U.S. Political Party Preferences Shifted Greatly During 2021
news.gallup.com
news.gallup.com
One party blows everything up. The other gets elected to fix it. That turns out to take longer than 2-4 years, especially with opposition and a thin margin in House and Senate, so the party that broke things campaigns on how bad things are now (due to their own actions).
On a year to year basis it’s difficult to see. But look over decades: this is a party that not only failed to advance anything building on the New Deal, but failed at every step to arrest its complete demolition.
If you really believe that the reason the dems can’t accomplish anything is because of Manchin, Sinema, The Parliamentarian, or $WEEKLY_SCAPEGOAT_NAME, I’m sorry to say you’re a mark. It’s like that Key & Peele “hold me back” skit.
Those are all Democrats. If those Democrats aren't the reason, who is?
> It’s like that Key & Peele “hold me back” skit.
You think some of the Dem Senators would vote differently if it weren't for the opposition? Maybe so. When everyone knows a vote will go one way, you can never tell whether people are "sincere" voters.
Still, it can't be that 49 out of 50 Senate Dems are all against the mild social democratic reforms being rejected by the 50th.
As are the Pubs. Ex. they left the ACA in place.
I'll take that over the GOP wanting me, at best, crushed under a boot and subservient, but I'll still vote for just about any candidate the DSA puts up locally if they ever do. I recognize the barrier function of voting for whatever barely animate ghoul the DNC triangulates on in the primary, so I'll do that until someone figures out how to get > 50% at that level with someone I'll vote for rather than a lineholder.
The DNC's marriage track record as far as I know was the same as the RNC, the only difference is who was celebrating when the supreme court made the decision.
That's a good example of why people who think the Democratic Party is a vehicle for progressivism are wrong. In 2008, Black people--without whom Democrats would not be a viable national party--said homosexuality was morally unacceptable by more than 2:1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu.... They were as conservative on that issue as Republicans. (Even as of 2019, 45% of Black Democrats think legalizing same-sex marriage was a bad thing, compared to just 11% of white Democrats. That puts them closer to Republicans (57%) than to the white members of their party. Hispanic Democrats are also twice as likely as white Democrats to say it was a bad thing, while Hispanics overall are three times as likely. See: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/5-gender-fam...)
The Democratic Party is a coalition of white social liberals, who are either moderate or progressive economically, along with people of color who vary significantly in political ideology. A significant chunk of the voters who put the party over the top in places like Georgia and Arizona are the old Reagan coalition: upwardly mobile suburbanites of all races.
The "ratchet effect" arises from the fact that the United States is a moderate country. If you look at the House popular vote over the last 20 years, Republicans have won it as often as Democrats. The House popular vote is a good metric to look at because it isn't affected by gerrymandering, and Republicans have an incentive to contest every single House seat (unlike with the Presidential popular vote, where Republicans have zero incentive to schlep all over rural California, New York, Illinois, etc., scrounging up votes).
Even within the Democratic Party itself, Biden decisively won the nomination. It's wasn't because of "electability." It's because the party is entirely dependent on minorities to be a viable national party, and American racial politics means that minorities often vote Democrat even if they are moderate to conservative. My parents are the "brown people" who turned Virginia blue. They liked Biden and disliked Warren. Not because of "electability" but because they're economically moderate and socially conservative, but as immigrants from a Muslim country they don't like Trump's rhetoric. That's the Democratic coalition, and progressives need to come to terms with that.
Each cycle, both parties make red-to-blue and blue-to-red lists of districts to flip, and allocate money disproportionately to them.
Even setting aside top-down party decisions, which clearly happen, seats aren't contested seriously for knock-on reasons: the best candidates won't run for hopeless seats, because the loss taints them and opens them up to carpetbagging charges when they try to contest other districts.
I don't think I disagree with your whole analysis, but the argument that "Republicans have an incentive to contest every single House seat" clearly doesn't hold.
Obviously political preferences over entire populations can’t be reduced to single issues. Still, I’m guessing the negative impacts of the pandemic have made a major impact. IMO they have a lot of people thinking “why didn’t you handle this better?” (with widely differing views on what constitutes “better”), and thus resenting the government, even if there’s really no silver bullet for handling something awful like a pandemic.
We've got things pretty good in the US. It's why people are trying to sneak across the border in droves-- everybody recognizes the economic opportunities.
