All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Michigan wasn't as close this time, but then again, neither was Florida.

Florida isn't comparable to Michigan. FL and TX are the mega-electorates for the GOP. It's their CA and NYS. In 2020, Biden won more votes in both states than Trump's winning margin in 2016. 5million people each in both states both voted for Biden. GOP can't boast any improvement in NYS and CA.

Shalala had an insider trading scandal, so that might have been a bigger deal.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...-trades-201392

Right.

The right has always thrived under these conditions though, because once they can declare that their way of life is under existential threat, they can throw out all the pretense of morality and consistency and just go all in with the forcible suppression of any opposition. The standard Republican platform of small government and religious social conservatism never really appealed to that many people anyway, they were really just indirect pathways to the kind of militant nationalism and white supremacy that most of their voters have now openly embraced. The GOP can't just hit a reset button and go back to what it was during the Reagan years because that image was always fake anyway, you can't start talking about welfare queens and small town values now and not expect people to know exactly what you mean by that.

Agreed.

Still at the end of the day, no matter what shenanigans are about to ensue, I feel pretty optimistic about the Democrat Party's future.

Only a fool would look at this and want to be in the position of the Republicans and not the position of the Democrats.

[DrNewGod]

...Still at the end of the day, no matter what shenanigans are about to ensue, I feel pretty optimistic about the Democrat Party's future.

Only a fool would look at this and want to be in the position of the Republicans and not the position of the Democrats.

There is no question that the Dems have gained and the Reps have lost. I'm not without concerns for both 2022, and 2024.

Biden got a lot of "I just can't take this other guy anymore" votes. This "We Wuz Robbed!" narrative the republicans are ginning up is likely to stick for some time, no matter who helms them. Progressives' best hope is that the GOP allows Trump to maintain his stranglehold on their party out of fear that Trump will Twitter Lash any dissenter right out of public life.

Right now, that's the way it's shaping up. But lets say that two things happen with Trump: 1) he doesn't do anything in the next 9 weeks+ that turns a substantial number of his fawning masses away from him, and 2) he dies in the next year or so. It strikes me that opens things up for another would-be Mussolini to step in, bombasting that he'll see The Great Leader's Vision Thru And Avenge The Steal!

ETA: Even if Trump does retain control of the GOP, I could see 2022 disappointing because the Dems won't have as obvious a boogey man to position against, and Biden's Never Trump voters won't be there for the mid-terms.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

There is no question that the Dems have gained and the Reps have lost. I'm not without concerns for both 2022, and 2024.

Oh absolutely. The Democrat Party need to make a lot of changes because they absolutely could have done better in the House and Senate had they run a better strategy.

Legislatively, the main thing that helped the GOP was Ginsburg's death and the SCOTUS and the failure to pass the stimulus before election. Ginsburg's death at that time is a stroke of bad luck (though one that absolutely everyone saw coming with many calling for RBG to retire during the last time Dems had WH and Senate). Lindsay Graham's re-election would not have happened without that. His re-election was nothing to do with him. And the fact is his opponent got more than 1 million votes, meaning that Graham's constitutency has far more blue voters in 2020 than it did before.

Biden got a lot of "I just can't take this other guy anymore" votes.

Biden got far more "He was Obama's best friend" votes. Anti-incumbency can't explain that Biden got 50% of the votes. That's a thumping personal mandate. To put that into perspective...JFK in 1960 didn't get 50% (yeah JFK wasn't all that popular and charismatic on the ballot), neither did Bill Clinton. Obama of course got more than 50% both times. "I just can't take this other guy" helps explain why HRC won the popular vote (and she didn't make it to 50%).

This "We Wuz Robbed!" narrative the republicans are ginning up is likely to stick for some time, no matter who helms them. Progressives' best hope is that the GOP allows Trump to maintain his stranglehold on their party out of fear that Trump will Twitter Lash any dissenter right out of public life.

Progressives have better hopes than that. To repeat, Election 2020 was a better one for Progressives than Moderates:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/d...ection-day-dsa

It strikes me that opens things up for another would-be Mussolini to step in, bombasting that he'll see The Great Leader's Vision Thru And Avenge The Steal!

