Lets give her Wiki a quick read: Bondi let an attempt to overturn Obamacare, led "Lock her up" chants in 2016 (so good start at de-weaponizing the justice system), specifically targeted the "preexisting conditions" protections of Obamacare, opposed same sex marriage, is in bed with fucking Scientology, was a lobbyist for a foreign country (Qatar), and supported Trump's baseless voter fraud claims in 2020

I don't see anything worthy of respect, personally...

I didn't say she was perfect. To each their own.

Well, what do you like about her?

She sounds absolutely awful

Just want to point out that neither party is representing the majority of American people and any claim of "mandate" is over-blown here (or any recent election really.)  

If either of the major parties appealed to the majority of voting-eligible American adults who didn't vote, enough to get a sizeable minority of their votes, they would be a dominant party in the same way the Democratic-Republicans were in the Era of Good Feelings, the Republicans were for decades after reconstruction, and the Democrats were in the New Deal era. 

This should be what the Democrats focus on solving in the next few years. How can one capture this large, majority, disaffected population? What are the issues they care about? I can guarantee it is not the things either major parties focus on. 

Last week I explained my journey through this election and the crux of what went wrong as I see it. At the end, I suggested that I might later, separately, provide my thoughts on the much-discussed role of gender in this election as the forum's resident feminist voice. I'm gonna try and follow through on that this evening.

So as we know, there's always a gender gap in American elections and usually it favors Democrats these days, as most of the time the Democratic advantage among women exceeds the Republican advantage among men. According to the exit poll data, that pattern was reversed this time around, with men preferring Trump by a 13-point margin and women choosing Harris by a smaller 8-point margin. So why? We could cite Trump's oft-remarked-upon podcast tour that wasn't rivaled by Harris, but the real question is why that worked. Well this is where I have to do something kinda painful and admit that think I'm part of the Democrats' problem. How can one tell? Because I didn't really see the problem with pro-Harris ads like this and this.

Of course, neither of those were created by the Kamala Harris campaign itself, but that fact speaks to a larger communication problem that the Democrats, and Republicans who support them for that matter, have fairly broadly. Namely, many of them apparently view men much the way I do: like they don't really get men anymore and are kind of afraid of them. On tries not to view the other sex as a foreign species, but I know that to me the level of anger and entitlement that I often see displayed in the online "manosphere" that seems to be massively gaining in influence these days comes off as...well it comes off to me like women won some legal rights, divorced abusive husbands and started going to college and getting careers, got established on more their own terms, developed these misandrist things called standards and expectations of their partners as a result of having more financial independence and consequently delayed marriage and childbirth, whereupon birth rate panic set in, and so now it's time to ban women from voting and restrict access to divorce. Women have more freedom today than in the past and many if not most men simply can't handle it. Without being able to bark orders at the women in their lives, men fall into a loneliness epidemic and lose their entire sense of purpose in life because controlling women was their whole purpose for living. That's what it looks like to me anyway. I don't understand it. I don't understand this trend we're seeing on X of guys just spouting out shit like "Get back in the kitchen!" and "Your body, my choice!". I don't get it, but I am scared of it. And no, I truly don't understand how the real problem here is women calling that behavior and those attitudes toxic. They are toxic and yes, in a specifically gendered way. I definitely understand what it is to feel incomplete, lonely, and depressed, but I don't go around demanding that others forfeit their rights over it and it's difficult to stop and feel your pain and offer you compassion when you're trying to enslave me. (Well okay, maybe not me, I'm too old and ugly, but you know what I mean.)

This though is a feminist mindset, which today is one held by just 24% of the country's population. (31% of women, 17% of men.) Perhaps it's one less trusting of the male sex than is merited. There is very, very real, lived experience behind my tendency toward threat assessment, but no doubt the fact that the Democratic Party orbit communicates with or about men in the language of assumption or danger is nonetheless insulting and offensive. Maybe the Democratic Party and its orbit tend to think too much like me of gender relations these days to be viable.

