AOC Asked People Who Voted For Both Her And Trump To Explain Why—And Their Answers Are Eye-Opening
AOC Asked People Who Voted For Both Her And Trump To Explain Why—And Their Answers Are Eye-Opening
I know lots of people are really down on this but it seems like people just want change. We all know the system isn't working for most people right now and want something different.
Trump is different. Bad but different. If you have little hope make sense to break everything. If there's a real progressive change candidate people will be excited. Change is what is needed
This is something a lot of libs need to understand imo.
You can rail on about how Trump is going to end democracy until the cows come home, it's never going to sway voters. The average person is not doing very well and prospects look really bad for young people and democrats are refusing to acknowledge that things are broken. They are promising the status quo - and the status quo fucking sucks.
Agreed. Run on change for the better. Higher minimum wages, universal health care, paid sick time, paid maternity / paternity leave. This will get votes because people want something better in their pocket books. Student loan forgiveness was a great policy to run on. If it wasn't blocked in courts it would have given a huge boost to Biden.
For the people that don't want to scroll a bunch of stupid stories for the answers
Holy fucking shit, people are dumber than I thought. And I already thought they were pretty fucking dumb.
Did you ever know that you're my hero 🎵🎶
🫡
I was overdue to pay it forward
Their excuses are baffling. Harris didn't have policy. Okay, but Trump did? He kept walking about "concepts" of a plan, and lying about wanting P25. Trump is for the people? He is hanging out with, like, the national league of assholes and duchebags. "Harris was scary." BUT NAZIS AREN'T!?
People were offered center right(D) and extreme right(R).
I voted for least worst harm reduction(D), but would have voted for AND campaigned for extreme left.
To the hopeless, especially the engineered ignorant hopeless, extreme often seems better than the status quo that keeps you in your hopeless state.
Our oligarchs starved public education both to cut their taxes and make their workforce this ignorant. We blame our stooopids for being so stupid, but the owner class that segregates their children into private schools they do fund destroyed public education on purpose, to ensure we can't universally use critical thinking and identify their economic class as the root poison that has destroyed our nation.
The only reason a fascist, extreme right is even allowed and funded by our owners in this country is because fascists love crony market capitalism, the very same reason we aren't ever given a true leftwing option, because whether centrist neoliberal or fascist Republican, they put the market's owners first, and the owners can and do attack any candidates that threaten to reign their power in.
Which is why we're irrevocably boned, and will continue to have the choice of capitalist exploitation with scapegoats(R) and capitalist exploitation with rainbow flags(D) until collapse, as the owners of this system demand capitalist exploitation as this system's primary function, then let us vote on how to address the symptoms it causes, if at all, to make us feel in control.
Reagan was the last chance to maintain any actual control, and we gave it all away for the false promise of golden showers of prosperity in return... one day... just keep making them money... any time now... Just assume it'll be five minutes after your body fails you from laboring for them.
promise of golden showers of prosperity in return
Trickle down. We got golden showers, just not the kind you’re describing
Every single one of those answers is straight out of the mouths of Fox News. If you don't disable open nationwide propaganda broadcasts, you'll never fix the problem.
This is the problem. The grievances are largely not legitimate. They are regurgitated outrage of the day. The moment you deal it they are on to the next manufactured outrage.
There is no counter propaganda. When Trump lied and said that millions of migrants are coming over the border and committing crimes, the democrats turned around and tried to pass a republican border bill.
They could have counter messaged about how 1. millions were not coming across and 2. illegal immigrants are overwhelmingly just regular people who pay taxes and commit less crimes on average than citizens.
Can we please start holding the democrats responsible for their failures instead of blaming literally everything else.
Can we please start holding the democrats responsible
Can we please stop pretending that no one wants that and just making it the only answer every time someone wants someone to stop doing something else shitty? YES I want the democrats to be responsible for for a third party to make it in, but this broken record crap is getting old.
That would be true if every one of those answers didn't also strongly support AOC, Democrats, or Bernie.
That's the whole point of this exercise. A bunch of deep red voters citing Fox is expected and doesn't tell us anything new. When a bunch of deep vlue voters do that, something is going on.
We normally expect AOC and Bernie supporters to be very Blue. If Fox is resonating with those voters we should really be asking ourselves, "Why?"