It's true that the pendulum swings back and forth. The Democrats control things (as they do now), they make some changes to fulfill campaign promises and they over-reach in a few spots. People always want something better, so they soon vote for Republicans. Who pass things they campaigned on, roll back some Democrat over-reaches, and do a little over-reaching themselves. Then the Democrats come back into power.....
The system works. Along the way, we get social changes like gay marriage, maybe some long overdue restrictions on late-term abortions, etc. Society slowly moves forward.
I just wish there wasn't as much demonization and pot-stirring along the way. There's really no need to throw hate at people actross the aisle, because without them your party would soon run amuck and ruin everything. The system works.
The Democrats had a razor-thin majority in both House and Senate, but they tried to govern like they had a large majority. That... didn't work. And it led to people comparing what they promised (or at least tried to do) with what they delivered. From that perspective, the Democrats failed miserably.
That leads to a lot of disillusioned voters.
I don't know why the Democrats chose this route, but it was a spectacular, predictable failure. Especially, Biden should have known better. He spent a lot of years in the Senate; he should have known what couldn't be done with a 50-50 split.
I don’t think you can blame Trump for the division in the country. For exploiting it: sure. But he didn’t create it.
I think that Democrats seriously misread the temperature of the country after the 2020 election. They thought they were granted a progressive mandate when really the voters wanted stability and competence with perhaps incremental progress on certain key issues. All evidence points in this direction, starting with the 2018 midterms when a slate of moderate candidates gave them a House majority (despite all the noise about a few celebrity progressive candidates). The moderate labor Democrat Biden was the nominee over Sanders and Warren, etc.
The messed up political system that forces the Dems to bundle the disparate measures together is the main culprit, and navigating that with only 50 senators is really hard.
50 senators combined with silly filibuster rules and Republican/Sinema/Manchin exploitation of the rules is the hand grenade the Dems are dealing with.
"We're eight months into this pandemic, and Donald Trump still doesn't have a plan to get this virus under control.
I do."
The anti-vaccine crowd at first pointed to lacking FDA approval and once that came, refused due to possible 'long term side effects'. I'm unfamiliar with any infamy around long-term side effects of past vaccines, so I see this as something of an excuse. It's just easier to blame the President who promised to get it under control, isn't it? But is it fair?
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-virus-outbreak-ap-f...
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize his response to the pandemic without making things up.
The current thinking is that mutations are most likely to occur in immunocompromised patients who experience prolonged infections. I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but vaccines are less effective in those with malfunctioning immune systems.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
I'll leave you with another Biden quote from October 2020: "220,000 Americans dead. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who's responsible for not taking control — in fact, not saying, I take no responsibility, initially — anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America."
We're up to 900K deaths now. Is it fair to blame Biden for failing to get it under control? Probably not, but he never hesitated to blame his predecessor. Politics is never fair.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...
One time he failed to clean it up was the very famous time he referred to getting disinfectant into the body as a COVID remedy, although he never literally said the oft-repeated phrase 'inject bleach'. After doctors were left condemning his comments, he said that he was being sarcastic, which I think is non-sensical given the subject matter (i.e., in the middle of the a pandemic, during a press conference surrounded by doctors, POTUS wants to go spit-balling on potential remedies and get all sarcastic on... disinfectants & their applicability to this virus).
As far as presidential responsibility for COVID deaths go, I think things are a bit different now owing to personal responsibility. Since we have vaccines now, should you refuse the vaccine and then die from the virus can you really blame POTUS for your death? Biden took the unusual step of reneging on his promise against vaccine mandates to do just that later once there was a new wave of deaths in August 2021. I give him credit for casting aside the obvious political implications of reneging on a promise and that of a obviously unpopular mandate, as well. To then blame this same POTUS for more deaths seems especially unfair. Biden and his medical advisors know the truth that this virus just won't 'go away' as Trump would like to say with a flick of his wrist in its early days, and that we will have to get bare-knuckled about it or suffer more deaths from evermore mutations.
While the Supreme Court (which isn't tasked with this same security role) decided against him on this order, as the executive it was reasonable for him to attempt to use this tool to gain control of COVID spread.
Given the divided, political state of our country and seeing that the COVID outbreak has taken an even worse upswing now, I personally feel like he did the right thing here. You'll note that I was not opining on the legal nature of the move. Other presidents have made orders without knowing their legality when the circumstances call for it. Lincoln and habeas corpus comes to mind.
What federal law did he ignore?
