It's better than that. Banning trans medicine and pharmacology from American minors, and litigating against the doctors who have been practicing minor transitions through drugs and surgery, will also have the knock-on effect of, at least some extent, de-transitioning trans adults who won't be able to find or keep a steady supply of drugs they need to maintain the transition.
In spite of some libs trying to flog the deadest of horses, to a significant extent this is already happening.
Here's a prediction that might create some perspective on the situation. It is widely expected that President Trump will pardon most or all of the January 6 defendants soon after he is inaugurated. My prediction is that the level of protest in public debate will be quite muted, even among libs. Not completely silent of course, but much much less that previous Resistance agitations.
I'm not looking at the NYT needle but my own personal needle says it's gotta be Trump 85-90% now.
Not only is Kamala getting nothing in the Sun Belt but the fact that Trump's toughest state was N Carolina which fell really easily for him and the fact that Georgia is likely to come in 5+% leads me to believe that we're seeing a parallel shift (Trump gains everywhere) as opposed to a tilt (Trump gains in the Sun Belt Kamala gains in the Rust Belt).
And, even if Kamala wins WI, MI, and PA, given what we've seen so far you have to think Trump is competitive in New Mexico and he still has chances even without any part of the blue wall.
We think Selzer may be on to something because she has a track record of stepping out of the conventional wisdom and being vindicated by actual election results (her poll showed Iowa was swinging towards Trump at the last minute in 2016 when nearly everyone else, myself included, was refusing to take Trump seriously).
Fwiw strictly in horse-race terms, I'm much more bullish on Kamala today than I was a few days ago when I wrote my endorsement OP and before the Selzer poll.
Not just the Selzer poll itself, though that was big enough, but also because when you look at the Selzer poll in context you can see a coherent story of how Kamala can win. Which imo, was substantially missing before.
She had always been polling well enough to where if you assume some random noise would break in her favor she could win. But until now, there was no demographically credible good story for her. Now there is.
There's a sweet spot available for her to hit that that's mostly been hidden for all the commentary we've seen of the election. Specifically, there's been a very loud Chip Daniels/Jen Rubin story, "ZOMG, Drumpf = Fascism in America." and that story has got little traction among the voters, especially for as loud as it's been and the number of our pundits who believe it. If it were possible to have negative traction, that would be it.
And the other thing is that the hostility to Trump has been dying down for while. He's actually been getting more personally popular through most of this cycle.
But the point being, with the Selzer poll especially, that doesn't entirely close the book on Kamala. What if, maybe we didn't _hate_ Trump exactly but we just didn't like him. What if we didn't care about fascism but we think he's too old, too flaky, too erratic, too inattentive to detail to go back to the White House.
Well, then among other things, married white women say 67+ years old would be going away from him. In general they are very risk-averse people and Trump is always stirring it up in ways they might not like. I think that's what the Selzer poll might be getting at.
To that end, it's not fascism, abortion, or Puerto Rico that's going to beat Trump, it's RFK and the general flakiness that goes with him and the general unpleasantness of having to listen to Trump. Among other things most of the points against Trump are accusations against him by adversaries and those can be ignored or discounted but Trump himself is leaning into RFK so that might get through in ways where other Trump criticism doesn't.
Of course that's all one side of the equation. In Trump's favor there's a lot of narrative, a lot of survey polling, and very important imo, almost _all_ of the hard data that could be a relevant proxy for the election, specifically early voting numbers, party registrations, and primary data.
Among other things, there is little doubt in my mind that the GOP will get the turnout they need win any plausibly close race of this cycle. But there is doubt that the Republicans who are going to the polls will actually vote for Trump (or other Republicans downballot for that matter). Again even here Liz Cheney types are going to be ignored. But RFK talking talking about water fluoridation or vaccines or whatever is going to leave a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of normie Republicans.
Given all the data we've seen so far this cycle, and how much of it is Trump-favorable, it's easy to rationalize that the Selzer poll is a polling mistake, a meaningless outlier or both. I'd still proooobbabbblly, maaaayybe rather be him than her. But, the case for her winning is a lot more credible now than it was pre-Selzer.
However I think it’s interesting that as best as I can tell she’s one of very few top Democrats to actually say what the message should have been, and in a very high profile way:....
Come on inmd, I think you know better than this. That quote is basically the same as her campaign flip-flops on fracking or electric vehicles, except before the campaign.
