The media here was VERY complicit in this. You'd think he wasn't even president before!

It's so cool how across all developed democracies the marginal voter is basically a medieval peasant who knows nothing about the world except the price of ground beef and the contents of the last 3 instagram reels they watched.

Critical to get them to vote IMMEDIATELY after watching the AOC reel

tbh this should probably blackpill you on what was really going on in all the elections which produced the results you liked too

Yeah I have fully internalized that people voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024 for the exact same reason (Make it 2019 again through science or magic)

Just really fucking stupid people I mean, literally decades now of evidence of the simplest thing in the world Republicans and conservatives do stupid and bad fucking shit everywhere that they have power lives become poorer, stupider, sicker and shorter

Obama and Clinton were both elected basically entirely on charisma and presentation, and Biden won because everyone was freaking out about Covid and (for once in their lives) correctly blamed Trump for making it worse.

"don't like economy / in-party bad" pretty much covers 92, 08, 20 "like economy, in-party good" gets you 96 "don't hate economy THAT much" gets you 2012 I guess

That combined with the fact that Obama personality-wise blew Romney out of the water. Pretty quickly in that race, it became whether Romney could present himself as enough of an improvement over Obama to overcome how utterly uninspiring he looked next to Obama, and the answer was "not even close."

04 was "not done being scared after 9 / 11 so more war is needed" beating out a still-large "why are we doing this war" bloc

The pervasive notion among pundits is that independents and swing voters are center right and move back and forth between the two parties around center right values. In reality, they're just simply not paying attention and voting based on vibes in the moment.

What gets you 97 again?

Arguably Ross Perot?

Yeah, every fucking time the GOP lost since 2008, I told myself "Thank God all the idiots did not doom us all to something worse."

The collapse of mediating institutions! Real bad shit!

That's really the crux of it. We broke all the machines we built to convert the impulses and priors of bored, incurious, and stupid people into something workable

I don't really know how to replace them either: 1) there are only 24 hours in a day 2) people spend a remarkable amount of those hours online or otherwise watching video 3) the literal built environment of sprawl and car dependency makes it hard to meet people and organize

you can see the same dynamic all over, even in places where it doesn't feel like there's a notable democratic deficit for example: we don't really have mass-membership activist groups anymore, with the exception of labor unions and maybe the NRA instead, foundation-funded professionalized NGOs

Oh, that's simply not true. Look at the membership numbers for Indivisible, Red, Wine & Blue, 50501, CASA, ACLU... all have seen MASSIVE bumps or straight up creation in the last eight months

that's encouraging! it's not uniformly that there's no participation in such groups, just much less than there used to be

And at least in my union, most of my coworkers seem rather disengaged with even its year-to-year business, making it even harder for leadership to convince members that the Internet is lying to them about Trump being their friend.

Fix three and we fix two. If people have real live free third spaces to spend time in, they do it.

There’s just a lot of detached uninformed voters (derogatory) and social media is rotting their brains.

This is what's so weird to me! The man was literally president already! How in the world are we stuck in 2016???

genuinely possible that COVID was a mass amnesia event

The fact that the majority of Americans are convinced Biden was president in 2020 is just bonkers.

I think it's one of those things where people conflate era-defining moments with political terms. Like I would also guess a pretty sizable number of Americans, if asked who was president when the Berlin Wall came down, would say Reagan.

Also COVID happened in 2020 and the election was in 2020 and Biden won so Biden was president in 2020.

Weirdly Biden doesn't get credit for the COVID stimulus though.

A lot of it was congressional dems tbh, bulk of it was in cares, arpa introduced ctc and the $300 ui floor but yeah trump gets the credit for all of it while biden gets the blame for covid. Love our gold fish brain voters

I do think this just kinda happens, you saw this with tarp and obama. I’d guess covid is a force amplifier for it. I mean m memory is totall fucked 2020 +- 2 years in a way that it wasn’t ever before

People genuinely bought the bullshit that Trump was doing a good job "until COVID happened" when: 1) that's not even true! he was garbage! B) COVID becoming a pandemic was his fault.

No, COVID becoming a pandemic was not his fault. That was always going to happen once it broke out of Wuhan. COVID zero was always a fantasy. Trump's failures during COVID were considerable; a lot of people died who didn't have to. That's not the same as the pandemic being his fault.

Counterfactuals are tough in that way. I also believe that 9/11 probably doesn't happen if Al Gore is President. There's a huge gray area, but the most important thing in dealing with a potential outbreak is to respond quickly and decisively. Trump did the opposite.

and now that we're in the "RFK Jr. as Health Secretary" phase of Trumpism, I think I can say that Trump welcomed COVID because he's a eugenicist (that is to say, a really stupid person).

His approval rating in 2019 was not good!!

I think it's much less 'people liked him then' and much more 'people forget how much they disliked the last guy when they dislike the new guy because their life is still hard.' I am constantly amazed at how little regular people think about politics, and how short their political memory is.

bsky.app/profile/desi...

Well, there's evidence to suggest that COVID aged the brains of literally everyone. So you're probably not far off.

because joe biden was president in 2020

as an ideological democracy enjoyer, the problem here is that the decisive slice of American voters are simply too stupid to be self-governing I don't really know what do with this fact

Even worse: there's a decisive slice of American voters who are not stupid that simply have no interest in democracy whatsoever

We should stop reminding people to vote. Serious minded citizens do not need a reminder.

He doesn't even remember he was president.

This is sort of unfair— 2019 was economically great! Unemployment low, interest rates low, wages rising I don’t blame a low info voter who went “I want that back!” Which Dave Weigel’s reporting indicated was a big sentiment for voters And it is not good politics to say “that’s never coming back”

Like nostalgia is a hell of a drug!

they vaguely remembered having a nice time in 2018

Which is funny because, for unrelated reasons, 2018 was by far the worst year of my life in the Trump I era, and worst overall to date.

Much as I try to erase it, I can still remember that long, lonely summer of misery followed by four more months of the mounting pressures at my horrendously mismanaged college. Even in 2020, I didn't feel like the world was ending as much as I did in that year.

I have the feeling that COVID made everyone idealize and romanticize all the time before it, which includes the Trump I presidency.

Someone accurately predicted that the election would hinge on who the public thought was president in 2020.

The 45-48% of voters who have memories: WHAT ARE THE REST OF YOU IDIOTS DOING? SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Also, in the same vein, Joe Biden was president in 2020 somehow.

it is fun that the people who said reality TV would destroy civilization turned out to be right in the dumbest possible way

Hunger Games sequel where Panem's fledgling democracy is destroyed when one of the announcers for the Games runs for office