The New York Times has some graphics that should kill the “both sides” narrative, but they won’t.
[The] findings are based on data from the Manifesto Project, which reviews and categorizes each line in party manifestos, the documents that lay out a group’s goals and policy ideas. We used the topics that the platforms emphasize, like market regulation and multiculturalism, to put them on a common scale.The resulting scores capture how the groups represent themselves, not necessarily their actual policies. They are one way to answer a difficult question: If we could put every political party on the same continuum from left to right, where would the American parties fall?
The Democratic Party is leftish, the Republican Party, extreme.
An explanation is easy to see in two parts. Part the first: Tea Party primarying forces moderate candidates to the right or out of the race. Part the second: Reasonable people leave the Republican Party.
It’s also an argument against courting the flyover diner crowd, but none of that will change the media.
SFAW
I’m not going to give the FTFTFNYT any clicks or money — although I’ve been chastised (not here, of course) for using bad words when talking about Pinche Sulzberger and the FTFTFNYT in general — so I could not see a blowed-up version of the bubbly (Buble’?) graph, but I did not see a bubble nor a grouping for economically-anxious WWC voters. Therefore, fake news, libtards!
ETA: But I agree: nothing will change re: the “both sides” bullshit. Although the “both sides” thing relates more to the Left poking a RWMF in the arm with a trimmed-nail finger, and a RWMF using a Louisville Slugger on a libtard, therefore “both sides!”
Bobby Thomson
Looking at party platforms is a terrible way of determining ideology.
Nicole
Television is theatrical entertainment, and the essential ingredient of theater/drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no entertainment. And so the media creates these two opposing sides that they can sell as being in conflict against each other as essentially equal opponents, except of course, for Fox News, which sells it as “us versus them.”
I gave up on TV news after November 2016, and it was one of the best decisions I made. None of the shows are worth it, because they’re selling entertainment above all. That goes for MSNBC too.
Gravenstone
Given what we see from our own Republicans, I’m somewhat in awe that there are parties elsewhere that much further out along the axis of extremity. They must be loads of fun to deal with…
schrodingers_cat
@SFAW: Indeed, NYT is indispensable, they do wonderful work. Like sandbagging the D nominee every fucking time even when the opposition is a deranged Orange Mafia boss wannabe.
bbleh
Reasonable people leave the Republican Party.
It certainly would be nice to see some of these allegedly “reasonable people” actually voting against the crazoid Republicans instead of tut-tutting and quietly shaking their heads … and then mostly voting Republican anyway!
In my experience, most of these “reasonable people” think it would be “reasonable” for Democrats and progressives to see the “reason” for voting Republican and just stop making such a fuss over things. (And of course, when it’s pointed out that, in comparison, Republicans don’t merely fuss, they throw screaming tantrums, it’s back to the tut-tutting and shaking of heads.)
Show me a “reasonable person” who allegedly has left the Republican party, and I’ll show you … a Republican.
SFAW
@schrodingers_cat:
You are SO WRONG. I know this because I was told that at another site, by someone who — in theory, at least — is left-of-center. [Not told that you [s_c] are wrong; told that I was wrong for making comments similar to your ill-advised, hate-filled libtard screaming comments, which I would like to point out are hate-filled. And libtard-y. And shrill.
smintheus
More extreme than Austria’s Freedom Party? That’s…awesome. Kurt Waldheim is rolling over in his 4th circle of hell.
bbleh
@Gravenstone: They are small fringe groups in systems with more than two parties where more-or-less centrist parties/coalitions dominate. They stir up minor trouble — for example, iirc, the Swiss party was responsible for a national referendum banning minarets — but they can’t really do too much damage unless they are a swing coalition partner (this happens sometimes in multiparty systems, e.g., recently in Israel). It’s a different situation than when one of the two major parties is nuts.
weasel
@bbleh: points to our blogfather
The Moar You Know
@Bobby Thomson: It is. I’ll bet most of the GOP platform is sensible. Although still bad enough to throw them pretty far to the right. They’re in no way a center-right party, which this graph (poorly rendered, not clicking the NYT for anything) shows.