In either case, the intention is the same as it pertains to fronting a misrepresentation to the American people. The policy, or the direction of policy is one thing, the politically convenient representation to the American people is the opposite.
As far as distancing from Joe Biden goes, in a vacuum she should be doing that but there are problems with actually doing that she can't overcome. In particular wrt immigration and inflation, not only was she part of the Biden Administration, but she also has significant measure of personal responsibility for the mistakes that have created their political problems.
But even in general, in order for her to pull something like that off, she'd have to show more adroitness and substantive engagement that she has or she can.
No, libs have bought a pig in a poke on that one. It's hard to say they don't deserve it.
And I find it really weird you’ve stopped there, but I guess conservativism means you can’t notice a bunch of _other_ stuff there actually is a voter bipartisan consensus on that the parties will not address. Like various specific sorts of gun control, or increased taxes on the wealthy.
Well yeah, I could have mentioned all-of-the-above energy production as well. Though tbf the libs haven't been as successful actually shutting down energy as much as they like to talk about it.
Even gun control has a lot of the same factors, though that's a little more complicated. There's basically three reasons why gun control doesn't advance in America: 1. the Republicans have the political power to stop it and they do. 2. the 2nd Amendment and its jurisprudence. 3. the grassroots unwillingness among Americans to let guns be regulated from them.
Maybe you are aware, but 20 years or so ago, Australia did a widespread buyback confiscation that more or less worked. Not talking about the effects on gun violence but just the policy itself: Australians sold their guns back to the government.
We can't do that here. It's not imminently on the cards here because of 1 and 2 above. But bracketing those things for moment the permanent obstacle is 3. Australians are ruled by "us" so when "we" (Australians) decide to do something "we" can carry it out. Americans are ruled by "them" so when "they" decide to do something, "we" can and do still say no.
There's lots of reasons to vote Trump in this election, but that is the biggest one: we can punish the libs who have made a routine of lying and maneuvering around the intentions of the American people, thereby restoring trust of the government among Americans and allowing us to accomplish things that would not have been possible before.
No, that was something different. What you're talking about is how to handle migrants who have made asylum claims in America already. And it is true in that case that Biden reversed the Trump policy of Remain in Mexico and other things to prevent migrants from establishing themselves in America. And after Biden tried to reverse Trump policies he was prevented by the courts from doing that for a while because of Covid reasons. But eventually those went away too and Biden got those migrants in.
What I was talking about was before Covid, when Trump negotiated a bilateral modus vivendi with Mexico to prevent the migrants from moving through Mexico, long before they were hypothetical asylum applicants in America. Biden reversed that too, and that was by far the biggest fish in the pond.
Without that we'd still have the same legal issues as before, but the millions and millions of migrants would never have made it here.
The only way to fix the southern border is to fix the countries to the south of us, and thus we need to do that, I say, pretending we don’t have a moral obligation to do that _anyway_ because we are the people who repeatedly broke them.
No. One way you can fix the southern border is to negotiate/intimidate/cajole the Mexican government to prevent mass migrations from getting with 500 miles of America, and thereby to a large extent preventing the other vulnerabilities of our immigration system (lack of wall, asylum loopholes, etc) from being exploited.
Of course, I must must must must must must emphasize this because either you don't know or are gliding past, THIS WAS THE STATUS QUO AT THE TIME BIDEN ASSUMED OFFICE. STATUS QUO WHICH HIS ADMINISTRATION QUICKLY DESTROYED AND ALLOWED MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL MIGRANTS TO ENTER AMERICA.
Once we have internalized this (and grassroots America has), the motive to vote for Trump based on border security is obvious. Whether or not the voters end up actually voting on this motive, we'll all find out soon enough.
Meanwhile, ‘improved border security’ is not only not something that people are demanding, it is something that both parties have _signed on to_. Harris is running around pointing out how Trump failed to build his wall and she promising better border security!
Well, yes and obviously that's ridiculous and most likely she'll end up losing because of that.
Really David, I'd be interested to know what your level of awareness is. The fundamental reality of border security of the Biden Administration is that the Biden Administration ended the successful bilateral US/Mexico modus vivendi that the US attained under Trump, and thereby allowed millions of illegal migrants to cross the southern border into America, where most of them are today.
