Holy crap, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually pulled this shit off (especially if you ask Fox News)
Aux Features Politics
America was asked a very simple question: “Can you possibly sustain four more years of this monumental, unyielding mess?” Dead-eyed and thoroughly broken, the country gesticulated wildly and responded, “We might actually be tired of this!” Though political analysts predicted that the race would be excruciatingly close (and it was, in a way that we can only hope was eye-opening for all), Joe Biden actually managed to pull off a victory on Saturday morning when the Pennsylvania and Navada races were finally called, beating Donald Trump and becoming the 46th president of the United States. If we sound just a little shocked, that’s only because we’ve seen just how awful this country can get.
This is also a rather historic moment for vice president elect Kamala Harris, who will become the first woman, the first Indian American, and the first Black person to hold that office.
News of the victory comes after days of nail biting, as counts in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Georgia (and Alaska, which—with three electoral votes—was too small potatoes to care about, apparently) dragged out for days. We all watched the counts change by a few thousand every time a new batch of ballots was processed. Poor Steve Kornacki probably slept three hours total in the past week.
Depending on which news outlet you followed, Biden sat at 253 or 264 electoral votes for days. In fact, because Fox News was the only TV outlet that called Arizona for Biden on Election Day, there was a chance—if a different state had been called for Biden first—that Fox could have declared Biden the winner while other outlets waited for another state to take him over the 270 electoral vote threshold. In the end, AP News finally declared Pennsylvania for Biden on Saturday, giving him the victory. Fox waited a few minutes longer but called Nevada for the future president at the same time, giving him the largest electoral vote count of any of the networks so far, 290. Trump surely loves that.
The win ultimately came at the hands (and mail-in ballots) of voters in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—historically red states that flipped thanks in part to record voter turnout from Black communities, per The Guardian. In Georgia’s case, many are thanking high-profile political organizers like former gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrahms, who did a lot of on-ground work to register Black voters in the state after her campaign was negatively impacted by voter suppression in 2018. Young voters also proved to be pivotal to Biden and Harris’ victory, especially young voters of color.
The official counts still need to be verified by a few states—and we will certainly have the Trump team’s baseless legal bullshit to contend with for a few days—but it does seem that we can all breathe somewhat easier knowing this hell we’re living will at least be a different hell in two long months.
God bless America?
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Well, it looks like I’m going to be the one whose insufferable at Thanksgiving this year, Dad.
As long as there are Americans, there will be insufferable Thanksgivings
“I want a drumstick!” ~ All three people at the First Thanksgiving
Reminds me of the classic joke about the three-legged chickens.
It’s a greater tradition than Easter probably.
I count my lucky stars that my entire family (at least, the small cohort of us who have Thanksgiving together) is a bunch of flaming liberal snowflakes.
I thank my lucky stars that my family and extended family are on my side (save for my wife’s brother’s family, especially his outspoken wife). But I do have a few friends who are Trumpers. I’m a 46-year-old white male, so demographically that’s kind of inevitable.
My mother endearingly refers to Trump as “that A-hole”.
My mother has been accumulating a list of insulting nicknames for Trump since before he was elected. It’s up to over 200 names.Personally, I only ever needed one: “Dolt 45″
Your mother is a Hero of the People.
My go to has been “Mango Mussolini”
My wife and her family are all left leaning if not downright bleeding-heart liberal, while my sister is a country bumpkin Trump supporter. She knows where everyone else stands and likes to keep things pleasant, so she keeps her goddamn mouth shut.
I’m still happy I won’t get to see my wingnuts-in-law this year, even if I’d get to see their angry, disappointed faces.
There’s always Skype or Zoom. “Heyyyyy, how ya holding’ up??”
I plan on not bringing up the topic at all if it can be avoided. I’m just tired of arguing with people.
You’re never going to get in to a food fight with that attitude!
I don’t think I want a drumstick crammed up my ass, thankyouverymuch. 😉
Don’t hold back.
I regret I can only give you one star…
There’s a pandemic on. Don’t go to Thanksgiving this year.I mean, definitely be insufferable, but also keep Dad alive, right?
YOu are missing a great opportunity to use covid as an excuse. You may never get that opportunity again.
Just tell them…
From what I hear about it, Thanksgiving always make thankful that I don’t live in a nation that celebrates Thanksgiving.
My wife and I actually successfully converted her parents. They came around and started seeing Trump for what he really was. We’re going to visit for the holidays and I’m expecting some actual pleasant conversation.
AP News was not the first to call this race. https://decisiondeskhq.com/ called it yesterday.
I’m glad they did, because it gave me a chance to cry with relief while I was working from home, which helped me maintain my composure at work today.
Which raises the question: who the fuck is “Decision Desk”, aside from being the outlet that Vox used to declare Biden the winner on Friday morning?
One question for the election post-mortem: would any of the other Democratic candidates (some of whom were much more popular with the more vocal part of the Democratic base) been able to pull this off?
I honestly doubt so. I believe that I would have made the wrong choice, if I had been able to select the democratic candidate.Biden didn’t discourage or demobilize the voters, and the turnout showed. I though that he would, by being so consensually “center” and basically representing the same world as Hilary Clinton. I thought that the left would only be motivated by an alternative to “business as usual”. But, with half of the USA capable of supporting the bloated pus-filled orange bubble of fascism just out of fear for anything sounding more left than him, I think that having a somewhat insipid center candidate was the unfortunately wisest decision. Dear USA. Please, in four years, have the next presidential challenge just be Biden’s second term versus Ocasio-Cortez first term. With Ocasio-Cortez winning.
I think he provided a more palatable alternative to Republicans wanting to vote against 45 than others may have – much as I love Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, it would probably have been easier for 45’s campaign to stick the “extremist” label on and moderates would have turned away.Just in my own inner circle, I know of a number of Republicans who went Biden because they knew that 45 was too dangerous.
Yea that’s what I was thinking. Who republicans would feel ok flipping for is a notable factor in which of the other Dems might have stood a chance. Bernie’s a tough sell. Whoever is on the ticket with him could help.
the cool thing is that now he can corral all those folks into some sweet jobs in his administration.sanders in charge of labour? warren in charge of the treasury? yes please!
He’s not the candidate I personally wanted but…he beat them in the primary. People wanted Biden.
It’s really unclear. Polls used to show Bernie would have done really well against Trump. Many people might be confused by this, but it’s probably because Bernie focuses on connecting with the youth and working class white voters in ways that most other Democrats just don’t (or can’t garner enough enthusiasm for, anyway – many Dems have minorities and suburban women to thank for their electoral wins). I think it’s really unclear what would have happened, though, with others, just because the polls have been shown to have been unreliable.
I am going to subtract 6% consistently from Democrat polling numbers to account for the hidden racism factor.
I think Bernie would have brought in a lot of the Latinx/African American voters that voted for Trump, and prevented others from migrating in the first place.
I doubt Bernie would’ve done better. The Senate and House elections showed moderate voters were more concerned about being Anti-Trump than Pro-Democrat. Biden only won because of slim margins in the purple states while Democrats took hits across the board for Senate and House control. Yes, he rocked the popular vote but democrats need to start spreading the hell out instead of staying in the blue states for any of that to matter. Bernie would’ve attracted the youth better but he wouldn’t have had the Never Trump support, either as a direct vote or an outright refusal to vote for neither, that ultimately helped Biden over the edge. Adding the socialist boogeyman would’ve tugged this race a lot closer.
No, I don’t think so. My choice was always Cory, more or less because I wanted to see him completely destroy Trump on the debate stage (not sure that’s a great primary reason for wanting somebody to win), but he inspired a lot of vitriol from the center-right, even after he lost the primary.As we see from the (still) razor-thin margins, he probably loses definitively without those votes on his side.Maybe Warren would have the best chance out of the others—I still maintain that Bernie was way too polarizing to challenge Trump.
There were dems I liked better than Biden, but I’m not sure how many of them would have had a stronger chance of beating Trump.
We don’t know what the GOP’s focused anti-Sanders campaign would have looked like, but I’m sure their Nazi friends had some ideas.
My roommate and I were talking about this on Tuesday, when it looked like Trump was going to win. One of the few things people like Bernie, Obama, and Trump (I know, I’m sorry) have in common is positioning themselves as agents of change. Being sick of the way things have been going and wanting something new and different seems to be the one thing uniting a lot of people on both the right and the left, even if they’re not totally sure what that is.Looking at the political situation from this angle, Biden was a uniquely risky choice. With his ~50 years of political experience, there’s no real way for him to position himself as an outsider, although he certainly represents a positive change compared to the current administration.It’s kind of like the Democrats asked the American people: “Look, the last four years have been an unmitigated disaster. Do you want to try to go back to the way things were before Trump?” It’s not clear that that’s even remotely possible, but I guess we’ve collectively decided to make some weak gestures in that direction.
There are a certain element of the population who would hold their nose and vote for Trump if they truly believed that Bernie was a communist. Given that Trump tried to paint middle-of-the-road Biden as a Socialist, (and succeeding in fooling some people!) should tell us how Bernie would have been labeled “Lenin” by the time the election rolled around.So yes, Bernie would inspire his own rabid fanbase, and probably some of the undecideds who are leaning towards an agent of change, but I really don’t see that being enough to overcome the people who would never vote for a ‘socialist’. And of course, Trump’s own die-hard fanbase.
