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"A great democracy has got to be progressive, or it will soon cease to be either great or a democracy..." - TR
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." - FDR
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(07-23-2020, 09:34 AM)Belsnickel Wrote:
I'm not sure if annoying people who don't support you is a valid way to get them to support you, but at this point I'm sure that whole campaign is about throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.
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So what is the difference between a person, a woman and a man?
Asking for a president.
![[Image: giphy.gif]](https://media0.giphy.com/media/1kwsTjL8BNqlszNtnCE/giphy.gif)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/upshot/biden-polls-demographics.html
Quote:White Flight From Trump? What a Decisive Biden Win Would Look Like
Republican structural advantages in the House, the Senate and the Electoral College would be in jeopardy.
Recent national polls show that Joe Biden’s commanding lead has eroded longstanding demographic divisions that have favored Republicans, endangering their hold on a tier of states where the Democratic Party usually has little chance to prevail in federal elections, even Republican strongholds like Kansas or Alaska.
President Trump still has plenty of time to close the gap with Mr. Biden. But with Mr. Biden’s lead enduring well into a second month amid a worsening coronavirus pandemic, it’s worth considering the potential consequences of a decisive Biden victory.
Remarkably, Mr. Trump’s lead among white voters has all but vanished. On average, he holds just a three-point lead among them, 48 percent to 45 percent, across an average of high-quality telephone surveys since June 1. His lead among white voters has steadily diminished since April.
White Voters Move Toward Biden
In 2016, Donald Trump carried white voters by about 13 percentage points. He still leads among them, but in recent months these voters have moved sharply toward Joe Biden.
Whom white voters preferred in national polls
![[Image: artboard-600px.png]](https://int.nyt.com/chartmaker/2020/07/24/20200723-endmargin/12/artboard-600px.png)
In the long view, the president’s losses among white voters compared with his final standing in 2016 polls are broad, spanning all major demographic categories. In more recent months, the president’s losses have been somewhat narrower and concentrated among younger voters, according to the polls. Mr. Biden has made no gains among voters over age 65 at all since May, and as a result his once-distinctive lead among the group now looks similar to what one would expect in this national environment.
At the same time, Mr. Biden has made few to no gains among nonwhite voters. He still has a wide lead among these voters, but his failure to improve over Hillary Clinton’s standing in the final polls of 2016 is something of a surprise, given the recent national attention to racial issues and the disproportionate effect of the coronavirus on Hispanic and Black communities. Many surveys do not break down nonwhite voters into more specific racial groups, since there aren’t always enough respondents for a reliable estimate. But a longer-term compilation suggests that Mr. Trump is modestly outperforming his 2016 standing among both Black and Hispanic voters, with more uncertainty about the extent of his strength among Hispanics.
If the race tightened, perhaps Mr. Trump would make broad gains, allowing him to reclaim a lead among older white voters and to outperform his showing against Mrs. Clinton among nonwhite voters by a wide margin. It’s also possible that an improvement in Mr. Trump’s standing would mainly involve rolling back Mr. Biden’s most recent gains, which would lead to outsize gains among younger white voters and few or no gains at all among nonwhite and older voters.
But if the president does not claw his way back into a tighter race, Mr. Trump and his party face a harsh political environment without many of the advantages that have insulated the party from public opinion in the past. Over the last two decades, Republican strength among white voters has given the party structural advantages in the House, the Senate and the Electoral College. A competitive race among white voters would deprive Republicans of those advantages, threatening carefully devised gerrymanders and raising the specter of previously unimagined losses in the Senate.
After 20 years of closely fought presidential elections, it’s hard to imagine the range of possibilities such a decisive margin of victory would create. To illustrate, we took the results of the 2016 election by demographic group and calculated what would happen if those groups backed Mr. Trump at the levels shown in recent polls.