The rise in gas prices wasn't a coincidence or due to Biden's actions. OPEC (which includes such wonderful actors like Saudi Arabia and Russia) intentionally reduced production and raised prices in part to punish Biden's admin for working against authoritarian nations.
"Everything that happened" includes cancel culture, woke culture, etc. It includes images like Kenosha burning. If you're a poor working-class white male, it's hard to vote for the party who calls you privileged. If those are the images you're seeing, you'll vote one way. If you see images of police killing minorities, you'll vote another way.
that's very true and it goes both ways (right-to-left and left-to-right). When you call someone the enemy long enough they will eventually start to feel the same way towards you.
https://ballotpedia.org/Jo_Jorgensen_presidential_campaign,_...
After receiving 5% of the national vote, third parties qualify for federal funding. After receiving 15% of the national vote, third parties qualify for participation in national debates.
Out of all the candidates on the ballot in the last election, Joe Biden was my favorite, but I didn't vote for him. I live in Massachusetts, a state which had a near-100% probability of sending all of its delegates to the electoral college in the name of Joe Biden. I voted for Jo Jorgensen, not because I support her or her party, but because she and her party had the greatest chance of hitting that 5% threshold and I personally value a chance of increasing political competition between parties over the empty virtue signalling I would have achieved by voting for Joe Biden instead.
I strongly believe that having more parties will strengthen our democracy, and by strategically voting for Jo Jorgensen, I know that I increased the impact of my vote and my likelihood of making the world a better place. Unless you live in a proportional state (e.g., Maine, Nebraska) or a swing state (e.g., Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin), you are absolutely wasting your vote and your time by voting for a Democratic or Republican presidential candidate instead of a third party.
The American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021
I think the current Democratic administration is most notable for its fecklessness and inability to get anything at all done. Maybe that's what's driving voters away.
On the state and local levels there is the tug of war between governments trying to keep covid under control and those same measures being deeply unpopular. I don't know what the solution to that is but there is a sizeable enough group of voters who just want to get on with their lives that its having an effect.
As long as COVID and the economy aren't "fixed" whoever is in power will have them as major problems.
Fuck, there are homes everywhere, we have the ability to dig, plant, make food, we still have the ability to transport things around. I know that no one wants to work anymore - but at this point, the entire economy is a state of feeling - and that's exactly what a president (or actually all of the leaders of the world) MUST fix. The resources are ALL there, but I think everyone is just letting it all go to shit.
This says it all for me:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/san-francisco-chronicle-ripped...
I know Biden isn't responsible for this, but it's just echo chambers from the top down that causes this.
edit: @nradov, thanks for the clarity there.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-joe-biden-no-vaccines-ma...
If you had said people are moving toward the R column because Biden hasn't met his campaign promise, that would be a valid argument. There was a shortage of N95 masks under the previous administration, there continues to be a shortage, and you ascribe that to some movement toward the left. That is a non sequitur.
As for the homeless problem in SF: again, has that issue changed since Biden took office? You have cultural myopia if you think a local SF issue is causing national polling trends to shift right. SF homelessness was an issue in 2020 when Biden was elected and people voted Dem to begin with.
Huh? Being able to produce something illegally is in no way a substitute for having a right to possess that thing legally.
1. 3D printed guns are crap.
2. Some people would like possess a gun that isn't a "go to jail card."
3. Some people would like to be able to conventionally practice shooting their guns, without attracting "go to jail" attention.
The only thing that 3d printed guns and homemade "ammunition from unregulated components" is to how gun control to be a futile effort, because criminals will still have access to them even if law-abiding citizens are blocked. A criminal planning a crime might not mind points 2 & 3 above, but a law abiding citizen certainly will.
Hybrid like FGC-9 can be reliable for over a thousand rounds. Non-firearm parts added in US to a printed AR or glock receiver ['firearm'] can be good for several thousand.
>Huh? Being able to produce something illegally is in no way a substitute for having a right to possess that thing legally.
Aight so how do I carry a glock for defense in Hawaii? How about carrying a glock for defense in DC after catching a felony for illegally importing a lobster? Can I drill a 3rd hill in an AR without asking daddy for permission?
>3. Some people would like to be able to conventionally practice shooting their guns, without attracting "go to jail" attention.
Aight, so tell me how I could avoid being infringed while mag dumping a lightning-link.