Yeah, some people want actual change (me included), but I think a LOT of people just want to go back to ignoring politics and not having to hear about this shit every day like they did before the orange man was yelling all the time.
I think that Trump would have hit the ”Pocahontas” button non-stop, and it would have worked.
Unlikely. The election was depressingly close, and anyone further left than Biden (essentially ever other candidate) would likely have lost the battleground states. Apparently, “socialism” is still a dirty word in America, and anyone who can (realistically or not) be painted with that brush is going to lose.We’ve got a lot of work to do.
A lot of re-branding would do it.
Theoretically, yes. There was actually a small bit of margin to play with in the end – and it’s possible another candidate might have raised turnout somewhere. Black turnout was good but not great – perhaps a black candidate could have gained more black votes, and compensated for the loss of some white ones. And it seems likely that some Hispanic votes were on the table – perhaps a Hispanic candidate, or a candidate with more trust among the hispanic community, might have done better there – if they’d swung Florida or Texas, they could have withstood losing some other states.In practice? I’m glad you didn’t take that risk. The path would have been very small indeed. I really don’t think Sanders or even Warren could have done it. None of the other options really had a compelling case, and most had vulnerabilities. For instance, Buttigieg could maybe have done well in the rustbelt, and Klobuchar certainly could have done… but Buttigieg is young and gay, and Klobuchar’s a woman. And they both could have had turnout problems. Maybe the best bet would actually have been Castro? But it’s not like he ever had a chance at the nomination, so… [actually, Bloomberg would have been interesting. But then the best case scenario would have been having Bloomberg win, which isn’t a great best case to be facing!]
Maybe? Biden’s position as a moderate helped bring in several conservative voters who were sick of Trump. Bernie’s a bit of a wild card populist, but it’s unlikely he would have won.I’d like to hope that Elizabeth Warren could have won, but I think that too many voters oppose the idea of a woman president (even if not conscious of that bias). Our first female POTUS will either have to ascend after Biden keels over or when the GOP has a woman at the top of the ticket IMO.
tough to say. bernie excited young people but there aren’t enough young people to move the needle. i firmly believe warren would have been steamrolled. biden sucked but he sucked in a way that made sense, i guess. i do think it’s funny how much of it was simply about ‘voting against trump’ as opposed to ‘voting for biden’ so maybe a lot of people would have plugged their nose and voted for bernie regardless, and bernie i think could have had potential to reach disenfranchised voters, particularly of color. but sooo much of it is just aesthetics and anti-semitism is bi-partisan, so who knows.
Yeah. I can’t say for sure, obviously, but I think one thing the massive turnout indicates is that a lot of people were coming out specifically to get Trump out of office. I mean, Biden’s about my 250th favorite Democrat, but I’ll take him over Trump any day. I agree with others that Biden was more palatable for a lot of people than other candidates, but I think at least a few of the others could’ve pulled this off. I have a couple of family members who I’m guessing voted for Trump who maybe perhaps possibly would have voted for Bernie if he were the nominee, crazy as that sounds.
There are enough young people the problem is getting them to actually vote. Their turnout was higher than ever this election, hopefully they’ll keep it up.
So Will Saletan had some of the stats from this election:I don’t really know how it would have shook out, but they actually kept polling with Sanders in Biden’s place for most of the general polling and he was consistently running 3% behind Biden — and we saw how off the polling was (again) this year nationally (some statewide polling was pretty good — will need this all to finish to determine exactly what worked and what didn’t).So would some of the states have flipped for someone like Sanders or Warren? Or a Midwesterner like Buttigieg or Klobuchar? Unclear. I think it’s fairly likely that we count out NC, FL and OH for sure, don’t flip AZ (largely Cindy McCain with the personal relationship with Biden) and GA, I think we keep MN for sure (regardless), and likely MI and WI. So it all comes down to PA again — and in that case, I don’t know who does better than Biden since the minority voters who shifted Dems -> Trump appear largely to be a) male and b) middle-aged — so the young people and old people were overwhelmingly still voting Democratic.
Trump certainly seemed to have no idea how to run against Biden. All his attempts to tie him to “the radical left” (race riots, Ilhan Omar, AOC, etc) plainly looked ridiculous, his attempts to make mountains out of molehills out of things like Hunter Biden ala Hilary’s Emails largely failed to gain traction in light of the real and serious problems in the country and them looking miniscule compared to his own scandalous record, and his attempts to make Biden look old and aloof largely failed both because Biden held up pretty well on the trail and also because Trump looked like a psycho for 90% campaign. In many ways Biden’s long time record of normie by the books politics made him kind of the ideal antidote to Trump’s chaotic nonsense.Running against an actual leftist like Sanders he probably would have been much more successful in scaring moderates away and (unfortunately) that may have also been true running against a person of color or woman (who the electorate often perceive as being more left than they actually are). I could also see him doing a better job of discrediting the credentials of a young guy like Buttigieg. Not sure what it would have been like if he’d gone up against some of the other “boring moderate white guys” from the primaries like Michael Bennett, Steve Bullock, Beto O’rourke, Jay Inslee, or Tim Ryan, but those guys probably failed to gain traction in the primaries for a reason.
I think that the real takeaway Republican lesson is going to be that if he had reigned it in during the first debate, he would have won, i.e., this was easily winnable.
The idea that this was easily winnable after this entire year is a joke and about par for the course with this clown car of dipshits.Even if Covid hadn’t happened he’d been a public disaster.
He could have aced all three debates and still lost.
But if he had done the absolute bare fucking minimum on the pandemic he’d have won. But that would have required actually giving a shit, something that became increasingly obvious he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.
And now I’m guessing a lot of Trump rally chanters and Hatriotism™ cheerleaders are going to come down with Covid themselves or lose friends and family in the aftermath of going to go see him scat sing his greatest hits while boofing experimental steroids and spraying spittle all over the place failing to properly pronounce the name of a country they never even knew existed until that night and now have decided to hate anyway.
One the one hand: Less hateful dipshits. On the other hand: A lot more people come January are going to be realizing how serious this all really is because now it has affected them personally. They’re going to see Biden as someone who at least has a plan to do something. I’m expecting a lot of buyer’s remorse and pleadings for forgiveness of misunderstandings.Fuck ‘em.
That debate was so bad that even die-hard Republicans couldn’t say Trump was any good. They just had to deflect to general “Wow, what a shitshow” comments without specifically commenting on Trump at all, in the hopes that it would paint Biden as equally terrible. But even so, I don’t think debates move the needle much. The autopsy on his era, for conservatives, will probably come down to “that goddamn Covid fucked us” and “we’re gonna have to either do more to stop mail-in voting or we’ll need to embrace it hard.”
I can’t imagine how O’Rourke and the gun platform would go, lol.Of the younger runners, my money would have been on Castro. Super sharp, projects a sort of class with a hint of toughness I liked.
they all would have, and would have probably done better.
man conventional wisdom is so dumb and wrong about this. wonderful that Democrats always manage to learn the exact wrong lessons from everything.
Give that it took a historically, epic, incompetant botching of a global pandemic to get the non-racist, qualified candidate a closer-than expected victory… I’m gonna say, no.
Honestly, my choice would have been a Bernie/Abrams ticket. But I don’t think they’d have won. Actually, given the razor-thin margins that pushed Biden over 270, I’m afraid anyone else would have lost. That it took the least-inspiring paring possible this year to beat Agent Orange is quite sad.
It wasn’t really razor-thin though
Roughly 1% in AZ, GA, NC, PA, and WI (with AZ possibly falling back to Agent Orange). Little tens of thousands in each case. That’s not what I call a landslide (outside the popular vote, which, as we know, doesn’t matter jack shit because “democracy”.)
I’ll stick with the same answer I have to my Bernie supporting friends in 2016 when they said he would have won. Maybe, maybe not, too many variables to know anything, but if you can’t win a majority of votes in your own party, that doesn’t bode well for winning the nation. (For the record, I like most of Bernie’s politics n all, I also think that he, personally, would not be a good candidate or president).Another hypothetical though, if Obama hadn’t run in 2008 and was running against Trump instead of Biden this year, how big a landslide we talking then, you think?
It’s really impossible to say since we don’t know what kind of campaign any other candidate would have run. The only other one who I think would have a shot is Bernie. He probably wouldn’t have done as well with suburban white voters but based on his performance in the primaries he wouldn’t have had nearly the same problems with latino/a voters that Biden had, although that was partially self inflicted by his campaigns baffling refusal to do voter outreach. Bernie also likely could have peeled off some white working class voters, although whether it would be enough is open to debate. I think he could have won, but his electoral coalition and campaign would be so different that it’s difficult to game out what the result would be.
Great question. I have no idea. I want to believe Warren could have. To me she feels like America’s Mom. Sanders maybe, with the right VP. There’s always the sense regular voters would turn out for ANYONE running against Trump, but it’s trickier to guess who republicans (some I’m hearing secretly flipped) would have been okay voting for.
No. Definitely not Bernie and I doubt Warren as well. They’re too far left, especially Bernie. (Sorry Bernie friends, don’t @ me but you know its true). Not Buttigieg either. Possibly Klobuchar but I’d say no because she’s a woman and we saw the negative effect that had last time. Maybe Booker, I’d listen to a case for this but I doubt it. There’s flaws in all of them really. Biden really was the only one with broad enough appeal to take him down.
