US Election 2024

So Trump wins Iowa with 51% of the vote and it's presented as "overwhelming" but, given his importance in the party and that they all supposedly love him, it doesn't seem like that big of a win.

I guess it’s because there were a few candidates and his closest opponent only got 21% so he’s way ahead of the rest.
Which is worrying.
There’s no accounting for the mentals across the pond is there.

Another cheery thread, goody!

Registered Republicans only. Older population. Ridiculously religious. Makes total sense that they would vote for their messiah which will send everyone to the rapture.

New Hampshire will give us an idea of how mental
The whole nation is…

We are fucked.

Chicago: Manning the barricades.

I'm not altogether au fait with with the American political system and primaries voting, but are nefarious Russian subplots involved yet?

I think Trump once peed on a Russian lady of the night so there's that

Give Tricky a break, he’s busy on the accountancy stuff at the mo, lots of plates need spinning.

I want a tag!

15 years of Tory rule?
NZ elected a coalition of landlords, farmers, libertarians, racists and antivaxxers who can only agree on aggravating lefties, so it seems to be a white Western thing. Weirdly, Australia seems to have mildly bucked the trend.

Agreed. Although Trump is another level.

Yes. But it is certainly mild. Libs and Labour are locked in agreement that the unemployed, poor, and disabled are scum and that a policy is only good if it directly panders to well-off white homeowners with kids and a massive cunty ute.

However, they do disagree on the merits of having remarkably unpleasant people in leadership who keep saying the quiet part out loud.. which is, I think, why the Libs are an electoral basket case at the moment.. which is good given other places embrace of the awful fucks their right-wing nut-jobs have decided to nominate.

The Libs did, however, roll out the reactionary playbook for the recent referendum on the indigenous ‘voice to parliament’ and a comfortable majority fell for it.

Currently the odious leader of the opposition is showing his belief in free speech and free markets by calling for a boycott of a supermarket because they decided not to do the usual shelf of tacky ‘Australia day’ merch because a) it’s shit and hardly anyone buys it and b) more than half the country has come around to the view that a national day of celebration maybe shouldn’t be on the anniversary of the colonialists arriving to do a genocide. The woke twats.

They really are leaning hard into culture war trash even though most of the evidence is that there is no electoral upside to it because most people don’t give a fuck, and in this diverse and urbanised country, the trend is only moving further against that sort of thing.

(Banging on about it all from the left is equally a turn-off, I think, but making policy designed to be better at inclusivity etc is generally popular.. and, indeed, whilst the Libs are trash.. their rhetoric is materially more regressive than their actual policy platform… which… I dunno.. just seems as pointless as it is cruel)

Good piece on the whole mess around whether Drumf should even be on the ballot.

My take, with my cold hard ‘the law is the law’ head on is that there is a valid, and untried, case to be had about whether his actions amount to ‘insurrection’. I think they do.. not because of Jan 6, but because of the proven attempts to interfere in the electoral process.. but that argument is easy to make when you know the guy is a crook and a liar.. whereas a legal case has to distinguish between what he did and ordered, and what you would reasonably expect any candidate to do if they reasonably believed there was shenanigans afoot.

(Not that I think he reasonably believed anything of the sort, but that would also form part of such a case.)

If he is found to have insurrection, SCOTUS will just have to temporarily hide its boner for ‘originalism’ to concoct a way out. Which it will do if it wants Trump to run (itself much more likely than not, but not a given.)

I also believe that the pathetic way most media is handling the matter is all the indication you need that there isn’t a chance in hell that he will be prevented from running by this. Even though he should be. Because even after nearly ten years of very public evidence, the opposing side of US politics thinks that, at the end of it all, they can win this cleanly.

Without a conviction, SCOTUS have got to decide for themselves whether he's guilty of insurrection, haven't they? My guess is that once they've weighed up all the evidence and read the constitution again, they'll decide that putting him on the ballot is the outcome that is less likely to get them shot and go for that.

Regarding winning clearly - with a republican majority in the house, I don't think it's clear, at all, what will happen if they have to ratify a Biden win in January. Seems more than likely they'll thrown out however many of his close wins they need for Trump to win.