But let’s a have a look at their legislation and public statements and see where the chips fall.
I would be willing to bet anything that the Dem party lands right of center and the GOP lands somewhere close to NSDAP.
Ocotillo
I was watching the View yesterday with Ms. O and Megan McCain (BTW, did you know she was John McCain’s daughter?) took exception with the use of the word torture to describe what is happening to the kids in the border camps. While the other hosts were saying, let’s not worry about language, let’s talk about right and wrong.
Joy Behar said using language like AOC using the term concentration camp actually is effective, that because of that statement, many more people are tuning into the issue. M/M disagreed saying conservative Republicans just tuned out when you use extreme language like that.
Now isn’t what she’s griping about a form of political correctness the conservatives so despise? Off topic but I saw Open Thread.
The Moar You Know
@bbleh: Nope.
Blog host for one, who I’m expecting to come out as a Marxist any day now.
My own father and father in law, both lifelong Republicans, have not voted for one since 2008. Not for president, Senate or House, or locally. The breaking point for both of them was McCain (they’re both former military aviators). They probably would have gone back to the fold, though.
Not now. That’s done. I can’t even talk to my dad about Trump because I’m a bit scared he’ll stroke out. He HATES that motherfucker in a way I can’t, because Trump stole his party and destroyed it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Kind of on-topic
wasn’t Jen Rubin the one who said Romney was gonna win because of yard signs?
FTR: I’m ambivalent about Biden, I think he brought a lot of this on himself out of his arrogant and stubborn fascination with his own long career, but I saw that headline and had flashbacks
Roger Moore
@SFAW:
It’s not even that. “Both sides” is only deployed when a Republican does something bad. The news media never seems to feel a need to point out that Republicans sometimes do bad things when it’s a Democrat who gets caught.
Eolirin
@Ocotillo: As always IOKIYAR
The Moar You Know
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yes, but mostly from “the left”. The GOP is smartly staying out of it for now, letting Dems and the national media kneecap the one guy who can win it decisively.
Jay
The Tiger Beat thingy names all the Beltways Good Germans so far,
Anita Kumar
Francesca Chambers
Josh Dawsey
Ashley Parker
Anne Gearan
Jennifer Jacobs
David Smith
Chris Johnson
Hunter Walker
Shirish Date
Franco Ordonez
Jeff Mason
Steve Holland
Todd Gillman
Jon Karl
Sara Cook
Fin Gomez
Debra Saunders
Dave Boyer
Asawin Suebsaeng
Nikki Schwab
John Roberts
Hogan Gidley
Steve Groves
Judd Deere
Jarrod Agen
Shawn McCreesh
Erik Wemple
Looks like 2/3rds of the attendees at the Princess of Possum Holler’s shindig were Mango Musollini’s Minions.
Jeffro
Screw it – push it out there, ‘share’ it, ‘retweet’ it, email forward it. There’s no downside. The GOP went off the rails slowly, and then all at once. We can’t pull the whole party back from the brink, but we can sure pull any remaining #NeverTrumpers and ‘independents’ (bless their hearts!) back to our center-center Democratic Party.
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
I think you’re wrong about that. Hardly anyone reads or cares about the official party platform anymore, so there’s a tendency for the platform committees to be a dumping ground for ideologues who are so crazy nobody wants them affecting actual policy. That’s why you have things like the Republican platform calling for a return to the gold standard.
Barbara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: On the one hand, I do think it’s unfair to ascribe excessive law enforcement intervention of the 90s to a single politician, since really, it was pursued by so many, including at least a few who were African American. On the other hand, Joe Biden himself sought to take much of the credit for a lot of these bills. So no, this is a real issue (unlike emails) and it’s okay to report on his record as a senator. And yes, it’s annoying to see him expect to be anointed as the nominee. What the article really shows is how much has changed. It’s unthinkable that a Democrat would talk like Biden did throughout much of his career. Gosh, even the people on NPR managed to push back at a Biden supporter who was trying to defend Joe’s comments about working with Eastlund by saying that criticism of the remarks stemmed from the fact that such bipartisan efforts have not been happening for a long time and there was really no reason to think that Biden could bring them back. He is the nostalgia candidate, except that, as the NYT article shows, like a lot of nostalgia it is really misplaced.
