I’m not talking about wild race outcomes. That’s “normal”.
I’m talking about the lib doomsayer predictions:
- Polls being shut down by the feds
- state of emergency being declared
- terror at the ballot box
- anarchy in the streets
- trump rejecting the outcome if the there is a blue wave.
- American Communism being ushered via electoral democracy!
- proud boys doing proud boy things
I already visited a poll today, it was like any other midterm election. Uneventful. Not even the cranks were out.
Nothing ever happens gang is on the ballot this year folks, and I think the polls are looking good.
If the dems win and control congress - I look forward to Trump getting many strongly worded letters from them.
Only one I think will happen is a mild blue wave with Trump tokenly rejecting it. Support for the Democrats is extremely low, same as the Republicans. Kinda want to post the Lenin meme immediately after the election, regardless of who wins, on the more liberal spaces of Lemmy.
I already visited a poll today, it was like any other midterm election. Uneventful.
not for nothing, but there are sure to be places it won’t be like this. voting in the suburbs or in majority white/affluent places is invariably chill, in my experience. in places where poor people and minorities are clustered, it can be a different story, especially if it looks like a long established political machine might be upset.
for example, maybe 6 weeks ago, Texas shuttered a shitload of the voting locations in Tarrant County, which is in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and about 75% non-white. there’s bound to be confusion about where people who live there are supposed to actually vote. i have no doubt the messaging around “voting in the wrong place” and “voting illegally” is going to be conflated and discourage people. the establishment, when called out, claimed they needed to do this for “efficiency”. everything is bigger in Texas, and the bullshit is no exception. https://abcnews.com/Politics/advocates-rally-midterm-voters-after-dozens-polling-sites/story?id=137615179
when it’s gonna be close, or perceived to be close, the dirty tricks come out. the easiest move is to target the minority vote because if you make voting take more than an hour for that cohort, they will leave the line because they’ve got to get back to work.
Broward County FL has been the poster child for shit like this since 2000. specifically, leaving machines in storage to make the wait longer. the dems mostly do it in the primaries to clamp down on the left. the republicans do it in the general for the same reason.
and believe: people do the calculus to know what percentage they can get to leave by the perceived length of the line. who has the time to complain? the local news tends to be owned by the same bazillionaire who is funding the machine anyway.
sometimes i wonder what sort of place this would be with an actual democracy. like one where elections are not run by partisan offices, ranked choice systems, and the district system was completely scrapped and converted to something immutable, but practical like watersheds.
Yeah, I think OP’s post is oretty telling that they live in an affluent/white district
Yeah, I don’t deny that I live in a very white town within a very white state, and everything @came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net points out is correct. However, I don’t believe it is POC communities that are acting as frantic doomsayers about the midterms, since everything @came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net pointed out has been the historical norm for a very long time. Part of that “nothing ever happens” includes nothing good happening either, like an improvement in the voting conditions for marginalized communities. That was never really on the table though; I think we know that. The doomsayers are white liberals from my assessment, which holds true in my personal circles at least. People I know have told me that this midterm was going to be cancelled, that the results would be overruled, and that “they” (white liberals) would be “silenced” by Donald Trump if we don’t “do something” (aka
). My town (full of old white boomer retirees) had the state police run a drill inside our town hall about a week ago to prepare for ICE showing up at the polls.Republicans won’t shut down the midterms, they already know, as someone pointed out, they don’t need to, it’s not worth it. But there’s really all sorts of ways to tip the scalesc such as what you mentioned, ICE intimidation
libs also said bush was going to cancel elections too.
of course, the bushes did have a recount canceled to start his presidency… so maybe the unrealistic lib doomsday on voting day prediction thing is also part of the background radiation / nothing ever happens and not noteworthy? i mean if we’re going to dismiss phenomena that have been around for years just because they’ve been happening already in some form.
at a certain point though, if nothing ever counts as happening, then what are we even looking for to comment on anymore?
voting in the suburbs or in majority white/affluent places is invariably chill, in my experience.
