So on the one hand, whatever truth this may bear, it's going to ultimately be on accident, since the differences between people and their interaction with politics is intrinsically tied to the underlying material conditions and superstructure yada yada yada. On the other hand, it's at least interesting to think about the fact that this is almost obviously true.

The American body politic by year 2000 was fully in Late Capitalism, and the days when the neoliberal - neoconservative cocktail was new, a la Reagan and Clinton, were somewhat faded into memory. So we're analyzing an electorate that was already crystalized into relatively firm voting blocs. Rural areas voting overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate, Urban areas voting overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate, states lacking a balance between the two in terms of overall population pretty much decided before the first announcement of candidacy. So really, we're interested in whether the 2000 and later presidential candidates in the general election were perceived as more or less cringe to the relatively small population of "swing voters" conveniently residing in "swing" states.

In 2000 and 2004, we had Bush v Gore and then Bush v Kerry. Most of the relevant swing states here are mid-sized western and midwestern states that would eventually swing blue for Obama in 2008 and the couple that would swing back in 2012, and back again in 2016. These people, the people of suburbia that change their votes, and people from urban areas that would come out to vote for Obama but not Hilldawg, are the people whose capacity for cringe we need to gauge. Ultimately, Bush was not less cringe than Gore, since Bush lost. Bush was probably less cringe than Kerry, but it probably didn't matter since comfy suburban voters really really liked that we were doing an imperialism to several nations because some brown people accidentally succeeded in winning a round in the homeland. Obama, compared to McCain, another tired old white man who managed to pick up as a running mate the single most cringe political actor of the oughts, was of course less cringe. 2008 era Obama also affected a revolutionary politics that Americans didn't really care to try peering beyond. In 2012, we're talking about an election where Obama, still relatively cool, runs against a venture capitalist. After the '08 crisis and the manufactured consent that bailouts were the right idea, we still see Obama turning out enough of a vote that doesn't think he's cringe that he wins again, albeit with strictly fewer states. By 2016, the cracks in Late Capitalist reality were becoming more apparent, and the un-fun spouse of one of the key actors in making life that way was the Democratic candidate. Trump would have been far less fringe to suburbia than Hilldawg, given the show he puts on and how debilitatingly boring his opponent was to the typically media wired American voter, and Hillary really had no standing power as Obama 2.0 to draw out more voters in urban areas.

In 2020 on the other hand, Biden is definitely more cringe than Trump. Biden does and says funny things, as a result of his brain beginning to noticeably melt, but Trump remains one of the most entertaining political actors in modern history. The obvious reason that he lost was that a slightly larger majority of people in the right states felt that they possibly had more to gain with a more stable political dominant in Biden. People who felt that Trump still offered them, in his chaos, a better chance at a less precarious life still voted for him, likely.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my effort post on a less popular Chapo post where I bully the poster about a lack of materialism in their Cringe Theory of Electoral Politics and then offer a much longer analysis that is probably less materialist. :party-sicko: