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

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Freudian slip there.

I am not even interested in looking up this spooky sounding Dominion thing, sure as I am that nothingburger it was, is, and shall remain forevermore.

Dominion. Weren’t they Star Trek bad guys? So, does that mean villains from the future came back in time to help Joe Biden beat Trump? Whoa! Mind blown!

[Mister Mets]

The Myth of the Latino turnout for Trump turns out to be just that, a myth:
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/...trump-11961256



This is what happens when a bunch of overpaid self-proclaimed smartguys in a slow-motion election cycle have their thinkpieces out before the data comes in.

The main argument was about whether Trump did better than expected among Latino voters, not whether a majority of Latino voters went for Trump.

Some of the criticism of Nate Cohn seems to be about points he's not making. No one suggested that Latino voters in Texas backed Trump at a higher rate than white voters.

[Tami]

Screenshot_2020-11-15 Shawn in Az on Twitter Trump Conceeded.jpg

Twitter Link

[Revolutionary_Jack]

The main argument was about whether Trump did better than expected among Latino voters, not whether a majority of Latino voters went for Trump.

Some of the criticism of Nate Cohn seems to be about points he's not making. No one suggested that Latino voters in Texas backed Trump at a higher rate than white voters.

The argument is about rhetoric and emphasis. The way the Latino vote was discussed it was framed as this decisive X-factor that made Trump do better, when even in TX and FL and others, the Latino turnout wasn't the decisive thing that helped Trump do better there.

[Amadeus Arkham]

The Covid infection and death rate currently is the worst it’s ever been in America, and the economy is tanking...



Meanwhile in Asia...

[Panfoot]

Dominion. Weren’t they Star Trek bad guys? So, does that mean villains from the future came back in time to help Joe Biden beat Trump? Whoa! Mind blown!

Section 31 rigged the election! Obama was secretly half romulan! The battle of wolf 359 was an inside job!

[WAKANDA FOREVER!]

Section 31 rigged the election! Obama was secretly half romulan! The battle of wolf 359 was an inside job!

Nah, Superboy Prime did it!

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of U.S. Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who clearly has been taking hairstyle tips from Donald Trump on how to rock a comb over. Rounds, a former governor of South Dakota, once tried to outlaw all abortion in his state, and was turned back by the courts for it being a violation of Roe vs. Wade. He also insisted the Keystone Pipeline would create 40,000 new jobs in South Dakota alone, which was a gross exaggeration over four times the amount the company who would have owned the pipeline claimed there would be (It was more like 50, in reality). That’s not his only big lie, though, he actually has argued in favor of repealing Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform on the fallacy that the economy got WORSE after it was passed (the opposite is true). Sen. Rounds also was investigated for an immigration scandal, where he supposedly abused the EB5-Visa program to offer green cards to foreign investors if they would pony up $500,000 into beef packing plants in South Dakota. The visas were then not given, and the beef packing plant in question went bankrupt… and the money vanished with several of Rounds’ closest aides. After almost a year and a half, someone was finally charged with a crime in the EB5 Scandal. Regrettably, it was not Mike Rounds, but his associate Joop Bollen, who was charged with five felonies.

On March 1st, 2016, Rounds commented on GOP Presidential Nominee Donald Trump, specifically, Trump’s reluctance to disavow the endorsement of David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, which Rounds took time to defend him for. Yeah, you got that right. On top of all the other horrible things about Mike Rounds, he also doesn't object to his party being linked with the Klan that much.

If the EB-5 scandal didn’t already make it plainly clear how comfortable Rounds is corruption, we have to point out that he also went out of his way in April of 2018 to defend former EPA Director Scott Pruitt, who was the subject of over a dozen investigations into corruption, saying that people calling for his resignation were “nitpicking”. From where we’re sitting, those nits were the size of house cats, at least.

And not surprisingly, Sen. Rounds has been on board with every other terrible idea Donald Trump has managed to float through the Senate, including approving every member of Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors”, voting for the attempt the Senate GOP made at the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act, and he also voted for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, frequently complaining about protestors in the Capitol who had more sense than Rounds, at least enough to know that you shouldn’t put a rapist on the bench, let alone on the highest court in the land, and claiming that the “FBI Investigation” the GOP made into accusations against Kavanaugh was adequate (in spite of the fact that they weren’t even asked to interview Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, who was in the room when the assault happened.

Now, if you want some consistency out of the guy, during the impeachment of Donald Trump, Mike Rounds went on record to argue that witnesses "weren't needed". Whenever there's a crime done by a Republican, it seems, the Senator suddenly wants everyone's tongue cut out to properly preserve the corruption in our government.

