[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/...
If you're running against Trump in an election, what's the point of drawing the ire of industry (pharma, insurance, military, surveillance, general big-corp) when you can focus on orthogonal issues? You could get more funding by ignoring them and focusing on mostly-irrelevant wedge issues such as abortion (never going anywhere), "decorum", etc. Personally if Trump loses the next election I think we're going to get the biggest corporate-bootlicker democrat we've ever seen
Pretty sure any phrase preceded by the word 'neoliberal' is already (by definition) aligned with corporate interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
"Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism refers primarily to the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. Those ideas include economic liberalization policies such as privatization, austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980."
A common critique of neoliberalism is that it pays lip service to adding diversity to traditionally high status/class/prestige careers and positions without disassembling the unfair power structures that cause those careers and positions to be so desirable. Hence "neoliberal diversity theatre" is somewhat separate from ostensibly selling out to corporate interests, because diversity theatre's goal is to advance justice along identitarian lines without removing injustice from the system; it's spreading injustice out among races and gender without addressing it as an intrinsic symptom.
Politicians selling out to corporate interests is the main mechanism through which those power structures are maintained and expanded, but the equality-charades are a necessary ingredient to make the main course palatable (for the democrats. Republicans are also neoliberal but use other wedge issues).
Some Democrats and some Republicans are neoliberal; the dominance of the neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party is weakening, and it's even weaker in the Republican Party—Trump is decidedly not a neoliberal.)
Just over 50% disapproval isn't actually that easy to beat; its enough to draw strong candidates of diverse viewpoints into the opposition primary (rather than them sitting out as often happens with a strong incumbent), but not solid enough for opposition complacency. Of course, that number could move strongly either way before candidates are firmly in or out of the primary.
> Personally if Trump loses the next election I think we're going to get the biggest corporate-bootlicker democrat we've ever seen
Personally, I think if the Democrats nominated a candidate like that again, they’ll lose to Trump again, even with his unpopularity.
Also as election season approaches, I think that disapproval will rise simply due to all of the marketing/discussion that will bring back into the public consciousness all of the reasons people disliked Trump in the first place.
if Trump is still around in Nov 2020, he's overwhelmingly likely to lose. his opposition is extremely motivated and overflowing with a prurient desire to defeat him, while Trump's remaining voters, who have been repeatedly embarrassed and disappointed, have as much motivation to show up at the polls as a child has to show up at a vaccination clinic.
Have they been? In real life? Or was it rather the inverse (all the impeachment fantasies etc, the collusion stories endlessly appearing and fading, the economy that was "sure" to suffer, etc...).
That said, is the Washington Post a representation of the "real life"?
Have they regularly run such stories by embittered union leaders before, when the President was more to their liking?
Or is it just confirmation bias?
Especially with economic indicators going strong (so much for the "disaster" people like Krugman predicted "If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never" [1] on those same papers), and many companies, including Apple, announcing plans to bring jobs back to the US.
At worst, the WaPo link you've sent would be "business as usual", the untangling of US manufacturing jobs that has been happening since Reagan, if not earlier. Surely not some unique catastrophe imposed by The Donald.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/elec...
* fiscal conservatives have had to defend the guy who brought them new tax laws that increase the deficit
* border wall supporters have had to support a man who just signed an omnibus spending bill which included basically no funding for the wall (not to mention the lack of funding from Mexico, which Trump also promised)
* immigration restrictionists have watched the Trump administration feebly defend travel bans that were immediately held up in the courts
* voters who consider themselves well-mannered, civil conservatives have had to defend a president who frequently insults and/or abruptly fires his own allies and team members
* voters who mistrust Wall Street big banks and want the swamp drained have watched as Trump embraced and employed some of these same Wall Street big bankers, including a couple of Goldman Sachs Democrats, who ushered in a huge corporate tax break
* conservative Christians have had to defend a serial adulterer
* manufacturing workers who were promised a significant revival of the manufacturing base have not seen much progress either, because bringing millions of manufacturing jobs back to the US is really really difficult to accomplish. but Trump promised it during his campaign. "You'll get so tired of winning..."
* what's going on with the US trade gap with China? we shall see, but, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently, Trump is not off to a great start. does he even know what he's doing? which brings me to ...
* voters who respect competence, order, a well-oiled machine, etc are not seeing much of it in this administration. at all.
On the other hand, non-fiscal conservatives should be jumping with joy.
