Kamala Harris dips in key states, making US election contest a toss-up

Honestly I thought this would be a slam dunk for Trump after the assassination photo, then he completely failed to capitalize on that, then I thought it would be a slam dunk for Harris, then she did absolutely nothing to make her likeable and got an endorsement from Cheney. How are both presidential candidates so bad at running for president

Neither have anything to offer and they know it.
- The mask is peeling off, Musk is already blatantly bragging about being the "shadow president" behind Trump like its something to be proud of.
- all the years of hysteria and bullshit from both parties and american voters are about to come out probably in record numbers to deliver the same result as a random number generator app
  maybe Americans are smarter than I thought lol
From what I understand, Trump actually got chilled by the attempt, right? Like he actually had to stop and think about the world and his place in it for the first time in his life. I don't know, I'm sorry to anthropomorphize a republican. I haven't really been following. But he's supposedly talented at reading the room, right?

I may not be Dale Earnhardt
But I'm about to crash into the wall because I couldn't turn left

I may not be Johnny Knoxville... But I ate shit, on live TV

All Harris had to do was to even pretend to be progressive, but she had to jump on the ghoul train in order to impress 7 columnists. Why do they think that Negraponte and Cheney are good endorsements?

The dems were on a slight roll when they chose to do what the 'left' told them by replacing Biden and choosing Waltz for VP, but then decided to double down to pander to the right.

- They can capture the donor class behind closed doors. This move reeks of DC staffer conventional wisdom
Bribers. They bring war profiteering bribers.
It really is one of the most incredible unforced errors of all time.
Her sister is married to an Uber executive. Her inner circle is a buch of people deeply involved with McKinsey, major banks, the Ford Foundation, etc. She is personally deeply embedded in the donor class, it's not even about appeasing them, it's the fact that she IS them
It’s the donors, it’s always the donor money that does this to them.
- Exactly. They’ve siphoned off a lot of GOP donors and see that as a continually valid strategy
Considering how unhinged Wehrmacht Waltz is I don't think that was a roll... but then again the bar is in hell
- As far as I can tell Walz's one good point is that he doesn't personally seem to have China derangement syndrome.
Not even pretend, she could've just given no comments and people would've filled in the blanks themselves. Instead she's very, very clear that her administration will just be 4 years of Republican policies.

Anyone notice their polling numbers started tanking as soon as it came out that

was consulting their campaign?

Or maybe it was the Cheney announcement? Or Walz's comments on Iran and Israel?

Boy I'm so excited for another 2016, I can already hear the quiet panicking and finger pointing on election night.

They switched from calling Republicans "weird" to being like "Okay, but we love Republicans, we're adopting a bunch of their policies, and we'll have Republicans in our administration" and the numbers dropped. Wow who could have seen this coming!?
And yes, all of this sounds like HRC's strategists.
- When you put it that way
- "We agree that immigrants are scary and dangerous, just don't be weird about it, kay?"
- I’m pretty sure it’s actually Biden’s team that has been recruited. Though to be fair, Biden’s team was probably Hillary’s old team…so yeah…
oh those fingers are already pointed at us and have been since the beginning.
you know those wacky oversized foam fingers? they just went ahead and taped them to us a decade ago and relieved themselves of the need to ever self-crit
it timed pretty well with the VP debate (didn't watch) but I would be surprised if that resulted in much difference given the large gap in favorability for the VPs
somehow last election felt like this too
trump will always be the dark horse to a fucking horrible democrat (all of them)
- At least with Biden there was a gesture to the left, even if simply because he had to solidify his support after the primary with Bernie and Warren
  Now they've just completely dropped all pretext of being a left-friendly party and have doubled down on being center-right. The only thing not present from 2016's run is the open derision of left-leaning "bernie-bro" dems - but even then, there is a pretty deafening silence that's hard not to interpret as contempt.
  To me this feels way more like 2016 than 2020, but my memory might not be serving me that well.
i wish i didn't have look forward to the threads from the diet reddit instances of the lemmyverse; but it's clear that .worlders are no different than redditors (aka your typical uninformed liberals) and i suspect that those threads will be the only source of joy out of this entire election.
i wish i wasn't childish told-you-so pleasure that will be definitely fleeting since liberals can only convince themselves to learn about their situations and usually don't bother.

You're telling me that Dick Cheney's endorsement didn't catapult her to an easy win? What is this world coming to smh

Dang it's almost like she was bottom-tier in the 2020 primaries for a fucking reason.

