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Comment by nyc_data_geek | Hacker News Reader

Yes and all of the credulous rubes still whinging about how they "can't imagine" how it's gotten this bad or how much worse it can get, or how "this is not who we are" at some point should no longer be taken as suckers in good faith, and at some point must rightly be viewed as either willfully complicit bad faith interlocuters, or useful idiots.

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Learning about WWII in high school, I often wondered how the people allowed the Axis leaders gain power. Now I know. However, I feel we're worse for allowing it to happen because we were supposed to "never again".

Worse, I often wondered how some people collaborated. Now I know that many people would rather have a chunk of the population rounded up and killed than lose their job.

"Whoever can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." and "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

etc, etc. So it goes

Agreed. To see "Never Again" morphed into "Never Again for me, Now Again for thee" has been one of the most heartwrenching, sleep depriving things I've witnessed since some deaths in my family.

Watching it in real time, I still don't understand it. I could see how Trump won the first time around; Hillary Clinton was unpopular with most people outside of her party's leadership, but the second just seems insane. The kinds of things that would happen were obvious to me, and I am no expert.

Two party system. As many people didn't like Hillary, clearly there were a lot of people unhappy with Biden->Harris. When you don't like the current admin's direction and/or their party, there's only one other party to select. I think there were plenty of voters that truly did not believe this would be the result of that protest vote.

Protest votes are probably overstated, I think most of it comes down to people staying home. Everybody in America already knows what side they're on, and they either vote for that side or not at all. Virtually all political messaging is either trying to moralize your side or demoralize the other, to manipulate the relative ratios of who stays home on election day.

> I think most of it comes down to people staying home

Obama was able to get people motivated. Neither Biden nor Harris had anywhere near that motivating ability. I don't know that the Dems have anyone as motivating as Obama line up. The Dems seem to be hoping that enough people will be repulsed by the current admin to show up.

Newsom is an extremely strong candidate. Vance has several critical vulnerabilities that can demoralize right wing voters if the election is handled properly, and the Republicans really don't have anybody else. Rubio maybe, but Rubio won't be able to get ahead of Vance.

Trump had more than several critical vulns as well which did not dissuade voters. The electorate isn't as predictable as many try to make it sound

Trump was able to moralize his voters, despite his weaknesses, by using a kind of charisma that Vance utterly lacks.

I think Vance isn't planning on using charisma, but violence.

> Newsom is an extremely strong candidate.

For what office? President? Do you live in California?

> Obama was able to get people motivated. Neither Biden nor Harris had anywhere near that

How do you explain Biden getting so many more votes than Obama even while Trump improved with black and Hispanics over past Republican candidates?

> How do you explain Biden getting so many more votes than Obama

US population in 2008: 304 million

US population in 2020: 332 million

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

Barring enormous turnout differences, pretty much every US election gets more raw votes than the last.

Interesting theory, explain 2024 when the total went down.

Simple enough explanation… 2020 was a massive outlier.

If you forgotten, the topic is GP saying Biden didn’t motivate voters. Well, that does not seem correct.

2024 was a massive outlier. First black woman ever, and the first time a candidate got swapped out mid-campaign. You can't extrapolate much from that one.

I think people were highly motivated in 2020 because of Trump, not Biden. The turnout would have been similar for any credible candidate running against Trump.

What's weird to me is that a lot of people lost that motivation over the next four years. If they found Trump scary in 2020, they should have found him scary in 2024.

And then in 2024 they were 100% opposite motivated for Trump to win popular vote, increase with every demo except for white women, and move almost every single county in the country to the right?

Why would Trump be so unpopular to boost Biden in 2020, then do so much better in 2024?

> Why would Trump be so unpopular to boost Biden in 2020, then do so much better in 2024?

1. He was President at the time, and people blame the President for what's happening (COVID then, recession now). Same deal now.

2. It didn't wind up being Trump/Biden in 2024 at all.

Prior to 2020, I usually voted for third parties so I do understand that kind of thinking. The danger Trump represented was not obvious until well after he took office; it seemed early on like congress and institutional norms would restrain him. To swing the popular vote in the 2024 election, almost all of the third party votes would have needed to go to Harris, so I don't think that's sufficient to explain it.

By the end of his first term, the danger was hard to miss, and the attempt to remain in power after losing the election should have cemented it for everyone.

I was unhappy with Biden and Harris. I voted for them in 2020 and 2024 anyway because I understood the alternative.

> The danger Trump represented was not obvious until well after he took office;

I just do not understand this sentence at all. The writing was clearly on the wall. All of the Project 2025 conversations told us exactly what was going to happen. People claiming it was not obvious at best were not paying attention at all. For anyone paying attention, it was horrifying see the election results coming in.

Project 2025 did not exist in 2016. We are in agreement about 2024.

> The danger Trump represented was not obvious until well after he took office

I don't get it, was there anything surprising about him after his inauguration? He sure sounded dangerous on the campaign trail.

The norm in 2016 was that candidates didn't make a serious attempt to do the more outlandish things they talked about in their campaign. When they did, advisers would usually talk them into a saner version of it, or congress wouldn't allow it.

Trump 45 had "adults in the room". Trump 47 has nothing but sycophants. The end of Trump 45 started eliminating the adults in the room, but there wasn't enough time left for him to do much drastic. Trump 45 felt like even Trump was shocked he won and there was no real game plan. The transition team was woefully unprepared. Trump 47 had 4 years of prepping with the aide of things like Project 2025. Trump 47 hit the ground running.

Not the second time, the third time. Remember that Biden whooped Trump's ass once and could have whooped his ass a second time, but the donor class (career retards) got cold feet when they were forced to confront his senility, and instead of letting the election be one senile old man against another senile old man, they replaced Biden with the archetype of an HR bitch. I hope nobody thinks it a coincidence that the two times Trump won were the two times he was up against a woman. Americans don't want to vote for their mother-in-law, nor for the head of HR. And yes, that certainly is sexist, but it is what it is.

I just pray they run Newsom this time. Despite his "being from California" handicap, I think he should be able to easily beat Vance by simply being a handsome white man with a white family. Vance is critically flawed and will demoralize much of the far right IFF his opponent doesn't share those same weaknesses.

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