Jump to content

US Politics: It’s Not A Crime If Your Feelings Got Hurt


Mr. Chatywin et al.

Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, Maithanet said:

I'll believe it when I see it.  It is somewhere between hard and impossible to imagine a scenario where Texas goes blue and the Democrats haven't already wrapped up the election elsewhere.  That's not a reason not to compete there, because it's always good to compete everywhere with even a ghost of a chance, but we shouldn't be pinning our hopes. 

The electoral map actually looks pretty stable to me.  The only Clinton states that Trump has any hope of picking up are MN, ME and NH.  None are particularly likely to be a tipping point state, since ME and NH are so small and a win in MN means Trump probably won WI and MI, and most likely the election as well.  I suppose I could come up with a crazy scenario where it's 2016 redux except Democrats win PA and FL, but Trump wins NH and MN, but that is pretty out there.

PA, MI, WI, AZ, FL.  That's the states that decide the presidency.  Democrats have to compete other places for the future of the party and for Congress/statewide races, but if all that matters is beating Trump, those are the only places where your vote actually matters.

The reason TX might be in play before would be because the other states like, PA, MI WI don't have enough of a hispanic population to make a difference. TX has millions of unactivated potential democrat voters, many minorities, but decades of disinvestment will destroy all your natural allies in the white vote as well, as they'll be forced to turn to republicans for representation since democrats think they don't deserve anything,

There's enough voters that with only three months of effort, Beto found a million new democrat voters and activated them. Merely 8 million people voted in TX in 16, mostly because democrats have agreed to lose in texas for forty years, because they prefer easy losing to the hard work of winning.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Holy shit you mean there are actual Guilfoyles out n the world? I thought this monikor only existed on Silicon Valley shows? https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/kimberly-guilfoyle-hired-trump-campaign-senior-adviser-114210181.html

Guilfoyle is an Irish surname which is an Anglicized spelling of Giolla Phoil, Irish Gaelic for "servant of St. Paul." Alternative spellings sometimes found are Gilfoil, Gilfoyle, and Kilfoyle. I am surprised you haven't run across it as the name of a real person before now. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

 

There's enough voters that with only three months of effort, Beto found a million new democrat voters and activated them.

He did.  What else happened?  In an election where Democrats won on average by 8% nationwide, he lost by 3%.  In comparison, Democrats actually won statewide races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida (admittedly not the big ones in the last case).  It is really, really hard to come up with a scenario where things swing a bit further in Texas but Democrats aren't already at 270 nationally. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

So Trump and the kids and 7 companies of theirs are suing Capital One and Deutsche Bank to try to prevent them from responding to a subpoena for records.

A long time ago I gave up saying Trump surprised me. Can a US lawyer comment on how successful this tactic might be?

I read that Deutsche Bank had already started handing over material to the Manhattan South district prosecutors, but presumably they had just started complying.

From what I've read, it probably won't be successful, however, if they get protective injunctions on the subpoenas, which is most likely what they're aiming for, it could delay everything until after 2020 election through legal shenanigans. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

29 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

He did.  What else happened?  In an election where Democrats won on average by 8% nationwide, he lost by 3%.  In comparison, Democrats actually won statewide races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida (admittedly not the big ones in the last case).  It is really, really hard to come up with a scenario where things swing a bit further in Texas but Democrats aren't already at 270 nationally. 

So you're saying that systemic disinvestment and abandonment by democrats in Texas led to Texas still underperforming by 11%? Huh, looks like a deliberate strategy of losing everywhere all the time has long term consequences for democats, who woulda guessed!?

3% losses start to get into the realm where future state wide races are winnable. investment over election cycles is cumulative. recruitment is cumulative. You cannot win Wyoming, voter participation is so high that even if every non voter voted democrat, you'd still lose by twenty. So don't invest there, and like places. But the states where the potential voters actually exist in numbers great enough to swing elections,  those states have to get major consistent cumulative cycle-over-cycle resource investment, and texas is number one of these states.

