… and maybe that’s because we have the media putting their thumbs on the scale in order to get clicks and/or discourage Democrats.
We hear all about the polls and other “news” items that are negative for Dems, and it’s often crickets when it comes to good news.
NEW: 52% of 18-29-year-olds say they will vote for Joe Biden over Trump, higher than *any* other age group AND 18-29-year-olds have the highest favorability numbers of Joe Biden compared to other age groups according to a brand new poll. Gen Z will re-elect Joe Biden in 2024.
— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) November 29, 2023
🌸
APPROVAL NUMBERS: 48% of young voters say they approve of Joe Biden’s handling of President. Is it where we want it to be? No, but it is worth noting it’s higher than any other age group. Gen Z isn’t as angry with Biden as it seems… pic.twitter.com/6mkudh5Lr3
— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) November 29, 2023
🌸
Lastly, if the election were held TODAY, Joe Biden would receive more votes from young voters than any other age group. So, maybe Joe Biden doesn’t have as big of a problem with young people as many polls out there want to make it out? These are promising numbers. pic.twitter.com/meVnLDGbTu
— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) November 29, 2023
🌸
They want us to be discouraged, disheartened, and disaffected. Screw that.
I am so impressed with the young people in the House, and with some of the young people who are planning to run. It’s an inspiration. They’re not tired, they’re not jaded. They are fighting for the world they want.
Totally open thread.
Miss Bianca
Well, I will go on record to say that I think that’s encouraging news.
ETA: Now we just need to make sure they get out to vote. :)
Trivia Man
I tell young people all the time – it is YOUR world and YOUR future. You DO have the power already, take it before us olds screw it up even more,
Trivia Man
Sometimes I toss in something about being careful not to fall for nothing but bread and circus stuff, but frankly the young people I talk to have limited greed and the X pans I’ve compassion so they are already thinking about big picture stuff. They truly want to lift all boats.
Mike S
The last one says it all. More people will vote for Biden 44/42 but more people think Trump will win 44/34. And this is when people haven’t been reminded of just how much of an asshole Trump is.
Searcher
Olds: but if our grandchildren don’t dislike Biden for being old, why do they despise us?
Raoul Paste
if they understand, climate change, young people are well motivated
Old School
As a percentage.
WaterGirl
@Searcher: Sometimes it’s personal! :-)
different-church-lady
Yeah, it’s become a very good time to remind people not to indulge in the pornography of despair.
Surly Duff
Sooo… the top line is really that bad, huh. I’m not reading it.
WaterGirl
@Surly Duff: Top line?
I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying.
JaneE
I don’t find it surprising that anyone would prefer Biden to Trump, young or old. MAGAs are one thing, but the polls imply that the general public doesn’t like Biden, or dislikes him more than Trump. That is what I wish someone could explain to me.
I guess the GOP efforts to undercut education and prevent the kids from learning everything from how to add to critical thinking are paying off.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Not when there are so many better forms of pornography to indulge in.
JaySinWA
I posted this at the end of the Cheney post but it is probably more relevant here:
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate has a look at the Trump rhetoric and who supports it. Looking at the 1A arguments as mostly a distraction.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/11/trump-rhetoric-who-listens-types.html
I found it through a Silverman Bluesky thread https://bsky.app/profile/silvermansecurity.bsky.social/post/3kfdu6zn3px2l
that I hope he re-posts here for the rest of us. He looks at it from a “revolutionary warfare” perspective.
Edited to fix the Silverman link to the beginning of the post
Alison Rose
@Surly Duff: Either this is sarcasm or you misread the tweet.
gene108
@Mike S:
@JaneE:
Trump has a hard floor of support that is somewhere between 40% to 45% of people in this country. Only thing that could erode his support is if Trump said something nice about non-white immigrants.
Also, Republicans have conditioned themselves to believe life is hell, when Democrat is president. Nothing good happens during this time, the economy is in shambles, the national debt is too high, society’s supporting “deviant” behavior that will destroy the country, etc.
Sentiment between thinking things are going in right direction versus the wrong direction increased dramatically after Trump was sworn in versus what they were in 2016. All the “economic anxiety” voters felt magically disappeared in 2017, for reasons no one has ever discovered.
Jeffro
The idea that Gen Z voters would look at their choices and somehow break for trump…it’s just absurd on its face.
And that’s even before Taylor Swift weighs in… ;)
Tarragon
@Baud: You’ve got my vote.
terraformer
We need to have a serious discussion about the apparent capture of our mainstream press. Used to be things were this way because of “fears of accusations of bias” or somesuch.
But it’s been clear for quite awhile now that not all, but *too many* members of our mainstream press are not only eliding the true import, the practical impacts, of what T***p and the Republican party is doing and thus implicitly enabling those who are anti-democratic, but they’re also refusing to report (and/or are intentionally misinterpreting) *the good things* that those who are democratic are doing.
I don’t know what the answer is, but we’re not going to last much longer in our little experiment when the primary purveyors of news and issues of the day can’t unlimber themselves to simply report objective fact.
We’re continually imploring them to *do this obvious thing* (e.g., reporting the stakes rather than horse-race drivel) or stop doing *that ridiculous thing* (e.g., going to diners in Ohio).
Our fourth estate is failing, by design, at educating and informing our populace. And I’m fcking tired of it.
WaterGirl
@Tarragon: Baud 20xx slogan:
Chris
Yeah. I think the Russian Bot brigade is going to do everything it can to spread the anti-Biden word among the young by using the current troubles in the Middle East, but that’s not to say that they’ll be successful. It would be a hell of a reversal if they were, given how much Republicans have poisoned the well with Millennial and Zoomer voters in the last couple decades.
karen marie
@terraformer: I got your answer right here.
More generally, thank you for yesterday’s post with the video of the service for Rosalyn Carter. I watched half last night, finishing it this morning.
It was wonderful. Without the encouragement and endorsement by you kids, I probably would have skipped it.
The Thin Black Duke
I think what’s going on with young people politically is comparable to what was happening during the war in Vietnam. When it’s your own skin in the game, the consequences ain’t theoretical anymore. Young people can see the future the GOP is constructing (climate change, the erasure of the thin line between church and state, etc ) and they don’t like it.
Marmot
@JaySinWA: Yeah, that 1A bit is rather tired.
And I feel like Lithwick could tighten up the rest, since it’s based on standard reactionary psychology:
Barbarians are at the gate! Bigots unite! Lest Our Way of Life be forever altered, and thus destroyed! Yea, we stand on the cusp of societal collapse and chaos! Just like crime, but all the time! This guy TFG is on Our Side and sees through the elites, and we love him so! Rally! Destroy!
Bigotry. Panic. Doom. Herd behavior. Violence. I appreciate her spreading the word, but it would be nice if this pattern were more widely recognized.
I blame WWII documentaries and history as taught in school.
