Get off your high-horse.
Improve your presence in real life. Anytime someone comes across one of you, you are very odd, and unable to relate to the people you think you are trying to help. They notice. You always give off the vibe of a veterinarian’s assistant tending to a sick dog.
This post really illustrates the problem that republicans have. In their view, if anyone is criticizing them, it must be because that person is condescending and not aware of what’s in “their” media.
Have you ever watched Hannity on a night where there’s a lot going on in trump world? It’s a parallel universe. This is not hard to see happening. I’m talking about the days news cycle, not year old stuff and staler. Do you really think that CNN doesn’t talk about IRS abuse against conservatives every day because they are “liberal”?
Has some portion of the Left begun openly saying that if democracy produced Trump and the Republicans, than democracy should be abolished?
That’s an interesting question! Have you got an interesting answer?
The percentage of people who think Trump is honest has been falling steadilly, and is now down around 36%. People are definitely catching on. He’s still getting a surprising amount of support (around 40%), but 40% approval is a disaster for a president in his first 100 days.
True, and good news, a rare combination these days. But even here, in the Olympian heights of intelligence and probity, there remain a rigid cluster that will not be moved by reason or fact. Roughly, twenty percent of the US population, is my personal WAG.
My theory is that Trump’s low approval rating is largely a symptom of our current hyper-partisan environment. Do you think that HRC would have a significantly better approval rating if she had won? I don’t.
Well, yes, that “hyper-partisan environment” thing is a definite problem, and we appreciate your efforts to resolve it. Such as they are.
I think the fact that his rating is decreasing is evidence against your theory, unless you think the country has somehow become significantly more partisan in the past 87 days. Notice, for example, that both self-identified “Conservatives” and “Republicans” have lower opinions of Trump than they did in February. I suspect that’s less due to partisanship, and more due to the fact that Trump is repeatedly proving his incompetence.
No; I was hoping someone else did.
Well, OK, of course there are! We of the left includes a wide array of humans, some of whom, statistics show, are nuts. There is probably a Kim Jong Il fan club or a group of persons who think Karl Marx was Jesus. I have personally witnessed a Stalinist and a Maoist arguing over who represented the “real” Communism. There are likely hundreds, perhaps thousands of such people.
On the other hand, you have people who voted for and support Il Douche. 'Nuff sed.
I think we reached hyper-partisan heights during the Obama administration, and he didn’t have such a low approval rating.
His approval rating has been pretty much bouncing around in the low 40’s ever since he took office. I don’t think we’re enough outside of the margin of error of most approval polls to really call it a “decreasing” trend (it’s actually been on it’s way up in the last two weeks - from a low-point of 39.8 on April 3rd), but YMMV.
Obama had long stretches of underwater approval, but he enjoyed a “honeymoon” period at the beginning of his Presidency. Obama’s low of 39.8 on December 2, 2013 actually matches Trump’s low exactly.
I don’t know how folks manage to say that people who want to follow the popular vote are trying to abolish democracy, buy they do.
The lower his approval ratings are the more the public are in actual concord, which is the opposite of “partisan.” Eventually, let’s say for instance if there is russian collusion traced to him, it may go all the way to “unison.”
I think Clinton would have had healthy approval ratings no matter what. She was never as bad as the all the squealing about her. This is just more campaign rhetoric that doesn’t survive past election day, like donald’s promises about almost everything.
Democrats shook the soft-on-defense label by…supporting $600 billion defense budgets, drone strikes, wars to topple Gaddafi, etc.
Do they shake the soft-on-illegal-immigration label with deportations, punishing employers who hire illegal immigrants, etc.? Obama already deported a lot.
Do they shake the pro-abortion label by curbing abortion, etc.? At a certain point they would be “shedding labels” by becoming…Republicans.
That doesn’t necessarily happen when you’re Just Asking Questions, yanno.
Do please tell us where you got the idea to ask that one.
[quote=“Iggy, post:4, topic:784510”]
Here’s a start.
[ol][li]Work on the state level. State legislatures are where most of the gerrymandering happens. Only a few states pass the district drawing task to an ostensibly non-partisan group. If you don’t control the legislatures you are facing a decade of elections with an unfavorable map.[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]
The problem with all these great suggestions is the Democratic Party doesn’t give a single flick what we tell them will work, and this is a prime example. If you follow politics – which I have to assume you do – you’re aware of the tragically lost opportunity the Democrats had in the recent Kansas election. A Bernie-Sanders-supporting candidate closed a >20-point lead to a single digit against a Republican incumbent who had handily won reelection last time he ran.
And he did it without an iota of help from either the national or state Democratic Party. Imagine how handily he could have handed that Republican his ass if the Democrats had said “Yes” when he asked for their support.
Instead we now have more excuse-making from party leaders that rings so absurd it’s astounding.
Seriously, this could have been such a major turning point that it would have sparked huge turnout numbers across the country organically from the excitement of it. But just like the Democrats did to Bernie in the Primaries, they sabotaged this candidate too … because Thompson was Bernie’s candidate, not Hillary’s.
It was profoundly stupid. Expect more of the same over the next two years. The Democrats are wholly uninterested in Progressive policies that kept them in power for nearly a half century. Unless there’s a photo OP where Hillary can once again take credit for a policy being enacted that she had nothing whatsoever to do with, and in fact fought against ($15 minimum wage, tuition-free public college, etc.)
You must not have followed Dean on social media during the primaries. He was not only a 100% whore for Hillary, he was mean and ugly to Bernie supporters. And he was one of many superdelegates who literally said he couldn’t care less how the citizens of his state voted (overwhelmingly for Bernie, as it happens), he was doing what he damn well pleased. That’s the height of arrogance and a flip of the bird to democracy. And it happened all over the country.
In fact, if you want to know the first thing Democrats could do to inspire greater turnout is eliminate the undemocratic superdelegates. Why the hell should people care about voting when they know these primarily unelected cronies are just going to nominate whomever the hell they want anyway?
Because while First Past the Post sounds romantic in theory, it’s actually as undemocratic as what we have now. There may be better ways than the Electoral College, but winner-take-all isn’t one of them. Frankly I don’t want New York and California to dictate the entire county’s elected leaders. And that’s basically how Hillary “won” the (really nonexistent) popular vote: by stacking the decks in those two enormous states where all her wealthy Hollywood and Wall Street friends live and hold enormous sway.
Finally, I’m putting this here so I can refer back to it when it proves true: Unless the national Democrats start embracing Bernie’s popular policies and candidates, and especially if they run another establishment stooge who is for more war, more oil drilling, more pipelines, job-killing and democracy destroying trade deals, and against universal Medicare for all, a higher minimum wage, and tuition-freepublic universities for president again, Trump will win a second term.
Shayna wrote: “Frankly I don’t want New York and California to dictate the entire county’s elected leaders.”
“New York” and “California” wouldn’t “dictate” anything. PEOPLE WOULD. In a straight up popular vote, the states would be as meaningless as as counties are presently, even though conservatives love to cite how many counties trump won.
See the link I provided that shows why that’s a ridiculous assault on democracy.