Usually they fail to incompetence and the proclivity for most people to not be complete asswipes even when they’re not the cream of the crop (e.g. Whitaker).
Barr may be Trump’s first success at trying to throw a wrench into things, beyond spin doctoring.
I am confident that a large protest, throughout the streets of majority libtard cities, will swiftly and decidedly convince Trump to change his ways, step down from the office, and report himself to the police to admit all of his criminal offenses.
Or, he’ll pop a bottle of champagne. One of the two.
You should make it clear that, in summarizing, you are not actually offering a summary.
Sorry to quote myself but it’s lunchtime and this bit of inspiration just hit me. I could make it a theme party! Have the players show up with signs protesting Trump. You know “mad libs” (mad liberals).
All we need is for most of the people who already changed their minds, as evidenced by the election last fall, to continue to regret their 2016 Trump votes. Not even all of them. In fact, we don’t even need most of them, given the narrow margin in those states. Just say a third of them would be plenty.
The dynamics of the 2020 race are going to be fundamentally different than in 2016. The 2016 race was an election that required Americans to imagine life under two candidates and to select one of those two visions of the future. In 2020, it’s a choice between imagination and a known quantity. In other words, a referendum on Trump. A lot of voters who don’t like Trump will nevertheless find it easier mentally to vote for someone they know rather than take a chance on someone they don’t. The only way that’s not true is if people are scared about their economic future - that would be a game-changer.
People didn’t like how the Iraq war was unfolding in November of 2004 and by that point were deeply skeptical of the Bush administration’s integrity when it came to the justifications for going to war in the first place. In fact, during the final few months before the election, Bush’s poll numbers were regularly down into the 40s. He still won re-election anyway. Moreover, the electorate is more fractured now than it was back then, so Trump probably doesn’t need approval ratings in the high 40s. He could probably win with approval ratings around 40. He can win by keeping his opponents divided.
Bush’s approval rating was around 50 in November 2004: RealClearPolitics - Election Other - President Bush Job Approval
And Kerry still came very close to winning.
Absent some major third party spoiler, no way is Trump going to win with an approval rating of 40. You are right that this is going to be a referendum on Trump, but I don’t know why you think that’s a positive for him.
It was at about 49 according to the RCP tracker, but on that same graph you’ll see that it oscillated for a bit leading up to the day of the election. Bush, like Trump, was increasingly a polarizing president, with those opposing the Iraq war raging against him. What ultimately saved him was that the economy had been doing fairly well up to that point, with unemployment gradually declining.
Even if voters don’t particularly like a president, then don’t generally vote for change unless or until there’s a perception that the president is hurting them economically. Obama wasn’t all that popular either, but he was re-elected because people were convinced that the economy was recovering. Trump has been enjoying arguably one of the better economic runs we’ve had in a while, which isn’t necessarily his doing, I would agree, but it doesn’t matter. Whether voters will credit him or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that voters will be leery about voting for a change agent when things are going fairly well.
No, he’s gutting DHS for the same reason he’s trying to remake other agencies in his own image: he demands loyalty, and he wants to eliminate the independence of civil service. His agencies will either function his way, or not at all. Keep in mind that he runs federal law enforcement and the military. Do you understand what I’m getting at here?
We all look at what he’s doing, nominating this clown and leaving other agencies unstaffed, and we assume that he doesn’t ‘get it’. I think he actually gets it better than we do.
Possibly related? Assange has been arrestedon behalf of the United States.
Seriously - the frog is boiling. We need to do something about it.
I’m gonna stop you right there. What you are saying is true in normal times. But Trump is not “a president”. He’s an obscenity. And one-fourth of the electorate *loves *that he’s an obscenity. Another one-sixth is made queasy by him and will be glad when he’s gone, but are still just that unwilling to do anything but grit their teeth and continue to support the GOP for the long haul.
The rest of the country is just looking at this with horror and disgust, with many of them mixing that with rage. Quite a few of those will be willing to look at a “Republican classic” in 2024 (hence my Elections thread “Planning for a post-Trump era”). But Trump’s name is Mudd to them. He gone.
I think the numbers are not quite so rosy for the Democrats. They’re bad for Trump (i.e. not close to 50%), but I think it’s more than just a quarter that are loving Trump so far.
Cynicism is baked into the cake. According to Pew research more than half the country has been dissatisfied with the direction of the country since the end of 2003 - we’ve been feeling pretty pessimistic for the past 15 years and despite that both George W Bush and Obama got re-elected after their first terms. Why? Because they didn’t want to take a chance on the alternative.
How are Hillary Clinton and Al Gore alike? They were considered more seasoned and qualified candidates who lost to their politically and intellectually inferior counterparts because the country is historically more willing to consider making a bolder change for the sake of change in elections when neither nominee is an incumbent.
They don’t have to love him to vote for him, just not hate him as much as they hate the alternative (and the Reps are good at stirring that up).
You can’t beat somebody with nobody, as the saying goes. Until there’s an actual Dem nominee, not just a generic one, none of today’s numbers means jack.
I am so stealing this.
Is there a chance that someone could release the whole, unredacted Mueller report to Wikileaks? Assange’s arrest hasn’t shut it down, has it? (I confess I don’t know much about how it works.)
Why not? It happened in 2016.
I see Tom Steyer has organized a ‘Demand the Report’ phone campaign. Count me in.
Enjoy. It’s nice to have someone to talk with on the plane before we storm the cockpit! :o