TaMara
@gene108: I think that 45% is generous. I have been around his supposed base in two different areas of the country since July, and the overwhelming feeling was Trump will be the death of the party and if he is the nominee, they deserve what they get. This is from hardcore republicans in their mid to late 70s.
ETA: They also think Biden is a doddering old fool, so I trust their Rep cred. LOL
ETA2: And most of these conversations took place in diners at lunch times, so you know it’s legit. 😁😉
Tony Jay
Meant to post this in the Nancy/Cheney thread, but since the topic is how the political media ignores information it doesn’t want spread around, here’s reason infinitybillion why comparing the modern Democratic Party to the revanchist Neo-Labour Party is a very bad fit indeed.
Can you even imagine Biden or Pelosi or Jeffries signing off on something this rancid? Or expecting to get away with it? Identity theft. Electoral fraud. Data protection violations up the wazoo. All because they refuse to allow anyone to vote them out of power ever again. And it’s only the tip of a rotten iceberg where Neo-Lab’s cheating frauds are concerned. when this all spills out onto the front pages (and it will, roughly halfway through Neo-Lab’s 2023-28 term in office I’d guess) that’s the Tories back in power for a decade.
Got to love the comments too, apparently “if it keeps the Left out it’s good” is a mantra that a lot of Rightwing morons can agree on, regardless of Party affiliation.
Meh. Back to your scheduled viewing.
Elizabelle
@gene108: re your supposed “Trump’s hard floor of 40 to 45 % support (of everyone? Non voters included??) in this country”:
Bullshit. Do you just make this crap up?
Martin
@Searcher: So, I’ve been trying to do some generation bridging in a number of context, and here are my observations – some of which I have seen data to support.
The main generational gap is that whatever claims of wisdom or experience that older generations would normally have to offer not only go completely out the window in the current situation, they come off as deeply hypocritical.
The kids *do* dislike Biden for being old, but he’s overcome that to some degree by advancing policies that help their generation. There’s also the reality that they are acutely aware of what the alternative is, which is vastly worse, so Biden is being graded on a big curve here.
So, take it as a given that your grandkids look at the state of the world – with housing policy exclusively favoring the enrichment of people who bought in prior to 2007, along with all the other neoliberal policy ideas (that democrats also bought into pretty hard), and the climate situation that we all caused (whether knowingly or not, doesn’t matter – we’re responsible) and generally what they get back from my generation and yours is words of encouragement but not action.
I’ll give an example. My dad is very liberal, but he’s still a boomer. He doesn’t understand his granddaughters anxiety – and climate change is one of the big ones. So he says nice things about addressing climate change, and asks good questions and all that. But he doesn’t DO anything. He likes his big SUV and flying around the world because he’s retired and he’s earned this. And one day I lost patience with him and said ‘no, you didn’t fucking earn this. You may have done your career and retired and are now worth millions but you’ve done nothing to piece together the climate harms you committed other than some nice words now. You have money, you can do things. Saying ‘oh someone should do something’ – yeah, that’s you, you dumb fuck. Figure out what you can do that will have a material benefit and do it because texting her from 30,000 feet on your 4th vacation of the year about how sympathetic you are falls really goddamn flat.’
And that’s really what they see. A record number of Americans own their homes outright. Housing prices are at record high. People over 50-ish are as a class fucking loaded, having taken all of the benefits of Reaganomics, whether we agree with it or not. And we advocate for big government programs to help the homeless, but we don’t help the homeless. We don’t pull $100 out of wallet and hand it over. The simplest thing that could be done. I go to my zoning commission meetings and at 55 I’m the youngest citizen in the room every single time (the people running the commission are all younger than all of the citizens) and I’m also the ONLY person who isn’t bitching about ADUs, or how the low income project will destroy their property values, and because I am NOT a polite person when important things are on the line, I remind them that they have a million dollars in equity in their house that they did not earn, and that’s not good enough for them, they want more, even if that means their grandkids will never be able to afford a house ever.
And yeah, you may not be the one in the zoning meeting bitching about affordable housing, but you’re also not in the zoning meeting demanding it. Sure we encourage young people to advocate and protest, but we’re the ones with the free time, who aren’t working 2 jobs to try and afford a shitty apartment and pay off their college loans. We have the home equity, we have the pensions, we had the free college, and the problems were created on our watch, but the solutions – well, why aren’t the young people doing more. Why aren’t they voting more. Hold on, I think they’re boarding my flight to Bali Bali.
You gotta do more than thoughts and prayers, man. I don’t know you, maybe none of this applies, but statistically, it probably applies. The generational gap is enormous and we have to put in the work to bridge it. And I read these comments, and see the quips like Bianca’s questioning whether young people will vote. And like, man, that doesn’t help. I get it, but all they hear is what fuckups they are, and can you please clean up our mess because we can’t be bothered to make even trivial changes to our lifestyle. From their perspective, we’re the ones who fucked everything up and won’t take ownership of that. And yeah, they think that of Biden too, but relative to the other boomer Trump, he at least tries – and that counts for a lot. That’s how low their expectations are.
Martin
@Jeffro: Again, not how this works.
Elections don’t turn on people changing their vote. Election turn on people showing up or not showing up. If you offer them no vehicle to change things, they ain’t showing up. This is why Democrats really need to be more aggressive with policy. It’s not about whether or not you can convince Republicans to vote for it, it’s about whether you can get left-leaning non-voters to vote.
Betty Cracker
IIRC, something like 60% of voters age 18 – 29 picked Biden over Trump in 2020, and that cohort was the most Biden-leaning age bloc then too. An incorrigible pessimist might fret that a more bare majority (52%) say they’ll vote for Biden in the polls cited above. It’s probably true that Biden will need a higher percentage of the youth vote than that to win, and he’ll need high youth turnout, which he got in 2020, whereas 2024 remains to be seen.
But I find it neither encouraging nor discouraging right now. I’m in the group that believes a binary choice will be clarifying for lots of voters, and maybe particularly for younger voters, who tend to pay less attention this far out. It would be interesting to see what young voters were thinking in November of 2019, but I’m too lazy to look it up.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Probably wouldn’t be helpful. Bernie was still in the race. And Biden was considered dead in the water before the South Carolina primary.
Tim C.
Another factor worth thinking about is the media is even more irrelevant than at any point in American history. We can all just look at the places that make us feel good and reward our biases. (Tiktok, blogs, etc) We can plug in and the algorythm, even if not designed to manipulate us, gives us the things we expect. Add in, what I think, is the level of screen addiction we have as a culture and we can all just marinate in our own nonsense.
The Thin Black Duke
@Tim C.: I think most young people see the MSM as being white noise; a persistent hum in the background to be ignored.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Right you are! That definitely wouldn’t be an apples-to-apples comparison.
206inKY
The freakout over younger voters a few months ago was distorted by student loans. It’s unreasonable to think people would not be upset when looking at their first payment in three years.
