Campaign 2020

Sabin
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by Sabin »

taki15 wrote
Which is obviously why it has won the popular vote in 7 out of the last 8 elections.

P.S. If somebody really believes that Joe freaking Biden is a closet socialist then no amount of messaging can change that person's mind.
Which is obviously why we're crushing with state legislatures and during midterms. We have no problem advancing any agenda. We're not utterly impotent passing legislation over 70% of Americans want to see like background checks, without it somehow getting spun out of control. But hey! If somebody really believes that Obama wants to put your Grandma in death panels, then no amount of messaging can change that person's mind, right?

If it's not our brand, then it's their ability to weaponize our brand and it's our ability to respond on a ground level. I don't remotely pretend to understand how anything in Washington works, but our messaging sucks. And Abigail Spanberger agrees with me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/po ... video.html
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Re: Campaign 2020

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I love this one from Gail Collins' opinion piece in yesterday's New York Times:

Rudy Giuliani is supposed to be leading the fight to keep Trump in office despite the minor detail of his having lost the election. Challenging the vote count in Pennsylvania, Giuliani told a judge that the plaintiffs were “denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity.”
Tick tock.
“I’m not quite sure I know what opacity means,” the president’s top lawyer continued. “It probably means you can see, right?”
“It means you can’t,” the judge responded.
Details, details. “Big words, Your Honor,” Giuliani said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/opin ... e=Homepage
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by taki15 »

Sabin wrote: The Democratic Party just has a brand that remains toxic -- or at least potentially toxic -- to so many different people.
Which is obviously why it has won the popular vote in 7 out of the last 8 elections.

P.S. If somebody really believes that Joe freaking Biden is a closet socialist then no amount of messaging can change that person's mind.
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Re: Campaign 2020

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Things like "Defund the Police" hurt with swing voters and talk of socialism hurts mainly with escapees from socialist countries, but what it boils down to is really stupid people. The example in this one is a Cuban-American resident of Debbie Murcasel-Powell's district but she could be any one of Trump's millions of asinine supporters. Trying to talk sense to any of them and you get the same stupid responses.

https://twitter.com/ChangeAbout1/status ... 3241975811
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by Sabin »

Okri wrote
Debbie Murcasel-Powell on her loss
Thank you for this thread.

Post-election, I largely agreed with the consensus that the party was killed by socialism and defunding the police. But now I think it's a little more nuanced than that. The Democratic Party just has a brand that remains toxic -- or at least potentially toxic -- to so many different people. Socialism and defunding the police are just more things to dislike in it. And clearly in this past election, a staggering number of people showed up to vote for Trump to make a stand against all of it. I'm really concerned the party has learned the wrong lessons.
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Re: Campaign 2020

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Re: Campaign 2020

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Who the fuck is this Dr. Atlas, the Trump Administration current Covid spokesman, and where does he come from, or better still, when will he go away?

I'm paraphrasing, but the after advising Michigan residents on Sunday to "rise up" against Gov. Wittner, he advised the country on Tuesday to:

"Don't wear a mask. Do celebrate Thanksgiving with your family. Don't forget to invite your grandmother. This may be her last Thanksgiving."
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Re: Campaign 2020

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I dont know if David Shor's analysis is correct, but at least it's a forward-thinking analysis. The Kos article could have been written in 2016.
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by Big Magilla »

taki15 wrote:The hidden deplorables aren’t Republican. They aren’t even conservative. They’re apolitical, otherwise ignoring politics, because their lives legitimately suck. They live in meth country, with dim job prospects (in fact, those two factors are highly correlated). Institutions have failed them—corporations abandoned them for cheaper labor overseas, government seems and feels distant, and it’s certainly not improving their lives. Cities feel like walled gardens—unattainable, unaffordable, yet that’s where all the jobs are, the culture, the action. These deplorables have been left behind. So their attitude? “Fuck them all.”

Trump shows up in 2016 and gives them hope for change, saying the quiet part out loud—that their lives suck not because of their own choices and that of those decamped corporations, but because all that sweet, sweet government money is going to “illegals” and “thugs” in those cities. He puts uppity Black and brown people and women in their place. He offers them hope that, if he can’t improve their lives, that at least he’ll hurt all those others.

Their lives suck, but Trump was supposed to be bringing everyone else down to their level. That’s why all that nonsense about “economic uncertainty” was such bullshit. None of these people ever thought Trump would bring back the factories, paying good middle-class wages. They can do the same math that the corporations have. But it would all be worth it if Trump would just hurt the people he needed to be hurt.

And then he did. He put brown kids in cages. He sent federal troops against the Black Lives Matter “mobs.” He nominated judges hostile to a woman’s right to have agency over her body.

