What’s wrong with healthcare for them? Are they not human? And if we dont give them healthcare, when they get sick, they just go to County ER, which is extremely expensive for the taxpayers.
There are many policies that would be both compassionate and technocratically efficient in use of resources that are just politically untenable. We have to operate within that reality even if it can often be frustrating.
It incentivizes criminal activity.
Are we talking about free healthcare for illegal immigrants while citizens don’t have free healthcare?
And this free healthcare WONT come out of the taxpayers pocket (lol)
And finally… the majority of Americans (you know the people all eleven would purport to serve?) do not support this policy.
BUT…screw them right? Its not like the Dems need their votes or anything.
But thats not what this thread is about. I’ve said I think Trump will win, and I gave an example as to why I think so.
Yeah in that list of what Trump has to do to win…I didn’t see “Sit back and wait for A Donna Brazile or Wasserman to fuck up while everyone calls Jill a Russian agent and Hilary does the mannequin challenge.”
If the argument is that previously Democratic voters are going to switch to Trump this time because the Dems are moving too far to the left, it kinda ignores the polling that a majority of voters favor progress on some of the big issues of the day. By fervently blocking any sort of governance which might help the average American, Republicans could be doing themselves equal harm in popularity. We might also be underplaying how disgust with Trump as a person is serving as a rallying point for his opposition.
The lack of fluctuation in Trump’s approval ratings indicates to me that there could be little crossover voting next year. Those who voted for him are as likely to vote for him again as those who didn’t are likely not to again. So the big battle will be for the independents and those who simply declined to vote in '16. He’s not doing well with that group of potential voters. It’s possible that he’ll do better as election time gets nearer, and there probably is a real danger that the Dem candidate will be perceived as “too liberal,” causing the unknown voters to cast their ballot for Donald. I think only Sanders and Warren, among the likely nominations, fit this criteria, though.
And my bottom line remains: if the newly eligible voters increase their turnout by the same amount they did from 2014 to 2018, Trump is toast. The GOP admittedly doesn’t know how to appeal to that generation. Their strategy appears to be “just wait until they get older.”
The real answer is, “Nobody has any freaking clue what is going to happen next November.”
We live in crazy times. Volatility is through the roof. Alberta, the most conservative region in Canada and one of the most conservative in North America, and a province with an energy economy, elected an anti-oil socialist government, then in the next election kicked them out in a landslide. Nobody predicted the election of the NDP. Around the same time, a joke candidate won the Presidency of the United States when the polls showed him to be a massive underdog, and a gladhanding substitute teacher was elected Prime Minister of Canada.
The same pattern is happening all around the world. Voter volatility is high, and social media has connected people in new ways and made old patterns of prediction invalid.
By next year, we could all be screaming at each other over an issue we don’t even know about today.
Look, overstaying your visit is a minor crime, on the level of speeding. Did the 55 mph speed limit incentivize criminal activity?
No, they are talking about not checking for citizenship when we have medicare for all or some similar system. :rolleyes:
Sure, if we bring in medicare for all or something similar it will cost the taxpayers, and including a few million illegals will raise the costs a bit- but so will checking for citizenship. However, now people can call 911 and get a paramedic or go to County general, and that costs the taxpayers even more. It’s* cheaper *to cover illegals along with everyone else.
That’s a fine argument and all, but do you think it will matter in the sound-bite world of vote-grasping we have today? A Biden or Harris or Warren will come out and make all those arguments, but Trump will take 5 seconds to roll his eyes and say something about how Democrats want to give rapists, drug dealers, and criminals free health care before they bother helping real Americans. If American voters were thoughtful people in general, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
The “(f)right wing” in this country is good at taking an issue that people kinda, sorta generally agree on and scaring moderates who barely follow politics into believing that they’ll lose their job, lose their healthcare, pay more than they earn in taxes, or be abducted by space aliens if they vote for change.
It’s not really the ability to self-promote. What we need to remember is that Donald Trump is the incumbent: he is the reality that people are experiencing. As long as people think their reality isn’t that bad, as long as people have job stability, as long as they have confidence that things will turn out okay for them and their family over the next four years, Trump has the advantage - even if people really don’t like him on a personal level.
The reason I think a healthy, vibrant, and ‘with it’ Joe Biden might be (at least in theory and on paper) the strongest challenger to Trump is that people remember what it was like when he was in the White House. Sure, he wasn’t the president, but he was the wing man to a president who was much more liked on a personal level than this guy. He’s like a co-star on a sitcom we used to love watching. The others are completely unknown. The question with Joe is, do people remember Joe as Obama’s sidekick or do they see him as a washed-up old man? Perhaps the latter, which is not good news.
But regardless, I don’t care what polls say now or how people feel about Trump’s disposition: a sitting president has an immense advantage when things aren’t that bad. Now if the economy tanks, or if we get into a foreign policy debacle, or if there’s a botched response to a natural disaster, then that’s a game-changer. I also think that if Trump ignores the Supreme Court’s ruling and puts the citizenship question on the census form, that opens him up to a much stronger and more bipartisan case of impeachment on grounds of violating the constitution.
Two problems with this:
-
The people who actually remember and cherish the good ole day Obama-Biden bromance aren’t Trump voters to begin with. They are solid D’s who will vote for the D nominee no matter what. Everyone else either resented that time because they hated having a Dem President or they only have a vague opinion about that time because national politics is not a TV show they regularly watch. The latter group is the type that can easily be convinced that 911, the Iraq war, and the 2008 recession all happened on Obama’s watch, because they are susceptible to lies and propaganda. We can not bank on them having nostalgic feel good memories about Biden, not in the era of disinformation campaigns.
