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

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%.

Try 40%.

"Fuck all these assholes"/"Vote? Fuck that" wins every election.

Yeah I don't think yesterday was a big polling miss, I think more the national head to head presidential polls are coloring a view of the national political environment that's clearly not accurate. https://t.co/Pv4LT22VEJ

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 8, 2023

^^ agree w/that

the R dog finally caught the abortion car, and it's "find out" time

i do think the polls will skew more in Biden's favor over time but it does depend a lot on how well he navigates things currently. and also i can't imagine trump becoming increasingly hinged and un-isolated.

Take it from DeSantis' cold, stale chicken fingers...

It has turned out that support for warcriming, having a loser son, failing at student loan gifts, and being older than earth are terrible for yr poll numbers no matter how stable it goes.

yeah that must be it

it's just great that this description basically could be applied to either of our future leaders

(that is the joke)

It's wild to look at George W. Bush's approval ratings, which fluctuated from 90% after 9/11 to 25% at the end of his presidency. Even Obama had a 31-point difference between his high and low points (38-69%), and he frequently swung back and forth between net approval and net disapproval over the course of his presidency. For both of them, approval ratings were highly responsive to what was going on in the news at the time. People

Trump, meanwhile, had only a 15-point difference (34-49%) during his entire four years in office, despite all the chaos that came out of the White House. And while Biden's approval started at 57%, it's stayed within a mere 7 points (37-44%) over the past two years. People are no longer changing their minds based on events; they're making up their minds early and digging in their heels.

(Those are all Gallup polls, fwiw.)

clearly the way to higher approval ratings is to stage another national disaster

i vote for dinosaur invasion

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warehouse-13-artifact-database/images/9/9a/Fullcabinboard.gif/revision/latest?cb=20170330230817

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warehouse-13-artifact-database/images/9/9a/Fullcabinboard.gif/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20170330230817

oh ffs

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/thecabininthewoods/images/2/29/Cabinboard_span.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/398?cb=20120421035619

I give up

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/thecabininthewoods/images/4/48/Tumblr_m8wg5dW2RD1qbvj0oo1_1280.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/400?cb=20121008042721

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warehouse-13-artifact-database/images/9/9a/Fullcabinboard.gif

would start pooling towards DeSantis, up until I actually heard the guy speak squeak