> border wall supporters have had to support a man who just signed an omnibus spending bill which included basically no funding for the wall (not to mention the lack of funding from Mexico, which Trump also promised)
Well, "border wall supporters" also knew that "Mecico will pay" was BS political strong talk promising. And they see that Trump does indeed moves to restrict immigration, which is what really mattered to them, not whether some physical wall will be built or not.
(And let's not talk about "broken promises" about the Wall, when there's the previous administrations tons of broken promises about progressive politics, all official promises during the campaign of "Hope").
> immigration restrictionists have watched the Trump administration feebly defend travel bans that were immediately held up in the courts
And they can easily just blame the courts for this, while still thinking Trump at least tried
> voters who consider themselves well-mannered, civil conservatives have had to defend a president who frequently insults and/or abruptly fires his own allies and team members
Voters who consider themselves well-mannered, civil conservatives either are hypocritical or felt they have had no place in modern politics ever since at least Nixon.
> voters who mistrust Wall Street big banks and want the swamp drained have watched as Trump embraced and employed some of these same Wall Street big bankers, including a couple of Goldman Sachs Democrats, who ushered in a huge corporate tax break
I'll give you that. Not that they weren't expecting it, short of actually having some kind of revolution.
> conservative Christians have had to defend a serial adulterer
That's no problem for them, Christ himself was all about forgiveness, and besides, most of their TV evangelists are serial adulterers as well.
> manufacturing workers who were promised a significant revival of the manufacturing base have not seen much progress either, because bringing millions of manufacturing jobs back to the US is really really difficult to accomplish. but Trump promised it during his campaign. "You'll get so tired of winning..."
At least they do see some movement in this direction, which is more than one can say for the previous decades.
> what's going on with the US trade gap with China? we shall see, but, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently, Trump is not off to a great start. does he even know what he's doing? which brings me to ...
Well, Krugman had also said in November 2016 that "the economy is never going to recover" (from Trump), based on some temporary disruption in the stock market. Clearly (and perhaps just like Trump) there are no consequences whatsoever as to whether what he prophecies holds up or not.
> voters who respect competence, order, a well-oiled machine, etc are not seeing much of it in this administration. at all.
Those are fewer and fewer, because many (even people who didn't vote for Trump) feel that the "competence, order, a well-oiled machine" of prior decades has been mostly working against them. What they want is to see some disruption to this well-oiled machine of "business as usual".
my overall point is that these issues are enough to keep a reasonable or perhaps substantial fraction of the previous Trump voters at home on Election Day in 2020.
by contrast, we will see a huge fraction of Trump opponents dance into the polling stations on Election Day 2020.
forecasters should not take all of these past Trump voters for granted in 2020. there's just not enough good news to make them enthusiastic.
Advocating for tax cuts and then using the resulting deficit increase to fuel advocacy for spending cuts has been a strategy of fiscal conservatives for decades, so this is just fiscal conservatism as usual, not something that will cause most of them problems.
But really, there is not one single overriding reason that she lost the election, but a different combination of reasons in all the millions that voted for Trump/against Clinton.
Maybe, but her being a corporate mouthpiece combined with her lack of charisma, combined with her 2016 loss is a big reason a sizable part of the activist base of the party is in open rebellion against the dominance of the neoliberal wing of the party, and why it's been able to force concessions (though not won outright) over internal leadership issues within the party. The 2020 nominee will probably be to the right of Sanders , but the party won't hold together if they are as firmly in the corporate camp as Clinton, much less the “biggest corporate bootlicker Democrat we’ve ever seen”.
It's an old book but I recommend reading Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, it gives an incredible insight into how current affairs are spun into particular forms to suit certain agendas. The key motif of the book is that there are more than two sides to every debate but we treat it as gospel that you're either for or against. It's never so easy as that.
We, as free thinking, reasonable people are continuously drawn into hyper-polarized debates, particularly on social media: There is no nuance (as you said), only pro vs anti (as you said II). It also seems fairly systematic, and that we are clearly being kept busy with these "debates" while we are flanked and maneuvered on.
So it isn't Trump's "disapproval" ratings that are new for any President, it's the level of hatred that the press has for Trump that is new and allows for their spin on everything he does to "...be made alarming" as you put it. Look no further than HuffPo for your ridiculous daily press alarm. Obama was right in the same range in terms of disapproval, you just heard less about it because he was very popular among the types of people that tend to become reporters.
