2023-2024 Presidential, senate, house, state and city election thread

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Better but Not Stellar: Pollsters Faced Familiar Complaints, Difficulties in Assessing Trump-Harris Race
by W. Jospeh Campbell
November, 2024

Introduction:

(The Conversation) An oracle erred badly. The most impressive results were turned in by a little-known company in Brazil. A nagging problem reemerged, and some media critics turned profane in their assessments.

So it went for pollsters in the 2024 presidential election. Their collective performance, while not stellar, was improved from that of four years earlier. Overall, polls signaled a close outcome in the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

That is what the election produced: a modest win for Trump.

With votes still being counted in California and a few other states more than a week after Election Day, Trump had received 50.1% of the popular vote to Harris’ 48.1%, a difference of 2 points. That margin was closer than Joe Biden’s win by 4.5 points over Trump in 2020. It was closer than Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory in 2016, closer than Barack Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012.

There were, moreover, no errors among national pollsters quite as dramatic as CNN’s estimate in 2020 that Biden led Trump by 12 points.

Also discussed in the article was the inaccuracy of the survey conducted for the Des Moines Register by J. Ann Selzer and the relative accuracy of Atlas Intel.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/better-but ... ce-243336

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Donald Trump Has NOT Won a Majority of the Votes Cast for President
by John Nichols
November 18, 2024

Introduction:

(The Nation via MSN) Politics /

Donald Trump’s popular vote total has fallen below 50 percent, and his margin over Kamala Harris has narrowed considerably as all the votes are counted.

John Nichols

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Donald Trump declared in the early morning hours of November 6, 2024, after all the polls had closed. Indeed, he claimed that he had won “a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.” Trump was excited by the numbers showing him with well over 50 percent of the popular vote and establishing a wide lead over his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Unfortunately, for the president-elect, the United States takes time to count 155,000,000 million votes—give or take a million—and the actual result will rob Trump of his bragging points.

Trump can no longer claim that powerful mandate. By most reasonable measures, the beginning point for such a claim in a system with two major parties is an overwhelming majority vote in favor of your candidacy. Trump no longer has that.

Over the weekend, as California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states moved closer to completing their counts, Trump’s percentage of the popular vote fell below 50 percent. And his margin of victory looks to be much smaller than initially anticipated. In fact, of all the 59 presidential elections since the nation’s founding, it appears that—after all of the 2024 votes are counted—only five popular vote winners in history will have prevailed by smaller percentage margins than Trump.

Read more here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politic ... 7e8&ei=78

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Trump-backed Republican Nick Begich Beats Democratic Representative Mary Peltola for Alaska’s Only House Seat
by Becky Bohrer
November 20, 2024

Introduction:

(ABC) JUNEAU, Alaska -- Republican Nick Begich has won Alaska’s U.S. House race, defeating Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola to claim the seat once held by his grandfather.

Begich was among the opponents Peltola defeated during her special and regular election wins in 2022, following the death of Republican Rep. Don Young. Young had held the seat for 49 years. Peltola, who is Yup’ik, was the first Alaska Native in Congress.

Republicans, seeking to maintain control of the House, eagerly sought to win back the seat.

Wednesday marked the deadline for elections officials to receive ballots mailed from overseas for the Nov. 5 election, and it was also when ranked choice vote tabulations were done. State officials were targeting Nov. 30 to certify the general election.

Begich, in a statement on social media, said Alaska has great potential, “but much work remains for Alaskans to fully realize that potential. I am committed to fighting for our jobs and economy, protecting our unique way of life, and ensuring that our voices are heard loud and clear in Washington.”

Read more here: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tr ... 16077576

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A Corporate Media System Bound to Capitalism Delivers for Trump for a Second Time
by Victor Pickard
November 27, 2024

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) Once again, the 2024 election provided us an opportunity to test whether the U.S. media system can withstand the pressures of an authoritarian threat. And once again, we observed a media system that far too often privileged profit over democratic concerns. This capitulation was, in some ways, more subtle than what we witnessed before, especially in 2016, when coverage of Trump’s campaign was marked by overt sensationalism. Yet, media’s role during the 2024 election season was no less troubling for what it bodes for U.S. democracy’s future.


