in generations.

Who are WE is the question

Personally, I don't believe this race is as tight as portrayed. But I also think you're absolutely right--we will be defined by the moment, by the way this election plays out.

For good or ill, this is going to leave a mark.

peggysue!

who doesn't give a crap about the U.S.. The second reason is the rush limbaugh right wing media brainwashed morons that think this is all normal.

It’s also a disgrace because of WHY so many people will vote for Trump, thanks to two main factors, 1) the unregulated flow of billions of dollars of dark money into US election campaigns, and 2) the tsunami of propaganda — much of it peddled by adversarial foreign governments — unleashed daily on Americans by big tech companies.

Those two factors are related, and they explain why a convicted felon/rapist/all-star shitbag like Trump is able to gain such traction with the voting public.

Personally I would add the bogus, slanted right wing polls that are designed to demoralize Democrats and designed to give Magats an excuse to claim the election was rigged when they lose.

Trump has tapped into cultural beliefs, fears, and intolerance that many of us thought were, while quite certainly not in the past, perhaps trending downward in our society. Nope.

We all rightly blame propaganda, right-wing media and the like, but that cultural stuff is also clearly a problem. That segment of the population has always been there. The other factors amplified it, and Donald Trump brought them out of the shadows and gave them perceived legitimacy. Trump and the right (for decades) have just exploited what was already there.

Fear and intolerance have been exploited by many dictators to gain and hold on to power throughout history. Any responsible leader understands that these factors *can* be used to sway populations, but they also understand the dangers that come with doing so.

In recent history, American presidents have dabbled in such behavior (see George W. Bush and the anti-gay marriage campaign of 2004, say, or the numerous "immigrants are coming to get you" campaigns that have been run over the decades). But no American president that I can think of has come close to going "full Hitler" in the way that Trump has. George W. Bush never openly discussed locking up his political opponents, for example. Even when he was engaging in bigoted campaigning, there was always the sense that "bipartisanship" was important, and that politics should remain generally "normal." There were certain norms and standards that politicians were expected to uphold.

Without the massive influx of unregulated dark money and propaganda over the past 10 years, laying the groundwork for the collapse of trust in mainstream media and the sense that nobody knows what's real or fake any more, I wonder if Trump would have made it to where he is now.

to thank for that!

We actually have a decent, good person up against a morally compromised individual, and I look at it in an unbiased way, and people have to see that difference, but his supporters really don’t care, they brush it off. Are they that indoctrinated?

as long as the agenda they want is pursued.

Massive understatement, I realize.

It's impossible to consider Trump's rise to the presidency and the de facto leader of the GOP in a vacuum, of course, and I'm sure you're right that he's partly, if not primarily, a product of his environment. That being said, I'm not sure anyone else in the GOP currently in the public eye could have pulled off what he was able to. He is uniquely (and inexplicably) able to engender loyalty and devotion, not just from the voting public, but from his staff and other politicians. People to this day continue to throw away their lives and their careers for the guy, for reasons I can't begin to fathom. He's uniquely able to withstand scandal after scandal after scandal that would have almost assuredly doomed any other candidate. After everything everyone has thrown at him, his approval ratings are near three-year highs. He's basically the leader of a nationwide cult, but even Jim Jones had people bail out when the writing was on the wall. He's like Charles Manson, if Manson was a mob boss.

Trump was also an instrumental piece in his own rise. He jacked up the birtherism claims, working through Michael Cohen to conspire with the National Enquirer to push them. He re-ignited his decades-long feud with the media. His disdain was further ramped up by the 2011 Correspondent's Dinner when Obama made him look like the tool he is. He would spend years relentlessly hammering on both, tapping into his and others' resentment over Obama's presidency.

The sense that bipartisanship was important to the GOP was handed a death blow when Obama became president, though the seeds probably date to Gingrich or Reagan. Since then, all bets are off, with McConnell (and now Johnson in the House) stalling everything and eventually stealing a SCOTUS seat.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that it's hard to know if Trump could have done this without the decades of propaganda and disinformation on the right. Likely not, but he was, as noted, a key piece in how we ended up here.

As an aside, the right's (and Trump's) incessant anti-media campaign has been so successful that even many on the left have fully bought into it. As someone posted in another thread, if one looks at what's often posted on DU about the media, one would think that there are no valid sources of news left at all. The line has became a circle. Mission accomplished.

Having said that I’m not making light of your post, he’s a threat, the oligarchs are a threat and the media they have bought to push their message. We must rise up to meet it. I personally believe we are. We just don't make as much noise as they do.

Otherwise, he'll almost certainly be able to use the presidency as a crutch to keep himself propped up.

