US Politics, March 2020 — There’s a very good chance you’re not going to die.

...but it's not 100%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDe1DqxwJoc

Good morning!

Where's the cryogenic receipts?

https://www.axios.com/federal-court-ken-cuccinelli-illegal-uscis-director-8479c5d1-0130-4477-bf98-a1e23be19ae0.html

In more ordinary times, I'd say that the onset of a global crisis like COVID-19, in an election year, would be far more likely to help an incumbent president than hurt them. The executive branch will be at the forefront of efforts to protect and aid the public and the vast power and resources at the president's command allows them to become the visible hero of the crisis. Handle the crisis with a modicum of competence, add a dash of public relations flair, and re-election would be a near certainty.

These are not ordinary times.
https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/59d3df26200000fb15084e57.jpeg?cache=5fjvb61ptb&ops=scalefit_720_noupscale

I'm not convinced it will make much of a difference

it wasn't even a good paper towel brand!

oh, I agree he'll still get his 48% of the popular vote and a fistful of EC votes from the south and Midwest no matter how he bungles this. it's more an observation on how a halfway competent incumbent would have their re-election in the bag already. yet, his approval rating has never been above 50% since a couple of days after his inauguration. this crisis ain't gonna help him one bit, even though it would help almost any other incumbent in history.

48% of the popular vote

He got 46.1% in 2016. You think his vote totals are gonna go up in November?

his approval right now is higher than it's ever been.

higher than it's ever been

...and still under 50%

just sayin. my wife was convinced trump was going to win in 2016 and she's convinced he's going to win this time. she doesn't follow election news. i don't know what basis she uses for these predictions. ley lines, maybe. but i do think that whoever gets the nomination is going to have a fuck of a fight on their hands. i'm particularly worried about bernie because young people just don't vote. i want him to win so bad. warren's.... aight but it's very difficult for me to trust anyone who was ever a republican. yeah yeah the good samaritan - i know, but i'm still wary. probably dumb of me. feel like she'd drone-strike the shit out of some people. again, based on nothing, not even ley lines. but like kevin k said, a lot of that's beside the point. the point is, appoint left-wing judges and don't start wars. and maybe actually staff federal departments again. just a thought. m4a and green new deal will require years of bottom-up fighting regardless of who gets the nomination.

and flip the Senate so that presidents get to do more than merely nominate them

~>:/

I heard an interesting piece on the radio about the two types of swing voters. One of course is white voters who swing from Democrat to Republican. But they're relatively small compared to the other swing voters, the ones who swing between voting and not voting. For example, the number of people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump is significantly smaller than the number of people who voted for Obama and then didn't vote in the 2016 election. I'm not sure which of the potential Democratic nominees is strong enough to keep enough of those other swing voters away from sitting it out again.

Was that Ibram X. Kendi on On the Media?

I think so, yeah!

A big part of the electability argument for Bernie is that the presumption that he would be able to turn out voters who didn't vote in 2016 or voted third party.

People who voted for Obama in 2012 and failed to vote in 2016 are "mostly young and nonwhite."

never ever ever ever count on the young vote. they don't vote! obama was once in a lifetime.

if negative aint working really (and its not, despite utter justification), sell “we can have it SO much better” i guess.

Since veracity doesn't matter, promise any old shit.

jk, dont do that.

I just looked up the 18-29 voter turnout since 2004.

2004 presidential: 49.0
2006 midterm: 23.5
2008 presidential: 51.1
2010 midterm: 20.4
2012 presidential: 45.0
2014 midterm: 19.9
2016 presidential: 46.1
2018 midterm: 35.6

Midterm data from here and here. Presidential data from here.

It doesn't look like Obama had a significant effect on turnout, but there was a huge increase between 2014 and 2018 because of Trump.

Of course, that's no guarantee that the 18-29 vote will go up in 2020.

For one, the midterm vote in 2018 was still lower than the presidential vote in 2016, so it's possible that the 2014-to-2018 midterm increase came from people who always vote in presidential elections but don't always vote in midterms.

