Diesel prices could crush Republicans in the heartland | Hacker News Reader

Diesel prices could crush Republicans in the heartland

natesilver.net

67 points7777777phil12 comments

Diesel prices certainly have cut back on the "rolling coal" and loud chipped diesel trucks that are everywhere in my area.

I absolutely believe this is going to hit a lot of people hard in the wallets. Not only do they have an expensive truck payment but the fuel has become a major issue. Not that the Premium fuel my car requires is that much cheaper...

*not sure if North Idaho counts as "heartland" but this article certainly applies.

Maybe Americans could stop driving pick up trucks and switch to concrete mixers.

The real problem is that people need to not forget in a few short years. This is exactly what the Republican party has become, completely. You can find quotes from like half of Republican senators before they were on the Grump train, saying how if they let this guy take over the party they were done for. And yet one by one they fell in line, and here we are - trashed or outright destroyed institutions, smashed economy, pointless forever war, our traditional allies moving on to a world in which we're not the global leader, pathetic response to 21st century industrial competition, etc.

His first term should have been widely recognized as the abjectly terrible leadership it was (dividership, really), but Covid was one hell of an excuse - and if there is one thing Grump is actually good at, it's making excuses. So instead four years later it was forgotten about because of the price of eggs, or her laugh, or the woke, or Palestine, or who really knows. Let's not make that mistake again!

The egg price thing was price fixing by some of folks contributing both financially and in action to the Republican machine.

Sure. The genocide has also been made so much worse, despite it being a point of criticism again Democrats.

There is a deeper point to my comment - the damage caused by Republicans often circularly benefits them, and isn't so easy to fix. If we have a "blue wave" now, but oil prices stay high as the strategic damage of giving the Strait to Iran can't simply be undone as easily as it was done, then voters need to remember this in a short 2/4/6 years rather than falling for media campaigns attributing the high prices to the future incumbents.

(Note I'm not coming from a partisan perspective here. I personally am a centrist libertarian! I was both-sidesing up to 2020 or so, but at this point it's only responsible to acknowledge that the Republican party has completely jumped the shark. And as much as the government is frustrating - when it's simply eliminated this doesn't make things more free, rather it leaves a power vacuum that often results in things become less free - ie corporate government).

"Uh, I guess I'm kind of an independent", says the voter, knowing full well who they are going to pull the lever for but not wanting to share it with the pollster.

I find polls to have had very little predictive value since at least 2016. The disdain that people have for politicians is such that they can, imho, no longer be relied upon to state their preferences before or after the election to any pollster.

Pollsters don't just ask you which party you identify with and then hang up.

I find that generally "Independent", or "Non-political" or "Libertarian" in the US today usually means Republican (although admittedly the first is the lesser of these).

Like my County's Sheriff, up for re-election, as an Independent, "I voted for Trump three times". Or the County Auditor, also Independent, "I voted multiple times for Trump and for Bush."

Oh. Darn. Anyways.

No, they’ll just blame the libs

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