US Election 2024

This is true. The Hispanics next door to you have that covered.

Well strangely and probably not a coincidence that at 4:50am this morning, the neighbours who had been way behaved when it came to noise lit up the car with muffler missing and shook the house with historically loud engine noises. I haven't bought a gun yet but after such a lack of sleep I was ready to tear his head off. You see, it's starting already. We are going to be at each other's throats because civility is gone.

This morning my female clients were expressing shock that the popular vote probably went to Trump too. They fear the worst.... As do I but all my problem is that I probably will never be able to retire..

Ah fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccck.

Chicago: Seriously considering getting a gun.

Yes. Looking at the electoral college votes, it's a strong victory for Trump.
I'm terms of fault, I think the democrats are as much to blame for even having Biden in the first place; he was almost the default candidate. He wasn't a bad president, but never had a second term in him. In the US it is rare for voters to elect a new president from the incumbent party. Bush in 1998, Hoover in 1928, Taft in 1908. Most commonly, presidents serve for two turns (unless they die, are assassinated or quit) and then the other party has a go.

The problem for Harris was that she had the whiff of incumbency which made it difficult for her to project herself as a change candidate even though she wasn't president. When a new leader fights an election for an incumbent party it is often a struggle; they are blamed for any mistakes of the previous leader and, as they were part of the government, find it hard to pitch what they would change. Johnson managed it in 2019 against a weak candidate and by lying through his teeth, but ultimately the Tories paid the price.

The Tories will be liaising closely with Trump campaign veterans in order to utilise their tactics. The Labour election victory was a landslide only on the number of seats; the Tories plus Reform percentage exceeded Labour's vote share by 38% to 33.7%. Anybody who thinks Badenoch is a gift for Labour needs to reassess; there is an audience for the politics of fear and hatred in this country and I don't believe what I've seen from Starmer so far will turn around many of the problems caused by decades of underinvestment. 182 seats is a massive majority by any standards. However, voters are now much more fluid and are less tightly wedded to a single party. Turnout was woeful in 2024, illustrating a general feeling of apathy towards the main parties. Badenoch may not be the leader who successfully welds the politics of fear and hatred into a working coalition, but sooner or later someone will come along who can. Unless we can start to fix the problems in this country, I see it as inevitable at some point.

This is my problem with the start the Labour government has made. They don't even seem to be trying to fix problems - they are just trying to manage things better than the tories. That simply isn't enough and could easily see them losing the next election. At which point they'll look back and wonder what the point of having a 174 seat majority was.

Having said that, I wonder how a generic white man, who isn't nearly dead, would have done for the Democrats.

I agree with this, but I am also interested to hear what people think the problems to fix are and the solutions to them from where we are now.

www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/pressures/nhs-backlog-data-analysis

www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/timeseries/hf6x/pusf

www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-march-2024/how-many-people-do-we-grant-protection-to

There's three to be going on with. I don't have answers but I don't see much evidence this government has either.

He would have been a white man. That in US elections might be enough.

This country is batshit. There is a lot of pain coming and people voted for it. It's not something I can reconcile. I suppose Social Media is to blame because people seem to believe all the nonsense on there. I haven't been on it for years. I am quite fine, (Shady might disagree), but this seems like a turning point for the world. Ukraine is fucked. Taiwan is fucked. The environment is fucked. The economy if Elon Musk gets a hold of it with be fucked. It will all have cascading effects on the world. I have no idea why people embrace horrible people. I don't understand sexism. I don't understand Racism. I don't understand Religion. Clearly I am not made for this world. Ironically I am in the people business which is exhausting at the best of times. I can only put it down to a massive dose of Stockholm Syndrome. What a horrible day. I do have a shopping list though. Get me electronics before the semi conductors get taken by China and buy a gun. I hate guns, but feel I may need one. It's all very depressing...

Chicago: Battening down the hatches.

For me, the problems to fix are those at the heart of the US election (in my view) and also the successes of the right in the UK and Europe. That starts with inequality. If you don't think you're getting a fair crack of the whip then you're going to 1) blame somebody, usually 'others' like migrants, muslims or some imaginary liberal elite, and 2) go along with anything new and radical that offers something different. If you reckon you're fucked anyway you may as well try something/anything to climb out of the shit you live in.

That's the biggest issue for me. I had hoped Labour would be bold and address it with a transformed tax system, including some sort of weath tax, alongside a proper grown-up conversation about what tax is for, how we pay it and who should pay the most. It's totally obscene to me that there is such a thing as a billionaire. Nobody needs 1,000 million pounds. Or, to be honest, anything more thana few million at the most. But Labour haven't even touched the nettle let alone grasped it. Even the farmer tax avoidance scheme, surely a good thing in principle, seems to have been ill-thought out and implemented.

She ran a fantastic campaign, i thought, all things considered. But we have no idea what people saw from their media in all these places. Certainly the big media were all cleaning up Trump's evident grotesquery and decrepitude, and Facebook, Xitter etc were promoting pro-Trump content.

So the pollsters were all wrong, people really do want this shit, no woman of colour could win, Project 2025 was more palatable than we thought, human rights are a vote loser, Hispanics don't give a fcuk about racism, money elites are more acceptable than intellectual ones, Covid skepticism works, lying about crime and the economy has no consequence, and they've learned again that small election interference is bad.

I also think that the exchange above is representative of a wider problem. In the NZ election last year, people were saying about the Left coalition that they had no plans, which they absolutely did even if Labour only had piss-weak ones. And lots of people had this same impression about Harris - "just compare them on policy", which you really couldn't. Trump's policies are abysmal.

I think a lot of it comes from media voices saying there's no plan and it makes the whole thing real, if utterly untrue.

In London for a couple of days, not the best news to wake up too… then Senora and Sonorità Mus tell me this is the tipping point and that they want to leave the US…

Mus: heading to the pub to try and forget about the whole mess for an evening.

I wish I could drink but I have to work. (Probably forever) and some of my clients are inconsolable. I feel the same way but cannot say that as it is my job to motivate them. I guess smashing huge amount of weights will make you feel better for a while but the fundamental problem still exists how the fuck can so many people be sooooo fucking dumb!

Social media. Burn it.

And yes Trump offered nothing on policy whilst Harris tried to. People are cnuts. End of…..

Chicago: Stuck.