Media malpractice
Media outlets should have been well prepared this time. Everyone knew exactly what to expect. There were no ambivalences or ambiguities about Trump’s incessant lying or his rabidly xenophobic, transphobic, racist, and misogynistic rhetoric. And yet, despite it all, our media institutions didn’t rise to the occasion to challenge the obvious dangers that Trump posed to democracy. While billionaire owners blocked endorsements of Kamala Harris or outright weaponized their media properties, as in the case of Elon Musk and X, much media coverage was, once again, complicit in normalizing Trump.

From “sanewashing” (sanitizing Trump’s outlandish rhetoric and behavior) to false equivalence, from trivializing policy implications to horse race coverage and the fetishizing of polls, we saw it all over again. The inveterate media critic Jay Rosen had long pleaded with journalists to emphasize “not the odds, but the stakes.” But too often, milquetoast media coverage reverted to a kind of he said/she said anodyne “bothsidesing” narration that left audiences insufficiently alarmed at what policies Trump was proposing.

Additional extract:

Pegging news media so directly to market relationships has led to systemic failures: Racial and class-based redlining, market censorship, ever-expanding news deserts, and degraded information. It also creates the conditions for monopolistic control over entire sectors of our communication and information infrastructures that allow oligarchs to capture them.

Indeed, “media oligarchy” is an apt phrase for describing our current state of affairs: From the right-wing tech titans such as Elon Musk and his ilk, to opportunistic monopolists like Jeff Bezos, to the villainous media baron Rupert Murdoch and his progeny. These unaccountable billionaires own and control vast swathes of U.S. information and communication infrastructure—a dangerous predicament according to the most elementary democratic theory.

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/c ... -victory

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Huffington Post: Kamala Harris Campaign Aides Suggest Campaign Was Just Doomed

Senior advisers to Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed presidential campaign suggested this week that there just wasn’t much else Harris could have done to beat Donald Trump.

Harris couldn’t have distanced herself from President Joe Biden, they said, because she was loyal. She couldn’t have responded more forcefully to attacks over trans rights, because doing so would have been playing Trump’s game.

And she might not have had much chance of winning anyway, given the deficit she inherited from Biden when he dropped out of the race in July.

“We were hopeful. I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, OK, this is tied, and if a couple things break our way [we could win],” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the campaign, said Tuesday on the “Pod Save America” podcast in a joint interview with fellow Harris campaign alums Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks and Stephanie Cutter.

More: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-h ... a469baf?ef

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Los Angeles County Shows Why Democrats Lost
by Noah Leonard
December 16, 2024

Introduction:

(Mother Jones)Two weeks after the election, I met Dianela Rosario in Huntington Park, California—an almost entirely Latino city that swung hard to the right this year. A 51-year-old Dominican American shopkeeper, Rosario told me that before this year she had never voted for a Republican presidential candidate. But, in 2024, inflation and the prices of groceries were front of mind. President Joe Biden and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris were not fully responsible for the cost of living crisis, she said, but she still wanted someone new.

“If she’s been vice president and there’s been no change, then I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to change things as president,” Rosario, who identifies as Afro-Latina, explained in Spanish about why she had not voted for Harris. “That’s what influenced me the most—that things might stay the same as they are now.”

Earlier that afternoon, a Guatemalan shopkeeper shared a similar perspective. She told me she missed the lower prices of Trump’s first term and that she hoped the incoming president would deport people she saw as causing problems in the area. Unlike Rosario, though, she hadn’t been able to cast a vote. “Soy illegal,” the shopkeeper explained of her own immigration status.

In 2016, stories like these would have been hard to find in cities in Southeast Los Angeles like Huntington Park, where 97 percent of residents are Latino. That year, Trump lost by huge margins. In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 84 percent of votes in the area, compared to only 8 percent for Trump. Sometimes, Trump even came in third; in several precincts, Jill Stein was the runner-up to Clinton.

Additional extract:

Macias mentioned a cousin who told her that he was planning to vote for Trump. When Macias reminded him that they have family members who are undocumented, he argued that Trump's promises about mass deportation were just rhetoric. (Macias stressed that despite her cousin's comment there is a "palpable fear" among many people in Huntington Park about what Trump might do.)

