Elections discussion post
Pluto has suggested (and I agree) that there was a discussion started by Marie regarding the 2025 elections that is worthy of continuing. So, I am going to post here a link to the comment that started the thread and if folks feel like continuing the discussion, well, have at it.
If the discussion continues after it slides down the list a bit, I will pin it up at the top until it looks to be concluded.
Have fun!
Here's the text of the original comment from Marie if you need it to get (re)started:
At this risk of being wrong,
The 2025 NYC election was a potential game changer. A thirty-four year old, NYC Democratic-Socialist Muslim mayor elect couldn't have been conceivable a year ago by almost anyone (moi included). The Dem-Reps are praying that this is a one-off and will do their best to trash Mamdani and his public policy efforts every day. Their only problem is that their answer is Trump and the Dem-Neolibs which is exactly what opened the door for Mamdani, and Cuomo lost twice to Mamdani. AIPAC is clearly an identifiable loser in this election.
Drilling down, there are some interesting elements. Independent primary expenditures supporting Cuomo were $16 million and opposing Mamdani were $7.5 million. Comparatively a negligible $1 million pro Mamdani and anti Cuomo. Candidate primary expenditures were $6.3 for Mamdani and $5.5 for Cuomo. Candidate general election spending will be approximately $7 million each, but expect the independent expenditures for Cuomo and against Mamdani will be even more.
Turnout in the prior last three mayoral elections was approximately 1.1 million. Yesterday 2.0+ million. Would guess that NYC GOP voters turned out in their usual mayoral election numbers of just over 300,000 and over half of them voted for Cuomo. If that's correct, Cuomo only added 262,000 votes from his primary total. Mamdani added 462,000 votes.
Trump was a big loser in New Jersey and Virginia this year. While it's common for the party in the WH to have losses in the off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia, can't recall that recent ones have been this large. Still, the candidates in those two states most likely won, but just not with such large margins which means they are more of the same instead of different.
Comments
good idea joe
.
Thanks!
Zionism is a social disease
It makes you want to believe
we can accomplish something. From what I’ve read, Mamdani got out thousands of volunteers who went door to door, and people were reading about it because the media covered it, which probably increased the number of volunteers.
At Consortium News this week Jon Queally wrote that Mamdani “ran a campaign focused on making life more affordable for the workers who make the nation’s largest city run and thrive.” That issue resonates from Eastern Europe to San Francisco. It has a lot to do with what happened in Ukraine. The second largest country in Europe, half again as big as California, Ukraine had before the war about the same population as California, a highly educated workforce, and vast mineral and agricultural resources, again, similar to California. And yet, unlike California, Ukraine had the second lowest standard of living, after Moldova, in Europe. Because of the war, Ukraine now has the lowest standard of living, of course. But the comparison between Ukraine and California is interesting because each place demonstrates what happens when a State’s natural resources are used to provide benefits to an oligarchy, or to the workforce.
California is in a slide toward Shock Doctrine status, I think, because the people who do the work of producing food and maintenance and care of children are living in cars, San Francisco teachers can’t afford to live in the city, and the rich get richer. But Ukraine is in the advanced state of Shock Doctrine, total destruction, out-migration of nearly half its population, authoritarian corruption, and military industrial death.
Mamdani’s volunteers create hope for peaceful change. I hope with all my heart they succeed.
I escaped from California.
Butch Ware did not.
https://www.butchware4gov.com/
Please send some love.
"The Trump Administration is a white-collar crime cartel" -- Max Blumenthal
Couldn't disagree more
with the California = Ukraine analogy. Nor was a shock doctrine imposed on CA or even any more than a spillover from that of Russia. Seems like a misunderstanding of The Shock Doctrine as described and defined by Naomi Klein (who, btw, was in NYC on election night). Traditionally and at its core, CA has a progressive political orientation. Through WWII even the Republicans were progressive. Nazis flourished in Ukraine.
I agree
that I didn’t make a good case for the comparison. I am familiar with Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine, and I believe it is one of the most important things I have read. (I can see the spine of the book on my shelf as I am typing my response to you.) If I were to recommend 4 books as most important to understanding the crises we are in, The Shock Doctrine would be one of them.
I do think the Ukraine condition is more than just a spillover from that of Russia. From my perspective it shows that the next step, if you voice outrage at the loss of pension benefits and school lunches, is PRIVATE ARMIES torturing and executing citizens, the national military bombing your cities, a coup-installed president saying your children will live in bomb shelters, and a foreign country arming your oppressors so they don’t run out of weapons. Rather than working through a peaceful process out of the Shock Doctrine, as I believe the Russians have done, Ukraine has prevented that from happening by going straight to hell.
