rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

They at least are willing to excuse racism. I don’t know if they care about race issues as much as they do their stock portfolio though tbh.

But again—that is hardly an excuse

The ‘I dislike Trump but the PC/woke left has gone too far’ crowd hasn’t exactly disappeared.

not so much mystery to MOR trump support. there's the old saying "there's none so blind as he who will not see." Or if you prefer the more modern version (paraphrasing) "it is very hard to understand something, when misunderstanding it is essential to maintaining your wealth and status."

the blindness in the face of all of this is what's dispiriting to me, that people aren't more evolved

i mean, i am really annoyed with all of you'al still stumped by and playing bridge and tossing horseshoes with f'ing trump supporters so whate'er.

lol

i just think there are a lot of people who might not think of themselves as part of MAGA country but who might vote for trump anyway. and this is honestly the central mystery of his entire presidency.

How? It’s just the GOP of the last five decades but uncouth. Most people deep down don’t give a shit about the uncouth part.

The ‘I dislike Trump but the PC/woke left has gone too far’ crowd hasn’t exactly disappeared.

This angle is being pushed a lot, especially over the last few months. Enlightened Centrists

He also did a terrible job governing the country and we are embroiled in a series of devastating crises. That’s the piece I’d expect people to reject.

that's the part that gets me too. if you make less than $10,000,000 a year I find it hard to think of a single thing he's done well - even by his own standards, he's a failure. the only thing he's good at is pissing off leftists and I guess when you have no fucking policy goals whatsoever that's enough

xxp re GOP of the last five decades, that seem right, and hoping that it's becoming more clear to the rest of us that racism is central to all of it

While this is true, the early part of Covid this did filter through to the polling and he was heavily underwater. So people did at one time register that he had handled Covid much worse than the democrats would have done. That perception seems to have changed

Nixon courted southern racists as brazenly as he dared to. Reagan's embrace of racism was only covered by the barest of fig leaves. Bush Sr. ran the notorious Willie Horton ads. When was the centrality of racism in the Republican coalition not plain as day?

right now yes but the civil unrest & protests seem to push the pandemic out of the news. I remember when the George Floyd protests were reaching a fever pitch and you had a few broadcasters going "uh hey guys did anyone notice our COVID numbers are worse than they've ever been? shouldn't that be the big story?"

the civil unrest is worse because of trump. he was encouraging cops to shoot looters before there was widespread looting.

It doesn't look that way to everyone. Even some ILX libs have started to get weird about 'riots.'

xp the racism was plain all along, but glad that people are now finally paying attention

As far as COVID, I don't think "Trump fucked up in March/April/May/etc." is all that strong of a play, since it's not March anymore. People want to know what Biden will do going forward about 14% unemployment and he's a void.

A void? The House passed an new $3 trillion aid package for the unemployed in early August that far exceeded anything the Republicans were willing to contemplate. Biden endorsed it.

"Even some ILX libs have started to get weird about 'riots.'"

admit to being queasy about riots

Such strong leadership, endorsing a bill that he had no part in negotiating or passing.

having your candidate associated with people burning down buildings and destroying private businesses isn't really a good thing imo

Joe Biden is very likely to beat Donald Trump in the electoral college

https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president?gclsrc=aw.ds&gclid=CjwKCAjwnK36BRBVEiwAsMT8WD01Z4tnHfdbP8Dj_KSRVoYklUcSD2ualUbh_OB5LVPVg__a4x1FgxoCRlQQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

xps - you said "a void". how is that endorsement a void?

Remember when Trump scrapped a proposal for a national testing program?

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner's team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. "The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," said the expert.

How is it not a void?

Is he blanketing the airwaves with ads for his plan to rescue the economy (which is part and parcel of a COVID response).

Or is he running on a "Trump suxor" platform?

The claim that he was willing to sacrifice blue states so he could just blame governors hasn’t been proven, but I think it should be investigated. His ambivalence about testing in the critical early months made no sense at all. Testing is the only way you can control a contagious virus.

I’m sorry, but Trump’s response to covid should not be memory-holed. It’s far more significant than “ukraine-gate.”

I think you should investigate that and potentially find out that Trump is a senile, venal monster whose only concern in life is not looking like a loser.

In the face of this it shouldn’t matter that Biden is a dusty old mummy.

How is it not a void?

