Current Affairs 2024 POTUS race

[Pittsburgh Footy]

Yup...

The GOP is the party of working people socially

Not economically.

We see what's more important to them.

Them's the facts

 

[RAFUH]

I would want to be a black or brown immigrant right now, whether here legally or illegally. Let's just leave it at that. Our hope here is they botch what they are trying to do so badly, it gets bogged down in courts, etc, etc.

Won't just be immigrants. Plenty of Latino people in the SW who have lived in the US for generations - even before some of the states where states. They won't be seen any differently.

 

[Pittsburgh Footy]

....hold on, I spoke too soon...

This is spot on - the trans issue is a social issue

When they hate woke, it's all social issues.

Not economic ones

 

[bluestevon]

Class issues don't take hold enough on this continent.

Coming from the Liverpool to Canada there's a huge amount of class ignorance here. Less so than the State's, there is still an overwhelming mentality of the "temporarily impoverished millionaire".

For a lot of it I think it has to do with the fact that for the most part class lines have traditionally fallen along racial divides for historical reasons here.

As a result of that you see a lot of class issues being reframed or addressed from a racial lense. This has actually worked to push the white working class away from the non-white working class to the point where they have swung right and are choosing to blame immigration, DEI, employment equity, and other initiatives that are trying to tackle class inequality from a race-based perspective.


They need to pull those young white men back and educate them enough to understand they're voting against their interests. How they begin to do this I don't know. They've got Joe Rogan and Elon Musk telling them the world is out to get them and only Trump will help because nobody else cares about poor whites.

Good post, but I'd add something more.

The most important thing they'd need to do is start showing dith actions not platitudes that they actually care about those poor young white men themselves.

Right now the Dems are suffering the fallout of being owning more interested in courting big corps and celebrities than actually what they were based on which is the average working Joe.

Until that changes you don't see anything besides what we've just witnessed.

And the amount of 'celebrity liberals' squawking about how they only lost due to racism, sexism, the country being half fascist and how the campaign for Harris was a brilliant almost perfect one only further show just how deluded the party has become.

 

[Pittsburgh Footy]

I think there's plenty of good young people - they're at the heart of the anti-war campaigns around Gaza. They get battered for their concerns by heavy handed policing.

Overall: as Sanders said - the Democrats have moved away from the American working class and Trump has moved into that vacuum.

You destroy Trump and Trumpism by shifting left and fighting on class issues (which include abortion but are more broader than that, obvioulsy).

Harris was a terrible candidate because she was mired in the Biden administrations crimes against humanity abroad and ignoring the suffering of working class people at home. Running on a message of women taking back control of their bodies was - in and of itself - never going to trouble Trumpism.

You keep harping on foreign issues like Gaza when Americans, by and large, don't care about this. Like at all.

You give Americans too much credit to think it even entered the consciousness of anyone who voted Tuesday other than a handful (electorally speaking) of Arab Americans

 

[Pittsburgh Footy]

He never won enough momentum to change the day and any real socially progressive class concerned candidate will face the same issues.

The establishment threw him away in favour of Clinton because they didn't believe that the public would believe in his class-based messaging so they hung their hats on the idea of a first woman president representing being "progressive". All it did was tell the poors that the liberal elites managing the party don't want to focus on their issues, so they went to Trump who told them it was OK to be angry.

Sanders would have been slaughtered in 2016.

Can you imagine the ads calling him a Socialist?

Game over here. Might as well say that the Super Bowl champion shouldn't be called "world champions" because we only play football in the US

 

[LinekersLegs]

@GoldenToffee Btw on illegal immigration it is already down to lower than when Trump ended his presidency

Donald Trump should have the easiest presidency ever - Kevin Drum

Donald Trump might be the luckiest guy in the world. First off, in a single day he (a) was elected president of the United States, (b) escaped all of his criminal prosecutions, and (c) made several billion dollars from his now valuable holdings of Truth Social. He's also accomplished all of his...

jabberwocking.com

He says he'll rein in illegal immigration, and it's already reined in. What's more, job demand has plummeted so pressure on the border will remain low.

 

[FrenchDarrenBent]

Here's where I get so frustrated though.

The GOP isn't doing anything for working people either. In fact, they are running on things that will actively hurt working people. They don't care. Trump says I'll bring down the price of groceries and they lap it up. The only way to bring down the price of groceries would be to implement government regulations/socialism (gasp), which they hate. The GOP is only offering them someone to blame for their plight (and it's not who's actually to blame, like the billionaires that sent their jobs overseas and busting unions in places like western PA and WV).

