I can't get my head around US President Joe Biden polling poorly and Donald Trump polling well
I can't get my head around President Biden polling poorly and Trump polling well.
I don't think I need to provide details for people on this site, but Trump was so horrible as a president and President Biden has done such a good job. Even if Biden was a passive placeholder four years of him would have been better than 4 more years of Trump.
I don't understand where the low polls are coming from. Particularly for groups that would not do particularly well under a Trump regime like African Americans and youth.
I see some people complaining about President Biden's age, but his administration has been doing a good job and Trump is only about 4 years younger ( and in much worse shape ).
I don't get where the hate is coming from.
I remember the "red wave" that never happened and articles explaining why polls aren't as accurate as they used to be. However, that answer feels too easy to me, a cop out.
Maybe people are angry about greedflation. However, Trump's presidency when it wasn't about vindictiveness was all about neglect. I can't believe people think Trump would be better for the economy -- that he would even try beyond the stock market so he polls well.
*Disclaimer:
My apologies if this is the wrong place for this conversation. I thought here or "talk" would be the best choices, though people in "talk" might not want political conversations.
People down on the ground level, regular folks, are being squeezed. Fewer jobs, lower pay, no raises, everything costs more, capital expenses like housing and vehicles and major appliances ... they can't cover it all. It's not about them being lazy, they're just not being afforded opportunities. There's no upward mobility.
Because they're not in the capital class. They don't have enough money to play the market, to see stocks going up and know it directly affects their bottom line for the better. That it's going to make next month's bills easier to manage, take stress and anxiety off their shoulders.
Why should they care if Wall Street makes more this month or this year than last? Hint; they don't. And rightly. Why should they care if rich people get richer, when they themselves are struggling and wondering where the money will come from?
Trump is a symptom. Yes he's deeply, deeply stupid. Yes he's dangerously narcissistic. Yes he wants absolute power because he's the best and most intelligent and capable person in history, and he knows best. I hope I don't have to point out that previous sentence is from his perspective; he's the best, just listen to him for about ten seconds and he'll tell you.
He puts on a show that caters to the fears of the Right.
The Republican base is more likely to be somewhat more reactionary against change than the Democratic base. People like that are more likely to blame their lot on New. New immigrants, new neighbors, new things they don't understand like changing technologies and fresh job sectors and the reduction of old ones. It's important to note that while some of them are racist, that's not really the explanation.
Most of them would be just as upset and angry and hostile (and are) towards white newcomers rolling into their communities and competing for jobs and houses as they would any other peoples. What they're upset about is lack of opportunity. They want to work their weeks, take home their pay, have lives that they don't have to live in fear of not covering the bills.
When they can't, they do what everyone does and point fingers. "These new people, these fuckers from California or Silicon Valley, those assholes from The CIty, they're pricing us out of our homes and towns. They're who keep running out the local stores we grew up with, and left us with these boutiques and super stores and corporate greed. They're why the factory closed, why the mill only runs twice a week. They're why we have no hope and are left in poverty."
The Republican base does it to everyone, not just non-whites. Claiming everything is about racism misses the point. Further enrages them. Making it less likely they'll do what most of us want and move closer to the Center, instead of being driven further Right since all the Dems do is call them names.
Do they take their fear too far? Yes. But so do Democrats. Lots of supposed liberals are just as reactionary against New as Republicans. When they're totaling up their paychecks, and seeing there's not enough to go around and deciding what doesn't get paid this month, people want someone to blame.
It's human nature. You see it throughout history, all over the world. Go to any country, and when times are tough, the fingers start pointing. Everyone points at someone else. There's always new, always outgroups, that can be targeted and blamed. It's not just race, it's class, it's geography, it's nationalism.
People want their group to advance, since they hope and assume it'll lift them too. When they fear there's not enough to go around, they definitely want their group to get what little there is. That's why fingers get pointed. To improve their chances of getting a share of what is available, be it jobs or raises or food or medical care or safety. Whatever it is, they don't want to be left out.
Trump has just (ineptly, accidentally) tapped into this. He loves the adulation he gets when he's on stage and they cheer and chant. When he says obnoxious stupid shit like "it's their fault" and the crowd applauds and whistles and smiles, that's his nectar of the gods. And they're not humoring him; they want him to get rid of "them". Who's "them". Whoever's in the way of the crowd not doing better in life.
Meanwhile, the Dems are trotting Biden back out the same way they trotted him out in 2020. Because they can't be bothered to actually try harder, to actually do better. When they saw Bernie Sanders had an actual shot at honestly, fairly, winning the primary in 2020 they started maneuvering. Suddenly various other candidates agreed to coordinate their dropping out, clearing the stage for Biden just to ensure Sanders would "see the writing on the wall" and knock his disruptive shit off so they can go back to ruling.
It's super fashionable online to deride "Bernie Bros", to shit on anyone who supported Sanders. "Don't you know how bad Trump is? How dare you contemplate splitting the left's vote and give everything to Trump. Fuck you for even thinking about wanting to teach the Democrats a lesson in ignoring the left side of The Left."
Millions of people volunteered for Sanders. Millions voted for him. And constantly since, we're told we're bad lefties. By people who are usually fucking Centrists. I'm Left. It's comedy of the highest order for some jackass who's Republican-lite to try to shame me for having had the gall to support an actual Left candidate, to be angry and bitter over how the Center-Right Democrats boxed him out of the running.
But that happens all the time. Even now, even today. Maybe even in this thread someone will show up and try to shame me for bringing Sanders up, for still remembering how it felt to watch helplessly as the Democratic Establishment pulled levers and spun wheels to write him out of things. I'm supposed to shut up and fall into line, be happy to be Center-Right when what I want is to live on the Left for once.
I stood in the booth, in 2016, after months of being fucking furious at how Hillary Clinton had just rolled through the primary acting like it was her divine right to be President. The Party had cleared the decks, even swept Sanders aside for her just as they did again in 2020. But I stood there in the booth, and I thought about voting for Trump. For the first time in my entire life, I was going to vote for a fucking Republican.
Why?
Because I was that angry at Democrats for ignoring me. If they're not going to give me the opportunity to have my views, as someone's not rightish-center but instead Left, represented ... what choice remains out of the two they've orchestrated? I can chose Evil Hard-Right (Trump), or Complacent Center-Right (Clinton).
I thought about how Trump would probably fuck things over enough that maybe it would shake the system up. Not just shake up Dems, but shake up the country and the political system. How that might be the impulse to start some kind of actual change, maybe rock the boat enough to get people thinking about maybe doing something to keep all that water from slopping up over the sides so our feet are always wet.
Little did I know, really did anyone know, just how fucking bad and how fucking evil Trump is. I didn't vote for him. I thought about it real hard though, because I couldn't think of anything else that might actually demonstrate how angry I was, and am, with Democrats who ignore me to cater to the rich.
How many people did vote for Trump? Who might not have if there'd been a candidate they believed could actually help them? Because that's what Trump says. Of course he doesn't believe it, doesn't mean it. But he says it and they lap it up. And he's the only one saying it. He acknowledges their fears, offers some sort of path towards removing it, rather than shaming them for feeling trapped. Is it possible Trump won in 2016 because that many who aren't Hard Right were angry, but did pull the lever for him rather than sighing and removing their hand in resignation?
In 2020, I had the pandemic to consider. And as angry as I still was with Democrats, people were dying in the millions. People were, still are, flaunting their "right to not wear a mask" and "go around living unafraid" even as basic medical science continues to claim lives. It wasn't hard to vote against Trump in 2020. And that's what I was doing, exactly as the Democrats were happy for me to. I wasn't voting for Biden, I was voting against Trump since I couldn't vote for Sanders.
And where are we now, in 2024? Biden v Trump. Yee Fucking Haw. It's not official yet, but it's probably going to happen since the Justice System doesn't give a fuck about actually dealing with Trump. He should be in jail. He should have been arrested on 12:01pm 20Jan21, as soon as he was out of office. Yet here we are, 2024 and he's still roaming around the country gleefully lapping up the adulation of the angry afraid masses.
Maybe if the masses had fewer reasons to be angry, to be afraid, he might have been swept off to the wings where he can wait for some court to finally stop fucking around and jail him. But no, we've gone four years continuing to enrich the wealthy, to laud big business, to ignore housing and inequality and lack of healthcare access. All while Democrats try to shame anyone who wants a better, more secure lot in life for not focusing solely on how bad Trump and MAGA Republicans are.
Shaming angry non-right voters is much, much cheaper and easier than actually doing anything to help them. To change their lots. To improve their lives. So that's what's happened, what's still happening. Fear Trump, vote for us. No no, don't be stupid and bring up this other crap you're worried about; just be afraid of Trump and keep voting for us.
Trump is a symptom. The situation in the country isn't his fault, he's just (badly, inexpertly, without forethought or skill) trying to capitalize on it. Biden is too though. Biden isn't as evil, but he doesn't particularly care to face off against the Democratic establishment. Who like being Right of Center. Who like catering to big business. Who aren't going to do anything they haven't already been doing; ignoring the little people.
