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Photo from MegaCon Live - Manchester Central Convention Complex (July 2024)
MegaCon is a Comic Convention with Anime, Sci-Fi, TV, and Video Gaming programming. Many cosplayers spend weeks, months, or all year creating a costume of their favorite comic, TV, film, or video game character. Once or twice each day, MegaCon will roll out a red carpet so that guests can show off their hard work.
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Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who refused to accept defeat four years ago, sparked a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts.
With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
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In 1992 James Carville, Bill Clinton's lead strategist, hung a sign on the wall of the Democratic candidate's campaign office in Little Rock, Arkansas. It had three lines on it to focus the team on the key vote-swinging issues and one of those lines would become so famous it's turned into a political cliché.
The line read, 'It's the economy, stupid.'
It stuck for good reason. Elections are almost always about the economy. It's atop most of the polls asking voters their main issue for the 2024 US presidential election as well.
If people lack confidence in the economy, incumbents are punished. Any politician knows economic confidence and election wins go hand-in-hand, and if Kamala Harris loses, one of the main reasons will be her failure to sell a clear economic recovery plan and the image many voters have of Trump as a top politicians, rammed home by his name-heavy real estate business and as he climbed off that helicopter and fired people week after week in his top-rating reality TV show, The Apprentice.
According to CBS News exit polls, two-thirds of voters think the economy was in bad shape. Forty-five percent consider themselves worse off now than when Joe Biden was elected four years ago, and of those eight in 10 voted for Donald Trump, helping to return him to the White House.
And if it really was the economy, stupid, then maybe there wasn’t much Harris could have done to bring voters around, given that she was at Biden’s side as he pushed through trillions of dollars in post-COVID recovery spending that had to fuel inflation.
Given more time to make her case, and not just the three months she had after Biden finally stepped aside, Harris might have been able to build a dividing line between her and her boss on economic policy and avoid blame for the rising cost of groceries, cars, fuel, and rents.
Instead, she had to find other issues to campaign on: abortion, encouraging first-time homeowners, protecting consumers from predatory pricing. None of them quite stuck. It wasn’t about the women, stupid. It wasn’t about owning your own homes. It wasn’t even about Donald Trump, however much the Harris campaign tried to warn voters about the orange-skinned felon and the threat he poses to constitutional democracy.
Perhaps, it was just the Democrats’ turn to lose and the Republicans’ turn to win. We will never know but maybe another, less MAGA Republican candidate would have done even better. After all, no party had ever won a second term when so many people think the country is headed the wrong way.
Carville’s famous line about the economy was immortalized in The War Room, the brilliant documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign, when the fresh-faced Arkansas governor managed to consign President H. W. Bush to a single term in office against the backdrop of a recession.
But it wasn’t Carville’s only message. The strategist hung a sign on the wall of the campaign HQ in Little Rock with three messages for people to drill home.
-Change vs. more of the same.
-The economy, stupid
-Don’t forget healthcare.
If Trump won on the price of groceries, then, according to exit polls from the major networks, he also won as the candidate for change. Healthcare was never really an issue in this election, not for the Trump campaign at least, but two out of three was enough to win it.
Sources: TheDailyBeast, RNZ, PBS.
Tags: President 47th United States Donald J Trump MAGA 2024 MAGA2024 President-elect elect US election Kamala Harris