This is a weird one in that everybody knows this at the grassroots level but the media/punditocracy are either playing dumb or really are dumb.
Really, there's no reason why the voters have to take on the feigned ignorance or actual ignorance that lib thought leaders have. It is their prerogative to punish the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party (and Administration's border czar) for its gross malfeasance of that issue.
We'll see soon enough whether they exercise that prerogative.
Likewise, ‘opposition to terrorism’ is pretty much nonsense. Sure, it’s something voters oppose but ‘What level of terrorism should there be in the middle east?’ is not, in fact, a US policy. What is that even supposed to mean as a policy position?
It's pretty simple. It means we put the hammer down on all the wannabe Yasser Arafats at the staff level of our political and cultural institutions and in our colleges and universities.
The part that makes this discussion a rather painful to read exercise in bad faith argumentation is that the only thing that makes this even a discussion is the Electoral College.
Without it there is no Trump, in fact, no Republican Party as it currently manifests. The EC is a racist artifact created to maintain a racist artifact and, to this day, excels at “electing” racist artifacts.
All you have to do to verify this, is to look at the RCP Averages for the 2016 and 2020 elections and compare with the actual results. In both cases, the RCP Average was way, way over the actual performance: Hilary was 5%+ over Trump but lost; Biden was 10%+ over Trump but won by around half of that.
I think your specific numbers are wrong but the general point is vaguely correct. With one important caveat: the 2016 national averages weren't that far off. Hillary ended up winning by 2% and she was favored by 3-4% or so.
What did happen was a polarization-enhanced geographical realignment wherein Trump was not only competitive in the Rust Belt, he actually won it. Nobody really saw that coming with the force that it did.
Frankly, I suspect that might be Kamala's best hope now, that even if the national topline numbers are basically right, that there will be some distributional effects in her favor enough to win. Specifically that she loses the Sun Belt but wins all of the Rust Belt and everything else breaks as normal and she wins the EC 270-268.
The very fact that the RCP averages show Trump ahead nationally by 0.4% now and 1.0% ahead in the swing states means he is far, far ahead – unless you really think the polls have fixed their problems.
This paragraph is interesting. I have a gut feel that you might be right, and a lot of people have mad interesting speculations one direction or the other, but nobody really knows for sure. We'll find out on Tuesday.
Though, one thing in her favor is that the pollsters are changing their methodologies all the time. Maybe for this cycle they have made adjustments that underestimate her. Again I don't really believe it, but maybe.
You always like to ignore that I’m an American voter too, and that 81 Million other Americans sided with me to repudiate TFG that last time.
I'm not ignoring that at all, in fact that's a key premise of the whole thing. As a voter go ahead and vote for Kamala if you want to. It's a bad idea on the substance for the reasons I went over in the OP. It's your prerogative.
As a lib activist, you are disloyal in that you (and other libs) are attempting deny, short-circuit, intimidate, mislead us out of our (our meaning Right-of-center America, or even apolitical Right-curious America for that matter) legitimate prerogatives to participate in electoral politics and other aspects of political culture. When and if we retaliate against that (tbh as much Right wingers talk and libs talk, I'm not at all convinced that we will), it will be legitimate.
You in particular are emotionally incontinent, especially wrt anger. Tbh, it's not at all your fault by any means. There are more judicious libs in the world, and some of them should have had a quiet word with you long before now. But they didn't, things happened and this is where we are.
Thanks North. Btw, to the extent I'm going to be following up with this, I'll probably be referencing this blogpost from Tyler Cowen, wherein he writes a number of bullet point speculations as to why the culture has shifted in Trump's favor over the last 6/12/18/whatever months.
My point is, libs just want to sweep it all under the rug and say that it doesn't exist or isn't important, when quite clearly they are wrong about that.
You’re right, we can’t talk to each other in good faith because you don’t consider people like me to be real Americans.
No, we can't talk in good in faith because we people like you aren't real Americans. What I consider is to be is not the point.
The whys and wherefores of that is a little complicated but not that much, and we've gone over it before. We, the American voters, sit in judgment of you, the lib activist class, and not the other way around.
If you can persuade us to support your agenda and/or you candidates, then your people get to hold office. Congratulations, you win. Otherwise well, it sux to be you.