And above else? He destroyed. He tore shit down. Norms, traditions, entire agencies.

So 2020 rolled around, and Trump no longer offered hope of economic revival in these economically devastated meth counties. Instead, he was the personification of their rage made real, in the Oval Office itself.
True, to a point, but Trump's 73 million votes didn't come from just meth country. There are plenty of outwardly respectable people with good jobs who think the same way, and while they may not be shy, they are liars with smiles on their faces. They may not agree with all the deplorable things Trump did, but they shrug and say "that's the price we have to pay to get things thing done."
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by taki15 »

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1 ... eplorables

There’s nothing “shy” about these people or their support for Trump, yet pollsters aren’t catching them. They turn out for Trump, but they didn’t turn out for Republicans in 2017, 2018, or 2019. Remember, last year Democrats picked up governorships in the blood-red states of Louisiana and Kentucky.
No amount of personal begging and pleading from Trump could get Republicans to the polls in those red states, nor did his extensive campaigning help his party during the 2018 Democratic wave year.

Yet with the national environment only worsened from the COVID-19 pandemic and other Trump self-inflicted wounds (like his failed trade war against China), Republicans stormed back this year, dealing Democrats painful down-ballot losses in the House, Senate, and state legislatures. Not only will those loses hamstring a Biden administration, even if we win both Senate runoffs in Georgia in January, but Republicans will have a free hand to redraw U.S. House and state legislative maps to their enduring, decades-long advantage.

All because Trump was at the top of the ballot.

So again, who are these people who only vote for Trump, otherwise ignore the Republican Party (despite Trump’s pleading), and don’t talk to pollsters?

The hidden deplorables aren’t Republican. They aren’t even conservative. They’re apolitical, otherwise ignoring politics, because their lives legitimately suck. They live in meth country, with dim job prospects (in fact, those two factors are highly correlated). Institutions have failed them—corporations abandoned them for cheaper labor overseas, government seems and feels distant, and it’s certainly not improving their lives. Cities feel like walled gardens—unattainable, unaffordable, yet that’s where all the jobs are, the culture, the action. These deplorables have been left behind. So their attitude? “Fuck them all.”

Trump shows up in 2016 and gives them hope for change, saying the quiet part out loud—that their lives suck not because of their own choices and that of those decamped corporations, but because all that sweet, sweet government money is going to “illegals” and “thugs” in those cities. He puts uppity Black and brown people and women in their place. He offers them hope that, if he can’t improve their lives, that at least he’ll hurt all those others.

Their lives suck, but Trump was supposed to be bringing everyone else down to their level. That’s why all that nonsense about “economic uncertainty” was such bullshit. None of these people ever thought Trump would bring back the factories, paying good middle-class wages. They can do the same math that the corporations have. But it would all be worth it if Trump would just hurt the people he needed to be hurt.

And then he did. He put brown kids in cages. He sent federal troops against the Black Lives Matter “mobs.” He nominated judges hostile to a woman’s right to have agency over her body.

And above else? He destroyed. He tore shit down. Norms, traditions, entire agencies.

So 2020 rolled around, and Trump no longer offered hope of economic revival in these economically devastated meth counties. Instead, he was the personification of their rage made real, in the Oval Office itself.

...

If Republicans can get these hidden deplorables out, then the political picture the next few cycles will be rough—more closely fought elections, control of Congress and the White House balancing on a razor’s edge. Making progress will be a tough slog.

On the other hand, if the hidden deplorables only come out when Trump is on the ballot, then that gives us some breathing room in the next few cycles ahead. That is, until a Trump ends up back on the presidential ballot in 2024.

Now this is an evolving theory, and it may be bolstered or undermined as additional data and information emerges (not to mention the Georgia runoff results will reveal a great deal). But regardless, Trump is likely the single greatest campaigner in modern presidential history. Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because she was a terrible candidate, she lost because she faced a political prodigy, someone whose ability to tickle the darkest recesses of the white American’s lizard brain is unparalleled, in a country that doesn't elect its presidents by popular vote, but by a system that overrepresents white rural states. Joe Biden cobbled together enough of a coalition to defeat Trump, but the damage was deep down-ballot precisely because so many of the House, Senate, and state legislative battles were fought in disproportionately white and rural states and districts—the places most excited by Trump’s candidacy.

So take a man who has criminally mismanaged the country, enriching himself at the expense of its people and his donors, killed a quarter million Americans due to negligence, leading to the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, and didn’t even bother to have a campaign platform because neither he nor his party cares about issues anymore … and he gets 10 million more votes than the last time? That number is a testament to his power as a vote-getter. Let’s hope no other Republicans reverse engineers that formula anytime soon. And let’s pray that these hidden deplorables, seeing their vote cast for a loser (and a loser who claims the vote was stolen!) decide to return to whatever dark crevices they emerged from.
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by Sabin »

OscarGuy wrote
Dems definitely need to change how they approach stuff or we're going to take a traditional shellacking in 2022.
They won't and we will.