Pointing out this very obvious fact seemed to rankle people, as if borrowers aren’t entitled to their emotions. But it is perfectly possible to simultaneously:
1) recognize the fact that Republicans bear primary blaim on reversing forgiveness, and 2) be frustrated at how things played out over the pause, and 3) still see that raising the debt ceiling was ultimately more important than preserving the pause.
Voicing frustration in September and October when budgeting for substantial new monthly payments is not the same as staying home on Election Day or voting for Republicans.
Young people will fuel Biden’s reelection—Trump is toxic, Biden has done great stuff, and Republicans have dug themselves a profoundly deep hole with all the overt racism, gay-bashing, and Dobbs.
Martin
@The Thin Black Duke: The problem is they’re pretty pissed at Democrats as well, because Democrats aren’t doing anything meaningful to address income inequality, to rein in billionaires, to address climate change, etc. It’s still all a defensive crouch behind ‘some people won’t like this’. Yeah, the people who won’t like it are the generations of voters – left and right – that the lawmaker is a part of. If you look at the ideas that AOC and Maxwell Frost and other young lawmakers put forward, it’s radically different stuff, because that’s what their generation of voters – left and often right – generally will support.
One weird view many of us from California have is that our last Republican governor is and always was to the left of most older Democrats on climate change. Mainly because we don’t have this Reaganesque notion that these measure are economically bad. A lot of them are economically good – and we’ve been proving that for decades. Addressing climate change can be good for the economy, but holy shit can people that marinated in voodoo economics for 40 years not get past that.
So there are a lot of places where young people don’t see Democrats as helpful. Sure, they’re better than Republicans – nobody is questioning that, but being the 2nd worst kid in class isn’t exactly the best way to motivate them to support you.
But otherwise I agree in the sense that the Vietnam war draft was an existential threat to the lives of young people, they see the current climate and economic, and social policies as being an existential threat. In isolation maybe not so much, but there’s really so little room for hope, largely because Democrats policy prescriptions are generally so weak. Biden being ambitious is what’s winning them over.
Baud
@The Thin Black Duke:
In terms of direct viewership yes. But my impression is that a lot of MSM information is recycled and repackaged through social media that young people do consume. It may be repackaged with a different spin, but truly original content is rare. YMMV.
UncleEbeneezer
@JaySinWA: This is spot-on:
The problem has always been that there are 80 Million Americans who like (or at least tolerate) the shit that Trump spews.
Chris
@terraformer:
The impression I get is that ever since the Republican Party (in its then-current form) collapsed in 2008, Official Washington elites have been low-key and not-so-low-key terrified of the prospect that the Democrats could dominate the next generation the way Republicans had dominated the 1980-2008 era; have decided that no matter what this absolutely must not happen; and have been increasingly throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the problem to ensure that it doesn’t happen. Increasingly strident demands for bipartisan endorsement in all things, promoting absurd third-party or “unity” fantasies, doing absolutely everything they can to hobble every Democratic president or presidential campaign, the works.
The mainstream media isn’t the only source of this stuff, but it’s the most visible and obvious one.
There was already a very palpable sense in 2009, starting not long after the inauguration, that practically everybody who could get near a camera or a news desk really, really, did not want Obama to succeed. The same’s happened with Biden even more thoroughly.
And while it’s all a huge problem, I just don’t know WTF to do about it if we can’t even admit that there is a problem. Right now, not just most people, but most Democrats, when pulled, claim that they see the mainstream media as liberally biased. I don’t know what it takes to get around that.
Baud
@Chris:
I feel the same way.
JaySinWA
But the real question is who will they vote for if Trump is the R nominee. Maybe some won’t vote, but I’d wager they would rather drink poison than vote D.
Old School
Geminid
@Baud:
@Betty Cracker: Also, the economy is very different now than from 4 years ago. Young people are hitting the workforce during the best economy in decades. Housing costs have increased, but people can at least get jobs and they pay better now.
Freemark
@Betty Cracker: I came to write basically the same thing. There probably are quite a few Democrats of all ages that worry about Bidens age. Right now those that are fairly low information voters are probably telling pollsters, the ones that can reach anyway, that they don’t love Joe Biden. Once the choice actually comes down to Biden and whatever anti-abortion, anti-democracy, pro changing the climate Republican candidate is actually left standing the support for Biden will increase pretty fast. I won’t start worrying until The Kurgan is the last one left against Biden and his support still hasn’t increased.
Baud
@Geminid:
Everything is different. But that’s not necessarily a good thing. People are more likely to take Dems for granted when things are going well economically. That’s what we saw in 2000 and 2016. People forget the progress and focus on what we haven’t achieved yet.
Chris
@The Thin Black Duke:
I think the fact that Republicans are offering no positive vision at all is a huge factor, because it wasn’t even true in the Vietnam era.
If I was the average guy in his thirties back in 1970 (the average guy is white), where I probably own my own home, have a solid job, am comfortable enough that the biggest economic burden I have to bitch about is my taxes, and meanwhile crime is eating the inner cities alive, yeah, I can see how the conservative message would at least seem to speak to the problems of my world. Hopefully I’d have been smart enough to see through it, but I can at least understand why it resonates.
That was then. None of that applies today. Our economic problems not only don’t look like anything Reaganism would fix, most of them are directly traceable to Reaganite ideas. And they have nothing to say about any of it except to lose their shit at people for daring to notice that their ideas aren’t working.
Baud
Chances are, voters are going to disappoint us either next year or in 2028, if not both. So pick your poison if you want to fret about the future.
Chris
@Tony Jay:
Nothing renews your appreciation for the Democratic Party like checking out some of its overseas equivalents.
Brachiator
The positive polls are good news, but again early polls don’t mean that much. We still have to work hard to get out the vote.
But I will also note how hard some of the media are pushing the “Biden too old” narrative. The bias is blatantly obvious. These asswipes are relentless.
I also saw a segment on MSNBC noting how Koch money is settling on Nikki Haley, and some of the commentators magically assuming that Republican voters will fall in line and move away from Trump. This was just idiotic.
Lastly, I watched a clip of a college lecture at, I think Penn State, which talked about the situation in Gaza. One student acknowledged that she didn’t know much about that situation because her social media feeds don’t include the typical news feeds.
A lot of students and voting age young adults don’t read the Washington Post or New York Times or any of the mainstream news outlets or even depend on Twitter or Facebook as much as they do TikTok and other services. I hope that Democratic Party media strategists are paying attention.
Martin
@Chris: In a way, it doesn’t matter, or I should say, it’ll solve itself. The main problem with MSM is that their audience is shrinking. We may still care about it, but the younger the voter, the less they are even aware what MSM is saying. And because young people increasingly interact directly, and not through agents of authority like news networks and papers and so on, even if MSM could reach them, they won’t really be believed. This leaves them vulnerable to social media influence campaigns, but not to traditional media ones. That’s also a big problem, but it’s a different big problem.
And I think if you ask young people they would say the only actual problem here is that MSM is economically motivated to put their thumb on the scale – just get rid of the economic motivations.
narya
@Baud: I pick 2028. That would give us four years to strengthen various bulwarks of democracy, not to mention maybe we could change the odds for 2028. I am genuinely terrified of what would happen with a R trifecta.