And as a Californian residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, having grown up in the post WWII period of increased well being for the workforce, thanks to the labor movement, I saw and still see the rise of Reagan, and especially that of the Bush regime, as an open declaration of a turnaround, which has happened. I agree with you that this trend is not the Shock Doctrine, as experienced in Latin America and everywhere else our plundering murdering forces go to work. It is slow and gradual. But I think the people of the Bay Area who see the service workforce living in campers because they can’t afford housing know we are sliding directly into an abyss.
I tend to agree with Linda Wood on the Shock Doctine part
Although I would be willing to argue that California is only similar to a Shock Doctrine location. Klein described -- we can go over specifics -- a series of disasters which provided opportunities for the capitalists, resulting in a world in which the social groups with the least of economic advantages were made destitute.
Klein also describes phenomena such as the manipulation of coffee prices by speculators leading, eventually, to the dispossession of small coffee farmers.
So what disasters happened to California?
1) Real estate and thus also rental prices flew out of sight when "big money" invaded the state. I remember hearing this story from a driver when I was hitch-hiking in California back in the Eighties: the government printed money to create lots of pricey jobs in the "defense" industry in places like San Diego and San Jose. This priced out people whose wages did not adequately cover rent or mortgage payments. Butch Ware has anecdotes about this, which he related on one of those podcasts I posted earlier -- you have college professors in CA living in their cars now. Proposition 13 provided a shield, but only to those who had bought before it passed.
2) There was a massive expansion of the prison system in CA in the Nineties made possible by a) the War on Drugs, b) the flooding of poorer areas of CA with drugs and guns as chaperoned by the CIA, and c) the building of great numbers of prisons.
When I was doing an ethnographic study of schools in Pomona, California, I was told: the way the Mexican-origin families in CA can afford housing was if each family signed up to rent a single room in a house, with children living in corners of rooms or in closets. Some of the children I saw were incapable of learning anything of substance in school because of the conditions in which they lived: houses with broken windows which nobody could afford to fix, inhabited by children whose parents were never there during the day. And that was in 2000. I doubt that life has improved in such places.
"The Trump Administration is a white-collar crime cartel" -- Max Blumenthal
We still approach the same dilemma.
Americans appear to be oh-so-slowly waking up from the stereotype they've built up for the rest of the world to see, which is that Americans are idiots ruled by mafias.
So when the whole concept finally goes down, when the parasites finally devour the host organism and leave it for dead, who goes down with it? When the billionaires engage that last big push to divorce all of their wealth from dollars and dollar-denominated assets, who gets stuck with the remainders?
The Mamdani thing looks great, because it reveals a lot of Americans waking up. The fact that he pissed off the Zionists is probably the most important one. By the same token, I noticed that there have been a lot of "No Kings" protests recently in Medford, Oregon, a small town of eighty-five or ninety thousand people in the wilderness of southern Oregon. This is a good thing -- more and more Americans are starting to recognize that they cannot evade politics and that it won't go away. The overall effect is that Medford appears from time to time as more than merely a place to buy groceries. Can we make the phenomenon faster and deeper?
"The Trump Administration is a white-collar crime cartel" -- Max Blumenthal
I wish I had some optimism left.
I think every media (every type) will attempt to slaughter Mamdani every day in every way. He and every move he makes will be criticized in poor light until we're sick of hearing his name, every story highlighting every misstep. The police union, talk radio, It's what the elites do to us.
We have elections with 2 choices, and in reality it's a game of musical tables. The winners get to sit at the adult table and run things while the losers sit at the kids table. The kids table can throw tantrums, and sometimes they get their way. At each table there's a seniority system with a lot of "it's my turn!" on who sets priorities. Most of those priorities are the same for each table, and we never see it because most of what affects us is the parts of the government that we depend on. So what if all the bombs we supply around the world could fund healthcare, or education it's not part of our dialog. The economy on the brink every day shoves us around and keeps us preoccupied with our daily lives, food, healthcare, not enough money in general to live.
Elites are the people who can pick up the phone and buy a house or a car or a vacation or a second home or whatever and not worry about affording it. It's a level where much of their lives surround thoughts of how can they make even more money, how to amuse themselves today, what social event can they conjure to mingle with their peers. This what the politicians aspire to. Think Clinton, Pelosi. The media fawns over this behavior, while giving solemn, superficial "news" stories that affect us.
