Sure, this is a tough problem. Ultimately, I honestly don’t even think it matters what the answer is, though. It doesn’t change anything.
Yeah, this pretty quickly ends up in repeating republican talking points. 80% of black people are getting hoodwinked, all democratic politicians, black and white are in on it etc. Biden did well with black voters because he closely aligned with them on the issues, especially older black voters which make up a disproportionately high percentage of democrats compared to other ethnic groups.
It’s not pretty, but I think the Democratic party needs to do a much better job of making sure it isn’t true. There are way too many democratic mayors who put in curfews over the last week to claim there’s not truth to it at all.
Are black voters even overwhelmingly against the curfews? I think much of this confusion comes from white liberals just assuming that black democrats agree with them on everything. There is more diversity among black democrats in terms of age, religiosity, rural vs urban, south vs north etc than white dems. The mayor of my town implemented a curfew and I didn’t see much backlash from white or black people.
This issue is the reason why many of those non-liberal blacks are Democrats. I don’t know of any polls, but I think it’s pretty unlikely that the black community is in favor of undermining the protests.
I think you can be for the protests and for the curfews. And I don’t consider those black democrats “non liberal”. They just may have different views than white liberals.
It seems as if the curfews have actually helped distill the message in the protests and persuaded more people that they’re legitimate and not just a cover for fringe elements to loot and destroy minority-owned businesses.
2012 was by no means easy, given the economy. I seem to remember the Republicans being pretty smug about it being a cakewalk.
Eh. Obama led every poll from like late august to early October. The polling sharply turned, and we got a month of memes about Hurricane Sandy changing everything. Turns out it didn’t change much.
2012 was much closer than 2008, for sure, and I’m not sure what lessons to take from it. My heart wants to tell me the lesson is that people were more into Obama when he promised change, and less into him when they found out he meant trying different heritage foundation policies. My head says the lesson is that we shouldn’t be comfortable with single digit polling leads.
You can’t.
2008 is misleading since Hillary didn’t endorse Obama until June 8th. When McCain picked Palin, he knew he was going to have a tough time winning.
Yeah, I could see that. I live right near a major downtown area in a heavily black/hispanic lower/middle class neighborhood and people were definitely worried about safety and looters.
Also, not all single digit polling leads are equal. 52-47 is much better than 45-40. Unfortunately, I think one of the lessons from 2008 was that it’s way easier to inspire people to go out and vote 1 time than to turn them into regular voters.
Double that, Joe.
Quintuple at least, imo.
I agree with you but I wouldn’t provoke the Trumpers with this stuff. Many of them are motivated but a fictional narrative of victimhood, this kind of quote from Biden is just a redux if the 2016 “deplorables” non-issue. Getting into this with Trumpers is just engaging in bad faith disputes that distract from the obvious big picture issues.
He didn’t even say the bad people are Republicans or Trump supporters. Tiptoeing around it isn’t going to stop the NYT and everyone else from breathlessly reporting on Joes fabricated elitism.