USA Politics

It's really maddening that Democrats learned absolutely nothing from the 2016 election. Their campaign will yet again be focused on not being Trump and nothing else. Their only shot at winning is hoping that the swing states, especially those in the Rust Belt, who bought Trump's rhetoric and saw him as a beacon of hope move to the other side after being disillusioned. I'm skeptical of that, since Biden doesn't represent anything new for them.

Bernie would've appealed to the Trump voters in those regions more due to his populist, more working class friendly platform. Biden performed better in those states in the primaries, but the point is about winning over the Trump voters, not merely retaining the Clinton voters. Trump's perceived relative economic protectionism and "appeal to the common man" was decisive in states where manufacturing jobs drive the economy, Biden represents the opposite of economic protectionism, much like Clinton.

That being said and as much as I dislike Biden and what he represents, I do hope he wins the election over Trump. There are many issues in which Trump's presence constitutes a great global threat - climate change being a major one. Then there also are the issues LC pointed out above.
 
The point is not winning over Trump voters, most of those voters are lost, rather it’s driving turnout in swing states. They need to bring out new voters and people who stayed home in 2016 but would otherwise vote democrat. Joe Biden might be unpopular with the far left, but he is definitely not the pariah that Hillary was to general voters and does not have an investigation hanging over his head. Disillusioned Bernie voters will keep Biden from racking up the popular vote in reliably blue CA and CO but will not have an effect in the rust belt, where Bernie severely underperformed this year. Biden proved he could drive turnout in the primary, Bernie did not.

Bernie was also unelectable in Florida, Biden keeps that state in play (especially if a huge chunk of Trump’s base there dies of coronavirus). Biden probably helps senate candidates in states like Arizona and Montana as well.

There’s a lot Bernie could have done differently as well. I read that his campaign didn’t reach out for endorsements; it took AOC reaching out to the campaign to initiate her endorsement even. That is just failed campaigning. Likewise, he probably should have spent the time between Iowa and Super Tuesday, when he was experiencing a major surge, building his coalition beyond his base. Instead he relied on a crowded field to help him win the nomination in a contested convention with a plurality of the vote (which, as I’ve mentioned before, guarantees a Trump victory imo).

Interestingly, Trump is making a lot of those same mistakes in his own campaign. He has spent no part of his term trying to build beyond his base. While I assume he is more popular now within the party (he isn’t going to struggle to get the party to coalesce like in 2016), he hasn’t really expanded his appeal among independents. Nor do I think he will drive turnout among Republicans, particularly in key states like Arizona.Trump is relying on the same polling errors in states like Michigan and Wisconsin to allow him to eek out a victory by a few points. It can certainly happen again, but it’s still a low probability.

Articles of note:
www.nytimes.com

How It All Came Apart for Bernie Sanders (Published 2020)

The Sanders campaign appeared on the brink of a commanding lead in the Democratic race. But a series of fateful decisions and internal divisions have left him all but vanquished.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
fivethirtyeight.com

Trump’s Base Isn’t Enough

There shouldn’t be much question about whether 2018 was a wave election. Of course it was a wave. You could endlessly debate the wave’s magnitude, depending on …
fivethirtyeight.com fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com

Trump Is The Most Unpopular President Since Ford To Run For Reelection

On Jan. 1, 42.6 percent of Americans approved of President Trump’s job performance.
fivethirtyeight.com fivethirtyeight.com
 
Suppose Trump loses the elections (which is starting to look like a possibility), wanna place bets on who uses the "You're Fired!" headline first?
 
Yesterday: Trump says some pretty stupid stuff, even by the low standards he has already set himself.

Today: Trump says he was being "very sarcastic".

November: A lot of people will show up, voting for this doofus while claiming his challenger has dementia.
 
https://twitter.com/x/status/1253733969356558336

This rambling response to a reporter from yesterday does make me laugh. I can sort of believe that he was being sarcastic towards the reporters or making a really crap joke, but there is a time and a place for that kind of behaviour and it's not when giving a daily press briefing during a pandemic. That's the sort of joke one of us might make here, or at a lunch break at work or at the pub with friends. It's not something the president of any country should be doing when the whole nation, and much of the planet, is tuning in.

