the official 2024 US Presidential Election thread

Cherry, there has never been a viable independent candidate in my lifetime. In *some* smaller races perhaps, but not in the presidential race. You're either with a candidate or you're with the enemy. Not one of them cares about real issues of governance. Not one will ever deign to speak about how it costs a hundred thousand dollars for a decent wheelchair, for example. They just have to rile up their base, because the bases vote in the primaries for the craziest candidate, while the sane people split their votes among the decent options.

And then we have Harris, who just skipped the primaries entirely... but hey, Clinton stole the primaries in 2016 with Superdelegate votes anyway, so it's not like primaries actually matter

Edit: Alright, alright As you can tell from the replies, I don't really recall the Clinton/Sanders race

Clinton won 55% of the PV vs Sanders in the primary and 28 of 50 states, what are you talking about? Sanders theoretically could have "won" if he'd gotten nearly every superdelegate, but that would have been him stealing it, Clinton won the actual primary elections and deserved to be the nominee whether you like her or not. Bernie Bros. have almost as strong of a reality distortion field as Trumpers so you really shouldn't listen to them too much. 

I'm probably misremembering, so strike that from the record

It was RIGGED, which is pretty damn close to stealing.

Bernie Sanders won the Washington primary in ‘16 55-45 but all the superdelegates went for Hillary making her the real winner of the state. How is that not stealing Washington? The delegate allocation made it look like Hillary won a narrow victory in that state when she actually got blown out and these shenanigans were going on everywhere, Washington is just the most egregious example

You shouldn't edit this out. It's not false information. It was shamelessly rigged for the entire world to see. That's how the DNC operates.

Clinton still won a majority of the non superdelegates for the entire election. Even if the Dems didn't have them she still would have been the nominee. You want to criticize the concept of superdelegates and say Dems shouldn't have them, fine, but they're not why Bernie didn't get the nomination overall. If you lose the national popular vote by 12 points the election wasn't "stolen" from you. 

This is classic "reality distortion field" thinking where you're cherry picking one fact (Clinton got more superdelegates in Washington despite losing the state) to reach a much wider conclusion that it does not support (Clinton stole the entire election). It's the same thing Trumpers do all the time with their election BS, Russia apologism, and anti vax stuff. 

I dunno guys, intellectual attraction + physical attraction seems to make a lot more sense and takes less fantastical effort than pretending some Fox News chick isn’t a total wretch just because she has nice tits. Plenty of women out there to fantasize about with an actual brain AND nice tits.

This doesn’t take into account how some states awarded delegates proportionally and others winner take all, or how momentum and demoralization can play a big role in a primary campaign. Hillary Clinton would pull off narrow victories in winner take all states while Bernie was winning blowouts in proportional states and immediately having the difference nullified after all the superdelegates go to Hillary. You also had the entire media and political apparatus behind Hillary constantly spreading the message that “IT’S ALREADY OVER. THERE IS NO PATH FOR BERNIE” from the very first primary. That messaging + seeing the lopsided delegate count even though it’s actually much closer than it is demoralizes voters and scares off donors. Hillary was already up by like 100 delegates after only the first few states where she barely won. If the campaign funds dry up then the campaign can’t travel or do much of anything and will have to resort to firing staff which kicks off a doom loop of more demoralization. That also leaves an effect on voters in other states seeing their guy pull off a 10pt win but still end up with less delegates because party elites making up the superdelegates think they know better than the voters. Not to mention that some states had their elections after Hillary already hit the delegate number she needed to secure the nomination so the Bernie bros weren’t even showing up to vote at that point which also skews the delegate count misleadingly. Bernie never had a fair chance 

Trump whined about cheating but he actually kneecapped himself by demoralizing his own voters and convincing them the democrats were gonna cheat with mail in ballots when he could’ve simply just spammed in his own mail in ballots. Trump had every opportunity to take advantage of the same rules that the democrats were taking advantage of. Bernie did not have that opportunity during his primary campaign. The game was actually rigged against Bernie from the start 

Trump got another assassination attempt threat? Geez. What's is going on with him. At least we know it wasn't Melania. She doesn't know where he is and could care less.

His family sent out a tweet disowning him. This will have no impact.