US Politics, September 2024 -- “I’m Not Going to Apologize For Posting a Joke”

Gotta guess Teamsters going with a non-endorsement is hedging against a Harris win.

Just Billie Eilish is on Team Bratmala, so neener-neener to the Teamsters.

*just heard

Yikes at those percentages

that's gotta be racism and sexism inherent in teamsters' membership, no? given how widely they supported Biden against Trump.

their polling methods were completely different before and after biden dropped out, so i don't think you can compare them in that way.

(straw poll before, actual random poll after)

Nothing turned up on name-search, so I assume this hasn't come up yet?

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/politics/video/sarah-huckabee-sanders-kamala-harris-kids-humble-comments-src-digvid

No kids myself, probably why I'm such an arrogant bastard.

Year 44 of being so tired of this shit

"Kamala has no humility...and now please welcome..."

It’s probably easy to be humble when you’re as worthless as SHS.

What jumped out to me about that wasn't just the no-kids stuff but that they've found yet another way to call a Black woman uppity.

They’re inventive like that.

The whole childless woman thing is such a political loser, I don't know why they keep at it... must be a Stephen Miller thing

amping misogyny (etc.) might keep "the base" turned out in sufficient numbers to pretend november 5 that mr. trump has enough voters to be POTUS

The "poll numbers" that were posted in that Teamsters article are what really didn't pass the smell test; sure enough it looks like they came from voluntary surveys only some rank and file replied to https://t.co/kCM5jhq9pW

— undecided voter (@lib_crusher) September 18, 2024

A thread:

The thing to know about the Teamsters lack of an endorsement is that every single union (or almost) has nothing even approaching a useful political education program for either members or staffers. It's a complete, unmitigated disaster across the board.

— Erik Loomis (@ErikLoomis) September 18, 2024

well at least some Teamsters endorsed her

California Teamsters endorse Harris after national union declines to back any candidate

Black Teamsters did a couple of weeks ago IIRC

I've heard anecdotally that O'Brien's fickleness has to do more with his own political standing with the union, and less with national politics

if trump keeps getting people in a froth about immigration will that lead to more votes? he seems to think so. keep feeling like kamala or walz needs to get those idiots talking about something else. something that makes them sound even more crazy. i really wish she would go harder on how awful covid was with trump. remind people just how bleak and apocalyptic it felt for a lot of people. but maybe that's too negative for her. she has done it a little bit. i can't remember if she has done an ad about it. people need to be reminded of his incompetence every day until election day.

from what I'm seeing after the most cursory channel-surfing this afternoon before dinner, the Springfield story, blessedly, has NOT gone away and has gotten worse

The most damaging retort Harris can make about Trump's position on immigration is to hammer away at the provisions in the bipartisan immigration bill that Trump deliberately killed last spring. It would put him back on the defensive and turn his own rhetoric back on him, as in:

"You say the situation at the border is destroying the country, but we could have had X, Y & Z happening TODAY, right now, because both Democrats and Republicans came together and created a bill that would have done all that. It would have passed. It would have been signed into law. It would be happening this very minute, but you killed it. Why? So you could continue to complain about all these problems that we wanted to solve and you stopped it! How do you explain that?"

I grant you the bill was no great leap forward to a saner immigration policy from a progressive standpoint, but it would go some distance toward disarming Trump's most potent issue.

Scott, this Springfield thing is hurting, not helping Trump.

the Springfield story, blessedly, has NOT gone away and has gotten worse

yeah, on tuesday Gov DeWine pushed back a little more forcefully in defense of Haitians there

Well, Vance has moved on, at least; today in North Carolina he said he wants to strip away Obamacare's protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Direct quote: "We're going to actually implement some regulatory reform in the health care system that allows people to choose a healthcare plan that works for them. If you only go to the doctor once a year, you're going to need a different health care plan than somebody who goes to the doctor fourteen times a year because they've got chronic pain or they've got some other chronic condition.

That's the biggest and most important thing that we have to change. Now, what that will also do is allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools, so that makes our health care system work better, makes it work better for the people with chronic issues, it also makes it work better for everybody else."

Thread here:

🟡NEW: JD Vance reopens the pre-existing condition debates

His NBC interview Sunday included several apparent references to Trump-era proposals to replace or pare back the ACA's protections for pre-ex conditions.

Why's that so notable? Trump has pointedly not said if he'd try…

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) September 18, 2024

probably more for the local news thread, but our absolute catastrophe of a mayor just endorsed a godawful basketball arena in the heart of the city that is guaranteed to destroy Chinatown and decimate surrounding businesses. i hate her.

Ugh I hate sports welfare

"Scott, this Springfield thing is hurting, not helping Trump."

i guess you're right. it has been so relentless i thought maybe it was somehow working for him. stoking the fear and xenophobia. but it would make a lot more sense for him to go after harris/biden on the economy since that is probably their most effective argument at rallies. "we were doing great until the pandemic and then the awful country-destroying kamala harris, etc, etc!". that kind of thing.

There’s absolutely no strategy in his campaign now. He wouldn’t listen to his original campaign managers (LaCivita and ???) who came up with the Swift Boat thing in 2004 and had a long track record of success running republican campaigns, people who might actually know what they are doing. So he re-hired Corey Lewandowski who was in charge of his 2016 campaign until he became a sex pest. Lewandowski’s philosophy is “Let Trump Be Trump”, and Trump thinks that is how he won in 2016, and not because it was a fucking fluke.

several xps - I think I recall that Harris did raise the immigration related bill that Asshole killed and concluded that it’s because he wants to campaign on problems not implement solutions, or similar

(during the debate I mean)

there's not really anything left to stoke, all the devoted racists are already in his pocket and he doesn't really have any credibility with the Dem NIMBY crowd

I think the big problem for him is he's just out of juice, he doesn't want to listen to anyone else not just because of ego but because he doesn't want to put in the work to actually learn things and stay on message. one thing I keep coming back to is the way they had to keep dumbing down his security briefings because he was so uninterested in them. the guy cannot stand to be bored.