But what of Kamala Harris herself? What was the role of gender in her actual campaign? ...Well to me it was that I found her more relatable than other candidates either party has nominated to date in my lifetime. I don't just mean that in a policy sense, but also in the subtle ways, like the fact that, in discussing the economy and what to do about it, she'd usually talk about not just male-dominated work like manufacturing, construction, and tech like most politicians do, but also would spend much time discussing the care economy and the service sector. Little things like that that just seemed instinctive to her had a way of making me feel more seen than I'd been used to. I don't recall her running on identity politics. Y'know, she didn't give her acceptance speech in suffragette white or make a point of highlighting her sex on the campaign trail that I can recall. But she did let you know in policy terms and in her feminine method of communication that she got you.

Much of the challenge for women running for the head-of-state position though is convincing everyone that a woman can be tough enough for the job. Unlike lower-level public offices, after all, the president handles military affairs, diplomatic relations, and has more influence on border policy. Will a woman be too soft? Will she be able to stand up to the dictators, terrorists, and other bad actors on the world stage? There's reliably a slice of the population that worries about these things. I remember hearing in some of the focus groups after the Harris-Trump debate people voicing reassurance that Harris was capable of being a strong leader because she had been able to go toe-to-toe with Trump, who they viewed as an example of an authoritarian figure himself, and put him in his place. But as the experts also point out, female leaders who are viewed as tough are also typically seen as less likable (it's not very feminine, after all), so there can be a bit of a catch-22 situation there where you simply can't win. So yes, I think sexist assumptions about how women are or how they're supposed to be certainly continue to play at least some role in presidential elections in this country.

Is it possible to elect a female president in this country? I don't know, probably not. Only a woman with the support of most men can win, I think, and that would have to be a Republican one and I see very little interest from Republicans in ever nominating a woman. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me like most women around the world who've been democratically elected to head-of-state positions have been more conservative ones. Frankly, I don't think the Democrats should nominate a woman for president again, or at least not for another generation at minimum. Simply going back to these being contests between men would make our elections feel less personal and hurtful to me.

The government is broken, and it can't be fixed with Republicans in power because that was their goal. The Republican goal is to shift responsibilities from the government to the private sector, so they do not want to allow government to be used as a tool to solve the problems that Americans face because that would undermine their goals. 

Public education is bad? Well that is the point. It makes it easier for them to say "Maybe we should get rid of the Department of Education and funnel kids into for-profit private schools". 

So, when the Democrats get some degree of power, they have enormous systemic forces preventing them from making those huge changes that would be needed to really capture that disaffected vote. They are forced to make small changes because it is much easier to break the Department of Education and stand in the way of progress than it is to fix these problems. And that disaffected population is too detached from politics to see what is happening, both in terms of the smaller improvement that the Dems are making and the obstacles that the Reps are creating. 

The problem with using this assessment as the whole explanation (even if it is generally true) is that Democrats are failing to live up to promises or even to promise in the first place equitable policies in states where they do have strong and diffuse control for decades now. 

For example, California and New York are losing (relative) population despite these being places where many people want to live when queried about it. Why? 

Because Democrats are not supporting pro-growth "YIMBY" policies in the local and state governments that they have majority control in. Or if they do support them, they allow them to get railroaded by special interest groups. There is no reason why California, as an example, should be losing (relative) population other than the fact that it isn't building enough housing and transportation in the cities people want to live in and therefore nobody can live there affordably. 

Same thing with things that they actually did get passed at the federal level. Consider, for example, the funding toward high-speed rail that Obama and the Democratic Congress got through in 2010. What has this amounted to? California is still not done with its project, again, because of special interests slowing down the progress and contractors siphoning off resources. 

There is no reason why any of the blue states in the map above shouldn't be the most equitable (measured by Gini Index or some other indicator), pro-labor states in the U.S, other than the Democratic Parties in those states don't truly want it to be. 