Martin
@JaySinWA: They won’t vote. And if Trump does win, they’ll blame Democrats for not doing more.
Baud
@Martin:
Maybe. I don’t think many Dems care about being blamed anymore. The Trump experience toughened us up in that respect.
Miss Bianca
@Martin: Martin, fuck off with your calling me out. And fuck off with the rest of your moralizing. By your own admission, you have money, property, and a lot of social cachet as a member of the professional class – oh, and millionaire relations, apparently. Good for you, sweetheart. I DON’T.
Here’s something for you to chew on, and may you choke on it, you sanctimonious, well-off moral scold: Currently, I am being asked to serve on the workforce housing board for our county merely because I, a lowly local journalist, am WRITING and TALKING about it. In fact, I probably spend more time thinking about how much my part of the world needs affordable housing than anyone except the people who actually work in a housing authority. Which my county also needs, btw.
Yes, I, who at age 60, don’t own a house, who works three jobs and HAS NO TIME for the amount of work and BS it would involved to get anything done with regard to workforce housing in my county. Somehow, that tide that supposedly lifted all the Boomer boats – and certainly lifted *yours* – left *me* high and dry. Gee, if I had only thought to supply myself with millionaire in-laws, how different my life might have been.
Will I join the Workforce Housing Board? Maybe, despite all the BS. Because it’s personal to me. Because at the end of the day, *I*, like all the Millenials out there, will *need* the affordable housing that you prate about but aren’t ever going to need.
You think you’re the only one talking about this stuff at public meetings? I am at fucking government meetings up the yin-yang pretty much EVERY GODDAMN DAY OF THE WEEK in a four-county area, chronicling the efforts of others and advocating on my own, writing about the need for this, and dealing with all the shit that that entails from the usual suspects. You’re welcome.
Hug yourself at the end of the day in your big house and be sure to cuddle all your cash while practicing your “I have my finger on the pulse of Da Yoot and dayum, don’t that make me look good” expression in the mirror.
Meanwhile, I’ll be over here scratching out my living, trying to make my little corner of the world a better place, and still making fun of youth voting habits if I fucking feel like it.
Geminid
@Baud: The economy was not good in 2016. A lot of people had not made up ground lost in the recession, and many never did.
And this economy is substantially better than in 2000. I still think it will be Joe Biden’s best issue.
Jeffro
Love it! “Again” (I can almost hear the deep sigh)…LOL
It works both ways. Some folks change their vote, some occasional voters on one side or another or both turn out when they wouldn’t otherwise. Sometimes that’s policy; more and more lately, it’s due to ‘negative partisanship’.
I’m looking forward to some Rs decided they just can’t vote for trump (and either leaving that ballot line blank or holding their nose and voting for Biden); I’m looking forward to our occasional-Ds turning out due to Dobbs (and maybe even trump’s recent dumb comments about taking another shot at Obamacare repeal); and I’m excited about the effects on GOP vote-switching and diminished turnout as trump convictions pile up across the coming year.
piratedan
@Martin: my issue with the 2nd worst kid in the class aspect is that these folks never run for class rep. Which party welcomes them and their ideas… the Dems point to AOC and Frost.. who does the GOP point to as being in touch with the youth? Matt Gaetz?
I’m not saying that the Dems couldn’t be better, but change takes time and the lack of awareness of the real tangible progress that has been made is considered no more than an afterthought by this group of voters sticks in my craw. Thirty years ago, would we even be discussing trans rights? It’s like they are blithely ignorant of the work needed to unfuck the decisions of Reagan and Bush v.1.0 and v.1.2 and the economic carnage from those years.
Geoduck
@gene108: The Shiatgibbon might also lose some support if he came out in favor of abortion on demand.
Baud
@Geminid:
I didn’t say people had made up ground. I said the economy was good.
When FDR win his landslide reflections, people hadn’t made up their ground from the Great Depression. That wouldn’t happen until WWII. But voters were smart enough to recognize the positive direction. We’ve lost that ability, it seems.
Manyakitty
@gene108: it’s not that many people in the country, it’s a percentage of republican voters. Still horrifying.
randy khan
@Martin:
I am going to continue to make a stand on claims that the Dems haven’t done anything “meaningful” on climate change or any number of other items. The Dems, against all odds, and despite having a huge booster of the coal industry in their caucus, passed the first significant climate change bill this country ever has had, with tons of funding to boot. Leaving aside that that never ever would happen under Republicans, it’s also much more significant than anything the Dems had done before, and well ahead of a lot of other countries as well.
Martin
@Brachiator:
A lot of? Buddy, it’s pretty much zero. That doesn’t mean the news doesn’t work its way to them, but it does in a very different sense. They get it through less of a political lens and through more of a moral one. That’s why they don’t really get caught in the GOP culture wars – they see trans people as people, and want the best for them, and not as political pawns. Same for abortion and guns and a whole mess of other things.
Maybe it’s naive and ineffective to operate through that worldview, but it does insulate you pretty well from NYT and Politico bullshit.
Villago Delenda Est
The Vichy Times blows its nose at Victor Shi and all those disgusting kids that are on Pinch’s lawn.
Baud
@Baud:
Reflections = reelections
Tony Jay
@Chris:
‘Zaktly.
Value what you have, Colonial Rebel Scum. Work for better, yes, and guard against internal fuckery, but be careful you don’t burn down the house while chasing each other through its many rooms with torches and pitchforks.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: Reaganomics are why we’re so fucked with economic disparity now. The Rs basically trashed as much as they could of the FDR/HST/JFK/LBJ economic programs to repeal the abomination that is the middle class, and instead renew the plutocracy of the Gilded Age.
WaterGirl
@piratedan:
I hate seeing the words “touch”, “youth” and Matt Gaetz in the same sentence. He may be in touch with youth, but not in any way that doesn’t make him a horrible creepy person.
Baud
@Villago Delenda Est:
Add to that the extension of Reaganomics with the massive Bush and Trump tax cuts.
Bill Arnold
@gene108:
I’d bet money (like a few percent of net worth) that Trump’s current floor is below that, and that it will drop over the next 11 months. That it will be made to drop, by competent and committed anti-Trump opposition. (And the trials on a bunch of felony charges will also inflict some political damage.)
TaMara
@JaySinWA: Two, I know for sure, would vote for Biden if Trump is the nominee – the rest, I’m betting will just stay home. There was a real sense of defeatism in their conversations.
That being said, I didn’t sense they were anti-MAGA, they were just anti-Trump.
Chris
@Martin:
The problem is that even if nobody’s checking the MSM itself, that’s still what drives the news. Most of the social media places where people my age get their news don’t produce their own content, they just repeat the highlights that they got from MSM outlets. You’re still getting the same narratives and talking following the same issues that you would if you read the New York Times or listened to NPR, you’re just getting the crudest possible version of it.