It's also psychological warfare. it will scare the piss out of republicans, and could also prompt them to make egregious and illegal overreaches out of fear and that could lead to a court imposed decision that could ultimately advantage democrats.

In terms of where the value to be arbitraged on the table. TX has a lot of it. But it's not the end all be all, it's merely a large part of an overall strategy.

More important is the national rural vote. Republicans get almost all their electoral advantage in statewide races from their insane share of the Rural vote. It's trended to beyond to 75-25 in recent elections. We have to one, stop the slide, and two, reverse it even a little bit. a rural vote that's 70-30 probably puts Clinton in the whitehouse.

Why? Because it just racks up a huge vote advantage in close states, like NV that is very hard to neutralize or defeat.

Let's say you have 100,000 rural voters in NV, and they break 75-25, that is a vote advantage of 50,000 to republicans. Now you have 1,000,000 non-rural voters in NV, and they break 52-48 democrat, that is a 40,000 vote advantage to democrats and you lose the state, in spite of 10 times more voters in the non rural parts of the state, it is the rural vote that controls the election, because they accrue disproportionate power by voting as a bloc.  This is true across pretty much any other state in the country. Democrats' successful response in NV has been to marginally increase their advantage in non rural parts, which they do by getting the vote up in their contra bloc (urban minority votes) and chipping away at the suburban vote margins. 

But the margins are really slim and there's very little room for error. Chipping away at the margins in that rural bloc could make a huge difference, and a candidate who even slightly pushed the rural vote a few points the other direction would probably win an electoral college victory similar to Obams.

And the rural vote gets worse every election because vote by mail is becoming more widely adopted, and vote by mail HUGELY advantages rural turnout, which can allow them to build up an even bigger margin than 75-25. Previously the biggest deterrance to rural voting was the inconvenience of voting. For example, driving into one election location in county with a population of 1200 but an area bigger than Rhode Island meant a lot of people just didn't vote, for example. Vote by mail means almost all of them vote. The enormous boost vote by mail gives rural voters is a big part of why republicans haven't been trying to stop that particular voting reform, it advantages them more than it hurts them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

54 minutes ago, Mexal said:

From what I've read, it probably won't be successful, however, if they get protective injunctions on the subpoenas, which is most likely what they're aiming for, it could delay everything until after 2020 election through legal shenanigans. 

Strategically speaking, it could be wiser to let things get out sooner than later, assuming there isn’t anything that’s tantamount to a crime. Trying to hide your finances during the heart of an election is a terrible look.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Strategically speaking, it could be wiser to let things get out sooner than later, assuming there isn’t anything that’s tantamount to a crime. Trying to hide your finances during the heart of an election is a terrible look.

For who? It's Trump. He hid them last time and was elected.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Rebecca Solnit nails it again.

https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-unconscious-bias-is-running-for-president/

For starters:

Quote

 

One of the ugly facts about the 2020 election is that white men are a small minority of people who vote Democrat but have wildly disproportionate control of the money and media and look to have undue influence over the current race for the nomination, which is just one of the many fun ways that one person one vote isn’t really what we have.

In 2016 white men were approximately 34 percent of the electorate, but about 11 percent of the Democratic votes, because more than two thirds of them voted for Trump or third-party candidates. Black voters were also about 11 percent of the Democratic vote total (and black women voted 94 percent Democratic, the highest total of any major social group). Black and Latina women alone constitute a proportion of the Democratic electorate comparable to white men. So in a completely egalitarian system, what black voters or nonwhite women want in a Democratic candidate should matter at least as much as white men.

But power is not distributed equally, and too many white men—politicians, media powerhouses, funders, people I crash into on social media—are using theirs in all those familiar ways. Also a whole hell of a lot of them are medaling in unconscious bias. In 2016 I wrote, “With their deep belief in their own special monopoly on objectivity, slightly too many men assure me that there is no misogyny in their subjective assessments or even no subjectivity and no emotion driving them, and there are no grounds for other opinions since theirs is not an opinion.” I wish that wasn’t still the case, and I fear how it will yet again affect election outcomes....

