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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
To be fair, voter apathy is pretty justified since they have little say thanks to the Electoral Vote being around. All they can do is vote for stuff solely affected their state and a tiny other few things. It does suck that some don't bother to vote for the state stuff either. :/
Can't blame 'em. However, they'd have a reason to care when their vote actually and properly affects something.
Shadow?Sure, the white nationalists will eat it up, because the only thing they really give a shit about is sticking it to minorities. It's a Single-Issue Wonk and they don't care if everything else goes to hell because that's the depth of their hatred.
Everyone else? Everything always gets blamed on the most visible figure in charge regardless of the complexities of the situation and who's actually responsible, which in this case is the POTUS. They're not gonna bother researching issues to get a nuanced understanding, they're just going to apply a simple cause and effect. "We voted for this guy, and ever since he's been in charge, things have been shitty." Likewise, if things going are doing well, they'll say "well things were pretty good when THAT GUY was in charge". Most people in any political system are guaranteed to not even have a particularly great understanding of how their government actually works, they just know the president is an important guy who does important things.
I've no doubt a lot of people would eat it up if Trump blamed everything on the Obama administration, especially with the dreaded Breitbart poised to become even more influential, but just as many if not more people are just going to get disillusioned because they're not getting their old jobs back, they're not getting new opportunities, their health care got fucked over and their lives are overall getting worse at the same rate they were before or even faster. And who are they gonna blame for that? The people in charge at that time, aka Trump and the GOP. The only people who will be placated is those who don't care about anything else but their own all-consuming and bottomless hatred, everyone else who is just indifferent and self-serving is not gonna give a shit for their excuses.
Many people voted for Trump not because they particularly like him, but because they're desperate, and when he fails to provide what he promised they're gonna realize they were duped by a snake oil salesman and that he isn't any different from the "elites" they claim to hate so much.
There's also the fact that Trump admitting he can't do shit makes him look impotent. His entire campaign has been run on the premise of being a political outsider and "draining the swamp", how stupid does he look when he can't do that?
edited 15th Nov '16 1:14:40 AM by Draghinazzo
@Louisiana Senate Race
Foster Campbell is the Deomcratic candidate. He's got a clean record of public office without scandal and he strikes me as very loyal to the party, though I don't think he is incredibly liberal. Definitely more moderate, but this is Louisiana we're talking about, so that is to be expected.
I voted for him, as I liked his record and the way he carries himself, and I had a feeling he was going to be the most popular of the democratic candidates, to which I was right. And I will definitely be voting for him again in the run-offs on Dec. 10th.
The republican candidate that got through the Senate primaries, John Kennedy (no relation to The Kennedy family) had way more votes than Campbell, but there were also like 20 candidates on the ballot instead of two. Luckily, Campbell is now being openly endorsed by our Democratic governor, Bel Edwards, who so far has a good reputation among the citizenry for how he's handled The Great Flood of 2016 and the holes left by Jindal. Bel Edwards is more of a blue dog than a straight-up liberal, but compared to former governor Jindal, he might as well be a verified saint of governance. And he is very loyal to the democractic party, certainly. John Kennedy, meanwhile, is being endorsed by David Vitter, the Senator who's seat is up for grabs, and also the guy who failed in the last gubernatorial election against Bel Edwards.The long and short of it is that Vitter had a well-known prostitute scandal, and that, along with Jindal putting our state two billion dollars in the hole through gross mismanagement of funds over his eight years as governor, is why Louisiana has a blue governor now.
Campbell and Bel Edwards are both trying to take advantage of the fact that Vitter is endorsing Kennedy, because Vitter's scandals are repulsive enough to the local Moral Guardians that it might rub off negatively on Kennedy by association. There are already some attack ads popping up to that affect. But this state is very red, so I'm not sure who will pull through in the end.
edited 15th Nov '16 3:07:35 AM by Soopor
I think the one cold comfort we have right now is how every passing day it's more glaringly obvious Trump didn't really want to win, didn't even expect it would happen, and now he's stuck in a position he can't walk out of and he's wholly, absolutely unprepared for
Sure, we're all still fucking doomed, but at least these coming four years are going to be utter hell for him too
Re: Breitbart as propaganda.
