lol
Is anyone watching the farce? It’s well past noon EST… has the Cheeto resumed his role as Cheeto-In-Chief?
Checks avatar - yup, that was him being sworn in.
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Lookin’ good!
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I guess when I say that I am suggesting the average voter is a bit more sophisticated than you give them credit for. Like I am willing to believe that there is price resentment that is a factor in the vote but the price of eggs the week before the election was not important enough to hang a vote on.
Ah, I didn’t look closely enough to notice that it was different from the last Trump avatar.
What fraction of voters think that the 2020 election was stolen? One third of the electorate don’t think that raising tariffs will raise prices on imports. Yes I’m angry, but the fact is that massive swaths of voters are not sophisticated.
And it doesn’t take a huge number of people who misattribute something to shift the election. Given how close every recent election has been, something that shifts 5% of the vote is massive.
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I mean, it’s not JUST eggs, of course. It’s a lot of things. Gas is another one. No, of course Biden doesn’t deserve the blame for gas going from $2.24 a gallon to $3.26. No President ever deserves the blame or the credit for gas prices IMO. But Biden shouldered the blame nonetheless.
So I went to a real middle-of-the-road high school. Probably tracks pretty well with overall population demographics… a bit blacker and less Latinx, but close. Guessing the income tracks really closely with overall demographics although probably tighter around the middle.
My Facebook feed has been chock full of memes comparing the price of gas in November 2020 and November 2024, or the price of a select basket of goods (always including gas and eggs) and yes… people are angry about inflation. Very angry.
And I saw a LOT of posts along the lines of “normally I don’t bother to vote because it doesn’t matter but this time I’m voting for lower prices; I’m voting for Donald Trump.”
And I went to high school in Ohio, and the majority of my classmates are still in Ohio. (And I’m pretty sure that the few who moved are mostly not Trump voters.)
Welcome to democracy! 
Yes, even if it only shifts 2% of voters that might swing an election. If 2% of voters change their minds and vote for the other party that’s a 4% shift in results as Party A has 2% less and Party B has 2% more.
5% of voters changing their minds is more or less guaranteed to swing an election. That’s a 10% swing. The last time a POTUS won the popular vote by 10% was 40 years ago.
It’s almost like there was a big decrease in demand in 2020 for some reason.
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Correct. But that’s not what people remember. They remember that they could fill their pickup for $50 and now it costs $75 to do the same thing.
From 2000-2015, almost no change. Then it went up quite a bit during the Trump presidency. What’s the explanation?
Wall I guess.
In fact I’m going to go one further and say that the reduced demand in November 2020 actually exacerbates the problem in the eyes of some voters.
Because half will say “I used to fill my pickup for $50 and now it costs $75.”
The other half will say “I used to spend $50 a month on gas and now I’m spending $150.”
I’m not entirely convinced that “inflation” explains entirely the results of the last election. There are other things going on, probably related to conservative religious values and a gradual increase in support for Trump over the years among latinos, especially men.
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I don’t think there is anything magical about the prices on Nov 2020, no one wrote down what they paid for anything at that moment in time.
What it all accumulates to is some consumption shift that people don’t like, whether or not it is because they can no longer afford something, or they simply no longer find that something worth consuming.
People talk about the price of common things to express the sentiment.
I’ve heard several writers talk about the idea that, once a piece of music is released, it is no longer “theirs” in the sense that it means to the listener whatever it means to the listener. One who I remember talking about this was Mike Nesmith, who talked about how that was one of the ideas behind the song Tapioca Tundra, where he says
“It cannot be a part of me
For now it’s part of you”.
If listeners think it is a gay anthem, it is a gay anthem, regardless of what a writer intended.
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Totally agree with your thought process.
Another popular song with multiple interpretations by listeners was Puff the Magic Dragon. Peter Yarrow swore until the day he died it was a children’s song but many listeners believed otherwise.
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