schrodingers_cat
@Jay: I recognize two Indian names. Shirish Date’ and Anita Kumar.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jay: Asawin Suebsaeng
that one’s a surprise, I don’t follow him closely but from what I remember I wouldn’t have put him among a group with Jonathan Karl and Anne Gearan
SRW1
To the right of Marine Le Pen’s ‘National Rally’, and the Austrian ‘Freedom Party’, as well as the the racist ‘Sweden Democrats’, the xenophobic ‘Finns Party’, ‘UKIP’, the neofascist ‘Brothers of Italy’, and way to the right of of Salvini’s Northern League)! Quite an achievement.
Roger Moore
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I thought it was an excellent column. In particular, I thought Rubin thoroughly dismantled the arguments about how Biden was a sellout for working with segregationists, given that those segregationists were chairmen of the committee he was working on, so that refusing to work with them meant it was impossible to achieve anything.
noncarborundum
@bbleh: This is entirely wrong. I was a Republican from age 14 until I left the party in 1992. I’m now a reliable Democratic voter and would not pull the lever for a Republican unless you held a gun to a loved one’s head. I know many others who have traveled the same path, many of them more recently than I did. To whom I say “What took you so long?”, but also “Thank FSM you’ve ended up in the right place.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Was it Rubin? I thought it might be Peggy Noonan.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Obama benefited from the fact that they didn’t “know” him. I mean, there was the downside too where they spent a year treating him like a creature from another planet, like Chicago was somewhere in the Arctic circle, but they weren’t able to “slot” him the way they did Gore and then Hillary Clinton, and now will with Biden. They couldn’t pull out the reliable narrative. That’s one of the reasons I was hoping one of the governors would get some traction. As a backup. I want redundancy – back ups to the back up. There will be a large group of very motivated “anyone but Trump” voters. That’s bigger than the D base and would be a nice floor.
rikyrah
@Ocotillo:
They didn’t give two shyts about what was happening when the language was nice
Eolirin
@rikyrah: Can we push back on the whole ‘extreme language’ thing too? Calling things what they are isn’t extreme, it’s accurate.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Moar You Know: Right of center on what scale? IMO that scale moves over time and varies from place to place. Once upon a time in the US, universal white male suffrage for those over 21 was a radical idea. Advocating it today would put someone way the fuck on the right.
rikyrah
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Folks have gone overboard when trying to attack Biden for stupid stuff. He should be vetted, but, make it about substance. The Crime Bill, him being held accountable for the bankruptcy bill – that is real. Bothering about how much money he has made since 2016-garbage
Harbison
The graphic showing the Democratic party’s swing to the left in 2012 and 2016 is interesting.
Obama, being a truly skilled politician, was able to gain re-election while the party moved left.
But the 2016 election – the first time that the Democratic positions moved left of median – produced results that many might consider sub-optimal.
/edited for clarity
Ocotillo
@Kay: Indeed, when I look back on 2016 I know that Clinton’s high negatives were due to a 25 year jihad by the right wing against her, the vast right wing conspiracy was real! I always forget to factor in the lazy legacy media types that never go away and have the pre-conceived narratives they use with tenured Washington Ds.
Gore and Clinton are excellent comparisons with what Biden will get from MSM types. I have to believe even with the lazy MSM narrative for whoever the nominee is that with the strong anti-Trump sentiment out there, winning the 2020 election will not be difficult in the end. My fear is Trump’s behavior when he loses. Does he declare the election void due to fraud? Does he salt the earth for the incoming administration? It’s going to be ugly.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jay: Okay, so you have a list of “Good Germans.” What criteria puts someone on your list?
waspuppet
They’re really trying to kill us:
Your first sentence confirms that what he said was true. The next three are simply trying to come up with a way to not get a suspicious package.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/26/guide-fact-checks-democrats-running-president/
Miss Bianca
@waspuppet: I am working 2-3 jobs just to survive. Am I really merely one of the 5%?
Eolirin
@waspuppet: I love the way they slide in part time vs full time, as if working multiple full time jobs is even part of the conversation.