And just as importantly, Biden was also smart enough to stay out of things and basically let Trump hang himself. Every one of those other candidates would have fell into Trump’s trap of getting into spats and verbal jousts, etc. Biden’s campaign basically kept a low profile, stayed off Twitter, stayed focused on one or two main issues, and let Trump self destruct. That allowed the narrative all Summer and Fall to basically stay on Trump’s failings and not what the Dem Challenger was doing in response. His long time experience as a politician really paid off in that way.
The fact that Biden basically stood back and let Trump self-destruct kinda surprised me, since I expected him to be more combative(remember that time he said he’d like to challenge Trump to a fistfight).
I think a lot of Biden’s success (both in fundraising and building momentum after the primary and in the election itself) are due to his status as elder statesman. He’s got an immense amount of political experience (especially in Washington) and number of connections that the other primary contenders just don’t have.While Trump could have said anything and kept his base, no democratic candidate would have had that luxury. Biden was pretty skillful at navigating those waters and not alienating any groups.I also think those same attributes are what we need for the next four years of cleaning up this mess. His experience and connections should be really valuable in mending some fences and shoring up relationships here and around the world.
Impossible to know.
If Trump’s vote count had been down where it was projected, yes. But he got out a ton of votes, Biden needed the holding their nose defectors to get this win.
the long national nightmare is over. let the many legal cases against citizen trump begin.
Honestly, some of the memoirs to come out of this administration are going to be just wild. I don’t know who reads political memoirs, since reviewers will give you most of the best parts anyway, but I might actually consider buying these. The White House was probably a goddamn circus for four straight years.
With the amount of turnover this administration has had, the memoirs already have been wild. I wonder how many officials there are that would be interested in writing a tell-all book that actually have been in the White House since the beginning.
Yes, you’re right. We know a lot, relatively speaking, about what went on in Trump’s White House. But as the political cost of criticizing Trump declines, we’re just going to get more revelations coming to light, and it’s going to be very good reading.
I don’t expect to hear a lot from the relatively small number of true believers that stuck with Trump through his entire tenure: anybody with a conscience quit or was forced out. But if the true believers do write memoirs in order justify their actions, we’re going to get some evidence that a lot of the big players in the administration were dull, empty, basically unsympathetic people.
The best thing would be if Ivanka and Jared read the tea leaves, and decide that going scorched earth on Trump and his administration would be their quick ticket back into polite society. “Daddy Wanted to Fuck me the Way he Fucked the Country: A Memoir by Ivanka Trump”
Yay ish, nothing’s fixed, but it’s less bad.Except for Jim Carrey on SNL for 4 to 8 more years.
There are some crucial executive decisions that can be reversed, so there are concrete fixes like continuing DACA protections and maintaining our support of the WHO. Our legislative woes don’t look like they’re going anywhere soon. Neither will the dispiriting knowledge that Trump probably would have won reelection if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic and a major economic slump.
And Trump won’t be president.
Totally on the executive orders! Trump didn’t get hardly anything done through legislation, but that fucker signed tons of malicious orders. Just a couple weeks ago, he signed one that would convert tons of federal civil servant positions to ones loyal to the president first rather than to the county and their ethics: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/donald-trump-civil-servants-schedule-f
What he did get done were presents from McConnell and he is still around (but with cancer? What was that on his hand anyway?).
I found it awfully suspicious that he was making that sort of move so close to the election. But it actually seems likely to me at the moment that, rather than part of a plot to steal the election, he was actually just making all his moves without a thought that it was even possible that he could lose.
I’d prefer they bring back Woody Harrelson rather than stay with Jim Carrey. I thought his Biden was a hoot.
Totally forgot that he played Biden. The teeth were great actually. I only remembered Sudekis playing Biden, but I would be all for Woody taking it back.
I’m glad, but I certainly don’t feel like celebrating, exactly. I feel like I just watched the fire department extinguish the last flames and am outside staring at the burnt frame of my house. Is it better than the house being on fire? Sure is! But… ugh, what are we left with?
Exactly.
But on the bright side Baldwin’s Trump will be gone by the end of the year hopefully.
I MIGHT kinda miss the Weekend Update bit with Don Jr. and Eric, though.
There is literal cheering in the streets of my Chicago neighborhood.
oh you are chicago huh? im in the south loop, and yeah, cheers and bells.
I’m pretty sure there are some pots and pans being clanged as well (Brooklyn).
Same here in Morningside Heights. I’m hearing from friends and neighbors that Times Square and Union Square are already packed with tons of people.
I’m a Chicagoan too. And I’ve NEVER heard cheering like this. Its incredible, actually.
Hello fellow Slooper! (is that what we call ourselves?)
I dont call myself that.
Meanwhile, my neighborhood in Texas has never by this quiet.
Yeah, my small town (not in TX) has had Trumpers waving flags and honking horns along the highway the last 3 weeks. I look forward to relishing their sadness.
their tears will taste sooooo good!
Especially pertinent since my neighbor’s car has a “Make Liberals Cry Again” Trump bumper sticker. Assholes.
It must be really fulfilling for folks like him who derive so much pleasure from strangers’ sorrow.
My drug of choice is Luis Suarez’ tears, but I’m eager to try something new. This may prove to be an even better high.
They’re doing the WASP equivalent of sitting shiva.
Having a temper tantrum.
I live in one of the white flights of DFW. Not a whole lot going on here either.
Lol, no kidding! (Kinda nice tho. Peaceful even)
‘smokes cigarette standing on the roof of a building on a US military base in South Korea with a pair of binoculars watching Gatling cannon fire tracer rounds from C130 gunships and nuclear detonations in the distance’ El Paso, Texas 2021. Good to hear from you again Generalissimo Alexander Haig how’d that fucking bitch President Kamala Harris die?I’m joking of course. There won’t be anyone left alive in South Korea or El Paso. Also I don’t smoke.
I was outside enjoy the morning here in Schaumburg and when I read the news I screamed “wooohooo!” louder then I should have and my neighbor yelled back “Oh fuck off!”. I think he’s a bit mad 🙂
If I didn’t know for a fact that my friend in Schaumburg is out of town right now, I’d have a pretty good guess who it was.
I heard a cherry bomb go off down the hill from me – and had no idea why the jerk was setting it off to wake me up from a lovely nap. I’ve now concluded it probably coincided with the first reports of the AP. Glad my neighbor was obnoxiously celebrating.Also, to your comment on military ballots still coming in for Georgia, something a few days before the election that absolutely shocked me on my political feed was a poll on veterans, where Trump was ahead with the over 55 cohort but lost the under 55 vote fairly substantially. That’s something Democrats haven’t had since Reagan.I haven’t gone through the exit polls yet, and it’s also important to note they will be vastly less helpful given both COVID (“Hi, can I spend a few minutes asking you some questions about you and your voting preferences while you either hover 6 feet away in fear or berate me for wearing a mask?”) and the massive amount of mail in ballots. However, the remaining Georgia ballots from those deployed are going to be a fascinating snapshot of if the substantial dropoff in support among career officers – Trump didn’t have a single retired 4 star endorse him – made it down to the enlisted.
Schaumberg? I thought that was only in The Onion.Maybe there is some kind of perceptual filter that keeps away outsider knowledge and vice versa.https://www.theonion.com/schaumburg-man-dimly-aware-of-shadowy-non-schaumburg-w-1819565306
Nah if you live in the Chicago burbs you know about Schaumburg. It’s kinda the joke of that article. It’s a big north west suburbs with a ton of shit in it, so if you lived here you could conceivably never have leave. That being said I didn’t grow up living here and lived all over the area so it’s not the center of my universe, just my current city of residence. I actually grew up in a city many people seem to be aware of but often think isn’t real, Berwyn!, and yes I marched many times in their mushroom themed fall parade
Cue Svengoolie “BERWYN?” sound clip.
Svengoolie salutes you! BERRRR-win
People are partying in the street, blasting horns and music here in upper Manhattan. Reminds me of those newsreels of people celebrating the end of WW2.
One of my coworkers just did a happy dance in the hallway.
In my sleepy, upper-middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood, on Saturday at 8:30 AM, the background is a symphony of whoops and cheers.
I’m in a suburb right outside of DC. I was watching live when Biden was called on MSNBC, and immediately started hearing car horns and “wooos!” Since then, someone found a cow bell, and an airhorn, and people have been driving around honking their car horns, shouting, and more.It reminds me, ah yes, this is, in fact, America. It feels good.
Car horns honking here in my small liberal island of Columbia, MO.
Same in Lawrence, KS.
People have been hooting and hollering and honking car horns and playing drums in West Philly non-stop.There was also some cheering after the AP called the election.
Im in Kansas (yes, Kansas) and we just got back from the party on main street! Lot’s of happy people, cheers, honking horns.
I’m waaay out in the western burbs, but there are some fireworks going off right now during the speech.
Funnily, I was driving somewhere this morning, and stopped to fill my car when my phone woke up with a news alert that Pennsylvania had been called for Biden. I was listening to Saturday Morning Flashback on XRT* and the song that happened to be on was “All I Need Is A Miracle” by Mike & the Mechanics.