Trump Being Trump And Not Just Another Evangelical Creep Republican is how we won in 2016 but that guy is dead. He’s bogged down in all the same culture war shit as other Republicans, mentally declining and no longer an outsider to anyone but his most delusional base.

He doesn’t really have another option but to keep it up and hope enough people dislike Kamala more than they dislike him.

Trump's electoral college (but not popular vote) victory in 2016 felt very much like a fluke, and that fluke was attached to whale the size of the US electorate and struck those of us who found his victory unimaginable about as hard. We were stunned, hurt, and incredulous. His electoral college loss in 2020 was relieving, but far narrower in real terms than it ever should have been.

Trump has ceased to surprise me. He's a monstrosity. But it's hard not to remember that, no matter what kind of disorganized campaign Trump is running this year, the US electorate has twice proved its ability to vote for him in numbers that beggar my imagination (when I think of just what sort of monster all those votes were cast for). This time around I'm hopeful, but I have no illusion of certainty.

Yeah at this point it’s just basically racism and sexism vs. everything else. And that’s why it’s close.

the sad thing is Trump's shit really did become normalized the way everyone said we can't allow it to be. Congress is full of insane people now and even allowed George Santos to become a bona fide Congressman. the fact that he lies about everything isn't news anymore. nor is the fact that he's a felon and a fascist. that's what the Republican party is now. so if Trump was the same guy he was in 2016 I think he'd have a real shot, but he's gotten a lot more weirder and more obnoxious over time

who is “we” here? xxp

The "we" I intended in my "we were stunned, hurt, and incredulous" was primarily the ilx hivemind, but I think it can be applied far more broadly to the many tens of millions who voted for HRC and still capture a large amount of truth.

I mean I didn't want to admit it but all the one-liners and nicknames and Twitter shit really did turn out to be good politics given the way the modern media landscape is. the man really did shitpost his way into the Republican nomination, and then the presidency. and he's right that the one thing everyone remembers about this debate is the cats and dogs thing. people just don't give a shit. the main story out of last election's VP debate was that a fly landed on Mike Pence's head. trouble is he went from one of the best posters ever to the guy who posts insane 500 word rants on Nextdoor. his instincts have left him to the point where he's let unlikeable losers like JD Vance and Laura Loomer into his inner circle.

As opposed to those likeable fellows, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller?

those people at least had some kind of political sense

some kind of political sense

We were told as much after they were given the bulk of credit for a successful presidential campaign, but their subsequent careers have not exactly been crowned by repeated successes. It's hard to pinpoint what acumen they supplied beyond getting Trump into the race and not trying to tone down his racism and penchant for constantly lying.

I'm not arguing they're brilliant minds or anything. Miller in particular seems very dim. but I don't think even he would admit on TV that he's making up fake stories because he thinks racism helps the campaign.

also neither are the VP, who is gonna be your second most visible person. the Mike Pence pick was absolutely the correct one for 2016 - he seemed boring and normal enough, and the Evangelicals liked him, which was important because at the time there was this idea that the human embodiment of all seven deadly sins might be a turn-off for them. but JD Vance fucking sucks. he's incredibly off-putting and he makes for terrible TV. Trump used to have some kind of sense of these things. and Loomer is so obviously insane you'd think he'd know you don't want any association with her whatsoever. the Trump of 2016 at least had the sense to not fully embrace David Duke.

as a counterpoint to the weird undecided youth at the times: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2024/kamala-harris-brat-summer/

Trump Being Trump And Not Just Another Evangelical Creep Republican is how we won in 2016 but that guy is dead.

I think he won in 2016 because of "I know the system is rigged...because I use it". Lines similar to that, but that one in particular.

And he passed the "turn the sound down and judge who won" test

He is flunking the Sound Down test this time time around. Stuff like this does matter, it why some two time Trump voters will vote for Kamala. People hear the tone and fill in their own words, to varying degrees

reading this is what kinda drove me nuts and thought his insanity was actually working on people. this also means that half of his voters don't believe him but don't care and are voting for him anyway:

More than half of Trump supporters believe the unsubstantiated claim made by the former president that Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating cats and dogs, according to a new poll.
a new poll, conducted by YouGov between September 11 and September 12, shows that 52 percent of likely 2024 Trump voters believe that the claim is "definitely" or "probably" true, compared to just 4 percent of likely 2024 Harris voters. Meanwhile, only 25 percent of likely 2024 Trump voters believe that the claim is "definitely" or "probably" false, while 24 percent said they are not sure. Of the likely 2024 Harris voters, 88 percent believe the claim is false and 8 percent are not sure.

The poll also shows that 46 percent of registered Republicans "definitely" or "probably" believe the claim, while 29 percent believe it is not true and 24 percent are not sure.

That is compared to 8 percent of registered Democrats who answered that the claim is "definitely" or "probably" true, and 81 percent who said it is false. Ten percent of Democrats said they were not sure.

Democrats also being racist idiots in huge shocka

What matters is that the pet story is emotionally true.

Answering a pollster in the way most likely to tRigGer tHe liBs is the important thing. Doing this is not normal verbal communication, it is a speech act, done to get a dopamine release. It has the approximate linguistic sophistication of a chimp flinging feces.

In a recent poll, 88% of Trump supporters said that their responses to polls is 93% motivated by a sentiment best described as "because fuck you, that's why."