Unfortunately, everything you do here at the League, through your spasms of dyspeptic anger, is about the diminishment of us, the American voters and our capacity to participate in our culture to determine American governance. Or in concrete terms for right now, for you we could vote for Trump but that really doesn't count because he's fascist, or authoritarian or Hitler or whatever.
It should be obvious, though for you it apparently isn't, that what you're trying to do inverts and distorts the sovereignty of the American people. In this way, you in particular, more than most other libs at the League even, you are not loyal and you are not a real American.
I voted for Harris anyway because of Jan 6th and the fake electors.
Yeah, but that's not good. Jan 6 was resolved soon enough and clearly enough.
If Kamala wins, it's going to be brat memes "Kamala for fracking" every day. Not those particular things maybe, whatever lie is required to maneuver around the next political difficulty.
I suspect the problem here is that for some people, maybe you, Jan 6 is a "real" threat whereas the ongoing lib message distortions is just sort of meh. But that's wrong, and it's important to emphasize that.
It's very likely that at some level we've already "lost" the Ukraine War because of this, we're very likely to continue losing important things because we can't talk to each other in good faith and move forward together. By comparison Jan just isn't that important.
Where I think he is fundamentally wrong is the belief that Donald Trump, or the type of conservatism that the GOP has degenerated into, can ever be remotely constructive.
Well yeah, that is a problem, I don't think it is an insurmountable problem (or the only thing we should be caring about obv).
As far as holding the Democrats accountable goes, a lot of that is going to come from Democrats themselves. When and if Trump wins, how are you going to feel about Ta-Nehisi Coates and brat memes and closing the public schools? Are you really going to be rah-rah motivated for that flavor of Democrat to continue speaking for you when we've just won a general election without you?
As far as Congress goes, I think you're misreading a three-seat-whatever majority in the House of Representatives operating day-to-day on the mercy of Matt Gaetz and the his type as the same as Republican legislative operations in general. It wasn't that way for the House during the Tea Party era, it wasn't that way in the Senate under Mitch McConnell, it's not the way now in the GOP statehouses. It doesn't have to be that way post Nov 5.
So talking about the protests in response to George Floyd’s (and other’s) deaths is “death” for the Democrats but talking about the Jan6 attack on our Capitol Building and the peaceful transfer of power is merely “not good” for Trump
Well, yeah.
For good or ill, Trump has built his rep. He's already ate most of the downside for January 6.
It is widely believed of Kamala Harris among people who follow American politics closely that that she has very little knowledge or intuition regarding the serious issues facing America today.
If that is right, it is therefore a crucial job of the Harris campaign to prevent this opinion from spreading to the wider more apolitical voting public.
So to that end, it's a very real risk that anything she says or anything the campaign says on her behalf regarding real things like inflation or whatever, will expose her lack of depth. And for that matter her association with the Biden Administration whose record on such things is not good.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025”
It's better than that. Banning trans medicine and pharmacology from American minors, and litigating against the doctors who have been practicing minor transitions through drugs and surgery, will also have the knock-on effect of, at least some extent, de-transitioning trans adults who won't be able to find or keep a steady supply of drugs they need to maintain the transition.
On “The Virtue of Tuning Out”
In spite of some libs trying to flog the deadest of horses, to a significant extent this is already happening.
Here's a prediction that might create some perspective on the situation. It is widely expected that President Trump will pardon most or all of the January 6 defendants soon after he is inaugurated. My prediction is that the level of protest in public debate will be quite muted, even among libs. Not completely silent of course, but much much less that previous Resistance agitations.
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You should obey in advance.
On “2024 Election Day Live Stream, Reaction, Open Thread”
Where'd everybody go? Had to wash their hair tonite probably.
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I'm not looking at the NYT needle but my own personal needle says it's gotta be Trump 85-90% now.
Not only is Kamala getting nothing in the Sun Belt but the fact that Trump's toughest state was N Carolina which fell really easily for him and the fact that Georgia is likely to come in 5+% leads me to believe that we're seeing a parallel shift (Trump gains everywhere) as opposed to a tilt (Trump gains in the Sun Belt Kamala gains in the Rust Belt).
And, even if Kamala wins WI, MI, and PA, given what we've seen so far you have to think Trump is competitive in New Mexico and he still has chances even without any part of the blue wall.
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Suck it libs, the fat lady is warming up.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: The Night Before the 2024 Presidential Election”
The West is GOP baby. Maybe you could pitch in a bit, help Colorado get with the program.