What happens once 2025 rolls around, assuming we avoid insurrection or civil war, and Biden is sworn in? The same shit that's been happening. Congress isn't going to work on the economy, on wages, on healthcare, on wealth inequality. Biden won't lean on them, won't hammer on his supposed connections and relationships after an entire adult life spent in professional politics at the Federal level.
Lack of change. Nothing will happen. Four more years of stagnant wages, high inflation, four more years of "shut up, don't you know how bad Trump is/was?"
2025 will become 2028, and someone else who right now is already plotting and maneuvering to be "The Pick", who the Democratic Establishment approves of, will be offered as Biden's successor. Meanwhile, Trump (hopefully) will be in prison or perhaps have passed on due to his complete lack of self care and shockingly bad health, but the Republicans will nominate someone who's just as much of a demagogue since that's what the base wants and that's what the current generation of Republican Rainmakers all are; demagogues riding the fear like surfers on waves.
Dems could pull those boards and quiet the waves by removing the fear. By addressing the conditions that create the fear. By improving wages, lessening wealth inequality, making it so you know that no matter what disease or illness you have the hospital will treat you fully and without delay.
Except they don't need to. It would hurt the rich, which hurts the Establishment and we can't have that. Little people should be afraid after all. Fear of Trump, or some other demagogue, is just as useful to Democrats as the fear Republicans are surfing is to them. Scared people don't strike, don't organize, don't rise up and demand change.
Or do they?
There is a breaking point. Fear works right up to where you convince enough people they are that fucked and do have nothing left to lose. Will we get to that point before 2028? Tune in, find out.
That's the sum total of the Democrat slogan for 2024. "We're not Trump." If you're afraid of Trump, vote Democrat.
It's truly a mystery why people aren't excited for Biden 2024.
Sanders has always been a factional candidate. He only vied with Clinton because he was a convenient vehicle for anti-Clinton/establishment sentiment, a voting bloc which rivaled the size of actual pro-Sanders/socialist supporters. And he only led (briefly) in 2020 because the moderate/center-left vote was temporarily split between multiple candidates. He lacked significant support from the party's core constituency (black voters), and was dangerously untested by negative campaigning against his ideology and background. Party leaders were justifiably concerned that him winning the nomination with 30-40% of the vote would lead to a McGovern/Corbyn-style debacle, so the also-rans did the logical thing and dropped out in favor of the candidate with the best chance of uniting the party and winning the general. Which Biden did, and did. And since Sanders and his supporters largely backed Biden, they were able to secure critical legislation that would have been impossible if they split the vote and Trump had won a Reagan/Nixon-scale landslide.
I say all this as somebody who voted Sanders in '16 and Warren in '20. He fought the good fight but he simply failed to win over a majority of Democrats and lost fair and square, and his ability to swallow his pride and join forces with DNC moderates resulted in major infrastructure investment, unprecedented child tax credits, drug price caps, the most important climate reforms in history, etc. etc. etc.
This is why I refuse to treat a system with state-by-state primary elections as legitimate. All the voters who would have preferred the also-rans in other states had their voices erased before arriving at the voting booth.
A simultaneous nationwide primary would vastly privilege the candidates with greater resources, name ID, and establishment support. Far more than the current system, which at least allows time for underdogs to do retail politicking in smaller, cheaper states and build a following. Obama would have been an afterthought if he hadn't catapulted into contention with his surprise Iowa caucus win, for ex.
I'd agree with you that's a possibility, perhaps the more likely case anyhow. I think the other person was right that people are being denied their voices by candidates not being an option, just I think they targeted the wrong thing. State by state primary elections aren't the problem IMO, it's the splitting of votes. You can only vote for one person. I think this is called plurality voting. So at some point people have to drop out because otherwise all they are doing is splitting votes away from other candidates. Granted the money and energy and effort plays a role too, where it might feel a waste to continue beyond a point where you seemingly have no chance, but perhaps in a system that isn't plurality voting would enable people to stay in the race and possibly build future support in a way plurality voting does not really allow for.
It's really no different in primary or general elections, plurality voting kills voter expression.
There are other voting systems which take the spoiler effect out of play. Plurality or First Past the Post (FPTP) is what we use most commonly and it naturally reduces to two candidates and therefore strongly supports a two major party system.
Approval Voting is an interesting system. Of the x number of candidates before you, indicate which ones you would approve of? It sounds like a decent system, but it has a few things working against it.
Other voting systems like Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) or Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) can allow a third party candidate who appeals to overlapping voters across the aisle, but it also can encourage more extreme candidates to win. This is especially true if there are a lot of similar candidates which split the vote for the first round, but the voters put down the more familiar extreme candidate for their second choice. Some people dislike this system because it doesn't assure a Condorcet winner, so a candidate with fewer votes cast in the first round can beat out candidates who had more votes and might be considered "winning" in early tabulation, but it seems to me that the candidate who wins has managed to demonstrate the greatest appeal to the most people, so I personally see that as a strength.
Range Voting or Score is like looking at the star rating for a review site. Something will have the highest rating and something will have the lowest. When voting, you get to choose any rating for any or all of the candidates. Unlike RCV, you don't have to be that exact in deciding that you prefer one candidate over another. If you want to give all five stars to candidates with a party letter next to their manger or all one stars to any other candidate, you may, but that starts to look like Approval and brings some of its flaws.
STAR (Score then Automatic Runoff) is an interesting system which is sort of a mix between Score and Instant Runoff. All systems have tactical voting flaws where how votes are cast can sometimes lead to a winner that is somehow regarded as inferior to a majority of voters. STAR tries to eliminate these weaknesses by bringing the best of Score and Instant Runoff so that they work against each other to prevent gaming.
Pretty much any of these would be better than Plurality and several actually give a boost to the third party candidates. However, it would take some significant Acts of Congress to change how things are conducted, and most members of Congress are in one of two parties. It's desirable but unlikely that you could get Congress to support bills which would effectively remove the Party system which got them elected in the first place.
Bit of an odd thing to say without elaborating on it. Care to mention what those things are?
From what I've read, one thing is that it's a little lackluster on voter expression (though this doesn't make it worse than FPTP/plurality voting). So lets say in a general election there's several candidates. There's 1 candidate that you really like and 1 that you'd be happy with but just not quite as good as your most preferred candidate. Well you can vote for both of them, but you can't express that you actually prefer one over the other. You can just vote for your most preferred, but if your most preferred doesn't win, then you had no expression in the outcome beyond that because you didn't vote on anyone else. If you vote for both, then you didn't necessarily help your most preferred candidate get the edge over your lesser preferred candidate.
All systems have some drawback of some kind like that from what I've seen. I think it's hard to adequately weigh their drawbacks towards an existing system because the existing system is sort of normalized so you get sort of adapted to it. It's kinda like the devil you know versus the devil you don't, except it's probably not fair to characterize some systems as simply "devil" because they're often strictly superior to FPTP, but when you don't know those other systems, it's a little easier to view them as a "devil" in that context.
Also I think how the prior comment described score voting is a little off, because it's not quite the same as how scoring would work on a review site or such. If you give a 1 star rating to something on IMDB for example, that means you really didn't like it. However, if you give a 1 star or 1 point out of 10 in score voting systems, that's actually helping that candidate sort of, so its more like your minimal accepted approval. Not scoring the candidate at all is disapproval. So the way to look at it is more like if you were given the choice to vote for a candidate or not vote for them, and if you vote for them, then you rate them on your preference scale, that's where the score comes in. Effectively that would be the most straightforward way to convey it to voters who are used to systems without voter expression, you'd start it out like approval voting, just pick the ones you approve of, but then after you pick the ones you approve of, you can express how much you like one over the other.
Ranked choice in addition to what the other comment mentioned has the issue in my opinion of having more complicated math essentially behind how it determines winners. So it makes the back-end a little more complex, and I think it makes it harder for voters to understand and verify the accuracy which makes it inherently weak against accusations of election fraud. If you imagine we had ranked choice voting in a presidential election, and Trump lost in that, think of how far Trump has gotten with his claims this way, only his most ardent supporters seem to believe his lies but in ranked choice I think it would be worse because there's inherently more complication to the process. You can have situations in FPTP where someone can win the popular vote and lose the election, which has happened a few times in the past couple decades to the Democratic party candidate, but to some extent it's probably simple enough to understand that the popular vote doesn't elect the president but rather delegates from states, since that is how news media depicts it. If you imagine news media only ever showed the popular vote in elections and nothing else, and then out of nowhere someone manages to lose the election while winning the popular vote, you can imagine how surprised and upset the citizens would be because they'd be surprised to learn of this other system that was actually what was responsible for determining who won. They would probably immediately jump to election fraud accusations and distrust the election. Well I think ranked choice voting has that kind of flaw to it, though probably not as extreme as I described there. Maybe the institutions and the media would be able to accurately convey the results on the fly to avoid that misrepresentation, but I don't know.
For Score, you get to choose any rating for any or all of the candidates. So, you can elect to not vote for a candidate. Your right that it isn't exactly like how websites tally, as not voting for something like that isn't regarded as a vote against and each product, restaurant, movie, etc. is averaged for just the number of ratings provided, but the important distinction is that it isn't just an up/down vote and unlike RCV you can decide what the rating means to you. Voting with a couple fives, a four, and a two for 4 out of 7 candidates would be just fine.
