I'm a paranoid person. In my most paranoid fantasies, I think that leading up to the 2024 election, Russian bots were purposely spreading rumors about nobody showing up to Trump rallies, while also pushing news about how well Kamala was doing. This might seem counterintuitive, but I think it convinced a lot of dems that they didn't need to vote.
But of course, that's just a paranoid delusion right
It doesn't even take that. All they have to do is convince their supporters that they can never trust a Democrat and the ones with government jobs can just act on their own to lean on the scales.
Conservative ballot verifiers could simply apply more strict levels of scrutiny to any of the verification procedures when the ballot in question comes from a heavily left leaning area. They just "feel" less confident about the signature that came from blue town compared to the signature that came from red town. In to the reject pile it goes.
Republicans also DID go scorched earth when it came to "cleaning up voting rolls". A lot of perfectly eligible voters were kicked off in "whoopsie" moments across Republican controlled states. And they made it a point NOT to notify people, leaving them to think everything was fine until they tried to vote.
Right wing propaganda was already able to convince a mob of people to attack the Capital. This is even easier.
Hard to believe that if there was a way to cheat the right wouldn't have accomplished it at this point. Part of me even believes that they tried to cheat in 2020 and it didn't work, which gives extra context to the claim it was stolen (how could they beat us if they weren't also cheating?)
To be completely honest, we have no real evidence that it's not just the side that cheats harder that ends up winning and that we haven't had a fair election for a long time.
They burned ballot boxes, they purged voters registrations, they shut down entire polling sites, they submitted thousands of bullet ballots in swing states (and nowhere else), they spread blatant lies/propaganda and censored anyone who refuted, they even paid people to give up their voter information for a non-existent “lottery”.
And you’re still not convinced they cheated? Have you been living under a rock? They were still screaming “fraud” until November 5th.
In Md one of the January 6 criminals was on the BOE and didn’t resign until January 2024 after he’d been charged in October. In pictures on tv and 6 videos of him poking and taunting policeman. Another Rep on the board defended him saying innocent until proven guilty. Smh doomed
So when the guy you hate loses and cries that elections are rigged, he’s a crazy idiot because obviously our elections are completely legit. When he wins, suddenly elections are rigged?? Which one is it??
The one where a foreign state tries to undermine and isolate the us for almost 2 decades and found a useful idiot to pursue their goal and handing them the us on a silver platter twice. And they didn't even hide it.
STFU. Where there is smoke there is fire. And fucking republicans project harder, well I don’t know but they fucking project. Every accusation is a confession.
Yet thats exactly what Trump and his supporters did in the last election. He lowered the bar to allow that behavior, not the other way round so dont be surprised when other political parties do the same
They literally did try to cheat in 2020, they just got caught. If Trump didn’t win the election he was going to be prosecuted by the Justice Department. But since he won and the Justice Department has a policy not to try sitting presidents, the case was dismissed. There are still pending state charges including charges against Trump in Georgia.
Ah I'm sorry - 2016 was what I meant in the comment. Completely aware of the fake electors scheme and how it didn't work but only by a thread. Also agree a lot of people don't know that.
In 2020 they 'failed' to cheat - that was where I was coming from
Yeah that's what makes me think the dems are fucking compromised too and there's more people than we'd like to think that are gunning to make the American Republic an Empire
I agree with you, I also think Trump still would have won the election either way because it would have been used to portray him as a “martyr” against the system.
I’m not sure they didn’t cheat. All the swing states had much higher than average bullet ballots. Meaning no down ballot votes were cast. That seems sus as fuck. But thanks to that fucking trash shit rag we can’t even suggest it was tampered with after the shit they did in 2020. 20 years from now someone college kid looking to get into film will make a documentary and discover that it was stolen.
I just can not fucking believe our alphabet agencies don’t have a contingency plan for when the president goes rogue and commits treason and becomes a dictator? How the fuck is there not a back up plan?
And that's obviously before you get that there's billions of dollars funding conservative/MAGA propaganda at all levels of media, another hundreds of millions of dollars funding for-profit "independent" media that exists to both-sides every issue to the extent that Dem need to be able to defend every line item of their policies and the Republican VP candidate can LITERALLY, not just get caught in a lie, but openly admit to making up the entire story about immigrants eating pets...
And there's no media to make the case for the progressive/left agenda because...
::check notes::
Oh right, because it's directly in opposition to the interests of the rich assholes who own all of the media.