2A is dead, we have a patchwork of [compared to rest of world] liberal gun laws that allow you to enjoy some firearms in some situations. But it's infringed to hell, particularly if you are a 'felon' [not in the sense of a felon when constitution was written -- just walking onto a prohibited water conservation area without disturbing it is a felony in my state].
The alternative is the politics of the deed, just make it.
Sure 2A would be better than mere ability to make them. But you have to live within reality. The needle isn't moving back to free of infringement.
>but a law abiding citizen certainly will
Well 2A says keeping/bearing a gun can't be illegal. Unfortunately state and federal laws say otherwise, and judges are happy to bend over and make any excuse to infringe, particularly against felons.
> Hybrid like FGC-9 can be reliable for over a thousand rounds.
Crap is relative. How good is that gun compared to one manufactured using conventional techniques?
In general, you're missing the point: the 2A isn't dead, since it's what allows people who aren't fools (i.e. people who have the sense to avoid doing things that could land them in jail even though they personally think they should be able to do those things) to own and use a gun.
Now, if you are a fool who wants to act like the law doesn't apply to you, I can see how you might think the "2A is dead," but that's just an artifact of a foolish perspective. People like that might also want to setup a GoFundMe for their commissary account.
>since it's what allows people who aren't fools (i.e. people who have the sense to avoid doing things that could land them in jail even though they personally think they should be able to do those things) to own and use a gun.
I don't think I'd call say someone who got caught with a scary mushroom 10 years ago a fool for wanting to be able to defend himself and his family.
I would. How well will he be able to defend his family from jail, after he's arrested for illegal possession of a firearm? If he decides he doesn't want to be arrested, how well will he do with his 3D printed gun in a shootout with the police? Will he do well enough to avoid jail time?
You're engaging in some weird fantasy. The world doesn't actually work the way you might wish it to, and if you pretend it does (and take action on that fantasy) you're very unlikely to do better than a sovereign citizen does in court (i.e. fail totally, with everyone shaking their head about how nuts you are).
The whole point of 3d guns for many people is to avoid ever entering the court system, because by procuring all unregulated components and building it themselves, it's much more difficult for them to be caught.
> OK, grandpa
is very much not up to par with what's expected here.
Huh?
Democrats couldn't move the needle even a tiny bit on gun control, even with nominal control of all three branches and stuff like Sandy Hook as a rallying cry. The most meaningful gun regulation at the Federal level in the past few decades was Trump banning bump stocks.
There's zero reason to believe the current court - which is likely to be around for decades - will do anything but increase gun rights.
Nowhere in the country can you just drill the third hole in an AR and go at it without asking for permission.
Nowhere in the country can someone with a federal felony [except some white collar trading crimes] exercise their second amendment right, even if all tehy did was illegally import a lobster.
Nowhere in the country can you saw a 16 inch barrel down one inch without asking daddy for permission.
Several states now require universal background check just to exercise a right (own a firearm). None of this has been strucken by supreme court.
2A is dead, now we just have a legacy of fairly liberal gun laws in certain circumstances and states.
2. While the First Amendment does protect speech, the Supreme Court has held that time/place/manner restrictions on speech can be created by the Government as long as there is a rational basis for them. Compare against content-based restrictions, which will be strictly scrutinized by the courts.
Legal analysis is complicated and actions rarely fall into black-or-white categories. Even Second Amendment law has a large number of contours.
Permit for a protest is also utter horseshit on par with restrictions on 2A.
A dealership tried to do this to me when I bought a truck with cash, and I told them [politely] to get fucked (I had insurance but no proof on me as I bought it over phone). Then they finally admitted since I owned the truck outright they wouldn't stop me.
> You can't test drive it without a driving license too.
When you're test driving you haven't bought the car. The dealership can refuse to let you drive their car for pretty much any non-protected reason.
> Name a single place in US where you need a permit to buy a car or drive it on private property
Even if you don't need a permit to back your car down your driveway (after someone with a permit has brought it to your home), you still need one to drive it anywhere anyone would actually want to go. So you effectively need a permit to drive.
This is obviously NOT analogous to the 2A, where you need licenses and registrations just to buy a gun. In an analogous situation to cars, you would not need a license to buy a gun and shoot it at a firing range. So the low effort quip "lol what about drivers licenses" that adgjlsfhk1 and many others make is not reasonable.
No, I haven't. Driving on public roads is what most people mean by "drive."
I agree they are not precisely the same thing in all respects. However practically, the situations don't seem very different.