I’m a white labor aristocrat nepo baby who lives in an affluent white suburb and vooted today. Can confirm it was chill.
sometimes i wonder what sort of place this would be with an actual democracy. like one where elections are not run by partisan offices, ranked choice systems, and the district system was completely scrapped and converted to something immutable, but practical like watersheds.
wonder not, this was all considered after the american mutiny by the founding fathers who were eager to take up the british imperial project after they sanitized it with a name change. they concluded upon several ways to control the “levelling impulses of the masses” in order to avoid your suggestions. parenti describes this quite well
Dems win, nothing changes, we just get the occasional excuse. Presidential primary begins between Newsom, Harris, Butt, AOC, and maybe Warren, purely to spoil AOC. All candidates complain about netanyahu (who is somehow prime minister again) and AIPAC while receiving laundered AIPAC donations. Libs will say we are sabotaging the presidential election if we say they aren’t doing anything to stop president grump. Trump bombs Iran half-heartedly and Iran retaliates in a way that won’t rock the boat too much. This is the nothing-ever-happens outcome.
Have to wonder how the republican primary will shake out, since trump keeps saying he’s going to run again.
van hollen will walk those pseuds for biden 2.0, the bidening.
trump will bomb iran after exit polls close, but i think it’s in iran interest to reach usa pain point instead of fumbling around until new congress ghouls arrive (in january?), so they have an apparent mandate to stop it.
Trump bombing Iran at midnight tonight would be fucking wild.
on one hand - iran floated deal is basically give our money back and we go back to normal (despite being bombed and decapitated), on the other - why would porkies agree to it, if they think they can get more?
That’s such a good deal Trump will think Iran must be desperate.
Yeah I think it’s gonna a boring blue wave and everyone will go back to brunch for six months to a year
It will be normal.
The right wing urgency to enact as much as possible in 2025-2026 came from an expectation of a midterm house flip, but also counting on Dems to be too feckless to challenge them during the lame duck session, or roll back anything if they regain control of congress in it’s entirety. They can then run the same playbook the next time a Republican wins a trifecta.
The raving lunatics of the right wing movement do want to do all of the things you listed, but they’re still mostly kept in check by the real power brokers who know that this is all basiclly working out for them without having to resort to actual violence. Obviously that’s bursting at the seams a bit (for example, during Jan 6).
US second civil war fantasies and ‘our divisions divide us’ polarization talk really deserve an effort essay. I’ve actually read cover to cover minor Chapo character Kurt Schlichter’s American Apocalypse, which is padded with hundreds of pages of 2010s grievance politics. There’s less a concern with how this would actually play out (see civil war 2024 lol) but instead constant epic or resolving setpiece battles.
Without getting into the weeds this speaks to two things. Violence as a cleansing force within the settler colony. And a new reaffirmed American exceptionalism. This couldn’t happen here (yeah no shit where’s the woke internet poster army to fight the isolated suburban chud army) so we are better than this. Please ignore the escalating violence resulting from anomie, mass shootings replacing serial killers cause we’re fucked up but nobody knows anyone now, constant strategy of tension activities, obvious government lies, etc.
there is no class or material basis for civil war, no divided bourgeoisie to speak of
FWIW Trump is sending out poll watchers. I predict a dozen or so “powerful” photos, while they spend all day scrolling their phones and being told to fuck themselves
Odds are on “Nothing Ever Happens” this time. Dems will take slight majority again. It won’t be enough to accuse the election of being rigged.
Over the course of the year we will learn of some new whipping boy to blame for why the dems can’t do anything. Maybe there will be more of those than usual.
edit: happily wrong
my money is on the dems sweep but still do nothing
im that cynical
I don’t think the dems are getting their base riled up enough to sweep. The dem voter core is on “harm reduction” levels of enthusiasm for their candidates. We’re really counting on the GOP base having a lower turnout here.
huh
No chance the Dems are going to sweep. I see republican signs and protestors everywhere in New England. People are going to get a swift dose of reality that the Chuds are gaining real cultural ground. We’re all in this for the long haul but if we can survive this, we might see a real leftist reaction 10 years from now (cope)
i dunno
well see
im seeing the opposite in florida, which is deeply red
i could be wrong
edit: well i wasnt wrong about the first part. we’ll see about the second part.