On “Final Thoughts Before November Fifth”
Fwiw strictly in horse-race terms, I'm much more bullish on Kamala today than I was a few days ago when I wrote my endorsement OP and before the Selzer poll.
Not just the Selzer poll itself, though that was big enough, but also because when you look at the Selzer poll in context you can see a coherent story of how Kamala can win. Which imo, was substantially missing before.
She had always been polling well enough to where if you assume some random noise would break in her favor she could win. But until now, there was no demographically credible good story for her. Now there is.
There's a sweet spot available for her to hit that that's mostly been hidden for all the commentary we've seen of the election. Specifically, there's been a very loud Chip Daniels/Jen Rubin story, "ZOMG, Drumpf = Fascism in America." and that story has got little traction among the voters, especially for as loud as it's been and the number of our pundits who believe it. If it were possible to have negative traction, that would be it.
And the other thing is that the hostility to Trump has been dying down for while. He's actually been getting more personally popular through most of this cycle.
But the point being, with the Selzer poll especially, that doesn't entirely close the book on Kamala. What if, maybe we didn't _hate_ Trump exactly but we just didn't like him. What if we didn't care about fascism but we think he's too old, too flaky, too erratic, too inattentive to detail to go back to the White House.
Well, then among other things, married white women say 67+ years old would be going away from him. In general they are very risk-averse people and Trump is always stirring it up in ways they might not like. I think that's what the Selzer poll might be getting at.
To that end, it's not fascism, abortion, or Puerto Rico that's going to beat Trump, it's RFK and the general flakiness that goes with him and the general unpleasantness of having to listen to Trump. Among other things most of the points against Trump are accusations against him by adversaries and those can be ignored or discounted but Trump himself is leaning into RFK so that might get through in ways where other Trump criticism doesn't.
Of course that's all one side of the equation. In Trump's favor there's a lot of narrative, a lot of survey polling, and very important imo, almost _all_ of the hard data that could be a relevant proxy for the election, specifically early voting numbers, party registrations, and primary data.
Among other things, there is little doubt in my mind that the GOP will get the turnout they need win any plausibly close race of this cycle. But there is doubt that the Republicans who are going to the polls will actually vote for Trump (or other Republicans downballot for that matter). Again even here Liz Cheney types are going to be ignored. But RFK talking talking about water fluoridation or vaccines or whatever is going to leave a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of normie Republicans.
Given all the data we've seen so far this cycle, and how much of it is Trump-favorable, it's easy to rationalize that the Selzer poll is a polling mistake, a meaningless outlier or both. I'd still proooobbabbblly, maaaayybe rather be him than her. But, the case for her winning is a lot more credible now than it was pre-Selzer.
On “The Way Through is Donald Trump for President”
I have never heard of that and I have no idea what that is supposed to be relevant to.
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Come on inmd, I think you know better than this. That quote is basically the same as her campaign flip-flops on fracking or electric vehicles, except before the campaign.
In either case, the intention is the same as it pertains to fronting a misrepresentation to the American people. The policy, or the direction of policy is one thing, the politically convenient representation to the American people is the opposite.
As far as distancing from Joe Biden goes, in a vacuum she should be doing that but there are problems with actually doing that she can't overcome. In particular wrt immigration and inflation, not only was she part of the Biden Administration, but she also has significant measure of personal responsibility for the mistakes that have created their political problems.
But even in general, in order for her to pull something like that off, she'd have to show more adroitness and substantive engagement that she has or she can.
No, libs have bought a pig in a poke on that one. It's hard to say they don't deserve it.
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Well yeah, I could have mentioned all-of-the-above energy production as well. Though tbf the libs haven't been as successful actually shutting down energy as much as they like to talk about it.
Even gun control has a lot of the same factors, though that's a little more complicated. There's basically three reasons why gun control doesn't advance in America: 1. the Republicans have the political power to stop it and they do. 2. the 2nd Amendment and its jurisprudence. 3. the grassroots unwillingness among Americans to let guns be regulated from them.
Maybe you are aware, but 20 years or so ago, Australia did a widespread buyback confiscation that more or less worked. Not talking about the effects on gun violence but just the policy itself: Australians sold their guns back to the government.