For another, midterms aren't dependent on a single candidate. If the Democratic nominee doesn't inspire enthusiasm among young voters, they probably won't turn out in great numbers.

midterms are always ~25% below presidential numbers is the thing. the 2018 turnout was extraordinary. the increase in turnout came from anti-trump sentiment, and a smart candidate in 2020 will do the same.

For one, the midterm vote in 2018 was still lower than the presidential vote in 2016,

apples and oranges, though?

was gonna say, the turnout in 2018 overall was the largest since they've kept those figures. after 1970. the highest overall turnout at a midterm was 42% in 1982, and it had shrunk significantly to 36.7 in 2014.

the 16% increase for those 18-29 was the highest of any age group. and although fired up Trumpers may have definitely increased Republican turnout, I'm with m bison, a large portion of that increase was an anti-Trump bloc who helped the Dems pick up 40 seats.

xpost yes, completely apples and oranges. like milo said, Presidential always greatly outpaces midterms. since they've kept records, the lowest turnout for a Presidential election was 48.9% in 1924. The only midterm turnout that exceeded even that figure was....2018.

replace "since they've kept records" with "since 1916".

i swear to fuck - if we are on the election thread in November talking about how polls always miss young people because they don’t have landlines so actually there’s reason to feel good about things i am going to throttle someone

i'm particularly worried about bernie because young people just don't vote.

Minority turnout has a bigger impact. Youth turnout was basically the same between '12 and '16 but minority turnout (and share going to Democrats) dropped, which is where you get the difference between Obama's comfortable re-election and Hillary losing.

For one, the midterm vote in 2018 was still lower than the presidential vote in 2016, so it's possible that the 2014-to-2018 midterm increase came from people who always vote in presidential elections but don't always vote in midterms.

it could also have included people who have never been eligible to vote in a Presidential election, or have been but never voted before. But I don't see why that's a pejorative. Because 2018's referendum on Trump likely inspired that stark increase in voting turnout, 2020 could wind up inspiring people who haven't voted in either type of election to show up.

2012's Pres election was largely won by turnout. If Dems get out the vote, it can happen again.

xpost milo otm

Bernie's strength with the Latinx community should give hope (if you think he'll be the eventual nominee) - there's more room for Democratic voter share to climb with Latinx voters (who also tend to be younger) than with black voters.

I do see higher social media performances by Sanders-following Latinx, but I don't know. We'll see on March 17.

That came out garbled. If you're in Miami and of Hispanic background, Sanders can claim a few fans.

Do any polls in Iowa, Nevada and SC indicate he won them by higher margins than in 2016?

according to cnn, sanders won 50% of the latinx vote last weekend. i dont have the 2016 numbers in front of me, but if i remember correctly, this was a yuge improvement.

https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/state/nevada/polling

sanders lost tx in 2016 by like 30%

Bernie Sanders lidera las encuestas en Texas rumbo al Super Martes y aventaja a Biden en 33% en el voto latino que representa el 40% del total del electorado en ese Estado el segundo con mas delegados -228- en este "Super Tuesday" tras California en donde también lidera Sanders pic.twitter.com/yGkQuA85GR

— Jorge Gestoso (@JorgeGestoso) March 1, 2020

https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/state/nevada/polling

― majority whip, majority nae nae (m bison), S

I saw it but compared to 2016? And what was the turnout? I'm not grilling you btw

https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/primaries/polls/NV/Dem

ah ha! sanders won latinos in nv in 2016, but 53-45.

he closed his deficit with Black voters quite a bit, too. -56% in '16, -10% last week.

what the fuck

Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher shows 60 Minutes his war memorabilia, including the knife seen in his photo with the dead ISIS fighter. https://t.co/nDZBPHA0ub pic.twitter.com/b86c5oI8Qu

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 2, 2020

People accepted and loved by #TheResistance:

✅ David Frum
✅ Bill Kristol
✅ Max Boot
✅ Jennifer Rubin
✅ Steve Schmidt
✅ Rick Wilson

People not accepted and hated by #TheResistance:

🚫 Bernie Sanders
🚫 Nina Turner
🚫 Ilhan Omar
🚫 Rashida Tlaib
🚫 Susan Sarandon

— Ibrahim (@ibrahimpols) March 2, 2020

Like her film choices since 1996, Susan Sarandon's endorsing Jill Stein is evidence of soul rot.

she was pretty good as bette davis in feud

What does it mean to be “loved and accepted by” and “not accepted and hated“ in terms of a hashtag?

