"Will you shut up, man?" US Politics October 2020

Pennsyltucky

It's been said before, but pretty much an hour or two outside most major cities will get you to Redneckistan.

lol American Greatness. they're a favorite source of RealClearPolitics, and their articles are dripping with "WELL ASKHULLY, LIBERALS, U R DED"

Stepping back to the NYT Texas poll and getting earlier results wrong, Cohn has thoughts, starting here and looking at other states:

Well, we certainly did underestimate Hispanic turnout/vote in '18. And it's possible we'll do so again. Hispanic voters are challenging everywhere, but this is a state where there's no real record of competitive races, no party registration, etc https://t.co/i3hwt8JKS4

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) October 26, 2020

The machismo appeal argument seems like lazy stereotyping to me.

We are talking about Biden's "weakness" in a group of voters he's winning almost 2/3 of! I think the lazy stereotyping is the idea that Latino voters "should" be Democrats.

I think I already posted this when it was published a couple of weeks ago, but here is an article about Trump's tough-guy appeal among young Hispanic men: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/trump-macho-appeal.html

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/az-patriots-leader-jennifer-harrison-charged-with-identity-theft-11504481

"In a swift turn of fate last year, Jennifer Harrison went from chanting "Respect our laws!" at a Tucson City Council meeting to being arrested on suspicion of breaking the law against identity theft. Now, the founder of AZ Patriots has been charged in connection with that arrest."

"Enablement: The tortured self-justification of one very powerful Trump-loathing anonymous Republican."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/anonymous-republican-donald-trump.html

Meanwhile, I give to you a motley crew

A bunch of major QAnon people are suing YouTube to get their accounts back, an effort that seems likely to fail. From their press release: pic.twitter.com/53eMEUXYkP

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) October 26, 2020

I think 'I like Trump because he's real tuff and I'm real tuff, also, grrr' is a sentiment shared by Trumpists regardless of race or nation of origin. And I think it's fair to paint all of those idiots with the same stereotypical brush.

i like to think i can set aside personal biases enough to comprehend opinions that fall pretty far outside of my own worldview, even some i might find personally abhorrent. but Trump being a "tough guy" simply is not one of them.

I'm honestly surprised to hear you say this -- Trump does not come off as a tough guy to me, but just being in the world I feel like I've encountered many, many people who deploy the kind of "toughness" Trump has to offer, and seen that plenty of people indeed see someone yelling a lot and not listening and self-aggrandizing as being tough. If being a loud whiny asshole didn't work, there wouldn't be so many loud whiny assholes!

he's a whiney spoiled new york asshole

entitled

the idea that he is a tough guy is insane. i guess he is unusually indifferent to social norms? but he likely only is that way because he is insulated by money.

local Bay Area news interviewed a nonwhite trump supporter at one of those truck things and he basically said “i don’t trust career politicians, I’m a business owner like trump, I don’t care about his personality, I just don’t want to pay more taxes”

I think 'I like Trump because he's real tuff and I'm real tuff, also, grrr' is a sentiment shared by Trumpists regardless of race or nation of origin. And I think it's fair to paint all of those idiots with the same stereotypical brush.

― OrificeMax (Old Lunch), Monday, October 26, 2020 6:54 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's not that he's a tough guy, it's that he has such open contempt for women. misogyny is a huge deal in every culture everywhere.

plenty of racist right wing hispanics; my entire paternal side of the family is like that.

xpost! Exactly, contempt.

He's not a Sam Elliott/Steve McQueen tough guy. He's a shit-talker. It's not so much toughness by any physical or emotional standard as the willingness to be contemptuous, to say terrible things to and about people. And since there are way more dudes like that than there are dudes like Sam Elliott, it has some political potency.

We are talking about Biden's "weakness" in a group of voters he's winning almost 2/3 of! I think the lazy stereotyping is the idea that Latino voters "should" be Democrats.

Yes, that’s part of what I mean. Throwing out after the fact cultural stereotypes is less useful than looking at why young, non-college educated men of every ethnicity are less Democratic than the larger group and how you might be able to change that.

FTR, I'm not personally saying he's tough. Heavens no. Like every blustery bully, he's really just a quivering little pissbaby underneath the loud-mouthed blather. But some people progress all the way through their lives without being able to see the charade for what it is and somehow see that pose as 'tuff'. They aren't super-bright, these people.