Biden actually did do things for working families, and unions. But b/c it ensured they had a job rather than lost it, and b/c inflation made things cost more, these people felt like the economy was bad, when it's truly not bad, and in fact it's good. But people vote on feelings, not facts.

So Bernie can say whatever lip service he wants, and these voters can wrap everything up into "the economy is bad" but I know enough of these people, personally, that all of this is nonsense. It's really code for something else. Everyone wants a quick fix for everything as it relates to blue collar jobs, when no one can snap their fingers and make jobs appear out of thin air (which the Biden Admin actually did by the way with the IRA).

In his defence: he was THE anti-Trump candidate until superdelegates and the party establishment underminded him. He was the only one on the roster in 16 and 20 that could speak to the same voter Trump speaks to. He mustered grassroots support. He could communicate ideas that were popular. He was principled as well. Throw in the support of the Democratic party and you have one formidably candidate. A candidate that might keep the blue wall blue.

Can't imagine his presidency being anything worse than Trump's.

 

[FrenchDarrenBent]

Sanders would have been slaughtered in 2016.

Is what everybody said about Trump

 

[BlueTX]

There's a couple of things going on here and I agree with all of them.

1. On abortion - Trump himself has been all over the place publicly, creating his usual fog where he can plausibly claim to be on all sides of an issue at once - and for someone who is primarily in the conservative media ecosystem, it doesn't matter because there's no substantive analysis going on. Many, many voters appeared to have satisfied themselves by voting for pro-choice ballot measures even while voting for Trump - not knowing, or caring, that Trump carried out years of planning to pack the court with enough justices to overturn Roe. No realistic or principled analyst of this issue could square supporting Trump with supporting the right of a woman to have an abortion - but (lack of) perception is reality.

2. Even though the economy is booming, and even though (notwithstanding his other flaws) Biden helped engineer the best recovery from COVID of any economy in the USA's weight class, the average working guy, to the extent that such a thing still exists, feels precarious in 2024. Well paying jobs abound, but whole skillsets, whole regions of the country, whole industries become obsolete overnight with the rapidity of change brought on by technology. I think the increased "efficiency" of the capital markets contributes to this, in that billions of dollars can be diverted to shiny new sectors of the economy quickly - which hollows out the "left behind" parts, in perception if not reality. In the heyday of US global economic domination, post-WWII to the late 1970's, men without university education had good jobs, for life, that paid for a house, two cars, college for the kids, and good vacations/a summer cottage/a boat etc. That's still possible, and many Trump supporters have those things, but the housing and the education are MUCH more expensive, sometimes beyond reach. Most importantly, the loyalty bond between employer and employee is gone, never to return. Of course, these men also enjoyed affirmative action in their favor, in that women and minorities were effectively banned from competing for "their" jobs. So the propensity of the economy to pull the rug out from even the most stable employees, even in the best of times, combined with the fact that the workforce is more diverse, creates the petri dish where Trumpism can grow. A shock to the system is all it takes. The shocks to the system in my adult lifetime have been: the 1991 recession; September 11, 2001; the 2008 depression; COVID; and, perhaps most importantly, whether anyone cares to admit it or not, in 2008 we elected a black guy and they lost their minds.

3. I maintain that many Trumpists are bored. Many of the January 6 attackers were quite well off or even downright rich, as a successful blue collar tradesman can be - I am an attorney, and many of my clients are contractors, electricians, etc - and these guys have made a lot more money than me (their contribution to society is probably more meaningful but that's for another day). They see the negative trends that I'm talking about, but they really don't suffer them in a meaningful way - the rise of Woke isn't really hurting you if you can fly your Trump flag from your $80,000 pickup truck or $150,000 boat. Affluence and the lack of true, deep, widespread hardship have softened us - even though some aspects of American life, for some people, in many places, are objectively miserable, and even though poverty is a very real presence here, it's been a long time since Americans, on our own soil, lived through anything as horrible as, say, the World Wars. The shocks I mentioned above were bad, but they weren't as as bad as, say, the Blitz. Even September 11 - to which I was a first-hand witness, living about a mile as the crow flies from the Twin Towers across the river in Brooklyn - actually personally involved only a fraction of the US population, for a day. The deaths of 3,000 people were tragic, and inexcusable - there were places not far off, and times not long ago, where that many people were killed so fast, every day, that no one could keep count. Misery on a scale we can't fathom. So in the absence of pervasive, every-man-and-woman trauma, these well-to-do folks who see their status being questioned - as in, they can't make fun of minorities anymore, or refuse a guy a job or a flat because of his skin color, it's not socially acceptable - play footsie at being revolutionaries and overthrowing the government, expecting to go back home and play a round of golf on Saturday. Except that they've been the footmen for some truly malevolent actors who are now going to use Trump and Trumpism to bring us some real pain.