I fully agree that we need to meet the challenge, and I believe that we're going to do so. Turnout was always the answer, as it always is. We show up, outvote the other side where it matters, and there will be opportunities to ensure his demise.

There was always a sense on the left that mainstream media carried water for the Republican Party, whether that was completely true or not. DU and many other websites -- think of the blog revolution of the early 2000s in particular -- were set up as explicit alternatives to mainstream media. When DU was created in 2001, we considered it an opportunity to use modern technology to try to push back against the massive advantage that the right wing had created in areas like talk radio.

But I think after a couple of decades, we've kind of entered a "be careful what you wish for" scenario. Twenty years ago we felt that there was a need for more widely-available alternative media sources. But we didn't anticipate social media, and the creation of a culture in which anyone could quickly and easily become their own news source, or could exist in a world where they could not just choose what "facts" they wanted to believe in, but to have those "facts" force-fed to them, minute-by-minute, on personal hand-held devices, all controlled by privately-created algorithms.

That said I totally agree that Trump is unique. His true talent has been in exposing and encouraging the absolute worst tendencies in people, whether that be his individual supporters -- to whom he has given a license to be proudly racist, misogynistic, and un-American -- or the Republican Party at large, who thought they could achieve their goals by controlling Trump, only to find out that they were controlled by him (or rather, by the forces whispering in Trump's ear).

But I think it took today's culture to get him there. Bear in mind that he did run for president before, on the Reform Party ticket in 2000. He won the California primary and then quit the race, because he realized his run was going nowhere. Nobody took him seriously then, at all. So I think Trump and today's media/Internet environment are like symbiotic parasites feeding off one another. It was inevitable that somebody would take advantage of the massive cultural shift that the Internet and social media brought about, and the person most suited to do that happened to be Donald Trump (likely because of his extreme narcissistic tendencies, which mesh well with today's social media culture).

Skepticism of any media is healthy and necessary, though some might go a bit overboard. Blanket statements that all of the MSM is the same and that they're all illegitimate or in the tank for Trump or that all polls are funded by the GOP are just silly. I suppose for some it's easier to just write it all off than to find a way to filter through the noise.

At the same time, some "facts" get posted from random blogs or some guy on X no one has ever heard of or Meidas Touch and they proliferate like bunnies, often even after they're debunked. It's actually kind of funny, but sad at the same time.

We do need alternative media, though social media and monetization has made even some outlets that used to be very objective and trustworthy lean toward tabloid-like sensationalism in the interest of clicks and ad revenue. That noise filter again becomes necessary, and everything you mentioned about the 20+ years DU has been around is what got us here. It's hard to find hard news in a post-fact, short-attention-span society.

I do recall Trump's run in 2000 and have referred to it often. It was that run that made the 2016 campaign even more unbelievable for me personally. The contrast between 2000 and 2016 does show that the current political and social climate are much more suited for someone like him to arise. Even then, I call the 2016 the perfect storm, because Trump needed 100 things to go right (or not go wrong) to win, and every single one of them happened. He'd also been, for practical purposes, running for president for six years by then.

They’re still having conniptions about that. That offended their sense of “order” in the worst way possible. And right wing media gave them license to be as racist and sexist as possible without consequences.

I went into that at length in another response, but that's largely when it started. Trump tapped into the backlash.

I opened my email there was a report from Gallup highlighting this election and what voters care about.

We had the usual suspects: the economy, immigration and crime.

But there was to my mind a huge omission: abortion access. This wasn't even asked. Gallup, of course, is right-leaning as an organization and routinely omits worker-related issues like childcare, healthcare, student debt and so on, not to mention gun violence.

The fact Gallup omitted any question this time around abortion access/reproductive rights says to me that the right is deeply worried about this issue. Because the way these things work is when the poll gets administered, participants are asked to pick their top three issues from a list. If something is not on the list, it then does not show up in the results.

My belief is these right-wing pollsters are avoiding the elephant in the 2024 election 'living room.' Because that is like a giant millstone hanging around their collective GOP necks. They can lie and promote stupid conspiracy theories all they want, much like monkeys in a zoo masturbating and throwing feces around, but women in the electorate are going to show up this time around, including white women, who for some very strange reason have traditionally swung right.

This might be a different survey than the one referenced in your e-mail, but here's a link:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx

Scroll down to "Importance of Issues to Vote Among U.S. Registered Voters"

It's ninth on the list overall. It's third when only Democrats are polled (further down the same page).

NINTH on the list! Donald, MAGA and the GOP caught the car-now they wish hey had stayed in the backyard!

