I was born in 1994. (September 25th, 1994, that is- I was able to vote last election). I got interested during my last year in high school due to the election year, this year, not so much. Third parties? I could waste my vote by not voting altogether- no state is going to go green or yellow anytime soon.
Money matters in politics (even though most politicians say they want money out of politics…right :rolleyes:), and I’d rather spend my money in something else than politics.
I’m a millennial, but I’m not with the group when it comes to traits- aside from my content choices, I’ve got my future planned out, picking alternative plans to make sure my future is in good hands (and within a couple of weeks I’ll have a job and have no student debt, as I’ve explained in this thread.)
I’ve also kept my ears open and visited message boards (besides here) for the past couple of years, probably one of the unfortunate side effects of being alone, an only child, and ostracized from the friggin’ crowd cause at the time I was socially awkward outside the computer. Well…that, and I was bullied in high school- though as I’ve known in life, eventually things turn around. As I’ve said in life, being an only child has its advantages- more food, access to places already full (except the bar at the top of the World Trade Center- there was one seat open and I still couldn’t get in…), and more reasons to enjoy life without being held back with another individual behind or ahead of me.
Back to the topic- I’d like to get a clue when it comes to voting, but I don’t care- and neither do the politicians. What’s the point?
I think a lot of people these days are less averse to experiencing something bad, temporarily, if they think it will be for long-term good.
I think a significant number of Bernie supporters would be willing to see America suffer through a one-term Trump presidency if it meant “teaching the Democratic Party a lesson” in the long term.
Now whether the Democratic Party would actually “learn” what the Bernie supporters want, is another matter. But many people are perfectly to take one step back for several steps forward - or, maybe even take 10 steps back for 15 steps forward.
I see no one is acknowledging the fact that (when you take race out of it) 18-30yos are actually less likely to support Hillary than are those over 30. That’s something I didn’t even realize when I started this thread (I thought they were more supportive, just not by a sufficient margin), and it’s pretty damning.
I’m losing patience with helping you “get it straight”, but I’ll take another stab. The people I’m irked with are, broadly speaking, on the left. If you just laid out anonymized lists of positions on varying issues (to whatever degree you could define Trump’s positions), they would very strongly prefer Clinton’s (or even leave the two of them out of it, and use the respective parties’ platforms). Not on every point, but most (I don’t agree with the Democratic consensus on some points, like Islam, but I don’t let that obscure my broad agreement with the party’s agenda, and my broad disagreement with the GOP’s). That puts them on “my team”.
As does the fact that if Republicans do get control of the presidency along with both houses of Congress, these people are guaran-fucking-teed to be vocally outraged by pretty much every law that gets passed. Yet you and some others like **LHOD **seem to think that if this comes to pass, I should just grit my teeth and smile and nod, not holding the slightest grudge about the fact that if all these people protesting Republican hegemony had just fucking voted for Clinton, we wouldn’t be in this pickle. :dubious:
Fuck that. I’m not Jesus, turning the other cheek. I’m not even Christian, for chrissakes.
ETA: To address what **Velocity **said, if lefties think they can take the party hostage from a minority position by threats of murder-suicide, they’ve got another thing coming. If that’s their tack, then they are just our political enemies, they make our job harder, but we can’t cave to their demands and let them set the agenda without compromise.
If you’re looking to see which generation is going to win/cost us this election, you might look at the difference between their support for the two candidates.
Obviously there’s some blurring of generations here, but this WaPo poll from September 5-8 breaks down generational support as follows, with the numbers being Clinton-Trump-Johnson-Stein:
<40: 47-24-17-8
40-64: 43-47-7-0
65+: 50-45-3-0
So under-40 voters favor Clinton over Trump by 23 points, while 40+ voters are a wash. But the kids are the ones who are throwing the election. Gotcha.
Hey, they’ve seen the far right wingnuts succesfully hold hostage and take over the other party, I can easily imagine them wondering why can’t they do the same over here.
No. That ignores the racial differences that are more powerful than age. Black people over 30 support Hillary more than Black people under 30. White people over 30 support Hillary more than white people under 30. Hispanic people over 30 support Hillary more than Hispanic people under 30. Asian people over 30 support Hillary more than Asian people under 30. It’s just that all voters under 30 are much less likely to be white, so this difference is obscured.
ETA: You’re also skewing it by making the dividing line at 40. Thirtysomethings are the best group Hillary’s got. But they are not classified in the “young” group I’m referring to here.
I suppose there are drawbacks to my proposal — and certainly passage is unlikely! — but is “pretty damn nutty idea” your idea of an intelligent rebuttal?