[1] http://news.gallup.com/poll/116479/barack-obama-presidential...
http://news.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-...?
Considering how laughably biased the media has been against Trump, relative to the exact opposite treatment that Obama had, he’s actually doing amazingly well in this regard. I think Trump has made a tremendous number of mistakes, but just going by the numbers, he seems to holding better than Obama ever did given the headwinds he faces.
My guess is Obama’s disapproval rating would have started off far higher too if Republicans were rioting in the streets and claimed cheating in the wake of his election. But Republicans didn’t do that, and took a considerably higher road than Democrats have done since Trump’s election. It has been shocking and terribly disappointing to see how poorly Democrats reacted to losing, and that poor sportsmanship is still playing out. It turns out that the “party of tolerance” is only tolerant of those in its own party.
No, they were not always in that range, and that's a huge range; the only time Trump has been anywhere near 40% is the initial honeymoon phase, where Obama was in the 20s.
> My guess is Obama’s disapproval rating would have started off far higher too if Republicans were rioting in the streets and claimed cheating in the wake of his election.
Yes, mass protests tend to be a symptom of widespread and strong opposition (another sign of widespread opposition is getting fewer votes than the other major party candidate; George W. Bush had the same problem, and started with the same poor numbers as Trump; unlike Trump, he managed to improve them to more typical early first term numbers quite quickly, even before the post-9/11 rally around the flag effect.)
They weren’t always there, but they certainly wound up there as his Presidency dragged on and things like Obamacare began to hit people’s wallets. Where it wound up is what matters, as people can’t disapprove of things that haven’t happened yet (except in Trump’s case, where some Democrats were calling for impeachment before he was inaugurated).
Yes, mass protests tend to be a symptom of widespread and strong opposition
The protests were driven by the media’s response, which were unlike anything that any candidate has faced before. The media was furious that they were unable to influence the election for Hillary, and then they realized that they could profit from the polarization. With enough negative media coverage, anything can sound like a big problem to those that allow the media to shape their opinions.
You're forgetting the birthirism, the claim that Obama was ineligible for the presidency because he was born abroad, complete with theatrical demands for his birth certificate.
His approval reasons would be in the dumps, media influence or not.
You're making a pretty wild assertion, that Trump's and Obama's approval ratings would be equal if it wasn't for media influence. How do you propose normalizing that?
How would you do that? Please give an example that doesn't entail making up numbers from subjective whole cloth.
That's quite the objective statement statement you have there.
How would you do that? Please give an example that doesn't entail making up numbers from subjective whole cloth.
It would be relatively simple, though it would involve some data collection. Count the number of positive and negative stories published at various time frames, and come out with a ratio. Then figure out the correlation between that ratio and approval/disapproval ratings at that time. Then you'd multiply Obama's disapproval number by the delta between his positive/negative ratio and Trump's (and probably include some multiplier that would be less than 1 based on how strong the correlation turns out to be) to show what Obama's disapproval numbers would be if he had suffered the same media bias as Trump.
That's off the top of my head, but the process would be fairly close to that. Nobody in the liberal media will do it, but the whole point is that comparing Obama's disapproval numbers to Trump's is not an apples-to-apples comparison because of the extraordinary bias of the media against Trump.
I feel very confident making that statement. Considering his personal and professional conduct, his backpedaling on earlier statements, his absolutely disastrously inept attempts at diplomacy and a whole host of other issues, it is accurate to say that he is absolutely not a person you would want to have any sort of relationship with, what so ever.
>"It would be relatively simple"
You're arguing from a biased starting point. You're assuming that media coverage is the most important factor in a president's popularity rating, not his actual actions and fuckups.
>"show what Obama's disapproval numbers would be if he had suffered the same media bias as Trump."
>"the whole point is that comparing Obama's disapproval numbers to Trump's is not an apples-to-apples comparison because of the extraordinary bias of the media against Trump."
You're ignoring the massive backlash, smear campaigns and outright hate spewed by the right-wing media during Obama's presidency. I'm not sure if you've just forgotten it, or if you're willfully ignoring it, but it was everywhere, endless pandering to birtherism, outright racism, doomsay prophecies that he would turn the US into a socialism/communist hellhole, that he would take everyone's guns, put all white people into camps, the whole spiel.
In contrast, most of the coverage of Trump is simply detaling what new stupid thing he did.
But if it's so simple, why haven't you done it yet?
Like the sitting US President:
* https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/18/politics/trump-obama-muslim-b...