WaterGirl
@Brachiator: My point, or at least one of them, is that the media isn’t so much “reporting” on polls as they are driving people to believe that whatever bullshit reporting they are doing is truth.
Do you think Biden is too old? People thing Biden is too old. The young think Biden is too old. Do you think Biden is too old? A lot of people believe that Biden is too old. Do you think Biden is too old?
It wouldn’t work on me, but there’s a certain kind of person that it does work on, and there are a whole lot of them.
Chris
@Tony Jay:
Oh, I very much value it. I’ve got a foot in two countries, what with dual French-American citizenship. I’m extremely aware of how much weaker of a position left-wing parties can be in.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Absolutely, but my point is that they don’t even pretend to offer a solution to our problem.
I mean, the closest thing to a positive economic message the Republicans can give people is “we’ll cut your taxes.” What the fuck good does that do me? I’m literally too poor to pay any. And while there are a lot of people doing better than me, a hell of a lot more people are in my position than were fifty years ago.
piratedan
@WaterGirl: twas done on purpose, I admit it.
I get pretty fucking tired of watching Dems being labelled as being the “less odious” of the political crap sandwich the younger generation is given.
Could more be done, sure…. in a world where the indifferent could be better informed and casting ballots to prevent these christian nationalists from being in place to prevent any progress.. sure there would be lots of time to discuss housing and climate change and healthcare costs, but because the rest of us would just as soon not experience the Fascism-Lite times of the 45 administration they choose to bitch at us instead of the REAL reason why we can’t even discuss these issues, the people who would just as soon make women barefoot and pregnant and anyone who isn’t a white male a 2nd class citizen.
I don’t want them to get over themselves, I want them to understand that the political choices that we are confronted with today are unfortunately binary. One group for Democracy as ugly as it us, the other is to cede those choices to people who DO NOT AGREE WITH THEM ON VIRTUALLY ANYTHING.
that’s it… so why are you bitching (and I don’t mean you WG)?
Baud
@Chris:
Now I’m wondering which left wing party is the strongest in the world today. The last win I can recall was in Chile a few years ago.
Geminid
@Baud: No, I was the one who said people had not made up ground lost in the Recession. But the point is that the 2016 economy wasn’t strong enough give them the prospect of making up the lost ground. Now, those who haven’t aged out of the workforce are making it up lost ground in this economy. Joe Biden can campaign effectively on a good economy, Hilary Clinton couldn’t; it would have just made people mad at her.
Baud
@Geminid:
I agree people would have been mad at her, but I disagree as to the economic justification for their madness.
Sure Lurkalot
This is good news.
At Thanksgiving, the talk turned briefly to politics and I said that Joe Biden was the best president of my life time. I volunteered my main reasons: union support, environment, job creation, infrastructure projects.
I was met with incredulous looks from my relatives (all Democrats), especially the 30 year olds. Like so many Democrats of this era, everyone expected me to say President Obama who we all supported, voted for and love.
Why did Joe pass Obama in the race? Biden simply has far fewer fucks to give than Obama did. I have more policy agreements with Joe’s cabinet and advisors too.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@piratedan:
Matt Gaetz is touching the youths, but that is different than being in touch with them.
Tony Jay
@Chris:
Many thumbs up
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
I think Biden is better because the party is better. I think people have a tendency to overvalue the person and undervalue the context.
WaterGirl
@Sure Lurkalot: Did that encourage positive comments from anyone?
catclub
Are you suggesting that in a two person race Trump will get less than 40% of the vote – hence the other person will get over 60%?
or is that some unmeasureable floor, and some his votes in a much closer two person race don’t really count as his hardcore backers?
Martin
@Jeffro: There’s no evidence since at least 2008 and maybe longer than vote switching actually changes elections. Sure, when Reagan won by 18 points that was happening, but 2008 was a 7 point margin and that was a monumental election in terms of the stakes considering the financial crisis actively taking place. The dominant trend is turnout.
And I say that with exasperation because the tactics for winning under one dynamic is mutually exclusive to winning under the other. So if you pick the wrong approach, it doesn’t just not work, it works against you. If you try to appeal to the middle, you lose your engagement with disaffected voters – who were probably disaffected because the things that they care about aren’t even the things being debated.
Until Dobbs abortion wasn’t being debated. Republicans were demanding a policy, and Democrats were ignoring it, hiding behind Roe. Once Dobbs went through, suddenly a LOT of Democrats showed up to vote.
Now, I do think there are dimensions for vote switching, but they’re pretty narrow. Abortion is probably one of them – with some Republican women turning out to vote for that issue when it’s isolated, but that doesn’t necessarily change their vote in a presidential race. I think the parties are simply too far apart for there to be any meaningful defections, instead we’re going at least for a while to have one side or the other disaffected or energized, and elections swinging on that.
But the folks avoiding voting for Trump aren’t becoming Democrats, or even aligning with them. It’s again a narrow circumstance, brought on not by anything the Democrats are doing, but because Trump is just so distinctly problematic. Republicans, even never Trumpers are not available for persuasion. Go back to Liz Cheney – none of her positions have shifted in the slightest, even on abortion. But she’ll vote for Biden over Trump because of this single exceptional reason that is so big it overshadows everything else.
Yes, young people are going to vote for Biden, but Biden needs to give them more of a reason to vote than just ‘I’m not a fascist’. And to his credit, he is. I can’t really say the same for a lot of Democrats in the House or Senate though.
Chris
@Baud:
I admit that I tend to compare the U.S. to peer nations, i.e. major Western nations – Britain, France, Germany, et al. There are probably other countries I’m not thinking of where the left is doing better.
If we’re going into Latin America, Bolivia’s left is actually doing quite well – it’s dominated politics for most of the last twenty years. Very different left. But so far it’s managed not to descend into the Venezuelan/Nicaraguan authoritarian trap, which is nice. (Morales seemed really interested in sending it that way, but that didn’t end up working out).
catclub
Yep. Looking back on it Obama was very cautious on lots of things, and it did not improve his presidency.
Baud
@Chris:
Thanks. Interesting about Bolivia. I’ll have to keep an eye out for Bolivian news.
Bill Arnold
@catclub:
The latter, or maybe both. Trump’s core appears to be shedding people.
And the others are in play. (ETA i.e. a blowout loss by Trump is possible, and (anti-Trump) activists should be working towards it.)
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: Well, they don’t give a rat’s ass about your problems, or my problems, or most of America’s problems.
Brachiator
@WaterGirl:
Many people will give extra validation to stuff that can be expressed in numerical terms even though it’s not meaningful.
I share your concerns, but I don’t know how many people are really falling for some of this stuff. I remember one negative poll report that fell apart once the overall total was broken down into Democrats, Republicans and Independents.
It was clear that not even Independents were falling for the “too old” stuff in large numbers.
What saddens me are news organizations that used to be more honest even if they were conservative that are now deeply embedded into misleading news coverage.