I don't know about that. Mussolini's death in the '40s didn't lead to a successor to Italian Fascism in any of the decades which followed. Hitler's death finished off Nazism.

Trump's defeat has taken the aura of invincibility from him. Reality is catching up. And a second Trump will be hard for the GOP to find. The Republicans never did find a second Reagan you know, nor are they likely to any time soon.

ETA: Even if Trump does retain control of the GOP, I could see 2022 disappointing because the Dems won't have as obvious a boogey man to position against, and Biden's Never Trump voters won't be there for the mid-terms.

Again "never trump" voters were not a significant factor in Biden's victory. Biden's victory didn't come from any Republican-base swing to the center. That itself is worrying enough on its own. But at the same time that shows the strength of the Dems' base.

[worstblogever]

Oh WBE-EEeeeeeeeeeee....
https://www.mississippifreepress.org...trump-lawsuit/

I believe Bill Engvall put it best when he said, "Here's your sign..."

[Amadeus Arkham]

What’s anyone’s opinions on Jon Ossoff? Week candidate, strong candidate?


Because he doesn’t sound very promising so far...

[Revolutionary_Jack]

AOC's counter-messaging seems to be working.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/1...ormance-435600

Doug Jones, who lost his seat in Alabama, and is centrist, agrees that Dem defeats are down to their inability to fail to get ahead of Trump's messaging and moderate incompetence more than anything.

Still, some frustration is bubbling up in the Senate as well. Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who lost by 20 points to Republican Tommy Tuberville last week, blamed getting tied to GOP “catch-phrases” as the reason red- and purple-state Democrats took a beating.

“We’re not some demonic cult like we’re portrayed to be,” said Jones. “I was fighting the same battle that Jaime Harrison was fighting, that Mike Espy was fighting, that Cal Cunningham was fighting, that Steve Bullock was fighting. And Democrats have not been able to fully counter the Republican narrative.”
...
“We always look at how we can do things better. But the map was the map,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), a close Schumer ally. “None of our candidates are supporting defunding the police, socialism. But we still got tagged by it. So the question becomes: How do you rise above that?”

She said the party’s polling didn’t “capture the people voting for Trump,” part of a growing chorus of complaints about polling in battleground states. Those surveys indicated several paths to the majority for Senate Democrats — none of which materialized.

“Would we have been better off winning the Senate outright? Of course. Would we have been happier campers today? Yes,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). But “I wouldn’t criticize Schumer — we won two of the three likeliest Democratic pickups … Maybe, in retrospect, we should’ve been managing expectations.”

[wjowski]

The country is currently being scourged by a pandemic that the GOP has all but actively spread. If this isn't a time to push "socialist" ideas, especially ideas like UHC, then I ask when should they be pushed?

[The no face guy]

The big question for Democrats is how long they can keep mobilizing the new demographic.

Will those people come on the ballot in 2022 when elections are a referendum on Biden and Democrats?

I think it will be more of a question of getting people who don't usually vote to turn out, rather than a referendum on the Democrats performance.

Arizona:

Hispanics in Arizona were most likely mobilized by Trump's draconian approach to border enforcement, but at the same time, Hispanic turnout is usually 20% less than Caucasian or African American nationally.

Hispanics are also not one voting block, as proven by George Bush's ability to capture 44% of the vote in 2004.

Georgia:

Georgia is now a swing state in play, with African Americans now making up to over 30% of registered voters in the state who vote overwhelmingly Democrat. That could translate into more permanent gains in the house for Democrats.

As for the House this election, outside of wanting to get a quasi fascist out of the Whitehouse, I don't think people were incredibly inspired to vote for an aging one term President. Had it been a younger potentially 8 year term visionary I'm sure the Democrats would have taken the house by a bigger margin, but you have to go with what you got.

[Malvolio]

Plus we already saw that play out in 1800's if no one ever knew (I didn't til a few years ago). In an article a bunch of angry Confederates who had watched Lee surrender decided to go to South America and set up their own country. They soon discovered how it didn't work and many returned home. Only a few stayed. I wish I could find the article or what to search under.