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

42 minutes ago, Mexal said:

For who? It's Trump. He hid them last time and was elected.

I think, or at least I hope, that voters will hold Trump to a higher standard in 2020 than they did in 2016. He now has a public record, and to use Trump’s language, it’s a real beauty if you’re running against him.  Hiding your foreign finances will only aid that narrative.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Completely anecdotal, and so probably worthless, but my Uncle (grew up in rural NC, ex-marine, currently lives in NC), thinks that 2020 is a year for Democrats and is completely and utterly DONE with Trump (he was originally in the "don't really like him but will give him a chance because not Hillary" camp).  He surprised the living HECK out of me by saying that he really likes the look of Kamala Harris (has no use for Bernie or Biden (too OLD), thinks Warren is smart but/and "dangerous", has no opinion of Booker, thinks Buttegieg doesn't have the experience, Gillibrand is an also ran).  Anyhow, will be monitoring his views.......

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

That is a disturbing bit of news, almost as if Boeing wants to double down on taking no responsibility.

He won't admit fault because it would expose the company to massive legal liability for the huge number of civil lawsuits (or class action lawsuit) that are sure to come.  This is standard corporate procedure.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 4/29/2019 at 1:56 AM, Zorral said:

.....

Come on -- if you never heard any such thing, don't believe anyone has reason to consider the possibility, it's on you, right? to go find out, right?

But if you took a second to google you'd find this most recent troubling racial thang come up pretty much on top.

As for the complacent bleating that a Dem must have white votes to win -- please explain how a Dem will win with only white voters turning out?  You know, considering demographics, voter registration and the rest.  Why do you think the criminal traitors white supremacist etc. work so damned hard at voter suppression?"

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/17/politics/pete-buttigieg-south-bend-tapes/index.html

Um, what in that article paints Mayor Pete as a white-nationalist?  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, Ormond said:

Guilfoyle is an Irish surname which is an Anglicized spelling of Giolla Phoil, Irish Gaelic for "servant of St. Paul." Alternative spellings sometimes found are Gilfoil, Gilfoyle, and Kilfoyle. I am surprised you haven't run across it as the name of a real person before now. 

 Trisk is right I was wisecracking about the HBO show but I love this response. My Grandmother used to visit her relatives back in county Donegal and would play us tapes of older family speaking Gaelic. I looked up her maiden name translated to Irish Gaelic and was shown this- 

barr sléibhe

Not positive thats accurate though so I will check with mother on my next visit .

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, Zorral said:

Racist propaganda. The author sounds like a German newspapermen decrying Gypsies in 1939.

And everyone who agrees with this is deluded at best, but probably racist and bigoted. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

47 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

So, black cop shoots white girl plays out differently. Who knew? 

Ha! Glad I wasn't the only one thinking that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am fairly sure that Trump's anti-Biden attacks make it more likely that Biden will be the nominee.  Inside Washington gossip is that Trump sees Biden as his biggest threat because of his "Average Joe" image that appeals to the same white midwesterners that won Trump the election last time.  Biden's establishment/moderate credentials are a bad fit for the current Democratic primary, but if he continues to look like Trump's #1 enemy, that will cover up a lot of Biden's flaws.  Democrats want a fighter - they are looking to twist the knife wherever possible, and Biden's decision to open his campaign swinging is really smart.

If I thought Trump were capable of it, I would almost think that he WANTS to face Biden and is using his unpopularity with the Democratic base to get it.  But while Trump has a certain animal cunning, that sort of manipulation isn't his MO. 

For the record, I'm not at all convinced that Biden's "electability" is real, and I think there's a good chance his popularity fades in the general election if he wins the nomination.  In contrast, I think that someone like Harris or Buttigeig could get stronger as people learn more about them.  But I'm probably biased since those are my two favorite candidates at the moment. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Sixty teeets this morning! 

I understand the desire for a much much younger candidate to run for the Democrats, but if this keeps up Trump will destroy himself. He’ll choke on bile and foam.

Didn’t you hear? Trump thinks he’s vibrant young man. He’s at least acting that way on the Twitter machine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...