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VitalSigns posted:I don't think Republicans will pull a coup, but I don't see anyone dying on the barricades for Joe Biden, if Biden and the Democrats were even interested in resisting with military force, which they wouldn't be. They'd all make more money under a Trump dictatorship than in an unpredictable civil war situation and they know it. The end game isn't a civil war, it's a cold war with Democratic states refusing to acknowledge federal orders and Biden as the anti-President. It's not going to happen because it would be the end of the United States. The stock market would also evaporate overnight.
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Nov 10, 2020 21:43
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah ok, but there would be downsides as well The point is that even within a market framework, the devastating economic consequences means that Capital would not let this happen. Trump lacks any of the traditional partners necessary for a fascist takeover - big business, the military, the intelligence community, the bureaucracy or the existing political class. Halloween Jack posted:Wanted to follow up on this thing from the election thread. Anyway. I assume that that crowd is relatively white, affluent, and professional, and has genuinely convinced themselves that neoliberalism is provably, mathematically, the best thing that ever happened to the human species. They have all these graphs from Stephen Pinker. We have threads on this very forum dedicated to ignoring tens of millions of graves to proclaim other ideologies as the "best thing that ever happened to the human species." Neoliberalism is not unique in attracting fans who readily ignore human cost. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 22:04
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he died how he lived: trying to own the libs.
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Nov 10, 2020 22:28
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Herstory Begins Now posted:idk what's controversial about this suggestion? My myth of the progressive non-voter 
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Nov 10, 2020 23:30
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Gulping Again posted:Notable Civil Rights Leader Jim Clyburn, who was not murdered by state-sanctioned actors like every other Notable Civil Rights Leader for some reason we can only speculate about This post sucks and you should feel bad. People who disagree with you politically are not all CIA assets. Also saying “the only reason this Black Civil Rights leader is alive is because he was part of a psyop”.... is something else.
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Nov 12, 2020 02:39
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Gulping Again posted:what're you gonna do about it, PCOS Bill's best friend Party Plane Jones Uh what?
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Nov 12, 2020 02:50
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Arist posted:I'm not really a huge fan of Clyburn, I'm just saying "this prominent civil rights activist wasn't murdered because they're a CIA asset" is loving unreal and I cannot believe I just read it. Yea but he supported the pharmaceutical industry, so that definitely mean's he's a CIA asset! (Yes it is unbelievable. No I am not Party Plane Jane because I recognize that thats a loving disgusting post.)
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Nov 12, 2020 03:04
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Famethrowa posted:I can support Karen being gender neutral, or, being swapped to Kyle as the occasion demands, sure. You're being quite the Michael right now.
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Nov 13, 2020 01:09
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Epic High Five posted:There is always - ALWAYS - utility and a reason to go extremely hard on your opponents and be extremely mean. There is no reason ever to not fire up your base and make your opponents look weak while putting them on the defensive. The Dems don't do this but also they're huge losers generally, and when they do go with it like with Markey it tends to work out well. Would you say... bullying works? I know it is alien to all of us, but yes there are people who - for whatever reason - do like decorum, and unfortunately they seem to fall in the camp of the 500,000 people who decide elections.
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Nov 13, 2020 20:00
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Jewel Repetition posted:Prosecuting heads of state who're leaving office just feels like a bad idea to me because places that do that a lot are usually authoritarian and have problems with their democracy. Maybe I'm confusing cause and effect but I dunno Who are we to tell New York State not to prosecute a career criminal for decades of crimes?
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Nov 13, 2020 20:13
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Does anyone have an example of a progressive candidate doing well in a white, rural area? It seems the only examples we have are progressive candidates doing well in already safe Democratic districts or in rapidly shifting white suburban areas that are markedly different then, say, West Virginia. Also the "Democratic primary voters" is a tiny, tiny swathe of the electorate and I find any analysis about hypothetical competitiveness which is premised on that very tenuous. 220,000 people voted in the 2016 Democratic Primary in West Virginia - 677,000 voted in the 2016 General Election - with Clinton getting 189,000 votes (about her total and Bernie's primary total, excluding the third candidate). Epic High Five posted:If absolutely basic organizing and outreach is the same thing as PUA hypnosis youtube videos, I can only ask what you propose as an alternative? Accepting voters as they are and recognizing that changing decades of propaganda which has prevented voters for voting in their self interest is not easily underdone with a thirty minute conversation or a savvy marketing campaign? Or that voters are both simple - in that they frequently make snap-judgements not necessarily based in fact - and complex - in that they are reacting to larger systemic issues, i.e. 2012 Obama voters who flipped to Trump in 2016 were largely driven by a general unease with how diverse the United States was getting, and saw that Trump's virulent anti-immigrantion/racist rhetoric spoke to their own discomfort. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 01:36
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Wilbur Swain posted:Some dude named Bernard Sanders. Bernie Sanders does well amongst Democratic voters who vote in Democratic primaries. That is a tiny subset of "people who live in West Virginia", and considering in 2016 (his high water mark) it doesn't seem Clinton lost any of his voters in big numbers, this is a bad example. But let me be more precise: do you have an example of a progressive Democrat doing well with Republican voters? in white, rural areas? PerniciousKnid posted:Plus rural areas are progressive strongholds in other countries, and in the past in the US. Usually rural hicks are the leftist vanguard. There are a million reasons why white rural American voters are not the same as rural white working class voters in the UK.