Rounds’ seat in the Senate was up in 2020, and even though he blindly voted against witnesses in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and then voted to acquit an obviously guilty Oval Office occupant, he survived a primary challenger in the form of Scyller Borglum (not a character in Harry Potter), and had a huge financial advantage, with almost $2 million in fundraising saved up even as early as November of 2019. In the general election, he defeated Democrat Dan Ahlers with 68% of the vote. He thus will be returning to the Senate to do whatever Mitch McConnell tells him until 2026.

Excuse us while we decide if we'll be spending our day drinking, or instead to go scream into one of our couch pillows.

[Amadeus Arkham]

The Myth of the Latino turnout for Trump turns out to be just that, a myth:
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/...trump-11961256



This is what happens when a bunch of overpaid self-proclaimed smartguys in a slow-motion election cycle have their thinkpieces out before the data comes in.

That article asks an interesting question: Why did more white women vote for Trump than in 2016? Surely racism couldn’t only be the motivating factor? I’m neither white, nor a woman so I definitely can’t claim to know. Anyone here please enlighten my ignorant self with their insights. I’m in need of some education on why certain demographics vote the way they do.

[Tami]

That article asks an interesting question: Why did more white women vote for Trump than in 2016? Surely racism couldn’t only be the motivating factor? I’m neither white, nor a woman so I definitely can’t claim to know. Anyone here please enlighten my ignorant self with their insights. I’m in need of some education on why certain demographics vote the way they do.

I'm a white woman and I can't stand Trump. Personally I have no idea why any of them would, outside the cluster of extremists. I'm still in shock that anyone voted for Trump, much less made it as close a race as it was.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

That article asks an interesting question: Why did more white women vote for Trump than in 2016? Surely racism couldn’t only be the motivating factor? I’m neither white, nor a woman so I definitely can’t claim to know. Anyone here please enlighten my ignorant self with their insights. I’m in need of some education on why certain demographics vote the way they do.

Obviously that's a question that will take a while to fully answer. Based on personal experience, i.e. having a relative who is in that bracket (when she's not talking politics, she's actually nice on a personal level even to POC and others...not that I am excusing her or anything):
-- One answer is religion, white women in rural areas tend to be a lot more active and present in religious services and Trump, for entirely cynical and hypocritical reasons, is their path to hold on to power in American society.
-- They also tend to view TV a lot more and so the collapse of fiction and news and so on, the level of unreality and pseudoreality which Trump represents kind of speaks their language. They respond to that stuff emotionally.
-- Racism is a factor definitely. Not only in the overt obvious white supremacist racism, but the covert one where they are blind to the consequences of their support and so on.

The other reason, outside this sample, and an underreported one is domestic abuse...
https://supermajority.com/news/educa...r-suppression/

Anecdotally there's evidence that women in red states are being forced to vote Republican or vote Trump by their husbands under the threat and reality of domestic abuse and spousal abuse.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

To elaborate. I had to Google Fu to dig up this article by Rebecca Solnit for The Guardian. It's 2018 but I am willing to bet it still applies.
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...term-elections

Progressive organizer Annabel Park told the story that made me start to wonder. “I can’t stop thinking about this woman I met while doorknocking for Beto in Dallas,” Annabel wrote on social media a few days before the midterm elections.

“She lived in a sprawling low-income apartment complex. After I knocked a couple of times, she answered the door with her husband just behind her. She looked petrified and her husband looked menacing behind her. When I made my pitch about Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, her husband yelled, ‘We’re not interested.’ She looked at me and silently mouthed, ‘I support Beto.’ Before I could respond, she quickly closed the door.”

Annabel told me afterwards, “It’s been on my mind. Did she get beaten? That was my fear.”

There’s a form of voter intimidation that widespread and unacknowledged. It’s the husbands who bully and silence and control their wives, as witnessed by dozens of door-to-door canvassers across the country I heard from....
...
Wives asked their husbands directly who the two were going to vote for. Many seemed cowed. Husbands answered the door and refused to let the wife speak to canvassers, or talked or shouted over her, or insisted that she was going to vote Republican even though she was a registered Democrat, or insisted there were no Democrats in the house because she had never told him she was one. A friend in Iowa told me, “I asked the woman who answered the door if she had a plan for voting, and a man appeared, behind her, and said, quite brusquely, ‘I’m a Republican’. Before I could reply, he shut the door in my face.”

Another friend reported, “A woman I texted in Michigan told me, ‘I am not allowed’ to vote for the candidate.” Many canvassers told me those experiences were common. I did not find stories of the reverse phenomenon – wives dominating their husbands, or husbands pushing their wives to vote for the Democratic candidate. Of course I talked to people canvassing for Democrats, and domestic violence takes place across the political spectrum, but the bullying seemed to be mostly either to oblige the wife to lean to the right or to not participate at all.