I wonder why. It must be Russian propaganda there is literally no other possible explanation!

Weird that their strategy of courting Republicans isn't working, given there's already a Republican candidate that appeals more broadly to Republicans (on account of saying out loud, "I'm a Republican").

Are democrats that clueless about politics? Americans love love LOVE the GOP. They’re more loyal to it than their wives.
If they actually cared about progressivism, it would be much easier to recruit a bunch of white men allies, register as republicans, hide your power level and claim you’re fash and when you get elected do all the progressive stuff behind everyone’s backs.
- There are a bunch of "moderate" Republicans that don't like Trump because he's an incompetent clown, they would rather have a competent fascist in power, I suppose that's who Kamala is trying to appeal to. But if you ask me, the moderate Republicans will still vote Trump for the party behind him. The Dems have people like Warren and Bernie in their party who might do something pro-labor once in 4 years, so just vote NSDAP no matter who.
Nobody could have predicted that Republicans weren't going to vote for a Black woman in the presidential elections.
After all, Republicans are famous for their acceptance of Black people and how well they treat women.

Turns out the "Im basically a republican in all but name" strategy didnt work out work so well when

will always prefers the big wet boi.

Demo are gonna lose this election, take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror and say "We've gotta get more genocidal."

literally the easiest election ever for the democrats, and they will still lose to fucking low energy trump lol

They probably think that Kamala wasn’t old and right wing enough. Next time they will select a 90 year old southern democrat who has dementia and that’s why he didn’t switch parties.

zombie strom thurmond
- We have zombie Strom Thurmond at home.
George Wallace Jr., if he's still alive. The bipartisan candidate.
Quick, somebody do the Jeb! map but for Joe Manchin.
They're gonna go with dick Cheney next aren't they 😭😭😭😭

I remember when a poll showed "Generic unnamed Democrat" polling 8% better than Biden in some places. It was clear as day that voters wanted literally anything but Biden. When Biden dropped out people thought they'd be getting their wish, but every day since then, Kamala just keeps telling us that she's gonna continue exactly what Biden did.

How is it not obvious to everyone that dems are controlled opposition?
Sure, they can reduce the imperial boomerang in reasonable amounts (but not too much) in their local places. But on a federal level they better lock in with the democrats to happily serve the American people all the exploitation they keep enthusiastically asking for.
- I think a lot of it is people wanting to believe otherwise. I noticed this in myself when the Walz picked was announced and there was this initial surge of enthusiasm. Democrats were doing this "Republicans are weird" bit that worked hilariously well and Walz had a record of progressive policies in his state.
  I live in Germany so US politics doesn't affect me as directly as it does Americans, but the tiny part in me that still holds on to naive, liberal ideas saw that and was like "Hey, maybe the West's descent into fascism will finally stop now and we can all go back to brunch! Wouldn't that be lovely? Wouldn't it be just lovely if the good guys took charge and you wouldn't have to worry about all the horrible things in the world anymore? Wouldn't it be nice to feel hope again after a year of unprecedented despair?"
  Personally I was way too jaded and disillusioned to truly buy into that, but I could tell that I wanted to believe.
- I don't even see them as controlled opposition anymore. They're competing (and generally friendly) fascist tendencies, nothing more- even the "reduce the imperial boomerang" is an overstatement, considering what we're actually talking about is them simply "not engaging in internal colonialism/oppression as much (in certain specific places)." Klanmala's history as a prosecutor is basically the textbook example of this.

Axios has an article out about infighting between Biden's and Harris's staff. I didn't post it because it was a nothingburger of a read, but I guess it's a sign they might be gearing up to pin a loss on Joe.

I mean it is at least partially his fault, but also it’s a fault that Harris can and should completely eliminate if she wanted to win
Why is he still president??? Fucking 25th amendment the man and you don’t have to worry about that anymore. And continuing to allow him to rule is an incredible failure of her basic responsibilities in her current job.
But she won’t do that because she supports all of his worst policies and opposes only his best, so if she got rid of him the ability to blame someone else goes away and it becomes obvious how bad she sucks.
- But if they 25th Biden, then Kamala can't serve her anointed 2 terms as president
I get the distinct feeling that either Joe is checked out completely and not helping consult her campaign at all (other than because he's toxic to her image), or Harris' team has decided to take the direction of Clinton against the Biden-team's objections.
They really have committed to a distinctly different strategy from Biden, so it isn't surprising at all that there'd be a lot of in-fighting.
- I keep forgetting that shambling corpse is still technically president. When was the last time he even appeared in public? Or had an interaction with someone that wasn't scripted and stage managed?
  I think the only reason they haven't 25th amendment'd his ass is because then Kamala would have to be president and take on all the baggage of the office right before the election. Not that it would make that much of a difference at this point...