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Nov 15, 2020 01:52
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Handsome Ralph posted:I mean I get that Biden has his issues and I don't expect anyone here to like the guy, but this isn't even remotely close to being true. But if it isn’t true why do I keep saying it is?!
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Nov 16, 2020 03:07
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I just want to point out that this thread is at its best when posters are engaging with the things that are actually happening (i.e. news and events) and not theorycrafted predictions about a presidency that hasn't started yet or hyperbolic takes based on caricatures of former presidents that seem to only exist in poster's minds. It can both be true that Obama did many bad things and that he is not literally Hitler. If there is any hope of this thread continuing (and it seems to be at a nadir of readability) then perhaps it'd be good to avoid arguments which are premised on unfalsifiable predictions of what may happen, particularly when this subforum has a record of practically zero when it comes to accurately predicting future political events. And with that, I go back to halfhearted lurking. MonsieurChoc posted:If Bernie had announced the same team as Biden I'd be yelling the same poo poo at him, except with added feelings of betrayal. But it's ok, he cave din during the rigged primaries and endorsed a racist rapist in exchange for zero concessions so we get nothing good for the enxt four years. Wee. I have some sympathy because it seems like you're a point on your political journey where in your eyes you've finally pulled back the veil on who politicians in the US are (largely bad people who do mostly bad things) and feel like its your job to let everyone know, but you should realize that many of us are much further on that path and are both very aware of this and have already accepted that participating in the American political system is, from the start, accepting that your best choice is still pretty bad, but that is the only choice you can make because you have very little agency and harm reduction and hoping for things to get better is the only option left. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 03:32
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Neurolimal posted:Biden will be worse than Trump on foreign policy because he's going to be more competent at it, which is bad when talking about american foreign policy. We literally don't know what the actual toll of Trump's foreign policy is because he was so incompetent that his advisors have been lying to him for years about troop numbers and locations. The legacy of Trump is "what does foreign policy look like when its unilaterally run by the military, NSA and CIA?"
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Nov 16, 2020 04:14
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Neurolimal posted:Out of respect for Majorian I'l drop the first tangent. We have no idea what Trump's foreign policy actually is, because it turns out that Trump is so incompetent and has the brain of a goldfish to such an extent that members of his administration have been lying to him for years about where we have troops, what they're doing, and how long they've been there. What we do know - because its happened publicly - is that Trump is a buffoon that careens between being easily manipulated by foreign leaders and unilateral over-the-top direct action (i.e. assassinating foreign military officials). We also know that his administration has stepped up drone strikes, but we actually don't know how many civilians they've killed because that information is no longer being reported.
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Nov 16, 2020 06:15
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MonsieurChoc posted:Lets not forget that the CIA first action was to shelter literal nazis and war criminals through Operation Paperclip. Or the Jakarta Method. What is the point of this post? Who are you replying to? Nobody here is defending the CIA. Nobody here is defending Obama. Saying "Obama is not literally Adolf Hitler" is not defending him, its just engaging with the very real distinctions between the bad things the US does and the bad things Nazi Germany did, because degrees of difference are important because: a. they allow you to engage with the world how it is, and b. provide important context and information that allow you to discuss things that happened. Building up a hyperbolic strawman of Obama's foreign policy makes discussing what actually happened impossible. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 06:29
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Like they’re bragging about Cori Bush - who won a seat that’s been held by Democrats for decades.