Ultimately, I guess we just have to note it, fight it, and work to get out the vote.
Subsole
@Martin:
What happens when you point out all the well-off bigots?
See, this is why I am not the official youth ambassador. Because I have known enough bigots, and encountered enough of America’s middle and working class, to know that these kids have it exactly backwards.
They believe that all these folks vote for bigoted policies because a shadowy cabal of money-grubbing billionaire boomers* are manipulating them into doing so, playing on their lack of money or opportunities to pit them against their fellow workers.
Which is pretty goddamned patronizing, when you get down to it. It assumes that only poor, desperate people fall for bigotry – the innocent, unsophisticated little dearies…
They say if we just hand bigots enough money, the bigotry will stop working on them. Neatly ignoring the bigots’ actual paychecks and circumstances.
When you point out that Da Yoots are essentially advocating buying people out of their delusions, they start jabbering about how you’re deluded or a shill or a sellout or same other lame-ass faux-jaded nonsense they picked from some semipubescent fashion-plate on InstaTokBookTube.
I am 40. Everything they went through, I went through. Everything they fear, I fear. And unlike them, I had to watch us throw away decades of progress in a fit of pique because folks who literally just got here simply couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the Email Lady.
Miss me with that bullshit about privilege, homie.
*For the record, it was the Silent Gen that fucked them. The Boomers grew up to be the Hippies that these snotty little pukes so desperately wish they were. If you want me to respect your anger, try pointing it in the right direction. Bro.
Alison Rose
@Martin:
Do you honestly think no Democratic voters were concerned about abortion rights until the Dobbs ruling?
Geminid
@Baud: People were really hurt by that recession. There was a lot of free floating anger about it that I think was misidentified as “economic anxiety.” Sanders tapped into it, and then Trump did to greater effect.
This did not have to be, but Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republicans wanted to choke Obama’s presidency with austerity and they almost did. I think Hilary Clinton paid the price.
This time around, Biden and a Democratic Congress got their countercyclical spending in early, in legislation passed in 2021 and 2022. If Biden wins, I think it will be because of legislation passed in the last Congress- the ARA, Infrastructure, CHIPS+ and IRA bills.
And that would not have happened had Georgia Democrats not put Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Senate. The runoff election on January 5, 2021 was a real inflection point.
Sure Lurkalot
@WaterGirl:
Yes, but only from my 70 year old brother in law, once and maybe still a self-described communist. I did not expect him to back me up! He moved to a tiny community in NM last year because he’s long wanted to get out of Denver. It wasn’t a particularly smart move and there’s precious little to do there. He’s always been a boots on the ground guy and he’s on board with the democratic party in his town. So, as many issues I’ve had over the years with his near total lack of common sense, good for him and his community.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I agree completely. Relatedly, it’s also a very different time. I remember thinking in 2008 that if Obama won, he might be the most consequential president of my lifetime because the country was in such a heap of trouble due to the financial meltdown — he’d get to do big things, never let a national crisis go to waste, etc.
And Obama did do some big things that I’ll always appreciate, such as significant healthcare reform, support for marriage equality, getting us out of Iraq, etc. Not to mention what a relief it was to know there was a decent, intelligent person in charge after the Dubya years, even if we didn’t agree 100%.
But hoo boy, did I underestimate how much worse things could get back then, how many more crises there would be to address, how much lower a GOP predecessor could sink. So now it is my fervent hope that Biden is the most consequential president of my lifetime.
Jeffro
@Geminid:
aka our current, good, economy. Agree 100%
Good point. We really should keep pointing that out as an additional trump loss. 2018, 2020, the GA election, 2022, and 2023’s various Dobbs-related referenda and special elections. 5 GOP own goals, all thanks to trump.
Baud
@Geminid:
I agree that I hope Biden ends up rewarded. And I fear the consequences if he’s punished. There’s no iron law that says Dems as a party must keep moving in a positive direction on policy, as we have been since 2002.
eclare
@Geminid:
As I have said before, we owe GA voters a lot.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
Paradoxically, we’ve been getting both worse and better since the mid 2000s. Democrats have enacted enormously meaningful changes, but Republicans have gotten so much worse that if you’d shown even the average Dubya voter in 2005 what the party would be by now, they’d tell you it was bad propaganda.
Honestly, the Obama era was still pretty spectacular. If you’d told me in 2008 that by the end of the next eight years we’d have passed universal health care, created the CFPB, withdrawn from Iraq, restored relations with Cuba, signed a treaty with Iran resolving the nuclear standoff, and legalized gay marriage everywhere in the nation, I’d have thought you were on crack, even if you then added that some of these would be reversed by Republicans later.
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud:
I might agree the 2010 electoral debacle was the party abandoning Obama at the first whiff of controversy, but the controversy was the ACA which they now support, not the fact that he bailed out corrupt as hell banksters who crashed the world economy. The party is a fickle bunch. A better bunch, I’m not so sure.
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
Most of the big banker bailout happened under Bush. Obama voted for it in the Senate, but I don’t know how he got tarred with it. He did bail out GM, which was considered a good thing at the time.
Soprano2
@206inKY: I heard a story this morning about a young black woman who kept paying on her student loans all through the pause. She reduced the principle to around $10,000, and says she’ll have them paid off in another year. She is a smart woman.
Chris
@Baud:
“Osama Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive” wasn’t a bad reelection slogan.
Brachiator
@Martin:
This sounds like every generation gap. When I was you, I was more politically active, but not deeply. I have voted in every presidential election since I was able to, but I also just lived my life when I was younger. Most of my friends and a lot of my coworkers never bothered to vote until their 30s, when they settled down.
The young always have political power. They are often too busy having fun and living their lives to use it.
But yeah, we all have to do what we can.
Martin
@piratedan: Problem is we don’t have time. A problem we spent a century creating we have much less than that to fix, so look at all the industrial and economic advances of the 20th century and you need policies that are at least in their effect, about 4x more radical. We had our first 2C day in the last month.
And there’s no progress at all being made on gun deaths, housing policy, etc. None of the safety problems are making progress. You have some economic progress but nothing structural. You do have climate progress but it’s not remotely fast enough, and the progress we are making is mostly exacerbating the economic problems because we chose a lot of bad policies.
Yeah, we’re talking about trans rights, but we aren’t necessarily codifying trans rights. So it comes off as a ‘thoughts and prayers’ kind of thing. Sentiment instead of action. And young people get a LOT of sentiment, and very, very little action. Let’s take a trivial thing like a prohibition on lawmakers profiting off of their positions in the stock market. Democrat won’t pass that. So any expression of economic change is at best sentiment. They’re not about to limit their ability to get rich, even though they have the best pension in the US, and will have a lifetime of earning options off of books and speaking engagements. That’s not enough. They need more. And that’s the Democrats. And not just the questionable ones, that’s Nancy Pelosi.