The cite is upthread, the 538 post. They have a graph showing that within every ethnic group, voters under 30 are less supportive of Hillary Clinton than voters over 30. And that’s even giving my case a bit of a handicap because I’m really talking about voters under 25 here.
What difference? Are you saying a particular racial subset of under-30s is to blame, or what? If not, then the racial differences don’t matter, do they?
OK, let’s look at the numbers at the link in your OP. According to their table, from a SurveyMonkey poll from Aug. 22-28:
The point of that graph is to show the relative difference between demographic groups. The 18-30 numbers come from a different survey than the overall numbers, so I don’t think it’s wise compare those numbers directly because the methodologies may be very different.
If I could post an image, I would do so. Go back to the link:
Look at the first graph. It does not feature Asian Americans as I wrongly remembered, but it shows that black voters under 30 are less supportive of Hillary than all blacks (which includes those under 30, so the actual difference is greater than what is shown), and that the same holds true for whites and Hispanics.
The people at 538 thought it was valid to compare them, hence the graph–and I tend to trust their expertise on the subject over most anyone else’s, including yours.
Think positively. Americans were so disillusioned by eight years of Bush the Younger they actually voted for a black guy. There’s a wonderful candidate waiting on the other side of two Trump terms.
Bit of an excluded middle, but I think these millennials are in two camps which favor accelerationist thinking: 1. Privileged, so Trump winning won’t bother them too much. 2. Up to their eyeballs in student debt, can’t find a job, the entire political culture seems ridiculous, they don’t think normal candidates will do anything but maintain the status quo…oh, you’re saying Trump will burn it all to the ground? Let’s test that idea out.
If only there were a lefty-lib sort who was popular with the base and independents and didn’t have a toxic cloud of scandal and corruption hanging over them (real or imagined) and who didn’t have a multi-decade blood feud with the right. Alas, unicorns like that don’t grow on trees.
Right, sports are mere escapism. Politics is more like war. People’s lives are at stake. Especially for a powerful country like America. I’m guessing politics engenders such strong emotional reactions because it impacted individuals so strongly back in caveman days. If the wrong faction took hold you might be banished from the tribe or have your skull bashed in.
Fair enough: I can go with that. Leaving aside the murky condition of the “war on terror”, the traditional, Geneva Convention idea of war is that if the enemy shoots at you and you capture them, you treat them well, let the Red Cross visit, and then let them go free when the war is over. If one of your own soldiers shoots at you or tries to sabotage your cause or simply refuses to fight, you may execute them on the battlefield, or if they are lucky they will just get thrown in the brig for years and years, long after the war is over.
Getting undermined by your comrades is much more of a betrayal than being attacked by your enemies, and I don’t understand why this is even controversial.
Yabbut. You remember how, despite House and Senate majorities, Dubya wasn’t willing to privatize Social Security unless some Dems went along so he could claim it was bipartisan?
Neither Trump nor Paul Ryan nor Mitch McConnell is like that. They’ll tear it all* down, even if it means the Dems retake Congress in 2018 (which won’t happen, the Senate will be out of reach), knowing that it’s a hell of a lot harder to build it all back up again than to maintain what you’ve spent generations building up.
*All: who the hell knows how far they’d go? Obamacare? Dead. Dodd-Frank? Dead. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Dead. Obama’s executive orders combating climate change? Dead. Hopes of a sane Supreme Court in the next decade or so? Dead. Medicare? Voucherized. Social Security? Who knows? Minimum wage? Still at $7.25, assuming they don’t repeal the minimum wage entirely. And who knows what they’ll do to food stamps and stuff like that, but it won’t be good.
Seems like the attitude that would happen when one party takes a voting bloc for granted.
So are those groups racist, or sexist, or both? That was the explanation I heard for people supporting Clinton and not Obama. Could it be that the two candidates are different?
Your odd definition of ‘comrades’ and ‘enemies’ itself, I think. Regarding an age cohort as ‘comrades’ since they’re more on your side than other age cohorts, and having regarded them so, turning around and being more upset when they aren’t even more on your side than they are, is the troublesome notion here.
They are what they are. They’re more for Hillary than Boomers or Xers or seniors, but the younger ones - under 25’s - aren’t as for Hillary as you’d like.
You know what? They’re new to this ‘grownup’ business. Few of us were all that responsible or thoughtful when we were that age. (I damn sure wasn’t.) A smaller proportion of people in that age group vote than is true for other age groups, and they’ve typically (#notallkids) invested less thought in their choices.
Expecting the kids to come through and save us, when we older folks can’t do the job ourselves, is a pretty foolish notion, if you ask me.