>>> So the low effort quip "lol what about drivers licenses" that adgjlsfhk1 and many others make is not reasonable.
It kind of is reasonable, given this sub-thread started with some pretty unreasonable or at least weird positions (e.g. 2A is "dead" apparently b/c everyone can't get a full-auto without a permit).
You keep using that word...
> 3d printing is an insurance policy.
Is it? An insurance policy isn't something that can blow up in your face, literally and figuratively.
Realistically, 3D printed guns aren't a direct solution to gun control, they're an argument for loosening it because they're proof it can't achieve some of its major aims.
I’ve wondered this myself. All the 3D printed things I’ve seen feel like really cheap, soft plastic. It’s hard to imagine it not exploding or at least melting from combustion like that.
For international crowd, something like FGC-9 is closest to reliable printed firearm they can get. It is hybrid. The barrel is created by 3d-printing jigs for electro-chemical machining a standard high-pressure pipe, yielding glock-like accuracy and durability of barrel. Bolt requires some work by hand. Rest is unregulated components and 3d printed.
In the US, the receiver ['firearm'] is the only component that looks regulated to the consumer. The UBAR for instance is a printed AR receiver reinforced with off-the-shelf U-bar that is extremely durable, and unless you're mag dumping or leave it in a hot car in the south or something should last thousands of round. The non-receiver parts can be bought without regulation in US.
Also bear in mind here, in self defense less than 15 rounds are typically fired.
>feel like really cheap, soft plastic.
FDM materials like PLA+ can be resilient when kept out of heat. Nylon-X and carbon fiber reinforced materials, depending on application, can provide even more rigidity and strength. Most of the stuff you've seen printed has probably been with cheap PLA with low in-fill (faster print time, somewhat hollow inside the shape). 3d printed guns are printed with very high 99+% infill (mostly solid inside the shape) with at least PLA+ to provide much more strength.
You mean like onto a trailer, then off a trailer, then a bunch of left turns then back onto a trailer?
Because that sort of recreational use is pretty analogous to what people used to do with machine guns and mortars and stuff back in the day before they were heavily restricted.
To borrow an analogy from Jerry Garcia, Bernie Sanders is the black licorice of American politicians. Most people don't like him, but the people who like him really like him.
> Democrats make up less than half of votes
Not the popular vote. Even Hillary managed to win the popular vote in 2016.
[1] https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-pol...
I was referring to registered democrats, as I believe was the article.
Regarding Medicare for all, those numbers are misleading. It has 70% of support until you get into the actual details of implementation. It's the same when folks say "An overwhelming majority of Americans support higher taxes on the rich". Well yes, but those surveys tend to leave out the definition of rich, so people tend to interpret it as "Rich = Someone who makes more money than I do".
This is not to advocate against medicare for all, but rather to say that it's easy to garner support for something in the abstract without getting into all the messy details that reality likes to impose.
Biden's agenda is dead, he blown up BB spectacularly, he is limited to executive orders power but he does not seem to be willing to apply it properly(cancel the students' debt, legalize weed, use ACA to the full extent, etc)
Republicans have NOTHING to offer to people except of cultural issues, but they are winning because they are not democrats.
People might not want that, and vote against it, but it's an actual policy platform they could run on
But Biden has been consistently against marijuana legalization. His power to make such changes is greater than his willingness to do so.
As for weed, he just need to remove it from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.
Keep in mind that this is what Bernie run on, so it is feasible.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized
While the public tended to have particular leanings, the Democrats and the GOP didn't really bother 'sorting' themselves until the Southern Strategy where the GOP went after the southern Dixiecrats:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
It's worth noting that there's decent evidence that one's political leanings may also influenced by brain structure:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/853648.The_Political_Bra...
A practical example, given in good faith: It may be that in their "random telephone sampling" they are only connecting with older people (who are usually more likely to answer calls from an unknown number), leading to unintentional selection bias. In this example, the confounding factor is age, and as such the gallop graphs could be simply showing that younger (ostensibly left-leaning) people are growing less willing to answer the phone (as opposed to the claim that Americans are moving right, idiologically)
There was a lot of 'even though polls predict a certain someone is going to lose, he might still win because voters are "shy"' copy written going into 2020
I'm quite shocked at how, after Biden decisively defeated his progressive opponents in the 2020 primary, Democrats have continued to allow themselves to be defined by their socially progressive left flank. Even my dad--a die-hard Carter fan who has voted straight-ticket blue since he became a naturalized citizen--is getting disillusioned.