And some policies can go slow. But some can’t. Climate change is a problem that compounds, like interest. We should have learned that lesson with Covid. Early on, modest policies could have addressed a LOT of the problem. But wait, and modest policies aren’t adequate, you need radical policies – which won’t be easier to pass. Wait longer, and the problem exceeds the ability of policy to solve it. Go look at my posts in early 2000. I said things like a million people dead, which seemed incredulous. We’re at 1.1 million dead. Because by April 2020, we’d run out of runway – the time for policy was then behind us, we waited too long.
If we can’t pass the necessary climate policy today, the policy we’ll need in 2 years will need to be even harder, and in 4 years harder yet, and eventually, the problem gets bad enough that policy can’t fix it.
We have this complacency where we will tolerate the armed forces lacking leadership because a rule that lets one dipshit from Alabama do that is more important than the armed forces having leadership. Sorry your city burned down and your parents are dead, but there’s this procedural rule, you see…
Citizen Alan
@Chris: If the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was persuading the world he didn’t exist, surely his second greatest trick was in persuading America that we have a liberal media, despite the fact that every media outlet of any significance is owned by an oligarch and every media personality of an prominence is a millionaire. As an institution, our media ranges from center-right to hard-right, but above all, it is absolutely terrified of leftwing income redistributionists. They fear Elizabeth Warren writing tax policy more than they fear Trump sending MAGA freaks to shoot them down in the street.
WaterGirl
@Alison Rose: Martin can speak for himself, but I don’t think that’s what he was saying.
It wasn’t that long ago that Dem politicians were still going with safe, legal, and rare. But when they took it away, Dems stopped with that bullshit and are fighting hard.
That was my interpretation, anyway.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
That will always be true though. Everyone fights harder when there’s a more imminent threat.
Martin
@Chris: What makes you think those content creators are American? What makes you think the content they’re getting isn’t coming straight out of Gaza?
Just because the world you choose to live in is gatekept by the NYT doesn’t mean theirs is.
cain
@terraformer:
It’s because almost every newspaper/media outlet is owned by a billionaire. It’s basically an investment so that they can have low taxes for the rich.
If you want to get the press back, we need to start building new newspapers and media places and start moving funds there. Make these ass holes lose their money and tank these other media outlets so they can’t pay their top talent.
Citizen Alan
@Sure Lurkalot: Personally, I rank Joe above Obama because of his cabinet picks. Most of them are good, some of them are spectacular. But NONE of them fill me with the loathing that Arne Duncan and Tim Geithner did.
Barbara
@Martin: I am in the zoning meeting demanding it. My husband has been sued four times for an affordable housing project he spearheaded through community groups. We show up all the time to support projects and zoning changes that advance greater housing density and affordability, and we go to meetings to persuade neighbors not to hunker down and worry only about property values. I wish more people saw it as I do, but I doubt if that is going to happen through the kind of sermonizing you are engaging in.
cain
@The Thin Black Duke: and it’s not just empty rhetoric by these people – Dobbs have shown that they are serious. The laws being passed shows they are serious. The fighting in congress among the republicans show their dysfunction if you’re paying attention.
I see a lot of tiktok videos (over my wife’s shoulder) and it’s all young people spreading the good word.
JaySinWA
@Baud: I think there was an intelligence failure In the Dem party about abortion politics both about how likely Roe was to be overturned and how unpopular abortion restrictions are. They thought the safe bet was to avoid the topic and let the courts take care of it. They might have been right, it might have taken a radical court ruling to turn out the votes, but there weren’t many that would risk campaigning on women’s health issues.
Even after Roe was overturned there was a lot of conventional wisdom that Democrats couldn’t run on it and win.
Geminid
@Jeffro: Those January 5 Georgia runoffs were a really big deal. They were immediately overshadowed by the events of the next day, but it was still a fascinating election.
I remember listening to results that night on WSB, the Atlanta clear channel radio station. They had a good team of reporters. One of them had talked about turnout with rural Republican leaders, and said they were “chagrined.” That made me hopeful.
Last November, I was looking forward to more expert coverage of the Georgia Senate and Governor races. But when I tuned in to WSB, they were broadcasting a Georgia basketball game instead!
wjca
Simply put, the polls say that people who answer the phone from “unknown caller”, or even just from someone they don’t already know, prefer TIFG. Which is a very long way from most voters, let along the public generally.
Sure, the polls (at least some of them, usually) try to control for that bias. But how successful are they? I seem to recall a lot of polls predicting a red tsunami in 2022. That didn’t exactly happen.
In short, any time spent worrying about polls is time wasted. Time that would be far better spent on something substantive.
Citizen Alan
@Alison Rose: TBH I would say that the number of Dem voters who made abortion rights their litmus test was quite small compared to the Republican voters who did consider either anti-abortion policies or radical 2nd Amendment positions to be their #1 concern. I remember being in law school just a few years after Planned Parenthood vs. Casey came down 6-3 in support of abortion rights, and my ultra-liberal con law professor (the one John Grisham blew up in the second chapter of The Pelican Brief) confidently predicted that abortion rights were safe indefinitely.
Baud
@JaySinWA:
I don’t really see it. If there’s one issue I recall Dems consistently campaigning on, it’s abortion rights. It’s why they borked Bork! And actual Dem candidates seem to have not shied away from abortion since Dobbs, regardless of what the “conventional wisdom” was.
schrodingers_cat
@Martin: Just because it is coming out of Gaza doesn’t mean it is necessarily true or without an agenda.
schrodingers_cat
Deleted double comment.
Alison Rose
@WaterGirl: Well “suddenly a LOT of Democrats showed up to vote” sounds like it’s about citizens, not politicians.
Subsole
@Geminid:
I remember I got up and danced when those results came in, and I don’t even live in GA.
Sure Lurkalot
@Citizen Alan:
Yep, and though Baud is correct that the banksters bailout was started under Bush, it was continued under Obama. There was no course correction to help out the millions of underwater homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure (especially those due to the foreclosure process malfeasance). Too much moral hazard to bail out homeowners (who just used their homes as ATMs, so was said) as if Geithner’s buddies were a bunch of innocent puppies.
Alison Rose
@Citizen Alan: Your professor aside, most people with uteruses in this country have never felt that abortion rights were completely safe, and many of us have had it as a key part of our voting habits.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Citizen Alan: This.
I was reading in Bloomberg.com (yes, I know, but I also believe “know your enemy” and I have access because of work) that the Wall Street “biggest voices” wanted anyone but Trump or Biden.
And it occurred to me that the one thing both Biden and Trump offer is, they can plausibly claim to be “not bought” by the Kochs of the world.
Trump, of course, does so by being a facist, and despite enacting policies that are bog-standard Republican, his followers believe he’s an independently wealthy self-made guy. We don’t see how anyone can believe this while Trump has no problem giving Wall Street’s “biggest voices” what they want – in the short term. But he’s killing the Republican brand, and they’d like to be able to keep their money in the long term.