*trying to make this a really Chicago post.
I’m in North Jersey- the car horns and cheering started not too long after the news was announced and was still going on 5 hours later
Hard to hear over the constant gunshots and sirens though
Kornacki signing off.
Nobody has ever earned a good night’s sleep as much as he has
Well maybe John King. Both of them need a vacation. Like a month long vacation.
… and Phil Mattingly
Anyone care to open a book on how many days in to the Biden presidency we are before he starts to bomb somewhere? And let’s open another on how long until the media rehabilitates Trump? I’ll give it 3 years tho I believe Joy Ann Reid tried to start it already.
Who ungreyed the troll?
Imagine the bubble you’d need to be in to think that someone saying something you don’t like is trolling.
I looked at your comment history wooooo boy. It’s practically incomprehensible. You’re just an idiot or a troll. Probably both.
Don’t make me tap the username.
What does this even mean?
Well least you aren’t doing the Gary Oldman “EVERYONE” post since your edit. But I’m honestly surprised you aren’t aware of the whole “don’t make me tap the sign” meme.
Apparently an esoteric reference to the dubiously realized UI of Unfriended: Dark Web. Basically, he means he’s going to “Dark Web” you.
Which means what exactly?
Oh, sorry…apparently I spoke too soon. I see now they’re his thoughts, not my inferences.
Now that’s paranoia
Paranoia?! WHERE?
Indeed
For the record it was 34 days you fucking shit-stain.
Pathetic trolling moron
You voted for a mass murdering rapist. That’s the ultimate troll.
And you voted for?
Someone who isn’t either of things. Lesser evil is for outright cowards.
And who was that?
…?
So you didnt understand my second sentence then for real. Wow. Ok.
Just spell it out specifically because I’m really stupid. Who specifically did you vote for? Name?
Weird to lie and say you’re really stupid. You clearly made a rational calculation about who was best to vote for and then decided to really commit to that choice no matter what. Unless you just voted for the feels and justified it later with lesser of two evils stuff.
Who did YOU vote for?
See you demonstrated previously you aren’t doing anything in good faith by lying about being dumb. There’s no reason to engage properly until you genuinely retract that and the other accusations you made about trolling.
I JUST WANT YOU TO STATE WHO YOU VOTED FOR.And you won’t, pathetic.
Oh dude no need to shout that was established a few posts back. You need to be able to criticize other people’s choices so you can throw out a whattaboutery in order to deflect from the fact you voted for a mass murdering rapist. The funny thing is that you won’t even do a “lesser of two evils” bit cus you’re not able to accept it.
You still have not answered.
Obviously not because as I said before your goal is to whattaboutery any one else I mention. All that does is reveal your total lack conviction about your choice. I get it sucks for your purposes but that’s the situation you made for yourself.
You still have not answered.
Obviously not because as I said before your goal is to whattaboutery any one else I mention. All that does is reveal your total lack conviction about your choice. I get it sucks for your purposes but that’s the situation you made for yourself.
You still have not answered.
Obviously not because as I said before your goal is to whattaboutery any one else I mention. All that does is reveal your total lack conviction about your choice. I get it sucks for your purposes but that’s the situation you made for yourself.
kill yourself
Trump dropped plenty of bombs in 2017, cope harder.
Pop culture-wise, there tends to be nostalgia for Presidents good or bad, after about about 15 years or so. But usually that ties in with whatever else was going on around that time (movies, music, etc). There may very well be nostalgia for Trump, but in a ‘look-back-and-laugh’ sort of way.
Id have thought it was a ‘lol what remember this guy’ thing but you can’t say something like “Our values are the same We disagree on policy but we don’t disagree on humanity. We don’t disagree about love and compassion. I think that’s true for all of us” Is laughing at. It’s attempting to redeem.
There he is! THERE he is! It’s the Great Trumpkin! He’s falling out of the presidential raaaaace!
I don’t think I’ve ever been as full of anticipation and anxiety for the results of an election here in Australia. Or as emotional as I was when the results came through.Congratulations, you guys. Biden might turn out to be mediocre as Pres at best. But won’t that be, at the very least, soothing?
I for one, welcome the boredom and mediocrity.
I’ll take mediocre over batshit insane ANY day.
Well, if the US can get their shit together, maybe we will finally wake the fuck up and vote out the LNP next federal election?
This. Between the rejection of Trump and the great results from the Queensland election, I’m really hopeful that those sunburned morons won’t fuck us at the next federal election. And that Palmer will die of COVID in the next year. Fuck that stupid cunt.
Seems right-wing populism has run its course for this generation. COVID exposed it a the hollow, empty, idea-free, cruel ideology it is. At least I hope (and what I see happening in the US, UK, Chile and other places gives me hope that I am right). They won’t go down without a fight, but the shine has worn off.
As a fellow who resides in Canada I concur, I first got emotional when he announced Kamala as his running mate and then again watching the videos of cities across the country celebrating, America is indeed great again. Now don’t let shit like that happen again.
Our results come in pretty quick though, and the campaigns don’t last approximately 8000 years either. Having said that, the last federal election might not have had me anxious, but the results were fucking crushing. The liberals snatching victory from the the jaws of a justly deserved defeat, yet again.
FUCK YEAH! USA! USA! USA!
Oh the humanity….
*huge manatee
Really, the greatest manatee.
I’ll not have you disparage manatees around here.
I need more stars to give this.
Man, I forgot how much I miss Ferguson.
Ditto. He was the best.
Too soon.
I heard this and was super happy and then got a huge wave of anxiety. Trump supporters are not known for their mental stability and who knows what the idiot in chief is going to say today. I don’t think we will see civil war but I’d be surprise if no violence breaks out somewhere over this. Stay safe everyone!
His son has already called for “total war” and boards around the internet are filled with people calling for civil war. Let’s hope it’s just smoke
“His son has already called for “total war””Don Jr. isn’t even trying to hide his Goebbels plagiarism anymore.
It helps that they’re mostly a bunch of pussies that like to play soldier online.
Let’s hope there isn’t civil war.But if there is, let’s all agree that when we win, we aren’t letting them keep their statues and flags, and they don’t get to name all the streets and schools after their treasonous losing generals.
Most will not do anything except express rage online.Yeah it only takes one psycho white supremacist terrorist to hurt a bunch of people, but I think people are on high alert some hopefully they don’t get too far.
That is my hope but I’m still keeping my head on a swivel for the next few weeks.
The real danger will come when they (and Trump) will realize that they’ve lost the election.So you’re still safe for 7 or 8 months.
LOL. I think Trump realized he lost on Wednesday when the states started to turn. He can’t be that dumb to think when they started counting mail in ballots that they would be for him when he basically told his supports to not do it for months.
To paraphrase the great Leo McGarry“Yes I think he’s exactly that dumb.”
I do think he was so dumb that he though elections had to be called on the same night even though that isn’t the case and was alive in 2000
While we’re at it, he was alive during ‘Dewey beats Truman.’
Can you just imagine the response as the margins in Pennsylvania and Georgia slowly, slowly, slooooowly flipped to Biden and then slowly, slowly, slooowly grew in Biden’s favor? It’s not adequate punishment for the last four years, but it’s a start.
It’s the slow, painful death this presidency deserved.
Narrator: He is that dumb.
I dont think this is the way to look at it. Remember when his 2016 candidacy first gathered steam, some people said he’d be a good candidate because he’s “not a politician”? (That would be the “run the country like a business” crowd.) Well I think what’s been revealed about him is that, in the worst sense, he is actually the biggest politician of all. Everything he says and does is about gaining and keeping more wealth and power. Except in attempt to warn the gullible, there was never any good reason to even evaluate the truth of any of his statements. He is not about truth or falsity. He’s a creature of pure, shameless scheming. The reason he won’t say that he lost the election is that there is no further play in that.
My father was talking to a friend the other day, before Election Day, who apparently supported Trump. He “joked” that if Biden won, he’d come to my parent’s house and “bring his gun” because my parents supported Biden. I’m a little bit scared of them, though I know my father also owns several guns. I really do hope no one does anything crazy, but seeing Trump’s reaction, and his son’s rhetoric, really does make me genuinely nervous.
If you haven’t noticed by now, these people mostly just talk a mean game and that’s about it.
I will not be surprised. His base is old people in rural areas & small towns. Back in 2016 Matthew Yglesias wrote “My guess is that in a Trump administration angry mobs will beat and murder Jews and people of color with impunity, even though he’s saner than his colleagues. There’s a market for overheated political rhetoric and many of us have been marinating in that, but it’s mostly hot air.
The Trump administration was a cult and now the cult leader is gone. I hope they will wake up from their delusion. But I guess there will always be some Kool-Aid drinkers screaming in Twitter and I’ll continue to ignore Twitter.
They have 4 short years to regroup for either Don Sr. again or one of his awful offspring. You know one of them is going to try in 2024.
They’re all going to be sitting behind bars in 2024.
That would be lovely, but I still believe Senior won’t spend a minute in prison.
He might go broke when the debts are called in, at least. Well, rich person broke, but still.
There’s no way he spends time in prison, even if he’s convicted.
Though I’ve learned to never say never, Don Jr. doesn’t have 1/2oth of the celebrity his dad did in 2016 or even the ability to pretend he’s been a successful businessman/real estate magnate/TV star.But, who knows, republicans already elected one Trump and one failed, stupid son of a prior president before.
