The amount of support for DJT blows my mind.
I don’t know this country anymore.
He won’t need to justify anything. Besides, he’ll be campaigning for “President for Life” starting immediately.
So, the polls were off by 6 to 8 points. That’s way outside the margin of error.
It’s not even just conservatives. Lots of liberal folks, especially young folks, are totally fucking done with lockdowns. Psychologically you just can’t expect people to live like this indefinitely without paying a political price, even when the other side is a risk of death. COVID frankly just isn’t scary enough.
It’s a terrible thing to say, but in a way, yes. But understand that what we call ‘irresponsible’ may not be perceived that way by voters. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, then you probably don’t give a shit about ‘bad flu.’
We assumed that voters would make the connection and blame Trump for the spread of the virus and also the economic toll. The reality was probably more complicated. Also, by now, voters may in fact be blaming congress, not just Trump, for the lack of financial assistance.
I also think that Dems are really starting to have a major disconnect with communities of color, particularly in the industrial Midwest. As I posted elsewhere, there’s a lot of political activism among blacks and Latinos but I think a lot of it is more locally contextualized. Voters in AZ are finally having a chance to pay back GOP for HS1070; black voters in the South are fighting voter suppression. They’re fighting against racism and maltreatment, but not necessarily for Biden, and in communities where Biden and Dems haven’t left enough of an imprint, we might be seeing the real results of this for the first time.
Biden was a better white candidate than Hillary was; I’m not sure he really did much though in terms of building the kind of strong coalition needed to put him over the top. It was thought Kamala Harris might help in that regard, but maybe not.
I write this knowing there’s a chance Biden might still be a projected winner, but the table is set now for all of the nightmare scenarios we’ve been kicking around the last few years - you know the shit that happens in other countries, where democracy is struggling to get off the ground. And even if none of that materializes, what does a president Biden have to look forward to? A divided congress.
Yet. Give it time.
Yep. I think we can now officially say that the polls really were off this time. Even Nate Silver, who actually got it ‘right’ last time, is looking a little silly today, IMO.
Perhaps, but in that case one might have expected the GOP to have lost more seats in the Senate.
Yeah, I mean I’m as pro-science and public health as anyone, but I’m honestly tired of being locked down and living in fear of the virus. I live with family who still insist on all of these precautions, which I abide by, but I’m sick of it myself. A lot of people feel that way, and at least I have online employment. If you don’t, then you’re really at wits end.
Yeah but spending bills originate in the House. It’s Pelosi negotiating with Mnuchin, not McConnell.
I think you have to do the hard work of selling it to them, of putting reasons and limits. The vague bullshit of “stay home, if you can’t, don’t be an asshole” isn’t cutting it.
I said from the convention that Biden’s slogan should have been “we didn’t have to be here”. I stand by that. My read is that people just can’t imagine anyone else could’ve done better. I think this is also the problem with healthcare: people who have never had good and affordable Healthcare just can’t imagine life like that.
Why reward the incumbent instead of punishing him?
I think polling has fundamentally changed beginning sometime in the past 10 years or so because new communication patterns and systems have made it all but impossible to consistently find the truly random pools of people that are crucial for good polling.
Oh I tried, but I can see how some minds might work differently
I sincerely hope that the post-election takeaway isn’t that the Dems need to steer MORE into identity politics. A decade of talking about every single marginalized group and the whole cancel culture vibe is probably the biggest reason that non-college whites are SO vehemently against the liberals. You can’t lose 75-80% of voters in the majority of counties in the country, even if they are small and rural, and expect to win.
Mind you, that’s not to say that Dems need to look the other way on racism and homophobia, but they need to find a much more inclusive way to talk about it.
It’s not like Trump peeled off a chunk of Latino voters because he pandered to them. I’m not exactly sure what he did apart from lots of Spanish language propaganda, but he didn’t take “pro-Latino” positions on anything. He didn’t have a Latino or Spanish speaker on his ticket or anywhere in his administration.
If he ultimately wins, I think Trump will drop Pence after 2022 and replace him with Junior or Ivanka as VP. Then the Republican misinformation machine will direct all of its resources to continuing the Trump legacy.
You’re right that Biden never figured out what should have been a super simple message. But we knew this was an issue when we fucking nominated him, he’s no wordsmith. But even if he’d have been more clear on this point, I don’t think it would have matter that much, With Biden voters are basically voting for 18 more months of lockdown, that’s not a great platform.
It would be easy to win on a populistic economic platform. People know they’re getting fucked. Costs of housing, schooling, health care, etc. are going up, and no one’s pay is going up to follow it. We all feel poor. Unions are at a low point. Our employers own us. It would be so easy to tap into this resentment. Trump did it to an extent, even though he’s part of the problem.
Easy win for the democratic party. So why don’t they do it? Because they’re just as beholden to the rich in this country as the republicans are. The democrats have a much saner, let’s keep the country healthy enough to loot it for the long term, rather than the slash and burn let’s loot and burn the country to get everything we can get out of it now style. But both parties answer to the rich first and foremost and the people in a far, far second place.
So since they won’t fight for us economically, they have to fight for something. So we fight over “identity politics”, guns, religion, abortion, shit rich people don’t care about, while they control both parties and loot this country. The democrats can’t change away from identity politics without fundamentally deciding they aren’t secondary pawns of the rich.
And how does he “drop Pence?”
We’re going to see a lot of more detailed info on what demographics voted and why, but it seems like white voters might matter more in this election than in future elections.
Trump had a pretty unique brand that flipped a lot of white voters in the rust belt. It seems like in 2016 it cost him suburban white votes, and in this election he’s going to gain black and latino voters compared to 2016 and prior GOP runs while losing more white suburbanites, esp. women. In the future, black and latino voters are going to be a higher proportion of the electorate, and those rust belt white voters will only matter this much if the GOP can find another candidate who can hang on to those rust belt white voters.
Now appealing to black and latino voters vs appealing to white voters isn’t just identity politics obviously, but whatever the Democrats do in the future, the focus on black and latino voters is probably going to be more important than white voters.
What do you mean? He’ll Just Do It like he just does whatever the hell he wants to. Who’s gonna stop him?