By the way: these new Republicans are the craziest in American history.
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Re: Campaign 2020

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That site I keep mentioning had a brief analysis of the polling and found that Joe Biden performed within 0.5% of his polling numbers. The reason the polling was off was that Trump overperformed his poll numbers. It's definitely a media bias situation and the only thing pollsters can do is recalibrate their models. Then again, it's also quite possible that without Trump on the ballot, polling might sort itself out.

There was also a mention of how Republicans successfully ran against Dems using the Defund the Police mantra. While most voters are supportive of BLM, they are not supportive of defunding the police. But this is like death panels. Defund the Police has nothing to do with actually defunding them, but realigning funding and putting it towards initiatives and policing that benefit the community rather than act actively against it. But, just like death panels, Defund the Police is short and catchy and ambiguous to any but the most hardcore Democrat, so it plays very well to paranoid inner-city folks who fear the police being defunded will mean more of their stuff is taken in riots and theft.

Dems definitely need to change how they approach stuff or we're going to take a traditional shellacking in 2022.
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by Sonic Youth »

Okri wrote:I'd be curious if if David Shor's analysis resonates strongly with people here.
Post-mortems are good scams. Analyze an election immediately afterwards, and by the next election no one will think to look back on what you said four years ago.

That said, I don't think there's too much to dispute here. Routine expectations always get shattered in time - I think we can bury the once-ironclad rule that high turnout benefits Democrats - so I don't think it's outlandish to suggest Hispanics as a voting bloc are slipping from the Democratic party's grasp (which seems to be getting quite a bit of dismissiveness). Whether it's a permanent feature or an anomaly, we cant know just yet, but it should be concerning and it needs to be addressed. Republicans have their issues, too. The assumption that 3-out-of-4 white southerners would automatically vote for them is also looking unfeasible.

He also clarifies what's been bugging me about the "shy" Trump voter theory. "Shy" is the wrong word. It should be "cynical" Trump voter. It's not because they're ashamed of their opinions. It's because they are so distrustful of media organizations that they're more reluctant to talk to them, or any prying stranger for that matter. Democrats, on the other hand, can't hold back their opinions when it comes to Trump. (It also helps that they have more faith in democratic institutions.) Put in those terms, it makes more sense to me now. Which means, unfortunately, that the Republicans are right that there is a systemic bias in polling. I have no idea how to fix such a thing.
Last edited by Sonic Youth on Mon Nov 16, 2020 1:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by Greg »

The problem with Shor's article is that he equates more spending from the federal government with higher taxes on the middle class, not with larger federal-budget deficits. He also claims greater financial regulation would scare non-college-white voters as the Chamber Of Commerce warns of sapped business confidence. Presumably, this would lead those voters to fear losing their jobs.

These two things are connected. You cannot have a modern-industrialzed economy without money, and, money comes from two sources, deficit spending from the federal government and bank loans. Moving towards balanced federal budgets would mean that Wall Street would be the only thing standing between the United States and a pre-industrial economy. This would also increase the difficulty in regulating Wall Street, as there would be screams to not "tie the hands of the job creators, the growth creators."

What has led Trump coming to power is a concensus between Democrats and Republicans to allow Wall Street to run the economy, to essentially run the country. When people have an opportunity to vote their economic interests, a substantial majority will do so. When economic policy is taken off the table, many will not vote; and, many of those who vote will vote their prejudices on culture-war issue as the only voting topics left.
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Re: Campaign 2020

Post by Big Magilla »

Does it resonate strongly? I wouldn't say strongly, but it does strike me as more or less accurate.

I still don't understand why the more reasonable thinking Republicans finally had enough of Trump, but not of his sycophants and other rightwing jackasses. I'd be interested in seeing more data about the supposedly large number of voters who voted for President and nothing else. How much did that have an effect on down ballot outcomes in states where Biden won big but the party overall did not?

I do think that Black Lives Matter helped the Democrats but Defund the Police hurt immensely. Labeling the entire party as socialist, when it clearly isn't, worked for the Republicans in places like Miami, but how strong a strategy was it overall?

Unless the two Senate seats in Georgia go to the Democrats by some miracle, we're in for a very bad two years and probably longer.

Over time, if the the young voters stay committed to liberal causes and voting their consciences, there will a shift away from the stranglehold conservatives have on the country. But that could take decades the way it's going.
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