Remember, even after Dubya, Jeb (er, I mean Jeb!) was the front runner before the primaries in 2015-16.
Nicki Clyne is still dancing outside Keith Rainere’s prison. Never underestimate the cult mentality.
He’s not gone yet. He’s still President for 10 more weeks. He can cause a shit ton of damage in that time, particularly because no longer has t hide anything. Even after that, he wont stop talking.
But he promised to leave the country. I guess that that even North Korea or Russia will want him so we’re probably stuck with him and his endless whining.
He was trying to hide his evil plans all this time??
The next step is to keep Trump from selling as many state secrets as he can before going on a “diplomatic” trip to Russia.
Honestly the anxiety continues for me because Biden has said he wants to put Republicans in his Cabinet. Which is a stupid idea and should be abandoned. And there’s still the matter of the Georgia runoff elections in January that decide the fate of the Senate and who’s gonna be Speaker.
It’s not necessarily stupid. There were republicans who were pretty horrified by Trump (also, the republican/democrat label is not sufficient, some people endorse such identities for weird symbolic, historical reason without realizing they don’t reflect their sensitivities). I think it’s an important thing to do. The goal is to come back from the insane polarization of the Trumputin years.Greece has never healed from its civil war and dictatorship because its super-polarized society kept purging and replacing every public servant at each new political swap (each time being denounced as cronyism, but each time being motivated by the correction of the previous government’s cronyism). I think that Biden is genuinely trying to find a more healthy path.I don’t expect him to keep the most dangerous bigots, like all the nazi staff that was staying in place after ww2. But he knows that fueling paranoia, pendulum swings, feelings of exclusion and negation, is dangerous in the long term. Republicans have to realize that it’s not the end of the world, and that it isn’t the election of a left-wing trump. Or else, the martyrdom narrative and revenge fantasies will just fester.
He’s going to try to find a more healthy (or ‘normal’) path, I agree — but there’s still plenty of good reason for trepidation. One can’t productively make compromise with someone who sees you as a mortal enemy in a total war, and that kind of mindset — which was already awful during the Obama administration — I think is even worse on the right now.
That’s why I nuance what “republican” means. Many republicans were opposing Trump (okay, for a very loose, subjective interpretation of “many” – like, wow, more than I can count on my fingers). I think there are republicans who aren’t in a “total war” mindset, and might help bridging all that.I expect Biden to find somewhat okay people, for this.
It’s an important distinction. But while perhaps Trumpism will mostly mercifully disappear now, I still think extremism permeates today’s Republican party, both in their belligerence and their policy ideas. So when I hear the sentiment going around some circles — “Biden’s a good man for the moment because he’ll compromise” — my reaction is still that a good man for the moment absolutely needs to repudiate a lot of extremism if he’s going to arrive at policies that actually help meet real needs of real people.
It really depends on what he’s supposed to compromise with. Not only extremism is bad. In order to build a decent society, a lot of dilemmas, tensions and paradoxes have to be solved. Freedom vs security, freedom vs cooperation, freedom vs freedoms, etc. It will always be a clash with bad faith and egocentric intents (deliberate or subconscious ones), and it will always be a matter of disputes between people who disagree in good faith, who weight differently all the legitimate priorities that conflict in a society. There are non-extremist bad ideas to discuss.But these discussions can only take place without the absolute trolls, driven by unapologetic selfishness, open evil, racism, glorified egoism, etc. That’s why many countries have these cumbersome, awkward laws against “hate speech” : the public debate has to take place freely, but outside of absolute nastiness. Some discourses and viewpoints are simply to be disqualified. Nope, we won’t behead people for blasphemy, nope, we won’t genocide this or that pretend “race”, we don’t even go there. And what Trump stands for, basically the opposite of democracy, is not an option within democracy. Democracy is not an all-encompassing anything-goes blank state. It’s its own system with its own thresholds. For instance, it defends minority against majorities : a Democracy doesn’t have room for “the majority decided to kill that minority”. It’s a bit counter-intuitive to those who see democracy as one abstract idea of universal suffrage and that’s all, of every opinion being enabled depending on its quantitative support.So yes, there is no compromise to be made with fascism. Some ideas, some postures, some behaviors and mindsets, have to be ruled out. There’s a “within a frame” versus “outside the frame” border that has to be made explicit. Democracy is about debating complicated matters, within a given frame only. It’s not infinite, it’s still much broader than in other political systems.But now, within that frame, there’s enough room for good and bad ideas. And at this point of history, Biden will have to compromise with the bad ones. He probably endorses many himself. It’s not (anymore) a time for the social shift that many people expected. It’s not a time for, say, a Bernie or Ocasio-Cortez presidency. It’s not a time for my own social sensitivities. The way I see it, … okay, this will be the absolute best metaphor EVER :The way I see it, US society is a half-torn blanket. It’s been ripped apart by, uh, mites, or cigarette ashes, or whatever. Getting rid of Trumpism (and, more abstractly, the unchecked fake news, interference, cyberbubbles that exaggeratedly polarize society) is like getting rid of these mites or cigarette butts. But before going back to the usual, normal, healthy disputes about pulling the blanket one way or the other, the ripped parts first have to be sewed together again. There’s confidence, cooperation, good will, and proofs of listening, that has to be re-established between people who disagree politically. If we pull the blanket now, in this context of distrust and paranoia, it will be a permanent civil war, with perpetual revenge elections, and a new trump every 8 years. It will be two inner countries at war, alternating. The healthy shift toward Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez modernism has to be slow, patient and careful, and to progressively shift common sense. Trump has fragilized the fabric of society way too much.Compromises with republicans is not incompatible with the total exclusion of trumpism. It depends on it. The window of acceptability has to be redefined firmly and re-centered. If you shift it so much to the left that the conservative half of the population is excluded from society’s construction, you just build the nightmarish eternal red scare enemy that trumpists fantasize about, and the eternal total war they relish.
That’s a much appreciated post.
Here’s the pattern that I see U.S. politics already deeply embedded in: Bill Clinton was a milquetoast centrist; right-wingers, particularly the Congress and Fox News, painted him as a Che Guevara without the hat. Then George W. Bush (moreso Cheney, Rove and other string-pullers) legitimately were dangerous radicals. This was followed up by another compromise-happy Democrat who was (1) successfully neutered by Congressional Republican refusal of that compromise, and (2) painted by the right as a crazed terrorist. Follow that up with the Trump debacle, which genuinely is extremely dangerous — and now follow that up — if we’re lucky! —with what looks to be a compromise-happy Biden administration that’s highly likely to have its balls cut off by Republicans it seeks to compromise with.The narratives are not equal: The dangers of the Republican administrations are based on just observing reality, while the dangers of the Democrat administrations are about 99% made up by right wingers. What it all amounts to is a lock-step duty-dance that’s dragging the whole country rightward, to the point where we can at this point smell and taste genuine authoritarianism. The Democrats never do anything but scramble to occupy the new center, which is always further from the actual needs of real people than it was in their last round of obsequious concessions.All of this back and forth takes place in a context of Democrats having won 7 of the last 8 elections by popular vote, but not always able to overcome the national gerrymandering system that is the electoral college.
His parting gift of doing as much as he can to delegitimize the election is also going to leave right-wingers even less likely to cooperate, or in many cases, to even acknowledge the Biden administration.
If someone had a problem with Trump but were okay with war criminal Bush and torturer Dick Cheney perhaps they’re not that good a person
You can save yourself some time and just say “the Lincoln Project.”
Yeah but those same Republicans are the same people who were ok with Bush and Cheney doing war crimes. Hell, the Lincoln Project took money from gullible Democrats and stole memes and they haven’t spent a dime on actually helping Biden win. In truth they’ll jump ship the moment a competent fascist shows up. Democrats need to accept that putting Republicans in the Cabinet will harm the country more than it heals.
I don’t care — no Republicans in a Democratic cabinet!Let them Feel the Bern for the next four years!
Not American here, but very curious about your comment.One major criticism towards Republicans during the Trump era has been their active attempts at dividing the nation. How would doing the same thing but in reverse help in any way? Wouldn’t that be a reason to criticize the Democrats in the same way?I am just baffled at the reaction that I’m seeing in general. While I understand and share the elation that comes from seeing Trump gone, seeing a political weasel like Biden as president is irking me a lot. Also, I fail to understand how so narrow a difference in favor of Biden can be seen as a “victory”. These results mean that half of the voters really thought that Biden would be a worse choice than a crazy moron that showed the world how stupid and dangerous he was for 4 years. At what point do you think America will acknowledge that fact? And Biden’s speech will not suffice, I think you need more than empty words.Really, I’m just curious and eager to understand better how it works in the US, as, sadly, everything you do has a direct influence on Europe.
For example, Cindy McCain is listed as on the of his transition team.
What brontosaurian
said. Most of them will just whine and troll online. Or at best, wave their
stupid Trump flags around. As we saw in the Gretchen Witmer case and all the
other Boggolo crap this year, most of them are too stupid and/or scared to
cause any real problems to anyone. It’ll be the lone wolf Tim McVeigh types to
worry about, but those are few and far in between.
grrrrr, i’m so angry that they stole the word boogaloo.
i love boogaloo music.
