Democratic (Party) Direction

I'm guess getting wracked by polio had something to do with an appreciation of vulnerability

*guessing

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/839508779737706497

Fav/Unfav (Suffolk)

Pence 47/35%
Trump 45/47
GOP 37/48
Media 37/50
Dem Party 36/52
Hillary 35/55
Congress 26/52

fun

lol @ Pence being more popular than Trump

can someone put that number in front of the Donald ie on Fox n Friends

and respondents hate Dems more

nobody likes losers

Trump 45/47

given everything that has happened, everything he has done, and the pure absence of hope for anything good to happen in the future, that favorability is a fucking triumph for trump

and respondents hate Dems more

this is the most telling number in this poll imo (inasmuch as polls tell us anything)

that favorability is a fucking triumph for trump

low bar. most presidents have a honeymoon period w net positive approval ratings. he has not.

have get

low bar. most presidents have a honeymoon period w net positive approval ratings. he has not.

Comparing his ratings to the historical trends for new presidents is a natural thing to do. it's probably the right thing to do. but here's my hot take: he's not a normal president. take a step back and consider how deeply terrible he is on every single dimension. remember a year ago when you were saying he could never win the republican primary because his ceiling of support was 25% (of republican voters)? that seemed like a very reasonable position at the time, given that he's a complete disaster and can hardly make it through a single week without committing a fuckup that would be THE headline gaffe for any other president in the history of the united states. it's unbelievable that he won the primary, it's unbelievable that he won the election by losing by 3 million votes, and it's unbelievable that 45% of people think he's doing an ok job. to me, to be doing that well while doing such a terrible job is a fucking triumph and must be an inspiration to everyone born into immense wealth that has an interest in exploiting everyone around them for financial gain.

or in other words, do you believe that his favorability trend will follow the traditional path: he's at his peak now (mid-40s), and then as disappointments pile up and people get sick of seeing his face all the time, it'll drop by 20 or so, ending with an undulating mid-20s or so? maybe that's right. but i think that's what everyone has expected for him since his candicacy was announced - waiting for the inevitable fall. it must be coming, right, after the next wave of disappointments? but i think there's also a possibility that 40-45% of america will like trump no matter what he does. the "no matter what" has already happened, repeatedly, unmistakably, an onslaught of complete stupidity and incompetence thrown at us every day, every week, for months, we're coming up on almost two fucking YEARS since he made an ass out of himself during the announcement of his candidacy. so i'm not holding my breath waiting for his support to collapse after this sweet ass honeymoon we're all on comes to a close. if/when the Greatest Healthcare Plan of 2017 falls on its face, i'm gonna bet trump isn't going to take any heat for it. his approval will dip 7 points, but then he'll make another critically-acclaimed speech where he exploits a dead soldier for political gain and he'll be right back at 44%

but i think there's also a possibility that 40-45% of america will like trump no matter what he does.

this is demonstrably true at this point. I have no idea if it will hold. Voters tend to treat ppl in office different than candidates but yes traditional rulebook is v much out the window w this guy, no argument there.

one would think that what's likely to go down with the obamacare repeal/replace thing is going to finally be the thing that drags his support down. but i thought the same thing about numerous previous events, so who knows. (also i know the paranoia/conspiracy angle is not a popular one, but if there's a successful ISIS-sponsored terrorist attack on U.S. soil and trump predictably overreacts and declares war, i fully expect my patriotic fellow americans to dramatically boost trump's popularity.)

anyway, just realized i dragged this thread off-topic, sorry

if they can't get ACA repealed/replaced I haven't thought through how that impacts the GOP - hardcore right feels betrayed, Trump angry about looking like a loser, presumably. And obviously the usual quarters (including Trump) will blame Democrats but it seems like it's more likely to spur intra-party in-fighting...? idk

I totally agree about the terrorist attack scenario, which is what worries me the most.

Christ those polling results are depressing.

yup

never getting my hopes up about politics again lol

Thanks for the balanced discussion in general about Perez, minus a few excessively partisan/snarky voices. I do apologize if it seems like I can't be bothered to do basic research but I'm in China and even with a VPN, common sites like Google and Twitter can take forever to load here.

I'm interested in how people here would explain those polling numbers, particularly about the Dem Party. I tend to attribute much of Trump's success to the media, particularly Fox News. But I don't think Fox News viewership is close to 45% of the total population. According to this they max out somewhere south of 20 million (I don't totally understand how those numbers work though, and thank you Bing for these wonderful results):

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/ratings-fox-news-tops-all-of-cable-total-viewers-q1-cnn-up-triple-digits-1201741012/

Personally I have my own ideas about the unpopularity of Democrats but maybe in the interests of diplomacy I should hold off on expressing them for now.

OTM :http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/02/the-assassination-of-keith-ellison-by-the-neoliberal-coward-tom-perez

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 8, 2017 1:58 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ok, well it looks like the straw man version of my perspective has already been covered. I'll admit I could be a lot more informed but the absence of any real nuance in most political discussion now leaves me cold. It seems like most people who actually care about these things now are so emotionally invested in the process that's it really challenging to take any kind of long view.