-
The others at the top aren’t completely unknown, at least not anymore than Obama or Bill Clinton were. What they aren’t are two-time losers like Biden is. Knowing how Trump fights, I can imagine him getting mileage out of Biden’s previous failures. Calling him a low energy loser without any ideas of his own. Calling him a weak “wing man” to the most inferior POTUS in history. How will Biden counter these punches? By being nice and smiley? These are things to consider.
There are Obama-to-Trump voters - they exist. They’re rather small in number, I would agree, but they’re just big enough to swing an election, which is what we’re concerned with. I obviously can’t guarantee that they would vote for Biden simply because he was part of the Obama White House, but I’m saying that this is an advantage that Biden brings to the table compared to others. People can see Biden in the White House because, you know, he’s actually been in the White House.
They’re not unknown, but they’re unknowns in terms of having served in executive office. They’ve never served in a presidential administration. They’re less familiar with the rigors of the job. But more than that, voters are going to have a harder time placing them in that space more than they would Joe Biden – in the beginning.
As you correctly point out, however, whether or not Biden lives up to that billing is another matter. I’m on record as having being rather skeptical of his chances to survive the primaries for all the reasons you and others have alluded to. And his disastrous debate performance only reaffirmed those concerns. As it is now, we’re more than a week removed from the debates and pundits can’t stop talking about how badly he performed, how he has slipped in the polls, how he has lost support in the black community, and how he looked old and confused. His campaign has been utterly unable to pivot away from that performance, which he desperately needs to do. I suspect that he might start to regain some footing just by virtue of the fact that news cycles do eventually pass, but all the signs I’m seeing right now are that Biden is running a really poor campaign relative to his opponents.
I guess what I was trying to articulate in the previous post is that the strongest type of democratic challenger would be a moderate (like Biden) but without all the baggage. I don’t know that a viable candidate like this exists in the field and it’s a potential problem for Dems as they approach the general.
I don’t want to repeat too much what I just posted in another thread (the “Hee Haw …” one), but not too small (at least 5% of those who voted), concentrated in Rust Belt states that are critical, and each switched vote is worth twice as much a didn’t turn out one. They are more than big enough to swing the election even though they are not the only way to do so. Overall big turnout of previously nonvoting blocs, like we saw in 2018, would also do it.
No you don’t win even the third of them who disapprove of Trump back just because Biden was part of Obama’s team, any more than he automatically gets back the Obama-nonvoters for that reason.
But it does give him a leg up on both that others don’t have, and in any case you do seriously consider how to get both of those groups voting for the D choice whoever it is and think about them both when choosing whoever it is.
I think you may be forgetting how much weight 2016 Trump voters gave these issues. Hint: they voted for a man who loudly trumpteted his complete and utter lack of experience.
I don’t think these voters think about the candidates like you and I think about the candidates. I think they think about them the way they think about prom king. A lot of it has to do with what you’re going to say the next day at work, or next time you see your outspoken sister-in-law, or how you feel about America.
I admit I’m trapped in my own biases. Nobody who was paying attention and devoted to rationally selecting a president could have voted for Trump. Ergo, we have at least 60 million citizens who vote based on emotions, whims, sound bytes, visions, horoscopes, single issues that break R regardless of the candidate, or other factors.
The only R > D change we can hope for is the dissatisfied vote. It’s pretty clear there are large numbers of dissatisfied Trump voters, at least. But they know that the RBG seat will likely be up for grabs, and probably others; they know that the Ds will raise taxes, and they’re already feeling squeezed by the status quo (which, oddly, they do not blame on the Republicans).
This is a fantasy and one that doesn’t even make sense at that. By the time Dems nominate someone, there is no time for another Republican to jump into the Republican race. The nomination contests happen at the same time.
The earliest a Dem could “lock it up” would be Super Tuesday. It would be impossible to jump in at that point and win the Republican nomination.
Plus… rank and file Republicans love Trump.
This is a good point. A lot of Trump-hating Republicans might end up voting for him if the idea of another conservative SCOTUS appointment excites them enough. To be so close to completely stacking the court is going to be a lot for them to walk away from, despite all their high-minded talk about how Trump embarrasses them. This is where extrapolating voting behavior in the 2018 mid-terms to 2020 becomes real risky.
The suggestion you responded to was that a Never Trump Republican would run as an independent, not in the Republican primaries. Which means there’s at least a year before they need to decide. And someone rich like Romney could go from 0 to 100 in no time flat.
False.
“… there will be a big hole in the middle which could easily attract a center-right Republican to challenge Trump for the nomination.”
Or to run as an independent. I also mentioned a center-left politician like Bloomberg running an independent bid.
I shouldn’t have said ‘nomination’. That was me being sloppy. Trump’s approval rating with rank and file Republicans is sky-high. I don’t really see anyone serious mounting a primary challenge against him.
But we could easily see an independent candidate from either the center right or center left. That’s what I meant by there being a big hole between Trump and say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Biden just had an interview with CNN that makes it pretty clear that he’s trying to capture the center left. He came out against single payer health care, against open borders, and in general is promising another Obama-like administration, not a ‘far left’ (his words) administration.
This is probably why he’s the front-runner, despite all his deficits and issues.