Barbara
@Omnes Omnibus: Maybe I don’t understand but I thought this is a list of White House Press Corps members who toasted SHS after her last day. Note that April Ryan isn’t on the list.
schrodingers_cat
@Barbara: They had a party for her at a DC steak house.
Mike in NC
@Dorothy A. Winsor: You are correct.
satby
The few former “friends” on FB that are right wingers have been bitching at me there all day about the concentration camp posts I’ve shared. I normally never hear from these folks, I’m surprised they hadn’t already unfriended me.That’s how I know it’s leaving a mark, because they’re trying to defend the indefensible and it’s making them extra upset. We need to keep the pressure on.
Eolirin
@Miss Bianca: Yes? But being able to find or keep a second job is not necessarily easy either. That’s not an accurate measure of how many people need multiple jobs, just how many can get them.
Miss Bianca
@satby: I’m to the point where I’m wondering why I haven’t unfriended a bunch of these RWNJ friends/family I have. Sheer laziness on my part, I guess.
joel hanes
@The Moar You Know:
My parents were Main Street small-town Republicans, because that’s what respectable people were when they were forming their political identities.
Dad changed his registration to Independent before he died, because of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and Terri Schiavo and Katrina. Mom continued to try to slow or reverse the rightward march of the local Republicans …
until McCain nominated Palin. It took just five days of Palinism to make Mom a Democrat,
and the escalation of hatred as the basis of Republican political identity has made her a fervent Dem.
She’s always been a decent person.
The Republican Party once had a place for decent people.
But no longer
satby
@Miss Bianca: I don’t so I can constantly get in their face with truth bombs. All my posts are public too. And if they quote Alex Jones or any of the other trash I delete their comments so we can argue about the consequences of putting up false information. I’ve been known to do all that in person too. Fuckem.
? and you all think I’m nice?
debbie
Speaking of Alex Jones, has anyone called the drowned father and child in that horrendous photo crisis actors yet?
Jay
SRW1
OT – Bernie says he coulda been a contender.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sanders-2016-nominee-hillary-clinton-rigged
debbie
@rikyrah:
Seconded.
Jay
Stuck in moderation @48
Probably too many quotes.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@satby: It’s it my imagination or does this Kiddy Concentration Camp feel different? I’ve been trying to ignore out of the simple fact that nothing gets threw to these useless a-holes, but like satby here, it feels like the wingards are arguments with their own consciousnesses out loud. I’ve seen a lot of magic phrase talking from wingnuts but never this voices in their head stuff.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Major Major Major Major
@The Moar You Know:
It doesn’t, did you try reading the labels?
Ryan
TO be fair, the authors don’t seem to have consulted anti-science scholars.
Jay
Chyron HR
@SRW1:
THEY RIGGED THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY BY LETTING DEMOCRATS VOTE IN IT! BERNIE WAS THE CLEAR CHOICE OF REPUBLICANS!
Gelfling 545
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Not Rubin. Peggy Noonan, I think.
Jay
Baud
@SRW1:
I wonder if Warren will be asked about that tonight since Bernie has raised it again. Her one-time flub on the issue caused me to blacklist her for a long time.
Villago Delenda Est
Infotainment sucks. The vile disease that is Broderism is deeply entrenched in the Village culture, and I don’t see any reasonable way to remove it short of nukes from orbit.
My nym, again and again.
Wipe them out. All of them.
Villago Delenda Est
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: I have so had it with Wilmer. And his white supremacist, misogynist fanbois.
Kathleen
@Nicole: I call it “propatainment”.
ETA Excellent points.
