He still is ahead of Kamala by about 2% or 2.5 million votes. Before he was ahead of Kamala + Claudia + Chase + Cornell + Jill + Vermin Supreme + Elmo.

It’s still a closer gap than he lost to Biden by by a lot. But it is also super clear that Harris managed to do worse in this environment than Hillary did in 2016 back when Trump was an unknown crazy person instead of the well known crazy shill for hire.

Some sort of camp to help ADHD folks work on their concentration?

I crushed it and have the American Dream. My experience now is, I’m surrounded by old people, trustfund kids, and people who broke themselves to get ahead.

I have to raise my kids knowing that 80% of their classmates have no chance and hope they luck out and also fall in love with a career path that pays well. All of my friends I grew up with are in a constantly struggle, none of them will own a house. I have friends with PTSD from serving in the military and even with the VA loan option and GI bill they will be lucky to own a house by 50 if ever.

I can’t even talk about my life, my struggles are meaningless compared to those around me. I feel like an outsider in America because I actually did what everyone says is the goal and it is wild to me. I’d give it up in a heartbeat just to feel like I was in a community of equals I felt safe to raise a family around.

The oldest profession traded in it so they are arguably the original currency.

He was elected as Dictator many times on a yearly basis and sometimes multiple times a year. He was so vastly popular the citizenry they killed the assassin’s, hunted down an heir and put him in power.

Julius Ceasar and his follow on Agustus were insanely capable leaders that did great things for their country. The empire was so great and lasted twice the time America has, it’s fall caused the Dark Ages.

Rome is a bad example here because technically the Dictatorship was good for them. Rome fell due to corruption that came in via enabling the Christian church to operate freely. Now that is a much better analog here that we enabled religious organizations to become tax free political action committees and uncapped their ability to influence government. This meant the evangelical grifters became the most powerful political entities in America.

Let’s not lump Trump in with Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a war hero and a capable leader who’s final crimes were giving out citizenship and housing.

Trump’s final crimes will be giving all our state secrets to every other government in the world and obliterating our infrastructure.

He is 78, in awful health, and has no interest in a legacy or supporting a successor. He keeps everyone around him at odds and maintains enough infighting that no clear heir apparent could really show up.

So like, he really only will hold power long enough to make everything terrible. So we got that goin for us.

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The US has literally 0 third party representation at the federal level and 10 state senators all libertarian. Even Bernie isn’t technically a third party he just is no party. So to be clear, having no party is far far better in the US than representing a third party even in a local election.

I’m an independent that voted for Jill in 2016 and Kamala in 2024. What is your issue with me? You think the country ever could recover if people like us didn’t work together?

None of this hurts me, I’ll be fine. I just question if I want to raise my family with American values now but I have the freedom to easily move anywhere. Others don’t.

They are short about 4 states right now. That isn’t as huge a gap as I’d like. And they have the ability to get the item out to the states.

Yea, if you want more leftist policies than right, vote and work with Democrats at the federal level and try to get Ranked voting in more places. Exactly like Bernie has. Continue to support your third party in local until they become able to actually get folks elected to even a Senate post. As long as the Green Party can’t even manage to get the most hippy district in the nation to get a single House Rep elected you might as well just cast your vote for Bob Ross.

The we made some mistakes but we are proud of our heritage deal only works when you’re not massively losing due to being out of touch with the morals of your base. It’s easier for me to not see the parallels when they are not sending troops to cleanse Gaza. When you look at the votes for them and realize that it is a combination of both the people who want Democrats and the people who just don’t want Trump and they STILL can’t win it is a huge issue.

It’s the oldest political party in the world, maybe it is time to rebuild it in a cleaner image.

It’s cool though, no way that a President that awful would still be ingrained in our modern politics. Well except for the fact that he is the Founder of the Democratic Party, you know… the “good” guys.

The Republican party is policy wise to the right of both National and the NZ First party as a comparison. They will also control all arms of the government and it is potentially possible for them to amend the constitution without any recourse but it isn’t easy.

So to be clear, they could change our Freedom of Religion and Speech to a Freedom of Christian Religions and “Truthful” Speech and there isn’t a ton that anyone could do to stop them just to give you an idea of the level of power they have taken in this election. It wouldn’t be easy, but the fact that it won’t be impossible should be terrifying.

The goals they have of criminalizing providing abortion services in all cases for the entire country is entirely possible. They could round up every person in the country of a certain nationality and put them in camps like we did with the Japanese during WW2, Trump already cited this act as being something he is considering to deal with immigration.

Historically we killed 90% of our indigenous population. When NZ was signing the Treaty of Waitangi, America was executing the Trail of Tears and rounding up 60,000 Native Americans and making them march 100km to live in a desert, a quarter of them died during the move. We’re not even starting in a similar place here and we’re moving far to the right.

The American people spoke and helped clarify what it means to be an American. It’s fair that some folks who last week felt proud to be an American now would prefer to be almost anything else.

A second loss should be a death knell of the current Republican party. He won’t transition any of his power to Vance or any other Republicans. He could die and we still would see 10% of the Americans to vote for him in 2028 because his death was just media propaganda as far as they are concerned.

The big issue is that physical media degrades. A cassette tape wont sound the same as it did after just existing for 20 years. CD’s and Vinyl records if kept really well can last for 100 years or so but are delicate in other ways and a bad record player can cause permanent damage.

Preserving the experiences of others, art, media is important, but at the end of the day nothing we do is permanent. I know that thanks to online archives I can go and find old music if I need to. I am glad some folks preserve hard copies but a preserved collection isn’t really a functional one and a functional one isn’t really going to last 50 or 60 years at the same quality as what you can get from streaming.

This is why I used Spotify listeners and not plays or ticket sales or album sales. It’s a metric that doesn’t really require a band to be currently active. New hits will clearly improve the metric but we’re talking here specifically about a person’s outreach today and influence on a voting population.

The idea that more individual people listened to her music than had a single Beatles song in their playlist or a single Michael Jackson song in their playlist is pretty insane. I know I listen to at least one Beatles song a month, it doesn’t matter if it is new.

45 million monthly listeners on Spotify. That is 10 million more than The Beatles right now. 60th overall on the top list of plays just above Michael Jackson. Half the amount of TSwift

So they are a well known artist.