I think Democratic elites have this notion that people like my parents "really wanted Warren, but voted Biden because of electability." They don't like Warren and they don't like Harris. They don't think the U.S. is a "white supremacist" country, they don't care about "voting rights," they don't think Republicans are "insurrectionists," they don't really care about climate change, etc. They didn't like how Trump talks, or his stance on COVID, and they support more funding for healthcare and education.
There is a lot of anti-establishment sentiment in the U.S., but what I think outsiders don't understand is that it's fragmented between the parties. Many anti-establishment, working class people are socially conservative as well, and vote Republican. They have no place in a party that talks more about race and sexual orientation than about immigrants taking American jobs. By the same token, many progressives are social liberals first and foremost. For them, opposing second trimester abortions is a bigger sin than working on Wall Street. That divide exists to an extent even within the Democratic Party--most of the "progressives" I know hate Sanders and think he's a "racist" and "sexist" "old white man."
This means that a key progressive premise--the idea that if the party only moved sufficiently left voters would "turn out"--is a mirage. Yes, there's a lot of anti-establishment, apathetic voters out there. There was a huge surge in turnout in 2020. But out of people who voted in 2020, but not in 2018 or 2016, fully 47% voted for Trump, versus 49% for Biden: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-biden.... There is just about zero chance that any of those Trump voters would have turned out for any of the progressives apart from Sanders. (But, as discussed above, Sanders couldn't carry the social liberal wing of the Democratic party that Biden carried.)
How can people not understand the reaction of moderates and independents? Perhaps they are watching propaganda that masquerades as news. The next few years will be confusing times for many. The pendulum swings as they say.
Really? I find this kind of hard to believe. I call myself an "independent", but I vote 90% of the time for one party. I wish we had metadata on voting information so we could see how many people are straight-ticket voters, because I have to imagine that it's a lot.
I think most of the election swings come from apathetic voters coming out.
My recollection is that there are somewhat more people who identify as Independent who vote primarily for Republicans, but that might not be true.
This discovery and the ability to quantify it was one of the breakthroughs of the Obama campaign in 2008 (the Bush campaign did this too, but the Obama folks really brought it to the next level).
At least for the past several elections, victory has come with energizing the base. In 2016, for example, there wasn't some noticeable shift to the right, Clinton only got 62000 fewer votes than Obama won with in 2012, but Trump got 2 million more votes than Romney did in 2012, because people who stayed home in 2012 came out in support of him in 2016. Conversely in 2020, Trump received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016, but Biden received over 15 million more votes than Clinton. Between the changes in overall election turnout and variance in third party voting, there's been no net shifting of votes from one side to the other in between any presidential election this century. Now it's a little more complicated than just getting people to come out, getting high turnout in the right areas is critical, so that fudges things a little bit. For example in 2016 Clinton had very comparable overall numbers to Obama in 2012, but she had dramatically less support in midwestern urban centers and stronger support in the south, which is pretty useless in the electoral college. But again, its not that people in the midwestern cities were voting for trump, they were staying home while suburban midwestern blue collar workers who traditionally didn't vote turned out.
However, he has really lost me in recent months. His administration spent so long trying to deny that inflation even existed, all while pushing for a gargantuan spending package. WTF? Then all this hyperbolic crap about Jan 6 started getting pushed, with the VP comparing it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Extremely disrespectful, in my opinion. And finally, the nail in the coffin was this Voter ID nonsense. I absolutely support Voter ID, it seems like a common sense policy. And I don't support giving illegal immigrants the right to vote, like they did in NYC. But according to Biden, this makes me a racist who is on the side of Jefferson Davis. Are you freaking serious!? My response to Biden is - go fuck yourself, asshole.
In summary, he has disappointed me in many ways. The left hasn't calmed down in the slightest, and cancel culture is at an all time high. Inflation is spiking and people like me may never get to own a house. Biden is too busy calling us racists to have any chance at uniting the country. And covid is at an all time high.
Very disappointing, and I hope someone more moderate runs in 2024 for BOTH sides. Trump and Biden are clearly a bunch of old curmudgeons who can't unite shit. Let's get some moderates in there, like Manchin or Romney.
Just to clarify, that law only gave tax paying legal immigrants the right to vote in local elections. No taxation without representation used to be an American principle.