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... is-biden

caltrek’s comment: Immigrant friends of ours that support Trump also mention how so many members of their family followed the rules to enter the country legally. Even when that included waiting for years before finally being allowed legal immigration status. I suspect one reason for supporting Trump, despite his hostility toward immigrants, is the feeling that undocumented workers should have followed the same process that members of their family followed.

There are also rationalizations about what was said by Trump on any given topic. When my wife explained that she saw and heard Trump on television take a certain policy position, the response was that she must have been viewing an AI generated image because their hero Trump would never say such a thing.

Yes, my eyes also rolled when I heard my wife passing along that last comment. It sucks to have a president with a cult following.

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Republicans on North Carolina Supreme Court Block Certification of Democratic Justice’s Victory
by Ari Berman
January 7, 2025

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) The Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the state election board from certifying the victory of one of the court’s own members—Democratic Justice Allison Riggs. In doing so, the state’s highest court laid the groundwork for potentially overturning the election and handing the seat to Riggs’ GOP challenger.

Riggs leads the race by 734 votes after two recounts. But her opponent, appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, has challenged the eligibility of 60,000 voters. He claims that ballots were wrongly counted from people who submitted incomplete voter registration records, but his list of challenged ballots includes many lawful voters—including Riggs’ own parents.

The state election board rejected Griffin’s protests and was set to certify the election on Friday, but Republicans on the state supreme court, who have a 5-2 majority, blocked that from happening for at least two weeks while they consider Griffin’s motion to reverse the election outcome. The state election board had asked a federal court to step in and resolve the matter so that it could certify the results, but a Trump-appointed federal judge on Monday remanded the case to the state supreme court. The state election board appealed that ruling to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the state supreme court issued its ruling before the federal appeals court could act.

Democratic state Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls dissented from that decision. “The standard for a temporary stay has not been met here, where there is no likelihood of success on the merits and the public interest requires that the Court not interfere with the ordinary course of democratic processes as set by statute and the state constitution,” she wrote.

Democrats have expressed alarm that Republicans on the state supreme court could take the extraordinary step of overturning the election of one of its Democratic members and in so doing use their power to expand their partisan majority.

“Do I have fear? Absolutely,” Democratic Party state chair Anderson Clayton said at a press conference in December. “What’s happening in North Carolina is sinister, and it will have a chilling effect on our democracy and our country if they’re able to get away with what they’re trying to achieve.”

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... -victory/

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What People Get Wrong About Christian Women Who Voted for Trump
by Nina Martin
January 7, 2025

Introduction:

(Mother Jones)You probably saw the cartoon that went viral before the election: A long line of women enter the voting booth wearing handmaiden-esque robes and bonnets, only to emerge in slinky black dresses and take-no-bullshit pantsuits. Or the ads in which white women accompany their obviously GOP husbands to vote, blinking each other a silent signal of solidarity behind the men’s backs: “Actually, I’m with her.” The disobedient-trad-wives trope reflected Democrats’ conviction that Donald Trump’s misogyny and temperament—not to mention his relentless assaults on reproductive freedom and the rule of law—must be deeply, albeit secretly, alienating to many Christian women. All they needed was a Liz Cheney–size nudge to cast their ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Not only did that notion turn out to be utterly deluded, it was “a profound misreading” of how Christian women view themselves and their role in American society, says sociologist Katie Gaddini—a mistake that helped cost Harris the presidency and could resonate throughout US politics and policy for years to come.

On election night, Gaddini, an associate professor at University College London who studies Christian women in US politics, was at San Francisco International Airport, boarding a red-eye to Virginia to do research for her next book, due out in 2026. “Trump had just won Georgia,” she recalls. “It was like a funeral in that airport. Faces were drawn. It was silent.” When Gaddini arrived the next morning at the far-right Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Trump had retaken the White House, and the mood was euphoric. Decked out in MAGA gear, women students were just as thrilled as the young men—maybe more so. “They felt like this was God’s will,” Gaddini says. “He has spared the nation by giving us Trump. Even after we’ve made so many mistakes, He’s giving us one last chance to get it right.”