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Nov 17, 2020 02:25
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Bioshuffle posted:In a sickening twist of fate, the brother in law and his girlfriend had the virus back in January, so they are in the clear. Unfortunately, this has also given them all the ammunition they need for the "it's basically a flu" line of thinking. From what I can tell, they still wear masks when they're out and about. None of the people attending are anti-mask, so I've got that going for me at least. We have also agreed to dine in different sections of the house. You're a loving moron and I pray that you're trolling (which seems to be your schtick). DON'T loving GO TO THE DINNER. You are the idiot who is having a drink and going well I shouldn't drive... and then hops in the loving car. Show an OUNCE of personal responsibility!
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Nov 18, 2020 19:17
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The idea that Mitch McConnell prefers a Democratic President to a Republican President is absurd. McConnell's entire MO has been delivering bailouts and tax cuts to the business wing of the Republican Party, not culture war nonsense, and that is now immeasurably harder, even if he retains the Senate. In hindsight, not passing a second stimulus was a huge tactical mistake, but I think understandable in that a second stimulus three months ago was counter to business interests, and Mitch, like most of us, had already written Trump off. Trump being in power the last four years let Mitch accomplish almost everything he wanted - from tax cuts, to an initial business friendly stimulus, deregulation, etc. etc. All of that is likely gone under Biden. Majorian posted:I don't think Mitch views his fortunes as tied to Trump, and rightfully so. They don't have the same agenda - it overlaps in a lot of places, but McConnell has never been down with this "economic nationalism" nonsense. Trump wouldn't be able to run again in 2024 if he had been reelected (assuming he didn't get term limits abolished, of course, but let's set that possibility aside), so incumbency advantages wouldn't have helped the GOP in any way. Biden may have some level of incumbency advantage in 2024 if he chooses to run again, but there's a good chance he won't. He's going to preside over a really bad economic depression and quite a bit of governmental gridlock (thanks in no small part to Mitch himself). The party in the Oval Office tends to lose seats in midterms, and the GOP could take back the House in 2022, especially if the economy is still in the toilet. If I were in Mitch's position (and, of course, shared his awful right-wing agenda), I'd gladly sacrifice Trump to hand the Dems that poisoned chalice. Mitch specifically wants a second stimulus which includes blanket immunity for business from coronavirus lawsuits. That is now dead in the water under Biden. Further tax cuts for large businesses? Dead. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 02:05
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Froghammer posted:So he's just pocketing the money then? This would explain every lawyer he's associated with that isn't a personal friend jumping ship. Robbing Peter to pay Paul has been Trump's MO since forever The more money he raises the more money he can funnel into his own businesses (which are deeply, deeply in debt), just like the $600 million he's already taken from the campaign (which is why he ran out of money in the end).
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Nov 19, 2020 02:20
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If you ever are worried about Guiliani remember he torched his 2000 Senate campaign by dumping his wife live on TV after letting the press catch him with his mistress because he thought it'd be good publicity and people would be sympathetic about his affair. He has always been very smooth brained.
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Nov 19, 2020 19:21
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the_steve posted:There was a tweet not too long after the first round of lockdowns, the gist of it was basically "I was going a bit stir crazy from the lockdown, so I figured I would reward myself by going out for a bit since I've been doing so well. I couldn't believe all the irresponsible people I saw ignoring the stay at home orders!" No, any mitigation measures in the context of a vaccine (which we now have) are not pointless, because they're reducing the number of people dead. Sure if there was no vaccine then it wouldn't make much of a difference over a long enough time frame (years), but we do have a vaccine now, so the question is "how many people are going to die between now and this time next year when the vaccine is widely available?" and mitigation efforts - any efforts - which reduce the death toll in aggregate during that time span are useful. The problem is that there are more things that can be done - quite easily - which would further reduce the death toll. But the idea that "anything that doesn't reduce the r-value below one is equally useless" is wrong. The biggest problem is that without unemployment support you cannot have a widespread, meaningful lockdown. That doesn't mean you can't do things short of that - i.e. shut down restaurants to indoor dining, close sports venues, close amusement parks, close high schools - but there is no world in which you can both shut down businesses and not have financial support.
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Nov 20, 2020 16:34
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Also we have clear direct evidence that the US's half-hearted mitigation efforts have reduced the death toll because we didn't hit the doomsday "no mitigation" death estimates - now, unfortunately, our half-hearted efforts are locking us into a range of 1,000 - 5,000 deaths a day (on the high side), but thats better than 10,000 or 20,000 deaths a day. Of course, even those 1,000 deaths a day were preventable, but not in this country.
