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Explaining the loss away due to dumb voters

I'm doing nothing of the sort. You're the one insisting on absolutes, I'm just questioning the absoluteness. Hence "I do suspect a portion", which isn't ignoring anything you said, just suggesting there are also other things happening.

Somewhere along the way, someone needs to keep up with an electorally popular alternative to both the status quo and nativist populism.

I don't think anybody is arguing against that.

Must be cool to be so clever that you can completely ignore what is staring you in the face.

I'm just questioning whether you can make such a blanket claim. Voters can be as unreliable about their motives (or even about how they actually voted) in exit polls as in pre-election polls, besides which at least some have said it's not his policies they care about, both yesterday and over the previous years.

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There was one Latino voter who said that he didn't like the racism and the wall and all that, but felt Trump was a family values person (!) and Harris wasn't. Not sure how much that was him just taking Trump at his word, and how much was a trans rights thing (there was some coded hint at that). I do suspect a portion of the electorate know he's a shit but think he's a "normal" heterosexual male shit and that's more acceptable to them than how they see Harris.

It was over when the last vote was cast, but we didn't have much information about that half a day ago. One of the mechanics in my local bike shop predicted that Trump was going to win because Elon Musk has enough information on paedo blood-drinking elites to blackmail them into not interfering with the election; the result doesn't validate his reasoning.

The simple and overwhelming explanation is that the majority of American voters preferred Trump's policies.

Some of the Trump voters being interviewed said they really didn't like quite a few of his policies, but felt his basic values aligned more with theirs than Harris's did. Even in his core MAGA base, there seem to be a fair number of people who don't care what he says or what his policies are, or even whether or not he delivers on them; they just like his style and hate the same people he hates. Your explanation is simple, but I'm not sure it's overwhelming.

Typical. Bernie, the coaster brake guy, is always being ignored.

Hunting lions in particular is highly regulated and requires special training.

I wasn't arguing with you, just commenting that even American conservatives don't take what they say about communists literally.

American conservatives were making the "Cultural Marxism" argument long before Jordan Peterson gave it a name. It if isn't explcitly and loudly anti-commie, it's pro-commie because it let's the Reds sneak in, and therefor commie. So they often know they're labelling people as things they aren't, but see it as justified because the gutless libs are proxy communists. It's an ironclad way of thinking; you can point out that their target is not an actual communist as often as you like, because it doesn't matter.

And in half a day Johnson went from the clown who was dropped from the Channel 4 coverage to somebody with powerful friends in America. He'll be looking for whatever he can get.

I thought "Wisconsin, ah well" was that.

There are more constructive ways to deal with the crushing disappointment than finding people here to blame.

More than four, most likely.

Pennsylvania result, ah, well. In the vanishing chance she wins all the remaining swing states, more than just MAGA hats are going to disbelieve it.

Calmly watching the Wisconsin count, even though it looks increasingly likely Trump has it. Don't see the point in the panic, which has been doing on since before midnight here.

Thank you for some rare sanity, Al. If Harris squeaks it in, the kind of thinking that dominates this thread is just what Trump is counting on when he contests the result.

The fact that Trump is leading in Georgia and Pennsylvania with 94% and 87% of the votes counted, respectively, now that is significant. If that holds up, Harris needs to win all four of the other swing states.

Trump 105
Harris 25

Calm down, that's a silly panic that early in the results. At that point, the only states that had declared were solid Blue or Red ones that almost never flip. The states report in in an order determined by geographical location and population size, basically, so the college numbers swing back and forth wildly until the countis done. Jesus.

Even now, the only significan result has been North Carolina - a swing state Trump won in 2020 and still lost the election. The most you can say right now is that the results so far (if these calls are accurate) is much the same as in 2020.

Meanwhile, all @Soul 's "voter shift" map shows is that views may have become more entreched in states that were already solidly Blue or Red.

This thread has turned into a chicken coop where one chicken saw a red woollen cap blowing about in the wind and ran around shouting "A fox! A fox!" and gpt the whole lot laying square eggs.

This is all assuming Trump hasn't changed the constitution to make the presidency hereditary before he snuffs it.

Well, they're defnitely not good at it. Some of the things being tried are crazy and ill-considered (although that particular technique is most likely to exagerrate Trump's support). But I don't even think this particular issue is that significant when it comes to polling inaccuracy. The biggest problem they have is that response rates - people willing to take the phone call, respond to texts and so on - have dropped below one percent of those they try to contact. This means the sample that the pollsters can work with is pretty much worthless, and they try to compensate for that with various dubious models.

When so few people are willing to pick up the phone, it wouldn't help even if they all told the truth.

They can correct for demographics but not for this variation within any and every demographic segment.

If this is difficult to account for, how can you be so sure that this time they're under-correcting and not over-correcting or even luckily getting it right? What magic crystal ball do you have that they don't?

All thos saying "But the bookies!" might want to read this. Not only are malign players gaming the system, but some are planning to use gamed odds as more evidence to back a "Stop the steal" coup.

Never underestimate the lure of the American dream that everyone has the chance to make it big.

Absolutely. That said...

Despite the poverty gap increasing people assume at some point their numbers will come up on the lottery.

Sadly, while this seems to be true for some of them, I think others just feel proud to live in a country where there are ultra-rich people, in the same way they're proud that it has a poweful military or wins a lot of Olympic gold medals.

Since it's free, you could take it now, play the available things you want to play and then sell it later to subsidise the cost of a disc version. Or sell it immediately, still in its box, to get more money towards the disc version.

if she tries to tack to the centre he will scream betrayal, and he will be constantly working to engineer a fresh leadership challenge based on any sign of wokeness

And if she tacks even further to the right, are they going to be playing leapfrog in their attempts to outdo each other?