Dems will lose to prove fealty to Israel

What other group will they talk down to next to rectify this?

It's like they're both trying to lose.

What’s even funnier is that all Kamala had to do was do the one thing democrats are good at: doing NOTHING! Just say they will take no more action in aiding Israel and Ukraine, and boom. EZ clap.
But no. Dems think that will “alienate the working class by being too woke” so they won’t do it.
- I dunno about that. The Republican Party is a political cockroach. It's unkillable. Every time they're cooked, they just survive inexplicably.
- NGL, that kind of explains why we get all the smuglord fascists saying “if you’re the counterculture, then why are all corporations so blue?”
  I know that in its current state the Working Families Party is just Democrats off-shoot, but I seriously hope they split.
- love your posts/POV, but disagree strongly.
  The Dems are not becoming/ cannot become Republicans. if fusionist republican orthodoxy was sufficient to win, the GOP would still be doing it; Paul Ryan would be in his second term as president. it's not, you need some popular juice, because only appealing to the donors is not sufficient. and yet, the Trumpist, pseduo-populist GOP still promises corporate/capital gains tax cuts; it will still be for exporting war and imperialism and deregulation of industry and markets, and there's no way it loses fully the donor class, which itself has different interests and constituents.
  the current harris attempt at triangulation only works, if it actually does, because Trump has unique weaknesses -- attempting to foment a constitutional crisis, instead of peacefully transferring power, and pissing off, in a personal way, prior GOP powerbases. harris can attempt to appeal to the Never Trumpers to squeak over this electoral line, but that won't be a viable long-term strategy: the WSJ readers will uniformly return to the GOP.
  if anyone is cooked, its these waffling dems. the Obama coalition is collapsing in real time: the demographic inevitability/ ascendency thesis is no more, as the dems are hemorrhaging support from non-whites. woke-capitalist/imperialist rhetoric will not be enough after Trump: if the dems can't provide material support to the non-college educated, many will be drawn to the inclusive, non-PMC-inflected cultural posture of the Trumpists.
- In other words, the Republican Party is cooked.
  I want this timeline to be the one where the GOP pivots towards MAGA social democracy.
Trump is scared of
, not sure what Harris's excuse is.

At this point i fully believen that for the wider world, American elections are pointless. Who gives a shit about the next administrator of US imperialism. Wether its Trump or Harris, blood will keep being sacrificed to the blood god that is capital. International law has proven itself meaningless when war crimes are being comitted by the west and its allies, so what are institutions like the UN and the ICC supposed to be? The fact that western media still treats this election as some extremely important global event, with live updates starting as far back as july shows the utter derangement of the average western liberal. The emperor has no clothes but the west is tripping over itself to praise his sense of fashion.

lose, you piece of shit

Congratulations Harris. Get ready to become more than a president. She will become light itself

I don't know if I'm online too much, and I'm definitely not smart enough to put things together, but it seems like these next few years will determine the next few decades and neither Trump nor Kamala wants to deal with that. To elaborate, war is on the horizon, the targets are China, DPRK, Iran, and Russia, and the events are already being set in motion. The wars will be both cumbersome, expensive, and potentially unpopular and blame and vitrol will be on whoever wins this next election. So with that said, neither party really wants to win nor deal with whatever turmoil comes from these upcoming conflicts. If Democrats want to keep the very little bit of legitimacy they have, they'd lose the next election , blame Trump for the wars and economic downfalls, and pick up whatever is left in 4-8 years.

My timelime might be off though.