Are there data metric systems that measure opinions of user groups that right? Source?

I’m not saying he’s wrong really.

"loved and accepted by" = booked on MSNBC

I feel like people are constantly mishearing "Bill Kristol is right about Trump" as "Bill Kristol is good now" rather than "Trump is so bad that even Bill Kristol, who is now and has always been bad, can't deny it"

yeah, conservatives always have pet liberals-- "Even the liberal x thinks Obamacare goes too far."

Remember the good old days when that was Alan Dershowitz?

I'm picturing all the Republican senators hunkered down in a December stop-coronavirus strategy session, getting called away on some trivial impeachment matter.

Who the fuck does McConnell think he's fucking kidding with that bullshit?!?

well, you see, they were so focused on the case and making a good faith effort to investigate his wrongdoing, there was no time for anything else. really hard to figure out if trump was guilty or not, wow, what a case! many agonizing long nights, thinking about the details and whether or not trump might have been involved in some wrongdoing, or as some allege, if he was in fact the rotting heart of corruption, as if all the corrupt acts flow directly from the president of the united states. luckily after many long nights of the soul all of the republicans (except romney, who is the antichrist) determined in good faith that he did absolutely nothing wrong, at all, and that there was no need to even hear directly from the people who directly spoke with him about the alleged wrongdoings! but wow, all that hard thinking really did wipe out january

fair enough, no worries k3v

xps

k3v and Shakes, happy hour at my place, 5 p.m. Enter through the back. Beers will be on the table. I'll sit 12 feet away.

It's Infrastructure Week motherfuckers!

With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country! Phase 4

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2020

hahahaha

*very upper west side voice*

there were 3 other phases?

shut the front door
you can't make it up

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWJjYzBkMGYtMzRhZi00YWM5LWJmYjUtYzFlNmVmMzU1M2IwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTMxMTY0OTQ@._V1_.jpg

good find! Didn't even know Saul Bass directed a narrative film!

and why he didn't again

"Phase 4" a suitably apocalyptic title for the April politics thread tomorrow.

that film is amazing, one of my favorite 70s horror/scifi films

have you seen it alfred? The extremely batty trailer makes me wanna give it a go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcs3_b3VXSU

it's on hulu!

I highly recommend it, especially the ending sequence, which is total psychedelic batshittery

*adds to queue*

I think there's a thing where there are multiple versions and the recent br release was an edited version? Is why I haven't seen it yet.

yeah there is a version out there without the ending iirc

we're both assholes, Shakey, i'm just correct more often

(also funnier)

*rimshot*

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQ6vKsZXYAE5Hu6.jpg

I assume when it happens and Trump is asking his aides and Congress for updates on infrastructure reform he'll ask them if the "infra has been structured yet"

There's a super fancy Blu-Ray of Phase IV coming out in about a week, with the original ending and a ton of supplemental material, plus a 200-page hardcover book. Unfortunately, it's Region B.

Thanks for the encouragement, all.

A reminder to some of his new TV fans that Andy Cuomo is a major shit

https://gothamist.com/news/cuomo-medicaid-cuts-coronavirus-aid

it's always hilarious when McConnell gets ahead of Trump, funny how he hasn't learned his lesson.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hit the brakes Tuesday on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) plan to move ahead with a fourth stimulus package that would include major infrastructure spending and other Democratic priorities.

“I think we need to wait a few days here, a few weeks, and see how things are working out,” McConnell said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”

“Let’s see how things are going and respond accordingly,” he added. “I’m not going to allow this to be an opportunity for the Democrats to achieve unrelated policy items that they would not otherwise be able to pass.”

McConnell's remarks came the same day that President Trump encouraged Congress to pass a $2 trillion infrastructure bill as the next piece of coronavirus legislation.

