Prayers for the refugee attack in Sweden two nights ago.

[Belsnickel]

(02-20-2017, 01:33 AM)Benton Wrote: I dunno.

Before the primaries nearly every projection had Trump beating Clinton in the general, or Sanders beating Trump. Results on the plethora of other GOP candidates versus Clinton or Sanders varied. Your moderate candidates didn't do very well against extreme ends. And despite how she was portrayed, Clinton was very moderate. You could put policies by her, Obama, Rubio and Kasich in a hopper, spin it around and — outside of maybe abortion and tax breaks — you could pin most of the responses on any of the four. You couldn't say the same with Trump, Rand Paul and Sanders.

The conversation right now is that the left needs to move more to the middle if they want to win in 2020. My fear is they're going to look back at those projections and move further left. They'll look at the data and say Clinton wasn't liberal enough to bring out the base. 

Some are saying the Trump candidacy was voter displeasure with the "move left." Except, there wasn't one. Obama was president for two terms, had the chance to pass whatever he wanted and he used it to roll out the Republican healthcare plan. No mandatory abortions. No death squads. No piles of guns melted down, their metal used to build a sculpture of Baal. No Bible burnings.

Yeah, some bipartisan courts ruled in favor letting people pee where it looked like they should, or upheld the executive branch stepping between big corporate and people. But, really, rhetoric aside, there wasn't a lot of difference under Obama than under the last year or two of Bush.

The people do want more liberal/progressive policies, in certain areas. When you look at issue polling you can see that people are by-in-large in favor of social democrat policies. It's really interesting when you look at the statistics on these sorts of things and see just how liberal the country really is. The issue is the rhetoric we see. The majority of the people in this country are in favor of universal background checks, but it gets labeled as the newest effort to take our guns by the NRA and so they fight against it. The majority polled last time I saw wanted stricter regulations on the banking industry, but it gets labeled a certain way and now we have the same people saying they want stricter regulations applauding the rollback of Dodd-Frank going on.

When you look at the issues polling, the trend is always to go the opposite of the POTUS. Not even joking, when we have a liberal president, the public goes more conservative, when we have a conservative it goes more liberal. This is why we so rarely see three terms of the same party in the White House. Now, since they have started tracking these things, the numbers have never been on the conservative side of the chart. Ever. People think they are more conservative than they really are. Well, the reaction to Obama's tenure was steeper than for other presidents. The line, last time I looked at the graph, was close to the mid-point than it had been since Eisenhower. Anyway, it's just one of those things that I find interesting that we, as a country, are more liberal than people like to admit when they actually look at the issues. It will be interesting to look at that graph in a couple of years, though.

The other interesting part of that is that the number of people that hold consistent ideological views has always been a minority, but Pew has discovered that minority is growing. People are becoming more obstinate. But that's a whole other can of worms.

Edit: I just remembered the damn term for what I am talking about, policy mood!