... is the trivialization of government in the eyes of so many voters that makes them vulnerable to this propoganda. Too many people just don't think about their government. They just assume that things will muddle along even if they vote for a clown that entertains them.

And so true. I know people who believe exactly that. They're probably the same ones who were going to vote for W because he seemed like a good guy to have a beer with.

makes that influence persuade so many.

I just gotta say that Religion is a big factor as well. (For the life of me though, i cannot believe an reason a religious person would be following this monster. If Jesus ie REAL, why would his (her) followers be choosing THIS bastard to follow? Some kinda cult behavior going on here.

The last ten years or so have been pretty eye-opening, in a lot of bad ways. I never would have believed that there were enough people in this country to elect Donald Trump to anything, much less the presidency.

...and this is shit I didn't want to know about my neighbors. I keep to myself and have NO desire to know what their political leanings are.

I live in a small development in upstate NY - 8 houses - and I know I can't wave hi to four of them anymore because of the big ass trump flags in their yard that popped up last month.

I think I hate that the most - finding out who the good people are and who aren't.

It's Coca Cola vs Pepsi...

And it's Taylor Swift vs Beyoncé

Harris and Trump are the "pitch people" for the brand.

The RIGHT question is...

How are the American people so divided on what they expect or desire from their gov't?

There is an intrinsic asymmetry for voting criteria depending on one's party affiliation and how people make their decisions.
Republicans aren't about policies per se, or even character as William Bennett used to preach - it's about voting for a wreaking ball.
Trump is a wreaking ball. He promises to tear it all down. The more egregious his behavior, the more popular he is with the base.
The disaffected and aggrieved just want pay back. They are ignorant of and unconcerned of the inconvenient fact it takes a long time and enormous effort to build systems that work for people and ensure the safety of citizens. State Dept. get rid of it! Education Dept. get rid of it! EPA - get rid of it! Taxes - get rid of em! They're nihilists whether they know what the word means or not and they are going to break the country. Welcome to Favela land. Seriously, I'd rather live in an ex-pat community in Mexico than suffer the psychic pain
and excruciating stupidity these fuckwits bring to the table.

Trans people, women who need to have control of their bodies, migrants who are being targeted, people of color who don’t want to go back to slavery or Jim Crow. I wish it was as simple as coke or Pepsi but the stakes are much higher. I prefer Pepsi but I don’t want a president that’s nuts.

Let me rephrase.

This election isn't about personalities.

Personalities are what makes the "spokesperson" popular or unpopular.

It all comes down to ideology.

~50% of the country wants the country to proceed one way OR another.

That's really all there is to it.

If Biden had been replaced by Newsom, Shapiro, Whitmer, Mayor Pete or whoever...

Polls would still look the same because it's a battle of ideologies.



Coke vs Pepsi is a solid analogy.

Should Kamala win North Carolina and Georgia, as well as the states on the East Coast, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and states west, this election is over.

Oh yes, he will piss and moan the vote was fraudulent, but he will LOSE regardless. MORE voters will have rejected him once again as they did in 2020. Women will be the driving force because of the Abortion issue. Conservative women are hearing the stories of other women near death when their pregnancies go wrong and need care to save their lives. If they have daughters and granddaughters, they have to be thinking of them. Their vote will be for them as well as for Kamala Harris.

I'll add that people can only speculate if the election results will be close or not after the votes are counted.

Magats must have spent 10 to 1 on TV campaign ads. I drive through rural Pa. on my way to visit my daughter in Pittsburgh. On route 28 from Brookville to around Butler there are 5 times more Trump signs than there were in 2020. Magats have made Pa. their priority IMO.

I am cautiously optimistic about Pa. but I am also a bit worried because of the amount of money Magats are spending.

Hopefully the urban blue areas will be enough to counter the rural areas.

I will breathe easier about the election when Pa. is called for Kamala.

Does not mean that the women will vote for him.

Women can tell their husbands they voted for him, but actually voted for Kamala Harris. How else will they be able to look their daughters and granddaughters in the eye and tell them...'You have NO RIGHT to your body! You have NO RIGHT to prevent pregnancy from happening by using Birth Control! If you were to be raped, you have NO RIGHT to abort, but carry the pregnancy through! YOUR life does not matter!"

I for one, could not look my 3 granddaughters in the eye and tell them "You have NO RIGHTS at all that I had for close to 50 years! That your Mothers had more rights than you will ever have!"

CRUEL I am not!

They, their daughters, and granddaughters are FUCKED!

Be bold and tell them that when the time comes. Kamala will win this election.

