- Apr 1, 2009
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Joe Biden's double digit polling lead.
- Thread starter NotDavidHayter
- Start date
In the Land of the Blind, the one eyed man is king. In this case, Biden is the one eyed man. We already know who the blind is. No, it doesn't make me happy to think that.
I know he's Chummy with Hannity, to the point they apparently call each other on a regular basis to shoot the shit. Perhaps Trump kinda forgot he was on TV and defaulted back to "Buddy Bullshit" mode? I mean, it's clear he doesn't have a plan and for most of us, has been true for quite a while. Most leaders/politicians at least try to pretend they do.
Plans are good. Being able to alter plans to adapt to changing circumstances is also good. Not having plans or just firing from the hip and hoping it will all turn out well when you have other options is stupid and reckless and not befitting someone (allegedly) running a First World Nuclear Armed Superpower. Trying to pretend problems don't exist and if we don't look at them, they cease to exist should be disqualifying to run a hot dog stand let alone any job of importance.
Then again, roughly a third of the country who literally doesn't care what he says and does because they've drank the cool aid so, so deeply(or Owning the Libs is apparently the only thing that matters). Meanwhile, Most of the Republicans in congress are either onboard with his insanity or know better but are too terrified/craven to say anything that doesn't sound like fluttershy meekly trying to object to people treating her like a doormat. "Hey, Trump, could you, you know, be a little less racist on twitter...I mean, if you want to."(barely whispering).
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Well, he could say that he'd like to do all the stuff he promised to do in his first term (Southern border wall, replace the ACA, etc.), but it would just reveal he'd barely achieved anything.
After that, of course he doesn't have a plan. He never had a plan, at least for the USA. He just wanted to get elected and said some stuff that sounded good to make it happen. It's been four years of decisions made by presidential whim to amuse himself with either no clear objectives for the country, or no clear objectives adequately measured against reality.
Well, that and funneling government/taxpayer money to his hotels and other properties. What? You think he lets the Secret Service and his guests stay for FREE?
Honestly I still think the single most devastating thing that happened to Hillary campaign was her high poll number. People saw that she was leading Trump by a big margin and so they decided not to bother voting. If poll had came out a few days before election saying it was neck and neck she'd be president now.
So I don't think this is good news, at all.
So I don't think this is good news, at all.
I totally get that side of this situation as well.
But inaction plus Redmap and all those other things I've listed lead to Trump being in office as it is. I think that sits on people's minds now.
It's always worth noting that Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes. It's also one of the reasons I get really skeptical when I hear "we just need to run more progressive candidates" when the fundamental reality is that you're actually running 50 state races of varying importance and not a single national campaign. And that doesn't get into downballot races where things like Redmap and disenfranchisement (which is what the GOP's strategy really is) really screwed over Democrats generally and progressives in particular.
For example, I see the appeal for Booker in Kentucky to take on McConnell, but the fundamental reality is that Kentucky is a red state that really only votes Democrat state-wide when they're effectively moderates that would be Republicans in most Blue states, and that McConnell survived 2008 when the Senate was a near-blow-out for Democrats. McSally could pump every ounce of backing she can muster behind him, but you're already dealing with a bad hand before you even talk about the Bradley Effect.
Because of the electoral college, we live in a situation that your voice only matters if you live in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. Also known as the Swing States. I could write in Kratos and New York will still vote Biden in.
I have no doubt that these polls are accurate. Trump is horribly unpopular. Even more so after Covid. But there's a large part of Majority America who doesn't care. Who thinks the economy has never been this good even though we are being trounced by the Chinese and unemployment still reaching a new high. I can't understand complaining about how you and millions of others can't work but proclaiming the economy hasn't been better thanks to Trump.
For the most part, we're dealing with True Believers. People who've said Trump has hurt them, but still will vote for them. So it's up to the swing states and hope sanity grips those 12 places.
If that were true, the swing states she lost would have shown better polling after the election when people stopped and said to themselves "Fuck..."
But they didn't. She lost those states good and proper.
USA
Seriously though, at this point, the only way we can finally do away with gerrymandering and shift to making every vote being equal is by having all the democrats move out of their cities into the Republican towns and out vote them. We actually have enough democrats in the US to do this, they just have no desire to move to rural america in order to accomplish what it will take to be able to change the laws. We have to remove the people who are keeping this awful system in place in order to solve it, then people can move back afterward to wherever they want once it is fixed so their vote will actually count no matter where they live.
EDIT: I also do not know how they consider Texas a swing state. I'm not seeing it happen. It is so hardcore GOP in most of the state, it would take a miracle at this point. All the democrat votes are in the cities, but the vast majority of the state is still rural and republican. It likely would take pigs flyin' at this point for Cornyn to lose his seat tbh.
Trump won by a little over 100 000 votes (on something like 140 millions), we're not talking a large number of people staying home here. You don't need large swing.
As far as texas flipping, not happning this election but the trend is clearly toward democrat, might become a swing state in 2032.
