Above, I should have said the Ohio GOP. Since that’s the one in the news.
If you’re referring to voting by mail, then that might be a better idea. Whatever makes it easiest and most convenient to vote.
Drutman and Iglesias are right about the fact that Democrats have been losing offices and Republicans have been gaining offices in recent years. They are wrong about the reasons.
It’s not because the Republicans have disenfranchised voters with barriers to voting. There’s no evidence that a single voter in the country has been disenfranchised. It’s not because the Republicans have attacked unions. Most Americans, if given the choice, choose not to join a union. It’s not because of any other pernicious plot by the Republicans.
It’s because the Democrats support so many things that most voters don’t want and oppose so many things that they do want. The Democrats support the ACA; most voters dislike it. The Democrats impose countless regulations that most voters hate. The Democrats keep trying to cancel the First Amendment, which most voters support. Democrats oppose the Keystone XL Pipeline; voters want it. Democrats oppose school vouchers; voters support them. Democrats support laws that make it easier to sue innocent people. Voters think that lawyers have enough money already. Democrats oppose right-to-work laws; voters support them.
I don’t know who will be the next President. Candidates personal stances affect that heavily. But as long as the Democrats remain totally out of touch with the American people, Republicans will do well overall.
ITR I have seen many of your points are debatable, and when looking at this ones:
The clear reply is that some Republican propaganda source has mislead you.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/28/it-s-time-for-gays-to-forgive-chick-fil-a.html
As shown, the same outfits that gave you the misleading impression that Democrats are out of touch, are in reality the same that are counting with the idea that many do remain ignorant about the changes that are going on. The point I made stands, I do think that the Republicans could win the Whitehouse too in 2016, but I have seen this movie before and the gerrymandering and propaganda eventually can not hide the ugly results many will face with no checks to the power the Republicans would get.
The Democrats aren’t imploding, so much as the same trends which are giving Democrats a major advantage for the Presidency are giving Republicans major advantages everywhere else. As Yglesias has pointed out, the Republicans are starting to dominate among groups with solid social networks, which means they can be motivated at the grassroots level much easier than the groups the Democrats are dominating among.
So while Democrats are doing better among populations that are growing, while REpublicans are doing better among populations that are shrinking, the Democrats are doing worse among populations that can mobilize effectively, and the Republicans are doing better among populations that can mobilize effectively.
This state of affairs won’t last long though. Whoever loses in 2016 will have a huge motivation to do better and so things will change again, as they always do. But in 2016, the big question is, will the Democrats win because of demographic change, or will Republicans win because their voters are more reliable? And whichever party wins in 2016 is likely to grow complacent. 40-50% of Democratic voters will think, “HIllary’s President, I can go back to sleep for four years.”
So what? Serious question. How does subtlety, or the alleged lack thereof, change the equation?
You haven’t been paying attention to the Senate lately. It’s the Democrats who are obstructing these days, refusing to even allow up or down votes on the floor. Even on bipartisan bills that pass through committee, in one case, by a vote for 27-3. When the bill in question came to the floor, it was blocked by the same Democrats who voted for it. THAT is obstruction.
Let me stop you right there. Is Michigan exempt from your “most voters” blanket assumption? Because if “most voters” in Michigan don’t want what the Democrats are offering, why did Democratic candidates receive 52,000 more votes than Republican candidates in the 2014 Congressional elections?
But even with those numbers favoring the Dems, the Republicans held a 9-5 advantage in Congressional seats. That means Democrats received 51% of the popular vote for Congress statewide, yet they only have 35% of the seats. That’s not voters rejecting Democratic policies. That is straight-up skullduggery.
I suspect this bullshit isn’t isolated to Michigan.
While there is some gerrymandering, it’s more the rural vs. urban issue. Urban areas are like 80% Democrat, rural areas are like 60% Republican, so simple math means you get more Republican seats with less Republican votes. It’s just like if you have a football team that wins by 50 when it wins, but loses by 3 when it loses. Such a team can very well lose the bulk of their games but outscore their opposition over the full season. That’s exactly what’s going on in state legislatures. Democratic districts are giving Democratic candidates like 80% of the vote, while in the rural areas, Republicans are winning by smaller margins. So the overall vote totals look like Democrats are winning, but they are actually losing more districts than they win.
You’re free to disagree with Drutman and Iglesias, but this post shows that you simply missed some of their essential points.
“Most voters dislike ACA”?? Much of this “dislike” comes from low-information voters who dislike what Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh tell them to dislike. When you consider the GOP-induced ignorance over a tangible issue like health insurance, to imagine that typical GOP voters have informed opinions about regulations or Keystone is laughable. Don’t forget that Fox News viewers are less well-informed than those who watch no news at all. Deteriorating education and defunding HeadStart lead to voter ignorance which is, some think, a deliberate goal of vested interests.
Drutman’s article stresses the correlations between social and political structures and electoral outcomes. I hope you and others reread it, as the above quote shows that the essential points were completely missed.
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The election is 12 months away, but I feel that I can predict it confidently! The final totals will be about 52%-48% or, very likely, even closer than that. We just can’t be sure which side will win.
Think of the huge differences between Bush-43 and what a Gore President would have been like. That election was also extremely close. The government elected in 2016 will select Supreme Court justices, influence the 2020 census, and dramatically affect America’s course. I hope that Hillary has a 50+% chance in this hugely important election, but I fear she does not.
