-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
- Status
Neither was Tim Kaine. Or Hillary for that matter. Likability is not the priority of the DNC for president. Adherence to neo-liberal policy is.
Xepa777
Banned
Has anyone here read this thread on Reddit about the Repo situation? Looks like this could be the big one. The fed repos are an attempt to prop up the global banking industry : wallstreetbets
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Coolio2000
Member
I’m pulling for the Sanders/AOC ticket! If you want to destroy the economy, might as well be all in. 
Trump hates anyone pushing back with reality. He's been pushing out anyone from his orbit who does anything but kiss his posterior. It's the nature of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. They can't handle a reality in which they aren't 100% right 100% of the time and everyone agrees they are the font of all knowledge.
Trump has created that bubble around him and deeply entrenched himself in it for the last few years. When he was in the private sector he did quite a bit to insulate himself from reality, but now he has much more ability to do it.
In the 2016 debates, he was a terrible debater and dodged one of the early GOP debates to do his own rally, but came back to the debates when he got backlash for it. The GOP debates played to bullies and Trump did OK there, but when he had to do substantive debates with Hillary he was terrible.
Trump hasn't had to debate anyone in 4 years and incumbent presidents always struggle with the debates in their re-elections. Obama's first debate against Romney didn't go well for him. Neither did GW Bush's first against Kerry.
Trump has a very, very fragile ego. Hillary had neither the instinct nor the inclination to hit that very hard, but when she did, Trump became derailed. Trump has become very used to everyone saying yes to him and being able to fire or expel anyone who has the temerity to not immediately say yes to him. Trump is even more vulnerable to attack in a debate now than he was in 2016. He has gotten used to being surrounded by yes people.
Biden's debate skills are fresh. He's not the greatest debater, but he has an instinct for where Trump's soft spots are and he'll have a first class team of people around him who will help him sharpen every barb in his arsenal. Bloomberg hired one of the top experts in the world in NPD to advise him in dealing with Trump. He will probably offer his services to Biden.
Trump will probably also be in a fragile state by the debates. He thinks he's an expert on everything and he is master of the economy as well as everything else. The more reality conflicts with his beliefs, the more agitated he gets. (Common with several personality disorders.)
This is shaping up to be a bad year to be president. People are very nervous about COVID-19 and he's bungling the response. On the economic front, the economy has been showing signs of softening for a few months, but now it's beginning a serious decline. Trump will likely be very touchy and reactionary by September and October.
If Trump doesn't dodge the debates all together, I expect Biden to throw Trump off his game at every turn with doses of reality.
Rachel Bitecofer has the best bead on the current political climate. Unlike most pundits who look to the past for patterns, she looks at the current psychological state of the country. She has been predicting for a year that any Democrat would probably beat Donald Trump.
A re-election is always first and foremost an initiative on the incumbent. The first question voters ask before considering the opposition is whether the incumbent should be re-elected. If the answer is "no", the challenger automatically has an advantage. Those people are poised to vote for the challenger unless the challenger proves themselves worse than the incumbent. All they have to be is a tiny bit better alternative. Incumbent presidents' share of the popular vote is almost always within a couple of points of their approval rating on election day. Trump's polling average has never cracked 50% and the Five Thirty Eight average hovers in the low 40s (42.8% today). If you look at the internals of the approval polls Trump is very close to 50% strongly disapprove in every poll. That's around 50% who will vote against Donald Trump under just about any circumstances.
Without a strong third party candidate drawing any significant portion of the vote, an incumbent president's odds of getting re-elected drop off sharply as the popular vote gets below 50%. At 47% the odds get very long and it become pretty much mathematically impossible when you get down to around 42%. Another thing the never Trump Republicans could do to further weaken Trump is to run their own candidate to draw off the conservative vote. There are rumors that Joe Walsh is planning on doing just this.
People who strongly disapprove of a candidate are strongly motivated to get out and vote against them. That's happening this year. Biden doesn't have to look amazing, he just needs to look like a better alternative to Trump. He has almost 50% baked in. Among people who normally vote Democrat, some voted third party and some stayed home in 2016 because they didn't like Hillary and figured she was going to win anyway. Those people are deeply motivated by guilt to vote blue no matter who this year.
Most people who disapprove of Trump just want to get back to a "normal" presidency. Once Biden showed he was viable in South Carolina, Democrats have flocked to him. He is a known quantity and even if he is senile as hell, he's better than Trump.
Another factor are the people who do approve of Trump. In most polls the 42% approval is about 1/2 strongly approve and 1/2 moderately approve. A few polls that have done a deeper dive into why people approve of him, quite a few approve of his handling of the economy and nothing else. If the economy goes into recession this year, which looks likely now, about 1/2 of the people who do approve of him will abandon him. Trump knows this which is why he's more concerned about the economic impact of COVID-19 than the impact on human health. Of course because he's an idiot, he's making the problem worse with his responses.
All the Democratic nominee needs to show is that they aren't scary and will be a better option than Trump. If Trump can convince enough people the Democratic nominee is scarier than him, he wins re-election. If he can't, he loses.