Why is it that some Democrats hear Fox News and immediately judge them as naked propaganda while other Democrats give them consideration?edit: grammar
The lesson: some people just like disruption, and equate being against the status quo with being better than the status quo. I think any left-leaning candidate who tries to court these people in the future should tread very carefully.
They care more about the headlines you produce than your policies.
I had to stop reading the replies she received; the stupidity made my head hurt. My hatred for humanity is growing by leaps and bounds daily. I think I'll be a full blown misanthrope within 2 or 3 days. It has become crystal clear that we need to pull the weeds out of the gene pool. I'm for instituting a national license program to breed. You may obtain a license if you can pass a test which consist of a common sense section and the civics section of the U.S. naturalization test. 🤨😁
Edit: For the morons that can't tell. This was fucking sarcasm.
Well the good news is that the probability of such a program happening has gone up.
The bad news is that you are disqualified if you have all your teeth or any kind of college degree.
That might be very true with incoming administration. 😁
I couldnt care less for the why. If you voted Trump, a third party candidate or not at all you are responsible for the coming fascism you waste of cells
Understanding why something is broken is a crucial prerequisite for fixing it. If you don't care why it didn't work, then you don't care about making it work - you only care about being angry.
I sincerely hope that Democrats do care.
Like it or not, MAGA can currently take that attitude. They control the SC, both chambers of Congress, and the White House. If they decide to say, "Fsck it. We'll ignore the Demorcrats," they'll still have all the process in place to enact their agenda.
MAGA doesn't need to analyze what went wrong during the election. They got everything they wanted.
For at least the next 2 years, Democrats will be able to do nothing that Republicans don't approve of. The law says that they get to set the standards.
If Democrats want any chance of checking that power or reversing it at the next election, we are the ones who need to adapt.
There's an "ancient Chinese saying", "卧 薪 尝 胆". You don't do it because it's fun or because you obliged to, you do it so you can win next time.
There it is. Liberals are so comfortable moving straight to fascism the moment they don’t get what they want.
Gee I wonder why your fascist centrism didn’t resonate with anyone.
Oh! I see where you misunderstood. No, Trump -the Putin worshipping, endorsed by Duterte, wannabe dictator- is the fascism that will be more unchecked than the first time he was elected. They were referring to the immediate next two years, not any hope of a come back where fascist policies like policing women's bodies or banning lgbta+ rights will be attempted to be repealed.
They're talking about the ones who openly worship dictators, not the liberals that currently have no control.
Maybe if the democrats had given 50% of the populace something they considered worth turning up to vote for they wouldn't have stayed at home.
voted
They most certainly did give people something worth turning to. And then stopped talking about it way too soon. Most people simply didil't know much if anything about Harri's campaign promises. The Dems shifted from talking about worker friendly policies to go after the handful of sane GOPers. And lost.
Ah the Highly intellectual argument that liberals use to win over voters... or is it?
I honestly doubt people who vote for AOC and Trump in her district are in any way representative of the swing state voters that actually decide the election. Engagement is what went wrong, obviously, but how it went wrong in those two places can be very different.
My state actually overwhelmingly voted for a Blue Governor.... and a Red President
trump only picked up 500,000 more votes than last time. Lets hear from the 10,000,000 that voted in 2020 but not this election
That parts easy. They voted against trump and got absolutely nothing for it. They went back to being non voters because the dems showed they weren't going to do anything better than trump just had.
Covid killed at least 1,104,000 people in the United States to date. In 2020, about 385,000 were killed with Covid as a contributing cause. I can't find numbers about the total deaths that occurred before election day specifically, but for the sake of simplicity I'm going to use the year total. Just note that the actual number of deaths by that time was somewhat lower.
We can subtract the number that had already passed in 2020 from the total number of deaths to date. That gives us over 716,000 people who died of Covid between the 2020 election and today, and therefore could not have voted in 2024. Also note that the 65+ crowd is historically the most reliable voting demographic by age and Covid laid into that same age group the hardest.
We can be upset at people who didn't turn out to vote this election, but we can't dismiss the significant chunk of 2020 voters who simply weren't alive by 2024.
Why does this even matter? We have an electoral college and turnout in the seven swings state met or exceeded 2020 turnout.
Those people could only be motivated to vote when it was as easy as possible and they had nothing better to do. They voted for the party that would handle COVID better and let them get back to their lives of not worrying about politics.