America’s political system has become a travesty. A multi-party proportional-representation system would work much better; unfortunately that won’t develop any time soon.
ACA is also an example of failure to mobilize supporters and failure to persuade those on the fence. Obama has been a terrible salesman, vastly inferior to Reagan and Clinton in that regard. Hillary doesn’t promise to be much better.
Yes, polls show that more people dislike the ACA than like it. Get used to it. You can hurl insults and try to change the topic to bashing Hannity and Rush and Fox News all you want, but what does that accomplish?
Let’s take those one at a time. “Defunding HeadStart leads to voter ignorance”? How so? A non-ignorant person like yourself is surely aware that the federal government has commissioned studies of Head Start which have concluded, well, let’s just quote directly: “there was little evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group”. Since Head Start doesn’t make anyone any smarter, how would defunding it make anyone more ignorant?
As for “deteriorating education”, you would have to explain what you even mean by that before we can debate its effect on voting. Data shows test scores remaining nearly flat for generations. So despite the fact that government spending on education has increased considerably nearly every year for the past 40 year, our kids’ education hasn’t gotten better, but it also hasn’t deteriorated.
No, I didn’t miss any point in Drutman’s article. I rejected some of the points in his article because they’re untrue. There’s a difference between missing a point and rejecting it.
This is why a lot of discussion of the ACA misses the point, IMO. It really depends whether and when we’re talking about the ACA itself, or the principles and intent of what’s in the ACA in a more general sense, up to and including ones that actually lead to more of a single payer system and such. Discussions too easily tend to slip between the two areas without warning, and that makes for a lot of confusion and cross talk, IMO.
Not much, as this demonstrates that you did not learn anything from the previous encounter, suffice to say is that Republicans are dead wrong in assuming that the majority does want the ACA to be repealed, and that is the key. A good number of the ones that do dislike the ACA do so because they know that it can be better.
Regarding the issue at hand the point here is that it is clear that the Republicans can win by promising to end the ACA, but the rude awakening comes by realizing that the Republicans do not want to reform it, they want to end it. Unfortunately for them the polls do show that a majority does want the ACA reformed or improved. Not to end it. It is that last bit the one that the current Republicans wilfully ignore.
And similar to the ACA, things like wanting to do something about climate change is not considered as important, but even a slight majority of Republicans do want a concerted effort to deal with the issue, but noting much happens because the current Republican package does include a complete denial of the problem.
IMHO the current crop of Republicans seeking office is still being considered by many Republican voters as viable because they have not encountered or learned what it does mean to live under the cascade of woo woo that they are pushing. Eventually, like in the case of prohibition, the clear mishandling that would take place under the Republicans will be noted because they will be using more faith instead of facts to try to solve problems.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson said, he was not sure when the Republicans in power will listen more to science, evidence and moderate Republicans and less to the plutocrats and fundamentalists. Tyson is not sure when that will happen, but it will happen as the system is self correcting and the Democrats will still be there to take over if there is no progress coming from the Republicans but devolution.
What I do think is that many republicans moderate voters are not aware also of how how different the current crop of Republicans are from the ones from less than a generation ago. There is a lot of media sources that do want to keep that misrepresentation and to keep pretending that they are the same good old conservatives.
You don’t have to repeal it. Just make popular changes to it that just happen to cause it to fail: repeal the individual mandate, repeal the funding mechanisms, repeal the insurance mandates.
And after it fails then the Republicans will get the sole blame as they would be with total power. You are still wilfully ignoring that the Republicans are wrong by expecting that most people want a repeal or even a slow moving one (that will fool no one). And it is clear to me that many that do want to reform it are making the mistake of thinking that the Republicans will be sensible, same thing that the beer and wine makers thought that the Republican prohibitionists were. The beer and wine makers thought in the 1930’s that the Republicans were going to only ban hard liquors and so many did support the Republicans. The beer and wine makers got a very rude awakening. And eventually the Democrats got their support.
The Republicans using wishful thinking to expect that the problems that the ACA was dealing with will go away is not good policy. It will not be pretty for the nation, and for the Republican party too.
Your man is overstating the case.
The DPP’s roots are, as mentioned, in Mogens Glistrup’s Fremskridtspartiet, as is well-attested.
I can’t think of a single anti-Nazi resistance fighter in the leadership of either the DPP or in Fremskridtspartiet.
The only extreme right-wing group which did, in fact, have anti-Nazi vets in their ranks - Den Danske Forening - wasn’t even founded until 1987, fifteen years after Fremskridtspartiet. And, somewhat confusingly, it had just as many Nazi members as it had anti-Nazi members - anyone who hated immigrants was A-OK, it seems.
The chief ideologue behind Den Danske Forening - Søren Krarup - was not an anti-Nazi vet but a Lutheran pastor, who ultimately broke away from them to help found the DPP.
(He agreed that Europe’s Muslim population was a “totalitarian pestilence,” but did not agree that it necessarily needed to be rounded up and expelled / eradicated. He still praises Den Danske Forening as “the resistance fighters of our time.” They have since come around to the “but Breivik had good intentions!” camp.)
So, all of these people who dislike the ACA: Just which part of the ACA is it that they dislike?
Losing their insurance, any taxes or fees that apply to them, the individual mandate, and the price of their insurance going up, if applicable, due to mandates to cover things they don’t need. Oh, and unions hate the cadillac tax. It’s not in effect yet, but since it will go into effect during the next President’s term, Clinton’s had to pander on the issue.
Do you pay taxes?