Hoodie
@Ocotillo: Hillary was the victim of years of contrived corruption accusations by Republicans, and amplified by certain malefactors within and near the Democratic Party, that may have affected swing voters. Bill Clinton and Gore got painted with the same brush, with Gore having the additional problem of the “who would you rather have a beer with” rap. I don’t think the GOP will be able to go after Biden on the Bankruptcy Bill or the Crime Bill or paling around with segregationists, and there haven’t been years of claiming corruption that they could build on like they did with Hillary. Biden is mostly viewed as an affable, if sometimes garrulous, grandpa or uncle. The best they have on Biden more lays in the gaffe machine/handsy guy territory, and that likely would not be very effective because most people view that as relatively harmless, especially compared to Trump’s psychotic behavior. Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities are with the Dem base in the primaries and, perhaps, an enthusiasm gap in the general, but the burning desire to get rid of Trump mitigates the latter quite a bit. If he wins the nomination, he stands a good chance of burying Trump because he endangers the core of Trump’s electoral college strategy (I have little doubt that Biden would have won at least MI and PA in 2016). He also gives the impression of being able to deal with the particular kind of asshole Trump is. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not a huge Biden fan, but he does have several things going for him and I could envision a scenario where he wipes Trump out, especially if Trump gets even more extreme. He could be viewed a transitional figure that could pave the way for someone like Harris.
Brachiator
Great chart. It also illustrates the degree to which pushing the West towards nationalistic populism is a global exercise. Trump and Boris Johnson are spiritual twins.
Is it really? I don’t know why some people keep insisting on this. It reminds me of the days when Protestant and Catholics would war against one another (or a bad day in Northern Ireland), and this was presumed to be the natural order of things.
Right wing dopes are not all born that way. They are being manipulated and pushed by Fox News, right wing plutocrats and other forces. And unless you can magically produce a super majority in Congress, you will always have to deal with some of these people.
Unless, of course, you actually build the mythical FEMA camps that some of these deluded fools believe in.
MomSense
@Ocotillo:
I don’t know about political correctness but for damn sure it’s white privilege. Wealthy white Republicans have the luxury of tuning out. Their kids are covered in lice and their own feces, starving, and sleeping on concrete floors in cages.
I had some fucking MAGAt tell me on Instagram that it’s their own fault for coming here illegally. After telling him that seeking asylum isn’t illegal I told him he’s a disgusting sociopath and that anyone who justifies the cruel treatment of babies and children is irredeemable. He was sooooo mad that I was “name calling”. More proof of his sociopathy. He’s more upset at being called a sociopath than he is at the horror of children being abused and neglected by the United States.
Fuckem
Eljai
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Did you see Tom Levenson’s twitter feed this morning about the NYT article?
If I follow correctly, there are instances in the article where assertions are made followed by a link. But when you follow the link, it does not actually corroborate the charge that is being made. I’m lukewarm on Biden too, but I’m tired of FTFNYT writing about Democratic “scandals” as if they’re anywhere equivalent to what the GOP is doing.
david
Anyone got a magnifying glass?
Miss Bianca
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Reposted from moribund thread downstairs:
I am so tired of this piss-ant’s whining about “rigging”. For one thing, to riff off an insight of Adam’s, it’s so Donald Trump-like: “I AM NOT BEING TREATED FAIRLY! AND YOU AND THE SYSTEM ARE ALL POO-POO HEADS!”
For another, to riff off an insight of Kay’s: Wait till he finds out that the “rigging” was a clear and unearned advantage to him. That he won’t get nearly the amount of traction he got in 2016, because with the “unrigging”, there are so many other, better candidates that he’s going to go nowhere faster and harder than he did when he was the “anti-Hillary”.
Brachiator
@joel hanes:
Thanks for sharing this.
Your parents sound like good people.
Baud
AOC has been on a role since she took office, but this is plain dumb.
rikyrah
Political cartoon about the border. Gut punching.
https://twitter.com/Shoq/status/1143982343620890624
rikyrah
chauncey devega (@chaunceydevega) Tweeted:
My new .@salon. Black voters will likely continue to back Joe Biden despite his egregious Jim Crow misstep. Why? They are pragmatic, not puritanical. This is a lesson for purity test Democrats who will turn on each other and let the Trump jackals feast.
https://t.co/x5zRPpJ1LI https://twitter.com/chaunceydevega/status/1143941003491053569?s=17
Roger Moore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I think AOC has shown the value of saying stuff that people don’t want to hear and refusing to back down when challenged on it. The right wing can’t help themselves in trying to refute her, but by doing so they only draw more attention to the concentration camps. If they had just laughed it off, the whole thing probably would have dropped out of the news, but instead it’s been reinforced. It’s an important lesson for anyone who wants to know how to work the media to remember.