It's really just that they cheated the guy everyone wanted and who would've won, and installed the only person in the world who could lose to Donald Trump, viborg xp

I seem to remember a bunch of people who lost to Donald Trump during the republican primary

yeah, but republicans aren't people.

it's really horrible how totally rigged the democratic primaries were. the person who gets the most votes is supposed to lose, just like in the general.

Anyone who truly likes Ellison should be happy he won't be the (haha) chair of the DNC.

hey rushomancy, Money buys Myth

you watchin' Liberty Vallance at work?

"Bernie was cheated out of getting the most votes in the primary" isn't that removed from "millions of illegals voted for Hillary in the general". Or at least people who casually say rigging should probably say how they think that happened if they think the former is true and the latter isn't.

'rigging' isn't necessarily synonymous with cheating

i was unsurprised by the primaries; when you have a casino, the house wins

you forgot to cite Nixontwitter.

"Rigging" is such a nebulous term, no wonder it lead a lot of people toward thinking that the votes themselves were somehow not real. Though results largely lined up with the polling throughout.

The Dem party nomination system is def designed to favor the more establishment-approved candidate, so in that way it's rigged. This was done on purpose for (perfectly defensible, at least in terms of historical American Poli Sci discourse) small-r republican reasons. This is a pretty undisputed historical fact.

I mean, there's really no way for it *not* to be rigged toward one kind of candidate or another. This isn't controversial imo.

Right but that's not what's being referred to whenever anyone complains about how it was rigged against Bernie. Anytime you hear someone say that in reference to the 2016 primary it very rarely means "just like how it was rigged against Howard Dean in favor of Kerry". The implication is that some atypical major transgression occurred.

It still amazes me that after the debacle of 1968 the Democratic Party subjected itself to a thorough overhaul of its system for choosing delegates in an attempt to redress the anger the '68 convention aroused, by making the delegate selection more open and inclusive. Then, in 1972, the man who chaired the committee which drafted the new delegate selection rules, George McGovern, who knew every nuance of how the new system had been "rigged", just happened to become the next presidential nominee. History, it teaches you stuff.

unless you're H.R.C., making the same mistakes in 2008 and 2016

primaries are rigged in the same way ships are

bullship

Then, in 1972, the man who chaired the committee which drafted the new delegate selection rules, George McGovern, who knew every nuance of how the new system had been "rigged", just happened to become the next presidential nominee. History, it teaches you stuff.

then the system changed again, allowing an outsider like President Carter to get the nomination, then changed yet again so that President Mondale could get it. It worked so splendidly.

Anytime you hear someone say that in reference to the 2016 primary it very rarely means "just like how it was rigged against Howard Dean in favor of Kerry". The implication is that some atypical major transgression occurred.

I really don't think that's what people are saying when they say that. I always interpret it to mean exactly "the system favors establishment candidates the way it favored Kerry over Dean." People aren't nuts, they don't think there's a secret faucet of illegal Hillary votes Donna Brazile can turn on whenever she needs to suppress leftism!

Well...

Our social media feeds were very different then. Was it only mine? Genuinely curious and fascinated by how the impact of this stuff can be gauged. The campaign had their own perspective on it...

"Mark Longabaugh, a senior Sanders adviser, described supporters who’d turn a “nugget of fact” — the disqualified Sanders-supporting delegates at the Nevada state convention, for instance — into “fanciful ideas that we had in fact won elections that we hadn't.”"

https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/democrats-confront-lefty-fake-news?utm_term=.gj5DmgKOZX#.jxmNoPzmAn

This was shared a lot dor example. I know it seems anecdotal but it gives you a sense of how people actually did get it in their heads that the DNC controls/counts votes and that voter suppression played a role. Shaun White's reporting and US Uncut pushed the idea as well. This is all well before the Wikileaks stuff.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cLPd2HhURq0

Not only was it before the Wikileaks stuff, some of the damaging DNC mails were about them trying to combat this, which only hurt them further.

one should be careful to put so much stock in just one poll. Economist/YouGov, for example, paints a diff pic: http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/9deo3n58va/econTabReport.pdf

Democrat favorability: 41% favorable, 48% unfavorable
Republican favorability: 38% favorable, 50% unfavorable
Trump favorability: 41% favorable, 50% unfavorable (40% of the 50 = "very unfavorable")
Pence favorability: 42% favorable, 40% unfavorable (he has a very high undecided number)

these things tend to vary wildly

Pence seems to be the most populari n all these polls but mostly cos there are so many "unsure" votes. voters don't know much about him yet since he isn't as publicly visible like Trump is

"Bernie was cheated out of getting the most votes in the primary" isn't that removed from "millions of illegals voted for Hillary in the general".

fuck this imo? the very real leaked DNC emails showed those in power actively working against him and many had concerns with that. you seems to be suggesting that the very real concerns based on very real emails are equatable with the nonsensical racist rantings of Donald Trump that is based on nothing.

That's almost 2nd order troll bait: Nerdstrom tosses off a remark, Adam finds it, and now if Fred B decides to read Adam's post...

hey imo we should ban political threads completely, it'd be a lot more interesting around here

Naw they're just in reruns now