God Has Abandoned Us: U.S. Politics November 2023

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An interesting result from Montana; a 28-year-old was just elected mayor of Bozeman, though he won't take office till 2026 because of that city's bizarre rules. Bozeman is, I believe, the most expensive city in Montana to live in; it's about $2000 for a two-bedroom apartment in a faceless housing development.

Big takeaway from yesterday for the GOP is not a need for self-reflection but “we need to get better at cheating”. And I’m sure they will.

I saw a clip of Santorum on Newsmax saying a democracy is no way to run a country.

An all-time "quiet part out loud" moment in American politics

Rick Santorum is upset that Americans had an opportunity to vote on the things they actually care about. @atrupar.pic.twitter.com/3EiLJUNHtr

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) November 8, 2023

Moms For Libertine

lol

Sign me up!

Dems should find out how sexy universal healthcare is.

depends how you feel about latex

I don’t know about you lot but I’m pretty goddamn happy this morning. And I don’t even like weed all that much! I don’t even own a marijuana.

Republicans are way mad that Dems own the wedge issues now

I saw someone joke that the GOP was reduced to "at least we held on the governorship of Mississippi."

oh no, condolences WmC

I'm too sexy for my representative democracy.

xp oh well -- I didn't have any hopes up. I wonder what Brandon Presley is going to do for the next few years.

An interesting snippet from MSNBC this morning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OZyCeFwkG8

Dems should find out how sexy universal healthcare is.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Wednesday, November 8, 2023 9:44 AM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh God, I'm so hard (at work because I had access to free preventative healthcare and didn't need to go on disability)

knights731
22 minutes ago

What's more frightening is the idea that people are more concerned about terminating pregnancies than the sustainability of our country and freedom.

I am coming to the conclusion that the polls indicating that All Americans are Very Concerned about Joe Biden's age are a bunch of horseshit carefully crafted by news organizations in need of content.

OTM. NYT (which I subscribe to just to get access to their archives) has run a dozen articles about this, and I've seen only one article I can recall about Trump's age. And even that was an absurd soft-pedal: "How Trump’s Verbal Slips Could Weaken His Attacks on Biden’s Age". Verbal slips? He can't string four coherent sentences together. His nonsensical rambling is further downplayed in the piece as "his usual freewheeling style," "an unorthodox speaking style" and "his usual discursive nature". And for years, thanks to "editing for clarity", most accounts of his rallies and speeches simply select the more lucid quotes and exclude the bizarre ramblings, giving the reader the impression Trump is more sensical than he actually is.

And I say this as someone who definitely wishes Dem leaders were younger. It just rankles me that this is an issue when the other candidate is at about a fifth grade level, mentally. Democrats should just run some Vic Berger clips of Trump speaking as campaign ads to counter this age nonsense.

interesting snippet

The facts were all there and I love how encouraging the election results were, but the way the message was delivered was as homogenized as the canned music in a supermarket. Dems are still bad at cutting through people's "this is just more political bullshit" sensors, even when their accomplishments are real, not bullshit.

Rick Santorum calls abortion & marijuana "very sexy & secret sauce" for Democrats, as opposed to the not so secret sauce named after him.

Meantime, among the adults:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-team-waging-gross-campaign-humiliate-desantis-1234872514/

We aren’t gonna be done with him until he’s fat again,” a crude reference to the Florida governor’s weight loss.

In the past month alone, the Trump campaign, or Trump himself, have also gone after DeSantis for his fashion sense (“Ron’s heels are high, his hopes have never been lower”); his manhood (“[Ron] is now a political eunuch. He’s the last person who should be talking about balls”); his brain (“completely fried and inoperable”); his allegedly bizarre eating habits (“stuffing your suit pockets with cold, stale chicken tenders”); and much else.

sick burns tbh

or just sick

Where else is he supposed to keep his chicken tenders? Pants pockets are too narrow.

Hm, Trump who wears lifts in his shoes, has been teased for the size of his hands, and subsists on McDonald's mocks DeSantis about his heels, his manhood, and his "bizarre eating habits."

I am coming to the conclusion that the polls indicating that All Americans are Very Concerned about Joe Biden's age are a bunch of horseshit carefully crafted by news organizations in need of content.

Eh don't get swept away by the moment. I'm super happy about yesterday's results too, and to me they point to a solid platform the Dems can and should run on next year, and that platform (plus Trump's despicability and the general loathesomeness and incompetence of the GOP at large) could help compensate for Biden's weaknesses.