We can't do that here. It's not imminently on the cards here because of 1 and 2 above. But bracketing those things for moment the permanent obstacle is 3. Australians are ruled by "us" so when "we" (Australians) decide to do something "we" can carry it out. Americans are ruled by "them" so when "they" decide to do something, "we" can and do still say no.
There's lots of reasons to vote Trump in this election, but that is the biggest one: we can punish the libs who have made a routine of lying and maneuvering around the intentions of the American people, thereby restoring trust of the government among Americans and allowing us to accomplish things that would not have been possible before.
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No, that was something different. What you're talking about is how to handle migrants who have made asylum claims in America already. And it is true in that case that Biden reversed the Trump policy of Remain in Mexico and other things to prevent migrants from establishing themselves in America. And after Biden tried to reverse Trump policies he was prevented by the courts from doing that for a while because of Covid reasons. But eventually those went away too and Biden got those migrants in.
What I was talking about was before Covid, when Trump negotiated a bilateral modus vivendi with Mexico to prevent the migrants from moving through Mexico, long before they were hypothetical asylum applicants in America. Biden reversed that too, and that was by far the biggest fish in the pond.
Without that we'd still have the same legal issues as before, but the millions and millions of migrants would never have made it here.
Really, you should vote for Trump because of it.
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I'm sure that's exactly how Justice Alito will see it.
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No. One way you can fix the southern border is to negotiate/intimidate/cajole the Mexican government to prevent mass migrations from getting with 500 miles of America, and thereby to a large extent preventing the other vulnerabilities of our immigration system (lack of wall, asylum loopholes, etc) from being exploited.
Of course, I must must must must must must emphasize this because either you don't know or are gliding past, THIS WAS THE STATUS QUO AT THE TIME BIDEN ASSUMED OFFICE. STATUS QUO WHICH HIS ADMINISTRATION QUICKLY DESTROYED AND ALLOWED MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL MIGRANTS TO ENTER AMERICA.
Once we have internalized this (and grassroots America has), the motive to vote for Trump based on border security is obvious. Whether or not the voters end up actually voting on this motive, we'll all find out soon enough.
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Meanwhile, ‘improved border security’ is not only not something that people are demanding, it is something that both parties have _signed on to_. Harris is running around pointing out how Trump failed to build his wall and she promising better border security!
Well, yes and obviously that's ridiculous and most likely she'll end up losing because of that.
Really David, I'd be interested to know what your level of awareness is. The fundamental reality of border security of the Biden Administration is that the Biden Administration ended the successful bilateral US/Mexico modus vivendi that the US attained under Trump, and thereby allowed millions of illegal migrants to cross the southern border into America, where most of them are today.
This is a weird one in that everybody knows this at the grassroots level but the media/punditocracy are either playing dumb or really are dumb.
Really, there's no reason why the voters have to take on the feigned ignorance or actual ignorance that lib thought leaders have. It is their prerogative to punish the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party (and Administration's border czar) for its gross malfeasance of that issue.
We'll see soon enough whether they exercise that prerogative.
"
Likewise, ‘opposition to terrorism’ is pretty much nonsense. Sure, it’s something voters oppose but ‘What level of terrorism should there be in the middle east?’ is not, in fact, a US policy. What is that even supposed to mean as a policy position?
It's pretty simple. It means we put the hammer down on all the wannabe Yasser Arafats at the staff level of our political and cultural institutions and in our colleges and universities.
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Sux to be you.
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I think your specific numbers are wrong but the general point is vaguely correct. With one important caveat: the 2016 national averages weren't that far off. Hillary ended up winning by 2% and she was favored by 3-4% or so.
What did happen was a polarization-enhanced geographical realignment wherein Trump was not only competitive in the Rust Belt, he actually won it. Nobody really saw that coming with the force that it did.
Frankly, I suspect that might be Kamala's best hope now, that even if the national topline numbers are basically right, that there will be some distributional effects in her favor enough to win. Specifically that she loses the Sun Belt but wins all of the Rust Belt and everything else breaks as normal and she wins the EC 270-268.
This paragraph is interesting. I have a gut feel that you might be right, and a lot of people have mad interesting speculations one direction or the other, but nobody really knows for sure. We'll find out on Tuesday.
Though, one thing in her favor is that the pollsters are changing their methodologies all the time. Maybe for this cycle they have made adjustments that underestimate her. Again I don't really believe it, but maybe.
