Thank you. The alternative seems exceedingly reckless, but there are some who would risk it.
By the way, you may or may not have to give up your toy if Biden wins. It’s not certain he’ll get meaningful legislation through Congress, or that he’ll even try to outlaw your weapon.
Honestly, the risk of this happening is as close to zero as you can get.
Biden may half-heartedly suggest it, and congress might even consider it, but it won’t go anywhere.
We’re several presidential cycles away from meaningful gun legislation but each new cycle brings 18 million newly eligible voters with it, voters who are not enamored of the second amendment. At some point, we’ll get the guns.
I still don’t believe there are any people really undecided except for a small percentage so clueless they can’t tell the difference between Biden and Trump, and probably not sure what continent they live on and don’t think the word ‘gullible’ is not in the dictionary. Ok, this is America, there are a lot of people that stupid, but in this election we know most of them have decided to vote for Trump.
Wasn’t anything half hearted about his speech with Beto. He said that he intends to pursue an assault weapons ban and registration. If elected, I expect him to attempt exactly that…and if, as some expect, the Dems sweep both sides of the Hill as well as the White House, there is every reason to expect them to follow through.
How will your quality of life be negatively affected by having to register or sell back guns you don’t have?
It would not surprise me if these are the same people who voted for Obama before they voted for Trump. In other words, either non-existent or statistically insignificant.
Their significance in deciding the 2016 election has been debated, but they’re hardly “statistically insignificant.”
People lie on surveys.
I simply don’t trust people saying that they voted for Obama in 2012 and then swung for Trump in 2016.
Has anyone ever produced results that said Fred in Michigan and Barnie in Pennsylvania both voted for Obama and then cast their vote for Trump? Not a statistical Fred and Barnie, but the actual F&B, to the tune of 13% or whatever is the reliable claim of Obama then Trump voter.
I question these stats because there is such a stark difference between these two people that I simply don’t believe such swing votes exists in statistically significant numbers. Or maybe I just don’t understand the method being used to analyze and report this data.
I guess you are arguing about the magnitude of the sample, but personally know of at least two such voters (a husband and wife, where the wife just votes for who the husband tells her to). They voted for Obama but felt that Hillary had broken some law after the Comey memo and voted Trump. They very quickly regretted it and will not be voting for him again, FWIW.
Clearly there is no way to actually count up 13% or whatever of voters, so polling is all you have. But it seems very obvious that some voters must have voted for Obama and then Tump, just by looking at vote counts, unless you think there is a very large change in who voted every 4 years (which I think is wrong - most voters are pretty consistent about voting).
In 2012 Obama got 2.99M votes in PA while Romney got 2.68M. In 2012 Hillary only pulled 2.92M while Trump got 2.97M. So maybe you got some new voters and they all went Tump, but it seems more likely that new voters were largely Hillary voters while a decent number of older Obama voters switched to Trump. That also matches up with anecdotal evidence.
This is what I’m getting at. I do think (but obviously can’t prove) that the 2016 election was sufficiently polarized to support the wild swing of new Trump voters countered by the low enthusiasm of former Obama voters who simply couldn’t be arsed to come out for HRC.
There were clearly plenty of such voters.
Some subset are the type who tend to vote to “shake things up” — they’ll vote (at the presidential level) for whomever they perceive to be less associated with the “system/Washington.”
This particular tendency is clearest among those who support Bernie and Trump!
Like you, I find it hard to believe that such people exist…but the fact is, they do.
Population of PA is 12.7M. It seems to me that there is room, from a mathematical perspective, to account for the 13% change in the voting block of an Obama vs. Trump voter. Especially if you are willing to accept that some significant proportion of those polled lied about having voted for Obama.
I concede that they exists. I just don’t believe that they exist in significant numbers. Certainly not to the extent that warrants such frequent mention of the “Obama/Trump voter”. I just don’t buy that 13% figure without harder numbers that don’t rely on surveys/polls to back them up.
Well again it’s a poll, but the exit poll from 2016 showed 10% were “first time voters”. Of those, 57% voted Clinton. You just don’t typically get a huge number of new voters, and they are never monolithic (most of them are folks that just became old enough to vote, and thus actually skew Democratic).
Yeah, I don’t have a cite to back up my claims so I should just hang it up. It just beggars belief, that’s all.
The best way to defeat cancel culture isn’t at the ballot box; it’s simply by ignoring it and moving on with life.
There will always be a cancel culture or a boycott culture, but not all cancellations are equally effective. There’s also the anti-cancel, as we’re seeing in the row over Goya’s CEO.
You can’t control how people’s reactions and overreactions - certainly not at the ballot box.
I do believe in Obama-Trump voters. Both Obama and Trump were considered out of the mainstream candidates, so it’s not crazy to think that at least a fraction of Obama voters who are probably not keen on following the day-to-day sausage making of politics switched from Obama to Trump to, as you say, send a message. I think it’s a small percentage of voters and in some years past, they might not have mattered, but in 2016 they did.
That said, in a race as polarizing and close as 2016 was in terms of the electoral map, it was more than just Trump-Obama switcheroos who made the difference. First time voters in rural areas made the difference. People who rarely vote or hadn’t voted in years made the difference. Obama voters who mainly voted to support the first black president but who couldn’t be bothered to support the first white woman president also made the difference. People who had been voting for a long time and decided that 2016 was a total shit show and that they weren’t showing up to participate in it made the difference, too.
I could be wrong, but I think a lot of those voters are not liking what they did or didn’t do that day in November 2016.
Hannity calling Biden out last night for running the most radical presidential campaign in history. Trump saying Biden will abolish the suburbs and take away your windows. Pence delivering a hyped up address to denounce socialism and the threat of electing Biden.
Imagine believing after all these decades of the Red Scare, that Joe friggin’ Biden is going to be the one who ushers in socialism.
Well Biden isn’t flying incessantly between the swing states, holding flag and banner rallies of acolytes, drumming up populist support, banging the lectern promising policies for a better, brighter future, ratcheting up the moral outrage, putting out poll-honed sound grabs for the evening news.
He’s holed up in his house, making no keynote speeches, barely getting a mention on mainstream media.
… how is that not a radical campaign? 