Not voting is like a hidden 0 rating.
I thought I covered that better with how I structured my comment. The biggest problem is when you have lots of candidates from two major parties, and the constituents all vote in block for their party. That probably won't affect a national race as much as state or local, because parties will still want to concentrate their campaign efforts. For other races where the candidates mostly handle their own fundraising, then the parties tend to benefit more as a bloc.
Still better than FPTP in my opinion and it has strong preference from those who study it more than me.
Yep. I didn't get to vote in the primary. By the time our state's turn was up, it meant nothing. It's really manipulative. I'm still bitter.
My working theory is that global labor arbitrage drives all US social problems.
People blame the Republicans and the Democrats. Sure, each party is doing its part to hasten the process, but the process is inevitable.
As other countries catch up in development and goods, services, capital, and labor and education flow more easily thanks to technological and logistical progress, there are increasingly fewer reasons why an American should be worth 30x more than a Bangladeshi.
Right now, Americans have several productive and market advantages, from the individual to the organizational to the national level:
These advantages are eroding.
The erosion of these advantages are going to hit the professional and wealthy classes last. They work in industries and sectors that have these advantages in spades; they have large moats.
For the past few decades and continuing forward, this erosion really hits working and lower-middle classes first and hardest. They work in industries and sectors that have small or no advantage moats. Equipped with the same machinery, a Bangladeshi textile worker is just as productive as an American textile worker. Given that cheap oversea shipping has collapsed distances and erased most geographic monopoly for the American, there's no point in paying an American 12x the Bangladeshi's wage for the same productivity.
You want change... yet you know that any sort of change causes the right wing outrage machine to churn into high gear. That outrage machine that generally sways the general electorate.
You've actually been getting change. Just not the change you might want.
In the last twenty years, the US right has tilted hard right. Hillary used to support left wing universal healthcare. The outrage machine killed that idea, and nearly killed Obamacare when it hyperventilated about death camps. So Hillary had to switch towards the more centrist Obamacare.
The democratic party has definitely become more centrist as the right became more extreme right. But it's a two party system. They didn't do it to screw the true left over. They did it to survive. They barely eek out a majority half the time.
The only real change would be to fix the gerrymandered electoral system, and maybe introduce some form of proportional multi party system or maybe a stack ranked voting system where your vote for sanders is a vote against trump. But that requires.... the Republican party to agree to change.
In the 90s that was the case but by Obama’s term the party moved significantly to the left. It’s not quite where it was in the New Deal era, but the idea that the median Democrat of today are to the right of 90s Democrats (or even 2010s Democrats) is borderline ridiculous. Joe Lieberman wouldn’t win a primary today. Jim Webb tried to run in 2020 and went nowhere. That guy would have cleaned up in the party of the 90s.
People make way too much of positions on healthcare when assessing how “left” or “right” anyone else. The healthcare sector is extremely complicated and a lot of states have industries that are deeply tied into it. How policy gets shaped has a lot more to do with whose votes you need to pass a bill and whether those Senators have to represent insurance companies, pharma companies, big hospital networks, etc. Ideology only kind of enters into it.
I don't see how any of that is relevant to someone expressing concern that regular folks are being squeezed financially. Which is the thread of the conversation we are in right now.
Yes, the democrats have definitely moved left on social issues like lgbt+ rights, and have definitely made a lot of noise about federal minimum wage (yet no action so far.)
It's the move towards the center of the 80's by the democrats that have helped caused a massive wealth squeeze. The welfare reform, deregulation and promotion of free trade agreements have helped raise standards of livings in other countries, but is slowly lowering standards of living for younger Americans vs their parents.
The right wing media is focusing everyone's attention on the amount of illegal immigration, which isn't going to fix the fundamental problem of younger folks feeling squeezed, but it's a wedge issue to keep democrats from taking action on other things that might help such as welfare reform, minimum wage reform, or other things.
Frankly, the only thing that is going to help someone who feels disenfranchised and angry at Biden. Which is the topic of this conversation.
No it’s not just social issues. There have been major strides on health care, education, infrastructure development, climate initiatives, green jobs, labor organizing, etc.
It’s also not really firm to what extent free trade agreements have impoverished the US. It’s more likely that it made the US richer overall, but with the lions share of the gains concentrating higher on the income ladder. But it was largely the Reagan revolution that created the policy agenda that made all that happen. It wasn’t “the Democrats” so much as the country’s actual electorate making these choices. New Deal progressives routinely got their clocks cleaned in electoral contests. These are the policies people are choosing.
There was this great comment on r/FiveThirtyEight:
Many non-political junkies still haven’t internalized that it is a Trump versus Biden rematch. Biden has only just begun campaigning. (I also suspect some folks are putting down Trump to signal how annoyed they are with inflation.) There’s also the fact that polling of younger folks (more likely to support Biden) is harder to do these days. As we get closer to Election Day, I think you’ll see a shift as people begin to realize that this is a Trump versus Biden election, part 2.
People love to misattribute the economy to the presidency. In the rare cases where the government did affect the economy, blame (or, in rare cases, praise) belongs to Congress.
I enjoyed your quote from /r/FiveThirtyEight. That half brother was 22 when Trump left office and a teenager while Trump was in office. Kind of normal for politics to be off of his radar.
Maybe many people were done with politics after Trump got ousted that they decided to slip into their own private worlds as a respite and will return when it is time to vote as you wrote.
I don't think I am a political nerd. I skim the headlines every day, but if you said that is much more than many Americans do you would likely be right. You might also be right that when such people are polled they remember how pissed they are at consumer prices and respond to the poll with "yeah, the other guy".
This is me, basically. I was heavily into politics before Trump's presidency, and then even more so during it. And it burned me the fuck out. I was always angry and knowing what was going on didn't bring any benefit to me what-so-ever. So I voted Biden, then he won, and I switched off my brain because at the very least I could trust that democracy and justice weren't constantly being eroded.
These days I stay informed enough to vote, but that's about it. No in-depth political discussions, no analysis of whatever, just the bare basics to make an informed decision come election time. And gotta say I'm not thrilled about voting for Biden again, but given the alternative I literally don't have a choice. And I am really tired of voting against people instead of voting for people I'm passionate about.
I am far more excited to vote for Biden this time around. He has been one of the most progressive president's in our lifetime. I was really expecting to be disappointed in him, but I think he's done a damn good job with his term, especially considering the stonewalling from Congress. He deserves a second term just for his actions of raising interest rates to slow inflation and avoid a recession.
Also, polls this far out are mostly meaningless anyway. A lot can happen in the next 10 months, and Trump's mental faculties are obviously withering away which may have an effect on the election.
Same here. He’s been far better than I ever could have imagined. I started out lukewarm, glad that it wasn’t Trump, but I am now very happy that he’s our president.
His accomplishments are amazing given the political headwinds, even amazing in a more favorable climate.
Agreed...but are you really excited by his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, authorization of more oil exploitation in "protected" lands, his slow-walking marijuana reclassification, continuing (indeed, expanding) a Trump's border policy that Human Rights Watch said was "illegal and violates the human rights of those subjected to it" and then replaced it with a new policy that other Dems say violates international refugee law, etc?
Afghanistan was a disaster of Trump's making. Blaming that on Biden is a bit much. And we're out now, which is a huge net positive.
I'm not fond of his lackluster environmental record, but considering the alternative, I'm fine with it.
Marijuana is another thing that Biden gets blamed/credit for that he has very little control over.
His immigration policies also leave a lot to be desired. But if those are the only things to complain about, I'd say he's doing a great job.
His environmental record is pretty incredible if you look at what was in the Inflation Reduction Act! The US has never done more on climate change and investing in renewable energy than it has under Biden's stewardship.
Nah, fuck that. Biden did not order the Pentagon to put enough thought into the evacuation. Trump didn't leave him with much time to prepare, but Biden was the Commander in Chief. He had the final say about when we pulled out, and we rushed it, ensuring that it was an absolute disaster. There wasn't much of a chance to prevent the Taliban from taking over, but we didn't have to just say "fuck, I guess we have to leave now" and essentially just dip. We're lucky it didn't go worse. I'll never forgive him (as President) for that, but I'll have to vote for him (otherwise I'm a pretty forgiving person and can probably forgive him as a human).
My point is that I'm very disappointed in him, the way a parent might be in a child who deliberately lied. I'm enthusiastic about voting for gun because of the potential consequences if Trump loses, but I can't see actively being excited to vote for him.
Donald Trump negotiated the pull out. You'd rather Biden completely change things and risk an even bigger attack by the Taliban? Who cares how we got out, we're out. That's a win.
Trump negotiated an extraction, conveniently for the next term, and then left Biden the mess. Could it have gone better? Probably, but complaining about the pull out after 2 decades being at war is making a mountain out of an ant hill.
There was essentially no planning until just a few weeks before the pullout. DoD leadership said it was a failure. Trump didn't leave Biden with much time, but that doesn't excuse an absolute disaster. Biden was President; the buck stops with him.
Do you have a source for that? Because I find that unlikely.
Nothing open source beyond the complete shitshow and the very last minute scrambling that had to occur to house refugees and move troops and materiel.
