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Kamala Harris was given an assignment that no other person in American history was given — to construct a presidential campaign in 90-100 days with absolutely no expectation or anticipation that she would be called to that assignment
Canada's federal election process is 36-50 days, or half that.
I agree with most of what was written, but I wanted to point out that countries put forth a scalable platform every 4-5 years in half the time. It's a bag-drive, but it's the timeline.
It is true, election cycles are much shorter in other countries but that's just not the case in the US. There's a saying that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Trump has been in the news with his bat shit crazy rhetoric for years now. That's hard to defeat in just a few months. Especially when his base is so fanatical they will vote for him even if he killed someone.
Before Last Week Tonight, John Oliver was on a podcast called The Bugle and I can remember him bemoaning how long US elections were compared to Britain. I wonder how he feels about covering our bullshit all the time now, I imagine similar to the exhaustion that led Jon to mostly retire
If all candidates are on the same timeline then I agree. That's not the case here. 100 days vs literal years of planning.
Yes and no, the official campaign is a month and a half but the campaign starts way before that. Also the leaders are chosen way ahead of the campaign, Harris became the candidate 3 months ahead of the election.
Tbf, Canada has like 15% the population, mostly in a smaller amount of areas. The US has more states than Canada has major cities.
We have mass media, you can scale that up. It's not like Trudeau had to meet everyone in person to get elected.
Everybody is warning us of the impact of the election. They've been warning us for years.
The problem is that Americans stood up and either said "We know. We just don't care.", or "We know. We want it that way."
After briefly speaking to one of my younger (white, male, most likely straight, but turns out he's prob an "enlightened centrist") co-workers earlier today, it seems like there are people who just don't believe it can happen.
He told me that "both sides have their propaganda" when I asked if he's read Project 2025. I wanted to scream.
The conversation literally ended with me telling him that this has happened before. He said, yeah, but not here. I was like, we're not special. Such a disappointing conversation. Ruined my day/night. Literally used the "it will never happen here" line.
This is a man with a STEM degree. He's not stupid.
I think there are a lot of people who are in for a shock when the shit really starts hitting the fan.
You can have tons of degrees and still be stupid.
Confirmed I knew a man who worked doing advanced particle research at cern but who also voted for the Tory party. In the words of a wise man, ‘that’s the dumbest smart guy I know’. People are retarded and it’s extremely annoying.
No reason to be ableist about. You can just say they're stupid.
22% of America said Fuck America, and thus we were fucked.
Then you've got the "Did Joe Biden step down?" crowd just completely oblivious lol.
In the aftermath the number of fuckwits I saw not voting or voting against their own interests has been insane.
Socialists sitting out because of Gaza.
Black women complaining Trump won but not voting.
Working class woman whose husband is in a union and he himself voted Harris; whose son is gay... Yep, she voted Trump.
I'm so tired of trying to drag along stupid people.
Just remember, America. You voted for what's coming. You asked for it and so you have no one to blame but yourselves.
They told you exactly what they are planning to do.
The problem isn't that America voted for this. Only 21% of the country voted for Trump.
The problem is that America didn't vote at all.
That only makes them more blameworthy, not less.
Unless we understand why they didn't vote it's just going to keep happening
I think most didn’t vote because they are apathetic, ill-informed morons with the attention span of a gnat. They don’t understand inflation, tariffs, deflation, international relations, trade, renewable energy, oil production, gas prices, vaccines, healthcare, or much of anything else. They also don’t care to learn about how anything works. It’s not like the last chapter of the history book on the United States is going to blame the pro-democracy candidate for not doing enough to appeal to a public that was too lazy to continue living in a democracy. They have access to more educational resources than any humans in history and they just ignore it.
If that's the case then we are well and truly fucked because that's not changing without significant education investment, and Trump is going to get rid of the Department of Education.
I believe we are well and truly fucked.
Education and critical thinking is lacking in the majority of the electorate and the trend is that we elect leaders that reinforce that instead of mitigate it. Defunding education doesn't improve this situation, and I feel we hit a tipping point where we might not be able to get these skills back in the curriculum going forward.
Humanity in general is fucked. This isn't a uniquely American problem. The growth of entertainment and technology has broken our primitive monkey brains.
This time, the election wasn't about dems or reps, it was about democracy or fascism. If you didn't vote, means you are ok with fascism.
Or just incredibly ignorant. I think we vastly overestimate the political intelligence of the people in this country.
There are a metric fuckton of apathetic people that are "too busy" to give a shit about politics unfortunately. Hell just look at the articles after the election that called out Google searches for "did Biden drop out?" spiking on election day.
These people are too busy watching whatever braindead Netflix bullshit, or just not watching anything at all to know what's even going on.
But when you look at what people said in the exit poll interviews, most were not voting for fascism when they voted for Trump. They were voting on the illusion that he would be better for their pocket book.
In exit polls, people actually hated Trump and his extremism significantly more, but they’re hurting so much financially that they were willing to roll the dice on his “I’ll take you back to 2017-19” bullshit.
He go in the same way other strongmen often get into power, claims of economic populism.
It’s your right to point fingers and blame people, but if you want to get them to vote and bring them over to your side, that is historically not been the best motivator.
I think there’s truth to this. The Democratic party has to engage with people in good faith and learn what it’s important for them and why they voted the way they did.
The people who abstained from voting, made their vote. When fascism is on the line, you don't get to sit out and be absolved. They've signed on for everything that is to come.
You can't count people under the voting age and you need to add the people who didn't vote because it means they supported whoever got in power. 170m registered voters in 2020 so must be similar. 43% of registered voters voted for him, 40% for Harris, 1% others, that's 16% who didn't vote that we can add to Trump's number... But that's just registered voters and doesn't count eligible ones who didn't register!
I didn't ask for it. I voted for Harris. If what you said they are going to do is the truth, you'll suffer the consequences too, and will be just as guilty as I am.
Only about a 4th of us...a fourth voted counter and the rest didn't or can't vote....
I voted against trump. Why am I to blame?
They told you exactly what they are planning to do.
Which is why half of the country voted against Trump, and why a lot of the other half voted for Trump. He told us exactly what he was planning to do.
I'll vote for her.
If you get another vote.