more right-wing as a country than ever in the recent decades. This election was a Republican primary with how Kamala ran on pre-Trump conservative values and policies.

    Maybe apathy exists on the Left because it is increasingly the case that Democrats don’t represent them anymore.