Martin
@rikyrah: Eh. Biden won’t feel like the safe pick in 6 months. Harris or Warren will win them over. Mark my words.
When the Democrats are losing whites and winning women, you don’t lean into the white guy.
Brachiator
@Jay:
Instead of just names, it might be useful to know what newspapers or media outlets these people work for.
rikyrah
@satby:
It is a combination of things.
1. This policy was supposed to have ended. A YEAR AGO.
2. The lawyer advocates on TV:very credible. But, more than that. There is an undercurrent of desperation when they talk, and you can see it
3. The lawyer arguing against children having soap, toothpaste and a bed.
4. The revealing of what they are paid per day.
All accumulated to this point
Chyron HR
@rikyrah:
Never fear, AOC is here to tell African-Americans how they’re supposed to vote.
Kathleen
@Baud:
So tired of that trope. Anyone who doesn’t even mention all of the factors against Clinton in 2016 only to play the “not inspiring candidate” card shows he/she has “piss in the Dem tent” agenda and/or does not comprehend the existential threat Rethuglicans and their Russian friends pose to this country. While I appreciate some of her positions and statements I still don’t quite trust her.
Baud
@Kathleen:
Agree. But what’s dumb is the notion that we chose Clinton to get the guy in the diner vote. They guy in the diner was a Bernie supporter. It’s a valid complaint with Biden, but it has nothing to do with 2016.
JPL
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: fuchem
Brachiator
@Martin:
Are the Democrats winning women? White women, especially married white women still tend to vote Republican.
And since we are still talking about electoral votes, the Democrats can’t really afford to “lose whites.”
Hell, this doesn’t make sense even if you were talking about the popular vote.
rikyrah
@satby:
Also,
The refusal of many of us.to be languaged police into calling them something others than the Concentration Camps that they are. They are so used to our side backing down so that they can do evil behind polite words. Not happening now.
Jay
@Brachiator:
Sadly, with our failed media, experiment, that’s something we have to do our selves.
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
Democrats haven’t won Whites since LBJ?
Patricia Kayden
@Ocotillo: Trump said that he’s glad that her father is dead. Perhaps Meghan should save her umbrage for her fellow Republicans who keep supporting a man who openly mocks her father’s death.
Brachiator
@Chyron HR:
Really? Where do you get this from?
@Roger Moore:
Yep. Right wing dopes live in an alternate universe where they think that they can intimidate AOC because she is a young woman and a person of color. But they only make themselves look foolish.
debbie
@Ocotillo:
Did anyone call Meghan “politically correct”? It seems the only responsible thing to do.
Patricia Kayden
@rikyrah: Exactly. Most Whites vote Republican and will continue to do so. I assume there are a few states where that is not true but in general, White voters lean right.
Jay
@rikyrah:
Until they don’t.
LGM has a good article up on why not Biden,
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/06/boys-club-2
Emily of the State has a pinned tweet on why not Biden,
If Biden holds the numbers into May 2020, that’s the thing.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Breaking the glass ceiling and electing the first woman in history wasn’t inspiring for AOC.
Sad.
karen marie
@The Moar You Know: “Stole his party”
I’m going to guess others may have pointed this out but just in case they haven’t …
Sorry, no. All Trump did was say the things out loud that it had been agreed would not be said out loud. The Republican party has been a garbage fire as long as I’ve been alive, and I’m 62 years old.
karen marie
@The Moar You Know: Fuck that noise. Biden couldn’t win a lottery if his was the only ticket.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Patricia Kayden: Not only that, he also implied McCain in burning in hell.
bupalos
@Kathleen: Really don’t get this take at all. You guys are opposing two non-exclusive truths as if they are exclusive. Yes, Hillary Clinton would have won without a perfect and perfectly interacting storm of vote suppression, foreign interference, sexism, perceived inevitability, and an absolutely mouth-breathing and self-obsessed head of the FBI. Yes that entirely explains her EC loss as it happened. And also, yes, a different candidate that was more identified with where the party was headed than where it had been also could have easily made the difference. I don’t think either is “dumb.” And as an avatar of where the party is headed, obviously this is and probably should be AOC’s take. It’s just too bad that it can be read as relating to (spits) Sanders.
