This was originally a response email that I sent in response to an article sent by a family member. In it I discuss my thoughts on the 2024 United States presidential election, the Democratic party, and how society as a whole has shifted away from a monoculture. As always, this post does not reflect the views of my employer (Microsoft Corporation) and are my own individual expression.

Re: Republican convention from historian Heather Cox Richardson

Point 1: She’s right but it doesn’t actually matter.

Yes, he is bad. He is a shitty guy and continues to be a shitty guy. That has never mattered electorally and never will. People have been saying this for at this point almost a decade, and my parents, who i love despite this, will vote for and support him. I don’t agree with them, I despise the guy and his beliefs and the general trend of him towards fascism. However the idea that there are 120 million people who functionally are incorrect and ontologically evil because they’re trump supporters and must be convinced, individually, as a sort of collective action by us, the left, is a fools errand and, in my opinion, not just an outdated understanding of modern politics, but an incorrect assessment of how culture over the past decade has shifted. 

Due to the internet and interactive mediums moving sources of culture away from linear one directional systems (televisions, radios, newspapers) and towards bidirectional interactive systems (blogs, social networks, youtube, newsletters / substack) we no longer exist in a monoculture. Both consciously by choice (you subscribed to this email newsletter instead of one by say Megynn Kelly) and unconsciously (your social feeds learn from your behavior and utilizes prediction buckets that attempt to predict and reflect it back upon you) every single person I am sending this email not only has their own world view but is constantly being reinforced with it every day, all the time, no matter where or how they choose to spend their time. What I mean by this long winded McLuhan-esque rant is that going up to a person who voted for Trump twice and follows like “women for trump!!” or whatever on Facebook is the digital equivalent of, pardon my language, pissing in the ocean to turn it yellow. 

This idea that all the right needs is to watch one good John Oliver clip you send them and Trump is gone forever is a fantasy that John Oliver makes money off of by selling you. That will never happen. Trump needs to be defeated by policies and platforms, he needs to be defeated by a candidate who isnt visibly older and can barely string sentences together. Watching his acceptance speech, this is super apparent. If there was anyone besides Biden (younger, non male, etc such as Kamala), Trump would be having a harder time competing electorally. However, right now, the numbers look like this.

Point 2: The numbers look like this

This is bad, right. Like this does not look good. One question you might have is, what is this thing I am looking at and how can I harass the person who gives me the information that makes me feel uncomfortable. First, i’d like to direct you back to point 1 and have you read that more carefully again. Second, this was made by Nate Silver, a political statistical analyst (not a right wing guy by any stretch) and the only person who even predicted that Trump would have a greater than 5% chance to win the 2016 election. Fivethirtyeight, the publication he founded and has since left due to a dispute with Disney, gave him a ~30% chance to win the day of the election in 2016 with the same model you are seeing above. In 2020, Trump was given a 10% chance to win. Those chances seem low, but given that the electoral college system favors republicans, they are easily capable of winning despite a popular vote loss.

If you’re reading this email a day or two late you can just check the page. Now the above image is showing you why Trump’s chances went from < 30% in the previous two elections to 75%. As of the time I am writing this, he is winning the national popular vote, not just by one or two points but by four. Let me state this as clearly as I can, this should _not be fucking happening. _Trump is a deeply unpopular president who lead one of the worst responses to a crisis in global history. He is running to support a party which just outlawed abortion, a move which has caused Republican’s numbers to slip nationally and is such a bad campaigning point electorally that they can’t talk about it. He should be losing, but isn’t, and you can just look at the numbers above and what lines up with the major shifts to see why. Biden is a uniquely bad candidate for this specific election. 

(Please do not argue with me about him as a president being less evil than Trump. I agree with you. That is not what I am discussing).

All available data post the first debate shows us that Biden, _as a presidential election candidate who needs to win the electoral college in The United States of America in 2024, _is uniquely and individually poorly positioned to defeat Trump. Again, I watched Trump’s speech. He was passionateness, rambling, and an overall disaster. He brings up zero new points and policies and essentially wants to pretend he didn’t lose by 8 million votes in 2020. In any other election against a normal candidate they’d optically crush him, a young vibrant democrat who wants to legalize abortion nationally and stop fascism etc should be easily able to defeat a bumbling old man who sounds more like he wants to run a podcast than actually be the president anymore. Unfortunately that’s not the world we’re in, Biden is the person running against him and his numbers are so much worse. Going back to those numbers, the electoral college and everything I said before, the numbers matter because of the college favoring republican candidates due to bullshit. However that’s reality. If Trump has the popular vote he wins the fucking election, and its only getting worse day by day. Something needs to happen for the Democrats to turn this election around, and I think the reason it’s not is because they are fine with a second Trump presidency. It allows them to control congress, push their policy etc, and functionally removes him as a threat in the party

I am voting for Biden, and so are my friends, but I live in a socialist hellscape in a blue state and my parents are republicans in New York so none of our votes actually matter. In the grand scheme of things they’re as relevant to the presidential election as they are in Puerto Rico. This idea of turning an election around by convincing people in blue states to actually show up and vote isn’t it. What is needed is for the democrats to have a platform, position, new candidate, or anything, literally anything, and they don’t / wont because they are fine with a second Trump presidency. They don’t want to lose, but they’ve accepted that attempting to actually do anything “drastic” is not in their best interests as a political party. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to keep a bonafide fascist out of the White House, they’re slowly resigning to a loss, which makes me wonder how serious they actually are when they call him a threat to democracy in the first place. You don’t run Joe Biden or a platform like this against a threat to democracy. I can’t even tell you what his campaign slogan is, or what he’s supposed to do besides just be a seat warmer so Trump cant get it. Even Hillary didn’t run a campaign this bad in 2016, and that’s just fucking worrying to me.

I’ll end with this, I say all these things because I care a lot. This idea that you can’t critique the party / candidate you want to win because it doesn’t convince others adequately is a cult mentality. You have braindead party line democrats yelling at Jon Stewart at this point for even so much as saying Joe doesn’t look great and might not win. At this point I just want Trump to lose right, and this idea that it’s an individualist issue that an average voter can solve by convincing people is a fairytale. It’s a pipe dream designed to make you feel better and engage you in a media ecosystem. This predicament is no one’s fault besides Joe Biden and the Democrats. It’s not my mom’s, its not my dad’s, and its not yours / mine for failing to “make them see the light”. It’s not worth expending effort trying to convince them of this rather than pressuring the party establishment that actually needs our vote to fucking do something, ANYTHING, so that they can maybe win Pennsylvania again.

With much love and respect because my iPad has 2% battery remaining and I need to buy sunscreen,

Evan

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