"With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill," Trump tweeted.

The Phase IV soundtrack was reissued, or maybe first issued in 2015. It is excellent!

Me, I'm looking forward to the lush swirl of

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tROZ-QijxoM/V9ODBm4AJ7I/AAAAAAAAWLk/bGsL6osb_yMetNYYehl20yhmkkUM1NINQCLcB/s1600/mxr-phase-95.jpg

My proposal to the politically correct Automobile Companies would lower the average price of a car to consumers by more than $3500, while at the same time making the cars substantially safer. Engines would run smoother. Positive impact on the environment! Foolish executives!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2020

here's what I would do if I ran a hospital: I'd make my own ventilators for cheap. they'd be much better than the ones we've got now. everybody lives!!

what's really sad is that he's talking there about his administration's decision to roll back the fuel economy standards that obama set into place, not even as a favor to the automobile industry (believe it or not they actually advocated for keeping the existing standards, which are more in alignment with Europe and other countries), but just because obama did it.

honestly I think this will be like his attempts to save the coal industry - ie a failure because the market's already made its judgment

obviously lying about the positive impact on the environment (shocker: in terms of climate change, this is his biggest and final move to increase US emisisons). and on the face of it it seems VERY dubious to tell people that the price of cars is going to go down by $3500 while not mentioning that they're going to have to buy more gasoline per mile.

by the way, the standards they dropped it to are so low that they're below even what the industry is already doing by itself:

The new rule, which is expected to be implemented by late spring, will roll back a 2012 rule that required automakers’ fleets to average about 54 miles per gallon by 2025. Instead, the fleets would have to average about 40 miles per gallon.

To meet the new number, fuel economy standards would have to rise by about 1.5 percent a year, compared to the 5 percent annual increase required by the Obama rule. The auto industry, without any regulation, has recently achieved an average annual increase in fuel economy of 2.4 percent.

why bother with the carrot and the stick? you don't need either! just do whatever

if it's a failure to make climate change even worse, than that's the best case scenario. but the pessimist in me also notes it's also a failure to press for strong economy standards that actually PUSH the auto industry to improve fuel economy more than they otherwise would. in other words, in an ongoing climate crisis, it's a very obvious missed opportunity to at least press them to do something more than BAU

guys my band's opening for the trump show. doors at 5.

its such a strange thing to get hung up on, nobody's advocating this and there's no constituency for it. it really is just trying to further shit on Obama's legacy

hey, if you see trump, please yell at the top of your lungs "YOU TREASONOUS WHITE COLLAR MURDEROUS FUCKING ASSHOLE!!" as many time as possible. find the tv cameras and look for the boom microphones sticking out of them. find the guys with headphones near the cameras - they are likely producers or sound dudes, and will have mics as well. aim your bad words toward those microphones, it's the only way

I will. Hang on!

ALfred!
ALfred!
ALfred!

curse! curse! curse! curse!

it's a low-probability thing but i am going to go ahead and make a weird witch's brew of cursing ingrendients, foliage, body parts, powder, etc, and come up with something that i can throw at him as well. hoping one of the ingredients will literally put a curse on him and he'll die

The most hilarious part about this is that the auto industry is raising fuel standards because they are hopelessly politically correct.

i am so sick of these liberal "PC" heavy manufacturing industries

fucking farm to table SUVs

I automatically read the last sentence in that tweet in a Gollum voice, makes a change from reading it all in a Paul Stanley voice like I normally do to keep myself sane

https://twitter.com/nahaltoosi/status/1245103140610936832

Trump pushes $2 trillion infrastructure package in next coronavirus bill. Citing low interest rates, the president tweeted that now is the time to push forward with a “VERY BIG & BOLD” infrastructure package.

Always a bad sign ...

I didn't watch yesterday's Trump conference but CNN seemed to be painting it last night as some kind of pivotal moment where he was forced to face reality and lay out some serious shit for the US people (and he did a bad job, well duh). Anyone else get that sense?

US Politics, April 2020 -- Where's the Vax Returns?