Didn't you hear? Starlink hacked the Voting Machines and deleted 20,000,000 Harris votes
I mean cheating to win is not even a crazy conspiracy theory. It's all the right has ever had to win, and this year, they had the richest person on the planet who has the technology on their side.
Maybe related to massive mail voting - just speculation haven’t seen breakdowns.
I think long COVID has impacted more Americans than we realize. Everyone out there suffering from diminished capacities thinking that the fascist sex-pest goomba is somehow more reliable than the nice black lady. I dunno about you guys, but I've just been seeing a whole lot of mistakes lately. On television, in News, in articles, just... everywhere.
And while a lot of it is probably people quiet quitting and not giving a fuck, I think a lot more people are suffering from the extended brain fog of long COVID than we think, and it's affecting everything around us. Unfortunately, that includes voting practices in elections.
This is almost certainly a prime factor in everything now. And we'll never know, because everybody will look at you like you're a fucking terrorist if you so much as point out that covid never stopped being rampant.
Covid never stopped being rampant?
mine isn't a brain fog but COVID and a trump presidency made me not trust humans at all.
i no longer trust friends, family, neighbors, governments, leaders, police, doctors, businesses. none of them maintained trust during the Trump presidency and the pandemic.
but i still vote straight ticket democrat. because their platform doesn't include NAZI-ism
The NYTimes wrote it out for me:
The playbook for transforming a democracy into a soft autocracy was clear: Win power with a populist message against elites. Redraw parliamentary districts. Change voting laws. Harass civil society. Pack courts with judges willing to support power grabs. Enrich cronies through corruption. Buy up newspapers and television stations and turn them into right-wing propaganda. Use social media to energize supporters. Wrap it up in an Us versus Them message: Us, the “real” Russians or Hungarians or Americans, against a rotating cast of Them: the migrants, the Muslims, the liberals, the gays, George Soros and on and on.
The quality of many things seems to be broken down to a grade school level. Which is pretty crazy to me.
Eh, it's always been a convenient myth for the republican party that Americans genuinely seem to believe they are better on "macro" even though it's always been probably the reverse (that democrat politicians have to clean up the mess that lower taxes and deregulation generate). For at least 40 years. In some states the reverse is true, like mass/NJ/ny voting blue pres while having a pretty regular flip flop in the governor's seat and then solidly blue house/senate.
Similarly Dems always have a worse than average spin on wars, the comment being "republicans want a massive military that does nothing, Dems want a tiny military that goes everywhere" when in reality our foreign policy doesn't really change (except Biden actually pulled out of Afghanistan).
I think a lot of this is that Republicans used to follow what used to be the recommendations of the most prominent main-stream economists. We can judge that as foolish in hindsight, but, "let the economics experts handle the economy" is a fairly reasonable policy.
2 big things changed. Republicans push more and more policies that economists consider dumb and economists have updated their models and recommendations based on new research. Even those old free market economists were not fans of tariffs and trade wars. It's pretty hard to find an actual economist (like with a PhD from a respected econ school) who thinks wanton deregulation is a good idea.
At the same time, Democrats still hold on to a few ideas that economists all agree are dumb. There's tons of evidence that things like rent control and home purchase credits make housing problems worse.
Democrats tend to support better economic policies than Republicans do but they support enough bad ones that it's easy for Republicans to argue that the old status quo is correct.
Most definitely. Whenever I mentioned that my short term memory got bad after I had covid the first time (before vaccines), many people chimed in and agreed that they have it too.
It got better after about 18 months.
The point I'm trying to make is, that people usually keep it for themselves unless they have someone that takes away the shame.
Jesus christ, this is what unaffordable education does to people. For fucks sake. I mean it's only fitting for a population that can't figure out that someone advertising a 1/3lb burger and directly comparing it to the competition 1/4lb, bragging about the price being the same, might indicate that 1/3lb is more despite 3 being a smaller number. What a combination, people that belive their thoughts are the only source of truth while having no clue what they're talking about.
Education is free
Attention is not
Fucking barely. American public schools suck, any school worth a damn in the states will put you in crippling debt. In other words not worth a damn again to most people.
I double checked if there actually are any good free schools and especially free collages. Turns out yes, there are some, but it's definitely not the norm.
Good analysis:
"Ppl like her because she’s real. Ppl perceive Trump as real too. Dems need to do a better job of just being real with ppl. Coming on social media and chatting with ppl, etc."
That's why people liked Bernie too.
AOC is real.