But Biden's weaknesses are abundant. He's a very very weak incumbent. He is not popular. That's not one poll or a few polls, it's widespread and consistent. I do not know of another incumbent president with his combination of numbers who has been reelected. That doesn't mean it's not a winnable election, I think it's very winnable. But I think it's winnable more despite Biden than because of him, and that's just how it is.

The modern GOP, ladies and gentlemen

He's a very very weak incumbent. He is not popular. That's not one poll or a few polls, it's widespread and consistent.

Yes, but...polls are clearly bullshit. They collate the inchoate, confused opinions of a small, ill-informed and unrepresentative slice of the electorate. They're bullshit.

In news from where I used to live, reliably Democratic commuter towns in NJ are going Republican, at least on the local level.

Hard to know what to make of that. The candidates are 130 votes apart.

There's always a disconnect between your local guy/issue and the national party/leadership - it used to benefit the GOP when they could win socially liberal areas with a normie businessman who wasn't burning crosses or trying to have the school librarian sent to Gitmo. Now it's benefitting Democrats, the local candidates are running against psychos and supported by popular ballot issues.

yes but it's in a district Trump won by 35 points in 2016 aiui?

xp

Polls are deeply flawed but imo they're not meaningless. Especially when you see the same things consistently month in and month out (like Biden's disapproval ratings). And also we've already run the Biden-Trump scenario once and the results were somewhat less than reassuring. It was really close! (At least, in the dumb Electoral College, which is sadly the thing that matters.) Even with no polls at all, if all you had to go on was the 2020 data, it would look like another tossup at best.

Wonder if, had people somehow known Trump was a lock for the 2024 nomination no matter what, Dems would've held the House in the mid-terms.

Who didn't think Trump would be a lock for the 2024 nomination?!

When DeSantis won big in 2022, there was a moment in which he seemed to have eclipsed Trump.

If you were a political reporter.

An interesting quote from bluesky:

"I feel like the last decade was liberals slowly realizing that lawyers and judges are not actually impartial practitioners of the law, and now they need to learn - slowly, so slowly - that mainstream media outlets are not impartial observers of reality"

After midterms I thought all the money would start pooling towards DeSantis, up until I actually heard the guy speak

i actually wonder if trump's scarred-earth approach to desantis is weakening ron in his own state, just completely wrecking his strongman image, while perhaps paradoxically causing bad blood towards trump among hardcore desantis supporters who might therefore sit out 2024? idk i feel like florida is potentially deeply weird for next november. and i'm not sure RDS is the type of guy to suck it up and throw his full weight behind DJT after all this.

Yeah, I don't remember anyone anywhere saying DeSantis was more likely than Trump but headline writers

i actually wonder if trump's scarred-earth approach to desantis is weakening ron in his own state, just completely wrecking his strongman image, while perhaps paradoxically causing bad blood towards trump among hardcore desantis supporters who might therefore sit out 2024? idk i feel like florida is potentially deeply weird for next november. and i'm not sure RDS is the type of guy to suck it up and throw his full weight behind DJT after all this.

― omar little,

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/22/desantis-florida-republicans-governor-elections-00117514

Feel like any time Trump goes after someone it wrecks their career so who knows maybe this is it for him

My belief is that Biden’s “unpopularity” is largely (but not entirely!) an artifact of today’s ultra-polarized political environment. You can no longer rely on a president from one party to have even a token level of approval from the other party. So the ceiling is now 50%. So if they are a little soft with their party or among “independents”, it will appear like historic unpopularity. And then when the media makes a big deal out of it because they want a big newsworthy thing that makes headlines and clicks, it drives the conversation and influences people’s poll responses (the bandwagon jumpers who want to be on board with the latest popular sentiments). I’m not saying Biden doesn’t have flaws and hasn’t made terrible mistakes that have hurt many people. But I am saying that his historic unpopularity is not isolated to Biden himself, but is at least somewhat a product of the times. We saw this with GWB (second term), we saw this with Obama and of course Trump. The political environment got much more polarized with Trump’s rise, and Biden is our first post-Trump president. It’s not like we have a lot of historical data for comparison in the post-Trump world. And I’m sure we can expect this trend to continue with future presidents.

re: biden's age, i'm actually on-board with handwringing over the gerontocracy! not super-thrilled about newsom being the "fresh young face" -- who else would be in contention?

Whitmer!

So the ceiling is now 50%.

Try 40%.