Harris lost. The Old FART won… again. I can almost accept that, but what I can’t accept is the way it’s being reported and discussed. Setting aside the notion of treating Trump as just another garden-variety politician, why haven’t we seen more analysis of the hamstringing that Democratic voters have endured and how it contributed to Harris’s loss? The circular firing squad is ready, aimed, and firing, but what about a real conversation about the anti-democratic tactics employed by the Republican Party?
I’d love to hear what all y’all think of the following issues.
Voter Suppression Laws
For years now, we’ve been hearing about Republican voter suppression laws: requirements for voter IDs, reduced early voting times, fewer polling places, and all sorts of obstacles.
As the votes were counted, much was made of Harris underperforming Biden in 2020. Did anyone stop to consider the effect that voter suppression laws might have had on her, especially in Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Wisconsin?
In the blizzard of reporting, punditing, gloating, and finger-pointing since the election, it’s tough to keep track of it all in real time. Yet, you’d think some eager-beaver reporter or sharp-tongued liberal talking head would have brought this up amid all the chatter. If you’ve come across any serious discussions about it, please let me know!
Voter Roll Purges
Just before the election, Virginia purged 1,600 people from its voter rolls, with the case making it all the way to the Supreme Court, where it got the blessing of the MAGA sextuplets. Much was made of how Harris barely won Virginia and how her poor performance is reflective of Democratic Party missteps.
Virginia’s purge was just one of dozens in many Republican-controlled states. Might those purges have something to do with the outcome of the election? Am I the only one thinking about this?
It can’t be just me, can it? Surely, somebody smarter, wiser, and with a helluva lot more resources is investigating the impact of these purges, right? Tell me it isn’t just the rat-fucking electioneers at the Republican Party gloating over how well their evil plan to “win” the election worked. Tell me there are Democrats thinking about this, too.
The Russian Disinformation Campaign
Throughout the election, we heard sporadic reports of Russian-led disinformation campaigns. With Musk “Frankensteining” Twitter to deny the left an organizing tool and amplify Putin’s fake messaging, has anyone looked into how much damage the Russian propaganda, hoaxes, and fake news stories did to Harris and the Democrats?
The Over-Performing Under Ticket
In the post-election analysis, pundits have all sagely observed how the Democratic Senate candidates performed better than Harris. Many of them still lost, but by smaller margins. If Harris wasn’t the problem, they stroke their chins and conclude, then why didn’t they perform as badly as she did? Ha! They’ve run circles around us logically.
Could it be that there were “ticket splitters” voting for Trump but also for Democratic Senate candidates? Trump-Gallego voters in Arizona? Trump-Tester voters in Montana? Seriously? What? Does that make any sense?
Are there “shotgun” voters who voted for Trump but not in any other races? Who would vote for Trump and not vote straight Republican? Doh! They’re Trump supporters; of course, they’d screw the other Republicans on the ballot. Is that what happened?
I’m a part-time blogger and a full-time citizen living in Cambodia, so some of my sources are pretty limited and often a full day behind the States. In spite of my best efforts, I haven’t heard a peep about any of these issues from my bunker, where I’m licking my wounds and hoping to wake up from this nightmare like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
I’d love to hear from y’all on these and other election strangeness and not about how Harris was in a bad situation or Biden was deeply unpopular. That analysis smells a lot like Tuesday’s garbage.
Image Attribution
The image was found on UEN Press’ Foundations of Aural Skills page using a DuckDuckGo Creative Commons License search.
The Psy of Life 
all but one of our voting places simply disappeared this year….the rolls were purged several times and I personally had to re=register twice. We had to drive by crowds of “militia” and trumpers with bullhorns and signs all screaming to vote “the right way” or else. The “red” states have all become fascist and seem to think brown-shirted behavior and rhetoric is appropriate. And even though this behavior was appalling and frankly frightening, there were zero “news” stations covering it here. No one but us knew what happened and when calling on the news stations, no one cares!
Yes, there were ticket splitters……….and yes there were people voting the green party and libertarian because…….racism, ya know? Southerners can not abide an “uppity nigger” and poor Kamala, being extremely intelligent is classified that way. They may not have voted for idiot trump but in effect they handed him the presidency through their throwaways.
