This is Nate Silver. Now funded by Peter Thiel, no longer associated with FiveThirtyEight. I would grain of salt anything he writes now.
I used to love the FiveThirtyEight politics coverage. I think it worked best when Nate had people like Claire to call him on his shit. Then she got laid off by abc.
That was a super depressing day
Nate Silver is kind of full of shit, but the new data isn’t. It was 1.1% difference between Harris and Trump, and 1.3% for independent votes total.
There were lots of spoiler campaigns, lots of lies, and lots of absolutely insane court cases that allowed a simple 1.1% difference. That’s about it.
Fuck all his idiotic pontificating. If he wants to dig down at the state level, then go for it.
The really weird thing about this election, which this analysis here repeats, is that a majority of young, especially young male voters went for Trump.
That is bizarre, because the political platform of Trump, the GOP, and especially Project 2025 is a frontal assault on young people. From reproductive rights to recreational drug use, from LGBTQ+ rights to employment rights, from access to universities to access to health care. Everything in that platform is meant to take from the young and give to the old, because the old have been reliable voters for the GOP.
It is not surprising that Trump suddenly polls tragically bad with GenZ after the vote. The question is, how could GenZ voters fall so easily for the mirage of lies? That’s the same people that accused Boomers of voting GOP because of lead poisoning, after all.
The youth are more susceptible to algorithm propaganda. The ones that didn’t get sucked down the right wing rabbit hole took the Palestine protest vote bait.
This. They’ve been honing their propaganda aimed at the youth for a couple decades now. It got me when I was 18 and, tbh, I don’t know if I would’ve broken out of it if I wasn’t gay. The “don’t tread on me” part of the propanda was really what sucked me in, then I saw how hard they fought against people like me having the same rights as them and realized they were full of shit. Young people today are going through the same thing, but with even more sophisticated propaganda to initially hook them.
Cambridge Analytica was 7 years ago.
They didn’t stop. Imagine how much better it is now…
That’s kinda what I was saying… lol. They’ve been really focused on indoctrinating young men for decades. They know they’re going to lose a certain amount of them, because their policies are deeply unpopular, so they’re banking on being able to get enough people while they’re young, then keep the wool pulled over their eyes.
And now they have all the big tech players on board! YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X (of course) are all happy to algorithmically lift far-right content, and let right-wing bots comment on anything to sculpt narratives.
We are fucked. I’ve tried talking to some of these people, and they live in an alternative reality. Discussing facts is questioning their reality, and it puts them hard on the defensive.
“The pen is mightier than the sword” and they have all the pens.
TikTok may be doing to GenZ what Facebook did to their grandparents?
Because “youth” is not a block, just as “Boomers” is not a block either.
A lot of young people are against LGBT rights, oppose the liberalisation of drugs, and care little about women and reproductive rights (including women themselves!).
GamerGate involved mainly young people, for example.
I know more misogynistic young people ( 18-35 in my view) now than at any point when I was that age. It’s heart breaking
A lot of things could have cost Harris the election. If you have 4 people of varying strengths try to lift (with varying effort) a couch and fail to move it, do you blame the strongest person? The person that contributed the least lift? The person whose effort is much smaller that what they could lift? All four equally? The person who picked the people to move the couch?
Depending on how you parse the data, you could come to opposite conclusions (Harris lost because she wasn’t pro-Israel enough! Harris lost because she was to much pro-genocide!)
What people who want to win next time need to do is look at their part of the failure (how do we get more youth to vote; how do we bring out the base; how do we secure the center; how do we strike back against lies; how do we stop the flow of foreign money…) and fix it for next time so that there are many ways the liberal candidate can win. THEN we can debate about WHICH candidate that should be.
Yep, people have no idea that most data filled reports aren’t really truths, but interpretations to fit the story the originator wants to tell
Data tells you what happened. Not why
As Democrats know all too well, national trends don’t decide elections. For reasons that increasingly strain credulity, that simply is not how US elections work. Any analysis that doesn’t spend the bulk of its time on what happened in Pennsylvania and Michigan specifically is probably not worth reading. People in these states know that their votes have massive impact compared to states like California and Wyoming and so they behave differently.
Except this time Trump actually won the popular vote too.
Which is even more discouraging.No he didn’t. He won a plurality of votes, not the majority. “He won the popular vote” and “he has the people’s mandate” are popular right-wing talking points.
I can see from the graph in the thumbnail that it very obviously did.