I look forward to seeing MAGA militia dipshits go against military drones.
That could work, ArgleBargle….
I think there’s a silver lining to all this taking so long in that passions aren’t quite as enflamed as they would have been on Election Day. People have had a chance to cool down a little bit, whereas had Biden been declared the winner on Nov 3, I think some dangerous idiots were a bit more primed to pop off. There’s certainly still a concern about violence but, for now, the streets look more like the end of Return of the Jedi than The Purge. Still, stay vigilant.
Cue the celebration sequence from Return of the Jedi.
Yub Nub version!
It’s always Yub Nub in my house.
You mean “Yub Nub (Dub)”?
Man, RotJ has been in my mind all day. Watching the celebration across the country reminds me of galaxy-wide celebrations in the Special Edition. And Fox News calling Arizona first and (for the most part) refusing to legitimize Trumps bullshit lawsuits is reminiscent of Vader throwing the Emperor down the shaft only after he nearly killed Luke.
Ooh, Return of the Jedi is a good comparison. Like how they just tried to make a New Republic that was exactly like the Old Republic that gave rise to the space nazis in the first place, and it just resulted on the space nazis coming back even stronger.
Hearing the Fox News anchor just say “President-elect Biden” through gritted teeth was the most satisfying moment of 2020.
yeah, there was a moment when one of them said, “vice-president biden…uh…president-elect biden…it’s going to take some time to get used to that…” – it was wonderful.
I mean, Anderson Cooper also said that exact quote, literally verbatim, so it’s not necessarily some Fox News bitterness thing.
The relief I feel is tempered by the fact little Hitler has 2 1/2 months left to burn Paris.
To quote Stormy Daniels, let’s just get this unpleasantness over with.
Though political analysts predicted that the race would be excruciatingly closeI mean, how close did America come here? How much of this was political theatre, and what could be defined as concrete thinking and behaviour in the run up to 2020?
And more to the point, in ten years’ time when dedicated teams of political scientists have completed their analyses and handed down new recommendations and strategies, how close will the next polarising, charismatic leader come to all out disaster?
It’s a New Day (Yes it is)
THANK GOD they called it in time for SNL to react.
jesus wept, we’re stuck with jim carey for the next 4 years.
Effect of this election #1,032: After four years of silence, right-wingers will again be vocally alarmed by the national debt.
Lindsay Graham already started a couple days ago. Hypocritical dumbass.
Didn’t they vote out that a-hole?
No, despite the fact that seemingly NO ONE on either side likes Lindsay Graham, being a spineless hypocritical toadie completely worked out for him.
I voted for Kodos.
love your avatar!
Its’ madder than Mad Jack McMad, winner of last year’s Mad Man competition.
I just bought his cookbook, but I’m having problems finding 40 humans to cook (for).
Well, if your goal was to make Serak the Preparer cry then mission accomplished!!
I’m not relaxing until January 20th. There will be shenanigans attempted. Also I live smack dab in the middle of Trump country and there are some angry knuckleheads out there.
At this point I expect the shenanigans to be harmless and hilarious. I’d say, relax, grab the popcorn and enjoy the arms flailing.
Same. If Trump isn’t going to be busy contesting the election, he’s gonna do something stupid and dangerous like the vindictive little turd he is.
Given how 2020 has gone, I fully expect a health alert on Biden…. oh, the day before the Electors meet to vote.
That just means President Harris and I’m more than okay with that.
Not necessarily, which is the fear. Trump and his goons are already talking about trying to get Republican state legislatures to install Trump goons as electors to just get them to vote for Trump, regardless of the outcome of the vote/court cases. Biden dying before the Electors vote would give them more than enough cover to do so (not that they’ve ever needed cover to hide their in-the-open crimes). Only in the case where the president elect dies AFTER the electors vote would the Vice President elect become the president elect, I believe.
You are correct. It would be left to the EC to figure out what to do. 4 years ago, I would have said without hesitation that they would choose Harris in that eventuality but I have much less faith in systems in this country than I used to.
Yeah, choosing Harris would not be mandated by law, but just a “norm.” And I think we’ve all seen how Trump feels about violating norms.
Poor Norm.
Fuck me it’s over! Nearly had a nervous breakdown on Tuesday. Oh thank god so much! Yes yes yes yes yes yes!!!!!
We can’t let up. There are still societal problems that—no, wait, taking a moment to experience the fucking full-body relief that I felt when I saw the news. Fuck you, Donald Trump! Fuck you, enabling GOP, you had four years and you gassed Trump up the entire time. And fuck off, Kasich & Santorum, etc. who are already calling for Dems. to listen to Republicans. I want to not feel terrified for myself, my friends, and family.
Until January, in the words of Leslie Knope: You don’t let anything happen to him, do you understand me? He is precious cargo
you know leslie is having the best day today!!!!
It’s literally my very Republican dad’s birthday today and I’m supposed to go to his party tonight and I don’t know whether I should gear up for him to be angry all night or bring some tissues. Either way I honestly feel kinda bad, I wish it would’ve lasted one more day so he could be happy.
I hope you folks having parties in the streets have a good evening because I’ve got a rough night ahead.
naw fuck him. trash his ass.
Us without parents think you are a fucking dipshit — fuck you
Your Dad consistently votes to hurt people like me. Fuck him to the ends of the Earth. Get him a box of turds for his present.
Whatever you do, make sure you do it while wearing a Biden/Harris hat or shirt.
Go to his party. My Republican dad died a couple of months ago. We disagreed politically. But I’d give anything to be able to see him and give him a hug again.
Oh I’m not not going, I was just talking about how weird it will be.
You… probably shouldn’t be going to parties during a pandemic regardless.
Status update: I forgot that any political developments can be delayed/averted by talking about sports and it’s college football Saturday so bullet dodged for now.
Football. The real way to bring together and divide America.
Minor correction: PBS also called Arizona for Biden on election night, because they were using the AP projections. (Not sure if they count as a “network,” though.)
Can we start talking about the narrative?Is this really a “close” election?It was slow and thorough. But, Biden is going to end up winning the popular vote by millions and he’s going to have more electoral votes than Trump in 2016.This feels like a landslide, even if mail in voting due to covid makes it feel close.
Plus Biden won via the Electoral College AND the popular vote, so it’s a straight win and not a technical win.
Many of us were hoping Biden would win in a landslide – ie, flipping Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and maybe even Texas. It was a pipe dream, and as it stands he’s going to win by a healthy margin (carrying Arizona and Georgia, which would be historic). I think people are using the word “close” to convey their frustration that an incompetent nihilist still won more electoral votes than John McCain or Mitt Romney.
The fact that Biden didn’t win in an obvious landslide on Tuesday night was very, very deflating, and whatever joy I feel at him finally winning is tempered by the fact that Trump got MORE votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. If someone voted for Trump in 2016, fine (well, not fine, but I guess i can almost understand it.) I just don’t see how someone could not vote for him in 2016, live through the last four years, and THEN decide he gets their vote now. It’s just scary.
He touched a nerve. Or maybe a few. It will be really frightening, but maybe we’ll collectively examine which nerves those were and why a shitty reality host was able to get his grubby little tiny hands on them.
Before election night in 2016, it seemed pretty clear that whoever won was going to be a one term President. Both candidates were so hated it seemed impossible either could win a second term. Had Hillary won, you’d NEVER hear the end of the Covid talk, even if she stopped the pandemic in June. So she woulda lost, Trump would probably just be getting elected now, and we’d just be starting all this shit, and probably with all three branches of government, and there’d be only 6 SCOTUS justices. So I guess it’s just like being hungover or sick and having to puke, and not wanting to go through the actual puking, but you know you’ll feel better afterwards. Not great, but not the worst. America just puked.
Yeah, I was willing to bet money that Trump would get less votes overall than he did in 2016. I knew he would keep his hateful base, keep the ride-or-die republicans, and foolishly assumed he would lose at least a notable % who saw the shit show of the last 4 years and realized he was not competent to lead. Wait to prove me wrong, assholes!
Yeah I never thought I’d ever see Georgia go blue but here we are.
I think when the back and forth ramped into “Most Important Election in our Lifetimes” territory and/in conjunction with “The Republican Party is Doomed and Tearing Itself Apart” — the narrative pushed the maximum number of Republican voters to the poles. If the election noise had only been turned up to its usual 11 instead of this year’s bazillion – I think many Repubs might have stayed home in silent protest to the TrumpsterFire. When it became about the life or death of the entire Right Wing – then the numbers turned up for Red State Senators. My point is: I don’t think 70 million Americans are gaga for Trump. 40 million Americans are gaga for Trump … and the other 30 million plus are still ride-or-die for the GOP out of family & historical loyalty. They voted for the Red Elephant not Orangeman. They’d vote for a discarded sock on the side of the road if Fox and AM radio screamed that the fate of the world hung in the balance.
I’m not sure that isn’t a distinction without a difference
Yeah. Idk either. It might be the difference between the people we somehow have to work with & the people we gotta just come at from some sideways angle. Direct politics doesn’t seem to work on those given to fantastical, nightmare, and wishful thinking. It’ll be a multi-generational effort.
I think what we need to do is make it clear that certain stances aren’t acceptable. Including demonizing the poor or leaving them to starve, among others.