But DJT is the most fictional character who's ever existed. Nothing he's ever said, done, or been has been true.
Sadly, we're stuck in the reality that allows his falsehoods to affect real humans.
He does not use politics speak. That's all.
But you're right, it's a very good distinction.
It's easy for a serial liar to sound "real" when they are lying. That's what they're good at.
When you at least attempt to keep to the truth, it limits how appealing your sales pitch is.
AOC is real.
A real union buster
Whoever was running Harris campaign needs to be barred from being in charge of any political campaign ever again; talk about legendary levels of mismanagement.
They had the golden opportunity to lean into the ‘weird’ meme and hammer Trump/Vance on that issue - but decided against it because it was what, ‘demeaning’?
The Dems need a firebrand, with a truely populist message and policies; rather than just lip service.
Democrats need to realize they're trying to win elections, not "Ribbon for Best Behaved Boy Scout Troop"
For whatever reason, when I'm hearing about Dems in the swing state I'm in, I'm hardly ever hearing why you should be excited to vote for the Dem candidate, but instead why the Rep candidate is so awful that you simply must vote Dem to stop them. Like, there was about a week(?) that Harris and Walz seemed to be coming out of the gate going "we're gonna be so awesome, don't even worry about the weirdos on the other side", but then it became "please, it is of Vital Importance you do not vote for Trump, we promise Harris will be better than him", and I just don't understand why they changed.
Whoever was running Harris campaign needs to be barred from being in charge of any political campaign ever again;
We need real populists, that go after people's needs, not pseudopopulists like in GOP.
Hard to pull that off when the entire core of the DNC is permanently latched onto the corporate teat.
We have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to break the core of the party and force even a smidgen of compromise out of them that costs their corporate donors profits.
Problem is there's too many vested interests. Bernie Sanders would have made a great president. In 2016.
Bernie would have crashed just as hard with the same apparatus behind him.
Do you think Trump is charismatic on camera? No! It's not him or his policy, it's that his message would just not get through.
If you voted for trump and AOC you need to make sure you never leave home without your fucking helmet on. Fuck.
Liz Cheney.
I appreciate the value of honesty and authenticity as key reasons people choose to support a candidate.
However, it is clear that Donald Trump often makes false statements.
Furthermore, Kamala Harris might have benefited from participating in more contemporary media formats, such as podcasts and Twitch streams, to enhance her outreach. Additionally, focusing less on appealing to Republican voters might have been advantageous, as this strategy CLEARLY contributed to her electoral loss.
Being a complete phoney didn't help. She had all the charisma of a late night preacher. That doesn't play well with most people.
You know what I love the most about late night preachers?
They don't put people in concentration camps.
They don't take away human rights.
They don't sexually assault people(typically).
They don't quote Hitler(typically).
You know what? Now that I think about it, she was a lot better than a late night preacher.
- not a Nazi
- not a racist
- not a rapist
- not sexist
- not a fascist
Wow! Why didn't 20 million Americans vote for her?
btw, that's a rhetorical question, I don't care about your opinions on her.
This is fucking nuts. Some of those answers are people being so uninformed and then acting like they're the ones that are informed. Some even voted for Trump because they think he's anti-war and will stop the Genocide in Gaza despite him wanting to turbocharge it. It's just. Fucking depressing. I don't know how to counter this. The far right has created a media ecosystem that allows them to feed trash into their viewers brains even if it's a blatant lie and those people will go from voting for a blatant racist and fascist who thinks people of color are not real Americans, to voting for a left leaning woman of color.
It's almost like they don't have any actual morals or beliefs and only care about being anti-establishment. Some say they'd vote for Bernie but instead voted for Trump despite them being completely opposite people. These people don't have media literacy. They've been brainwashed, and I don't know how to fix it.
The thing AOC, Bernie and Trump do have in common is that they are all populists. That they would also have accepted AOC or Bernie means that they dont necessarily want a demagogue, but its also not a deal breaker for them.
We need to stop with the brainwashing talk. A few people on the fringe were clearly mentally ill, but the rest of them had agency and they made a choice.
American voters have zero agency. We only exist to pay taxes and legitimize the state, which is not obligated to provide us with actual options to vote for.