How is this an answer to my question?

"When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people," Trump said in June at an ill-timed rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "You're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'"

Like what is this

dusty old mummy

Because I don't have to accept your premises? Biden is failing to make a positive case for himself or his vision for the near-future of this country (because he doesn't have a vision).

He's a void - he's a hole in which people who agree that Trump is terrible throw their hopes in, because they think enough other people will recognize that to carry Biden to victory. They can tell themselves that it doesn't matter that Biden doesn't have a convincing plan for 13% unemployment in February, that he's completely disinterested in the desires of the Democratic base in general, because surely their fellow Americans will recognize how awful Trump is.

This looked like a bad plan pre-COVID (which is why Biden needed the ultimate rescue), a fine plan with COVID at its worst and now it's looking increasingly dicey.

dusty old mummy

― Dan S, Monday, August 31, 2020 12:15 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don’t really think he is this—his convention speech was good. But he isn’t the most robust candidate—I’m just saying from a voters standpoint who cares.

People - overwhelmingly the young and POC voters that make the difference for Democrats - have been out in the streets for months protesting the existence of a nationwide occupying army and Biden and his cohort do not have a coherent and meaningful response.

Even if you argue they can't jump on the defund the police train, they can do better than defend all the good apples you uppity protesters just don't want to think about.

(Just hope those young and POC protesters don't notice that it's thugs serving under Democratic mayors doing most of the head cracking and starting getting ideas about what that means.)

a fine plan with COVID at its worst and now it's looking increasingly dicey.

Covid is still at its worse!

I think Trump took a big hit over covid and particularly unemployment handling, but then over the following couple of months there wasn't enough from the Democrats on it to reassure they would have better handle

Practically anything would have been better. No democrat would have been complaining about “too much testing” in june.

I was referring more to unemployment, rent, evictions!

Practically anything would have been better.

This is a good phrase though, I think it gets to the heart of situations where in the short term something can benefit without doing anything, but this bump is time-limited until you show something yourself. Not just in this scenario but any

(Just hope those young and POC protesters don't notice that it's thugs serving under Democratic mayors doing most of the head cracking and starting getting ideas about what that means.)

haven't read enough I guess and am not sure what this refers to

That big city Democratic mayors like Ted Wheeler aren’t exactly fighting on behalf of protesters.

Jenny Durkan, Seattle's multimillionaire mayor, made one big action on behalf of the protestors: she promised to pause gas us for 30 days, until Independence Day (coincidentally she made this pledge when they ran out of tear gas, after tear gassing us all week). Two days later they got stocks of CS gas, and started CS gassing us instead.

Do you think every other state is going to go exactly the same way it did in 2016, after three and a half years of Donald Trump being Donald Trump, full force and top volume, all day every day?

Trump being Trump has been relentlessly normalised by mainstream media for those three and a half years, which is the biggest thing that makes me fearful of an electoral college victory again. (Second-biggest is Biden running a far worse campaign than Clinton did.)

there is also that tweet (linked in this thread? or another) showing how facebook is a completely alternate universe, in which trump is getting things done for the american people and his opponents are whining about it for partisan purposes. when you talk about “traction” and “optics” you need to think about that sphere, rather than the msm

See also 'mask freakout videos'. A good number of these are also filmed by someone with the anti-masker, for their own approving udiences. While these rants are being made fun of by Trevor Noah or whoever, they are being cheered on in other spaces. Optics is subjective

Four Years Later, It's Still All About Base

Trump is trailing, not because he's losing his 2016 base, but because he has never expanded beyond it.

This week I dug into the most recent national poll from Pew research (7/27-8/2) and compared it with the results of their 2016 validated vote survey (basically, a post-election exit poll that uses official voting records). What you find is that Trump is hitting his 2016 share of the vote among most demographic groups. But, he's not grown beyond those voters. Instead, it's Biden who has improved markedly on Clinton's 2016 performance.

Now, the all-important caveat. The voter validated survey is of people who actually voted in 2016, while the July-August survey is of registered voters. In other words, some of the people in the July-August survey may not vote, while everyone in the 2016 survey did. But, it does help give us some perspective on how Trump is performing with key demographic groups compared to how he did with them in 2016.

...

