I feel like the most obvious one is COVID. - ThreadSky

rev-avocado.bsky.social • 14 days ago

I feel like the most obvious one is COVID.

"actually, elections are driven by the rate of change in mortgage rates relative to base"

guys come on. stop it with this epicycle business. the continual retreat to ever-more-opaque economic indicators in a desperate attempt to find one that matches electoral trends

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10000thmule.bsky.social•14 days ago

A big part of what he's missing is that sudden shocks are much more perceptible to people and that's half of what drives "vibes" in the first place

hurricanexyz.bsky.social•14 days ago

The only one that remotely fits, yeah

tcshappyplace.bsky.social•13 days ago

As devastating as COVID was/is, it’s made a significant positive impact on my life. My work is 💯 remote, with Zoom I’ve made new friends all over the world, and during lockdowns, I learned to play more instruments.

alwaysadorecats.bsky.social•14 days ago

Spitballing here - it felt like a *lot* of people expected Covid to be a literal End Of The World, and didn’t know how to process the world not actually ending.

jkfecke.bsky.social•14 days ago

Yup. Or that it would actually kill off a few billion and figuratively sweep the world clean, which it might have if we hadn't been as quick to mask up and develop vaccines.

alwaysadorecats.bsky.social•14 days ago

People wanted an End of History with a clear, definitive ending, and it didn’t happen. No wonder apocalyptic cults like qanon took off.

jkfecke.bsky.social•14 days ago

Dying and knowing the world will continue without you: Humbling, distressing

Dying at the end of humanity: Cool, exciting

It's really that simple. It's people who can't accept that they aren't the key to reality.

mayangelsandheroes.bsky.social•14 days ago

I have never saw the appeal of the former. One of the reason I got scared of Asteroids is the idea that the entirety of humanity would die not just that I would die. I like the idea of the world continuing without me and building off of people’s legacies.

notthegodofhammers.bsky.social•14 days ago

If Stancilism has 1 flaw it's that the best evidence for Feels Over Reals is just as easily explained w "plagues and/or inflation cause a general psychological break in the population"

& "that's still social relations!!" is the kind of recursive argument you see in the most vulgar materialism

rev-avocado.bsky.social•14 days ago

Like there's a global anti-incumbent backlash occurring during the post-crisis period. It's happened everywhere regardless of ideology, the U.S. has one of the smallest swings (likely down to the strength of the Biden economy, Harris campaigning well, and Trump sucking shit).

ritterteufeltod.bsky.social•14 days ago

The global nature of the backlash is the biggest issue with Stancils monocausal information environment thesis. If it was purely information environment then you would expect election results to track information environment bias globally, not correlate negatively with incumbency.

yohannanx.bsky.social•14 days ago

Every US-specific explanation fails to grapple with this fact (and it goes along with the common belief that COVID cost Trump the 2020 election).

davidjorgonson.bsky.social•14 days ago

Synthesis: the pandemic caused people worldwide to be more Online

chrisfumo.bsky.social•14 days ago

this doesn't explain why Biden's approval had recovered to ~46% in early 2023 - a place where he or Harris likely would have won re election in 2024 - and then tanked back down to 40% after the documents were found;

and never recovered, as all economic variables stayed virtually identical

chrisfumo.bsky.social•14 days ago

46% exactly is what 538 - on the methodology Silver was using before he was fired - had Biden at on their Likely Voter model on the day the Documents story was reported

degolierthomas.bsky.social•14 days ago

Like look at the trajectory of Canada's election before trump took office

degolierthomas.bsky.social•14 days ago

And really all the other elections. The backlash was clear

rev-avocado.bsky.social•14 days ago

"Everyone is mad because the world is different after COVID, they're traumatized, and they want things to be normal again" feels like a pretty parsimonious explanation.

tricrocheteuse.bsky.social•13 days ago

Covid is the great unprocessed tragedy and trauma of our time. There has never been nor do I suspect there will be a societal reckoning, or even a personal one for many.

rod34gt.bsky.social•14 days ago

NYTs rather just say Harris was woke

maxp94.bsky.social•14 days ago

I think it was COVID, but I still think the primary insanity delivery mechanism was being alone in a house with a computer for extended periods of time

maxp94.bsky.social•14 days ago

You can loosely correlate the rise of the Tea Party to the first actual major wave of internet users in the late 00s early 2010s, and the same thing basically happened in 2020.

yungdreyfusard.bsky.social•14 days ago

t party was tv and radio not the internet

travisatkins.bsky.social•13 days ago

there no great writing about the 1918 pandemic either tho. People just want to forget.

jeffreyboone.bsky.social•14 days ago

Is there a way to tweak this to allow for 2016 as the other shift event? Trump & Brexit showed some kind of culture war backlash a la Redemption undoing Reconstruction, had turned a corner, & Covid then supercharged it? Most relationships I know broke after ‘16; Covid was then the guarantor.

jeffreyboone.bsky.social•14 days ago

A bit like the double whammy of 1918? Plague on the heels of something that already irrevocably changed the world (WWI obvs more seismic than 2016, but still a deadly twofer…).

rev-avocado.bsky.social•14 days ago

And yes, inflation is part of it, but it's not mechanistic. People are mad about inflation because it impacts their economic well-being, but mainly because it's a daily reminder that Things Are Different Now.

michaelcaley.bsky.social•14 days ago

I think the way that inflation hit incumbents harder in countries with less history of inflation both shows that the vibes of inflation matter more than the exact measurement and that it really was inflation that people hated

supern0thing.bsky.social•14 days ago

This. "Inflation may have stopped and my wages increased by 15% but McDonald's didn't cost $10 in 2019 and that makes me furious"

marble47.bsky.social•14 days ago

It was crime or it was immigration or Afghanistan or inflation or Israel or housing...but yeah, it was COVID which there's no longer anything to do about so we'll be mad about these other issues is my simplified belief.

marble47.bsky.social•14 days ago

And those were all real issues to one degree or another, but COVID is why sentiment diverged from the reaction to previous economies or foreign policy.

gjconnors.bsky.social•14 days ago

Not uncommon for conservatives who lost friends or family during the pandemic to blame “the lockdowns” (Dems) for the real pain and trauma of having to say goodbye unexpectedly to a dying loved one over an iPad.

gjconnors.bsky.social•14 days ago

They can’t blame Trump or acknowledge that the pandemic was, in fact, a big deal. So instead you’ve got tens of millions of grieving and angry people lashing out at whatever acceptable targets they can find.

stork-sculpture.bsky.social•13 days ago

The basic thinking is that Covid was something that couldn't possibly happen to People Like Them, so it didn't actually happen

gjconnors.bsky.social•14 days ago

America’s disordered emotional response to our more severe Covid experience compared to peer countries helps explain some of our incoherent disaffection relative to how the economy was doing from 2020-2024.

docstock.bsky.social•14 days ago

Increasingly convinced this is bascially all of it. The experience of COVID irreparably boiled the brains of at least 1/3 of our fellow citizens, and we’re going to be dealing with the deranged, society-destroying fallout for the rest of our lives.

yussefr.bsky.social•14 days ago

obsessing about a variable that explains every election is foolish but you can clearly point to several things like COVID and the associated inflation that did drive the outcome in '24

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