tsubaki
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Never!
Current Affairs The 2020 United States Presidential Election
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TN Toffee
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UptheTofees
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UptheTofees
Player Valuation: £20m
Sassy Colombian
Member: Team PoP
It is ridiculous the amount of money that has been spent and will be spend on these campaigns in the next few weeks. What's even more upsetting is that one has to become part of this insanity. Because after seeing all the money being poured into Georgia by far right radical groups how can't I not contribute to help these Democrats gets elected. Specially when the weight of power of Biden's presidency depends on control of the Senate.
Except, you know, they didn't. He lost the popular vote by 3m last time.
That is so perfectly put. And THAT is what certain people just don't get, you can try to help all the people you want, if they actively are fighting against your help how are you supposed to?
This must be a bit concerning?
I mean, there's brain fog but he has a lot of these moments doesn't he?
I'll be surprised if he serves 4 years.
I mean, there's brain fog but he has a lot of these moments doesn't he?
I'll be surprised if he serves 4 years.
lol You boys choose the strangest pretexts to get upset about. Ok vereauxi, no more scary book lurnin' or historical parables about whether people better remember Marie Antoinette's charity work or being told to eat cake then, if it makes you feel more secure.
As you well know, this is a one-sided, tendentious filtering of what happened in West Virginia. Biden outperformed Clinton slightly - but this is like saying that rain is wet and falls from the sky because Clinton won the lowest number of total votes by a Democrat in West Virginia since the backlash against the First World War. So yes, Biden improved on 2016 (albeit almost imperceptibly on the NYT swing map), but Osama Bin Laden, the Ayatollah Khomeini and an inanimate carbon rod would have, too. Biden's performance was still worse than Obama in 2012 and especially 2008, when he took 7 counties. It was, in fact, the second lowest vote share for Democrat in the history of the state of West Virginia. And you are also ignoring that Trump increased both his share of the vote and his total votes by far, far more than Biden did. If you consider it progress when your opponent defeats you by an even greater margin than he did last time, knock yourself out. "Phenomenal", to borrow a phrase. And, far more relevant than West Virginia, you are also overlooking the further and likely permanent swings toward the Republicans in Iowa or Ohio - states that the Democrats once won routinely even as late as Obama.
Regarding Democrat support among African Americans, you are also ignoring both historical trends, momentum and overall turnout, all of which matter far more than vote share. Yes, the overall percentage is high, but when it swings even by a few points to Republicans the consequences are existential for the Democrats given the precarity of their coalition. This, as I'm sure you know, is exactly what happened in 2016, when Trump won the same share of the white vote as Romney but defeated Clinton through modest gains among African American and Latino voters. In 2020, it is looking like African-American voters again swung for Trump by about 3-5% (which is essentially two votes for Republicans - add one for them and subtract one for you). Absent an unprecedented surge against a historically unpopular opponent in the suburbs (by people who still voted Republican down ballot) and by young people (which the Party apparently has no interest in sustaining if the appointment of fossil fuel crony Cedric Richmond as environmental liaison is anything to go by), this shift alone would be enough to cost them an election. It did in 2016.
When we consider African American voter turnout, the picture is even more bleak. Take a look at what has happened in Cleveland, for example:
This is what the obliteration of the Democratic Party looks like.
Among Latino voters (who do not actually exist as a coherent voting bloc), it is even more stark. Tejanos swung to Trump by huge margins - 30 point swings in many counties. That's the headline but elsewhere the Democrats also lost ground badly. In Nevada for instance it is looking from the exit polls like Biden shed 10% among Hispanic voters. This is terrifying to anyone who actually understands how Democrats win elections, but not unexpected; after all, the Party took great pains to repudiate the only candidate who understands how to mobilise Latino voters, turned up their noses at his formidable grassroots organisation, spent the whole summer ignoring increasingly frantic warnings and pleas about Latino outreach, and then, when it was far too late, assumed that classic specimens like this could win them back:
Imagine just how contemptuous or indifferent to your party voters have to be to swing toward Donald Trump, a man who spent four years demonising immigrants from South of the border, calling them rapists, accusing them of being unable to judge impartially... And then the Democrats lost significant ground to him. Has it occurred to you yet to genuinely attempt to understand why that is? If you honestly think people don't understand the insinuation when the most salient question as they're queued up for food handouts is who they voted for - or, that implications of the elites' collective guilt-induced hysteria and competitive rites of wokeness don't nonetheless filter through to people who don't know who Kendi or Robin di Angelo are - or, how people who've just lost their small businesses or their homes or their ability to feed their children can be expected respond to being told that the most urgent problem in America is their lack of contrition for oppressing Barack Obama and Kamala Harris's children... well, lets just say, liberals' extraordinary talent at keeping their heads beneath the sand is yet another reason why we can state with such certainty that the future is so bleak for the Democrats. In ceremonies of the horseman, even the pawn must hold a grudge.