Why are Utah and Alaska the most equitable states? And yes, the difference between >.5 and <.41 is very significant. It's not just a matter of urbanization either. Utah has an urban population of 90% and New York one of 87.4%. Also even if we control for these other variables New York state had a Gini Index of .5142 between 2015-2019 and one of .5102 in 2024. A drop of .004 despite the average state's Gini-index dropping by .009 in the same period. One would think a Democratic controlled state, if it were interested in equitable results, and especially when it is starting at a much more unequal level (meaning there are lower hanging fruit) would become more equal more quickly than the nation as a whole. 

There are many places where Democrats control the government where they can show competent governance and their ability to solve problems. The places where that actually happens aren't dispersed enough that Americans are convinced. Basically New England and Colorado really. Both of which, have increasingly shifted blue over the last few decades. 

The failure of Democrats to do left-wing things in the states and cities they control (with some exceptions) is the primary reason why I am a left-wing Independent despite voting Democratic across the ballot since 2018. The party needs to revive the left-populist, social democratic faction that still somewhat exists in some purple states, but which no longer exists in the urban cores of the party. You can't win on social liberalism alone. The party needs to revive its appeal to farmer-labor, populist factions, of course modernized for the 21st century. 

Yeah, my post was pretty much exclusively in reference to the federal government. I agree that state governments are important and need to do more (but there are also limitations and challenges which are created by the federal government system). I agree broadly though. I think one of the best examples of left-wing state governance of late is Michigan who passed a lot of great legislation when receiving a trifecta. How did that work out for them in 2024 though? I think we see voting trends more powered by national trends than local trends, but I'm not really sure.

As for Gini index, I feel that just that graph demonstrates some pretty substantial limitations. States which are more financially developed will naturally have more inequality as there will be a higher percentage of high earners and their economies will be more dependent on those high earners. This doesn't really mean that a state with lower inequality is doing better if it just means that everyone is poor (or at least, if no one is rich). 

That's why imo inequality is a flawed metric without pouring huge amounts of context into it. An example of that is the Biden presidency. Gini peaked in 2021 and decreased since then and income inequality decreased, yet how did American's feel about their economic situation? 

While I won’t deny there are some Men that do want to go backwards when it comes to women rights, I think you find that even among trump voters they actually a very small percentage.

While am far past the days of being a young man, at one point I was and I do not think young men have foundationally change.  One thing young man have never liked is being told what they allowed to say or do.  If you heard the private conversations, I had with a black friend of mine growing up, you would think that I am a racist and he hated Jews.  Glad this was pre social media because out of context anyone hearing those conversation could get a very wrong impression.  We were best friends.  Neither of us believed a single word we were saying to each other, it was just 2 boys thinking it funny saying the stuff that we were told we not allow to say.  Now we had the common sense to do it in private but not all people that smart.

I think 90% or more of what you hear on twitch just like an infamous halo chat room back in days is just boys saying shit they been told they not allowed to think or say and not genuine beliefs.  I think the difference now is what use to be jokes between friends, or contained in a video game chat room is now posted on social media and then get picked up by media for all to see. 

Now what is true is many Men do feel left behind.  The manual labors' jobs of past are disappearing because of automation or exported to other countries with cheaper labor.  It hard to make a decent living these days doing manual labor and the reality is there a percentage of people who never going to fit into an office job.  The democrat party need to get back to talking about economics of all people and not focus on gender/race.  The reality is if your life sucks and all you hearing from one party is there are people who life sucks more than you and the other party talking about making your life better even if it all lies many going to choose B.

No one really care about fairness, in reality they care about their own problems and they do not care if other people problems are even bigger.  Now this may be depressing but the up side of that is that if democratic party can get back to offering solutions, then a lot of stuff that scare you also go away.  Young men might have voted for trump more this election but they also voted pro-choice, they also support gay marriage.  Part of them voted for trump because they believe they be better economically under him and the other part believed there no difference between the parties and trump would be more entertaining.  There also a small percentage of people that actually believe the stuff that scare you but they have always existed and is a very small minority that loses all their power if the democrats can message better to the rest of the men in the country.