I think both of them REALLY want to be president, Kamala for the sheer prestige of it and for being the first black women to do it, and Trump at this point as a personal interest in staying out of jail. I doubt either of them think war is on the horizon and if they do they probably believe they can avoid it (Kamala by continuing the ukraine war and trump by ending it)
- I doubt either of them think war is on the horizon and if they do they probably believe they can avoid it (Kamala by continuing the ukraine war and trump by ending it)
  I have to disagree here. Both sides have been at least drumming up support to attack Iran, unsure how this will look at the moment, but they agree that Iran is their "biggest" target and are not shy in saying so. That rhetoric tied with the unwavering support for isntreal gives either side the consent to target Iran.
If Democrats want to keep the very little bit of legitimacy they have, they'd lose the next election , blame Trump for the wars and economic downfalls, and pick up whatever is left in 4-8 years.
I've seen some people float this idea. The Democrats are throwing this election so they can get Gruesome Newsome to the White House in 2028.

Election wins don't just fall out of a coconut tree.

Islamophobia among liberals in 3, 2, 1...

Already happened. My mother the "progressive" "pacifist" said the "they've been fighting over this piece of land for thousands of years" shit to me and I lost my shit. This directly after saying the problem is how much foreign aid we send "the Jews". Like... Dems are beyond cooked.

If Kamala Harris loses to Trump, will it be more or less embarrassing than Hill-dawg's loss? Probably has to be worse, right?

no. Hillary faceplanting was embarrassing because of how unexpected it was; it's understood that Kamala very well may lose, there's just no way it can be embarrassing to the same degree.
I say worse absolutely. Trump is at like 10% power. He is a dry dry boy these days
It felt like Hillary was trying to lose.
"Like wipe my server with a cloth?" - Hillary

How the fuck are there still undecided voters, you'd think everyone at this point would have already cemented their opinions but it seems like there's just a good third of the USA running purely on vibes.

Americans are so idiosyncratic that I don't think you'd get a solid straight answer. My mother is currently in the third of undecided voters. She likes Trump because she despises Mexicans, but she also likes Harris because she feels like a Harris administration would involve a full UK annexation of Ireland.
Americans are not normal people
- would involve a full UK annexation of Ireland.
  How in the fuck
My buddy works for the dems currently, and I had made the joke about Dems doing vibes-based-politics a few times, and apparently, yes, they are doing vibes based politicking as a policy. They're told not to talk about issues but rather just how bad everything will be if she doesn't win. He tried to request talking points for different policies, and they literally don't have any.
I'm somewhere between "I'm worried Donald Trump will come for my hormones and force me to destransition" and "I want to see the democrats destroyed"
I'm wondering if polling companies are quietly bundling "none of the above" with "undecided".
I mean if you're the average American voter and your only care is "will I benefit more economically under Trump or Harris" the answer isn't immediately obvious. Anyone who's a single issue voter on Palestine doesn't have a super straightforward choice either, although I imagine most of them will vote third party or not at all.
Exactly, I don't really think there are a lot of people who are undecided. People aren't voting on individual issues anymore, there are two competing narratives regarding what the future of US should look like, and people either subscribe to one or the other. Anybody who is going to vote for Harris was already going to vote democrats regardless of who the candidate is because they think the republicans are destroying the country, and vice versa.
There are no undecided voters there are just liars and lonely people who think surveys count as human interaction.
- You underestimate the power of
  , most people are incredibly uninformed when it comes to politics.

Cool democracy when like 7% of the total population of the entire country determines the outcome of federal elections.

- There is only one Senate Parliamentarian, and she doesn't share power
  
  The wills of the Nine were lost to her long ago.

I don't believe the American people are good enough to reject genocide, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

Oh, and how is Nate Silver still around? I thought the humiliation of 2016 should have made him crawl under a rock to hide forever

I don't get why a 70/30 projection for Clinton should have humiliated him? He was more skeptical of Hillary than a lot of mainstream media. What should humiliate him are his dogshit analysis of political strategy and COVID stuff, not his projections
I thought the humiliation of 2016 should have made him crawl under a rock to hide forever
Huh? Silver was literally the only "serious" prognosticator who forecasted a possible upset; everyone else thought it was a no contest (Princeton gave it like a 99.5% "Bayesian" prediction for Hillary).
- Am I misremembering? Who was the statistician who predicted a slam dunk for Clinton and then later released a post about why he got it wrong?
I don't believe the American people are good enough to reject genocide, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.
Pretty much. Though even then it's also a toss-up, because the system genuinely has nothing to offer and anyone with sense knows it, Klanmala's "joy" and genocidal vibes can't replace the actual material conditions Trump is calling out (though he won't fix them either).
A bad country, with a bad society (many good people, but a profoundly and perhaps inherently sick and wretched society), and admittedly they'll get what they deserve (same counts for my country and the entire west TBF).