None of this has not gone unnoticed among conservatives (who virtually nobody here reads or understands). They have started to realise, far, far sooner than the Democrats, that a decisive bloc of Latino and African-American voters will vote along class lines when given the option, giving them to keys to govern virtually unopposed. Democrats think they've won some epic victory against the final video game boss, but the truth is, against Trump they were playing on easy mode. The Republicans have far more room to grow than the Democrats, who maxxed out their turnout and still lost down-ballot while barely defeating an impossibly weak opponent. They will never again get to campaign against a pandemic, a depression and a historically unpopular President who spend his airtime blubbering that Grayson Carter was very unfair to him when he wasn't insulting the very voters who nonetheless swung for him. The Republicans know this, and will run a ruthless, disciplined, largely colourblind campaign for nationalism, patriotism, pride and solidarity, and against clueless, condescending, prosperous liberal know-it-alls. The script is familiar, and they've recited it with great effect since Nixon. They will call themselves the Party of the Working Class, which is grotesque but against the post-Obama Democrats, still the more plausible claim to the mantle. And they can cite the very tangible material gains accrued to the lowest income bracket under Trump (and if you're bursting at the seams to tell me that Trump wasn't personally responsible, you're correct and it doesn't matter). In 2022 + 2024, the Republicans will restore their standing among rich white suburbanites (whose 2020 aberration the post-Obama sold out every other element of their coalition for) and continue expanding their gains with non-college educated whites, African Americans and Latinos (many of whom will also once again cease to vote). The appearance of authenticity is the most important currency there is in American politics, and against this, once Biden and Sanders are out to pasture, the only Democrats with any national profile act like they're auditioning to play the villains in Office Space. If you let the RNC choose their own opponent, Harris, Buttigieg and Warren would top every single list.
Stamp your feet, gnash and wail, filter the polls and keep calling me playground names or insulting my 'intellectual complexity' (PS Lol!) to collect your Pavlovian dopamine rewards from the SteveBots, if it soothes you. It doesn't matter. It changes nothing. It is a certainty that the Democrats will lose the House in 2022, and two years later when West Virginia, Montana and Ohio go red, they'll have lost the Senate for a generation, if not permanently. And most likely the Presidency too, without Trump to drive turnout and after Biden does nothing (or, better yet, does nothing save for waiving college debt by fiat) and the Party's clueless functionaries, grifters and obedient base toss up some hilariously tone-deaf West Wing kayfabe tag team like Harris and Buttigieg to test once again how 'vote for me or you're racist' fares with a country that feels sneered at, humiliated, impoverished, angry and ignored.
The first part of your post up until the Biden video was a decent analysis. The Biden video and all subsequent text was just more of a whingey and egotistic gloss.
In the interest of not prolonging this any further, I'll say this and stop. The Dems have run two very weak machine-Democrats in the last two presidential elections. They lost one election and they won this one. I see Biden, and especially Clinton, as being pretty flat and uncharismatic politicians, which is exactly why I think the Democrats are not completely finished as you claim. To me, it's surprising that the Democrats won in spite of Biden, whereas you seem to think the Democrats won because they spite Trump. Certainly it is some of the latter, but the former hasn't gotten much notice.
But those numbers I posted, whether you find them inconvenient or not, do matter. No matter what new set of numbers or new set of constituents you want to bring up, the division between college-educated and non college-educated is not so starkly divided along party lines as you claim. It really is just that simple.
You write with pedantic conviction, as if all of us here are some uninformed suburbanite housewife or some oblivious and self-satisfied Brooklyn hipster dad. This is your central conceit. I would guess that no one here in this thread is a cheerful party-line Democrat who is blissfully unaware of all the horrible strategizing within the Democratic party, especially for down-ballot elections. This does spell trouble for them and I'm not incognizant of it. I just think your certitude is woefully premature in the face of an unprecedented election cycle. Biden, like Clinton, has resonated poorly with the black vote and especially the Hispanic vote (that cringey Biden video only proves both our points). And if Biden runs again, it probably does spell a lot of trouble with the 2024 election. I've stated as much in previous posts. But if the economy turns for the better or there is better Democratic messaging, coupled with decent candidates, then things are not so dire as you claim.
You are welcome to continue hammering this thin nail. I find it odd that of all the things one could analyze regarding the Democrat's apparently grim results and ostensibly grim future--things like redistricting to favor a huge net gain by Republicans in the House (with more to come after the census), the recent Republican swing against electoral college reform, the continued disenfranchisement of black voters, the fact that a Democratic presidential candidate has won Georgia for the first time since 1992 (and a Northerner at that), the distressing silence from top Republicans regarding Trump's continued anti-democratic tactics upon losing the election, the Republican war on labor unions, the overt racism in sections of the Republican party--you choose to reduce your analysis to "vote for me or you're racist." This is a Hannity-level eisegesis. Exactly who is being tendentious here?
[As to my slight regarding your Marie Antoinette quote, I'm not upset. I'll just say that having grown up around literary critics throughout my childhood, I have now developed a general disdain for uncalled for intellectualer-than-thou pretense. Make no mistake, back in high school I would have thought your posts were boss in the same sense that I would have found my dad and Harold Bloom's pompous exchanges while they played billiards really really cool. Now I just find it to be self-serving filler-text.]
[As to your intimation that I post here for "likes" and affirmation yet you post stuff like "collect your Pavlovian dopamine rewards from the SteveBots", I think it is pretty clear who the hand-waving, validation-seeking, I-have-so-many-clever-things-to-say kid at the back of the room is.]
carolinablue232
Player Valuation: £70m
This was the concern when he was chosen as the nominee and through the election and why some, expressed frustration with the Democratic Party over the choice. Agreed, I see him stepping down before his term ends. I disagree with a decent amount of what Kamala says but I wish it was just her from day 1.
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
There is not a single person here unfamiliar with 'Let them eat cake' (or $12 ice cream, as it were). It is not exactly invoking Althusser and Derrida now, is it.
And, self-righteously standing up for the simple, honest common man at the same time as he name-drops close family friend Harold Bloom! That's too much.... * chef's kiss *
Thanks for the evening chortle, mate!
Maybe they should hire my 7 year olds as lawyers, they at least know all the state abbreviations.
TN Toffee
Player Valuation: £25m
What an absolute profile in cowardice my local Senator, Lamar Alexander continues to be. He’s retiring at the end of his term, so faces no political consequences for doing the right thing, and it took him almost two weeks to step forward with this tepid statement.
I was dropping that name to prove my point that needlessly self-serving filler text is exactly that.
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