Think of it a bit like the 100m at the Olympics. The goal is to win the gold medal. This year the field is weak, Usain Bolt may be the world record holder, but he isn't running this year. Other top runners aren't in the final either. All you need to do is be the first across the finish line to get the gold medal. It probably won't be a world record. It may be the slowest 100m in history, but the first one across the line is the winner. The only two viable runners are over 70 and neither is terribly spry, but one is dragging a giant albatross of his record behind him. Biden could fall down, but all he needs to do is stay upright and get across the line first. Everything else is just noise.
Last edited:
Who is AOC?I’m pulling for the Sanders/AOC ticket! If you want to destroy the economy, might as well be all in.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. The House rep from Queens, NY. She's too young to hold the office though.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Possibly, or they will just blame it on the virus. Sure Trump is bungling this but I honestly don't know if there is anything any president could do to stop the effects of the virus from damaging the economy. I suppose that maybe some evangelicals will see it as a sign that Trump is out of favor with the lord and vote against him.
Green New Deal also, and a good age for the office
Norbert
TSLA will win
Norbert
TSLA will win
There is no recipe for getting out of the Trump dilemma, or some debating technique to try beat him at his own game.
Agreed. Therefore, the only approach is staying on the progressive program and ignoring him. It's all about messaging. Talk about what other countries (mostly Scandinavia) already have. Volunteer taxes will rise yet ask, "do you expect more and not pay for it? I don't want to be a free-loader!" Pivot to how billionaires are free-loaders, how the military protects Big Oil, etc. When you are in the right this is easy-peasy.
Trump blames everyone but himself for everything. That's a given.
There are ways to deal with a crisis, even one that is not completely in human control. Trump has been trying to play down the threat with lies right from the start. It's obvious to everyone that has two brain cells to rub together that Trump is lying constantly about everything.
In situations like this, people want reassurance that things are going to be OK, not denials there is a problem when it's obvious there is one. When it's obvious the people at the top are incompetent and lying about it, people will overreact and be overly cautious. Trump's lies to try and keep the economy propped up are backfiring and making the economic damage worse because investors know he's botching the response.
His lies are also causing the medical world to overreact. The reality is that while this is a highly contagious virus, it's mortality may be lower than the seasonal flu. The data has been coming from several sources that 80% of the people who get it have a mild case. But it's causing a panic in the population and the more Trump's lies are proved to be lies, the less people trust anything coming from him and his people. The boy who cried wolf phenomenon sets in and people assume things are really worse than Trump says, even if they are getting better.
He's put himself in a situation where any credibility he had left is gone.
Black voters are generally high information and very pragmatic. In 2008 they liked Barack Obama from the start, but they didn't get behind him until he proved white people would vote for him.
A pragmatic look at the political realities in Washington it's clear Sanders' health care plan is DOA. It will never pass until the Democrats have a commanding majority in the House and Senate as well as the White House. There are quite a few Democrats who won't vote for it under the current climate because they know what happened in the 2010 midterms. And the ACA was not going to put the very powerful insurance company lobby out of business like Bernie's plan would.
Pragmatists are breaking for Biden because his proposals, while not as ambitious, have a better chance of success. And more importantly, the pragmatic voters think Biden has a better chance of beating Trump, which is the #1 concern of most primary voters.
This election is all about whether Trump should be president in 2021 or not and whether the Republicans should have any control in Congress or not. All the pie in the sky ideas are a lot of hot air because very little of it is going to happen in the current political environment.
Time favors these ideas over the long run. The youngest cadre in the electorate (which votes in very small numbers compared to the older voters) is quite possibly the most liberal in the history of this country. The US is also becoming browner with the percentage of whites in the population declining at about 1/2% a year. This makes the vote every presidential election 2% less white. 2016 was supposed to be the tipping point, but Trump got some whites who had given up voting to turn out and the Republicans successfully suppressed the non-white vote so the ethnic make up of the electorate looked like 2012. The 2018 midterms showed a return to trend so the 2020 electorate will likely be 4% less white than 2012 and 2016.
But we're still close to the cusp. The Silent Generation (born 1930 to 1945) is the most reliable voting block with Boomers being the second most reliable. These blocks are much whiter than the general population and more conservative than the under 40s. But time will remove this generation and the current under 40s will vote more as they get older, just like every other generation before them.
We will reach a point where these ideas become mainstream and eventually law, but this election cycle is about something much more fundamental: will we be able to hold a presidential election in 2024. For the first time since the ratification of the constitution that's a real question. To everyone who wants to see the constitution hold, a Democratic government is the answer, even if they don't agree with any policy position the Democrats hold.
People are in fear and all the policy debates by the Democratic candidates is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The Democrats believe talking about health care is what caused the blue wave, and it may have brought out a few voters, but what brought out the most voters was Donald Trump.
Last edited by a moderator:
Buckminster
Well-Known Member
Unless martial law is declared, there is no way it’s a low turn out.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Hmm, corona virus quarantine right around election day...
- Status
Similar threads
