Anghraine

Hey all. :\

I have a post on Tumblr about it that I imagine most of you have already seen. The short version would be that this doesn't feel as bad as Trump's first victory did—I had told myself over and over that this could happen, that it would come down to political trends thousands of miles away from where I live, etc. But my brain is telling me it's actually much worse. Trump scraped a victory in 2016 with a deck stacked very heavily in his favor, and without certainty about what his administration would really look like given that he's a lying blowhard, via the electoral college but against the will of the greater number of voters. That didn't mean he wasn't president, but getting fucked over by outdated mechanics of government set up by long-dead men is not the same as getting fucked over by fellow citizens who are very much alive and who know, or have the ability to easily find out, about the policies of the first Trump administration. Kamala Harris, whatever her faults, did not have anything like the baggage of HRC and yet the people of this country were far more willing to vote for Trump against her.

I've been quietly enraged for hours in a way I don't often get—I get annoyed, and sometimes I get normal angry, but like ... in 2016 I broke down crying over and over, and I haven't done anything of that. I feel cold but not numb. The last time I felt this kind of frozen hatred was when a relative told me he'd struck a plea bargain about statutory rape with a sixteen-year-old student and was telling me so I didn't find out about it in the news. I didn't get upset as such, or feel immediately angry, or fight with him about it. I simply didn't care whether he lived or died for years afterwards.

There's this awful review of The Borgias that condemns Jeremy Irons's performance as Alexander VI/Rodrigo Borgia, because the reviewer claimed Irons lacks the appropriate "fire" to play Rodrigo—he admits that Irons does play him with a kind of fire, but says that Irons "burns with the steely flame of the North, not Latin fire." I thought this was a hilarious and very stupid characterization of both Alexander VI and Jeremy Irons, and told my best friend J about it, and it's entered our friendship lexicon. But he (my bff) has remarked a couple times that when I get truly, genuinely angry, it is absolutely a Steely Flame of the North situation. And I'm definitely feeling that now—not numb, not sad, not shocked, not screaming, just kind of hard.

I will say that, despite dutifully voting for him in the primaries, Bernie's "this is happening because of the Democrats turning their backs on working-class people, they lost the white ones to Trump and now they're deservingly losing Latino and Black ones" shtick is even more contemptible than usual IMO. Yeah, he's hammering it into his The Class War Is The Only War constant replay loop, but I don't know why the fuck he's associating this with Black voters. From what data we have at this point, the talk about Black men switching from Biden to Trump came out to a shift of four points from 2020 in exit polls (which, while done carefully, are known to be rough estimates—that's in the realm of statistical noise) and even if you did treat them as 100% accurate, the exit polls have Black female support for Trump actually dropping three points from 2020. (Union households favored Harris, btw.) Maybe he referenced Black voters to avoid sounding like he's scapegoating Latine voters specifically (who did shift towards Trump, especially men), maybe he's talking about lower turnout, but I think it's honestly super shitty to associate Black voters with this loss when a) there are many other more proximate causes, b) many Black voters are deliberately disenfranchised by their state governments and deal with more obstacles to voting than virtually any other group, and c) Black voters have been and remain unambiguously the most stalwart Democratic demographic apart from LGBT people (iirc the only group even slightly close is Jewish people—the same exit polls have them at 78% Democratic to Black voters' 85%, with Black women specifically at 91% for Harris). Lumping Black voters in with almost anyone else flattens a truly vast divide.

*screams into a bag*

I then reblogged this post and added:

NE-2 has been called for Biden, which has only one electoral vote, but if it comes down to the wire…

I try not to get too into politics blogging over here, but:



lmao

I'm still just kind of boggling that Trump came to Oregon to talk about how he's going to swing the state red and get back to cutting down our trees (*hiss*). And he gave this speech in Eugene, of all places.

If you're not familiar with the peculiarities of the PNW political scene: geographically, most of Oregon and Washington are conservative, particularly Oregon. They get their hardcore progressive reputation (and votes) from small regions west of the Cascades, mostly concentrated in ultra-liberal urban centers like Seattle and Portland and, uh, Eugene—home of the University of Oregon. However, the population is also concentrated in those areas, which produces its own problems. There are more or less local issues, like secessionist sympathies ranging from violent to wistful, and intense environmentalism that is particularly intense among Democrats but part of PNW culture in general. In the last midterm elections, disastrous for Democrats, Republicans had talked about increasing logging and it ... ended badly.

So giving a speech about how he's going to make Oregon great again by chopping down more trees in EUGENE is just "???????????"

But he didn't end his tour of Democratic Cascadia there!

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