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Comment by simple10 | Hacker News Reader

It's much more nuanced than people are giving credit. See my other comment below for a fuller analysis. I have some military Republican-leaning friends. To give credit where credit is due, Trump successfully switched the Republican party away from the being the party of expansionist war. This plus the economy (whether or not you agree with people's interpretation of the economy) swayed a lot of votes.

Ultimately, I think Trump won because a lot of key independent voters cast votes against the Democrats. It's a referendum on the way Democrats have been running campaigns for the past 20 years. See 2016 Democrat Primaries [1] where Hillary Clinton's campaign pulled some shady deals to get Bernie Sanders out of the race. Hopefully, we'll get a legitimate 3rd party one of these days to properly give a referendum on both leading parties. Doubtful, but one still has to dream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presiden...

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Elections are basically controlled by the media. They publish the news you consume, filtered through their editorial stance. They control the narrative. It’s all headlines, clickbait and eyeballs, only in this century it’s done algorithmically through social media too. You are never getting an unfiltered, unbiased opinion of the state of affairs, you are getting a carefully curated snapshot.

While there is still more nuance to it than that, there is still truth. In the UK, one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers The Sun likes to boast about their political influence on voters. “It’s The Sun what won it.” This is a bare faced statement that The Sun basically decides on their candidate of choice and voters go with that.

So it is when you depend on a so-called free press to give you the facts in nice, bite-sized form.

I honestly feel like the media was covering Harris quite a lot. Her message needed to be more than "he's a fascist" and while some might say, she had a stronger message than that, as an educated person who consumes news from all sides of the spectrum, I didn't see it.

Edit: In fact, some say she lost the election because of her performance directly in front of the news media on TV and whatnot.

She was placed in a very difficult situation where she had to try and have her own policies and candidacy but also had to defend Biden.

There was also the difficulty for her campaign that she was not voted for in a primary, just picked.

Absolutely agree. Until we restore a proper and trusted free press, all political bets are off. Americans are living in isolated bubbles of information with little agreement on actual ground truth.

Do you argue that Trump was elected because the media supported him more than Harris? Although Fox News and X are fully pro-Trump, of course, my impression is that the majority of media did not support Trump. So, I find that media control thesis hard to believe.

Given how often the media would uncritically repeat upside-down nonsense like "Trump supporters say they're concerned with inflation" without any kind of analysis, yes, the overall media did tacitly support Trump.

I've no idea whether this was from the ownership class pulling strings to cut any real objective criticism of ZIRP corporate welfare, democrats uninterested in economics being blind to the fact that inflation actually has concrete causes, or from the writers having their brains steeped in things like racism-everywhere orthodoxy and thinking that referencing those narratives makes for a neutral objective article. But regardless of why, with friends like those...

Fox News has been the most watched news channel for 22 years.

If this was the case then it seems that Harris would have won the race...the vast majority of the media I saw here in the US was going on and on about how Trump was a grave danger to democracy and in general just a terrible person and candidate. In regards to the media, I think this election shows that a large majority of the population simply does not believe them at all.

You don’t watch Fox News or listen to talk radio… it’s a nonstop drumbeat about how Kamala is a communist who will forcibly trans aborted prison babies. And “migrant crime” is up 10000000% and they’re lazy but also taking the jobs.

you're right I don't...but people that listen to that stuff were probably never going to vote for anyone other than Trump (anymore than listeners to MSNBC were going to stray from Harris). My primary sources are relatively centrist sources like WSJ and Economist as well as a variety of independent podcasts and the NYTimes. With a few exceptions on the podcast front all of these outlets were unabashedly anti-trump.

The media gets too much flack. Harris was more favorably covered in the media than trump was, but he still won.

Depends on what "the media" is. Fox News has been the most watched news channel for 22 years.

When trump enables a war in the middle east that's bigger than the dems would have ever allowed, will you take that credit back and say it was a mistake to believe that republicans are no longer a war party?

You're not meaning the same thing by "pro war" or "anti war".

So long as the war in the middle east or Ukraine does not involve US soldiers on the ground, Trump can finance or equip one of the side - for the average voter in the US, there is no "war".

Maybe the the young men in the US were more concerned about the war in Russia escalating to a conflict that would involve US soldiers on the ground.

We know how Trump will behave with Putin (he will offer half of Ukraine on a plate in exchange for pinky promises.)

We can suspect that Trump will not move a finger when those promises are broken and the Baltics are invaded.

What is still a mystery is how Trump will deal with Iran - here, there is no clear policy that will please both Israël and Russia, so someone will have to give.