I have not been afraid to be so bold. A few of the older women where I currently live avoid me, or stare at me because I spoke the truth to them in a profane manner. What a shock to their systems.

“Women can tell their husbands they voted for him, but actually voted for Kamala Harris.” My mother did this. She was far too smart to vote for Reagan, Nixon, etc.

large population of Arab Americans. They have trump signs posted big time. If trump wins and Project 2025 takes hold, they will rue the day they either voted for trump, Jill Stein or not at all.

They just need to win 5 swing states? scares me shittless. Hopefully the voter turnout is massive and everything is fair and all the votes are counted. We'll win.

I just don't feel at home here anymore.

It's nothing more than xenophobia, racism, sexism, tariffs, Arnold Palmer's dick size, and McDonald's.

And the news media, that qualifies as a coherent message.

lacking even the most rudimentary understanding of the ways and means of governing themselves, have no command of basic facts, are barely literate, would not recognize a syllogism if it hit them in the face and are prone to navel gazing. Humans who are easily persuaded to eat their own shit.

It's Fox, OAN, Newsmax, all the shitty right wing talk show hosts, megachurch pastors, Sinclair Broadcasting, X, the list goes on.

I'm still not believing the at large polls. I'm thinking and trying not to feel anything this time. I

*I'm paying attention to Northampton County in PA. I have a bit of hope for Bucks County PA - these women are angry.

*Jackie Rosen is going to trounce her opponent in Nevada - and that's going to bring 6 electoral votes to Harris - and those folks are going to vote to enshrine abortion in their state constitution.

*In North Carolina - I think Mecklenburg County is a much deeper blue than usual.

*Arizona - We have a stellar Senate Candidate - and I think we are going to see GenZ energized by Harris at the top of the ticket. Scroll down
https://spa.asu.edu/content/independent-and-sustainable-democracy
This one from June 2024 Prior to Harris' nomination: https://news.asu.edu/20240624-law-journalism-and-politics-2-out-3-gen-z-voters-arizona-say-they-will-vote-november-asu


I don't believe in these big national polls anymore. They got it wrong in 2016, Biden won in 2020 (in spite of the M$M), and that big huge red wave never materialized.

On the feeling side?
When I reach deep down inside my icy blue soul - I'm beginning to 'feel' like Allred is going to win in Texas.

The one House race I have zero hope for is Sue Altman's. I've been engaged in Hunterdon County politics too long, and know the gerrymandered district too well. Will I being carrying her literature around with me while door knocking the next two weekends? You betcha. But it may be a fools errand.

Not a real gaming site.

That's all you really need to know. Ignore them.

These show that Biden was heavily favored. Polymarket isn't listed here, but they too favored Biden.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/betting_odds/2020_president/

I hope Kamala focuses solely on the booming economy for these two weeks. The negative ads aren’t going to convince former trump voters to her side. They already don’t like him. They’re not voting for him.

Clean up the fracking stance. Make it about this booming economy and she wins PA by double digits.

Both sides do it? As someone pointed out recently in a critique of modern journalism, when one side says it is raining and the other does says that it isn't, it is the job of the journalist to step outside and see if it is or is not raining, not to merely give equal weight to both sides.

Those Freepers of yours are not in any danger because of a Harris victory. However, millions of people who are being targeted by MAGA will very much be placed in danger by a Trump victory.

All opinions are not equally valid, and the suggestion that they are is a big part of how we got to where we are.

"it is the job of the journalist to step outside and see if it is or is not raining"

It is the job of each citizen to go through all available information and discern from that, what is true or not. Those who expect to have it spoon fed it to them will very likely get what they deserve.

And one has to be diligent. Even here false news can be posted and going by the replies and number of recs, it is widely accepted as being true and this happens because folks are less likely to fact check something that reinforces their world view

One thing I've noticed is that those on the far left and far right often speak essentially the same language. One could take a post from here, change a few words and it'd be accepted at FR and vice versa

These are the same people that hold the same beliefs as those that seceded, instituted Jim Crow and other awful things. They’ve always been here and will continue to be here.

may never get it and may never want to get it.

Fox news has been on for 30 years now and has sprouted cousins in the misinformation news/entertainment era.

It was bad during the Rush Limbaugh/Talk radio era cause they could just spout lies and garbage and nobody could really counter what they said and did, but Fox has programmed people to think a certain way and even though they can find the truth, MOST of them DON'T find the truth and that is sort of how we got here....

Facts used to matter
Truth used to matter

The gas lighting this generation has faced is unmatched and social media has no regulation.

We are at a big time crossroads...can we come back from this ?