The margins were really pretty close in a lot of swing states, in many ways that’s what makes elections “close” in our system. Also the house and senate races were quite the disappointment.
the fact the someone like susan collins got re-elected is….i’ll blame gerrymandering.
yes. that’s what it was.
Gerrymandering only affects the house, not the Senate.
yeah. *sigh* i know.
dammit, maine….
I mean, I don’t have much of an explanation either. I’ll never understand the mentality of someone who thinks “I want Biden to win this thing, but I also want to prevent him from ever actually doing anything.” Like, do these people know how Mitch McConnell operates? Do they really think being a “moderate” means anything in his senate?
Maybe he’s referring to when they split Maine off from Massachusetts…Too many states, is what I’m saying.
I mean, this is basically how the “blue wave” in 2018 turned out, which is why I was (at least trying to) not freaking out on Tuesday night. For WEEKS after the election, Republicans were gloating that the expected blue wave didn’t happen… until all the votes were counted and it actually did. A lot of the “WTF pollsters!?” anger actually turned out to be unfounded. FL was always a tossup, Ohio was the weakest of the Blue Wall states, and in the end, Biden is gonna win the popular vote by at least 5 million.Also, it’s pretty difficult to confirm that Trump actually made any progress with Blacks or Latinos, given that those numbers all come from exit polls of same day voting, I think, and those votes are largely skewed toward Trump, as we’ve seen.As Larry Wilmore said on Colbert, Trump made “progress” with Blacks the same way jumping gets you closer to the sun.
plus…MOST. VOTES. EVER.
Yes, its close. Also, it isn’t. The final numbers aren’t gonna look close. That pop vote and final EC tally will look like comfortable wins in the history books. But the margins in the final swing states actually were pretty close. One even modest bad press event for Biden in the lead up to the election and those margins could have been against him. And considering the losses Dems took down ballot, I wouldn’t call this a landslide.
“But the margins in the final swing states actually were pretty close.” Are they? I guess Wisconsin is close, but Michigan is a blow out, and PA will be won pretty handily by Biden as well. Particularly when compared to Trump’s margins in 2016. And on top of that Biden flipped two states – AZ and GA – that are traditional red states. That’s pretty significant. It is surely not a landslide, but I think we can comfortably say Biden won this election handily.
I think you also need to look at the Senate races in considering this was not a landslide. It looks like the Republicans may still carry a majority in the Senate. If you’re reading the tea leaves, one way to interpret that is that many people are still really digging Trump’s message, they just got sick of Trump.Ultimately, that’s what scares me most. Trump probably should have won this election in a landslide. His stupidity/ego re: the pandemic is probably why he failed. But he’s laid the blueprint for how to succeed; all the racist-dipshit sentiments he fomented are still at a rolling boil; and it will only take another politician who’s marginally smarter to follow in his (war) path and get us on that horribly shitty path again.
Decisive sure, but ‘landslide?’ Not by my standards. A mere few thousand votes separated Biden and Trump in too many states for my liking. It sure as hell was closer than I cared for.
Yes. Maybe decisive is better.I don’t like the narrative behind “close”. Like it was closer than one would like, but, it’s also you know not 500 votes like 2000.Biden always had the votes and he’s going to end up winning by a fair amount in total. And that should be yelled from the rafters. Like Republicans and Trump supporters need to hear it every day that this is what a mandate looks more like.
Seriously: Stacey Abrams rocks. After that ugly loss in Georgia (that she should have won) she doubled down and found a new outlet and thanks to her and the people around her, Georgia has become a serious contender for the Democrats. The woman absolutely deserves a place in Biden’s administration.Also, I’m so excited about having Kamala Harris as Vice President, I might be crying a little.
Let’s give Stacey Abrams all of her props.She didn’t start helping register voters in 2018 because she lost. She was helping register voters before and after 2018 because it is important. Almost half the voters she registered were not black.Afree 2018, she helped register voters from across the country, not just Georgia.In all likelihood, this race would have had a different outcome without her efforts and the organizations she helped found like Fair Fight.
You don’t think all the entertainment people that now call Atlanta home had more to do with that?
Details about her other work starting in 2013 with New Georgia Project. https://theslot.jezebel.com/stacey-abrams-was-absolutely-right-about-georgia-1845566935And Brian Kemp is a thief and a liar.
so sorry to lose elizabeth warren as my senator…but she’s gonna be a hell of a treasury secretary!
Im proud you had her as a senator. I got stuck with Rod Portman. But she’ll do fine, more then fine really. Love her.
Try having Ted Cruz…
Or Mitch, man I’m sorry.
As fantastic as that would be, the Senate will not allow Biden to choose a Cabinet. McConnell will tell Biden who he can appoint, or else he will leave them empty.
Biden can pull a Trump and have all his picks be “acting” to bypass senate confirmation. I mean, they couldn’t complain about something they allowed a Republican to do for. years when a Democrat does it right? That would be downright hypocritical!
As happy as I am that Biden won, I also have to come to grips with his limitations. And one limitation is that he wouldn’t do that.He’ll work with McConnell to appoint a bunch of Republicans to those Cabinet posts.
Should appoint McConnell to head, say… Veteran Affairs just to see how he responds.
Hey Donald… You’re fired!!This morning’s announcement brought tears to my eyes. For the first time in a long 4 years, I feel like we can have some hope. The struggle won’t be easy but it just became a better possibility for a positive future. Thank you to my fellow voters and Americans that decided it was time to end this national embarrassment.
Joe Biden won by less than 5% of the popular vote — 74m to 70m. That is far from a resounding rebuttal to the Trump Insanity. Do not breathe easy. The insanity is far from over. This was just stopping the acceleration to terminal velocity. The US is still very much in a free fall. The Republicans know this, are likely to control the senate, and will use it to undermine confidence in another democratic president in 4 years time by sabotaging everything they can get their hands on while blaming Biden and the democrats for it (like they have successfully for decades now).
The insanity is never ever over (fascistic values and worldviews haven’t been defeated by the shames of ww2, nothing will defeat them). But it has been largely disarmed for now : the US executive power in the hands of fascism was very actively shattering the Earth. An immortal dragon has been somewhat shackled and muzzled, after 4 years of roaming free, stomping and scorching everything around and beyond. That’s a thing to celebrate. The free fall has been the last 4 years. Now there’s a grip. The usual boring struggle to climb slowly or slip downwards. It’s a huge difference.In the free fall scenario, there would have been no electoral coming back from Trump’s values being broadcasted and validated from the White House. But he didn’t do two terms. There is a thick resistance to his 70’000’000 admirers. Trump didn’t become the USA’s new normal.
If the Republicans maintain control of the house, Biden’s only option are EOs, which can be immediately overturned by the next president. Which means nothing has actually been accomplished — all the shit the Republicans have created is still smeared all over the US. It’s just that, for the purposes of the presidency, things won’t be getting worse. For the purposes of the Senate, things absolutely will. And that plays right into Republican hands — they’ve already managed to convince roughly 1/2 the country that everything is Democrats fault. Imagine how many more they’ll convince after 4 years of attacking the people and sabotaging the government under Biden’s watch? It’s his presidency, and they’re good at redirecting blame onto the blameless. It’s a game they’ve played quite well many times before, and it has brought us progressively worse and worse Presidents each time they do.We’re still very much in a free fall. We’re just not *accelerating* anymore.
Biden’s only option are EOs, which can be immediately overturned by the next president.Come on, Ocasio-Cortez would never do that.
That’s been my takeaway as well. A vote for Trump was in essence, a vote for racism, and 70m people were ok with that. That’s 70m people that are cool with children in cages. 70m people who want to throw people out of the country. 70m people that don’t trust the science. 70m people who see foreign interference as a perfect call. 70m people that can get fucked.
I’m happy with the outcome, but I’m disgusted by how it played out.
I will only be happy with the outcome when Biden takes his seat in the Oval Office.And it’s not just the 70m people who voted FOR Trump. It’s also the ~100m Americans who didn’t vote AGAINST him. They weren’t bothered by Trump enough to vote. Which, you guessed it, is tacit approval for what he was doing. They were fine with his lies, rhetoric, and hate. They were fine with locking children in cages. They were fine with throwing working, contributing members of society out of the US because they weren’t white. They were fine with foreign powers meddling in our elections. They were fine with Trump and everything he stands for.
It’s really said something when Fox, of all news channel, is the first pointing out “Yeah, Sleepy Joe win this one”. When even the most vaunted conservative news channel out there tired of Trump *shrugged*
“Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—historically red states”Um, what?
I’m happy, but it has a bitter taste to it. I want my rights secure again, as a woman. I want every destructive, hate filled action performed over that last four years undone. I want 45 in chains in a dirty hole somewhere, never to be seen or heard from again.But mostly, I want the people in my life (myself included) to be OK again. To stop the anger and fear that has grown in us PERMANENTLY over the last four years. The thing that has made us hate other people so viciously. I want to live in a version of the world again where I can pretend most people are good and mean well. But I’m not sure I can get these things back no matter who is in charge now.You just can’t unsee or unlearn certain things.
