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  • The time lines of America elections confuse me a bit. Is he campaigning for the election itself or is this still the point where his party (the democrats?) are choosing their candidates?

    • It’s still the primaries where the candidate for the parties are being picked. trump is part of the republican party but is likely to receive the nomination because apparently we learned nothing during the four years this trash ran the country, took foreign money, insurrection, treason, etc.

      • Thanks. With all the articles I thought I'd somehow missed him winning the nomination and we were on the actual election campaign.

        Your elections are normally in the autumn aren't they?

      • because apparently we learned nothing during the four years this trash ran the country

        His victory wasn't because his supporters were ignorant. They knew exactly what kind of shithead he was, they just couldn't admit out loud they wanted the sexism, homophobia, racism and authoritarianism.

        Remember that when he was first elected, his support flowed out from the "alt-right". They were nothing more than rebranded white supremacists, but the name change gave them enough plausible deniability to dodge deplatforming.

        When "Unite the Right" rolled around, many of them triumphantly tore of their masks, waved their swastikas, grabbed their tiki torches and started an antisemitic chant. One of them even started executing political dissenters then and there.

        But their "ha, we were nazis all along" celebration was short lived. They'd undermined their plausible deniability and their platforms were crumbling. Even Fox News was hesitant to put any alt-right figureheads on air. Even better (for us), many of them lost their jobs, girlfriends and families after their face popped up on the news.

        So the rule became "never go mask off". They could be openly advocating sending Jews to concentration camps but if someone says "that is blatantly Nazi behaviour", their reply will always "the left just call anyone they disagree with nazis".

        They still want to do it. They'll still try to do it. The vast majority of their supporters know they mean it and that's exactly why they support them.

        But as long as they never say it out loud, there will always be an army of useful idiots giving the benefit of the doubt.

    • For a country that prides itself on democracy, the process of picking party candidates Is decidedly undemocratic. Primaries weren't even used at all until 100 years ago or so, and didn't get used consistently in a binding fashion until 1972, after the shitshow that was the 1968 Democratic Convention.

      And this year is super weird. Trump is still technically campaigning for the Republican Party nomination but is so far out in front of his competition in the polls that he hasn't bothered attending any of the debates. However, due to a dispute over election scheduling, Biden won't be on the Democratic Party ballot at all in New Hampshire, and that election won't have the same proportional power at the Democratic convention that other states have.

      New Hampshire's Primary election also has the quirk that there are a lot of voters unaffiliated with either party, and in that state they can choose which Primary election to vote in. My favorite conspiracy theory of the moment is that the Biden campaign orchestrated the scheduling issues in New Hampshire specifically to give unaffiliated voters in New Hampshire "permission" to ignore the Democratic primary, and vote against Trump in the Republican one. Trump ignored all those debates out of the perception that his nomination is inevitable; even a close win by Trump in NH will be a big blow to that perception in following contests.

80 comments