Straw Puppy's Potus Polls

By camestrosfelapton on Jul 23, 2024

I've been meaning to post another one of these for awhile. The last one was in May. Between then and now:

The genocide in Gaza has continued and despite talks of a ceasefire agreement, if anything the Israeli government has broadened the conflict.
Meanwhile, in the USA, amid general talk of Biden's age and right wing social media picking up on every verbal stumble by Biden (and a lot of dishonest video editing), the man himself had a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.
There was a period last week in which the left & right of the Democratic Party appeared to swap positions on Biden, with some of the left of the party rallying in support of him and many on the right, panicking after the debate, wanting him gone.
Then Trump got shot. This unleashed a degree of verbal fury from the US right. Then it turned out that the shooter might have been a Republican and the right shifted to anger about inflammatory rhetoric (without any apparent sense of irony) and about workplace diversity initiative (just because and also there were shots of a woman secret service agent - which proved something but they weren't sure what).
The RNC happened. Trump's speech was weird and apparently sapped a lot of the a-Trump-victory-is-now-inevaitable energy.
Fake hillbilly J.D.Vance was announced as VP, which was extra funny as he was once one of those never-Trump people who used to say mean things about Trump which is what a day earlier the right were saying is why Trump got shot )as in people saying mean things about Trump - not specifically J.D.Vance saying mean things about Trump).
The polls had Biden v Trump as a statistical 50-50, which was bad, bad news. This is not an election that should be close.
Donor pressure and public statements calling for Biden to withdraw increased but even worse, there was a lot of talk of having a whole set of possible replacements fight it out on the floor of the Democratic National Convention (not literally have a big fight but it wouldn't surprise if there wasn't at least one supposedly serious pundit suggesting that.)
Biden stepped down from the contest yesterday.
The Democratic Party decided that maybe losing an election to fascism was a bad idea and it looks like today that people are rallying around Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate.
Meanwhile Israeli Prime Minister and genuinely awful person in his own right, Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in the US to speak to Congress just in case everybody had forgotten point 1, which you'd think Netanyahu would want everybody to forget about except the man is, as I already said, even by the standards of Israeli politics a genuinely awful, awful person who really loves to be he centre of attention and stirring up shit in the hope that people get killed.

I usually include some quotes from my special panel of experts aka the former Sad Puppy leadership. I'm saving one reaction to the Trump shooting for another post as it ended up being more Debarkle related than I expected. Meanwhile, the reaction to Biden withdrawing has been a proliferation of sew-work themed slurs hurled at Kamala Harris from the likes of Larry and Brad. Who would have thought that when face with a woman in a position of influence and authority that they'd react badly? Oh...everybody thought that they would?

If there is one broad lesson we can learn from elections in 2024 it is this. Coalitions matter. When the Right is disunited it loses. When the Left and the Centre at a minimum co-operate/coordinate electorally, the Right loses. I doubt Kamala Harris is going to be much better on foriegn policy issues than Biden or Obama and that is bad news, but I do know that we have been living through a global, coordinated far-right nationalist push to grab electoral power, undermine constitutional norms in multiple nations and shift politics to one were territorial wars of conquest, ethnic cleansing and corruption become the global norm. Trump is the face of that in the US and as somebody who lives on this planet, I'd rather that the USA isn't captured by the nationalist far right.