The remaining article includes an interview with Katie Gaddini.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... or-trump

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'Damning' New Poll Shows Price Kamala Harris Paid for Backing Israeli Genocide in Gaza
by Julia Conley
January 15, 2025

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) As a cease-fire and hostage release deal was reportedly reached between Hamas and Israel on Wednesday, new polling made it clearer than ever that Vice President Kamala Harris' refusal to break with the Biden administration's position on Israel's relentless assault on Gaza had an impact on her support from voters, and contributed to millions of potential Democratic voters deciding to stay home on Election Day.

A YouGov poll backed by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project and released on Wednesday showed that among the 19 million people who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 but did not vote in 2024, nearly a third named Israel's U.S.-backed war on Gaza as a top reason for staying home.

"The top reason those non-voters cited, above the economy at 24% and immigration at 11%, was Gaza: a full 29% cited the ongoing onslaught as the top reason they didn't cast a vote in 2024," wrote Ryan Grim at Drop Site News, the first outlet to report the news.

In states that swung from Biden in 2020 to President-elect Donald Trump in 2024, 20% of non-voters said Gaza was the reason they didn't cast a ballot in November.

After replacing Biden as the nominee in July, Harris faced pressure—as the president had—to take decisive action to end U.S. support for Israel's assault on Gaza, which has now killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been civilian men, women, and children.

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/harris-gaza

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Women Made Electoral Gains in Statehouses Across the Country in 2024. The Southeast Is a Different Story.
by Jennifer Berry Hawes
January 22, 2025

Introduction:

(ProPublica) A few weeks ago, the clerk of the South Carolina Senate called out each of the 46 members’ names, then directed them all to stand and raise their right hands. He needed to swear them in for the new session. Among the supermajority of Republicans, zero women stood.

Voters hadn’t elected a single one to the chamber in November.

Now, after more than a decade, the Senate’s Republican caucus is once again an all-men’s club, one that will make decisions about issues that directly affect women: abortion, in vitro fertilization and Medicaid coverage of lactation specialists, to name a few. November’s election ushered in only two women to serve in the entire chamber, and both are Democrats. Given Republicans control what legislation moves forward, neither will wield much power.

Women aren’t represented much more on the other side of the Statehouse. Female lawmakers make up just 10% of South Carolina House Republicans.

Similar postelection stories are playing out across the Southeast, a region long defined by traditional culture and conservative politics. All but one state that held legislative elections last fall in this region saw losses of Republican women, including Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and South Carolina.
Tennessee was the lone exception — its voters added a single net Republican woman to their legislature.

Read more here: https://www.propublica.org/article/rep ... -carolina

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Trump Lost. Voter Suppression Won
by Greg Palast
January 24, 2025

Introduction:

(The Hartmann Report) Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

Stay with me and I’ll give you the means, methods and, most important, the key calculations.

But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.

As in Bush v. Gore in 2000, and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.

Read more here in which Palast further explains his calculations: https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost- ... sion-won/

Also regarding Palast’s analysis: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/v ... election


caltrek's comment: Basically, it wasn't democracy that allowed Trump to become president, it was the absence of democracy.

[firestar464]

*sighs* revolution when

(yes, I know it's not good to call for revolutions from the comfort of another country, but c'mon, let a man dream)

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Author Claims Culture Wars Caused Evangelicals to Vote Against their Interests
February 10, 2025

Introduction:

(Baptist News Global) Right-wing influencers propelled Donald Trump to power by spreading misinformation that convinced the MAGA base to support political agendas detrimental to their own interests, according to Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.

Stewart discussed her research for the new book on “The State of Belief” podcast moderated by Interfaith Alliance President Paul Raushenbush. She described how billionaire powerbrokers and Christian nationalists diverted the attention of Trump’s core supporters from their own economic needs to issues they perceive as threats to their cultural and religious identities.

“How do you get the rank and file to vote for policies that are going to make their lives harder? You get them to vote on these culture-war issues, these side issues, which I think of as these shiny baubles you dangle in front of people’s faces having to do with gender and identity and all the issues that don’t pertain to a lot of people and have nothing to do with the price of eggs or shutting down your factories.”

Conclusion:

Also, remember Trump’s forces, although well organized, remain in the minority, she said. “More Americans prefer to live in a democracy, however imperfect it may be, than in some sort of kleptocratic authoritarian system with theocratic features. That’s not what America wants. So, we are in the majority and we need to act like it.”

Read more here: https://baptistnews.com/article/cultur ... or-says/