I think the confusion is around the term "immigrant". I agree that immigration implies a permanent move - i.e. you become a citizen of where you are immigrating to. However, I think most people (and media) use "immigrant" as a catch-all for someone who currently lives in country X but was not born there.
How do you classify a non-citizen Green Card holder? Or someone here on a work visa? Legal immigrants usually don't start out as citizens from the moment they arrive. Obtaining citizenship is a long process. In the meantime they are still residents, and taxpayers, and ought to have a say in decisions which will affect them.
No, noncitizens include nonimmigrants in legal status and aliens in illegal status.
> I assume legal-immigrant means one has obtained citizenship.
No, it does not. In US law an “immigrant” is an alien present in the US other than one legally admitted under a designated nonimmigrant status.
A citizen is just a citizen.
Except they didn't. They changed the law to let legal immigrants vote.
Honestly, this lack of ability demonstrated in your comment nullifies most of the ranting you have built up afterwards. I suggest you seriously examine how much of a "pressure head" of resentment you have built up based on these equivalents of software bugs. Running a linter over your other assumptions might also help a bit.
I'll give you a suggestion too - if you want to win independent votes, then stop insulting independents.
I'm suggesting that you be properly informed about things that are influencing your voting. If you're irritated about the NYC law, it seems prudent to get the basic facts right about it before drawing a conclusion.
> I'll give you a suggestion too - if you want to win independent votes, then stop insulting independents.
I don't want to win anything; and I'm not part of any political campaign. I elect representatives who I generally agree with, and leave things in their hands.
If you generally want to vote to take the country in a good direction, I suggest you vote based on a complete understanding that's not influenced by loud-voiced commentators. Alternately, you can choose to be a low-information voter whose vote is easily "won" by some random person posting lies on the Internet, in which case elections turn into more of a shouting match about how much you can smear the other candidate and less about pertinent issues.
If you are wrong about one of your assumptions, it's possible you're wrong about others as well. I'm trying not to say what those are; because that just leads to more nitpicking and arguments – things that we already have way too much of on the Internet.
In summary: "Do your research before voting" is my nonpartisan and hopefully reasonable suggestion. I'm sorry it's coming across as disrespectful.
Swing independents tend to be more political practical and less ideological.
I hate to be so cynical but I have no faith in these phone surveys anymore. Most adults I know avoid surveyors on principle. Even further, most adults I know won’t answer any number that isn’t already in their address book. It seems like the only type of person that a survey like this might reach is the stereotypical technology-fearing conservative.
That’s not to say that these results are inaccurate in any way. I just don’t believe the methodology backs up the results here.
What they don't tell you though is that it's not truly random as claimed. They recruit a representative sample of respondents. So there are young people in the sample, it just takes more calls to get the data.
Source: I run these surveys
Don't want to take the vaccine? We'll find a way to make you
Disagree with me politically on Twitter? We'll look for your employer and coerce him into firing you
Stay two weeks at home, by the way stay in two more weeks and it's been two years. Some places even had curfews (but then if it's a BLM protest we'll ignore the existence of the virus)
We follow the science! (Except if the scientist disagrees with you. Check the interview with Don lemon and Sanjay Gupta when he's about to make a point about Joe Rogan. Lemon cuts him off and wont let him finish)
I thought it was to discourage throwaways, but others have noted they’ve created throwaways without the “auto-dead” behavior.
The religious right says, "We don't like what Disney/Home Depot/Google/etc. are doing, and so we're telling all of our friends to boycott them if they also hold those values".
"Cancel culture" says, "We don't like what you, Joe Schmoe, are doing. As a result, we're going to tell Disney/Amazon/Google/etc. to boycott you and make you unemployable."
> The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations. On May 6, Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two DJs for playing their music. WTDR-FM in Talladega, Alabama, dropped the Dixie Chicks after more than 250 listeners called on a single day to complain about Maines's comments.
That's not to mention the baying for blood that happened in the early 2000s when anyone came out against the Iraq War[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
[2] http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2...
The FRC once even called for a boycott of Chick-fil-A in 2019 https://townhall.com/columnists/toddstarnes/2019/11/29/famil...
They do this sort of thing often.
I'm not sure about the accuracy of this, but it is attempting to use past bad behavior to justify current bad behavior.
You can't change the past. You can do something about what's happening right now. A lot of rational people want to cancel "cancel culture" right now because of the harm it inflicts on society.