This sort of analysis offers only a rough idea of what could unfold. A demographic category like “white voters without a college degree,” however useful, encompasses an extremely diverse group of voters. They can move in meaningfully different directions, and there is no reason to assume that Mr. Biden’s strength would be felt equally in West Virginia and Vermont. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what this exercise does. A similar effort in previous years would not have anticipated the vagaries of real election outcomes, like Iowa moving 15 points to Mr. Trump while Wisconsin moved just eight points; or Indiana moving 22 points toward Barack Obama in 2008 while Ohio moved just seven points. This hypothetical offers only a rough guide to the kinds of districts that might be competitive.
But in this situation, Mr. Biden would win by 10 percentage points, 54 percent to 44 percent, and would win 375 votes in the Electoral College, including all of the states won by Mr. Obama in 2012, in addition to North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. Mr. Biden’s weakness among nonwhite voters would leave Texas short of turning blue.
Notably, in such a hypothetical, Mr. Biden would also win by nine to 10 points in the three Northern battleground states that decided the last election: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Four years ago, Mr. Trump fared better in these states than in the national popular vote, but this potentially decisive advantage in these relatively white states fades along with his lead among white voters.
This result would be close to current polling averages. Perhaps more surprising is how Mr. Biden would fare in a long list of traditionally Republican states and districts. He would fight to within single digits in Alaska, Utah, South Carolina, Indiana, Montana, Missouri and Kansas.
Again, it’s important to emphasize that these are rough estimates. But the prospect of somewhat competitive races in these states is borne out in recent polling: Mr. Trump leads by an average of seven points, 49 percent to 42 percent, in an average of 13 polls taken of these states since mid-April, when Bernie Sanders left the Democratic contest.
It’s not terribly consequential whether Mr. Biden wins these states. But four of them have Republican-held Senate seats that are up this year, and a strong showing by him would help Democratic chances further down the ballot. If Democrats actually could win one Senate race, most likely Montana, it would materially improve their ability to govern. It could even give them a serious chance to hold the chamber through Mr. Biden’s hypothetical first term, since the Republicans have relatively few opportunities to flip states in the 2022 midterm elections.
Republicans in the House may also face severe consequences. In this analysis, Mr. Biden would carry a staggering 260 congressional districts, including a half-dozen districts won by Mr. Trump in Texas. He could even carry districts where Mr. Trump won by double digits in 2016, like Indiana’s Fifth, Arizona’s Sixth, Florida’s 16th, or Ohio’s 14th. Mr. Trump would win another set of 25 districts by less than five points each. Many of these districts were only somewhat competitive in the 2018 midterms, while many others were not competitive at all. Already, various ratings outfits like the Cook Political Report have classified them as competitive.
The idea that Democrats could run so far ahead of their showing during a so-called wave election year like 2018 may seem hard to believe. But at the moment, Mr. Trump’s approval rating is a net six points worse among voters than it was heading into the midterm election, according to FiveThirtyEight estimates. The national political environment is substantially worse for the Republicans than it was two years ago, and the possibility that Democrats can extend their gains further can’t be dismissed at this stage.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-campaign-suppressing-hispanic-vote-180950158.html
Quote:Over 90 field organizers for the Florida Democratic Party signed a scathing letter Friday to the party’s leadership, claiming among other things that the campaign is “suppressing the Hispanic vote” in Central Florida.
The seven-page internal letter, obtained by the Miami Herald, contains eight allegations from field organizers about what they say is a lack of a “fully actionable field plan” from the Biden campaign as it transitions into the Florida party to coordinate voter outreach efforts.
This letter comes 100 days out from the general election and as recent polls show enthusiasm about voting among Latinos in battleground states like Florida could be waning in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the claims: mistreatment of field organizers, relocating trained staff members without explanation, lack of organizing resources and taking on volunteers who are then left in limbo.
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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/06/lincoln-project-ads-republicans-democrats-349184
I can't remember if I posted this, but I thought of this article while looking at a tweet from the Lincoln Project mocking Trump's tweet about being too busy for baseball that he sent while he was golfing.
From the article:
Down to the smallest detail, it’s a masterful nugget of compact filmmaking. And it helped draw attention to a renegade corps of Republican strategists, veterans of campaigns for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney, who are applying their attack-ad skills to their own party’s president—and going for the kill shot, every time.