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
Well, I still have this nugget among notes I keep about presidential elections.
Links:
http://politicsofcolor.com/white-women-vote-republican/
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Hoodie:
This.
germy
Lately I’ve been seeing A LOT of commercials from these people:
https://www.onenationamerica.org/
Warning about the dangers of “socialized medicine”
They remind me of the old Ronald Reagan record about the dangers of Medicare.
bupalos
@Baud: AH, OK, I didn’t pick up on this part, I guess I read it a little differently, more like Clinton was a generally “strategic” rather than “inspiring” pick, not still talking about the exact same guy in the diner. I think it could read either way and I give her the benefit of the doubt because she slings stuff out at the speed of the internet.
Jay
@bupalos:
???????
As Adam pointed out, there is no going back, there is only through.
Western Democracies are facing exticential threats, in no given order,
– inequality and the precariate
– propaganda and clickbait, not information
– climate change
– Nazis
– a global reordering of economic status and geoploitical influence
– voter supression and ratfucking
Just to name a few.
Not all Democratic voters understand that yet.
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
Perfectly captures Trump’s callousness.
Martin
Getting dunked on by the magazine in the pediatric dentist office.
karen marie
@Chyron HR: I’m always surprised when I come across a comment this stupid on a site that has so many smart commenters.
Brachiator
@Martin:
As one Twitter message noted, this is definitely Gallant.
Jeffro
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
They’ve known all along what they “bought” with their tacit, quiet, head-in-the-sand support of this scumbag, and now that it’s here, they don’t wanna look at it. Too fucking bad. You brought this on our country, Repubs. You own it.
That utter cretin GOP Rep who was on Hayes’ show last night, Burgess I think his name was…his eyes were just about to pop out of his head trying to defend the indefensible, and when he couldn’t take it any longer, he blurted out “and you know what, [trumpov]’s going to be your president for the next four years too, Chris”. As if that would soothe it all, make it all go away…
bupalos
@rikyrah: I don’t love “personality” assessments of voter groups. Black Americans are as diverse a group within the Democratic coalition as any other you’d care to draw a circle around. Though I guess I’d also agree that any group that has been as thoroughly ostracized from power and been forced to sit as an outsider is more likely to have a habit of voting strategically rather than by a more positive direct identification. Though this later consideration may be working for Biden as well, through an association with his boss.
I think Obama can (and probably will) make or break Biden. I think ultimately he’ll (softly) toss in with Warren.
Martin
@Brachiator: Yes, Clinton won women by 12 points, and Trump won whites by 12 points.
The lesson here, though, is that elections are not zero-sum. Non-voters are the largest population. Biden is not going to get anyone out of the non-voter pool. He appeals primarily to the citizens that always vote, which is part of why he’s polling well, but that means he adds nothing. Democrats need to get people off the sideline, and to do that, you need to do something different and energizing. That’s why Dems did well in 2018 – all of those women candidates won because they got voters out. In my district which we flipped from a female R to a female D, every single organizer that I met was female. Does Biden get them to open their homes to canvasser training? Or does Warren or Harris? Yes, they’ll vote, but we need more than a vote to win.
germy
The trump effect is spreading to young people
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/n-j-mom-allegedly-beaten-13-year-old-after-she-n1022031
Martin
@bupalos: I don’t think it’s a personality assessment. Black voters have way the fuck more to lose in an election than white voters do. That should be obvious to everyone. White voters have a different risk/reward calculation than black voters. A Dem win is life and death to many of them. The puritan ponies are almost exclusively white, black voters are very pragmatic. John Lewis nearly died for that vote – he’s not going to burn it on Bernie.
It’s a reflection of the role government plays in people lives, not the personality of the voter.
chopper
@The Moar You Know:
i wouldn’t say it’s that much, but definitely a chunk of the GOP platform *seems* sensible, when it’s described in generalities, because it fits in with some basic ideas americans tend to agree with. hey, taxes are too high! hey, these government regulations are making it hard to start a business! man, it’s like the government gets to tell you everything.
the actual party platform, in detail, is god fucking awful.
this is the way any religion works. or a cult, actually.
