First, I typically don’t watch election return coverage, and this time was no exception, and since I rarely watch live TV, I wasn’t getting election updates.
Anyway. . .
I suspect that the cameras would occasionally cut away to watch parties for the candidates, so with that:
When did was there an obvious mood change for the Harris supporters?
When did it seem to you personally that it wasn’t going to go her way?
For my part, I turned on my DVR and TV at 5:30 AM, and my provider defaults to their own news channel when it’s turn on. They were showing Trump with 267 EV, and I thought to myself, “Holy crap!”
I thought something was amiss when states like NJ and DE weren’t called instantly at poll closing while the ruby red states were. By the time I went to bed (11:30 ET) I was fully expecting the foul result.
I knew it wasn’t going her way when Jeff Bezos did the mental math and calculated that it would be worth the bad publicity to restrain the Washington Post from publishing an endorsement almost two weeks before the election (and ditto for Patrick Soon-Shiong and the L.A. Times). Anybody who saw that signpost should have been unsurprised that when the billionaires who are nominally insulated from political winds started syncopating a convicted, failed, babbling ex-president the numbers were not looking good for Harris. The election day pageantry is just for the networks and fans of political drama. Harris had to know that she was likely toast on the morning of before the first states reported in.
Do you think they had more inside info than the rest of us had access to? Or were they, and Musk, just doing a trumpy version of a Pascal’s Wager: by invoking trump’s wrath and it turns out he goes on to win they risk much more than if they appeased him, and either trump or Harris goes on to win. Everybody knew the race was going to be very close.
I felt a change in the wind when I saw the TV commentators trying to come up with all the swing state permutations that would allow Harris to win. They weren’t doing that for Trump as I recall. I thought, this doesn’t look good and went to bed around 10 p.m.
I awoke at 3 a.m. with a strong premonition that Harris had lost, but didn’t bother to look to see what was actually happening. When I got up at 6 a.m. and checked the race had already been called for Trump.
Many people tried to convince me that Harris was going to win easily thanks to an expected boost from Hispanic and suburban female voters. Wishful thinking. Boy, were they wrong.
Probably around 11pm or so. Went to bed around midnight, hoping that the swing states would turn it around. Woke up at about 3am, went to check, and despaired, they showed him at 267, with most of the swing states still up in the air, but with him leading in almost all of them. No way was he going to suddenly lose all of them at that point.
A little of Column A, a little of Column B, plus (in Bezos’ case) more fear about losing critical contracts and launch site access for Blue Origin. Trump and his campaign officials met with executives from Blue Origin, and while we don’t know what was said I think it is likely that they made clear what the consequences would be of a Trump presidency following public criticism from Jeff Bezos’ pet school newspaper project. (Bezos has sworn up and down on a stack of Trump-branded Bibles that he didn’t know about the meeting, which tells you just how much bullshit he is shoveling because there is no way that BO execs wouldn’t relay this to the boss and angel investor.)
Of course, for Jeff Bezos the calculus is clear; there is no political downside to a non-endorsement and Harris, had she been elected, would have done little more than give him side-eye, so the only thing he had to worry is what the public would think and what subscribers to the Post might do, but he’s lost hundreds of millions of dollars in operating costs on the paper since he purchased it in 2013 for ~$250M so it isn’t as if he’s counting on revenue to keep the paper going (and frankly is probably operating it specifically for the loss against which he can deduct capital gains and other taxable revenues).
I also think that anybody who saw the neck-in-neck poll-based estimates for both candidates and didn’t recognize that the polls have consistently underestimated electoral support for Trump since 2016 despite having record unfavorability numbers is living the dream of obtuse. It was obvious to me that the optimism for Harris’ chances was at best misplaced, and all these stupid hacks opining at how Trump had “October Suprise”’d himself by that openly racist Madison Square Garden shitshow apparently had a bout of collective cognitive dissonance about the fact that he’s done this for eight years and it hasn’t hurt him in the least, either with his base or against the ethnic groups he is actively besmirching. I’m morally certain Bezos has a kennel of pet prognosticators who advise him on all manner of economic, political, and social implications to his businesses telling him what the real odds look like (and he’s not dull in that regard, either; this is the guy who foresaw that we’d all be buying cheap Chinese crap for the free shipping, and undercut virtually everybody by turning his online bookstore into a global bazaar that people won’t live without).
So yeah, I think he had “inside info” in the sense that he doesn’t have the general media screaming the bullshit they desperately want to believe to be true into his ear, and also maybe some of the actual inside concerns that I’m morally certain that the Harris campaign was discussing internally in the last couple of months when nothing she said or done moved the needle in her favor. But I also think that the winds were out there for everyone to feel, and it doesn’t take an expert brave to feel how they were blowing.
