Two things I don’t see anybody saying:

1. BlueSky is has venture capital funding, giving it greater marketing capabilities. Capitalism isn’t won by having a better product, it’s won by convincing people they should buy your product.
2. Dumb luck. Sometimes things just go viral, and you can try to figure it out in hindsight, but even that’s just a guess. If people could accurately predict what was going to be popular, venture capitalists wouldn’t have like a 90% miss rate.

Yeah, how often do the Republicans actually manage to come together to stop Trump?

One major problem here is the lack of community. It was easier to get in-person events organized when the default was to do things in person. #resistance isn’t just more common because people aren’t willing to be in person, but because it’s not as easy to get involved.

As far as actual political groups are concerned, a lot of them have very little online presence, or their information is only available through something like Facebook where you need an account to view it. Those that are more available frequently only hold their meetings online, and many make it difficult to find how to get involved because you have to navigate through all their requests for donations to find there’s very little else available.

But that’s just my experience over the last few years. I imagine it’ll get a lot worse when these groups aren’t legally allowed to exist.

The point is that there’s sanctions, and the sanctions are supposed to prevent those parts from getting into Russia. It’s not surprising to a lot of us that sanctions are ineffective at anything other than hurting the general population, but it’s good to report it and have that data point.

Not who brought it up, but it’s essentially just checking a box if you approve of the candidate, and check as many boxes as you want. Highest number of box checks wins. I’d take it over first past the post, but I prefer RCV still. Proponents of approval voting say it helps weed out extreme candidates, but I find the most extreme candidates in the US have historically been a huge net win, so I’d prefer to give them a better shot at winning.

Conservative messaging wins propaganda battles because it’s simple. Democrats can’t use the same tactics, because they’ll be less effective no matter what. Preventing consolidation of media and monopolization of media would be more effective, since it’s a centrally coordinated effort. Or just preventing anybody from having enough money that they’d even have the ability to do that.

If we get elections in the future, it’s possible we’ll get Democrats in two of the branches, and if they get their shit together they can pack the courts. It’s not entirely hopeless, but it does ride on the Democrats being remotely competent as an organization for even a brief period of time.

Like for a reasonable, ethical individual, that should 100% be enough.

Conservatives have never been reasonable, ethical individuals. Slavery, Jim Crow, against women’s suffrage, against the equal rights amendment, against social security, against gay and trans rights, the list goes on forever. The country’s fight isn’t to change a conservative’s mind, it’s to get enough of the non-conservatives to engage, protest, and vote such that they overwhelm the small but galvanized conservative base.

When you win on those issues, those conservatives don’t change their mind. They continue to support slavery, or voter suppression, or the issues of their time, but eventually they die off. Then you have new fights with the new conservatives.

True, but that’s not new. George Floyd, Occupy Wall Street, Seattle WTO, and the entirety of the civil rights movement all were met with state violence. The more they crack down, the more necessary it is to protest it.

They won’t hear about the bad things, or they’ll be told it was the Democrats that did it, and they’ll be believe it. Convincing MAGA of reality is pointless while they’re still feeding from the trough of conservative shit. We’re better off protesting and being disruptive in combination with getting our shit together for next round, where hopefully we’ll have real primaries and get our first competent general election candidate since Obama.

Yeah, home advantage is less and less relevant every year. Once upon a time this would be news, but it’s a new era and he wasn’t even the presidential candidate.

Too true. Listening to Sanders from the 80s is the same as listening to him today. It’s shocking how little his views and rhetoric have changed while being absolutely correct from the beginning.

Sort of, with the major distinction that you can just tell somebody water green tea is and they’ll know what green tea is. It’s a trivial fix. You can tell a Trump supporter that Harris is not a communist, and they won’t believe you for a million years, with all the facts in the world behind you.

Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don’t think it’s the driving factor. You don’t vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you’ve been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she’s going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there’s a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I’d vote for him too.

It’s not just ignorance. It’s brainwashing.

Not a bad idea, though I’d tweak it to say election officials can’t release information, since that preserves freedom of press.

Either way, it’s highly unlikely it’s ever affected the outcome of an election.

And I very much recall at least two instances where he said this is the last election you’ll have to vote in. Is he going to find/create a way to suspend the 2028 election and stay in power? Who’s going to stop him?

That’s why I said it’s possible, I just don’t think it’s probable. People are loyal to Trump until they’re not. Nobody’s loyal to him because they like him or they think he’s a good guy, or because they think he’ll bring the country prosperity. They’re loyal because they think they can get something out of it. Most people aren’t in a position where they’re willing to give up literally everything to help this particular asshole become a dictator. Those that are are typically incompetent - see anything and everything related to stealing the 2020 election. They tried a LOT of things, but nothing came even close to working.

So they’ll try again, and I don’t think anybody’s doubting that. And I don’t think our institutions are particularly strong, but they’re probably strong enough to stop that kind of incompetence from leading to a dictatorship.

Let me be clear here. If we have a global nuclear war, that’s not recoverable, because every human on earth will be dead. If we enter a fascist dictatorship with today’s technology, that may not be recoverable, because we may see the permanent end of anything resembling a democracy.

I’m not saying there weren’t horrific atrocities committed during Trump’s reign. What I’m saying is that so far, there’s a chance future generations can live better lives.

Not unusual, and not a bad thing. They called a number of races with less than that. If you’re taking your expected percentages with the voting samples you’ve got and your statistics and calculations say there’s less than a 1% chance the race will flip, you might as well call it. They’re pretty much never wrong when they make a call that early.

It also doesn’t actually matter because the AP isn’t who decides the winner.

The truth is it’s unlikely anything historically big is going to happen in the US. We saw what Trump did last time he was in office, and it was really bad, but it was recoverable. The fear isn’t that it’s likely, but that it’s far from a non-zero chance, and there’s very little we can do about it. That uncertainty is scary when we’ve had a relatively good time in recent decades.

Will we see a sudden shift toward a state where you can get jailed or murdered for being a dissident? Maybe, but probably not.

Will we see an escalation of the wars involving Israel, such that we see a WWIII and/or the first nuclear strike since WWII? Maybe, but probably not.

Will we see economic collapse causing widespread hunger and homelessness that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression? Maybe, but probably not.

The only thing that’s really a guarantee is that we’re another four years away from dealing with climate change, and while that’s massive for humanity down the line, individuals currently living in the US are probably going to be mostly fine. Not to say nobody will be affected - hurricanes, floods, fires, and so on - but it won’t cause catastrophic failure of society in the near future.

They should have given people on the left some reason to be motivated to vote though, not just fear.

This is the massive key that I really don’t think the Democratic party understands. When people are scared, they vote conservative. There are literal studies that show fear is the driving force behind conservative voters. Democrats need to make them feel safe. That’s one of the reasons Obama was so successful - he ran on change and hope. Fear works for Republicans. It doesn’t work for Democrats. But they see fear working for Republicans, so they copy it.