I get what you're saying. And agree somewhat. But I think you don't have to be mentally ill or an idiot or whatever to be brainwashed. But being brainwashed is 100% what a lot of people on the right are and refusing to use that term might make sense in some regard, but it also doesn't properly address how we could go about fixing things. While I don't fully know how to fix this, treating it like brainwashing is the only way we can address it, as long as we also approach these people with patience and compassion and try to show them why what they spout is brainwashed.
It's a cult ya know? And cults are brainwashed. And calling people mentally ill or idiots for falling for it will definitely just make them double down. But it's still brainwashing.
Trump ain't no fucking populist, he tried to dismantle democracy, ignore every human right, and said out loud he plans to do it all again.
This is my thoughts exactly the one person who said Harris had no plans when she did and Trump literally had 0 it's insane.
they think he’s anti-war and will stop the Genocide in Gaza
He's an IRL Peacemaker... He wants peace in Israel and doesn't care how many have to die to achieve it.
people being so uninformed and then acting like they’re the ones that are informed
I see you’ve met my Trump-supporter/Qanon MIL
only care about being anti-establishment.
I bet they'd feel differently if the establishment had a meaningful impact on their lives.
I thought this was just click bait. But some of the answers are actually interesting (and scary in that way) how people can "rationally" explain how they fell for the lies of trump ("he cares about Muslims", "he is a political outsider", "he gets things done"...)
It's the delivery.
Delivery is everything.
Trump reached these people, and Biden/Harris did not. It's that simple. The message does not matter if it doesn't get there. And this is a tremendous failure, considering the war chest the Dems squandered.
And I have zero faith they will learn from it. All the arguing I see is over policy that these people clearly never even laid eyes on.
If by delivery you mean “lies and propaganda”.
Um, it's called sparkly commercials if it's from capitalism, it's only propaganda if it's from the province of communism.
Precisely.
Dems need to do the exact same thing, and more.
If it wasn't for The Voice I wouldn't have seen a single political ad. I recall very few if any YouTube ads, a buttload of Instagram ads, but pretty much every one of them was asking for money. Okay? Money to do what? Buy more ads asking for more money? I'm sure political ads aren't super effective in changing people's minds but they do get people start to think about the issues and ways to compare different candidates. Also, the most things I remember about the campaign were when Trump said something crazy and when Kamala responded to Trump saying something crazy. Her entire campaign was pretty much, "You don't want this other guy do you?" I have voted for very few candidates in my life and this time I definitely voted against Trump.
All I ever saw were ads of Obama asking for five dollars. Everytime I saw it all I could think was "Damn this is going to piss people off."
I see zero ads beyond billboards and the occasional radio at if I happen to be at a store.
Other than one guy going around to make sure people had a plan for voting the only interaction I had with the Democratic campaign was them begging, PLEADING for money. A dozen texts a day. Two dozen emails. Three or four phone calls a day that never left a voicemail and have stopped since the election. (I didn't answer them.)
If that's what the rest of the Democratic base was subjected to it's no wonder they had a bad taste in their mouth about the election. Even though Trump won a part of me is glad the harassment has stopped.
These answers read like idiocracy…
“He felt like he cared because he was an outsider”
I’m just waiting for “She talked all faggy-like”
“Ow my balls”
“He really spoke to me, and her professional speak made me feel dumb”
“He felt like he cared because he was an outsider”
Everyone with common sense knows Donald Trainwreck cares about nobody but himself.
Cognitive dissonance? Doublethink? Humans have always been great at it.
I don't know if this kind of thing is captured very well but I wonder how many voted blue for other Federal offices but simply skipped President. I understand the general motivation behind "sending a message" and "leaving this one up to chance" but good Lord.
This is like me refusing to "play chase" with my kid even though he's running right towards the street. It's annoying as fuck every time but the consequence of me "refusing to play" could be dire. After I save the little shit for the 10th time I punish him, but in a way that doesn't kill or cripple him for life.
I don’t know if this kind of thing is captured very well but I wonder how many voted blue for other Federal offices but simply skipped President.
Trump won PA by 144,739 votes, but Casey is only trailing McKormick by around 40,000 votes, which may get narrower as all the ballots are counted.
So I'd rate this plausible.Edit: In the other statewide races the democrats lost by even more than Harris did, so I'm not rating this plausible.
I feel like my brain is getting hijacked. Maybe that’s the point of articles like these.
Authoritarianism prep.
Why did you vote to protect the rail corporation from the union strike AOC?
Why are you asking the question to somebody who'll never read it?
Why are you throwing a red herring into this entire thread?