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Comment by Steltek | Hacker News Reader

I think what people fail to realize is that it's not unpopular enough and not with the right people. For the GOP base, they may disagree wholeheartedly but what are they going to do? Vote for a abortionist gun-grabbing Democrat?

For Dems, the best use of these things is barrage the election cycle with negative news about the GOP. Failed policies, bad ideas, myopic leadership. Bad bad bad bad. Suck the energy right out the way the Clinton investigation did in 2016.

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Reducing enthusiasm in the opposing party’s base is a key tactic in US elections, which are won at least as much by turnout of reliable votes as turning swing votes, however much the media prefers the swing voter narrative.

You didn't mention the largest voting block, voters who don't strongly identify with either party.

Unfortunately that voting block doesn't line up with reality, as least from the stats I know for the presidential elections. A given voter that voted for party X's candidate four years ago, if they vote again, will vote for party X's candidate about 92% of the time. This means that in the pool of 'likely voters', the two parties are realistically fighting over 8% of hearts and minds.

There is another caveat: 8% in ~12 states.

Greatest democracy in the world!

Then why didn't clinton win easily?

HRC got nearly 3m more votes. That ain't nothing.

But less turnout than Obama. Disastrously less.

Obama preached change, clinton to stay the course. People are so desperate for change they even voted for trump.

Swing states, where the votes matter the most, have been won by less margins.

The largest voting block are the people who don't.

Voters who claim not to strongly identify with either party vote as consistently with one party as voters who do strongly identify with a party, at least, from research I saw several years back.

It's something to use for undecided voters and something to rile up the democratic base.

Also, everyone to the right of Antifa have been told Net Neutrality was disguised legislation to censor conservative opinions.

Given how completely Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al censor right-leaning political opinions, and they're big pro-NN orgs, it wasn't a hard sell.

Unfortunately, NN has become yet another casualty in these weird post-fact times.

> Given how completely Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al censor right-leaning political opinions

Right-leaning opinions which violate their TOS.

big difference. I'm pro merit based immigration and feel entirely comfortable tweeting that (if I had a twitter, never saw the point).

weird post fact times? heres a CMU taught, Cambridge written paper that concludes:

"we never had network neutrality in the past, and I do not believe we should engineer for it in the future either."

Its the exact condescension and willful ignorance of intelligent opposition in this thread that so characterizes the left.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/15-744/papers/p49-crowcroft.pdf

We've had net neutrality as official FCC policy with different enforcement mechanisms from 2005 until 2017. Being “CMU taught, Cambridge written” apparently doesn't stop the paper from being blatantly wrong and simple, easily verifiable facts.

Absolute nonsense. What mechanisms? The cases of fraud or misrepresentation are just that. Not preemptive regulation like NN.

> What mechanisms?

Case-by-case application of the Open Internet principles from 2005-2010, Title I regulation from 2010-2014, Title II regulation from 2015-2017. The case-by-case approach was struck down by the courts in 2010 while the Title I regs were being drafted; the Title I regs being struck down in 2014 with a specific identification of Title II as the legal basis that would support the kind of rules the FCC adopted under Title I is what prompted the Title II regulations to be drafted.

> The cases of fraud or misrepresentation are just that.

The VoIP and BitTorrent blocking cases before the Title I regs were adopted weren't based on general fraud or misrepresentation principles, but on the FCCs publicly adopted Open Internet (net neutrality) principles.

So no preemptive regulation before 2015. When the entire internet was created.

> So no preemptive regulation before 2015.

That's clearly wrong, but how wrong is a matter of interpretation: it's either the 2010 or 2005; the Title I regs in 2010 were no less “preemptive” than Title II, and the 2005-2010 approach was, IIRC, struck down because it amounted to preemptive regulation adopting the net neutrality principles as binding rules without following the mandatory process of the Administrative Procedure Act.

> Given how completely Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al censor right-leaning political opinions

for "completely" doing such, they're doing a terrible job.

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