By specifying “open source” are you implying that there are non-open source materials that confirm your statement, or is this speculation?
Meh, we're out finally, I see that as a win.
I guess screw the people who died and our Afghan partners who we left behind to face the Taliban alone, then? And, sure, thousands of Afghans probably have PTSD from their weeks in refugee camps that we didn't even think about setting up ahead of time, but at least we didn't have a few more chill weeks in Afghanistan, where we hadn't had any casualties since Trump's deal.
Not to minimize the deaths and chaos the exit caused, but we have been "screw(ing) the people who die and our Afghan partners to face the Taliban alone" for the entirety of the war. I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2017 and met a number of Afghani translators who had fled to Balochistan because US forces had abandoned them. I don't want to give Biden a pass, but he is continuing the legacy of Bush, Obama, and Trump in the region.
As an aside, I'm actually hopeful that we might see some stability in the region as a result of the exit. I think we cast the Taliban in a pretty negative light because we needed the world to see them that way in order to get onboard with our geopolitical shenanigans. My own experience is that they are largely made up of your typical folks from the countryside. Their view of woman's rights and LGBTQ+ is abysmal, but so are many of the countries we consider allies like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates. I'm hoping if the international community can support rebuilding Afghanistan, with strings to basic human rights attached, we might actually see more progressive leadership in the future.
I would love more attention on the issue and I really appreciate you bringing it up, but I don't see this as a "Biden" issue, it's really an American issue. We are terrible with the way we conduct invasions, the way we act during occupation, and the way we exit.
I don't really see the relevance of all that. Other guys didn't do well either, but that doesn't make Biden exciting.
Because they were waiting for the withdrawal date. It had already been pushed back once. They were most likely going to start terrorist style attacks again if it were pushed back again.
You think the people who our troops were working with directly during the evacuation would have started terrorist-style attacks if we pushed the evacuation back to the date we originally agreed to evacuate?
That’s not what they are saying. They are saying the Taliban would have started terrorist-style attacks if the US extended their withdrawal deadline.
That's what I was trying to get at. Thank you.
Yes, our troops were actively working with the Taliban during the withdrawal, which happened ahead of the schedule that Trump had agreed to.
Maybe I’m missing some subtlety but that seems to contradict the timeline as I understand it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_U.S._troop_withdrawal_from_Afghanistan#
Sorry, you're right; I thought 9/11 was Trump's date.
The Taliban were locked, loaded, and ready for war at the time of the withdrawal, as evidenced by the speed of their takeover, and there weren't really enough US assets in theater to readily stop it at that point since the withdrawal had been rolling along for weeks already and most of the US resources were already out.
fwiw, I did think they should have done a better job organizing the extraction of Afghan partners ahead of time. It's just the idea of "Well, we could have just stayed longer with no consequences at all!" that I find laughable.
I maintain that if we had stayed longer we’d have never left. The nature of the withdrawal was as much about maneuvering around the military industrial complex foreign policy deep state as anything else.
Biden saw how Obama got rolled by the Blob. He wasn’t gonna let it happen to him.
Yeah, I’ll cut Biden some slack, but not that much. There was a lot more coordination that could’ve gone into the withdrawal.
His Afghanistan withdrawal was excellent. Any withdrawal from Afghanistan was going to be a clusterfuck. Everyone knew it. Obama wanted to leave but chickened out because he knew it would extract a political cost. Even the Bush administration wanted to cut and didn’t.
Biden did it and accepted the blowback. He saved incalculable amounts of American blood and treasure doing so.
Hell no it wasn't. Even the SecDef and CJCS admitted it was a failure within weeks of the withdrawal. Some incredible airmen and Marines did some heroic things, but those were only necessary because of cataclysmic strategic failures.
I am not surprised that the members of the military/foreign policy blob didn't like a political decision that went against their political preferences. But if we left it up to the DoD and CSIS-types we'd be mired in these wars forever waiting for an imaginary "clean exit" that will never materialize.
Retreating in defeat never looks good, but it's a better look than just continuing to lose. The strategic failures were already baked in by 2010. Everything sense has just been throwing bodies and money on a pyre. The foreign policy hawks need to grow up and learn to accept it.
I think it's worth separating the decision to leave, which was correct, with the execution of the withdrawal, which was a disaster. Sure, there's no such thing as a clean exit, but even a slightly more gradual draw down might have allowed for saving the lives of more people who were working closely with the US.
Maybe, but the draw down was supposed to be gradual. What actually happened was that the Afghan state and army basically evaporated as soon as the US began to draw down at all. Dragging out the departure could possibly have made things worse by putting US forces in more direct conflict with the successor government of Afghanistan, which could have meant we end up not leaving at all because of some Gulf of Tonkin type bullshit.
You just know one dead American by Taliban hands as part of the drawdown would have immediately led to non-stop war-drums beating by Blobists in the media.
Yes, absolutely. It's really bothering me that people don't care about the absolute disaster of a withdrawal because they're just glad to be out. It feels very callous to me.
I am happy with his antitrust enforcement. I am happy that he required the department of education to actually implement the public interest student loan forgiveness that was promised public sector and nonprofit workers more than 20 years ago if they faithfully made payments. That was a government benefit that was not being provided after people had relied on it in their career choices. Biden made that promise good, without needing to be sued.
I was unhappy with Mayor Pete's response to the hazardous train derailment in Pennsylvania, but I am happier with Biden than I was when he was elected. I have seen him do some things that are pro labor. I have even seen him implement some Elizabeth Warren style financial regulation in spite of having been the senator from Delaware.
If ever there was an age where young people engage politically younger, you'd think it'd be this.
While voting rates for younger voters have traditionally lagged behind other cohorts, recent years have seen some of the highest levels of engagement in decades. Young voters showing up at the polls is basically why the vaunted "red wave" of 2022 turned into a trickle.
@nukeman has done a great job capturing where a lot of Americans are politically.
To add to that, a lot are just working class people who have been thoroughly convinced that Democrats are either evil and/or the cause of our problems.
People blame Biden for this economy even though it's not his fault. They're doubly pissed off (as am I) that the liberal news sources keep saying how great the American economy is doing, ignoring that regular people aren't the ones benefitting from this supposedly robust economy.
If Biden wins again and pulls an Obama (getting us out of a recession and into a booming economic situation), Fox and other Republican news sources will pivot to focusing on crime. Americans have short memories and attention spans. They're just going to think that Biden went from having a terrible economy to a terrible crime problem (whether that has any basis in reality or not).
Another thing to consider is that, counter to every other politician, Trump does better as an insurgent than an incumbent. His rhetoric is far stronger than his results. His strength is not in what he's done, but he will do. It's not how great he is, but how dumb and evil his opponent is.
People have had four years to forget. They're excited for change again. This brings me to my last point. I think Americans are so unhappy with the status quo that they'll vote for anything different at this point. Obama won on promising massive change. Trump won on change, as did Biden, and Trump may again. Populism is so in right now.
Ding ding ding!
The vast majority of Americans don't have huge investment portfolios and don't get paid dividends. They're not seeing the benefits of runaway capitalism: they're the fodder to make it possible. The fact that Biden and the capital class even boasts about how well the country is doing is going to be bad for polls: a bully punching you in the gut and laughing with glee about how much fun he's having is unlikely to suddenly make you realise why gee golly it is fun!
All me and my neighbors know is cheese and milk and eggs and flour got way way way more expensive and someone needs to pay.
I would venture to guess the perpetually low voter turnout and the anger of the masses from left, right, and the growing "undecided" come from the unmistaken belief that neither candidates have our interests in mind.
Part of the problem is also that we let things like Trump's tax cut get passed, that show an immediate benefit for the working class, but then starts raising rates approximately 4 years after passing, so that it looks like the incoming president's fault to the majority. So people blame Biden for their tax bill going up....despite it was Trump and the Republican congress that passed it.
And if Trump did win in 2020? Well who cares he wouldn't be eligible for another term so he wouldn't give 2 fucks what his polls were saying then.
The economic data being cited to talk about how it's going well isn't stock performance though. The media is specifically talking about low unemployment and high wage growth. That's definitionally benefits to regular people.
Wage growth is great but I've not been able to keep up with inflation in my household.
Low unemployment is great too but nobody I know can afford a house right now and everyone is terrified of needing a new vehicle at the moment.
For reference, I'm 30 with a real career, wife is 30 with a real career. One kid. We are making it work but we are one vehicle purchase or two major appliance replacements away from not being able to make it work so great. My student loan payments are starting back up too.
We outgrew our condo once we had this baby. We would like a second child but I honestly don't know where we would even put them. We need a house so bad and it's not realistic right now. Sucks.
Inflation has a ratchet-like nature that adds to the problem.
I must confess that I felt a little shook up at the height of the pandemic when I went to McDonald’s and saw a Big Mac meal now cost more than $10 and thought “I can’t afford that!”. This is a product I’ve been buying since I was a kid around 1978 when I would pick up lunch between gym and swim at the YMCA and going to the public library. Of course the price went up gradually but crossing that psychologically important number hit me hard.