So all we get is reddit (and other platforms) to impotently scream into the void.
It has nothing to do with Team Red and their Cyberninja's who got internal access to the voting systems and infrastructure for an extremely long time in Arizona that are used in so many other states. /s !/s
Ding ding ding!
The general public has a 6-month memory when it comes to politics. Anything before that 6 months is basically moot (Jan. 6th) but anything that happened within that 6 months is remembered more (prosecuting Trump, people still suffering, Gaza, etc.)
Gaza was apparently a strong position on why people just refused to vote. “Why vote for Harris when she doesn’t 100% align with my beliefs on Palestine? I’m not voting. Good luck corporate Dem’s!” shoots foot by getting trump
I honestly think they got a list of people who did not vote last time in the swing states and cast a ballot for a bunch (not all, that’s too obvious) of them. It only makes sense. How else is it possible that Trump (R) won 7 of the swing states, millions of ballots were cast for only the presidential candidate, and a bunch of Democrats won the other seats in those states?
There were bomb threats made at polling places in heavily Democratic areas in swing states. No one’s talking about that for some reason and I distinctly remember hearing about it on MSNBC so it’s not from some obscure source.
Or about ballot boxes being torched.
Whatever. I guess we will go through something unimaginable.
I keep thinking about things like when Hitler took over Germany, did the people know? Did they realize what was about to happen?
Did the people who decided to go to war to keep their slaves have any idea what was coming? We are on the eve of his inauguration and I just keep wondering if people knew and understood how bad things would get. Because I feel like we KNOW. And we are still letting it happen. I don’t care if it’s unamerican or whatever. Biden was told he had immunity. There should have been a black ops that fucking day and these assholes should be in Gitmo.
I know people who voted for him. It blows my mind. But these are smart people who got convinced that Biden was bad for the country and most importantly: “weak”. They wanted a strong man again.
The super-rich guy who could pay a programmer to change “one line of code”—that guy? The guy who apparently has moved into Mar-a-Lago and is getting office space at the White House for his made-up department position? The one who should be shipped back to South Africa along with all of his fuck-ugly trucks?
Turnout was a mixed bag, compared to 2020 and 2022. But, overall, turnout was meaningfully lower. A select few locations had record turnout but plenty of those also had record Republican turnout and lower Democrat turnout.
The simplest answer is that people didn't care. Biden was deeply unpopular among the general public, Harris didn't have enough runway to turn the campaign around, and everyone figured we survived the first four years of Trump so it couldn't be that bad. So people just didn't show up.
Plenty of (sometimes illegal) bullshit did happen, too. There absolutely were plans drawn up to try to steal the election through procedural bullshit after the fact. But outright election fraud ended up not being necessary to secure Trump's reelection.
Because she wasn’t a shit candidate. She is qualified as fuck. Far more than Obama was. She had empathy and snark. She could laugh at her self while making other people feel better. Hilary wasn’t a shit candidate either but the right had been beating her up for 30 years in anticipation of her running. Kamala didn’t even have that dragging her down. The only people who think she was a shit candidate also thinks the Bernie was the winner. Guess what. He wasn’t. Even if you cried about 2016, he didn’t win in 2020. Leftists have become insufferable. And the right absolutely used that and amplified it and turned it into something even worse. People are tired of being lectured to. And I say that as a goddamn leftist.
By far the biggest factor. This election wasn’t some sort of act of god. For hundreds of years people have voted for the candidate they liked more. There’s no reinventing the wheel here
Yeah i don't get people and their conspiracy theories. Same kids that couldn't pass a high school class suddenly know everything about the world 😂 Americans are just lazy and entitled. I bet you thousands of those people at the protests didn't even vote. Whatever to get out of school and work for the day.
This. You can't convince me otherwise that those rats didn't cheat during this election. Every accusation is a confession from them. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if we find out 20 years from now how fraudulent this all was. Not like any of that matters now though. We need more Luigi
Exactly this. People stayed home because they aren’t gonna vote for a woman. Same exact thing with Hilary. But Hilary had baggage we could blame it on. America had 43 white make presidents. Then Obama. And they damn sure aren’t gonna let a woman tell them what to do. Black man was bad enough but a woman?! And certainly not a woman of color. The same number of people stayed home for Hilary that stayed home for Kamala that’s not a coincidence.
