Election night 2016 was pretty rough for me. Without getting into too much detail, we went to dinner with my wife’s very conservative family and then stayed up way too late watching the results roll in. So, this year I made a plan to keep myself distracted! I queued a whole season of Top Chef that I haven’t seen before to watch this afternoon until my kid goes to bed. I set up parental controls on my phone to disable social media after 7 p.m. so we can watch Shin Godzilla in peace. On top of all that I started a new save of Breath of the Wild and got past the plateau in case I can’t get to sleep and need some gaming comfort food.
So yeah, get out and vote if you do it safely and in good conscience, then take care of yourselves! Any results you could see by staying up late will be around in the morning!
My workplace is a polling place today and it’s been very slow. I’m hoping that’s just the nature of people sending absentee/mail-in ballots or being at work at the moment, but I’ve only seen a few people who have refused to wear a mask while voting which has been a pleasant surprise given the conservative attitudes nearby.
Regardless of the outcome, the fact that it’s a nail-biting close race just tells you the neoliberal positions just don’t cut it, regardless of the opposition.
Just take care of yourselves. Lots of down ballot wins tonight and good policy won out.
We’ve had a lot of such “final statements”, but the fact remains, the Democratic Party would rather lose to a Republican than let a leftist win. That’s their role.
But who is that person? There’s a reason the “great” Democrats are all ancients: Biden, Hillary, Chuck, Nancy. What future do these people have? Who is the prince waiting in the wings? We’ve seen them. They’re all shades of pitiable. None of them could beat the left.
The next four years are the last gasp of the center - if they get it at all. You either go right or left.
Kamala Harris. That’s why she’s the VP. And it doesn’t matter what the Dem primary voters want (it won’t be her) because the party will straight up fabricate vote totals like they did in Iowa, Michigan, and Massachussetts.
When posed with your decision, the party will go right.
Harris couldn’t win a state on her own and it seems Biden lost votes compared to Hillary in the groups she was supposed to shore him up on. She’s a loser. She isn’t it.
Biden was always a primary loser before he was VP. But the point is, the Democratic party will go to any length to stop a leftist from winning the primary, even if it dooms them in the general. The only way to change that is an aggressive mass movement willing to utilize direct action - not just letter campaigns, get out the vote, and street marches - to literally force the Democrats to concede.
Biden obviously isn’t it, but the narrative that Bernie should have won the primary if not for interference is something I’m uneasy about.
Is it frustrating that all the centrists dropped at Obama’s request? Yes, absolutely, but the projections on 538, etc. had already turned when Biden won South Carolina. But it’s also clear that Democratic voters ultimately preferred a more central candidate. In just pure vote count, Biden almost doubled Bernie’s total. I’m skeptical that literally twice as many votes as his opponent can be blamed on the DNC. Bernie didn’t do well among black voters at any point and young people still didn’t come out at a greater rate than older people. Some of that is suppression, but I also think some is on him.
I’m also skeptical that Bernie necessarily would have won this election. Biden won all the states we’re waiting for calls on in the primary. Could Bernie have flipped Cuban voters in Florida who don’t like socialism? Doubtful to me. So what state is he flipping that Biden is winning, because he lost to Biden in Georgia and the Midwest? If his voters didn’t come out in the primary, how is he motivating them and changing that for the general? 538 said earlier tonight that theoretical polls had Bernie winning vs. Trump, but by fewer points than Biden. If the polling error was the same as it was for Biden tonight he’d be getting crushed.
Frankly this election has me super concerned. Medicare for all is a popular position theoretically, but I think as soon as Republican politicians organize against it as “socialism” it’s going to have a hard time as a main running point.
Electorally we’re basically fucked. How can you educate voters if you’re competing with so much corporate money? Prop 22 is maybe the most disheartening thing that happened last night, because it was a vote Uber and friends bought. An anti-worker measure passed in our bluest state because of a massive misinformation campaign. The Dems are barely winning against a historically unpopular opponent. A half competent Republican is going to absolutely kill them.
I’m pro-Bernie. I want more socialist positions from Democratic candidates. But I don’t know how those popular positions can compete with the misinformation campaign that’s inevitably going to be run against them in a national election. The right-wing propaganda machine is extremely powerful. That this election is even close when the incumbent has been hugely unpopular is terrifying.
A lot’s gotta change in the next 4 years. I’m gonna get more involved. We’re gonna have to fix this through a lot more than just voting. Just dunno how much is possible.
DSA candidates won 26 out of 30 of their national races. Leftist propositions like drug decriminalization, public transportation, and minimum wage increases were huge successes in most states, even red ones.
The weak link here is, and always has been, the core of the Democratic party. “Reach across the aisle” senators failed spectacularly, and despite the incumbent administration killing a quarter million citizens in a bungled response to a pandemic, Biden is on track to barely squeak out a win in what should have been a historic blowout of an election.
Their focus has been creating a refuge for neocons that can’t cut it in the new fascist brand of the Republican party, and pushing against the burgeoning leftist populism growing in the country. Don’t let these hawks and grifters try to tell you what people actually want right now.
I love to see drug decriminalization and minimum wage propositions pass, but I can’t help but be deeply, profoundly, cynical and depressed about these results.
If I’ve got this right:
One of the weakest candidates in Dem party history just barely squeaked out a victory (maybe) against a murderous criminal. Meanwhile, the people actually in charge of enforcing a President’s will are all pretty much the same people as last time, representatives who will immediately shoot down any legislation that even smells vaguely equitable.
That these propositions won in red states honestly concerns me quite a bit. Like in Florida, they voted to increase minimum wage while also broadly voting Republican.
The Democrats support policies those people theoretically want and still can’t get them to actually vote for them. These voters want socialism in everything, but if you call it socialism then it goes nowhere. Don’t know how to bridge that gap.
And, no offense, but calling poll data from 538 or info from the NYT “hawks and grifters” does not help anybody. They absolutely fuck a lot up, but I was literally just referencing polling data and voting results that said , at least in a national election, Bernie would have had a lot of issues, too. Don’t dismiss information just because it disagrees with the future you want to see. I want the same policies. Information helps us bridge the gap between what we want (blue Florida, Michigan, etc.) and the reality (Biden won almost every swing state in primary, Cuban Republican voters swung Miami red and will never vote for Bernie with Castro comments and general “socialism is bad”).
I don’t want to Dems to shift right. Candidates like McGrath in that vein are absolutely failures and I agree. But socialism has electoral problems, too. Bernie got half as many votes as Biden / moderate Democrats as a whole in the primary, even though he supported more popular positions. How do you fix that?
I guess I’m not optimistic about the future of leftwing politics on a national scale in the next, say, 10 years. It’s going to take a lot more victories on the more local scale, like those good DSA results you talked about, to get voters to understand “socialism” isn’t inherently evil. The messaging from Democrats clearly isn’t landing when they’re losing close Senate races despite backing popular policy.
I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that about half a million more Illinois voters would rather keep a flat income tax than implement one that would force the wealthy to pay more. Disappointed probably isn’t even the right word. Now they’re probably going to have to increase the flat rate at some point to try and make a dent in the deficit. I don’t know what they would have to do to convince people considering that the campaign to get it passed was mostly self funded by our billionaire governor. I’m getting more tired just thinking about it.