For example, for all the talk of Trump's cratering in the suburbs, the recent Pew poll finds that the president isn't doing any worse today among white, college-educated voters than he did in 2016. In 2016, Trump took just 38 percent of the vote from this group. Today, he's still sitting at 38 percent. But, Biden has improved on Hillary Clinton's 55 percent showing by 6 points to 61 percent. Trump hasn't lost support from his core white, non-college base either. The July/August poll found him taking 64 percent with this group — the same percentage he got in 2016. But, Biden has improved on Clinton's anemic 28 percent showing by 6 points. Most important, Trump has made no gains among independent voters, while Biden has improved on Clinton's showing by 14 points.

One bright spot for Trump is an increase in support from Latinos. He took 35 percent of the vote among Hispanics in July/August, a 7 point increase from his 2016 showing. His support among Evangelical Protestants has also improved — from 77 percent in 2016, to 83 percent.

So, how can this work? If Trump isn't really losing support from his 2016 base, but Biden is gaining on Clinton's performance, where are those extra votes coming from?

Answer: a lot is coming from voters who supported third-party/other candidates in 2016. According to the Pew July survey, voters who didn't support either major party candidate last election are now breaking decidedly for Biden — 55 percent to 39 percent. This group of non-Trump/non-Clinton voters doesn't get the attention of Obama-Trump voters or suburban moms, but they are a not-insignificant portion of the electorate.

It's still about that base

no treble

People - overwhelmingly the young and POC voters that make the difference for Democrats - have been out in the streets for months protesting the existence of a nationwide occupying army and Biden and his cohort do not have a coherent and meaningful response.

Milo Z I definitely respect your perspective here. I'm sure we're all sick of talk of 'electability' too. However I don't think that Defund The Police is a platform plank that will get voters in swing states to turn out for Biden in the numbers needed, I'm sorry.

It seems like there is some way that Democrats could politically outflank Trump, personally I lean towards Tax The Rich. This year has really thrown my sense of political topography way out of whack though. I never would have thought we could bungle the response to a pandemic so singularly, or that Americans could be generally be so blasé about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our own, after we collectively freaked out for a decade about 3000 people dying in the Twin Towers.

Whatever the potential body blows the Dems could deliver to Trump, I think the most effective ones would have to be starkly visual.

Trump is losing The Troops

The latest Military Times poll shows a continued decline in active-duty service members’ views of President Donald Trump and a slight but significant preference for former Vice President Joe Biden in the upcoming November election among troops surveyed.

The results, collected before the political conventions earlier this month, appear to undercut claims from the president that his support among military members is strong thanks to big defense budget increases in recent years and promised moves to draw down troops from overseas conflict zones.

But the Military Times Polls, surveying active-duty troops in partnership with the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University, have seen a steady drop in troops’ opinion of the commander in chief since his election four years ago.

In the latest results — based on 1,018 active-duty troops surveyed in late July and early August — nearly half of respondents (49.9 percent) had an unfavorable view of the president, compared to about 38 percent who had a favorable view. Questions in the poll had a margin of error of up to 2 percent.

Among all survey participants, 42 percent said they “strongly” disapprove of Trump’s time in office.

The unfavorable number matches what an earlier Military Times Poll found in late 2019, while the favorable total slipped from just under 42 percent last year. In a poll conducted at the start of Trump’s presidency, 46 percent of troops had a favorable view of him, versus 37 percent who had an unfavorable opinion.

Even with the steady decline, Trump’s popularity in the poll remains better than former President Barack Obama. Obama had a 36 percent favorable rating and a 52 percent unfavorable rating in a January 2017 Military Times poll.

Still, the dipping popularity among troops — considered by Republican Party leaders to be part of the base of Trump’s support — could prove problematic for the president in the upcoming election.

Among active-duty service members surveyed in the poll, 41 percent said they would vote for Biden, the Democratic nominee, if the election was held today. Only 37 percent said they plan to vote to re-elect Trump.

Another 13 percent said they plan to vote for a third-party candidate, and nearly 9 percent said they plan on skipping the election altogether. About 40 percent of troops surveyed identified as Republican or Libertarian, 16 percent Democrats, and 44 percent independent or another party.

“It’s fair to say that Trump is not as popular as Republican nominees have been in the past among this group,” said Peter Feaver, a White House adviser to former President George W. Bush who now works as a political science professor at Duke University. “The bottom line is that in 2020, Trump can’t be claiming to have overwhelming support in the military.”