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Nov 20, 2020 16:38
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VH4Ever posted:Yeah when I see people defend Gavin on scientific or policy-based merits it exposes that they don't know much about the man, never lived in CA, and aren't aware what a craven, elitist, empty suit phony he is. He basically is what Republicans accuse all Democrats of being, only for real. He's not smart, or savvy, or anything. All he has is ambition, packaged in a plastic, coiffed exterior. Just because he can string a few sentences together doesn't mean he knows what he's doing. And he doesn't give two shits about the citizens of his state and never has. Nobody is defending whatever half-measures California is doing, we're defending the idea that "something is better than nothing" - i.e., closing restaurants at 10 PM or closing bars is better than not closing those things, but still not as good as closing restaurants to indoor dining entirely. I don't really care about the specifics of what California is doing’s (and if these new restrictions include restrictions on the size of gatherings or indoor dining thats Good), but "if its not getting the r-value below 1 its all equally useless" is repeated all the time here and is wrong. The other elephant in the room is there is no longer any financial support for people if you close their businesses. If you're making people choose between the risk of contracting coronavirus or the guarantee of losing their home, they are going to risk going to work or engaging in economic activity. So the real question becomes "what are the greatest number of half measures we can reasonably implement without forcing tens of thousands of people into the streets or to violate our orders to pay their bills." And the answer is clearly "more than what's being done" but far short of the full lockdown that people are incorrectly saying is the only response worth doing.
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Nov 20, 2020 17:10
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Killin_Like_Bronson posted:So basically America is unable to solve the coronavirus problem without solving the America problem first. What is "solving the coronavirus problem"? The ability to stop spread before it began was out the window eight months ago, and the ability to implement measures to limit spread to the greatest extent possible died in July when the Senate refused to pass a second relief bill. What we're left with is "what half-measures can we implement to get the death toll as low as possible for the next twelve months until a vaccine is widely available." And under that framework things like closing bars, closing restaurants to indoor dining, prohibiting attendance at sporting events, etc., are meaningful because they do lower the death toll. The harsher truth, though, is that because meaningful mitigation is out the window we - for all practical purposes - have a floor of the number of people who are going to die every day, and that seems to be about 1,000. But 1,000 daily deaths is still "better" than 10,000 daily deaths, or whatever the ceiling is.
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Nov 20, 2020 17:21
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Gerund posted:According to the article Wicked Them Beats linked in the thread, a Curfew policy is actually a net negative and the epitome of "unintended consequences". Having read the thread, and that post, I have no issue with saying that bad policy is going to kill people, and that just because anything is being done does not mean something good is happening. Here's what the article states: quote:The trendiness of curfews has perplexed public-health officials, who say they’re just a weaker form of more effective stay-at-home orders from leaders resistant to completely shutting down cities. According to experts at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who today shared a road map to reverse the country’s alarming coronavirus trends, the best way to halt the exponential progress of COVID-19’s march — as it always has been — is “closing high-risk activities where the epidemic is worsening and reinstituting stay-at-home orders where healthcare systems are in crisis.” This doesn't say that curfews (and by curfews I think you mean "closing certain businesses earlier than normal") are entirely useless or a "net negative", its saying they are not as good as what is the actual public health solution - a widespread stay-at-home order and entirely closing many types of businesses - which everyone here already knows. The title of the article is that the curfews will do "almost" nothing - which means they will do something. The problem is that without financial support the type of lockdown that would do the most to limit spread and save the most lives - the type of the lockdown that public health officials want and this article is arguing for - isn't possible, period. And every Governor and every Mayor and every elected official knows this. Also, as far as I can see we don't have any public health research about curfews and mitigation. Again, what I (and several others) are saying is that without widespread financial support the best we can do is to save lives on the margin, but its still better to save those lives than not.
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Nov 20, 2020 17:31
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rko posted:There are numerous countries where COVID-19 is more or less under control, and none of them are secretive about how they “solved” the virus. This is also true for all of the problems our society faces, which suggests that, indeed, solving “the America problem” is of world historical importance given how much our fuckups affect everyone else. Nobody is defending what the government is doing, what are you talking about? What some people - including me - are doing is saying "we want the fewest dead people possible, and considering that any meaningful response went out the window six months ago, at least closing restaurants to indoor dining will save some lives until a vaccine is widely available, so we shouldn't say stupid things like anything short of a full lockdown is equally useless." If you want to have a conversation about what the government should've done eight and six months ago, we can have that, but pretending that we're not in the situation we're in now isn't particularly useful.