Texas has been the white whale of democratic presidential politics (as well as state politics) since the last Democratic Governor Ann Richards in 1994 (before her, Only Bill Clements' two terms broke a Democratic win streak going back to the Civil War, though this was during the post-reconstruction single-party south), though it really became a prize following the 2008 presidential election. The state's political demographics has been shifting slowly towards racial minorities, notably Hispanics, year by year gaining more and more. The 2018 senate race that made O'Rourke famous for nearly toppling Ted Cruz via enthusiasm, a relatively moderate platform, and a general dislike of Cruz was the closest any Democrat had gotten to a state-wide win in almost a generation, and may have actually happened had the President not personally intervened in that race.
Right now, Biden is defacto tied in Texas with Trump for the presidential race and while I'm skeptical it will hold until November, it's nothing to sneeze at that a state that could determine the whole national race if it flips in November is currently running neck and neck.
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It's an important point, but then again, there's the fact nobody really expected Trump to win in 2016. Even Trump didn't, considering he didn't have a transition team in place, had actually cut back on campainging weeks prior to the election and apparently was going to head to his Golf Club in Scotland right after election day.
So people got complancent and he won by some very slim margins across the midwest. I don't think people can be complacent, particularly not with Trump reminding us every day of what a fucktard he is, let alone Covid and Mass Unrest.
Turnout has also been very high in the recent congressional elections, without Trump being on the ballot.
Fun fact I did a bit of napkin math and it looks like, despite Hillary getting basically the same number of votes overall as Obama did in 2012, Obama would have beaten Trump assuming he got the same number of votes in the same places.
Yes. There can potentially be all sorts of reasons for this sort of thing.
I actually wouldn't put it past potentially being a significant enough number of people who just didn't like the idea of a woman president, especially one conspicuously touting stuff like feminism. I suspect the socially progressive messaging of the Democratic Party can be a substantial vote loser amongst white men (and maybe particularly working class white men?), because it makes them feel they'll always come bottom of the Democratic Party's list of people to care about.
Well I personally think it's the fact that the Democrat party has put working class people at the bottom of their list of people to care about for decades. It should also be pointed out that Obama came into office in 2008 on a huge surge of support when he was promising change, and then lost a huge amount of that support in 2012 when he showed himself to be indistinguishable from the corporatists that have fallen out of favor.
Personally I view the sexism crutch as just that, a crutch. There wasn't a large different between male votes by party between 2012 and 2016. There was just a noticeable pattern that the DNC centrist approach was losing steam across the rust belt, because it's those policies that made the rust belt the rust belt. Obama lost 5 million votes between '08 and '12, and then Hillary picks up millions more votes in California and NY while being within a margin of error of Obama's '12 popular vote. It's clear to see policy is what's important, not messaging.
Not to say sexist people don't exist, I just don't see them as having a large presence in the Democrat party that their apathy would throw an election. Especially when that apathy was in long held blue states with an interest in economic policy.
In the absence of policy gain, people will either turn to apathy or to other appeals. A person loses faith that the Democrats or the Republicans will improve their life. So at that point, they may vote on other stuff like social issues, whether the person seems to appeal to their attitudes, be "more like them", instead.
So a woman who exemplifies hand-wringing, smug, metropolitan, feminist, BLM liberals might have a lot of work to do where Obama and Biden have less.
While I think it could be possible for Biden to get momentum here due to the "Never Trumpers Bush supporting Republicans" stronghold here, I still don't think Cornyn will lose his seat. I would LOVE it for him to lose his seat, but I'm not holding my breath considering what I see on the ground here. The pro Trump Evangelicals are still pretty strong here, and I am not convinced that rural Texas has gained enough other populations in the right places in order to oust the loony far right GOP in those regions. We have some serious crazies here in office in Texas, of the whole " Obama was a gay prostitute Muslim" variety that actually hold high offices within the party, so if they can still be getting elected, I am not seeing how we can have enough votes in those regions to actually elect someone sane at this point. Democrats holding the cities alone is not enough to flip the state due to how it is divided and the size of rural Texas.
I don't know how much of that Hillary embodied. But in any case, the point is they didn't turn to anything, they merely didn't vote. Hillary had a dearth of enthusiasm, but Trump wasn't some great charismatic hero that got their votes instead. Notably he didn't receive more votes in Michigan or Wisconsin than Romney did in '12. Hillary just flat out lost enough votes that the normal Republican voting bloc won out, which they hadn't in decades.
I seriously don't consider sexism to be a meaningful factor in Hillary's loss when there's so many far more important and obvious failings with her. For example, perhaps she lost Wisconsin because she never campaigned in Wisconsin herself. Even if you could somehow show conclusively that a small handful of sexists would have let her eke out a win, I'd still ask why she was in such a position that a small handful of sexists caused her to lose. A lot of states she lost were safe states that held blue for decades, you don't lose places like that just because you're a woman.
I personally don't have a problem with a woman president but I was also not exactly stoked for Hillary Clinton being our first female president.
I suppose some might think that block is gigantic if they subscribe to the Sarkeesian theory of all men being unconsciously huge sexists.