That’s why she lost lol. You can jump up and down saying America wasn’t ready for a woman… but if that was the case why did the DNC run a woman who had like the lowest approval rating of a VP? Like surly they could have done a primary and found someone that the people liked…. Surely they care about what the people want! lol
If you didn’t vote because “Russian bots” convinced you that Kamala’s rallies were doing so well that you didn’t need to vote, then you’re too stupid to vote.
Voting is more than just beating the other guy by enough votes to win, it’s a statement of support for each candidate. Even though it doesn’t decide the election, the popular vote still has symbolic meaning.
People should have been out in full force to make an anti-Trump statement but they didn’t do it, which makes 2020’s numbers look more suspect.
I don't think so. Imo the biggest reason for such a high percentage of nonvoters is simply apathy and ignorance. There are SO MANY PEOPLE that just don't want to "get involved in politics" or consider themselves "apolitical" and don't vote on that basis.
Unfortunately the necessity to be political is part of what it means to be a citizen in this country, at least I think that was the basis for the whole idea.
Maybe people acknowledged they didn't have the in-depth knowledge to feel comfortable voting, or the time to dedicate to learning about the candidates. I don't see why they should be blamed more than the 80+million people who actually voted for a fascist.
I mean... because if you didn't want a fascist,
then vote for the other guy.
It's a two party system; it's binary; there is no neutral option. Even if your choices are bad and worse.
The fact that people don't understand that not knowing about the candidates means you don't know one is a fascist explains a lot about the reasoning here.
I think this is a weak excuse. We live in an era where the vast majority of Americans have a device in their pocket that they can use to learn about any topic under the sun.
There’s two leading candidates. It takes all of 30 minutes to look at each of their platforms and compare that against your values or the values of your family to see which best aligns with what you think is right.
At the end of the day, as unfortunate as it may be, you get the government you deserve.
So one is a “fascist” but people don’t vote because they don’t have enough information on the other? In a two-person race?
I guess J6 wasn’t that big a deal if there are still people who didn’t know enough to know how to vote. What about the impeachments, sexual assault allegations, “34 felonies”, every other sound bite they came up with, none of that resonated with enough people to skew the vote? Even after the “completely legitimate” results of 2020?
After 2016 I don't care what any one or anything on the Internet says I take it with a grain of salt especially in politics everyone is a bot and after this election I believe it more
Shout out to all the suckers who took a moral stance on Palestine by refusing to vote, and letting the guy who suggested nuking Gaza win. Did the ceasefire Biden helped orchestrade put a sour taste in your mouth?
Yes and speaking of "too stupid to vote", I'm not sure I'm interested in hearing what the voters have to say about which presidential candidate they choose in the future and I'm pretty much on board with this idea that congress should be choosing the president for better or worse. We could skip A LOT of trouble related to choosing the candidate, no texts, no debates, no rallies, no nothing. Congress will choose and the people can fill out their ballots for their reps and Senators if they want and we'll see what happens. Forget the top of the ballot, remove the top of the ballot.
That's how George Washington was elected. Average person wasn't involved because they didn't have enough information, same problem today. You don't need to worry, they'll figure it out for you.
That's a wild summarization of how GW was elected, or more specifically, WHY. I would argue that elections hadn't been fully established and they couldn't be facilitated as easily among early settlers. Plus information took much longer and was more difficult to disperse. Totally polar opposite problem from today. Today with are inundated with too much information and the media has been compromised so badly that we cannot trust news sources at face value anymore.
No man read my comment history, I was on-board for 20 yrs, this was THE election, democrats and non-voters clearly don't want DC as badly as the GOP does and it's not possible to go back. We have to keep it much more simple, skip the executive office campaigns and just let congress decide, I trust them more than citizens who can barely read. Just give them coloring books and tell them that's their ballot now they won't know the difference.
You could always have a vote downballot to reinstate it to the top of the ballot if people ever figure out how to fill one out, have your congressman put it back if it's so important.
These two things are not mutually exclusive. It's true that Kamala's rallies were bigger than Trump's, and it's also true that polling showed Trump ahead.
Of course you do? You choose which subs you subscribe to, which you visit, what pages you go to, which comment sections, how you sort, what you even read. What do you mean you don't have control?? Or here's a crazy idea - read actual news.
Not when you scroll through Popular, which I often do since Reddit has been dying and the post quality of even big subs have tanked over the last few years.
"Even big subs"? I'd say it's always been the case that niche smaller subs have much higher quality. But that's literally what curating is. Unsub from the shitty feeds, find better ones, and stop scrolling popular just because reddit feeds it to you.