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Nov 20, 2020 17:49
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I think if you're approaching dining in restaurants through a frame of social superiority it says much more about you than anyone else, and also has nothing to do with coronavirus.
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Nov 20, 2020 18:24
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Lol Trump Jr.
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Nov 21, 2020 01:05
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VitalSigns posted:Yes of course he is evil, good people are unpopular among slaveowners and don't get to be in charge of the slaveowner emporium in the first place. Slaveholders didn't think they were "bad" people, though. And - more importantly - morality is flexible, subjective and largely informed by contemporary standards, not universal truths that don't exist. The criticism of the South isn't just "slavery was bad" its that "slavery was bad even by the standards of the mid 1850s, which regularly embraced other things that we think are bad." Playing gotcha games with past historical events solely based on contemporary morality is boring and fruitless. In other words, having any conversation about the South start and end with "well all their politicians were evil slaveholders and the system only allowed evil people to hold office" is some real elementary school level discourse.
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Nov 22, 2020 17:44
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Majorian posted:Delve into this more deeply, please. In what way is Ghost Leviathan in a bubble? This thread is a bubble. This forum is a bubble. The wider online left is bubble. There are things taken as received truth in this thread (and in larger spaces) that most people would disagree with, i.e. Obama is a heinous war criminal and liking him is monstrous, the Democrats have never accomplished anything, Nancy Pelosi is terrible at her job, etc. There's nothing inherently wrong with living in a bubble, but its helpful to be aware that some things exist outside the bubble, too. Obama is an excellent example. Most people like Obama. He is more popular today than he has been at many previous points. What people are arguing is that acknowledging this fact - and the fact that most people don't have a problem with Obama's drone strikes or think he's a war criminal - is important, even if you disagree with it.
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Nov 22, 2020 17:47
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I will also add a propensity to turn further inward and refuse to engage with the outside world is a particularly problematic propensity (alliteration!) in analytical leftist spaces. What people have pointing out, too, is that reducing things to simple theoretical framing - even if its a leftist theory - is bad in the same way QAnon is bad: focusing on a master narrative and selecting (and fitting) facts to fit that narrative. For example, reducing any discussion about electoral power and choice to Marxist materialism.
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Nov 22, 2020 17:52
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VitalSigns posted:So what. It's very rare that bad people think of themselves as bad people. That almost never happens. Believing that you know who the bad people are because they go around saying "yes I am evil and everything I do is for love of evil" is, like, comic book poo poo. Because it's not about right or wrong or correct and not correct because people who are ok with murdering foreigners aren't going to stand up and go "You're right! I'm just wrong!" and change their mind. Just because people are wrong doesn't mean their ideas don't have influence. You're reducing this to "well those people are wrong" - ok, then so what? I don't like Taylor Swift, and I don't think people who buy her music have good taste in music, but people still do buy her music and I still get to listen to it when I'm in a store and they're playing a top 40 playlist. Take Obama for example. Obama has a space because most people like him. Standing back and going "well Obama is actually evil!" isn't that insightful because ... so what? Its much more important to discuss and recognize why people like Obama regardless of that. What I'm saying is this: its sometime important to look beyond our thread where most of us agree about most things and ask "OK, well why don't other people think like we do?" instead of struggling with the is/ought problem forevermore. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Nov 22, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 18:01
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cr0y posted:I know polls dead and whatnot but do we have any idea what the GA runoffs might look like? Is there a chance? Well, Trump telling his supporters that voting is worthless sure isn't helping the Republican candidates.
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Nov 22, 2020 18:04
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Sampatrick posted:The relevant bit in RGV is that Biden did 15-20 points worse than Clinton in Hidalgo and Cameron county. That is the worrying bit and if the DNC doesn't try to promise material benefits then they are going to have a very hard time getting back to the old margins in the region. It's still likely to be an area that votes D but carrying RGV with super high margins is pretty essential for winning statewide races in Texas. Is a $15 minimum wage a material benefit? I would hope when we discuss things like this we can actually be clear what Biden offered - which includes many material benefits - as a pre-requisite to discussing the deeper question of "why wasn't this appealing?" Was it an issue of people understanding what Biden offered and rejecting it? Messaging? People preferring what Trump offered?
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Nov 22, 2020 18:12
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Also I think the worst part of the conversation about "how can Biden win over Hispanic voters in Texas?" is that it assumes a level of rationality amongst voters that we know doesn't exist.
