What the actual fuck, people?

Current estimates when all votes are counted is that Trump will receive 77.9 million votes to Harris’s 75.7 million votes with less than 250,000 total votes in 3 swing states flipping the election to Harris. But we keep hearing about a sweeping Trump victory and a wholesale rejection of the Democratic Party and its values.

  Meidas Touch

If the exit polls are roughly accurate, about 19 million people who had voted for Biden in 2020 just stayed home. And, again, if the exits are roughly accurate, nearly all of those who stayed home had said they were voting against Trump when they cast ballots in 2020.

  Michael Podhorzer

Could it be the woman they refused to come out for?

In October 2009, John Roberts said this on C-SPAN (and it’s worth listening to him say it – audio here):

“The most important thing for the public to understand is that we’re not a political branch of government. They do not elect us. If they do not like what we are doing, it’s more or less just too bad.”

[...]

While Trump was almost certainly not the first choice of the FedSoc coalition, his election, along with the incoming Republican Senate, means that Trump will be able to allow Thomas and Alito to strategically retire and install a 6-3 or 7-2 FedSoc majority for decades. And with the opportunity to place 200-plus more judges to the federal bench, we can expect nearly half of the federal judiciary to have been appointed by Trump by the end of his term.

[...]

[If] we think of the billionaires and theocrats behind the capture of the courts and the Republican Party, then we have to recognize that they actually “came to power” about 19 years ago “through democratic elections,” and that “once in power, like Trojan horses, dismantle[d] democratic systems from within so that they [were] able to entrench their powers and eliminate the possibility of being removed through the democratic process.” The Roberts Court has been a dictator from day one.

[...]

Before the FedSoc capture of the Supreme Court and Citizens United, the billionaires were constrained by contribution limits. And while there was already “dark money” and some outside spending, it was nothing like what we saw in 2024.

[...]

[T]his election was legal, but not democratically legitimate – in just the same way that for nearly a century, elections in the South were “legal” under Jim Crow constitutions, but did not legitimately represent the consent of the governed.

[...]

While Trump “won” playing by the rules as they were on Election Day, those weren’t what everyone thought the rules were when he announced his candidacy. Remember that in the last two years:

Every time Trump’s actions have come before a grand jury, he has been indicted;

Every time he has faced a trial jury, he has been convicted;

Every time he has had an important case heard by judges he did not appoint, including those appointed by other Republican presidents, he has lost;

Each time surveys have asked whether he had committed crimes, a majority say he has;

BUT:

Every time he has come before the Supreme Court justices or federal judges he appointed, he has had his way.

The Supreme Court has captured the flag. 

As this article points out, modern elections have been a see-saw of presidential preference by party.  The conclusion is that people are simply fed up that our system isn't working for them.  This has been the case for a long time now, and we had the chance to either change the system so that it does work for us, or keep affixed to the dysfunctional system and end up with an authoritarian government instead of a democracy.  Looks like we chose the latter.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.