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Comment by ifyoubuildit | Hacker News Reader

To the people that are very upset about this, I'd like to offer some silver linings.

A blowout in either direction was necessary here. A clear result is better for everyone.

The press can go back to being adversarial to power (Although straight faced bullshit like the Cheney firing squad thing will probably only be more common, so thats a double edged sword).

The dems will likely stop anointing people.

We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.

The first woman president will likely be a much stronger candidate. Kamala could have potentially really ruined it for women going forward.

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> The dems will likely stop anointing people.

I thought that after 2016...

1. The margin of victory does not matter—If Trump won, the Democratic establishment would have largely accepted the results and if Harris won, the GOP would have fully rejected the results. Everyone knew this was true. There is a fundamental asymmetry in respect for democracy between the parties.

2. Harris actually did just ruin it for women going forward. The Democratic party has now put forward two women against Trump that arguably both failed in spectacular fashion. It's not really clear to me why they did this, but they did it, and I don't know why we'd see a woman secure a major party's nomination for president in the next couple decades as a result.

1. Maybe. I am happy to not be testing this hypothesis.

2. I think the problem is inserting women that the voters aren't asking for. They could try asking who to run instead of telling people who to vote for, and they just might get a woman into the office.

There are women out there that have their own real following that could probably get there with the machine behind them, but the machine doesn't want any of them.

Depending on how things go, Tulsi could be the next best chance, if people stop making up shit about her being a Russian asset. But shes on the red team, so the dems will tear her down if she tries.

Amy Klobuchar is probably the Democrats best example—she just once again significantly outperformed the other national Democratic candidate (Harris) in Minnesota. Personally I wouldn't trust Tulsi Gabbard to win anything. what the Dems need is someone who is a strong political force that has a track record of winning elections and winning over people who voted for Trump. I don't think gender is necessarily important but I do think that the results of Clinton and Harris against Trump should rightfully scare Dems away from that idea going forward.

Tulsi Gabbard is a Republican now; the Democrats won't put her up for anything.

Regarding (2), I agree, but I don't think the electorate is in for such nuance. Two women failed to win the presidency, and that simple fact is all that matters. I agree with the other commenter that we won't see the dems put another woman up for president for decades, and that's a damn shame.

We might even see the GOP successfully get a woman into the White House before the dems do it, which is just embarrassing.

> We might even see the GOP successfully get a woman into the White House before the dems do it, which is just embarrassing.

That happened in the UK with Thatcher.

This was not at all a spectacular failure. This election was an uphill battle from the start.

Mitt Romney did not fail spectacularly when he couldn't beat a popular incumbent. It was impressive that he got as close as he did.

The fundamentals here were similarly harsh for Harris, just for different reasons.

Why was this election an uphill battle from the start? This was the dems election to lose as far as I can see.

And isn't Harris the incumbent in this situation?

Because of the pandemic, the aftermath of which was awful inflation. This has been the pattern globally for a few years now. And US-specific, because of immigration.

Yes, Harris was treated by voters as the incumbent, and the incumbent administration was unpopular. That is usually an uphill battle for the incumbent.

It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative! Plenty of people wrote about the possibility that this would be a pretty bog standard "reject the incumbents" election.

> It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative!

I find this baffling. With the dems tying themselves to biden and then Harris, it was absolutely an uphill battle. But that was an unforced error.

If they had a robust primary, you have to assume there was someone on the blue team that could beat Trump. If not, then they deserved every bit of this anyway.

Yes, and that's one of the problems: the DNC defers to tradition and "politeness" rather than what will win elections and keep the party in power. Right up front they should have told Biden he was not going to be the presumed nominee, and that he would have to fight it out in the primary like everyone else.

No, it was an uphill battle regardless of the candidate, is the point. The fundamentals were always difficult for Democrats in general, for non-candidate-specific reasons. Primarily this was due to inflation, which in my view Biden actually handled about as well as he could have, it just still sucked and pissed everyone off. But also because of immigration, which was indeed a policy error, but one which happened years before the campaign began and was not fixable at that point.

IMO the fact that Harris is a black woman meant this was always going to be an extremely uphill battle. Someone like Harris winning would be completely unprecedented. I'm not surprised she lost, but I am disappointed.

I think the results demonstrated that it would have been an uphill battle for a white man as well. I think this result was pretty much a foregone conclusion after the 2022/2023 inflation surge.

