This saintly bipartisanship is ultimately what led to wonderful things like the Iraq War and the Great Recession. Those times are dead and rightfully so. Standing with his arms folded shouting “NO!” year after year also worked great for Mitch McConnell. The courts have been transformed for a generation, while Trump has pretty much made erased most of everything Obama accomplished (I cringed typing that, because he didn’t accomplish much at all, besides whining about how mean Republicans are).
The democrats need to realize we are in a Cold Civil War, and any chance of bipartisanship or “getting things done” is over. The system needs to be radically altered, and the Dems need to start disenfranchising conservative voters whenever possible, just as Republicans do to their enemies.
No it wasn’t. He relatively briefly dropped as low as Trump has consistently been and by the end of his third year was back over 50% approval. Never low 30s and upper 30s only briefly.
Why make up shit?
Reagan’s approval was down for a bit after being higher due to a poor economy and came up as the economy picked up. Trump is in the dump with a booming economy continuing the expansion that predates him. I hope the economy stays fine but cycles are cycles and a downturn is very possible. If he’s this low now what would he be during a sputter?
Trump has shocked me many times over the past four years. But today he did so in a brand new, completely different way. To understand what I am saying, please go to this link and resist reading the tweets, which are less coherent and delivered in his usual hyperbolic manner. Just watch the video and try to push out of your mind everything you know about this guy. Doesn’t he sound rational, authoritative, even thoughtful? If he had pivoted into this mode immediately after the 2016 election and never deviated from it, he would be unbeatable right now. I want Democrats to win, so I am glad he did not!
A president who twice wins in spite of acquiring millions of fewer votes than his opponent necessarily calls into question whether the US government legitimately represents the will of its people. I get that the electoral college exists and yadda yadda yadda, but…people vastly overestimate the stability of the US Constitutional order. The persistent inability of the majority to exert its will is the kind of shit that has historically led to revolutions.
I loathe him with a passion, am a loyal Dem and hope to God I’m wrong, but yes, I suspect Trump will win. An incumbent President with a (seemingly) good economy is always tough to beat. If Trump stopped tweeting between now and Election Day 2020 and didn’t start a war with Iran or anyone else, I think he just might win in a landslide.
I voted “no”. I’m willing to risk being wrong again.
And I may very well be, given the incumbent effect and the fact that we are nowhere near determining who the specific Democratic nominee may be. Nevertheless, in an informal personal poll with the respondents consisting of “people I know and who have expressed a political viewpoint recently”, the weight and depth of loathing for Mr. Trump is really quite striking. But, yeah, yeah, miniscule sample size and non-random, so take it with a block of salt.
OP: IMO it would be best to re-run this poll once the actual Dem nominee has been selected.
Carter was hit by both economic and foreign policy problems, and he faced an extremely charismatic opponent in Ronald Reagan.
And Bush Sr. ticked off conservatives in his own party, and they sat on their hands, plus he was a weak candidate, plus he got hit by a recession, plus there was a third-party candidate with nationwide appeal.
Trump could win this thing, even if he deliberately wants to lose.
If Joe Biden survives the primary but limps into the general the way Hillary Clinton did, yes, Trump could win the electoral college vote. The same is true if a far left candidate like Warren or Sanders - even if the party is energized, they will face skeptical voters in much of the industrial Midwest and they will almost certainly lose Florida. I won’t say that Warren or Sanders can’t win, but they’d probably need Trump to be in bad shape. If Biden loses, I don’t know which of the remaining candidates is viable and capable of building a coalition of hard left and center left progressives the way Obama did. Biden is not my idea of the prototypical candidate – maybe a younger Jerry Brown would have fit that description. But I hope Biden can avoid foot-in-mouth syndrome and I hope that Democrats can see past trivial controversies and support him.
I didn’t reply in that particular thread, but I couldn’t conceive that female Republicans would actually vote for Trump. I expected them to simply abstain on the Presidential race.
But to follow up, his recent gaffes with respect to working with segregationists to get legislation done may hurt him a little going into the campaign, but I think he can survive it. What would worry me if I were a Biden adviser is how he responds in the debates when Cory Booker and others confront him about the comments and push him to apologize in front of a national audience. Subconsciously, people are attracted to perceived strength and repulsed by perceived weakness. Making Biden defend himself and putting him on the defensive in front of millions of people might be damaging, even if voters weren’t necessarily aware of or offended by his original remarks.
There’s no more hiding from the cameras for Biden. He has to bring it.
He weathered the Stormy Daniels business, unfortunately, but there could be more. Saw a report today that he allegedly raped a journalist. Well, it ain’t over till it’s over, hence my slightly plaintive "yet?) addition to my points. There’s still time for him to screw (up).
To be clear those were not gaffes, they were his on point branding.
IF (and while he is the odds on favorite it is very much still IF) he becomes the standard-bearer, he will have done so based on the appeal of that message to Democratic primary voters and will be selling that as the alternative to Trumpist hyper-partisan us vs themism.
His brand is the counter-narrative to ever greater polarization. He is precisely positioning his message as one that tries to work things out with those “on the other side” and who negotiates rather than demands, trying to find the common ground to achieving the common good.
It is aimed especially at the Obama-Trump voters, the Clinton-Romney voters, and eligible voters who don’t bother because the hyper-partisanship just turns them off. Those who are swingable and those who can be convinced to vote want to hear that something can actually get done, that government is not doomed to forever cycles of dysfunction, one side blocking the other forevermore. Even those who think that such is a dream have to accept that it is a dream that appeals to those voters.
In the general those are not gaffes that will hurt him they are the image that he hopes will sell him: limiting the “other” to be demonized specifically to Trump and Trumpism.
One can disagree with whether or not that brand message is going to be effective or not, but staying on that brand message is no gaffe.
If he had pivoted into this mode immediately after the 2016 election and never deviated from it, he would be unbeatable right now. I want Democrats to win, so I am glad he did not!