Inflation seems to be mostly tamed but prices won’t go back down. If a demagogue promised to get the Big Mac meal down to $8 I think people would be attracted to that but deflation like that is really a disaster since your paycheck shrinks but your debt doesn’t.
I'm in a similar boat as you, including having outgrown our house but being unable to move anywhere with more space without eating a significant loss in quality of life.
But that was sort of baked into the cake from day the pandemic started. There's still a lot of economic hurt that we'll need to process before things get to a stable footing. Interest rates should hopefully start coming back down by next year, though the <2% rates probably aren't back until another Great Recession. Biden gets the flack for that, but it's also not really in his hands. He inherited some extremely severe headwinds.
People think the economy is worse for others but they're doing fine. How people feel about the economy is not in line with how the economy is actually doing. The types of comments you replied to try to push a narrative that the economy isn't great, but it's not true. Yes, food prices are high, but we've seen a huge change in real wages in that time too.
"low unemployment" is pretty tricky though, from the ground level: sure there are jobs, but there aren't any that pay at a level that would allow most to save and have some financial security. Jobs aren't the same as decent jobs.
I would venture a guess that high wage growth is tricky like that too: my boss's boss got a huge increase meanwhile I got less than inflation and I should be thankful.
There is a squeeze at the better paid professional jobs, but there's been a lot of growth at the service sector level. That's not great if you're not in the growth area, but it is a big deal for the people who are in that line of work. The difficulty saving I view as more of a cost of living issue, but those have been persistent, decades old problems that will take a decade or more to fix.
I'm very very glad to hear there's been good growth in the services sector. Do those in that segment view Biden's administration more favorably?
Probably not to be honest. But he's gotta be President for everyone, not just the people who like him.
I like the broader U-6 measure of unemployment to look at "real" unemployment rather than the U-3 measure that is the one often quoted by news media, government reports, etc. By that measure, unemployment is back down to pre-pandemic levels.
Real Median Household Income in the United States as of March 2022 is down from 2019 levels but still above 2018 levels.
I'm not saying everyone is better off than they were pre-pandemic, but based on these measures, it sure does look like the "average American" is. Not just the 0.01%.
Having said that, I would like to see the "Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States" adjusted for non-housing inflation. (There might even be a way to do that on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website, but I don't know how to, unfortunately.) I know that's a huge pain point for both my generation (Millennial) as well as Gen-Z adults.
Much better metrics would be:
It's me, a regular guy. My rents going up another 15% this year, my total expenses are up 35-40% since 2020. My salary? Up 7.4% in 4 years.
I'm not drowning yet, but any hopes of making progress towards actually growing my income and owning a home were demolished over (not because of) Biden's presidency.
And now I'm sitting here getting told by every news source that our economy has never been stronger and that the average American is thriving! And I'm just sick of it. This is also happening to every single one of my friends, often far worse than it is to me.
I completely hear you and it makes me want to throw up in my mouth whenever they boast about the economy.
I remember the first time I got laid off, as a young grad, and how only a few months later they were boasting about how amazing the turn around is and how capitalists were able to buy so much cheap crap during the dump, and I'm still trying to interview for a job paying me less than before because of how bad things are.
It's like things are always only bad on our end, whether the economy does well or not.
My only advice is to do everything you can to move to any area where you can stop paying rent: paying rent is like playing monopoly without any possibility of gaining money. But I don't know where that might be any more.
Insane inflation has been a worldwide problem since the pandemic, but our inflation rate has been lower than other developed countries — that’s not by accident.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/27/cea-apples-to-apfel-recent-inflation-trends-in-the-g7/
If you look at almost any measure, the US economy is doing amazingly. If you are unlucky enough to have read the Financial Times comments section you may have encountered phenomenon of the person earning 1 million a year who will unironically state that they are living "paycheck to paycheck" [full explanation at the end]. This is a really extreme case but I think it shows that a lot of people don't have a good handle on their personal finances. I think people are pretty good at convincing themselves they are in a bad financial position when they're actually perfectly fine. For lack of any other rational explanation I have now had to put this down to people are unfortunately really really terrible at making considered decisions and they just see "ooh higher prices" and forget to deduct x% for payrise, y% for the increase in value of investments, etc.
[1 million paycheck to paycheck explanation]
this is unironically something someone said
My wife and I make significantly less than 100k/year before taxes.
And we're doing better than a lot of people. Both of us have real careers in the fields for which we got our degrees.
The economy is not good for most 40 and unders.
This absolutely is the wrong place, but maybe for different reasons you had in mind. If you really want to understand and not just have your bias confirmed by people who share it, ask people who want to vote for Trump why they do it. I bet you will not find many of them here.
I am not an American. I do not know the answer to your question. However, some things can be spotted more easily from the outside - which is why my perspective could be useful to you:
America is so extremely polarized that it is like you are all watching the same movie, but each half of the audience can only see their half of the screen. Each side has no idea what's on the other side of the screen. Each side thinks that their half of the picture is a more or less correct and complete view of the whole movie, and people who say they see something different are either delusional or malicious or simply too dumb to understand what they see. In normal times, the majority of the screen in the middle is visible to all. In the current US, the overlap is like 2% of the screen.
If you want to understand the other half of the audience, ask them what they see. Do not ask the guy sitting next to you who sees the same half of the screen that you do.
The few conservative people I still keep in touch with go on long rants about how america is controlled by a "Marxist-Leninist doomsday elite" filled with "dick choppers" who are out to groom our children on "liberal pedophile islands." There's no reasoning with people who have a worldview based entirely on fiction. The conservative media sphere has driven people to function on pure outrage, and any potentially reasonable points they might have get lost in a sea of nonsense.
Whatever you may think, I believe a lot of people don't realize that there is a huge amount of support for Trump. I'm completely flabergasted that just based on character alone he ever got more than 10% of the vote but it still stands that he's insanely popular and people who are against him stometimes fool themselves into thinking this isn't the case. Within the framework or our electoral college systme, he almost won the last election.
I can't understand people who are surprised Trump is still popular in 2024. He's still popular for the same reasons he was popular in 2020. What I remain flabbergasted by is that Trump somehow earned more votes in 2020 than in 2016. What inspired all the 2016 nonvoters to ride the Trump train?
I recently read an article (which I can’t find right now) that claimed mobilising the base is more important than capturing swing votes. Within the political system of the US, this makes sense to me. The turnout is generally very low anyway.
I can imagine the republican base was just as fed up as the democratic base, even with Trump being the president. It helps that as president his rhetoric had even further reach than before.
This is a fair point, but what I don't understand is why Trump is still so popular relative to, say, Nikki Haley. Yeah, sure, conservatives have been sold decades of lies about how liberals are going to destroy the country (Obama is coming for their guns any day now!) and they are true believers about that fact. But Trump is just so transparently a self-serving, narcissistic idiot. Wouldn't conservatives with half a brain prefer a Republican who wasn't so obviously stupid?
The thing that gets me about the obviousness of Trump’s character isn’t his stupidity, it’s his meanspiritedness. He’s a veritable faucet of insults, mocking, schoolyard name-calling, etc. I can’t think of a more illustrative example of bullying in the public sphere, ever. I was raised to believe those are vile traits for a human to exhibit. So what’s disheartening, to me, is to discover what a sizable portion of the population is apparently okay with that, or consider it “strong” or aspirational. This shedding of basic decency reveals something really reprehensibly ugly in the American moral psyche.
Also his compulsive lying, which by this point is easy to demonstrate. How do people equate virtue with such a disregard for facts or honesty?
All other concerns aside (and there are many), his enduring popularity despite these flagrant warning lights paints a really disturbing picture of what’s going on in the heads, hearts, and consciences of voters in America.
One of the few good pieces of MAGA analysis from the Trump era is The Cruelty is the Point, which touches on the meanspiritedness you bring up. It's a feature for a lot of people — Trump is sticking it to those people who his supporters "can't". He's made it socially acceptable to troll others solely for the sake of enjoying their distress.
Re: bullying.
I think that's something that well meaning adults screwed up in all their schoolyard presentations of bullying. They portray bullies and as hurt troubled kids who also want to be loved deep down, that bullies aren't popular maybe only feared, and that they're obvious social rejects.
Bullies are the most liked and most popular of the groups. They don't bully everyone, they have an instinctive nose for sniffing out the anxieties and fears of those who won't have any champions, so that when he tears into them the crowd will chant "serve them right!"
Trump is popular because he hurts what his base consider the right people: women, persons of colours, the poor, minorities, LGBTQ+, "foreigners".
It's exciting to be part of the self righteous "crucify him!" mob.
From the news it always seemed like he had 30-40% of voters ( versus the large portion of the population that never votes ). Given that, I would think polls would show 60% of Americans being against Trump - but all the headlines are his glowing polls.
Well, I think all the headlines are talking about Trump cause it benefits them. Trump of course gets support by people talking up his poll numbers, and Biden is basically running on a platform of "Not Trump", so he needs people scared it will be Trump again.
On top of that, media has always loved Trump as he makes headlines all the time. I'm just so tired of this all. Can we please get someone younger with an actual platform?
Trump has people who can vote and are active In Real Life and not just online.
The people who hate trump do so online and won't even bother to register to vote (stupid idea btw, Americans) nor will turn up to actually do so.