Edit to add: I now think that. It isn't what I expected to happen until the results actually came in last night.

I see, the past becomes a forgone conclusion after it happens.

Well ... yeah, of course. This isn't some unusual thing.

Lots of things are foregone conclusions for a long period of time before you have the data to know it.

Think: A competitor is working on a product that massively outcompetes yours, but you don't know that until it is launched. Or you have cancer that is progressing but you don't know until it is diagnosed.

I think this turned out to be like that.

Hillary Clinton still complains about the election being stolen by Trump (there were riots by Democrats back then too). Democrats still complain about Bush beating Gore in 2020. To say that Democrats would simply accepted the results if Trump won only the electoral college defies past history.

Election denialism is found in both parties in large quantities.

> The dems will likely stop anointing people.

You assume the dems will learn from this loss, which is a big assumption.

> We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.

If Trump is alive and well in 2028, I'm sure he will try to run again (ignore rules or change them). But, he also said you'll never have to vote again after this one, so we'll find out what he means by that.

We really should fund an anthropological study in the people who overreact to every little thing Trump says. I'm sure there is an entire media niche to go along with these overreactions too. I would read that.

You don't need an anthropological study, friend. There's already an apt slang term for it.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bitch_eating_crackers

Personally, I absolutely despise Trump but he's been firmly in that realm for quite some time now.

> We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.

I wouldn't count on that. There is a chance that he'll abolish term limits.

There's also a chance that you're right, but only because we've installed a monarch.

How likely do you think either of those things are? 2% chance? 20% chance?

I think hes too old to have to worry about that. And I don't think the republicans would try to weekend at Bernie's him after hes gone too far.

I also think its more likely someone succeeds at assassinating him during his term than he tries to overstay his welcome.

3rd term of Donald Trump seems very low percent chance, but appointment of Donald Trump Jr. to president (through some means) seems much more likely

Spare us your fan fiction, please

His son will run I'm sure

> The first woman president

And that's why the blue folks lost, all about identity politics rather than realpolitik.

> better for everyone

This is a guess or a bet, and one I'll take the other side of. Let's check back in in a year.

Trump has said he will be a dictator on day one. Trump has said that after this election we won't have to vote anymore. Trump has suggested we give the police "One rough hour" like the horror movie The Purge and that would solve crime.

I expect that people are going to die because of the policies that Trump enacts during his presidency. And because of the hate and bigoted rhetoric that he subscribes to and legitimizes. Better that we go down fighting than willingly be party to America becoming another authoritarian regime that commits atrocities.

But it appears that the American people value their wallets more. I'm sympathetic to that, even if my values are different. And TBQH I hope I'm wrong. But

> When someone shows you who they are, believe them

> I expect that people are going to die because of the policies that Trump enacts during his presidency

This comes with the job. His actions or inactions will have all sorts of impacts, just like every president before him.

> Better that we go down fighting than willingly be party to America becoming another authoritarian regime that commits atrocities

Forgive the snark, but what universe have you been living in? We have a pretty strong record when it comes to committing atrocities.

> But it appears that the American people value their wallets more.

That's a pretty dismissive way to put it. Food and housing and medical care being increasingly unaffordable is an existential issue for a lot of people. Of course Trump presided over some of that decline, but this sort of blind spot towards what the lives of common people are like contributed heavily to this election IMO.

Sure, rephrased "die unnecessarily, again," https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/11/trumps-pol...

I haven't said that America is perfect or innocent. And past problems don't mean we shouldn't work to prevent future ones.

Ok. It's dismissive. I don't understand. This is deeply confusing and disheartening to me. I find it unconscionable to put my own quality of life above others living at all, and am having a lot of trouble processing why so many people have. I could ask you how bad it is exactly but I wouldn't vote for Trump even if I was homeless. So maybe I can't understand.

I think the best bet at this point is either go all in on politics and make it your life's work, or just shut it off for a while.

Too many people drink from the firehose of bullshit news and it drives them nuts. In reality you can't have much influence on any of this beyond voting, unless you're going all in on it.

And believe it or not, life is going to go on either way. Might as well act accordingly.

> We never have to sit through a Trump election campaign again.

He has children who are very much like him and popular in the "MAGA Movement", Donald Trump Jr. specifically. Political dynasties exist in America. Just sayin'.

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