Jay
Anita Kumar, Politico
Francesca Chambers, Daily Mail
Josh Dawsey, Washington Post
Ashley Parker, Washington Post, MSNBC
Anne Gearan, Washington Post
Jennifer Jacobs, Washington Week, PBS
David Smith, The Guardian
Chris Johnson, Washington Blade
Hunter Walker, Yahoo News
Shirish Date, HuffPost
Franco Ordonez, NPR, MuckRack
Jeff Mason, Reuters, MuckRack
Steve Holland, Reuters, MuckRack
Todd Gillman, The Dallas Morning News
Jon Karl, ABC News
Sara Cook, CBS News, MuckRack
Fin Gomez, CBS News
Debra Saunders, Los Vegas Journal Review, Syndicated
Dave Boyer, Washington Times, MuckRack
Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
Nikki Schwab, New York Post
John Roberts, Fox News
Shawn McCreesh, New York Times
Erik Wemple, Washington Post
John Gizzy, Newsmax
Claire Hillen, Newsmax
4 names were removed from the list, as they wern’t journalists, just Mango Mussolini Minions,
2 were added from the CJR coverage.
A lot fewer Fauxites and Wingers than one would expect.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Never suggested that they were.
Here’s the thing. Right now I think that all the Democratic Party candidates are solid, but none of them are exciting or inspiring. Maybe they don’t have to be. I don’t know that any of them can capitalize on the mid term energy.
Also, turnout was lower in 2016 than 2012, and more previously non voters turned out for Trump than for Clinton.
Biden is not my guy, but he has advantages and disadvantages, as do the other candidates. I certainly don’t see that he necessarily is weaker than anyone else. The eventual nominee is going to have to do well with all the groups that compromise the Democratic Party.
Cacti
@Martin:
Elections are most definitely zero sum. The winner gets 100 percent of the contested office, the loser gets squat.
Kathleen
@bupalos: That’s how I read it.
Brachiator
@Jay:
A motley bunch. I wonder what they thought of Trump’s attack on the press and of Sanders’ horrible job performance?
Kathleen
@Jay:
So true. And it drives me crazy.
Jay
@Kathleen:
Adam’s “Through” Post needs cyclical reposting.
bupalos
@Martin: I take the point, but I’m really not sure of the obvious point there. It could be because the black voters I’m most in contact with are college students and families mostly not from well to do families, working class out of Cleveland and Akron…. but I’m really not sure of the “more to lose” formulation. I mean, I’m not arguing the reality of whether they really do have the most to lose, I’m saying I don’t know that it’s the vibe I get. There’s a bit more wise fatalism that I maybe recognize from Dave Chappelle’s set on SNL right after the election. There’s a strange “more to lose/nothing to lose/I’ll be fine because I’m tougher than you anyway” kind of trichotomy.
Martin
@Cacti:
Zero sum would suggest that a vote for Biden is a vote taken from Trump. And if the world worked that way, then yeah, he’d be a difficult candidate to overlook. But Democrats don’t need to win any Trump voters. (That’s why the Ohio diner stories are such bullshit.) All they need to do is turn out non-voters. Not only is that easier, there’s way the fuck more of them to take. Trump could keep every voter from 2016 and lose by 40 points simply because Dems drove turnout to the max.
Jay
@germy:
Read that earlier today. It was a severe beating that put the Mom in the ER, was an ambush as she was leaving the school, while pushing her one year old in a stroller,
And the school did nothing.
Brachiator
@Martin:
This is not necessarily true and is also close to being nonsense.
Who are you counting as non-voters? People who never or rarely vote or Democrats who didn’t vote in 2016?
Converting dedicated non-voters is tough. But energizing Democrats is a path to victory. But getting,say, Obama level turnout might still be a challenge for anyone.
Also, as I noted before, disdaining Trump voters is dumb. When you cut through Trump’s nonsense, it is clear that he has failed them. There’s an opportunity here for Democrats.