Eh, fair enough. It’s Warren’s election to lose anyway.
Dude I know had all his arteries like 80% blocked and that happens over years. He had a very mild heart attack which was very lucky and got all kinds of bypasses - too serious for just stents. He’s recovering well. But, if you just get an angiogram that shows a lot of blockage you can end up getting a heart repair without every having had a heart attack. And you can have angina without having a heart attack and lead to tests that lead to heart repair. Though, maybe the definition of when angina/blockage gets called a heart attack is a little fuzzy.
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…only a small percentage of so-called moderates or independents are centrists who consistently hold views more conservative than those of the Democratic Party and more progressive than those of the Republican Party. Instead, nonpartisans hold a variety of political views, and tend to be ideologically fluid.
I listened to about half of it and got bored. I can predict his answer to every question, which is not a bad thing, but doesn’t make for riveting listening.
Re skydiver’s article, I think we want to be careful with stuff like this:
Perhaps for that reason, many of these nonpartisans are easily turned off by what they see as extremism. Alexander Agadjanian found recently that when “independents who could ultimately tilt things in Mr. Trump’s favor” are presented with newspaper articles that emphasize Democratic support for abolishing private health insurance or decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings, they become “six percentage points less likely to vote Democratic.”
I’m skeptical of research like this which orphans policy positions from overall political stories. As I’ve argued before (and as skydiver excerpted from the article), swing voters are people who do not possess political ideologies. If they did, they wouldn’t be swing voters. Stuff like protectionism and denouncing the Iraq War were beyond the pale on the right until Trump co-opted them into an overall story about national greatness, at which point they became completely fine.
What it looks like to me is that voters in places like the Rust Belt have a deep conviction that they are getting screwed, and they want a story that helps them make sense of that. I think it’s hard to see how the leftist position on some issues (such as immigration) is going to be helpful in telling a story like that, but on virtually any left-wing economic position you could name, I think it’s easy to see how they could be part of an overall narrative of elite corruption and malfeasance. Just being like “yo, getting rid of private insurance polls poorly” isn’t all that convincing to me, because we know that these voters have no actual ideology on something like healthcare. Those opinions have no independent reality outside of whatever overall narrative they’re currently buying into. That’s why, per the Yglesias article, 72% people who voted for Obama and then Trump favor abolishing the ACA. It’s not that they’ve en masse had a change of heart on healthcare policy, it’s that they were for it when they were voting for Obama and they’re against it now they voted for Trump. It’s the tail wagging the dog.
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Not going to pretend that I’m not for the Supreme Court delivering for the conservatives on this abortion case. I’m obviously pro choice, but it would drive turnout on our side… and I’m no longer willing to hope for political solutions that don’t stem from obliterating the GOP electorally.
Would it really help?
I’m skeptical that abortion would be this driver of turnout. Aren’t the most fervent pro-choice people already voting (with most of the rest not caring or basic their vote on something else)?
It is kind of lol, but I presume they said that because they see themselves as jurors and no matter how much evidence of the accused’s guilt has been shown in the media, they’re supposed to keep an open mind until the actual trial and the evidence has been formally presented.
https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1180250315041325056?s=19
https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1180269634995421185?s=19
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Just trying to be fair to Donald Trump. First off, Biden isn’t a senator anymore. He is just a weak willed, mealy mouthed, piece of human garbage. He is under no obligation to be fair to Trump. JFC Biden is pulling a Ted Cruz. Trump attacks his family and Biden is playing fair? Fuck him.
Kamala actually can use legitimately use that excuse. It is still weak as hell. Every Dem Senator should be screaming guilty every time they get near a microphone.
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And that’s why the idiots keep losing.
“President Trump is clearly unfit for office for dozens of different reasons. He never should have been elected and we should take the steps necessary to remove him from office immediately.”
This shit is not hard.
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That’s not going to play well with Democratic primary voters lol. Good, I’m looking forward to the continued decline of the ‘centrists’.
That’s idiotic. They don’t have to pretend that everything they’ve seen for the past 3 years (and especially the past 3 months) didn’t happen and the only thing that matters is the evidence presented by the House of Representatives.
My main criticism of the Dem leadership isn’t that they bend over backwards to seem to be playing fair - that’s why I think Biden and Kamala’s statements only rate a shrug - it’s that I don’t trust them to take the necessary steps to reduce the chance of a Trump-like presidency from ever happening again i.e. I fear in the interests of national healing or some bullshit they won’t go after and jail everyone in the administration and their fellow-travellers who broke the law. And that they won’t take other necessary steps such as end the filibuster, stack the Supreme Court etc.
Probably, but I’m guessing that that was why they answered how they did. Can’t think of any other reason.
“They suck at this”. Especially Biden. Good fucking god.
Sure Biden sucks. But I’m not sure this one makes the Top 100 reasons why he sucks.
Can we talk about the fact that the candidates that are only taking small donor money are outraising the people taking big donor money? That seems like a really important story right now. That could literally indicate that structural change is coming to politics.
You used to have to listen to the lobbyists because they could bundle together large numbers of max donors who would in turn fund your getting elected. That’s clearly no longer the case. I mean let’s be clear the small donor only campaigns did REALLY well on fundraising and there’s no end in sight for them, where the establishment big donor candidates barely beat Andrew Yang (who is an second tier candidate, but only small donor and still raised 10M in 3Q).
It also means that Wall Street and the healthcare lobby are screwed. They can give as much as legally possible to Warren’s opponents, the rest of the humans in this country hate them and will happily donate to see them put in their place.