Yeah, the problem will be if Arab-American voters stay home on Election Day and not vote at all.
I kind of get that reasoning. A long, long time ago, I indulged in it myself, not voting (or supporting–I was too young to vote) for HHH in 1968 because of his alliance with LBJ, which got us Richard Nixon and Four More Years of war in Vietnam, my strongest objection to LBJ in the first place.
Although the most recent poll I see has Trump leading. Sample size only 500. And I am skeptical that the pollster may be fudging to try to make a point. But still.
One possible explanation? Many Muslims are pretty socially conservative. The Trump anti-woke messaging may resonate and if both parties are going to support Israel might as well vote on those lines?
But some is basic human psychology. We want to punish those we feel have wronged us even if it hurts us more.
I grew up in Arab-heavy Dearborn. Before about 2002-2004, they were pretty Republican. They turned out heavily for W in 2000. I think it’s a combination of their religion and “traditional values,” but they’re also a community of small entrepreneurial business owners, low-tax bootstrap fiscal conservatives. The notion that the Republican party is the party of business appealed to many of them. Then after 9/11, they got on the George W patriotism train…until the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Then they soured on Republicans because of the aggressive foreign policies the admin enacted in that region. The Arab community swung strongly Democratic, turning out for Obama and Clinton and Biden. But now they seem to be ready to take another collective swing away from Democrats as they see the Biden/Harris administration doing nothing to help (and maybe even actively supporting Israel in hurting) their community being slaughtered and starved in the Middle East.
My point is, this is a community of voters that really holds no strong allegiances to any political party. They’ll turn away from a party that’s in power and is seen as hurting their brothers and sisters across the globe. We saw it with Bush, and we’re seeing it again now. This may end up costing Harris the White House. Yes, we can scream about how much worse Trump will be for them, but right now they’re very unhappy with theDemocrats in power, and that’s how they’re voting.
I have been saying this. I’ve taken the opportunity to point out to a few young people I know who will be voting for President for the first time how politics right now are not normal. I’ve said something very similar about how what we experience when we come of age is what we think normal is. It takes a dedicated attention or someone shoving it in your face to learn some history.
It’s not just politics this applies to, it’s everything about the way we live, how society interacts, how we live, and what we value.
I first observed in the '90s that medicine made a huge transition in expectation during the 20th century. At the beginning, if you were seriously ill or wounded, a doctor mostly could just tell you how you were going to die. By the end, we expected to be able to go to the doctor and have him or her tell us not only what was wrong, but be able to do something about it.
Neither of those was really true, but that was the expectation people had of medicine.
The top end of that hasn’t advanced much toward that expectation.
As simple as it is, I have to concur that a combination of these two responses provide the core answer to the thread title. Trump and his supporters have lied so bigly and for so long that to a significant portion of the population this has become the “new normal.” It’s sometimes easy to forget or dismiss that in addition to being a former president Trump has been been on the national political stage for 10 years now. Combine that with a younger electorate just coming of age, (Odesio’s under 25 set), and this is all a lot of people know and understand.
To those of us who remember Clinton or even the Bush years, Trump seems like an abberation. To that younger set he’s not. He is the Republican party because the party has completely rolled over and allowed it to happen for politically expedient reasons.
When one party is allowed to lie with complete, straight faced impunity and half the country just accepts it, (because they believe him, because they want to believe him, because they don’t think it’s important, because they know he’s lying but are more interested in the little ‘R’ after the name, etc…) This twisted morass of lies and half truths becomes what a lot of people simply regard as “politics as usual.”
It’s self-inflicted ignorance, and it’s going to kill democracy in this country if we’re not careful.
Unfortunately, aside from tirelessly pointing out the lies every single time, I don’t know what else can really be done. I follow all the Trump and election related threads here and every single day there’s multiple new instances of bullshit that needs to be addressed. Psychologically this neverending wave of gaslighting just gets to be overwhelming and just makes you want to throw your hands up and weep for what Trump has done to the electorate in this country.
How can Trump still win at this point? Because people are DUMB.
deep breath
I’m better now.
Well, I’m pretty fucking far from being better.
It is looking more and more every day like Trump will get re-elected. I doubt I can endure another 4 years of him destroying this country.
Good news! It won’t take him four years.
There are no structural changes in his direction. It’s just RNG from the polls.
If anything, he’s melting down more and more, has more and more legal problems at the moment, and has more and more prominent people speaking out against him.
It absolutely fucking sucks that it’s this close at this point. It makes me hate people. But I don’t think there is any particular shift in favor of Trump.
Yeah, the country would come apart and we would have a revolution within six months if he were to be elected again. In my mind–and I mean this–it’s a bit of a win-win. We either get a normal president for next four years, or we start tearing it all down to the studs and expunging all of the antidemocratic paraphernalia, such as the EC, Senate, Supreme Court, gerrymandering… the list goes on.
Where is that like button?
I don’t think young people like Trump, however, so it’s good that he’s the face of the Republican party to them. Once Trump is gone, the GOP brand will be destroyed.
I get you are eternally optimistic about Harris winning but the tide appears to be turning in Trump’s favor over this last week.
Harris is losing black and Hispanic voters and a D victory in Michigan is getting more and more shaky by the day. It will be close no doubt but it feels as if the momentum is shifting in favor of the GOP.
But the momentum has been shifting back and forth since Harris entered the race.
I don’t think anything major has changed in favor of Harris either. Nor do I think she has done anything to lose a particular type of voter.
If something had really changed, then I would be concerned, regardless of the poll results.
I was in the West Bank when Trump got elected in 2016. My Palestinian colleague said it makes no difference which party has the US presidency, “they both are ok with our extermination, but the Democrats feel bad about it.”
It’s not that there is a shift in favour of Trump. It’s that there isn’t a particularly big shift towards Harris - not enough to “Trump-proof” this thing or prevent it from being a coin toss.
At this point, if most people were critical thinkers, there should be no undecideds and no Trump supporters. But there are, seemingly lots of them.
More truth in this than the other 2775 posts combined.
LOL, I think that’s been mentioned before…
I am concerned. I have been concerned. My concern is unchanged. Little has really changed.
Little not nothing. The escalation towards a direct Israel Iran war is something. And the hurricanes. Of course they are something of major significances far beyond the election, but in this discussion those are not the subject. Unless there is some sudden step down and progress Harris will lose some otherwise winnable votes in MI. Maybe even if there is that sudden good news? There may be no winning those votes now.
But polling. Been in toss up and remains so. And I appreciate 538’s perspective:
trends, not levels. If you compare Harris’s margin over Trump in polls released Oct. 10 to the results of previous polls by the same pollsters in the same places, Harris’s margin has increased by an average of 0.4 percentage points.
Media narratives will frame polls to maximize anxiety and thus clicks and eyeballs. The momentum though has not meaningfully shifted.
The story remains which way, if any, the systemic error falls, which will be the result of who bothers to vote.
Speaking of momentum… new Morning Consult poll has Harris up nationally 51% to 46%–her highest lead yet:
Does it mean anything? Not really anything new, but I do think Harris has the edge on the surface of things and, I hope, a bigger edge beneath it.