This is 100% the media. The right-wing media praises trump and talks about him constantly about how great he is and how terrible the left is and Joe Biden is. Can't watch Fox News or turn on conservative radio for more than five minutes without the host going off on a rant about how the left is ruining this country and how only Trump Jesus can save us. If you honestly believe that, you're going to be very passionate about voting.
The way news is consumed these days is really weird. The right seems to have the right idea that news media is not as impartial as they would like you to believe, but they seem to frequently believe that the news they consume is centrist when it’s not even trying to hide how much it’s pushing an agenda. In the meanwhile the left seems to believe that their news sources are impartial and are thus very likely to accept right-leaning opinions that get put into them.
These are huge generalizations of course. Left wing media does exist but it is still relatively fringe, with the larger ones falling into the impartiality trap.
So many people don't grasp that MSNBC is only "liberal" in the sense that they let the liberal talk next to the right-winger. And that their definition of liberal is still fairly right-wing when compared to democratic countries as a whole.
CNN was purchased by a right wing advocate
This makes me think about how sometimes I feel there is so much narrative driven through the news and we don't seem to think about it or question it.
On some level I get it, as humans we like to make predictions and identify patterns and try to estimate what will happen based on certain things etc., so when the news reports that the Republican primary is basically over because he just won New Hampshire and if Haley can't win New Hampshire then she can't win, I get on some level it might just be catering to some aspects of us that try to organize things that way. On the other hand, she had something like 43-44% of the vote, and if you consider that we've been told this whole time that Trump was the frontrunner, I'm frankly a bit surprised she got that much of the vote with the narrative I've been seeing before this.
After all, Trump literally didn't even participate in the Republican primary debates, he skipped them because he was considered to be that strong of a candidate that he had little to gain by participating in them and more to lose, and that it also may have given some appearance to those candidates that it was actually a contest that they had any right to compete with him.
Now I also get that New Hampshire isn't a typical state and has some factors that would lead to it being more favorable towards Haley than other states.
I just find it incredibly weird that losing a primary while getting 44% of the vote is seen as so incredibly damning that the news narrative most commonly driven from what I'm seeing is that Trump already basically won it all. There's been two states total so far, and one of them still had DeSantis in the running pulling votes.
So while I get that there's one element of context towards Haley not winning New Hampshire, I feel like there's also another where it feels like the news almost contributes to the idea that voting for Haley is pointless because Trump already has it locked up. To me you would think that when Trump literally skipped the debates and was semi-crowned before even a single primary happened, you'd think it would be notable that Haley could even pull 44% of the votes in one of two states where a primary has even occurred. Yet that's not the way the framing of it goes. And perhaps the narrative the news is pushing where it's a foregone conclusion that Trump has won is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course I don't think of this just when it comes to Republican primary news, I think it happens in a lot of news, just since we're on this topic I figured I'd mention what came to mind when thinking about this topic.
538's take on it is that polling indicated more positivity towards Haley in New Hampshire than in other states, and so if she didn't win there it would be even harder for her to win in later states. But you're definitely right that saying that the whole situation is wrapped up now will depress voter turnout for Haley where a more Haley-positive narrative might bolster her chances.
Yep. What you're describing is colloquially known as the ratchet effect, when it's put into practice.
The Republican party understands that pushing politics to the right is their job, and turn everything to the right while they're in power. The Democrats, who are frankly barely even centrist in the grand scheme of things, either through incompetence or impotence (really, it doesn't matter), prevent government from moving back to the left when they're in power.
Remember: hate sells. It’s been seen time and time again, people consume media that makes them feel strong feelings. And reporting follows the money, so the less reputable and moral publications will write about topics that make people mad. I’ve said it before: trump is the most profitable thing to happen to American news media in a long time. And until that cycle is broken, we’ll just get more people like him who know how to spin coverage about them, no matter what it is, into more popularity.
Not my comment, but sums it up pretty well:
There are a few things regarding polling and incumbents that tend to occur. First, people often attribute problems to the incumbent whether it is their fault or not. I still see people blame Biden for the failed student loan forgiveness. People think of the president as having the ability to control more than they do.
Secondly, polls aren't votes, and it is easy to say you will vote one way or another at a nebulous future date. However, when the reality sets in and the date draws closer, people tend to poll a little more closely to how they actually decide.
Finally, Biden hasn't been campaigning in earnest yet while Trump has. Once a few months of head to head campaigning and media spend has occurred I think the polls will tighten.
This isn't to say there aren't other substantive issues; there are. Economic perception has been weighing down on Biden's numbers, though that has started to ease slightly. There are very real losers from the shifting economy driven by globalization that Democrats in general have lost as stalwarts in their base. And, frankly, much of the identity politics are simply not popular with moderates and poor messaging from the progressive wing has created challenges for national races.
But I think the biggest factors are the two I led with. People project problems on the president, as well as their pet issues as explanatory variables (you can see it in this thread), and we are still far enough out that people are polling differently than they will act when the race is certain and the platforms set.
It goes to show how much of a bubble I'm in that I'm surprised that active campaigning moves the needle at all. I actively ignore campaign news because I assume it's all lies and puffery—especially since we have two leading candidates who have established track records to scoff at.
Strategically, I don't want to be too harsh on GOTV campaigns, because they turn out votes that are closer to my ideals than the #JustStayHome crowd. However, I have grave difficulty respecting the vote of an American who needs to be reminded of when Election Day is each year.
I understand. I spent a great deal of time wondering the same sort of things over the years. One article I read that I found moving was a series of interviews by ProPublica with voters who had voted for Obama and then Trump.
Link here
I found this particular quote compelling:
And it's true. So many people, just running from one life emergency to the next, on the brink of losing their job, or supporting kids, or performing elder care, just aren't informed voters. Heck, even a good chunk of the people who have time and develop strong opinions aren't what I would considered well informed. Maybe "selectively informed" and that goes for both the vociferous left and the right.
So I do try and be empathetic to people who make up the swing voters, because some of them really are just struggling and trying to find "their guy" who will help change the trajectory of their life. Whether such a politician exists, or could ever exist that can reverse the trends of time, who knows.
Anyway, I digress. Have a great day!
The Pro Publica examples of voters switching from Obama to Trump tracks closely with some IRL friends who swung hard from Bernie to Trump (with varying stages of stopping at Gary Johnson along the way).
I hope your day has been wonderful so far.
I think the identity politics thing is going to be pretty big now because of conservatives banning books. People are very apathetic about issues that affect people far away, but the far right has taken over local areas and some are waking up to the reality of their hate. No one wants dictionaries banned from their kid's schools, so those headlines are going to drag people to the polls. Whether that has an effect on national races, I have no idea, but I do think it will push local and state elections mack to the left if any of the book banning candidates are running.
I'm not so optimistic. I think progressive folks tend to overestimate the extent to which moderates agree with certain policies issues and programs or react negatively to the bans.
That and the book banning candidates are largely local, regional, and some few statewide races, in places where they have a strong conservative base.
I suspect that running on these issues would hurt Democrats on the national stage as opposed to economic issues that drove more moderate and swing voters.
A NYT article I read did an analysis of elections where the politicians ran on abortion rights, and the moral of the story was that voters came out to vote on voter initiatives to protect abortion rights, and at the same time, voted for conservative lawmakers. Basically every statewide rave where the Democrat made abortion rights their flagship issue, lost.
So I hope the Democrats don't make the mistakes of 2016 again. UAW coming to endorse Biden will help, I think.
Biden would be a fool to not point out the social issues of the country. Every time he debates Trump, bring up things like Florida's book banning. "Do you want this to happen nationwide?". I'd disagree with you on the social issues, I think that conservatives overestime the support of moderates for their regressive social policies. They take voter apathy to mean approval. When the social issues hit close to home, people come out to vote.
I would like to see your source on the abortion thing though?
Gift link: A case study in abortion politics
It's hard to say. I think it is necessary to hit the points about the social issues, abortion, racial inequity, book bans, because that does resonate with the left and some moderates. But poll after poll has shown that the economy weighs most heavily on swing voters minds. So while it is necessary to hit the social talking points, it's insufficient to win. Hence why the politicians who organized their campaigns around a single social issue, lost.
I hope I'm wrong. I'd like people to care about these social issues more. But time and time again I've seen them ignored by voters.
As a woman who grew up when religious belief was much more popular in this country, I have been horrified to see what abortion bans actually look like in red states. In college when such things were debated, anti abortion people took hard cases like rape and incest off the table of what they were asking for. The idea that miscarriage treatment would be a potential road to prosecution and that women would be required to be septic and actively dying before receiving emergency treatment had not ever crossed my mind as a possibility.
I'm a lawyer, so I will add my legal perspective. The republicans created unneccesary opponents for themselves in the way they wrote these laws. They made medical necessity an affirmative defense to abortion as a crime. What that means practically is that any aggressive prosecutor can force a doctor to be arrested and go through trial, pay a lawyer, submit their medical judgement to the assessment of a judge or jury who are not medically trained, before learning whether they will be sentenced to prison for unlawfully killing a fetus. Even doctors who personally disapprove of abortion, still are now faced with choices about whether to save women's lives by extracting dying fetuses and at what point it is glaringly obvious even to non medically trained legal personnel that the act is unavoidable without condemning the woman to die.