The whole reason the term “cancel culture” was coined was to give right-wing rants about the troubling new trend of “political correctness” a veneer of novelty; it's literally the same complaints from the Right (about things the Right does just as much, but based on different ideological orthodoxy) that have been being made since the 1980s, but with a new label swapped in to the old complaints, because complaining about a new trend for 4 decades starts to show that, whatever the basis of your complaint is, it's not a disturbing new trend.
It seems really weird to blame the Democratic party for this or Democrats as a whole since this is completely unrelated to the government or administration or elected Democrat officials.
Electing Republicans won't "fix" this for you at all.
> Don't want to take the vaccine? We'll find a way to make you
For interest's sake, are you consistent in wanting to remove all vaccine requirements, including for things like the measles vaccine?
Electing Republicans might get Section 230 updated to require platforms to be platforms and not a mix of all the benefits of platforms and none of the downsides of being publishers that are not neutral in silencing certain perspectives.
Also, I don't know why you are so eager to prevent platforms from performing moderation. Section 230 is quite simple, it means that social media companies can moderate without being responsible for their user's content. No free social media company can feasibly moderate all of their user's content, the math simply doesn't work out in terms of moderation effort per dollar in advertising revenue. Companies would have to stop moderating. The removal of 230 would lead to the total destruction of social media in the tech industry as consumers don't want to go on unmoderated platforms like 4chan.
A lot of this anti-230 stuff feels like 4chan users angry that the general public doesn't like 4chan and are thus demanding that the government ban all of 4chan's competitors.
It doesn't just feel like it, Republicans passing state-level “lets try to work around 230” laws have had them enjoined on First Amendment grounds supported by their explicit statements of pretty much exactly the attitude you describe as the motivation for the laws.
Yes, because we live in a market-socialist utopia where the giant firms that dominate the economy are controlled by democratic vote of their workers, not some dystopian system, let’s call it “equitism”, where society is organized around the interests of and firms are run by equity owners who generally are not the same people as the workers.
And also in a world where campaign spending is entirely by official campaigns with disclosed donors, not by notionally independent groups spending unlimited money with no requirement for tracking and reporting expenditures or donations.
When the choices are plugged in from the top, democracy is a sham. We live in an authoritarian state. We need a new republic that would do away with all the mechanisms of minoritarian rule.
Take a look what is happening in the UK (Covid policies combined with self destruction on the side of the PM):
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/148312195316683571...
Just for myself personally, while no where near enough to change political affiliation, I've gotten quite sick of what appears to be hypocrisy, arrogance, and gross incompetence from the left establishment, expressed through the popular media, government policies, and generally the "blue check Twitter" crowd. We are now living in "TSA everywhere" land with all kinds of ridiculous sanctimony.
I'm vaccinated, got a booster, caught and recovered from COVID initially and now again from omicron last month and still getting tested on a regular basis. When I go to a restaurant I have to show ID, vaccination proof, temperature check, leave a phone number, then wear a mask to walk 2 meters from the door to my table...where I can take off my mask and hang out for an hour surrounded by people doing the same...that is, unless I need to go to the bathroom. If I don't wear a mask while making the short walk from my table to the bathroom--oh my god, I'm basically single-handedly murdering old and immunocompromised people.
It is hard for people to take you seriously when you are associated with this sort of emperor's new clothes COVID theater. This is literally the modern equivalent of the "or else the terrorists win" nonsense of the Global War on Terror era.
- me and wife got Covid but we do not have symptoms
- I have surgery (quite important and relatively urgent since it hurts) but it is delayed because I’m positive
- my wife is a nurse but she forced to go to work because she has no symptoms
Should I blame democrats on this? I do not know but they really love being “COVID police” …
Of all the places to complain about, a hospital seems one of the least warranted
Speak to right wingers and you’ll find that many will tell you they weren’t convinced by some right wing youTuber. It’s often the policy or rhetoric of the left that drove them away.
A specific example in 2021, lockdown policies of the left may have had a far more profound impact on pushing people away than any random guest on Joe Rogan.
Add lives saved by various requirements. Subtract lives from increased traffic fatalities [1]. Multiply by the number of businesses decapitated by lockdowns.
Do you know what we gonna end up with? I don't...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...
If so then put a sentry in everyone's home and keep them there forever. Think of the lives saved!
There is Hypernormalization [0] through popular/state media's simultaenous support of opposing views, i.e. disinformation through doubt and plausible deniability (perfected by world powers, particularly Soviet/Russian regimes in the modern era).