Biden does so by being too ethical to be bought, but because he’s working with a lot of government officials who are bought, his compromises can be easily besmirched as proof that he is bought, and of course the whole Hunter Biden investigation is to prove that his family is bought.
eclare
@Citizen Alan:
Also SCOTUS. Obama went with what he thought was a safe pick with Merrick Garland. I wonder if he had picked someone like Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose nomination would have been hanging over the 2016 election, would that have inspired more turnout/excitement for Hillary and other D’s?
Alternative history, we’ll never know.
Baud
@eclare:
Our side always has a tendency to believe more aggressive action will be more successful. That’s not always wrong. But it’s not a view one can have religious faith in IMHO.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Did you find a drawing class/youtube channel that you like?
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I bookmarked the ones you mentioned, but I haven’t had time to try them yet.
Martin
I’ve never encounter these sentiments at all from that group of people. In general, they don’t seem to think much at all about why voters vote the way they do. They do think a lot more about why lawmakers vote the way they do, and why policy ideas are or aren’t considered.
In my experience they’re more concerned with actual observed behavior (why they oppose abortion) rather than why they vote for people who oppose abortion.
I don’t even know what you’re referring to with the ‘buying people out of their delusion’. I’ve never once seen that. I’ve seen that with my generation, but not theirs. I don’t think you can really argue with Elon Musk running around out there who young people generally pretty despise, that they might think only poor people can be bigots. He’s literally the richest guy, and the most visible bigot, and why most of them left Twitter.
Bill Arnold
@Citizen Alan:
Stealing that, at least in form.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Is there in particular style that appeals to you, like say illustration or realism.
Martin
@schrodingers_cat: I never suggested otherwise. In fact, scroll up, and you’ll see that I say it opens them to a different kind of influence and propaganda, but it’s NOT the US MSM bullshit. So it is a solution to the NYT problem, and introduces an entirely different (and possibly worse) problem. But it’s also the case that the NYT will likely never be able to penetrate that space because the reason they like that as a source is they are explicitly trying to reject corporate media. So anything that sniffs like corporate media they turn away from.
Bill Arnold
@Martin:
Somebody needs to teach the youngs (and everyone, really) about the “reliability” in the journalism context. Sadly, much though not all corporate media is unreliable in that sense even for straight news (vs opinion), though a deliberately diversified feed helps (in several ways).
But when it comes to being informed on a limited time budget, TikTok does not suffice.
Subsole
@Martin:
I am speaking of people mostly in their 20s, though some are early 30s. Mostly middle class backgrounds, with some higher education.
They feel like mom and dad got handed a working civilization, broke it, then stuck them with the bill. That’s school, jobs, housing, transport, society, public places, opportunity, everything.
They worry that climate change is going to kill everything. Like, all those animals at the zoo? You won’t even be able to see them at the zoo. They’ll be dead. We probably will be too.
They are very tired of everyone telling them they are weak because they didn’t have to grow up under the kind of senseless macho bullying that their parents rationalized as a way of toughening people up.
They get a lot of their info from tiktok. Which means they are aware of a lot more than I was at their age, but it is often an incredibly shallow and distorted awareness because it was delivered as 5 second zingers and pithy quotes, dressed up in a cool and provocative way. Like living on a diet of political ads and bumper stickers. And that’s before you get into how easy it is to fall down an echo-hole.
Their sense of humor is at once ironic and surrealist, and really doesn’t work well if it has to stretch past 30 seconds. It also makes me belly laugh, because it is funny. Devastatingly witty, at times.
They tend to believe socialism is the future. They have a distressing tendency to reduce problems to financial issues, or attribute financial causes to issues like racism.
They are very prone to conspiracy thinking. They think rich people manipulate the world to keep everyone down. Which, yes. That happens. But they tend to attribute almost supernatural power to these folks. They are also very fast to assume that all instutions are breathtakingly cynical.
Does that sound familiar? No sarcasm. We may be speaking of different groups here.
Edit: Also, this group is very white. The nonwhite crowd tends to have a different perspective on things, and tends to skew more conservative, in a lot of ways. Though not in a pushy way.
gene108
@Elizabelle:
Polling while President showed anywhere between 40% to 45% of people (I’m not looking at all the polls from Jan. 2017 to Jan 2021 to figure who was surveyed) approved the job he’s doing.
That’s a hard floor, which why Biden’s approval has been lower, in some polls at some points in time during his first term, than anything TFG polled at.
The below link has aggregated some recent polls from this month on Trump’s favorable/unfavorable ratings and the favorable ratings fall between 40% to 45% across all poll results.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
Omnes Omnibus
The sanctimony runs pretty deep in some of these comments.
Subsole
@Omnes Omnibus: Such as??
Omnes Omnibus
@Subsole: Let’s just say, it wasn’t you.
Subsole
@Omnes Omnibus:
Fair enough.
matt
@Sure Lurkalot: Biden has done the job better, but he’s not as good a marketer as Obama.
matt
@Martin: The Senate’s procedural rules can’t just be waved away. Not sure how you think things work, but it’s fucked up and wrong.
Martin
@Subsole: You had me up to socialism.
They tend to believe capitalism ISN’T the future, and have vague ideas of things they think would be better, some of which are socialist and some are not. Things like single payer they support because they do recognize pretty accurately how that cannot work in a capitalist framework. My daughter was just asking me what the economic benefit of private toll lanes on the freeway was, and there just isn’t one. She recognizes that. But she doesn’t see an inherent problem with a public toll lane – at least, she can see situations where that would be fair and economically beneficial.
I haven’t seen the conspiratorial thinking. The young people I interact with see systems that incentivize the rich to do harmful shit, which creates a feedback loop. I don’t aspire to be a billionaire, so I don’t engage in the kinds of activities that would allow me to become one. So a system that can create billionaires attracts a certain kind of person to that system, and then that person by virtue of being in the rarified air of parties that can, I don’t know, buy Twitter now becomes an agent that I have to deal with on some level. If the system didn’t allow billionaires to even exist, that problem could never develop. It’s not that rich people control the world, it’s that the system attracts people who want to control the world by giving them a runway to maybe do that a little. I haven’t seen a supernatural power attribution, but more of a ‘the system is perfectly optimized to produce the results that it does’ attitude. If you have bad people in power, it’s because the system is designed to put bad people in power. Maybe we should change the system to not do that.
Martin
@matt: Why not?
I mean, let me rephrase that – how absolute are the Senate rules? How serious of a crisis must we face before we wave away a Senate procedural rule. Jefferson said:
So Jefferson (that fucking loser) would seem to agree with me. The procedural rule exists to retain a certain order, to attain a certain goal. But if it fails to do that, you suspend the rule, because it’s failing. This was the problem we faced going into Covid, and we failed there too. It’s the problem we face with Trump, and keep failing. He should have been in shackles on 1/21/21, but we didn’t do that because of some norm, that half the country proudly states they won’t respect, but which we keep adhering to.
Procedural rules require parties act in good faith. When they stop doing so, you throw the rule away – at least until the behavior is corrected.