Still, the Lincoln Project is clearly getting under the skin of the president and his supporters. And the evidence is not just raging tweets; in one of those Washington funhouse mirror moments, the Trump-friendly super PAC Club for Growth just released an ad attacking the Lincoln Project founders as if they were candidates themselves.
Part of it is skill: The Lincoln Project ads are slick, quick and filled with damning quotes and unflattering photos. But part of it might just be that Republicans are better at this than Democrats. Trump may sense that these ads are especially dangerous because they pack an emotional punch, using imagery designed to provoke anxiety, anger and fear—aimed at the very voters who were driven to him by those same feelings in 2016. And history, even science, suggests that might in fact be the case—that Republicans have a knack for scaring the hell out of people, and that makes for some potent ads.
Stoking fear is a tried-and-true tactic of political advertising, stemming back to the Lyndon Johnson campaign’s 1964 anti-Barry Goldwater ad “Daisy.” But many of the most indelible ones have stemmed from the Republican camp, and over time, they’ve grown increasingly blunt. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Bear” ad used a grizzly as metaphor for the Soviet nuclear threat: “Isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear—if there is a bear?” the voice over intoned. That ad inspired George W. Bush’s “Wolves” from 2004, which accused John Kerry of being soft on terrorism. George H.W. Bush’s infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad linked Michael Dukakis to a prisoner who committed brutal crimes on a weekend pass, flashing the words “Kidnapping,” “Stabbing” and “Raping” on the screen. (The ad has since been scorned, not just for exploiting racial stereotypes, but also for paving the way for tough-on-crime bills that had lasting social repercussions.)
The secret of fearmongering is a willingness to go there, and that’s where the Republicans of the Lincoln Project might have an advantage over Trump’s left-leaning opponents. The group’s founders aren’t calibrating their ads around a Democratic base that mistrusts the military, delves into nuance or shies away from causing offense. That leaves ample room for dog-whistle symbols that range from clichés to horror-movie tropes: One ad accuses Trump of being played by China and ends with the image of the White House, the entire screen tinted red.
Research shows there’s a reason these ads could be effective with Republicans voters: Conservatives are an especially fear-prone group. In a 2008 paper in the journal Science, researchers subjected a group of adults with strong political beliefs to a set of startling noises and graphic images. Those with the strongest physical reactions were more likely to support capital punishment, defense spending and the war in Iraq. A 2011 paper in the journal Cell found a correlation between conservative leanings and the size of the right amygdala, the portion of the brain that processes emotions in response to fearful stimuli. In her book Irony and Outrage, University of Delaware professor Dannagal Young points out that liberals and conservatives respond differently to entertainment rhetoric: Liberals have a higher tolerance for open-ended ambiguity, while conservatives look for closure and want problems to be solved.
That research helps explain why some attack ads move the needle with the right populations—and why some, in retrospect, don’t. Take the Hillary Clinton campaign ad, “Mirrors,” which aired about a month before the 2016 election. Hailed, in certain circles, as an instant classic, it showed a series of young girls looking at their own reflections as Trump’s voice played in the background, saying things like, “I’d look her right in that fat ugly face of hers.” Mother Jones deemed the ad “powerful”; Bustle called it “brilliant.” But it didn’t convert the white suburban women Clinton’s advisers surely hoped to reach, because it not only preached to the choir, but spoke in the language of the choir. It was too subtle, Young might say, asking viewers to connect the dots, rather than hammering in a dramatic point. And it played to voters’ conscience and values—the kinds of things voters have to think about—rather than their raw emotions.
Trump’s ads, by comparison, have required little thought; the dots are preconnected in thick Sharpie ink. His first 2016 ad, “Great Again,” touted his willingness to utter the words “RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM,” which the ad displayed in all caps over images of masked fighters and photos of the San Bernardino shooters. (The same ad pledged that Trump would “cut the head off ISIS.”) His campaign’s fear-stoking 2018 anti-immigration ad, featuring an illegal immigrant convicted of murder and caravan footage that evoked an invasion, was so incendiary that many networks, including Fox News, refused to run it.