Health care workers were not consulted about how to restrict abortion without needlessly threatening their freedom and also without needlessly threatening the fertillity and lives of women. In a rational world, ectopic pregnancies would never be a legal issue, but red state politicians have made it one.
I haven't yet mentioned the reaction of women, and of Millenials and GenZ generally as they come to terms with a court that has forbidden abortion and wants to take away most or all forms of birth control.
I don't disagree with any of what you said about the unnecessary callousness of how the bans were crafted, or the outrage by many folks. And yet, from my article above:
Voters have shown that they will approve ballot measures to protect abortion rights while simultaneously electing the politicians trying to ban them.
I don't think that is the case in every state or amongst every demographic. But the outcomes are there to see. Voters certainly gave some punishment to Republicans in 2022, but not to the extent that I think social issues as the flagship talking point will win the day in 2024.
I'd love to be wrong.
In Ireland it took a highly publicized unnecessary death before they revoked their abortion ban. And it wasn't the first such death.
Ohio... Every state will be different, but I take your point.
Ohio is worth considering because they actually passed constitutional protections for abortion last year. Clearly there is popular support for abortion rights. But that still doesn't equate to electing democratic candidates like Whaley even when they make abortion their only issue.
My father is conservative. He wants every family to support itself without help from government. He believes that programs like Tanf and school lunches discourage people from being creative and persistent in seeking work and lead to a higher divorce rate.
He is a scrooge
If it offers any optimism, I like to think about the march of progress through the long arc of history. Progress isn't monotonic; it has set backs, and reverses, and times of trouble and regression. Looking back we read about past setbacks as a handful of paragraphs in a history book. But those people had to live through it, for years, and continue to nurture and sustain progress. These oscillations in the trend lines, they have real suffering, real pain. But as long as we keep advancing the cause, voting consistently, educating the next generation, we will turn this around and the march of progress will go on.
I'm just a strategist and risk manager by nature and recently, by profession. Which often makes me sound like a pessimist, but I really do have hopes for the future. And I want to help guide us to that as much as possible with realistic strategy.
Anyway, have a great evening, it was fun to chat!
I wish it had not happened in my time said Frodo
The economy is definitely big for independent voters, but independent voters don't win elections like they used to. Biden needs to get his base out, and that's going to happen by bringing to light the existential crisis minorities face with a 2nd Trump term. I'm terrified of living the next 30 years of my life with 5 justices being appointed by Donald Trump.
But thanks for the article, I will definitely read that when I get a second!
I wish I believed that liberals cared more about queer folks than conservatives hate them. I'm not particularly optimistic that the pushback you describe will happen sufficiently.
A lot of people don't think biden has done a good job. The economy is much better than it should be, but that doesn't get you points unfortunately. Biden has been on the wrong side of just about every issue for decades and is now quite literally reaping what he's sown in many different aspects. The handling of weed classification, the student loan debt, Ukraine, and perhaps most importantly to his base, the Israel/Hamas war, has pissed off important voter blocks.
I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of this statement for a lot of reasons, but a lot of people seems to assume how large blocks will vote and are surprised when they don't. Frankly the republicans wouldn't be in this mess if 20+ years ago they found a way to court the black community because they're very very conservative on specific issues. As for the youth, plenty stand to benefit or think they do.
Doesn't change the fact that age is an issue. 4 years at that age bracket is a huge difference, and almost no one is happy about the idea of Harris or whoever Trump picks this time being very likely to lead the country without really being elected. It would help a lot if the dems hadn't picked harris, but they did, and she's probably one of the worst possible picks for the times (hey the entire country is having protests about police brutality, here's a prosecutor!).
The red wave should've happened because the party in power always loses seats. This is another issue for biden as he's the party in power. It not happening was a huge example of how bad the backlash is against the republican party.
Most people know things weren't as bad, economically, under trump. That's about the end of it. Doesn't matter who's fault it is or isn't (people are really hypocritical in how they'll blame one president for every economic nightmare and give the other a pass so it's a worthless discussion in my experience).
Really the easiest way to explain it is that Trump and Obama campaigned essentially on the same thing. "Fuck the status quo, i'm an outsider!". The majority of the country feels the game is rigged against them (because dear god is it in many circumstances), and Trump won because Hilary Clinton is the embodiment of status quo, "look i have a speech written by writers to read to you" nonsense everyone is sick of. Trump arguably only lost because of how terribly he handled the COVID situation (literally killing his own base) and because even staunch republicans were jumping ship by the end.
It's close now because Biden is the literal worst candidate to put up against Trump. He has the exact same issues as Hilary in that he's clearly super establishment, and he's old, and his VP pick was terrible, and he's stuck in the worst possible conflict for his base.
None of those except the Israel/Hamas war make any sense to me.
Biden does not have the authority to just unilaterally decriminalize weed, or even to unilaterally deschedule it (this last point is somewhat debated). His administration has been moving things in the right direction, but federal executive agencies are obligated to follow certain procedures, so even they can't just change things overnight.
Biden tried to unilaterally forgive student loan debt, and that got struck down by the Supreme Court. His administration has been trying to find ways around that.
There is broad support for Ukraine among American citizens, and it is stronger on the left than on the right.
There are very good arguments that this is something that could absolutely be fast tracked and they're dragging their feet on it because they don't want to do it until right before the election so people don't forget. This is a legacy issue for dems as it only looks worse and worse that they've had control of the country multiple times and weed is still sending people to jail for life. Again extra bad when your VP had thousands weed related convictions during their time as prosecutor (even if most of those didn't go to jail, it's still a life ruining thing).
And people don't care. They feel lied to. If you can't get something done it's better to not do it. The whole thing was a pandering move that doesn't really solve the problem so much as "buy votes" imo, and it blew up in their face when the SC got involved. It's not a new thing that your approval is based on your results, not your intentions.
While you're correct it's stronger on the left, it is not broad support: https://news.gallup.com/poll/513680/american-views-ukraine-war-charts.aspx
People are never thrilled seeing billions go overseas while they deal with rising prices on essentials like utilities, food, and gas, while being forced to pay extreme rent.
Biden is the only politician proven able to beat Trump in a national election. He was chosen by winning the Democratic primary. There are plenty of politicians I personally like better, but I wouldn't be so sure they would do better against Trump in an actual campaign.
We haven't seen any governors aged 50-65 in a while other than Nikki Haley.
I will support Biden because Trump is terrible, but a man over 80 is going to be frail and is at risk for dementia and sudden death. I don't like running an aged candidate at all.
One of my mental scenarios for 2025-2028 is Biden hands off his office to Harris. Maybe it'll be for medical reasons, or even because he dies (don't put me on a list USSS; he's super old, it's not unlikely he could pass naturally and peacefully), maybe he'll just decide to (or be asked to) step down so she can step in.
However this scenario works out, my concern is that will be about the same, to the Right's base, as 6Jan was to everyone who wasn't in the Right's base. It's really not a stretch to see them going utterly ballistic if she assumes the Presidency.
Personally, I think it would piss off more than zero of the folks who aren't on the Right. Lots of Progressives weren't in favor of her selection. I didn't vote for Harris. Sure she's on the ticket, but she was picked by Biden and the Dems for identity politics reasons. The choice offered was vote for Trump, or against Trump, which is what I did. I didn't vote for Biden/Harris, I voted against Trump.
Harris is basically a cop. Yes, I know she was a prosecutor. Who are in tight with cops. She was a law and order prosecutor. She played all the usual games you love to hate if you believe cops (with more than small amount of evidence to back up) have an Us vs Them attitude towards the public that leads to police brutality and corruption. She is definitely not someone I want to be president.
My concern is the "wise and experienced" Democrat Establishment, maybe around late 26, early 27, will "encourage" Biden to hand off to her. So she has a year or two to run from the Oval. Allowing her to step right into the candidacy for 28 (assuming the country doesn't implode before then; I'm just outlining what I assume might be the Establishment's thinking). From their view, she'd be well positioned to take over and win 28-32 if Biden would "help the Party and give her a leg up."
If we want a woman running, if we're going to play identity politics with the Presidency, get Elizabeth Warren, or AOC. Katie Porter perhaps. I'm sure there are others who could be named, quite sure there are others. Get one of them. Not Harris. Not someone who built a career fucking over people in favor of helping cops fuck people over.
Barring a stroke I think Biden is unlikely to develop dementia. If he was prone to it he’d have it by now. He already had a brain surgery that he recovered from. He’s definitely slowing down, but aside from misspeaking and mumbling he still seems to be pretty sharp and in good health.
Of course a debilitating stroke is in the cards. But it’s as likely to happen to Trump too so it’s kind of a coin toss. It did happen to Fetterman and he’s way younger! You can never tell with this stuff.
I can't find the study now, but I recall reading something a few years back that found that while people physically slow down as they age, their capacity for making rational decisions is unaffected unless there's some mental impairment like dementia. So we can continue to trust someone's judgement, but we'll need to give them a little more time to process the information.