Apparently in Maryland there have been a lot of calls asking about disinfectant consumption. The guy knows that his fanbase is not the most intelligent group of people - "I love the poorly educated" - and that they hang on his every word. It was grossly irresponsible to blurt that out. I was reading on CNN's website (obviously biased) that he was citing some ideas from the (non-scientist) head of science at Homeland Security that he was only told about a couple of hours before the press briefing.

In the video I embedded at the top of the post he changes his mind to say that washing one's hands with disinfectant might be a good way to kill the virus. Yeah, that would certainly kill the virus but also do a fair bit of damage to your skin too. He also rambles about sunlight, heat and humidity having a negative impact on the spread of the virus. That might turn out to be true but we won't know for a while yet.
 
The rambling old man in the White House now preparing for war against his own communication channel of choice ... because they flagged a couple of his tweets as dubious.

After he's been allowed to spread speculations, lies and insults there for years, it was about time.

By the way, I find it sad how it seems like the focus of many in the US now is on pointing fingers, blaming each other, R vs D, Trump vs governors rather than a unified effort to do what should be the obvious priority: Minimizing the spread of the virus while finding ways to reduce the consequences for the economy of ordinary people. You can't achieve a 100% score on either, compromises will be necessary.
 
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Dr. Eddies Wingman said:
I find it sad how it seems like the focus of many in the US now is on pointing fingers, blaming each other, R vs D, Trump vs governors rather than a unified effort to do what should be the obvious priority: Minimizing the spread of the virus while finding ways to reduce the consequences for the economy of ordinary people. You can't achieve a 100% score on either, compromises will be necessary.
Click to expand...
It’s been brewing for a long time for various reasons, but Trump’s very public divorce from the truth really forced the issue, and it turns out that ~40% of the country cares more about reinforcing their preexisting beliefs than about accepting reality. When facts no longer matter, there is unfortunately no basis for rational discussion or compromise. And when you can’t have a rational discussion, your only choices left are to ignore, tolerate, or fight.

When the stakes of the decisions are extremely high, it’s hard to choose one of the calmer, more surrendery options.
 
I was going to post it in the Fighting Tyranny thread, but decided against it. I say that, because Trump has threatened to shut down/regulate social media after Twitter fact-checked his ass. This.... is complicated. While I can't speak for @The Flash and how the media is treated in Turkey, I can tell you that here in Mexico we have free-ish press. The safest form of critique is satire, comics, political carttoons, comedic movies and shows are the easiiest way to get away with talking shit about the government with basically no repercussions. But when it comes to actual news pieces it's like an RPG 20 sided die roll, and your stats matter. Piss off the wrong person in either organized crime or the government and either you or a a family member WILL disappear. If the disappearance is by organized crime and you reach out to authorities instead of getting help you get a, "Well, you shouldn't have done that."

The United States SUPPOSEDLY has free press and freedom of speech, but... not really. Take whistleblowers, for example. It wasn't until 1989 that the Whisleblower act got passed, protecting federal employees, yet Edward Snowden is holed up in Russia.

The Trump incident mentioned above about cracking down on social media can be seen as an extension of the platform v. publisher discussion when it comes to social media. For those who are not aware, Platforms only HOST content and are NOT legally responsible for the content of that content e.g Facebook and Twitter. Publishers are the creators of the content and they can host it on their own sites or place it in platforms, e.g the news, and they ARE legally responsible for said content.

Social media sites have been touting the line for a while claiming to be platforms or publishers when it suits them, basically eating their cake and having it too. So one can read into Trumps claims as more of his dictatorial comments and actions, OR as forcing Social media sites to finally settle on whether they're platforms or publishers. One can see this on Google, Youtube and Facebook, starting by demonitizing, burying and flat out prohibiting right-wing content like Alex Jones, but it affects smaller content creators and sites as well, many that are caught in the algorithims by mistake.

Recently it's been the banning of any material contradicting the establishment on Covid 19 and the pandemic. Supposed doctors and experts saying the WHO is full of shit and feeding into conspiracy theories that it was made up by governments to control us and fueled by alarmists. I had an interesting exchange with a friend of mine on the matter on Facebook, but what do you guys make of it?
 
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Hey Donald, how about you get worked up about 100.000 Covid-19 related deaths and an unemployment rate of 14.7% in your country instead of provoking legitimate reactions from a private company? Oh wait, you can't because it's your fault and it's an election year.
 
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