The Lincoln Project, too, knows how to deliver an unsubtle message, and Trump has given it some useful raw material. Recent news footage makes him look weak and despondent—as when he descended from a helicopter after his Tulsa rally, a MAGA hat drooping from his hand like a dead trout. (The Lincoln Project’s ad sets the scene to “Jurassic Park” theme music, played badly on melodica.) The image of Trump holding up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, intended as a metaphor of strength, now plays as shorthand for tone-deaf insincerity.
But the genius of the Lincoln Project ads is that they’re quite specifically after Trump, using his own favored tools of shamelessness and fearmongering, and turning them back on their source. Who knows? It could actually work.
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A post in the meme thread reminded me of this older article about Biden and his gaffes.
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-gaffes-quotes-2020-election-1323905
You can read all the times he said something stupid there (up until then) but his reflection on it was stuck with me and how Trump characterizes it too.
Quote:Joe Biden admits it: "I am a gaffe machine," he said in December 2018. He turned his confession into a dig at Donald Trump—"But my God, what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can't tell the truth"—but now the former vice president has entered the 2020 presidential race, he might regret some of his stumbles.
President Trump said he's eager to battle Biden for the White House.
"I hope it's Biden," he told a group of television anchors before his State of the Union address.
"Biden was never very smart. He was a terrible student. His gaffes are unbelievable. When I say something that you might think is a gaffe, it's on purpose; it's not a gaffe. When Biden says something dumb, it's because he's dumb."
There is your choice. The guy who knows he makes mistakes and is willing to admit it and tells you the truth versus the egomaniac who can't even admit he makes mistakes all while lying all day, every day to you.
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After a quick search I can NOT verify this but it sounds about right.
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(07-27-2020, 10:43 AM)GMDino Wrote: After a quick search I can NOT verify this but it sounds about right.
I'm sure the Trump supporters will all boo the hell out of those performers and entertainers who dare to speak their political opinion before their reality TV president arrives.
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(07-27-2020, 10:43 AM)GMDino Wrote: After a quick search I can NOT verify this but it sounds about right.
the Lincoln Project can meme
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(07-27-2020, 12:35 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: the Lincoln Project can meme
What is to meme? We have a proud draft-dodger and Charles who was "in charge" some 30+ years ago setting the stage for our blemish-free leader. Man, if anyone dared think a Trump presidency would be absurd, I say I'm waiting for him to tag in the Hulkster.
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The actress who voiced Dora endorsed this Lincoln Project "ad"
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Ooof.
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Just for reference about the polls above and because Bob Dole's campaign site is still online (until it crashed from everyone going there.)
![[Image: Ed45SJkUYAErmkf?format=jpg&name=small]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ed45SJkUYAErmkf?format=jpg&name=small)
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Trump is going with "America: Love it or Leave It" apparently.
Also the stock market is up so everything is ok.
The page says this was two hours ago...not sure if that's when it was or not.
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(07-27-2020, 04:54 PM)GMDino Wrote: Trump is going with "America: Love it or Leave It" apparently.
Also the stock market is up so everything is ok.
The page says this was two hours ago...not sure if that's when it was or not.
That's old.
I'm gonna break every record they've got. I'm tellin' you right now. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but it's goin' to get done.
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April 2021
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(07-27-2020, 07:16 PM)jason Wrote: That's old.
I thought it was but it was showing as "live" on July 27th and the time stamp was even right. Oh well.
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(07-27-2020, 08:34 PM)GMDino Wrote: I thought it was but it was showing as "live" on July 27th and the time stamp was even right. Oh well.
Of what year? Where's the link?
Volson is meh, but I like him, and he has far exceeded my expectations
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(07-27-2020, 08:41 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Of what year? Where's the link?
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=3100930809984904&ref=external
I embedded it so anyone could click on the title and see the FB page. It was shared by a friend and the time was correct so either it was a coincidence or the page did it on purpose.
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