One down, 1460 to go.
I’m not sure that the pardons and sentence commutations are the big story, although that’s what the media are covering, including some mild comments by a handful of Republicans. Getting less media attention is the executive order putting all federal DEI workers on paid leave and effectively shutting down all government DEI activity. I have every expectation that we’ll soon see many more departures from basic human decency.
If the numbers I’ve seen on the WWW are true (I haven’t verified them myself), Trump squeeked by with a margin of just 1.5% of the popular vote; and it seems obvious to me that he couldn’t have achieved anywhere near that without the roughly 80% of Christian fundies voting for their god’s chosen one. All the other guesses, e.g., refusing to vote for a woman, white working class men being abandoned by the Democrats, although probably true, strike me as small potatoes by comparison.
I’m coming to the conclusion that the real problem we have is a faux religion that’s just an excuse to be prideful, hateful, self-satisfied DIEhards. I wish I could be more understanding; but I’m finding myself simply disgusted.
interestingly the eeoc was not put on leave in prep for termination, but instead transformed into a vehicle for letting creeps to tie up courts in claims they were discriminated against for being white or christian or transphobic. wotta hoot. still not laughing yet.
That’s certainly one way of putting it.
Another is: a winning margin over almost 2.3 MILLION in the (meaningless) popular vote, and in the bit of the election that actually counts, a margin of EIGHTY SIX electoral college votes – a larger winning margin that Biden had when he beat Trump in 2020. I do wish people would stop trying to slice and dice statistics to try to play down his victory. I get it, losing hurts, but trying to pretend the loss wasn’t as bad as it was is not a strategy for winning next time. (It’s my contention that a distressingly large portion of the not-quite-as-hard-right in the USA (the ones who call themselves “liberal” or “progressive” while continuing to e.g. permit executions to be carried out and torturers to escape prosecution) don’t actually care about winning, only the dopamine hit of feeling right.)
I think you have it backwards.
Turnout in 2024 was 63.9%, so there were ~238m people eligible to vote.
Of those, per a Pew study, about 1 in 4 are born-again or evangelical Protestants – so let’s say about 60 million of those. 80% of that would be 47 million.
So your contention appears to be that only about 30 million non-fundies voted Trump, compared to the 75 million for Harris (assuming the non-Trump voting fundies abstained, obvs).
I think the phrase called for there is “citation needed”.
It’ll be interesting to see whether any lessons are learned, what sort of candidate and what sort of campaign the Democrats put up for the 2028 election… if there is one.
(aside: when looking up some figures about the election, I checked out Wikipedia. It’s entertaining that Trump’s official presidential portrait (as used on Wikipedia) is practically indistinguishable from his mugshot, to the point that I thought it WAS his mugshot and Wikipedia were having a laugh.)
sonofrojblake @ # 3: It’s entertaining that Trump’s official presidential portrait (as used on Wikipedia) is practically indistinguishable from his mugshot…
I don’t want to spoil your amusement, but please consider that Trump very consciously chose that pose and expression for both pictures. He wants us to feel impressed by his tough-guyness – and knows that few of us know actual tough guys.
@2. I get it but his victory was not the landslide the media and conservatives are portraying it as either. The Dems loss in this election was not nearly as bad as the GOPs losses back in 2008 and 2012 (or the Dems back in 2004) yet they rebounded. Considering the global phenomena of most governing parties being swept away by historical landslides since the pandemic, the results are better than they should have been all things considered. Leadership void? Ok but that’s actually how it works. The GOP was leaderless not so long ago, ditto with Dems during the Bush era. Plus, Dems made gains in several states in the local and state level (plus in the US House). This means that Dems aren’t as “lost” as people say they are. Here in my state of Washington, Dems swept all statewide offices by comfortable margins (this is the first time such a feat has occurred in over half a century). Oregon saw progressive gains too. Voters will tire of Trump regardless (Obama was far more popular yet voters got tired of him) and Dems need to use that energy and smart messaging to take advantage. It’s what the GOP and Dems have done after their losses in the past. I understand the loss is still fresh but the sooner we get up, the better.
idk if it’ll help but he’s radical as fuck. the things he is doing are wildly savagely abnormal and unprecedented in us history. nobody who like normalcy likes creepy neonazi police state shit, which he has immediately implemented with executive orders. literally the only hope I have of dems reversing this is in how over-the-top the fucking nazi freaks go with their evil. feels like cheering for my legs to get chopped off. hate it.
sonofrojblake @2: it’s possible that I got the numbers wrong. As I said in the OP, “I haven’t verified them myself”. Indeed, I was just repeating what I read from inside my progressive bubble.
“…a winning margin over almost 2.3 MILLION in the (meaningless) popular vote…” — I don’t think it’s meaningless at all: the fact that he got a majority of the popular vote means that maybe the electoral college worked OK this time.
I’m guessing that the rest of your comment reads more into what I wrote than what I intended. I’m not saying that there weren’t any folks who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman, nor am I saying that there weren’t any working class white men who voted for Trump because they thought he could improve their condition (and were fooled into thinking that he cares about them). Indeed, from what I’ve read, had the Democrats not mostly abandoned poor white males, enough of them might well have put Harris over the top. I’m just saying that we also have a problem with religious nutters that might be even more important. I’ll admit that that’s just a guess.
BTW, I also agree with Bébé Mélange; it’s just that this old fart’s knee-jerk reaction is to put it less forcefully. 😎
” I don’t think it’s meaningless at all”
It doesn’t really matter what you think. You are objectively, provably wrong.
The electoral college is what decides the election. You may consider it flawed. But it “works” every time, no exceptions, in that it indicates who has won. You not liking the result doesn’t mean it hasn’t worked.
In fact, it’s worse than that: if you think about it even for a moment, the entire point of the electoral college system is to be able to deliver a result other than that indicated by the popular vote. Thus, when the candidate who didn’t win the popular vote nevertheless becomes president thanks to the electoral college, that’s not a failure, that’s an exemplar of the US electoral system working precisely as designed.
It is at root a deliberately racist system explicitly designed to dilute the Black vote (even before there was any such thing). If there was a left-wing party in the US, it would be an urgent priority to replace the system with something less obviously flawed. However, since there are only two parties in the US, one extreme hard right and the other even further right to the point of being literally openly supportive of actual Nazis, and they’re both satisfied with how often they win under the existing system, there’s no prospect of it ever being changed, despite the fact that the hard right party have lost twice in recent memory because of it (2000 and 2016).