They seem to think “project 2025” is just a code name for fear mongering democrats and trump will be their savior. They “remember” when they could buy cheap milk and eggs and haven’t a clue what a “tariff” is…but it must be good because trump wants them. They blame Joe for high prices and COL, and do not remember it was under trump that the economy tanked. Tell ya what….I WISH I was living somewhere other than the “good old USA”…it isn’t good anymore and I doubt it ever will be again.
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Howdy Silver!
That’s exactly what I’m talking about, so thank you for sharing some solid evidence of voter suppression. It baffles me how well-informed reporters are not pursuing this as an angle of explanation when everyone is interested. Those stories would garner as many clicks, shares, and likes as Harris is an idiot that’s why she lost stories that we’re seeing now.
However, I think you’re underestimating the misogyny factor. Yes, race played a factor. There is no doubt about that, but I’ve long held that the 2016 election demonstrated that misogyny is a stronger force in the American social fabric than racism. Of course, the thirty year long Republican smear campaign against Clinton didn’t help. With Harris no one needed to say anything about her race or gender, though. It’s baked in. There was a Latino radio host I heard talking about how Latino men calling his show would say they would never vote for Harris or a woman for president. It was the mas macho thing in Latin culture.
With 70-odd percent of the electorate reporting that they thought the country was heading in the wrong direction, when all objective metrics said that it was going in a good direction, it is easy to imagine the emotional calculus of we need a “strong” leader who can turn the country and a woman just won’t be able to do it. I can see that as the unconscious reasoning leading to… but I just can’t. I can’t see any reason any living human being would ever vote for Trump. I can’t. I just can’t.
Blog on Sibling!
Jack
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We have known for a long time that Republicans have been trying to rig elections by Gerrymandering and every other means they can think of, and that their accusations of Democrats stealing elections is pure projection. This time around, they were actively encouraging a cottage industry of challenging voter’s registrations en mass, an flooding election officials with public information requests, quite aside from official purge efforts.
So, why are we not hearing hearing reporting and analysis of all that? Like any other form of critical thinking, it’s hard. Finding opinionators to fill the time slots of 24/7 “news” to hash over all the usual suspects, from, “Biden shouldn’t have run for the second term at all.”, to, “It was all about the price of milk and eggs.”, is so much easier. There are so many of them just begging to be on TV and talk as if they know something.
And, at this point, really digging into the voter suppression and misinformation would have to include something of a Mea Culpa for not doing more of it all along.
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Howdy Bob!
Admittedly I haven’t actually consumed much media since the election. On the one hand, busy. On the other, I can’t stomach it. And, on the third, I’m hoping I’ll wake up and find it was all just a nightmare. But, I haven’t seen anything about the regarding voter suppression even on reliably liberal sites like MSNBC, the Daily Kos, and others. The closest I could find was an NPR article outlining reasons Harris loss and citing an uptick in white voters as a percentage of the electorate for the first time in decades… um voter suppression anyone?
The lack of investigative reporting on the issue I find as disturbing as the continuing coverage of Trump and the Republicans as “normal” as in normal for a democracy. I actually heard someone on NBC News on the Last Day of Voting say, if America wants a strong man… as if that was okay… as if, what are you going to do when a democracy backslides. Someone followed up with, it’s the will of the people.
Fuck me. The first casualty in the fight for democracy was the press. They left us long ago.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Part of the problem is, I think, that the liberal and the press have been fighting the stolen election BS for so long (and unsuccessfully) that turning around and accusing the other side of stealing one sounds so much like becoming like them. Ant that, is the genius of the persistence of the claims of voter fraud.
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Howdy Bob!
I agonized over how to word the post for just that reason. It is the genius of it because it deletitimizes accusations against you and legitimizes your accusations.
The press is only too happy to both sides the accusations, too.
Huzzah!
Jack
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It is the essence of gaslighting to accuse the other of what you are doing or planning. AT this point, there is no point in trying to tell those Trump voters what is going to happen to them in the first months of the new year. They won’t believe it. We have to wait of the sticker shock to hit them where it hurts, because it will, on so many fronts. Then, they might begin to suspect that they have elected a wrecking ball aimed at them. ” But he said he would fix it.”, they will cry, to which the answer is, “Yes, but he didn’t say for whom.”.
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Howdy Bob!
I’m starting to formulate THOUGHTS on how to respond. My first ideas are to do a deep dive into the propaganda playbook that has the Republicans in the ascendency and adopting some of those tactics only ethics washing them.