I know people here dislike Sanders, but much of what he has spoken of has gained support. But in a 2 party system as rigid as this there is little room for his ideas no matter how popular unless he plays ball with one side or the other. In some ways Trump breaking the government might have an upside. Departments that get institutionalized over many decades become bloated and unresponsive and lose their way. Think non profits or government where it takes $.90 out of every dollar to give away one dime. I just can't see crusaders rushing in to make a better government. Just vulture capitalists and the 2 parties we have, and the same old politicians waiting to service them. The president said it best...
"I don't care about you, I just want your vote. I don't care." - DJ Trump 10 June 2024.
It's not that we "dislike Sanders", so much as that he
turned out to be a tissue-paper tiger, incapable of walking the walk he talked. (There's too much of that - performative talk and PR that makes news and does nothing else.)
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
That imo was a naive response.
No recognition that there's a limit to what one, old, and imperfect man can accomplish. If nothing else, the left should be grateful to Sanders for keeping a leftish flame alive in Congress and the national dialogue. imo he sacrificed a leftist position on foreign policies by mostly being silent to get his voice heard on domestic issues. OTOH, he may honestly have few and very limited FP thoughts, and many that have been revealed are far from leftist ideology. But those who supported him should have recognized that limitation and not have been so disappointed in him.
Naive? Perhaps so.
However, it should be noted that the literally massive turnout among young people that we experienced in support of Bernie in 2016 was not repeated the next time out. Consequently, it can be said that that naivety was ironed right out of an entire generation of new voters, all at once: voters who might still have been interested in participating, had their standard-bearer not folded.
They certainly got the detailed education in how the sausage is made that is needed to arm themselves against future disappointments. Now, their expectations are well and truly set.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Unfortunately
he didn't have much clout. His ideas were co opted when the dems needed him, then discarded. Bills need cosponsors, they need leadership to get it to the floor. Dems didn't. Republicans didn't. He's a party of one. He supported the lesser of 2 evils, no matter how odious. He also wasn't perfect.
The character assassination
is absolutely guaranteed at this point. My only hope, and it is a very distant one, is that more and more people will come to the realization that whoever or whatever is opposed the most vehemently by our presstitutes is actually deserving of further attention. If they hate a thing that much, and with such a unified voice, it must have real value…
I believe that the collapse is baked in, at this point. I just want to assume room temperature before the final act.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
I know
We've seen it over and over and it always works, but maybe, one time it won't.
Do you have kids and grandkids? This is
a very important question, and pertains to this discussion. Look at climate change. It's rapidly approaching crisis level worldwide. It involves the whole world. Now, how do you look the young ones straight in the face, and explain this threat to them? The only way to solve it, if at all possible, involves all the power holders from all over the world. Too many of them suffer from an out-of-control-greedball mindset. You think they'll tackle this threat together and peacefully? Think again. I'm old, and never had kids cos I was not maternal. Man, am I grateful I stuck to my guns. Plus, I'm agnostic. Appreciate this discussion. Rec'd!!
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Good question.
There are many like you, older and childless, who are nevertheless conservationists and loathe the rape and pillage of the planet for short term greed and hedonism. I have to admit that every time I see a photo of some oligarch's mega-yacht, I shudder just a bit. Can't say that my response to the humongous commercial cruise ships is much different.
If any progress
were to be made, it would not be in America, the land of the every-man-for-himself, bootstrap-pulling, rugged individualist. We’ve all been lectured since infancy that Cooperation Is Communism, amirite? We cannot allow that! If you are doing something that doesn’t make a Profit by grinding those around you into the dust, it ought to be illegal. Boo-yeah!
Faugh. Sad, but altogether too true.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
The US cannot be left out of the equation
In a bi-polar or tri-polar world, "capitalist" US versus "communist-socialist" less wealthy countries, the outcome will remain the same as capitalism is inherently predatory.
Right now we're seeing what happened to democratic-socialism in Europe since the US began seriously stomping on the left in the mid-1970s. (Should say "again" because prior to 1929 the anti-socialists were succeeding.) Germany has rediscovered its Nazi past and is embracing it. As is Ukraine. All of western Europe is acting as if Russia is a greater threat to their well-being than the USSR had been. They're as namby-pamby about the Palestinian genocide as they were about the Holocaust.
I will never accept that a majority of the people in the US or western Europe asked for or wanted neoliberalism and perma-war. They were lulled into by all the wolves in sheep's clothing. There probably isn't any effective way not to get fooled by a wolf, but there are effective ways to quickly respond when they show their fangs.
100-year old veteran: given what the United Kingdom has become,
World War II “wasn’t worth it”:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tv/article-15268525/world-war-two-veteran-gm...