US Politics, March 2024: The house of illuminati will NOT be holding any other event in the foreseeable future.

I do think that Trump cares more about staying out of jail and not having his properties seized or being forced to sell them than he does actually being President. like a normal politician probably wouldn't keep bringing up the fact that he's been charged with nearly 100 felonies and has to pay like half a billion dollars in penalties for running a sham business and being a rapist but Trump can't shut the fuck up about it. it's the only thing he thinks about. if I was conservative I'd worry a lot about Lara Trump being in charge of the RNC where she can just funnel a bunch of money to Trump's legal team at the cost of funding downballot races. I mean they're probably gonna go all "a rising tide raises all boats!" and put every cent into Trump's re-election campaign. who's gonna say no to them

I don't know a lot about how campaign finance works, but do they even have a budget to be competitive or is there not going to be an actual campaign at all?

Well he’s not gonna win it on Truth Social

the RNC has about $8m in the bank (i.e. a couple months of interest on the current fines). the DNC has $24m. in terms of campaign neither is a big player iiuc. they're more important in terms of media response and coordination.

Super PACs and dark money probably look like a better investment to the billionaires and multi-hundred millionaires who might have given to the RNC or DNC before Citizens United reconfigured the playing field.

that's another thing you'd have to think they may be having second thoughts about giving to a guy who desperately needs cash and is obviously corrupt enough to use the RNC as his own piggy bank especially when he lost this exact matchup 4 years ago and didn't really show much ability to get stuff done even when he was in office

Can you imagine if the General Election was still as it was originally imagined?

(That is, the person who gets the most EC votes becomes the President; the person who gets the second-most EC votes becomes the Vice President.)

So you'd have:
Obama/McCain
Trump/Clinton
Biden/Trump

that’s assuming that the prior result under that system would have no affect on the next result

it’d probably be something weird like several Romney types

in that being VP gave you more of a leg up to the presidency. Biden’s kind of the outlier and it seemed like a lame duck thing when Gore was the candidate, but I might just be hallucinating because we did get George HW

my brain is forever poisoned by the Quayle yearst

Potatoe

So you say.

I didn’t say that. If he’s picked it would reassure wavering non-MAGA Republicans that they aren’t racist if they vote for Trump and centrist media that Trump has “pivoted to the center.”

Non-MAGA Republicans have largely left the fold and are unlikely to go back barring Biden ripping off a mask and revealing a reincarnated Josef Stalin. Anyone left is MAGA, MAGA-but-won’t-admit-it, or imaginary. Tim Scott is not a Dick Cheney; he’s not going to be directing policy from the background or wielding outsized influence over his President. He’s there to thoroughly tongue Trump’s supporting asshole and I don’t believe that’s the basis for a political coalition.

I feel in many ways that the Presidential election has already been decided and the real question is how many voters are willing to out themselves as stupid racists.

^^^^^^^^^^^

yeah, some of you guys still think it's 2016

I wish I could be as sanguine as you guys.

Seriously. I was so casually, unwaveringly 'Hilz got this in the bag!' eight years ago that I got the wind knocked completely the fuck out of me. Never again.

It's one thing to worry, which I get. It's another to think he might win in the same manner.

re: the RNC's budget

Lara Trump says the RNC will devote ‘massive resources’ to election integrity before soliciting the audience for volunteer lawyers pic.twitter.com/CE0b9GRs6n

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 13, 2024

They should spend all of their money on proprietary postage stamps that can only be used by (real) Republicans.

Biden's very unpopular and the polls right now are definitely worrying (though arguably they don't mean a thing) - hate to get all Nate Silver here but there's a pretty wide latitude of possible outcomes. I don't think any of them involve Trump actually winning the popular vote or taking all the swing states but a 2016-type victory is definitely in the cards somewhere. But I also think it's equally likely he gets massacred due to how incredibly weird the party has become. Trump's popularity at this very moment is probably as high as it's ever gonna be. Once things get into swing and he's actually saying shit on TV again...

We live in a society where the GOP’s placed all its faith in Donald Fucking Trump. Aaron Rodgers is mentioned as a potential VP running mate to Kennedy, whether seriously or as clickbait. All bets are off afaic. This country is irredeemably stupid.

I mean I pretty much took 2016 as a blanket statement that the US was no longer interested in even feigning to be a serious and functioning institution. At that point, it was just a question of how long it would take entropy (and, yes, stupidity) to bring it all toppling down. I'm frankly pleasantly surprised it's managed to somehow stay afloat this long.