The next thing is to try and get the media to stop sanetizing Trump-speak and openly calling MAGA politicians liars. Not going to happen in the access-dependent press, though.
And, the last bit is to try and diagnose the real problem. Because if the real problem is the success of the Republican voter suppression efforts and insulating themselves from electoral accountability, how do we circumvent that, especially without a popular press to help get THE MESSAGE out?
I’m not as dark as I was earlier in the week, but I’m still pretty fucking dark, my friend.
Blog on Sibling!
Jack
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Our established press and media are incapable of effectively fighting the fire hose of lies in social media environment. They don’t have the bandwidth, and they haven’t figured out how to operate in that space. I suspect that the answer is in something like guerilla cyber warfare that takes the battle of the message to where the conflict is being waged.
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Howdy Bob!
I don’t think the legacy, for-profit, access-based media care about doing anything other than continuing the status quo.
I was going to say that nature abhors a vacuum because we have an accurate news vacuum, but too much of that space is filled by social media algorithms that are guided by unknown agendas or, at least, the for-profit agenda, Russian disinformation campaigns, influencers looking to make a buck, and internet trolls. However, I think that the liberal “resistance” will coalesce around a social media platform — why do you think Musk bought Twitter and the governments been trying to ban Tik Tok? — and something will fill the information vacuum on the left. We’ve been through several waves of things: blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, Substack. Who knows, maybe blogging will make a comeback?
Blog on, Sibling!
Jack
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The guy who created Twitter and lost it to Musk has launched Bluesky as the anti-X platform. Reportedly, the Swifties are flocking there from X.
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There are like three platforms of similar social media sites that people from X left for. Maybe it will consolidate around Bluesky. I don’t know. I haven’t been very interested in social media lately. For a few years there, Facebook and Twitter were fun, but after a while, it just started feeling like work. I’ve tried a couple of times to go back to it, but just can’t seem to sustain. I’ll email and message he people I’m interested in keeping up with, I guess.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Mastodon has been out of the news for a while, but that sort of system still has potential. Unfortunately, the way it works is too wonky for most folks, and the limit on postings is 500 characters, not words.
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Howdy Bob!
I just saw a headline of Vox proclaiming BlueSky as new and improved Twitter, so there’s that.
I used Mastodon for a long time, but it was wonky and I never had the feeling that I “knew” what I was doing on it. I always felt like I was missing something. BlueSky is exactly like Twitter. Threads is sort of like Twitter.
I just signed up for a BlueSky’s account. It looks like I’ll be social mediaing again until I get sick of it and quit again.
Blog on, Sibling!
Jack
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I’ve never really figured out how to get connected with people on Mastodon, and I didn’t go there for some months, only to come back and find nothing new in my feed. I’ve never done Twitter, Instagram, and only used Messenger with FB Friends occasionally. Let me know what you think of BlueSky.
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BlueSky is Twitter. It works just the same. After all, they were both made by the same guy. Right now, it is nicer than X. People are less reflexively critical and more encouraging. There is a wide variety of topics being discussed and some easy ways of finding them.
It is an enjoyable social media experience, but it is still social media, which to me starts to feel like a chore after a while instead of something that I enjoy.
That said, I’d be happy to expand our friendship to BlueSky.
Jack
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I’m loving the exodus from Twitter to other platforms. Hopefully it financially cripples Musk.
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He’s got upwards of 500 billion dollars depending on stock valuations. There really is no financially crippling him, but Schadenfreude is the sweetest of all the spites! We can but hope and dream that the smug bastard gets the comeuppance he so richly deserves.
Jack
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If you’re on Bluesky, look me up under The Psy of Life. I searched names that I thought you might be using, but came up empty.
Jack
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I’m going to have a look at it.
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Look me up when you do. I’m under the moniker, The Psy of Life.
Jack
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Purging voters just before the election had to have an effect but nobody but nobody is talking about this. BIDEN & HARRIS SHOULD BE RAISING THE FUCKING ROOF ABOUT THIS BUT NO! THEY’RE BOWING DOWN TO THE ORANGE MONSTER & I’M ABSOLUTELY APPALLED.
We’re fucked. Absolutely fucked.
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We’re absolutely fucked in every way imaginable. There is no turning back. Even if Trump stroked out tomorrow, there is no turning back from the Republican Dystopia.
Jack
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