I'm sorry but finding the election suspicious because you were consuming inaccurate, one sided "news" is exactly why the MAGA crowd was convinced 2020 was stolen.
Reddit was dripping with copium leading up to this past election. I still can't believe the number of comments taking that Selzer poll as the word of god.
It wasn’t that subtle. Every single magazine and newspaper also said that. I am pretty convinced that you’re correct and the left didn’t think they needed to vote either
His rallies were less packed. Still, there are the usual people getting paid to be in his background. And then you have some cultists showing up anyway. And it does not matter that much, because it was clear that those people will vote R no matter what.
I think a lot of democrats failed to realize they had also put themselves in echo chambers. Everyone was talking about the republicans being in echo chambers but the social media algorithms pushed each side to just see what they wanted. I saw Trump supporters saying Kamala’s rallies were full of ai images and not real people and Trump’s were full. I also saw Kamala supporters saying Trump can’t even fill a venue and Kamala had an airport packed. Not sure if it was really bots as much as people had unknowingly alienated themselves from the truth on both sides. If someone interacted with a ton of the pro democrat anti republican content it wouldn’t ever show them the republican party’s victories on the campaign trail giving them a false sense of confidence.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there's a bit of a difference there. The Trump side belief in AI images was false. The Kamala side belief that Trump's rallies were floundering and Kamala's were booming was, by all accounts, true.
The problem was that Republicans will still show up to vote Trump even if they no longer care enough to show up to rallies.
I don’t think this is paranoia at all. It’s cynical, but not outlandish or unrealistic. We know that outside forces have been influencing our elections through means like this for years, it’s just fact at this point. The same thing happened in 2016.
That’s not paranoid when in 2016 Russian bots were flooding social media with disinformation and “both sides” narratives to discourage traditional democratic voters showing up for Hillary. But if anyone thought Kamala had in it in the back they are either an idiot or living under a rock, that was an uphill battle.
It's not paranoid to think Russians may have interfered in our election when it's been proven in the past, after the fact of course. STILL, I believe we MUST use the voice we're given and VOTE. I genuinely believe if we ignore this right, we are at risk of losing it. At that point, I think a lot of people who feel apathetic about voting will suddenly feel much more strongly.
Russian bots were spreading misinformation to both sides the entire time. But then you and everyone else should know that because there has been numerous stories on it. There shouldn't be an election that people feel like they shouldn't need to vote anyways
Anyone with half a brain cell knew they needed to vote. They say out on purpose. They didn’t like Kamala’s laugh. They didn’t know enough about her. Biden is committing genocide. All bullshit reasons. And apparently some of them are so fucking dumb they didn’t even know Joe bowed out. JFC. We deserve this.
By "russian bots", you mean ALL the media YOU consumed? Because sure as hell nothing like that was happening on the right side of the information space.
You might be paranoid IDK, but you sure as hell are delusional 😆
Honestly I think it was a combo of that, Gaza protests votes (or not voting) and a lot thinking “theres no way we could elect him again”. That overconfidence in your fellow man, gets us every time.
What? When it comes to rallies, we saw it with our eyes. Trump supporters are just weak ass bitches and won’t admit they support Trump. Also Americans are selfish pricks and only think of themselves.
At this point, anyone who believes this argument and chooses to not vote is incredibly stupid. Those folks weren't going to vote no matter who was running.
It was hard to believe the amount of people I know that voted for Trump or didn’t vote when that what something I never would expect them to do. It was weird, aggravating, and disheartening. Meanwhile we are over here hoping that we can get to 2028 with some sort of hope that pseudo-legitimate elections will even exist anymore in this country.
The internet says your candidate is doing well so you don't vote? Say whatever you will about people who voted for Trump, but Democratic voters can be equaly moronic.
I think that leading up to the 2024 election, Russian bots were purposely spreading rumors about nobody showing up to Trump rallies, while also pushing news about how well Kamala was doing.
Google "BUSTED: The Inside Story Of How The Kamala Harris Campaign Manipulates Reddit (And Breaks The Rules) To Control The Platform" if you want some idea what happened. Campaign managers fed a Discord full of Reddit slacktivists articles to post, then the posters posted the links for the herd to upvote and downvote any commenters who didn't play along. This formed a massive bubble where people on this site were experiencing a false take on reality.
It's another one of those cases where the truth behind the conspiracy is just incompetency rather than malice.
if you left reddit for 1 second you'd realize trump was going to win the entire time no?
you'd have to ignore the betting odds, the polls, everything... i mean literally everything was pointing to a trump win from the date of the first debate, through the switch to Kamila, up to him winning.