Generally yeah. But that slowing down can also lead to some personality changes, like becoming crankier or more anxious. Both of those are normal responses to being cognitively overburdened, which is easier to do as you start slowing down.
Also allow for physical limits of strength and stamina, don't schedule as many meetings per day etc. Travel less. Delegate more.
All things being equal I want a president with physical stamina. It's a demanding executive job that visibly ages the people who take it.
But Trump is insanely bad and Haley is pandering to the anti-abortion crowd and RFK is a nutcase who couldn't win anyway
That’s the thing though. Trump is in worse mental and physical health than Biden and it’s not even close. I’d worry if the general was between Haley and Biden, she’d be a real threat. But Biden is almost perfectly suited for beating Trump.
Thankfully Joe doesn’t seem the type to refuse to step down as his health declines.
He also said he would only serve one term, and you can see how that panned out. It seems very difficult for career politicians to quit while they're ahead...
Biden never said, to my knowledge, that he would serve only one term. I do think he had initially planned to and loosely signaled that intent but changed his mind after Trump started campaigning again.
I don’t disagree that Biden is old and I would prefer someone younger in office. That being said I don’t think it has affected his tenure much at all.
You're right, my mistake! I thought he had actually said as much but I guess it was just some unofficial sources.
And I do agree that his age hasn't made him less effective – it's more the administration as a whole that actually gets stuff done, and he clearly still has the acuity to build a solid one.
He also has long standing relationships in Congress and deep understanding of how it works as an institution.
Winning the primary and winning the election are two totally different things and a good 40% of the reason US politics is such a mess. There are many candidates who would fare better against trump and never make it through the democratic primary.
Thank you for saying this. The number of people who parrot “he must be a strong candidate because he won the primary” is unfortunately high.
Anytime I start thinking about how ineffective and horrible the fellow was as President, I remind myself that he flipped SCOTUS. That pony has legs, and while I hate it, those legs will run for awhile.
I'm not certain we'll get to see this eventuality, but I'm very curious if he loses to Biden if that sinks him or not. I don't think this guy goes away until he dies, at which point he'll be held up like Reagan, which is just as awful and ridiculous.
I'm reading a book called Plaintiff in Chief by Zirin a new York attorney.
Donald always had legs and he was always underestimated by polite society, partly because he is such a terrible, transactional, narcissist. He has sued very nearly everyone who ever did him a favor or agreed to be a business partner, for short term advantage. He doesn't do alliances for any extended period of time.
However he was mentored by Roy Cohn and idolized him. He has always sought power and status obsessively and sees bullying, political dirty tricks, slander, law suits as his preferred tools. Cohn was a functional attorney who could and did make alliances, but he worked for Senator.Joseph McCarthy on the anti communist hearings and then took his tactics back to New York as a litigator connected to the mafia and involved in power politics
My mom always warned me that people judged you by your friends and associates. I've occasionally had a person or two in my friend group who is fun, but worthy of that warning.
Basically everyone in this guy's orbit at any given moment is a significant PoS - that goes double for his kids - and the only reason they change is because he has zero loyalty, as you mentioned. It's completely wild and would be entertaining if it wasn't so dangerous.
Donald Trump is doing everything his supporters want him to and Joe Biden is not doing (or is unable to do) a lot of the things his possible supporters want him to.
this makes no sense. The things Donald Trump does are horrible and evil and any normal human should be aghast at his actions.
Name me a president in recent memory who doesn't have horrible and evil actions under their admins belt. Trump is a new flavor of horrible and evil in that he's completely inept and trying to tear down the entire political structure but none of these people are even close to saints.
It doesn't change the fact that many people just want to win. As much as circles like this dump on trump supporters, there's more than a few flavors of supporter on the left who are essentially the same kind of person rooting for a different team. Trump appeals to those kinds of voters.
My theory is essentially
But... We are doing poorly.
Without meaning to insult you, I think anyone who thinks this economy is servicing regular people is speaking from a place of great privilege.
I have a master's degree and a job in my field. My wife has two degrees and a job in her field. We have one kid and we bought an insanely small condo/townhouse before COVID. Now we are completely stuck here for the foreseeable future and we're one car breakdown away from being very financially uncomfortable. Our appliances including the furnace and hot water heater are on their way out. We already had them fixed cheap and the next repairs will likely just have to be replacements. The stress from this is very real for us.
By the way, do you know what daycare costs if you're even lucky enough to find one with availability right now?
Do you know what it costs to have an electrician or plumber come to the house? I'm DIYing stuff beyond my skill level.
Dude, we are working in professional fields and we're barely making it. And those degrees we got to get our jobs? I want to vomit when I think about my upcoming student loan payments. We went to our local state college by the way. The cheapest possible option for the degrees we needed.
We aren't one of those couples who makes 400k and can't allocate our money properly. We make significantly less than 100k/year combined... before taxes. And we're still doing better than our friends.
My buddy and his girlfriend both work semi-skilled, low paying jobs (think insurance company and small factory type jobs) and I swear to God I don't know how they're surviving on $19/hour wages.
Nevermind people who are stuck paying HALF their paycheck for rent in a no name little town.
It's not doable for a LOT of people and while I'm not one for conspiracy theories, I do not trust the message that's being sent to us about this supposedly amazing economy. The data is being massaged or is not representative of your average young family.
Edit: As a teacher, I'm so so lucky to have great healthcare. Knowing what my friends pay for healthcare per year makes me want to hug them. I really have to wonder if they're going into debt or selling drugs because, as they say, "the math ain't mathing."
I don't think it's fair to blame voters for not understanding economics. GDP is meaningless to the typical citizen. What matters is what's going into their pocket.
Wages may be up but if the cost of housing, food, transportation, and whatever else you have to spend money on is also up you're not going to feel it.
Nobody wants to hear about the record profits corporations are posting when it's coming out of their pocket and into a shareholder's.
It doesn't matter how low unemployment is when you still need a second job or a side hustle to pay the bills.
You can find polls that show most people say they're doing better while also saying "the economy" is doing worse. Part of that is right-wing media straight up lying about things, but another part is seeing a new GoFundMe for someone's medical emergency every other day.
If the common person "understood" economics better, they'd probably be even angrier.
My point is that people feel worse off even though most metrics would not suggest that they are, and they don't really have a grasp of their personal financial circumstances.
That's because the metrics are developed by economists to measure marco-level trends. They're completely irrelevant to the everyday person trying to make ends meet. I went into greater detail on this in my earlier reply.
Most people have a perfectly fine grasp of their own personal financial circumstances, even if that amounts to knowing how boned they are. I'm wondering what makes you assume that this isn't the case. They know how much money comes in, how much goes out, and how much is left over.
Now if you were to argue that people have misplaced ideas about what's driving unemployment, inflation, wages, prices, etc and are generally uninformed about what the actual data says, then I'd be more inclined to agree with you. This is what causes people to be more pessimistic about the national economy than their own personal finances.
Since it was about inheritence taxes for the wealthy, one of the YT commenters brought out the eternally-relevant Steinbeck quotation that “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Definitely agree that people—especially those who aren't regular voters (defined as only vote fewer that once every 2 years)—vote to blow off steam.
Because they are (relatively) poor/badly off. No one cares what the statistics say in the voting booth. The un(der)employment rate is either 0% or 100%. Lucky people elsewhere in the nation dragging up the averages means nothing.
Cult of personality verses a meh president.
For something like their age, it doesn't matter for Trump because his cult like following will overlook it. That doesn't change the fact that Biden is ALSO old and that IS an issue.
I know "meh" doesn't get the people excited, but after 4 years of seeing Trump in the news nearly every day, I'm so happy to return to have a boring president that I can just forget about most of the time.
I don't think it is an issue since both men are advanced in years.
You can have an old POTUS who did a good job or you can have an old POTUS who did a shitty job.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. The first being that Americans, from the far left to the far right, don't want a president: they want a god or messiah.
Our lack of civic education and culture have loaded the role with impossible expectations.
I don't think that's true of the left at all, but I'd be curious to hear why you think it is.
Anecdotally, I heard a lot of grumbling in my own (extremely liberal) social media circles about Biden's supposed failure to cancel student debt, even though his initiatives did manage to forgive $127 billion before they were stopped.
Data-wise, his student debt forgiveness efforts expended lots of political capital but didn't move the needle much with young voters, according to Bloomberg. 43% of Gen Z, who are very left-oriented, said he's not doing enough. Granted, his initiatives forgave only 7~8% of total US student debts, but that's the extent what his administration can do.
My impression, through anecdotes and looking at polls, is that the role of the president is to thread an impossible needle as everyone looks on with dissatisfaction.
Liberals aren't really the far left, but I think I understand your meaning now. I still think wanting someone who is effective and makes the lives of the people in the country better is far from wanting someone to worship.
I listened to this podcast from Ezra Klein today and it speaks to a lot of the conversation here. It didn't lull me into apathy, but it did make me feel a bit more hopeful.
The guest makes a strong point that I agree with, too: Biden's campaign needs to spin up and get going.
I cannot either. I mean the answer is propaganda, really good propaganda over 60+ years of time.
Still I do not understand how 35% of people fall for this propaganda.
"Think of how dumb the average person is. Half of people are stupider than that!" - George Carlin