I don't know anyone with skin like that who couldn't be described as "tough"

he's quite fey and he wears as much make-up as Liberace so I guess the tough guy thing is just because he's big and says mean things about women

he's always seemed ridiculously pompous and fragile and whiny, and I'm taking from way back. but tbf i've never seen a single minute of the Apprentice and certainly wasn't keeping up w the NYC real estate tabloid game in the 80s-90s.

tortured self-justification of one very powerful Trump-loathing anonymous Republican

It is amazing how often these highly-placed Republicans call Trump "an idiot" or "a moron" and yet they do exactly what he wants them to do, so by extension they are even worse idiots than Trump. They all seem to believe they can claim "I have zero respect for Trump" and still maintain their self-respect while cravenly doing his bidding.

All these anonymous little backstabs they administer to Trump are their futile efforts at self-absolution, but it is really self-condemnation.

fwiw one of the reasons the lincoln project does nothing for me (beyond the obvious fact that they're republicans) is that one of the core motivations is like, unmasking the false daddy so the true daddy can be installed. not the kind of politics that inspires me tbh.

he also regularly insults anyone he doesn't like. I think a lot of perception of toughness is the fact that his message has no hope in it whatsoever, he's not like Obama or even Romney where he can articulate some sort of "together we can realize the dream of America", literally all he has is "everybody else was a total disaster, but not me, I am very smart"

And he hasn't carried anything heavier than a five iron in forty years.

the five iron is his penis

The dark underside of presumed toughness is that no one who cares about his opinion wants to be on the tough guy's shitlist. These are folks who are most comfortable when they're cowering before their drunken father.

trump's schtick has always been wrestling heel, full stop.

Trump loves taco bowls.

Biden has never (to the best of my knowledge) been photographed with a taco bowl.

Newsflash: lots of dummies conflate verbal abuse and assholishness with "toughness". Not sure why this is so hard to grasp.

Exhibit A: just about every Executive or Sales individual at my company I've ever met

these folk , like Trump, also wilt when you hit them back

Xp Coffee is for closers

I treat an Executive like 7-Up, I never have, never will

Newsflash: lots of dummies conflate verbal abuse and assholishness with "toughness". Not sure why this is so hard to grasp.

ding ding, finally someone hits it.

Saw this A TON working on construction projects. A project manager or superintendent would come in to meetings and verbally abuse everyone for an hour, without offering a single suggestion or solution and storm off. The owner and client would gush for weeks about how "tough" he is and can GET THINGS DONE. Even though it was his minions, who sat silent throughout the tirade, that came up with the actual solutions and pushed the project forward.

fair re abusive assholes. but there's Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross (lol xposts),,, and then there's a guy like Trump.

yeah when I got in "truly dngaf mode" at my job in 2017 when I was being abused as were other employees I just got mouthy and these folks just have no gameplan for that because they're not used to people saying "no" or giving them sass back. everybody just assumes you kneel before Zod.

FiveThirtyEight has a new feature where you can test out various electoral college scenarios by shifting one or more battleground states into Biden's or Trump's win column. I simply picked Biden to definitely win in AZ and made no other changes to 538's current win probabilities elsewhere and *bingo*, Trump's odds of winning the electoral college instantly dropped to 3 out of every 100 simulations.

That was fun!

real life Al Swearengens vs wheezing manbaby, etc

yeah it's a cool feature, but definitely dont' try the opposite, like flipping FL to Trump

somehow i ended up in the 3 out of 100 simulation last time tho...

Regarding Texas Latinos, this article was a p decent read:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/dont-call-texas-latino-voters-sleeping-giant/

I was curious, so I drove by my local polling place today. When I dropped off my ballot a week ago there was a huge line, hundreds of people long, for in-person voting (and even a small one for me). That was right after the polls first opened on the first day, around 10am or so. It was around 2:30 when I just swung by now, and while the line isn't nearly as long, there is still a line out the door and down to the street, which is pretty impressive. That's after a full week of available early in-person voting.

Re some comments above about why non-college educated young men don't go Democrat by a large margin.... it's the usual answer, but I don't think it would be wrong to cite the absolute decimation of unions and union jobs in the United States. Of course unions aren't wholly Dem or leftist orgs, that's obvious, but it has something to do with it, I think.

I wonder if there are some people who just like voting for whoever is currently in charge without thinking about it too much

I think the lazy stereotyping is the idea that Latino voters "should" be Democrats.

I can go on and on about this.

Growing up as a Cuban in this town -- always a liberal in a conservative milieu -- I don't understand the assumption that Latino men must be liberal when up-from-the-bootstraps still exerts such a powerful hold on the ambitions of these men.

this article really delves into why people don't always vote, thought it was interesting: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/non-voters-poll-2020-election/

Perhaps because I didn't experience a large Latino presence in my surroundings until I was 22 or so, I made what I would say is a safe assumption that Latinos wouldn't support obvious racist assholes who want to kill them, but obviously I was wrong.

Not trying to be snarky, just explaining, btw.