Funny thing, though, is that some of the people they had enslaved did make it work in Africa. In fact, that nation, Liberia, is still there today. Granted, they're not perfect, but they did make it work.

[PwrdOn]

AOC's counter-messaging seems to be working.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/1...ormance-435600

Doug Jones, who lost his seat in Alabama, and is centrist, agrees that Dem defeats are down to their inability to fail to get ahead of Trump's messaging and moderate incompetence more than anything.

The problem for moderates is that if they just reject all progressive policies outright, they leave themselves without much of a platform to actually run on. Sure, defunding the police sounds extreme, but how exactly can you expect the police to shape up without at least the threat of withholding funding for departments that refuse to tone down the brutality? Throwing more money at the problem and expecting that "community policing" is some kind of magic wand that will fix everything is a silly fantasy, and everyone knows this, so basically there is really no room where you can simultaneously advocate for black lives mattering while still being pro-police. The same thing goes for that dreaded "socialist" label, if you want to invest in healthcare, education, clean energy, and all the rest, you need to accept that this will require significant government expenditures and financed by heavy taxation, because the last few decades have conclusively shown that the private sector is unwilling and unable to do this. So once again there's no middle ground to occupy here - either you're in favor of the government providing healthcare and education to people whom the market refuses to serve, or you're not.

By the way, the kind of European style social democracy that the likes of Bernie Sanders advocate for isn't some kind of miraculous solution either. That only worked in Europe because all of these countries had extracted vast sums of wealth from their colonial possessions, realized that the tap would soon run dry once the colonies gained independence, and decided to invest the surplus they had accrued into a more sustainable socioeconomic system. It's not like Norwegian socialism somehow operates on inherently different principles than North Korean socialism, it's just that one country happened to have the resources to make it work and the other didn't. The problem with the United States is that we're still in that imperial extraction phase, and have convinced ourselves that there's no need to invest in sustainable development because the loot will keep flowing in forever, and we really need to snap out of this delusion because countries in the global south are already exerting their newfound geopolitical muscle and pushing back against US influence. Imagine what the history books will say when they get to the part where the USA strip mined half the world of its resources and just wasted it all with NOTHING to show for it?

[DrNewGod]

Again "never trump" voters were not a significant factor in Biden's victory. Biden's victory didn't come from any Republican-base swing to the center. That itself is worrying enough on its own. But at the same time that shows the strength of the Dems' base.

I'd love to be proven wrong on that. Independent data analysis on it won't be available for quite a while. I applaud you for bringing in sources for your assertions, but most of what you're citing in support of where the national sentiment is heading is qualitative assessment in support of an a priori view.

Using the term "would-be Mussolini" was not to draw a direct historical parallel to the events, but to the appetites of the kind of people we're talking about.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

So basically Trump its reported threatened to tweet negative about the Georgia Senators unless they backed his silly claims and they buckled and tried to blame the Secretary of the State there for election. Who took NONE OF THEIR BULLSHIT and told them he works for the people of the state...NOT THEM. Its becoming clear this stain on the Republican party will last for years as people will question now after each election ..."Will ___ do a Trump ? Will the Republican party accept a loss ?"

Its gonna be brought up every 4 years to them and all because they just failed to do the honorable thing and cared more about trying to appease Donald Trump.

[Jackalope89]

Tweedle Dumb, also known as Eric Trump, makes another stupid.

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/eric-...152415379.html

[BeastieRunner]

STRIKE THREE! GOP is 0-3 for trying to get the ACA struck now.

ACA is saved again.

High court seems likely to leave to health care law in place.

"Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, among the conservative justices, appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law — a long-held Republican goal that has repeatedly failed in Congress and the courts — even if they were to find the law’s now-toothless mandate for obtaining health insurance to be unconstitutional."

Kavanaugh came out against Trump.

45's gonna be mad.

[Tami]

Maybe he hasn't been following the news

Pompeo just now: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."