We have effe'd around. We are about to find out.

Hear, hear. Very well stated.

I spoke to a group of realtors and real estate investors last night. Virtually all of them are massive Trump supporters. They were shocked yesterday to find that home improvement and builders/developer stocks took a hit and mortgage rates moved in the wrong direction, largely due to inflation fears. My wife works in the industry. Most of her colleagues are Trumpers. When she and a couple of others drove by a house being built and the music being played and conversation among the framers, plumbers, etc was all in Spanish she asked, "do you guys think we'll be able to replace these tradespeople? Who is going to build our houses?" She was met with silence.

Indeed we are about to f'ing find out.

 

[Bishop Thumpety-Thump]

See, people wondering "how could this happen". Well its simple. Its this complete and utter sensationlist, exaggerated, BS right here that the Democrats and the Democrat run media have pushed for the last 4 years... no, 9 years, that has caused people to take stock and say, "No, ive had enough".

They pushed the narrative so hard, and tried to say that Jan 6th was "worse than 9/11", after spending a literal whole year defending much worse and much more violent attacks by activists all around the country, including firebombing St Johns church near the white house as being "mostly peaceful".

They called Trump a literal "Nazi", which he literally isn't, but it sounds better in a soundbite than "meanie". And thats since 2015. And all the way through to as recently as this week, when Obama chimed in again with the completely untrue "Nazis are fine people" hoax, that im pretty sure most people who dont like him still believe.

Thats Obama, Clinton, Harris, and Biden who have all used it in this election cycle, knowing its a lie, to push a false narrative, and the supposed impartial msm news channels (again, plural) fail time and time again to fact check.

Saying he was holding a Nazi Rally in MSG, when its been used by JFK, Jimmy Carter and i think Clinton as well if memory serves me. But no, this 1 is different. How dare he hold a rally in his home town.

Its dishonest, its corrupt, and people are tired of it.

I thought Everton fans might see it for what it is, given our treatment by the powers that be and lapdog media. But seemingly no.

"Premier League. Corrupt as f***k.
US Democrat Government and its media puppets. All above board"

Quite catchy. I wonder if we can get it going at the next game?

And if you need a reason for why they would possibly go to such lengths? Its simple. Trump is an outsider who should never have been able to do what he did, and he embarrassed them in their arrogance.

Twice.

You ok mate?

 

[Pittsburgh Footy]

In his defence: he was THE anti-Trump candidate until superdelegates and the party establishment underminded him. He was the only one on the roster in 16 and 20 that could speak to the same voter Trump speaks to. He mustered grassroots support. He could communicate ideas that were popular. He was principled as well. Throw in the support of the Democratic party and you have one formidably candidate. A candidate that might keep the blue wall blue.

Can't imagine his presidency being anything worse than Trump's.

It's an interesting argument - would working class voters in 2016 vote with the economy in mind (Sanders) or the culture war stuff (Trump). It's interesting and I think it would have been a wash

On the college educated side of things, Sanders would have had less support than Clinton, because of the socialism, whatever that means. So Sanders would have bled white voters in the suburbs.

 

[trueblue84]

I can think of another 4 letter word for her.

Harry potter cast the cuntius stupidius spell on her.

 

[Blue 1]

Sanders would have been slaughtered in 2016.

Can you imagine the ads calling him a Socialist?

Game over here. Might as well say that the Super Bowl champion shouldn't be called "world champions" because we only play football in the US

Biden should've been the candidate in 2016, and we'd have never had Orange Shitler.

 

[Pittsburgh Footy]

Is what everybody said about Trump

We didn't understand the cult of personality surrounding Trump in 2016. By we I mean college educated white collar people.

I could be wrong here. But my belief, with the benefit of hindsight, is Sanders is too much of an intelligent-adjacent personality to win those people over vs Trump. They want Trump because "he tells it like it is" and doesn't use those highfalutin words. It's easier to buy in to the blame game rather than rational lines of thinking.