* https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/10/opinions/why-trump-clings-to-...
* http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/time-donald-trump-talked-birt...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-b...
* https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-proud-birt...
Edit to add: You say birtherism as being fringe and rightly dismissed as nutjobs. My response is to show that it’s not fringe as it was supported by the current president. Part of the disapproval you’re trying to dismiss can be attributed to people frustrated with things like this.
There are legitimate reasons regardless of the hype you’re trying to use to dismiss the high disapproval ratings. There are well-known Republican/conservative voices that are speaking out against Trump as well. We’re also no longer in a period where people are necessarily comparing Trump and Clinton, choosing the lesser of two bad options.
Anyway, I’m out. Have a good $timeOfDay.
There are countless articles, videos, tweets (from The Donald himself) documenting it.
Instead you attack specific sources, in an attempt to discredit the facts.
Both were shitty candidates, Trump was just the shittiest of the two.
- Allegedly Sidney Blumenthal urged a reporter to investigate where Obama was born, suggesting it was Kenya. This was denied by Blumenthal and appears to be a misread or exaggeration of an email Blumenthal wrote. (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election...)
- Mark Penn wrote a strategy memo about Obama's "lack of American roots" in reference to him having lived abroad, which the campaign never acted on. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/09/the-fro...)
- A volunteer coordinator in Iowa forward an email promoting birtherism and was fired for doing so. (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/sep/25/...)
I have a hard time reconciling "very active in birtherism" (or promoting birtherism at all by the campaign, much less Clinton herself) with these incidents. If you've got other references, please share. (Though this is really far off the reservation with respect to the submission.)
I also want to point out that it's pretty facile to assert that if Republicans had disapproved of Obama more strongly, he would have been more strongly disapproved of.
I think even the most hardcore Democrat would agree that the vast majority of media outlets are liberal leaning. So their disapproval has a stronger effect on their opposition simply because they are louder and more people listen to them.
No, it's not. From the source cited upthread, here's what other Presidents had at the same point in their Presidency as Trump's current 53.6% disapproval:
Obama: 45.3% Bush 43: 17.6% Clinton: 40.2% Bush 41: 15.3% Reagan: 45.0% Carter: 34.5% Ford: 38.6% Nixon: 31.4% Johnson: 15.1% Kennedy: 12.0% Eisenhower: 22.2% Truman: 45.1%
That’s either scary or good, depending on your political leanings I suppose.
That's true in the sense that it's true that Nixon's outgoing numbers were pretty good given the time of the media coverage at the time; there's not a lot of evidence, though, that measuring support relative to media coverage produces any kind of useful information.
There are studies proving that the media does in fact have an effect on overall opinion. So if you believe those studies, then you have to also believe that the overwhelmingly negative media attention received by Trump would have an effect on his disapproval ratings.
Obama got to 55+% disapproval rating twice, in two single polls (3 Dec 2013 and 2 Aug 2014). His yearly average disapproval ratings were 36, 47, 47, 48, 52, 50, 46%.
Trump has spent roughly 30% of his time above 55%. RCP doesn't have yearly rates up, but it's pretty clear they are much worse than Obamas.
factoring in the unprecedented liberal media headwinds faces by Trump
It seems to me the only thing keeping any kind of approval at all for Trump is his attacks on the media. It seems to me that fighting with the media is the only thing keeping him below 60% disapproval.
It also looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402648.
It seems that the political tangents are just fine, as long as they are liberal-leaning. Futher, if you look at the entire universe of my comments, maybe 1% of them have anything to do with politics (and again they aren’t the rants that most accounts are allowed to go on without the threat of banishment - they usually have references and data to back them up). If you do ban my account, you would essentially be sending the message that it’s ok to discuss political matters here, but your view on those better be leftist or you’ll face a ban.
This is simply a wakeup call. A democracy is not a forest, it is a garden. We should not rely on forest fires to shape our society, we should tend it carefully at all times.
This is wrong in so many levels, and explains exactly how we got here. You're judging the issue not by its own weight, but by who is going to deal with it, or not.
In a representative system, the "who" is, and is intended to be, important.
In any case, I don't think it's a counter, nor related to the comment. We're magnifying some issues because Trump, when the fact is that it shouldn't matter who's President in order to assess its importance.
Check out George W. Bush's ratings in the comparisons below the fold - massive spike peaking at a little less than 90% approval right around 9/11, and almost always staying above 50%. I really thought he was unpopular.