Not the least of which is the deliberate destruction of the public education system & universities, resulting in a dumbed down and ignorant/stupid public. After all, it’s easier to fool stupid people into voting against their own self interests by stoking fear, anger and hatred: Stupid people can’t think critically.

president. If not, America is doomed by our inability to get through to the rest of the country.

Unless we prevail, truth will be flushed down the Memory Hole.

I suspect monopolistic MONEY will tell. That said, I've early voted up and down a blue ballot...Our nation will not survive with continuing misogyny, willful ignorance for the sake of leisure and entertainment, and the dementia and nostalgia of ageism. The human brain, especially the limbic system is full of emotions, the good and bad ones; it has always been both free and flawed. The physical body always seeks homeostasis first but can be influenced to seek balance. Same with the body politic.

be followed by vance, hand picked by Thiel and musk

The danger facing us is real and not hyperbole

that most of us are tolerating the fascist magats in our daily lives, inadvertently providing a pathway for the fascist to take control of this country

to use that platform then there will be no voices to counter the lies.

we have become numb to maga insanity.....

If you want real numbers follow
Jen Rubin
Simon Rosenberg
Heather Cox Richardson
Tom Bonier
These folks have the real story

Our country seems to be having an identity crisis.

Most of us seem to want to continue to advance with a progressive plan: real equality and justice for all, clean water and air, healing the damage to the life support systems of our planet, acknowledging the injustices that have been and continue to be inflicted and working to change the flaws in our society that contributed to those injustices, etc.

What is extremely distressing is having the sad reality shoved in our faces: that a fairly large portion of our population are actually nasty, spiteful and evil people who seem to be fully on board with inflicting more violence, injustice and greed driven destruction, a ramping up of the wrongs of the past. All the old hatreds and toxic beliefs are still present, like the sewage that flows through the pipes under our streets. The dark money and propaganda have caused the ugliness and disease to burst forth into the light of day, just like the flooding from the hurricanes caused raw sewage to burst out from underground.

It has also been disheartening to see how easily our legal system can be jerked around by the uber wealthy and the well connected. It is like watching an abusive spouse going after their partner.

The one good thing about all of this trauma has been to drag the ugliness out into the open, as well as expose all the work that needs to be done to fight off the disinformation and propaganda campaigns, expose the dark money and the monsters who are supporting it all, and hopefully motivate us to keep on trucking. I'm sure that most people here know that defeating Cantaloupe Caligula the Corpulent is just the beginning.

But for today, we just need to focus on what is in front of us: vote blue, put Harris/Walz in office, give them and all of our government offices a full slate of democrats and do the long slog of clipping the claws and tentacles of the monsters. Then we can work on fixing the weaknesses and imbalances in our social systems.

Sigh. Keep on truckin.

Everything stated above by many is true re the dark money, the foreign gov't interference, the barely disguised racism, etc...

But there is also the money. I've seen it from local friend's posts this week. "Our homes are going to be taxed higher", "the grocery prices are too high" etc. The new tax rates that came out today - that will set them off too. They not only have this desire to keep whatever they make and not contribute (basically greed), but they won't dig deep to discern the causes. They just take the easy answers that they get from the MSM and don't look further.

Finally, for TX, oil/fracking jobs. That's a big deal down here and many will vote accordingly.

Our homes are taxed higher because the State of Texas, even with billions of dollars surplus, refuse to fund education and therefore property taxes rise because the school districts have to be funded some way.

Grocery store prices have absolutely nothing to do with POTUS - they are just another brick in the corporate greed that we embrace in America with our predatory capitalism.

Tax Rates? We have already seen and experienced what a Trump administration will do regarding taxes.

They take the easy answers because they don't understand the issues or maybe they just like to vote against their own interests?

Oil/Fracking? The oil industry, drilling, pollution, environmental degradation are all at record highs under a Democratic administration?

No the reason that Trump will carry Texas is because he speaks their language - the same reasons that the GOP has a super majority in our State government and because in 2022 only 42% of eligible voters voted.

I'm sick and tired of it, but.....We get the government we deserve.

and is only worse with the voucher nonsense he's pushing.

I absolutely agree on grocery prices, etc - but they are hearing something different on Fox News I'm sure. I don't think they understand they are voting against their interests. For all their screaming about "do your research", I don't think many of them do it themselves. They just repeat back the talking points of the day.

I will give you that he speaks their language - not just the racism/bigotry - but he absolutely panders to the religious right. Not insignificant here (I'm in the suburbs, these folks talk about their churches all the time).

trump should be a minor candidate

the country is unhealthy

TFG supporters are very stupid people

It's been making the rounds, but it is a fake meme.