Nothing is going to happen except in some red state with a blue city there will be a controversy that ultimately doesn’t mean much
Think Trump is way too excited to go back to bombing Iran to actually put any effort into “they stole the election”! It’s his last term. He absolutely does not give a fuck about the republicans, he wants to do his own thing. And that thing may be absolutely destroying the global economy lmao
I’m sure there will be plenty of fuckery and plenty of people getting away with it after a short period of minor outrage.
I think all the lib doomer predictions are complete bullshit, main character syndrome, a desire to feel like revolutionaries when they are inherently fascists.
https://hexbear.net/post/9929588
Honestly if I’m wrong and the libs are for once right I’ll rejoice because at least something will be happening. As Mao said – "Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.
As for the rest of it, I can predict the outcome of almost every race: A genocidal fascist zionazi will win. Whether they’ve got a D or an R next to their name is irrelevant.
whatever sort of coordinated maga denial-of-outcomes-action move happens, i expect it closer to january. maga media is still insisting that the republicans, trump, maga are very popular, the non-maga polls are fake, etc.
they are likely to stick with that narrative if there is an expectation of countering any anti-maga mandate at the ballot.
Really stupid question as a non-USian: since voting machines are used and known to be unsafe (need to trust the software, trust the compiler, trust the compilers compiler, etc.), is it far fetched to assume, that every election in the the US is being manipulated and faked by three letter agencies? Are there reliable exit polls to check for manipulation and do the results match the polls closely?
Because that would explain, why elections go smoothly now and in the future, if they are manipulated anyway.
It’s certainly plausible but I doubt they feel the need to do something so risky. The deep state will continue to chug along as normal regardless of the outcome. Despite the DSA wave, it isn’t enough (yet) to throw a wrench into the genocide machine. Only if such a scenario was being threatened would I think they’d cross the line into open manipulation of the actual votes themselves, because being caught violating a process the average American deems quite literally sacred would cost the state tremendous amounts of legitimacy, especially at a time when the legitimacy of institutions is eroding across the political spectrum. At least that’s my guess, I could be wrong and they’re doing it or have done it before, but the propaganda machine is so well oiled to maintain the status quo that I would be shocked if they did something so drastic just to keep out a handful of demsocs and socdems out of a miniscule amount of power.
Editing to add: I think it’s a mistake to think the deep state is wedded to the Trump coalition. The MAGA coalition will eventually collapse, whether that’s because Trump drives the world economy off a cliff with the West Asia war or he leaves office or dies or whatever, the far right will eventually recoalesce into a more explicit American fascism. In the meantime, the Democrats will take their place governing in an increasingly forceful neoliberal manner by using the oppressive tools crafted by the Trump 2 admin, maybe even diffusing some popular discontent by using AOC as the president in '28 or '32 by lying about doing sixteenth-assed social democratic stuff again.
US electoral infrastructure is wildly inconsistent and there are big roadblocks put up against marginalized people and even just likely Dem voters. Not because Dems are a threat to capital, just because they are the false underdog on the kayfabe of bourgeois electoralism, always downtrodden, never actually fighting for anything people care about. There will likely be massive electoral fraud into the future, indefinitely, via both suppression and voting machines.
I don’t think any outcome will make anything happen on the streets. Americans are subservient 99% of the time and when they do take action it is disorganized and fizzles out once coopted. Sustained ground actions require the kind of organizing that we can do as comrades but that requires a critical mass of us and relationships with our communities - org building, base building, etc, via disciplined org membership.
Donnie is planning to nuke Iran right after the election. The election itself may be uneventful, but the fireworks afterward will be grotesque because all conservatives are violent warmongers.
