They didn’t lose the election for Harris.

Right… I don’t think there are enough Arab- and Muslim-Americans in PA to swing it, and she needed that to win the election, even if she had won MI. I suspect it was her failed messaging on the economy that made the difference. But we don’t have final numbers yet so it’s hard to tell.

The article is a lot more nuanced than the headline. Arab- and Muslim-Americans knew that neither candidate cared about them, and the article explains various ways that affected their thinking.

banned me from the store “for life”

Awesome! I hope you refused to honor it unless he put a poster on the front door with a picture of you and a ghostbusters-style “no” sign around it.

Hmmm… “A Passage to India” takes place during the Raj (which is when the Crown took over from the East India Company) but a lot of the attitudes and issues are the same

• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087892/
• the novel on Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/61221

Similarly, “Conduct Unbecoming” takes place right after the Crown takeover. But hey, it’s free on youtube:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gzE8HkRrz0
• description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduct_Unbecoming_(1975_film)

Finally, you could look here:

• https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=east-india-company

It’s like calling tech support and having them say “works for me! try reading up on the problem” and hanging up.

Unpopular opinion: blaming the voters is counterproductive. It’s important to understand why they voted (or abstained) the way they did.

Yes, some percentage of voters are indeed racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. But hypothetically, another percentage are people who were unhappy because of economic reasons and felt they were presented with two bad options:

• an unreliable candidate who acknowledged they were unhappy
• an unknown candidate who said they were wrong and should just be happy

Is this hypothesis correct? I don’t know, but just assuming the voters are ignorant, or just saying that leopards will eat their faces, isn’t productive.

Hmm… I’ve dealt with elderly relatives, and it can be hard to tell when someone’s no longer capable of doing something… so I have a bit of sympathy for him there. It’s possible that a year ago Biden was up to the job and really was the best chance at defeating Trump. And he gets credit for stepping down when he did. However I’m a little more skeptical of his sticking VP Harris with the job of solving the border crisis, which is a notoriously unsolvable problem.

I suspect that given 3 months to jump-start a campaign, NOBODY could have won this election against Trump. Biden was headed towards Dukakis and Mondale levels of defeat, and Harris at least brought it to a couple hundred thousand in 3 states. (I wish I could post my argument to “unpopular opinion”, but apparently they prohibit political posts.)

I mean this respectfully. The character Everett True is known as someone who tells the truth even when it’s not popular.

FTA:

…for at least 20 million U.S. households, there is good cause for disillusionment. The method the federal government uses to calculate real incomes tends to capture the economic realities of higher-income people better than those of working-class and middle-class Americans.

To be fair, she had little more than a weekend to come up with her campaign messaging. She was made candidate like 3 months before election day.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LaundromatLiaisons

The more I think of it, I wonder if anyone could have won that election given only 3 months. If Obama had been VP, and suddenly made the candidate, could he have done it? Could Hillary have won it? John Kerry? Maybe, but it would have been a miracle.

Kamala did a solid job. Note how people are debating how she could have fine-tuned her messaging or policy proposals; they’re not talking about gaffes or complete incompetence. She lost with a deficit of 30K in WI, 80K in MI, and 150K in PA. A definite loss, but not comparable to the landslide losses of 1988 or 1984. Biden was headed for that sort of landslide loss, but Kamala turned it into a much closer contest.

Harris’s campaign, conducted over a short three months, deserves to be credited for skillful execution under extraordinary circumstances. Once tapped for the job, she had little time to lose to mount an eleventh-hour rescue mission for the Democrats. It was a classic case of a woman leader being thrust into a glass cliff” situation, a term first coined to address how most women came to be appointed CEO. Faced with a company/party/country in freefall, a highly qualified woman is tapped to rescue a situation that might well be unsalvageable.

Articles like these are frustrating to read. But it’s worth reading them to think about: how can Democrats get Arab and Muslim Americans to vote for them again?

Because Democrats won’t succeed without understanding them. And saying “Trump will never allow elections again” is just doing his job for him.

This year, Trump voters who supported abortion rights amendments may have decided to take Trump “at his word that he was not going to support a national ban,”

Trusting that Trump is telling the truth? What could possibly go wrong…

David Brent - Lady Gypsy.

His fans are like cats.

Hey, no need to disparage cats…

This is a great time for European labs to advertise any open positions.

Mother Nature is a prankster. She was just having a little fun.

This was a “Fuck YOU, in particular” sent right at Harris.

hmm… I think a “fuck you” would be if people went to the polls and wrote in someone else. This was more of a “meh” sent right at Harris… they couldn’t even be bothered to vote.

I firmly believe it was a combination of her race and male voters’ unwillingness to vote for a woman under any circumstances.

I suspect that this played a large part, but the tricky thing is: how do we confirm this? We can’t just poll people, bc they’ll rarely admit it. We can’t compare the performance of congressional candidates because people likely hold the presidency to a different standard. To make things even more complicated, Harris is mixed-race - and Americans are notoriously bad at studying that. And what do we do with the results of these studies? Clearly we still want to nominate qualified people regardless of gender or race.