My open-hearted faith in the American people allows me to believe that they will only elect an insane criminal president once.

societies don't collapse all at once usually

Americans aren't stupider than anyone else, but we do have a stupider electoral system than most more-or-less democracies. If we had a normal system with proportional representation in Congress and a presidency where the candidate with the most votes wins, we wouldn't seem quite so loony.

Motion to change spelling of stupider to stupidier - more fun to say

y'all ever think how crazy this is

CLinton 65,853,625 votes (48.0%)
Trump 62,985,106 votes (45.9%)

only for four whole years

We are kinda stupid, I think. I mean, we made billionaires out of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. Don’t know who ever thought we’d be effective guardians of democracy.

We are definitely kinda stupid, but so is everyone else.

The thing that is aggravating to me is that to this day people still talk about how bad and hated Clinton was because she only managed to get slightly less than 3 million more votes than Trump. It's just totally normal at this point to assume that a "good" Democratic candidate is expected to get vastly more votes than whatever piece of garbage is running on the other side, and there's no obvious problem with that.

The Electoral College was necessary to get the slave states on board with the whole America thing, this effect is calculated and is doing what it was designed to do and has always done, let racists win elections they would otherwise lose. Southern states with a large population of enslaved people wanted to have their cake and eat it too: Not let the enslaved vote, but make sure they counted in terms of electoral power. Thus the Electoral College, which formalized population count's advantage over the popular vote.

maybe schumer is going to protect biden from signing this in an election year

A notably bland statement from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the House-passed TikTok bill: “The Senate will review the legislation when it comes over from the House.”

No commitments to hold a vote on this or any other TikTok bill.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) March 13, 2024

I think it's in everyone's interest to have elections decided by people in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It saves the candidates and the press a lot of travel time.

otm

and now the College also empowers the states created by Republicans in the late 19th century to counter the Solid South. Irony!

I'm still stunned by seeing Santos at the SotU. Like there are so many ridiculous loopholes and privileges barely known about (perhaps including by those who exploit them) until right before they/we do.

Meanwhile Greg Abbott is in the UK for another state-specific trade deal, another unbelievable thing that should not be happening.

“Volunteer lawyers”, everyone

Motion to change spelling of stupider to stupidier - more fun to say

We're the stupidiest. #Americanexceptionalism

Meanwhile Greg Abbott is in the UK for another state-specific trade deal, another unbelievable thing that should not be happening.

I'm sure there will be some shaking down.

They should spend all of their money on proprietary postage stamps that can only be used by (real) Republicans.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 10:07 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

We
Await
Second
Trump
Empire

Crying of Trump 47.

lol

I would just like to reiterate this statement from my last post:

the real question is how many voters are willing to out themselves as stupid racists

I’m not sanguine about this election because I think this number is higher than we currently think it is. However, I’m very willing to go on record with the opinion that that number is not at all affected by the presence or absence of Tim Scott on the ticket.

I grew up in rural Wisconsin so I'm kind of sympathetic to these folks. I mean I think they're generally dumb and hateful and actively bad for this country but I've spent enough time around them to at least know how they think. Their primary political view is really simple - everyone's screwing you, all the time. The elites are taking advantage of you. There's a big coordinated effort going on involving every celebrity on the planet (minus Kid Rock and Dilbert) and it's all done with the goal of keeping you down. Like 95% of this comes from right wing media. If you watch any of it for just 10 minutes this is always the overarching theme. They believe in personal responsibility when it comes to good things but when anything goes badly it's because ~they~ are taking it away from you. This is why they love Trump. The media focuses so much on his personality and the constant stream of dumb shit that comes out of his mouth but the reality is they love him because he's just as whiny and aggrieved as they are. The media focuses on his crimes and business fraud and how he never suffers any consequences but his voters like him even more for that, because it means someone on "their side" actually beat the system.

The most enthusiastic Trumpers I see and know drive new F-150s, sent their kids to expensive private schools, and benefited from the Cuban Readjustment Act, i.e. the most obvious beneficiaries of The System, The Swamp, what have you.

i can't imagine ever being sympathetic to folks who vote a fascist into office

My sister was momentarily stopped in her Trumper tracks by me saying ‘so the trade-off for cheaper gas is… Fascism?’