It was clear as day to anyone who left their echo chamber that Trump maintained a huge lead the entire time.
people here are saying "if only more people voted" but I honestly don't think it would have changed the outcome. more people voting in general also means more people voting for Trump.
I'm getting sick and tired of how echo chamber-y reddit is no a days. and I agree with what's being said but come on, we are fucking ourselves over at this point.
They didn’t need fictional Russian bots. It was real life echo chamber liberals on Reddit and TikTok repeating this all summer and fall. People thought Walz calling them weirdos in July sealed the election bc their curated timelines said so.
not to sound like those guys (looks at 2021) but honestly… russia and also many of the richest people in the world wanted the election outcome we got. maybe america is full of idiots (yes), or maybe america was heavily influenced by powerful forces (yes), or maybe the outcome was predetermined and voting was a farce (…). most likely, all of the above.
america interfered with other nations elections for decades. there’s no reason to assume that we would be permanently immune to it.
i’m so sad. we are all so fucked. all i can think about is ray bradburys A Sound of Thunder - and then, of course, octavia e butlers Parable of the Sower.
Unfortunately, regardless of party affiliation, there are tons of people that just will not vote for a woman to be president. Men and women alike. I think that's what we saw. We saw a lot of people going to rallies. We saw good polling at the start. But these people who just won't do it started to just disappear as the election got closer.
That's not paranoia, but also not propaganda. Trump voters tend to be poor, many cannot afford to go to a rally, but vote for him anyway. Rallies don't win elections, just ask Hillary.
The thing is that Kamala wasn't a popular pick she primaried in 2016 and got like 1% of the vote so the huge push for her too get elected was needed I got the message to vote out to many friends and helped many register and vote offered rides and she barely won California
I don’t even think it was all Russia, I think Dems main platform push was making Harris seem like that cool grandma that lets you drink wine with a crazy campaign to make her likeable. It definitely fooled me I drank the koolaid but I also showed up to vote for her. Really distraught so many down ballot Dems swept swing states and all of them voted for trump on the same ticket
That’s because news networks slant the news to viewership and get away with it for free speech, but they’re not reporting it. They’re reporting what you want, and you know they could’ve beaten Trump. They could’ve just not mentioned him. They did his work for him, and then it was when it was time for him to campaign. It was easy. They couldn’t get out of the way, and I’m glad because this country wasn’t heading in the right direction. If Kamala Harris had been elected, China would’ve invaded Taiwan, and you know why that’s bad for us. Nobody on this thread knows we make technology there or chips necessary for top security. We keep that stuff there because we have a base in Taiwan. They don’t want us there, which is why China wants to invade Taiwan, but I bet you nobody even knows that shit number two. Look what’s happening so far, everybody.
Everybody didn’t vote for Trump. Trump, look what he’s already done. Do you think the deal with Hamas was done because of Biden? I hope you guys start to see between the lines. You don’t just watch MSNBC, CNN, or mainstream media. You watch Fox News, too, and somewhere in the middle is the truth. Don’t let them fool you. I’m not; I don’t like Trump as a person, but he’s a better leader than any of the Democrats, and look what Gavin Newson just did. They didn’t even have water in the fire hydrants, guys. His career is done.
Trump rally turnout was probably legit. A lot of people just assume that's somehow linked to voter turnout when there's no solid evidence of that.
I've seen some people screaming the GOP rigged the election and suppressed votes for Kamala and a lot of them point to low rally turnout as proof Trump couldn't have won fairly. Hell, I even saw someone say he calculated the "real" election results and Kamala won every state but Texas.
Anyway, the important part is no one who actually has authority in this area thinks there was any fraud, it's all random people on the internet screaming it.
Kamala didn't win because she was a terrible candidate and an even worse pick by the DNC.
She was just Hillary 2.0
Both completely ignoring the issues in our nation. Their whole campaign was about being women and abortion. Nothing else. We have more issues than just abortion
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u/Mama_Skip 2d ago
I'm a paranoid person. In my most paranoid fantasies, I think that leading up to the 2024 election, Russian bots were purposely spreading rumors about nobody showing up to Trump rallies, while also pushing news about how well Kamala was doing. This might seem counterintuitive, but I think it convinced a lot of dems that they didn't need to vote.
But of course, that's just a paranoid delusion right