The problem with converting a bona-fide conservative rage-making machine into a propaganda tool is that you have to switch gears from "everything is awful" to "everything is fine" at the drop of a hat, which doesn't reflect the readership. A more mainstream org like Fox News was able to make the switch, but will it work for Breitbart, or just cripple them?
The alternative is that they work as a perpetual pressure group for the deplorables, constantly telling Trump to fulfill his campaign promises, but if they cross him too much he'll just fire Bannon.
Far easier than you could imagine.
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVYes, it can happen. Here in Argentina, while we had nothing on the level of racism that Breitbart has, the Kirchner government (both the husband and the widow) started a war against the mainstream media around 2007 or so, and by the end of last year everything had descended into an propaganda apparatus by state-controlled and Kirchner sympathizing media spinning the news more or less say "everything is perfect, the government is great" going against an anti-Kirchner media conglomerate (which the K-government accused of trying to manipulate the minds of the people and of being an hegemonic group bent of givin control of the nation to big business) with one or two somewhat independent newspapers who said the opposite "everything is shitty, the government is filled with corruption".
Now, with the recent change of government, the state media seems to be the closest to neutral, the private K-sympathizing media switched to the "everything is shitty, the government is filled with corruption" message the day the new president was sworn in (and a lot of it concentrated into three or four channels and newspapers because it was artificially maintained with subsidies even though very few people read their propaganda, so many of the media groups collapsed), and the anti-k media went "everything is great" during the honeymoon period and is slowly getting more critical of the government (not without reason, there have been some mistakes and some corruption cases, but saying that a twit by the foreign affairs minister congratulating Hillary and lamenting she lost
is ZHE WORST POLITICAL MISTAKE EVER! HOW DARES SHE DO THAT? may be a bit to much).
So yes, it's extremely easy for propaganda machines to go from "everything's perfect" to "this is the apocalypse" at the drop of a hat.
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVDaily Stormer and Breibart live and thrive on outrage. The only positive news they have is something like this: Tumblertard and SJW cucks commits suicide over Trump victory or Look at all these SJW cucks being scared by the KKK march.
Nearly everything else in their main page is either outrage over some bullshit about black people, LGBT+ or SJW and the rest is a bunch of conspiracy theories or bullshit articles made to validate their bigotry.
Inter arma enim silent legesElectoral College: Are Idaho’s 4 electors being pressured to dump Trump, or harassed?
http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/election/article114786018.html
While perhaps not uncommon in other places, either, even the Electors in a red state like Idaho are feeling the pressure to go the faithless route and not vote for Trump in December.
This Vox article
piqued my interest.
edited 15th Nov '16 7:20:04 AM by Demongodofchaos2
Watch SymphogearQuestion: Had there ever been pressure like this on the Electoral College's electors to overturn an election? I never paid much attention to elections prior to this outside voting so I probably wouldn't have heard of there was, and I'm sure it's happened on a small scale out of "my guy didn't win" anger, but on the level we're seeing now?
edited 15th Nov '16 7:34:25 AM by sgamer82
Speaking of Louisiana what are people's thoughts on the current Louisiana governor as a Democrat candidate come 2020? I don't know much about him beyond being a Democrat governor in the South but I stuck him on my list of possibles, has he got the charisma?
As for which way to swing in 2020, remember Clintong to out flanked by Trump this election, he won the Rust Belt by being more Left Wing ecneomically then Clinton was while winning the racists nutjob and religious right by being more Ring Wing then Clinton, so a shift left wing economically could pick back up the Rust Belt.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Overcompensating for previous optimism isn't necessarily the wisest thing you can do, though. And you missed the last parts of what I said; he hadn't managed to piss people off quite this much. If this sort of thing keeps up, who knows what will happen come 2018.
Because really, we need to seriously get people voting in the mid term elections.