Assuming he abides by constitutional law, this will be his final term.

most Americans voted for a man they have every reason to believe is a rapist.

Minor quibble, but Trump won ~75 million votes by current count. Out of our population of 330 million people (including ineligible voters) that is 22.7%.

So no, most Americans did not vote for him.

I don’t fully agree with this, but I agree with enough of it that it doesn’t really matter. To add to it, now is the ideal time to push for reform in party leadership, after a major loss.

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

I just wanted to highlight this statement. He’s absolutely right.

Trump and his supporters use “unity” as a euphemism for conformity, expecting marginalized groups to suppress their identities.

How do dems manage that one?

Also not sure how dems enable fascist tactics, when one person-one vote is a primary platform position.

That last line was the funniest thing I’ve read in the past few days, so thank you for that.

People like to focus on economic factors because they’re easily quantifiable. More vague factors disassociated from economic lifestyle are difficult to quantify, so harder to study and talk about. By way of example, though, when someone really hates black people, that’s not economic, it’s personal. It’s something else entirely. Men wanting power over women isn’t economic. Even immigration complaints aren’t really economic, that’s just an excuse to cover up much less defensible reasoning.

Not very much stock yet.

Accusations flying around on the internet based on whatever people’s imaginations can come up with is something we should expect at this point. Making shit up on the internet is about as easy as activities get, just in general.

If any actual evidence is presented, that’s when it becomes more worthwhile to seriously consider the possibility.

Let’s not forget other inflationary impactors. Russian energy coming off the broader market, Ukrainian food exports being offline for a year, a major shipping route through the Red Sea becoming more expensive to navigate, and even smaller things like a certain ship getting itself lodged sideways in a major global shipping artery for a little bit. Not even to speak of existing tariffs in the US that never came off.

Lots of individual factors stressing an already pandemic-stressed situation.

It’s partly a coping mechanism. I agree its no longer politically advantageous, but in the free world people can say what is on their mind, and this is apparently it. If consequences stem from that, then that is also part of freedom.

Is what it is.

They believed some of Trump’s bullshit. I suspect this was because they were exposed to more of that bullshit than any counter-messaging. This could be due to isolation from traditional sources of information.

Ultimately, I have to pin that on the Harris campaign. I wanted the prosecutor to prosecute the case against the criminal. But to do that you have to show up to the courtroom. Where is the courtroom these days? It’s not on CNN or 60 Minutes, it’s wherever the jury is hanging out. That’s online. Trump showed up there a lot more than she did.

There’s around 2 million Gazans still alive. That’s a lot of ethnicity still to be cleansed if cleansing is the goal.

I didn’t say 330 million registered voters. I said 330 million people, as in total population of the country including all nonvoters and ineligible.

At any rate, I don’t think any singular factor dominated, each person has their own mix of issues. Economy was a big one, including things like rent prices that the feds have little control over in our system. Gaza was a smaller one, definitely. There’s at least a dozen more.

Polls cannot really accurately capture this, they’re too clumsy a tool. Focus groups can though.

There are around 50 million registered dems in the country and Harris is currently sitting at around 70 million votes. Our problem is everyone else in a country with 330 million people.

Fine, technically true I suppose. But when you gut something that comprehensively and change its thrust, I think it’s a little disingenuous to call it the same thing. It had all the workers rights stuff stripped out of it.

edit: Disingenuous on the bill author’s part, not yours. Though tbf, they did rename it.

On the arms shipments, we may try lawsuits via the Leahy Law if the ethnic cleansing ramps up. The way the law is written, it actually looks at arms shipments all the way down to the granular level of individual military units. It does not say arms cannot be exported to countries engaging in war crimes, it specifically says individual military units that commit war crimes cannot receive arms. If they choose to engage in a broader campaign of organized displacement out of Gaza or starvation in places where combat has largely died down, a larger number of military units could potentially become implicated, which could maybe make a lawsuit more feasible. We’ll have to see.

Regarding AIPAC, since Citizen’s United determined that monetary donations are a form of speech, this requires either an amendment or recapture of the Supreme Court. Otherwise Americans are allowed to lobby the government for whatever they wish, even if they are doing so at the behest of a foreign government. They have to disclose that, but so long as they do, they are simply exercising their Constitutional rights as perceived by the current Supreme Court. This isn’t going away any time soon, the current law is very clear and pretty much ironclad, rooted in the Constitution itself via the Bill of Rights.

Some good answers already. To add, in the media sphere Pod Save America and their related branches is a liberal progressive media organization that tries to run counter to the conservative media ecosystem, trying to ride the line between policy wonkery and approachability.

No, not excuses, simply doubt. Manchin has a long record in the Senate as a moderate, Clinton-style dem. He’s even voted against abortion rights. Rather than corruption, I think he’s just semi-conservative, he even voted with Trump around 50% of the time during his first term. That is not typical for a democrat, it’s quite unusual actually.

Ah, that’s orchestration, which you just said was not happening. You are insinuating that most of them are neoliberals who simply put forward a chosen sacrificial scapegoat in some sort of planned scheme to deceive the American public. Strong claims require evidence, otherwise they are simply convenient ideas we can adopt to oversimplify a messy world and make ourselves feel better.

If that’s true, then the bill failed by a slim margin. It almost passed, and had the support of the majority of the democratic party, including passing the House of Representatives. This is an important detail.