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I'm not ignoring that at all, in fact that's a key premise of the whole thing. As a voter go ahead and vote for Kamala if you want to. It's a bad idea on the substance for the reasons I went over in the OP. It's your prerogative.
As a lib activist, you are disloyal in that you (and other libs) are attempting deny, short-circuit, intimidate, mislead us out of our (our meaning Right-of-center America, or even apolitical Right-curious America for that matter) legitimate prerogatives to participate in electoral politics and other aspects of political culture. When and if we retaliate against that (tbh as much Right wingers talk and libs talk, I'm not at all convinced that we will), it will be legitimate.
You in particular are emotionally incontinent, especially wrt anger. Tbh, it's not at all your fault by any means. There are more judicious libs in the world, and some of them should have had a quiet word with you long before now. But they didn't, things happened and this is where we are.
And as where we are, Go Trump.
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Thanks North. Btw, to the extent I'm going to be following up with this, I'll probably be referencing this blogpost from Tyler Cowen, wherein he writes a number of bullet point speculations as to why the culture has shifted in Trump's favor over the last 6/12/18/whatever months.
My point is, libs just want to sweep it all under the rug and say that it doesn't exist or isn't important, when quite clearly they are wrong about that.
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/the-changes-in-vibes-why-did-they-happen.html
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No, we can't talk in good in faith because we people like you aren't real Americans. What I consider is to be is not the point.
The whys and wherefores of that is a little complicated but not that much, and we've gone over it before. We, the American voters, sit in judgment of you, the lib activist class, and not the other way around.
If you can persuade us to support your agenda and/or you candidates, then your people get to hold office. Congratulations, you win. Otherwise well, it sux to be you.
Unfortunately, everything you do here at the League, through your spasms of dyspeptic anger, is about the diminishment of us, the American voters and our capacity to participate in our culture to determine American governance. Or in concrete terms for right now, for you we could vote for Trump but that really doesn't count because he's fascist, or authoritarian or Hitler or whatever.
It should be obvious, though for you it apparently isn't, that what you're trying to do inverts and distorts the sovereignty of the American people. In this way, you in particular, more than most other libs at the League even, you are not loyal and you are not a real American.
"
Yeah, but that's not good. Jan 6 was resolved soon enough and clearly enough.
If Kamala wins, it's going to be brat memes "Kamala for fracking" every day. Not those particular things maybe, whatever lie is required to maneuver around the next political difficulty.
I suspect the problem here is that for some people, maybe you, Jan 6 is a "real" threat whereas the ongoing lib message distortions is just sort of meh. But that's wrong, and it's important to emphasize that.
It's very likely that at some level we've already "lost" the Ukraine War because of this, we're very likely to continue losing important things because we can't talk to each other in good faith and move forward together. By comparison Jan just isn't that important.
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Well yeah, that is a problem, I don't think it is an insurmountable problem (or the only thing we should be caring about obv).
As far as holding the Democrats accountable goes, a lot of that is going to come from Democrats themselves. When and if Trump wins, how are you going to feel about Ta-Nehisi Coates and brat memes and closing the public schools? Are you really going to be rah-rah motivated for that flavor of Democrat to continue speaking for you when we've just won a general election without you?
As far as Congress goes, I think you're misreading a three-seat-whatever majority in the House of Representatives operating day-to-day on the mercy of Matt Gaetz and the his type as the same as Republican legislative operations in general. It wasn't that way for the House during the Tea Party era, it wasn't that way in the Senate under Mitch McConnell, it's not the way now in the GOP statehouses. It doesn't have to be that way post Nov 5.
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Misdirection and subterfuge? Christ you're an oblivious bubble-man.
On “Tim Walz announced as Kamala Harris’s running mate”
Well, yeah.
For good or ill, Trump has built his rep. He's already ate most of the downside for January 6.
It is widely believed of Kamala Harris among people who follow American politics closely that that she has very little knowledge or intuition regarding the serious issues facing America today.
If that is right, it is therefore a crucial job of the Harris campaign to prevent this opinion from spreading to the wider more apolitical voting public.
So to that end, it's a very real risk that anything she says or anything the campaign says on her behalf regarding real things like inflation or whatever, will expose her lack of depth. And for that matter her association with the Biden Administration whose record on such things is not good.
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