What percent of the population votes in France?
Good question. But ref myself and **UTJ **just above, there’s also the opposite effect to consider as well: folks who normally vote but who abstain in protest this time. They’re in effect a reservoir of “antivotes” that are just as powerful in swinging elections.
Ref the US again, a non-trivial chunk of D voters stayed home out of either misguided allegiance to Sanders or disgust w Clinton largely fomented by decades of R attack advertising and paid punditry.
Bottom line: Getting one of yours out to vote or convincing one of theirs to stay home are equivalent. A well-balanced political attack plan includes both measures. Would that it were not so.
I recommend Pepto-Bismal.
Can’t see France providing a majority to LePen. Only thing that could upset the apple cart would be another terrorist incident, which I feverently hope doesn’t occur.
It’s too simple in the new paradigm; more like, who will stay home - last minute deciders, how big will the wave of people too disillusioned these past 10-20 years who are on no pollsters radar, how large now is the group of active/disgusted abstainers … all stuff the pollsters cannot get a handle on.
There is major major churn in, say, 70% turnout this time as compared with any other.
For presidential elections, it’s usually somewhere between 75 and 90%. But the last time the FN passed the first round (with Le Pen father in 2002), the voter turnout reached record highs on the second. Outside of FN voters, NOBODY wants the FN anywhere *near *power.
[QUOTE=Great White Dope]
From the rumblings I’m hearing, this is shaping up to be a Le Pen blow out victory.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure who you’re hearing this from, especially after last night’s debate where Marine out-fasched herself.
Presently Macron is beating her by eighteen points in the polls; the different in popular vote almost precisely matches, say, the 1984 Reagan-Mondale Slaughter. Even a better turnout performance by the FN campaign isn’t going to make that up.
Fascists remain very hopeful, but something has to happen big time for Le Pen to make up the gulf, and thank God for that.
Derek is hearing it in the heated imagination writings of the anglosaxon extreme right that he reads.
that is 100 per cent wrong. Macron attempted to push for some of the badly needed liberal reforms, he was not the architect of the primary economic policies of the PS or of Hollande.
That says more about the sources you listen to than anything else. You should consider getting out more.
I agree with your assessment, but I think you’ve mis-named the poster in question.
It is a footwear. Maybe I am guessing wrong what footwear is covered, but it is a footwear.
Right or wrong, the perception is the reality.
The perception of not well informed anglosaxons does not much matter to this voting.
Yes, I think it’s extremely weird. His parents freaked out and tried to stop it, but they kept in touch and apparently true love prevailed. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be allowed to marry or anything like that, but it’s *very *strange for someone about to become president of a major nation like France.
So you would also shrug it off if the genders were reversed? :dubious:
It is being shrugged off all the time right now.
Fifteen year old girls’ love affairs with their male teachers is being shrugged off all the time? :dubious:
Furthermore, I am–again–not talking about such a couple simply living out their lives, but about their becoming the President and First Spouse of a major industrialized power.
Y’know, you can just go ahead and say “Jews”. The “globalist” figleaf isn’t fooling anyone.
So they stayed home out of allegiance to the guy who had been campaigning his ass off for Clinton and telling everyone to vote for her for the last six months? That would be misguided indeed, except that it didn’t actually happen; Sanders voters voted for Clinton at just about exactly the rate at which supporters of the losing primary candidate typically vote for the winner, about 90%.
It’s amazing the lengths to which Clintonists will go to convince themselves that the loss was someone else’s fault, and that nominating someone who most Americans disliked before the campaign even started wasn’t a catastrophically stupid decision with an entirely predictable outcome.
Let’s please leave Clinton and Sanders out of this. I have no desire to rehash all that.
As an American political junkie, seconded.