Weeks ago (and I said so in the prediction thread). The stubbornly deadlocked polls combined with the anti-incumbent bias in (what was rightly or wrongly perceived as) a troubled economy and the deep racism and sexism of America’s average voter painted a compelling picture for me. I thought the glowing optimism for a Harris victory was frankly delusional, but I didn’t know how to say so without seeming crass.
…if you are asking about when it turned on the night, I didn’t watch it, but I thought she was going to lose from the outset, so it wasn’t a surprise to me.
If you are asking when the mood changed in the campaign, it was when they decided to nerf Waltz. He came out firing. “These guys are creepy, weird as hell” was a winning line, and it neatly put Trump & Co in a box that they should have kept hammering over and over again. The polling at the time reflected that.
But they quickly pivoted. They muzzled Waltz. They reached across the aisle bringing in the likes of the Cheney’s and promising to put a Republican in cabinet. They made bizarre decisions like sending Cheney, Richie Torres and Bill Clinton (who made the most appalling speech) to Michigan.
According to trans journalist Katelyn Burns, the word “trans” was only mentioned twice at the Democratic Convention, and all pro-Palestinian voices (even ones that had been vetted) were banned from speaking. Hasan Piker, a prominent Twitch Streamer and one of the few prominent voices on the left that had any impact on the troublesome “white male 18-25” demographic, was kicked out of the convention. He was live on stream when it happened.
For a brief period at the start of the Harris campaign it was spontaneous, in the moment, and seemed to be breaking free of the baggage that Biden had bought to the table. I follow a lot of progressives in America that were appalled by Biden’s foreign policy, and were hopeful that Harris would at the very least be a bit more sympathetic.
But then the campaign pivoted. Both Harris and Waltz started sticking strictly to the talking points.
And I think it was this moment that, for a lot of the people that decided not to vote for her, was decisive.
It sent a very clear message. “I’m speaking. And I won’t be listening.” “If you support Palestine you want Trump to win.”
And the cheers.
She lost a lot of votes in that moment. They didn’t go to Trump. They just stayed home.
Yeah, it just seemed like there was a party face masking uncertainty about what the message even was supposed to be and how Harris was going to appeal regardless of the ‘energy’ she threw out. That being said, although I’m sure there will be recriminations about ‘forcing’ Biden out of the race, she still made a better run at it than Biden would have.
Well, some of them voted for Trump. Never underestimate the propensity of righteously angry to cut off their nose to spite their face.
This is far from the only reason that Harris lost (and some of those she never had control over) but it is indicative of the attitude that alienated a lot of fence-sitting and abstaining voters. Bringing in Lynn Cheney—a women that is as odious in her own way as Trump, and clearly just trying to distinguish herself for a post-MAGA return—and making a show of what gal pals she and Kamala were was just bizarre and ill-conceived, as if that was going to bring more votes than it burned. It feels like a plot twist straight out of VEEP that goes immediately wrong and requires her entire staff to run around in a pointless fire drill.
My wife has a much better feel for the “average” voter than I do. She called it for Trump in September. I felt right up until the end that it was too close to call.
Pretty quickly, I think? Indiana and Kentucky didn’t really hold any clues, and when the Florida returns started coming in, my first thought was Florida gonna Florida, but I think as soon as we had data from Georgia it was clear that things were not going well. I’d say probably by 6:45 Central time, because I was already apprehensive by the time the big cluster of polls started closing at 7.
I knew from the beginning. I found Kornacki Cam on youtube a little after 8 pm.
His electoral count was ahead, stayed ahead, and got larger.
I wasn’t truly sure however, til morning.
I was looking at the election day omnibus thread at about 10:15 PM EST and people were talking as though Harris was still some chance. I had a look at Betfair and she had blown from $2.40 to $11.00 and it was obvious that she was toast. I think the market had about $470 million bet at that stage.
It looks like my first negative post in the Omnibus thread was at 6:32 central time. So that’s when I first got an inkling she was in big trouble. That was based on early GA and NC returns.
There was always a chance the rust belt would save her - I saw the writing on the wall there a bit later (looks like around 7:40 CT), but I was already resigned to a loss around 7pm CT when FL was called immediately for Trump while multiple blue states were “too early to call”.
My wife knew she would lose months ago, and she is much closer to the “man on the streets” than I am. She also is well aware of the disadvantages a woman faces being taken seriously in a leadership position.
About 11 pm on election night, Harris sent some schmoe out to speak to the crowd at Howard University, instead of addressing the gathering herself… Even though it hadn’t been called, it was clear that it was over.
When the news came out that Biden had dropped out and Harris was taking over, my wife shrugged and said “doesn’t matter - Trump will still win.” She held true to that the whole way through.
I thought Trump had no chance. I had a 6:00 PM PST class to teach on election night. Before I left for work, I was still hopeful. When I was done lecturing I checked the news, and knew it was over.
When they called Florida for Trump. I was expecting it to go to Trump, but i wasn’t expecting AP to call it as soon as the polls closed. After that, i thought things were going to be bad.