Yeah. I see these things from afar because 2019/2020 have destroyed too many (unrelated) things in my life that won’t be replaced. I find the Trump removal a bit soothing because he was a horrible weight on me and on the people I consider decent, and because the collective reactions are beautiful and moving. but it’s like… please enjoy this, it’s a bit late for me.Also unrelated, but making a nice analogy to it, I used to participate in a forum that became an unmoderated cesspit of alt-right and neonazi militants. After a while, it became extremely moderated (any allusion to politics is forbidden), but I had left it because what had shown under the lid would always be there : you can prevent people from expressing their opinions any more, but once they’ve expressed them you know them and you know what people they are. The Trump years may have done that as a whole society’s scale. It’s not at all as bad as having to rebuild a society after a civil war or a genocide (imagine the very real everyday life of Rwandan neighbors after the genocide, knowing what each others have actually done and yet, for peace’s sake, having to not take it in account), but it’s still a very sour awareness. The one we get after horribly inhumane vote results (effective or close enough), when you walk down the street knowing that roughly one out of two passerbys are proponents of “this”.It’s heartbreaking. But it’s also, in the US case, an artificial situation manufactured by deliberate disinformation in the age of novel medias, not yet fully domesticated or understood in their impacts. Just look how much we have learned (the hard way) on the consequences of twitter and facebook manipulation. There’s a genuine effort to adjust. There’s the potential for this world to adapt to its new self-generated dangers. Also, don’t forget that the reactionary forces are precisely this : a reaction. To actual societal evolutions. To heterogeneously increased awareness of human realities (pertaining to “race”, gender, etc). It doesn’t truly go backwards. It screams and wrestles because it goes forwards, at a differential pace that tears it off a bit.This might go better. In the long term. Is what I’m saying.If there’s a long term (which is its own ecological issue, but, yeah, hm).
I don’t know if it’s really all that artificial. It’s based on something very old and rooted deep in the DNA of America.
Indeed. To put it succinctly: The damage has been done.
I know everyone’s exhausted by this but two more senate races in Georgia coming up. A chance to neuter the final boss and the ghoul behind all this if there’s a 50-50 senate. Very difficult I know but old school videogames always were.
January 5th, Georgia. Remember the time and place.
Hell yeah god bless America! We did it. We really did. It won’t solve everything immediately but the most important thing, get Trump out, has happened. He will leave. Either willingly or forcefully.
FUCKYEAHI VOTED DID YOU? i live in nyc so who gives a crap YAY GEORGIA YAY ARIZONA YAY NEVADA YAY PENNSYLVANIA FUCK YEAH AMERICA. USA USA USA USA USAturns out being a piece of shit to everyone doesn’t pay off, always!
Sunday morning here in Australia. Great news to wake up to. I was starting to think Biden would be stuck on 264 forever. I’ve heard some people describe this as a glacial victory, rather than a landslide.
Glaciers can do both, I guess.Nice to wake up to some national Covid free days down here while we’re at it, isn’t it?
Michigan, Wisconsi, and PA are “historically red states”? uhhh only if history starts and ends in 2016 i guess.
Very excited and relieved by the news. Hoping we can win the runoffs in Georgia and get that fuckhead McConnell out as Majority Leader. That being said, am absolutely baffled by AVClub calling Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania “historically red states.” They were Trump states in 2016, but that was newsworthy because they were reliably Democratic before then, not because they had a recent trend of going for Republican presidential candidates.
2016 was fourteen billion years ago though.
Haha Fair enough! I wouldn’t have quibbled if they hadn’t said “historically.”
The win ultimately came at the hands (and mail-in ballots) of voters in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—historically red states that flipped thanks in part to record voter turnout from Black communities, The first three states mentioned are actually historically blue states. That’s what was so shocking four years ago, that the “blue wall” flipped red. Biden flipped them back. Arizona and Georgia are the pickups this time.
As a Wisconsinite, I thank you for doing the correction for me. Wisconsin went red for the first time in 30 years in 2016.
Let’s hope that was the last time!
See Donald? THAT’s what it looks like when they’re dancing in the streets in New Jersey.
Though political analysts predicted that the race would be excruciatingly closeSurely you jest? Because all the pollsters and analysts went to great lengths to not call the election for Biden for weeks before Election Day, insisting Trump had a 10% chance of winning, blah blah blah.Biden was supposed to win Florida, and even possibly Texas (which was supposed to turn blue), and in the end Texas Latinos swung 60% to Trump, and Florida ones handed the state to Agent Orange too. “Close”? The only thing that turned out to be “close” is their credibility, close to zero.
Congratulations President Biden. Day one, it is time for you to rectify some of the terrible decisions that have been made in the past four years.1. Reverse Kinja;2. Season 8 of Game of Thrones needs to be retconned and reshot without D & D;3. Rise of skywalker is removed from Star Wars continuity;4. All the racist, regressive, anti-environmental stuff, in your own time of course.
Glad to see America finally catching up a little with the rest of the world where women have been prime ministers and presidents for the past 60 years.This is also a rather historic moment for vice president elect Kamala Harris, who will become the first woman, the first Indian American, and the first Black person to hold that office.
as one of those places who has had both a female prime minister and president (our gov’t is weird)….it feels nice, but if these accomplished women decide to surround themselves with a bunch of greedy little men, the shine wears off really quickly.
Do you think we’ll get to watch the movies and shows about this time when we’re old and bitch about how Trump was way dumber than his hologram?
I think it’s going to be one of those “future generations look back on the Trump years and ask WHAT THE FUCK, 2016-2020??? How did this moron con 70,000,000 people???” type situations.
And, just like that, all of America’s problems were solved… Again!
Haha Sorry for the hyperbole and “parade raining.” This is definitely a good and absolutely necessary change! I’m just bitter, tired, & pessimistic anymore.
How sweet it is 😊Now. To business:How soon can we throw Trump in jail? The Office seemed to protect him from like a million crimes! That protection is gone, yes?
TIL: The late Beau Biden had Coldplay as his favorite band. That’s why Biden’s president-elect acceptance party played it as part of the soundtrack. I’m glad I had such an ally in loving Coldplay, a genuinely great band whose music is gorgeous and thrilling. The lyrics don’t matter so much.
The win ultimately came at the hands (and mail-in ballots) of voters in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia—historically red states that flipped thanks in part to record voter turnout from Black communities, per The Guardian.Uh, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are not “historically red states”. They just flipped versus 2016. Now, if you go back into the 19th century, all three were reliably Republican from the beginning of the party (which ironically did get its grassroots founding in Wisconsin and Michigan). But that was when Republicans did little things like, oh, end slavery, pass birthright citizenship and enfranchise African American males. Unfortunately, we all see the abomination the national party has become 150 years later.
America finally has an adult President again. Yay.Harris has potential.Let’s hope that America has hit its bottom and that the spell is broken by this comically narrow victory.
Man, earlier in this week I was sad drunk.Now, I’m happy drunk.
Harris is a cop, which is all we need to know
My prediction, Republican leadership will force Trump to leave, and because he’s a vindictive little bitch he will start his own political party (the Trump party obviously) just to fuck up their chances in the next elections.
That’s the best part. Trump is going to want revenge in Republicans for not supporting his delusions and lies post-election. Don Jr. and Eric have already started whining about it.
…there was a chance—if a different state had been called for Biden
first—that Fox could have declared Biden the winner while other outlets
waited for another state to take him over the 270 electoral vote
threshold.
I was so hoping NV would get called Thurs which many thought it should have been, putting pressure on Fox to call the race, it would have been a chef’s kiss to have Bone Spurs and his lovely sons Uday and Qusay rage tweeting at Fox for giving Biden 270 while ‘MSDNC’ still hadn’t called it.
Well, Fox News DID call Arizona first, and refused to back down when the Trump campaign tried to bully them into reversing the call. I think they read the writing on the wall, and are setting themselves up for a post-Trump world.
I’m still dreading a nasty surprise from Trump’s legal team…
SO far they have been laughed out of court for almost their law suits, and the ones that weren’t laughed out MIGHT change, at beat, a couple hundred ballots. They are out of options, this is just a(nother) fundraising grift at this point (gotta pay down those campaign debts!).
This is true but the strategy might be more about delaying certification of electoral votes and spreading general uncertainty about the legitimacy of the results, leading to a contingent election that would likely allow Trump to remain in office. Horrifying, but there are a number of articles out there that detail this exact scenario, which Trump himself has alluded to. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/
He has no legal obligation to concede. On January 20th he isn’t president anymore. He’s just being a sore loser and using this as an opportunity to fleece the flock one last time. Honestly, look at their press conference this weekend. They can’t coordinate fucking lunch.
That’s what I’m hoping, that this is just a lot of ineffective bluster.
I remember after 2016, republicans engaged in the kind of smugness once thought to be the sole province of libs. “Maybe now they’ll finally listen to the voice of real America,” went a typical self-satisfied tweet. But the thing is, these last four years were essentially a process of us laying at their feet, powerless, and unable to do anything BUT listen to their demands. And what they wanted, straight up, was for children to get ripped from their families forever, black people to get their throats crushed and heads blown open by tank cops, women to have their rights stripped away by drunken rapists, and torch mobs to stroll through the streets shooting up synagogues. This was their policy platform: A death march back to Mayberry paved in blood.Fuck them all. It’s 2020, maybe now the voices of real America will finally choke on some Covid until they collapse face first in their Thanksgiving meal.
I don’t have high expectations for the Biden Administration, but MAN it feels good to see Trump lose.