Both the Israel and Ukraine wars started under Biden. It's hotly debated how it would have all played out under Trump. An no, I'm not a Trump supporter. But context and public perception is important. And understanding how and what Trump did to radically shift the Republican party is important to future predictions and restoring balance. This is my primary claim as to why Harris lost. Democrats have drifted too far from the truth on the ground with large swaths of Americans. And yes, Republicans have done the same, but not to the same extent which is why they won. I hope the Democratic party can recalibrate and learn from the mistakes for next time.

The reason is that Trump was giving Russia everything they wanted without the need for a war. Why invade Ukraine for resources when you can just call up Trump and say "make Ukraine give me resources"?

And Israel invades Gaza every year, under every president. It's just that in 2023, someone decided they had the propaganda power to make it seem like a new thing and that it was Biden's fault.

I'm absolutely certain that if Trump was in the White House the full on invasion of Ukraine would not have been started. Not because he's some exceptional negotiator or because he brought peace, but because he was doing such a great job of undermining US influence that Russia would have been dumb to distract them from it. As soon as that stopped happening, they pulled the trigger on something they have been planning for quite a while. It's probable that now, Russia will try chomping as much as possible from Ukraine in the short term and then just sue for a respite of a couple of years until they deem the opportunity is ripe to finish what they started.

It's one thing to speculate that this is what would have happened, call it one's "gut feeling" or "character read" or even "reasoned speculation", and leave it go at that.

But to be "absolutely certain" about a pure hypothetical like this (concerning a war that dumb and irrational for Putin to start, in any case) seems, well -- quite strange.

It's also unlikely, given that one of the key drivers for Putin's decision to launch the full-scale invasion was likely (not proven of course, but by any analysis it does seem highly likely) Trump's isolation stance in Afghanistan, and blatant backstabbing of the local Afghan government. This surely emboldened Putin, convincing him that a new era of disdain for interventionism had take hold on the US side -- and that he could most likely go in and have his way with Ukraine, with no significant consequences of any kind.

I admit it worded much stronger than it warrants. Still, the point stands, I would have expected Russia to stay put not not mess with the NATO weakening process that Trump was engaging in. I'm not saying it would have been a good outcome for the world, because it would likely just have delayed the invasion, and probably been more successful when it happened.

Yeah the "no new wars" talking point doesn't make sense. Trump's solution for peace is to just give into Russian demands and let them take over every previously soviet-union country. And let's not forget all the drama that came out of Trump moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem which sparked even more tension between the Palestinians and Israel. Also the talks he had with Taliban behind the Afghani Government's back which is why we had to pull out like we did.

Both the Israel and Ukraine wars started under Biden

Did Biden "start" the Israel-Hamas war? Or even do anything to conceivably precipitate it?

Since the answer is "no" -- why does this count as a war "started under Biden"?

They're both war parties, but the Democrats are actively courting Dick Cheney and his progeny[1]. We already know what Dick Cheney thinks of war in the Middle East - it's not something we have to wait to find out about.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/cheney-gonzales-harris-endorsemen...

Agreed. Republicans used to be the party of war. Trump substantially changed that as a perception within his voting base. Talk to active American military service men and women or veterans. Their attitude towards blindly trusting the government in new wars has substantially shifted. I don't think Trump actually caused the shift. I think he tapped into this growing sentiment and ramped it up to the point of significantly influencing the Republican voting base.

As for the left and Democrats, the shift is equally noticeable in public perception. But instead of the sentiment being "oorah let's go to war for American glory" it's instead being heavily influenced by emotional appeals. This was most evident in Democrats support of the Russia / Ukraine war on social media. Once the leaders of the Democrat party, including President Biden, saw the overwhelming public support, they implemented policies that ultimately led to the expansion of the war. Refer to Anthony Bilken's visit to Kyiv during early peace talks. And again, I'm not making a claim as to who's right or wrong. Just trying to provide some context on how public perception is being leveraged and manipulated on both sides.

It's not a matter of my personal belief. It's just the public perception. But public perception does play an important role when a government is actively trying to start a new war like when the US invaded Iraq.

Trump didn't do that, the US becoming the largest oil producer did. If you want names then George Mitchell, Harold Hamm, Bush and Obama. And those last two did a great deal in making war very unpopular across the aisle. Maybe Clinton would have put a few more regulations than Obama, but I'm not sold.

> To give credit where credit is due, Trump successfully switched the Republican party away from the being the party of expansionist war.

That's mainly because Trump is a Russian asset and it's in Putin's best interests to manipulate the US to yield and capitulate to his demands to betray allies. So under the bullshit excuse of being isolationist and pro-peace, you'll see Trump ultimately ensure Ukraine ceases to exist, NATO is dismantled, and war ravages through eastern and western Europe.

I don't think we agree.

Trump likes to win. I have a feeling he wants to "win" over Putin. The man is shallow, it isn't rocket science.

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