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Nov 22, 2020 18:15
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Pick posted:Who's that one poster who talks about the registered Libertarian who always voted Green but Greens weren't on the ballot so it's fine because God told her to vote for Biden? That's a voter. Here's the Chris Hayes article that gets sited a lot during these discussions: https://chrishayes.org/articles/decision-makers/ quote:Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn't have much luck. [/quote]A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation--and polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out. In August the Pew Center found that 40 percent of voters were identifying foreign policy and defense as their top issues, the highest level of interest in foreign policy during an election year since 1972. But just because voters were unusually concerned about foreign policy didn't mean they had fundamentally shifted their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism--an isolationism that September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. Voters I spoke to were concerned about the Iraq war and about securing American interests, but they seemed entirely unmoved by the argument--accepted, in some form or another, by just about everyone in Washington--that the security of the United States is dependent on the freedom and well-being of the rest of the world. In fact, there was a disturbing trend among undecided voters--as well as some Kerry supporters--towards an opposition to the Iraq war based largely on the ugliest of rationales. I had one conversation with an undecided, sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the "mess in Iraq" he lit up. "We should have gone through Iraq like poo poo through tinfoil," he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: "I mean we should have dominated the place; that's the only thing these people understand. ... Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats." I didn't quite know what to do with this comment, so I just thanked him for his time and slipped him some literature. (What were the options? Assure him that a Kerry White House wouldn't waste tax dollars on literacy classes for rodents?) That may have been the most explicit articulation I heard of this mindset--but it wasn't an isolated incident. A few days later, someone told me that he wished we could put Saddam back in power because he "knew how to rule these people." While Bush's rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy played well with blue-state liberal hawks and red-state Christian conservatives who are inclined towards a missionary view of world affairs, it seemed to fall flat among the undecided voters I spoke with. This was not merely the view of the odd kook; it was a common theme I heard from all different kinds of undecided voters. Clearly the Kerry campaign had focus groups or polling that supported this, hence its candidate's frequent--and wince- inducing--America-first rhetoric about opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in the United States.[/quote] quote:Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the "issues." That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured--a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example--but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number.
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Nov 22, 2020 18:19
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Bernie was very, very successful in his appeals to Spanish-speaking voters for a number of reasons: Bernie was successful in appealing to Democratic Hispanic voters who voted in a Democratic Primary. We have zero evidence today that: 1. those voters did not switch to Biden after Bernie dropped out, 2. those voters are the same as Hispanic voters who don't vote in the Democratic Primary. Your answer also assumes a level of knowledge amongst voters (about Biden's record and specific policies) that we know doesn't actually exist. If you read any of the articles with anecdotes from Hispanic voters who voted for Trump this election none of them mention things like M4A, they focus on much larger, less-policy focused concepts, like Trump is a businessman and he likes business, Republicans support the economy, I'm worried about taxes, etc. There is a tendency amongst the left to mythologize voters into savvy political pundits who are interested in parsing complex policy decisions and are rational enough to make choices based on utility. We know from hundreds of years of examples that that is simply not the case. Most voters do not particularly care about granular details. Look at the 2018 mid-terms: they're widely considered a referendum on health care, but the issue isn't "what specific health care policy each party is pursuing", its "The Democrats want to save your health care and the Republicans want to take it away." One of the common complaints about how the primary was rigged against Bernie is an exit poll that shows most Democratic voters support M4A, and that some of them believe Biden supports that. People are taking the wrong lesson from this: the lesson isn't that "well that means Democrats should support M4A", its that issues are less important than we think they are, and "issues" aren't granular policy details, but rather big ideas like "good for the economy" or "supports business", and perception of candidate stance on these issues relies on so many things outside of the candidate. Many people think Trump is good at business and therefore is good for the economy because he's a billionaire. Period. Now, you and I know that he's not a billionaire, has a terrible track record, etc., but that doesn't matter. kitten emergency posted:I don't think I saw a single Biden ad where he said he supported a $15 minimum wage, nor heard it in the debate. Possible I wasn't paying attention, but I'd be interested if he mentioned it on prime-time TV. He spoke about it repeatedly during debates and had a number of ads (including digital ads). The problem is Trump sucked up the airtime. Owlspiracy fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Nov 22, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 18:23
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Srice posted:I only found out about that being one of his policies after hearing about the minimum wage increase passing in Florida, and I consider myself pretty plugged in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwhDeprmFxo
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Nov 22, 2020 18:26
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