“The wife spotted me and jumped up from her table to intercept me at the door before I could knock,” one canvasser from California told me.

Without saying any words, the wife softly put both hands out in front of her body, palms facing me. She moved her hands from side to side as though to tell me, “No thank you, please go away without making a noise.”

She was one of many who appeared to be afraid of their husbands.

Going door-to-door is an extraordinary experience. You see demographics break down into actual faces, stories, shabby or manicured front yards, see subdivisions and slums, see people who are clear and fierce or indifferent or confused about the upcoming election. You meet people where they are, and where some of them are is in fear of the man of the house.

My friend Melody had a Nevada man who never turned off his leaf-blower roar at her over the din, “This is a RED house! This house is Republican!”

Melody told me: “I say I’ve come by to speak to Donna. ‘No, she doesn’t want to speak to you.’ I consider saying, ‘Looks like this house is kind of purple, since Donna is a Democrat.’ But then I think, ‘Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe she just goes into that booth and votes the way she wants without telling him.’ But what if she doesn’t go into a booth? What if they vote at the kitchen table? Does he supervise her ballot? Is she afraid to fill it out according to her own wishes rather than his?”

No one knows to what extent this domination may prevent women from voting according to their own beliefs and agendas or participating at all.

Of course there are plenty of rightwing women who are enthusiastically voting for the conservative of their choice, but when you look at the enormous gender gaps between Democrats and Republicans or hear the myriad door-to-door stories, you recognize that there are many marriages between Democratic women and Republican men, and many Republican men who intend to control their wives’ political expression.

The problem matters for voting rights whether or not it influences outcomes, and it’s also a reminder that many women are not free and equal in their domestic lives. Yet another canvasser reported that one of those husbands, this time in Turlock, California, told her, “And if she needs to know how to vote, I’ll just take her in the back and beat her.” He was sort of joking but sort of not.

...
Last week, Mark Harris, a preacher fond of Ephesians 5:22 – “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord” – won North Carolina’s ninth congressional district, and Ohio Republicans made more attempts to take away women’s right to control their fertility. The conservative agenda is, of course, what you could call marriage inequality, an asymmetrical relationship in which men hold disproportionate power.

The right to vote according to your own conscience and agenda is not really so different than the right to control your own body or have equal access and rights in the workplace. It’s a right that we’re meant to have because the laws say we’re all equal. But we’re not. As with the myriad Republican measures to prevent citizens from voting on the large scale – Crosscheck, voter ID laws, limits on polling places and voting hours – this domestic tyranny is an attempt to limit who decides what this country should be.

[Mister Mets]

The argument is about rhetoric and emphasis. The way the Latino vote was discussed it was framed as this decisive X-factor that made Trump do better, when even in TX and FL and others, the Latino turnout wasn't the decisive thing that helped Trump do better there.

It was a factor that helped Trump do better than expected, in that the polls suggested that he improved his numbers among Latino voters, while his numbers went down among white voters.

No one's suggesting that Latino voters supported Trump at a higher rate than white voters.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...no-republicans

I can appreciate a frustration if a dry discussion of voting patterns sounds like groups are blamed. The polls suggest that Biden won because he cut into Trump's numbers among white men, but white men still voted for Trump by 23 points.

For progressives, it can be annoying if white men are given credit for voting for Biden, when a much greater percentage of members of other demographics voted for Biden, but this is an important discussion to have when determining campaign strategy.

If a Republican can match Trump's 2016 performance among white men, and his 2020 performance among women and voters of color, that candidate will be President.

[Mister Mets]

That article asks an interesting question: Why did more white women vote for Trump than in 2016? Surely racism couldn’t only be the motivating factor? I’m neither white, nor a woman so I definitely can’t claim to know. Anyone here please enlighten my ignorant self with their insights. I’m in need of some education on why certain demographics vote the way they do.

It probably made a difference that in 2016, they had a chance to vote for a woman. In 2020, the election was between two white guys.

Republicans also recruited more female candidates for other races, in an initiative spearheaded by Representative Elise Stefanik.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/13/93424...ed-to-congress

The month before the election, a working mother was appointed to the Supreme Court.

It is worth noting that there will soon be much more detailed information about why individuals voted the way they did, as pollsters match surveys with the publicly available information about whether people voted. These results can take a while, but they will be illuminating.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics...ethodology-94/

[Adam Allen]

Maybe Trump did slightly better with women and minorities in 2020 because he was the incumbent, the incumbent usually wins, and people generally would rather back a winner than a loser?

Maybe he did worse with white men because the country was hurtling towards its doom, compared to four years ago, and that's hard to ignore?