US Politics: July 2020 - "Denigrating this Luxury Avenue"

Headaches aside I thought voter turnout has been *up* in a lot of recent elections.

Georgia Democrats cast more than three times as many votes in the Senate primary as they did in 2016

we're going to have voting problems here, but turnout will not be one of them

A) Kentucky was, as described, not voter suppression but rather "keep the voters alive if possible"
B) Turnout is way up on the D side, up but not by nearly as much on the R side. Folks are invested in getting rid of Donald Trump.

Quick google:

Lead re: GA: "Democrats cast close to a million votes in the Senate primary, more than triple the number in the 2016 primary."

Lead re: KY: "Kentucky's primary election turnout broke records before a single polling location opened Tuesday, but despite the high interest, in-person voting at limited polling locations seemed to flow smoothly."

xpost

As I understand it, there was just one polling location for 600,000 Louisville voters that stayed open for a a WHOPPING 30 minutes extra to accommodate the overflow?

(I am fully prepared to be wrong, but I'd gotten the story about Kentucky from a friend who worked on the Booker campaign). And apologies if I missed something re. Georgia, but isn't it well-established that Kemp ordered the rollout of an enormous batch of new voting machines w/ wildly insufficient training for clerks all around the state)?

As I understand it, KY made a good effort to shift towards mail in voting and the lack of polling places was not in fact down to pure voter suppression as it has been elsewhere.

This covers KY. https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/06/kentucky-the-day-after

I'm trying to imagine the batshittedness that is coming should one of these full on Q believers that made it past primaries end up in Congress.

Relax your crack old lunch!

I'm trying to imagine the batshittedness that is coming should one of these full on Q believers that made it past primaries end up in Congress.

Honestly, how much worse will it be than the current House, which has Jim Jordan and Louie Gohmert in it?

i'm more curious about who will be the first sitting representative to "join" the Q caucus

louie gohmert, for example. i'm surprised he's not already a loud Q advocate, it seems right up his alley

and Matt Gaetz xpost

Oh I'm well aware of the borderline cases we have already, but someone fresh coming into Congress more or less explicitly feeling like they have a mandate to represent as a Q supporter will really up the batshit levels.

i read https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/upshot/poll-trump-defectors-2020-election.html so you don't have to

this is the good quote, don't bother with the rest

"I think if he weren’t such an appalling human being, he would make a great president"

if only he weren't made of meat, he would be good horse fodder

let no-one marinate rent-free in your crack

The appalling human being thing, that's pretty weird. I occasionally look at that Ask Trump Supporters reddit board and a lot of his defenders are the opposite: he is an appalling human being, but I think he is a good president. A big number of posters there seemed to concede that if he stopped tweeting so much he'd have much higher numbers. But then, they are Trump supporters, so by definition think he is a good president.

this is the good quote, don't bother with the rest

Sorry, but you're overlooking "He said he was going to, quote unquote, drain the swamp, and all he’s done is splashed around and rolled around in it"

Right, the "yeah, he could probably tone it down on Twitter, but that doesn't change my support" set is prevalent there.

1. Yes he's coarse and crude but he's doing what I want in government.

2. Yes he's sometimes overly thin-skinned but he's way better than Clinton (or Biden or any D alternative).

3. Yes, I wish he wasn't so childish on Twitter, but judges, economy, strong on immigration, etc.

xp

Sorry, but you're overlooking "He said he was going to, quote unquote, drain the swamp, and all he’s done is splashed around and rolled around in it"

― but also fuck you (unperson), Wednesday, July 1, 2020 5:26 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that sounds like something hilary's team would workshop for a week and then schedule to tweet at 9am on a monday morning

Sorry, I cannot read a piece about Republican voters that was not reported from a folksy rural diner.

Thank you to those who read that. I saw it and was like 'do I truly care what a bunch of racist assholes who pretend they're not really think about anything?'

I'm not quite ready to relax my crack

true thread title imo

keep healthcare in the news

By my count, @cprwarner asked Senator Gardner six times whether he supports the Trump administration's attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and Gardner never answered. #cosen #copolitics

A transcript: pic.twitter.com/1b4bElEcvh

— Justin Wingerter (@JustinWingerter) July 1, 2020

It's real. https://t.co/Fhnw0o2iT4

— Bad Fox Graphics (@BadFoxGraphics) July 1, 2020

im out yall

https://newrepublic.com/article/158344/viral-impotency-lincoln-project

if Trump wins again, then truly nothing means anything anymore when it comes to campaigning. as awful as previous presidents like Dubya were, they at least PRETENDED that they were trying to win the votes of most Americans. almost every single thing Trump does and says scans like an attempt to cater to absolutely no one except the group of people who would already walk through fire for his dumb ass. as far as I know your vote doesn't count double if you orgasm while casting it, but it certainly seems like that's what he's aiming to elicit from his cultists.

Online donors poured a record $392 million into campaigns and causes via ActBlue in June, a sign of surging activism and political enthusiasm on the left that smashed the previous monthly high, from just before the 2018 election, by a whopping 50 percent.

The eye-popping numbers on ActBlue, the favored digital fundraising platform for the Democratic Party as well as a growing host of left-leaning nonprofits, make for a startling split-screen next to Great Depression-level unemployment and spiking coronavirus cases across the country.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/actblue-june-protests-coronavirus-347492

86 percent of the president’s 2016 voters are committed to voting for him again. (Six percent say there is “not really any chance” of them casting another ballot for the president, while 8 percent have said that they no longer support the president but are not sure if they will vote for him again.)

In other words, Trump is going to lose. He can't afford to shed a single voter.

I think he’s going to lose but that’s not true.

Certainly isn't what you want the electorate to think before the vote happens. Great way to create wpathy about turn out if so. Want people to actually engage in voting not think it's already won.

it's 12:42 am, chicago time, united states, 2020

it is finally time to ask the question:

what has the republican party gotten right since 1980 that the democrats didn't?

what did they take a position on that now seems to be good a decision. give them some credit. what did they do right?

it is 12:45 AM

Democrats and their base are interested in principles. Republicans and their base are focused on power, and thus are better able to retain it without principles getting in the way of what they need to do.

oh sorry I read your post as meaning "why do they have more power than their support base would seem able to give them" not "when did they make a principled stand", the answer to which is never, unless the appearance of principle added to their power base.

surely there must have been at least one time

I tell you what, googling "good decisions made by Republicans" is pretty hilarious

This Sartre quote is apt:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past

From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/isnt-hillary-clintons-polling/613690/">the Atlantic:

Which scenario is more likely: that Biden will blurt out something in the next few months that alienates women voters whose support he needs, or that Trump will express support for white supremacists that alienates almost everyone? That the economy suddenly kicks into high gear after a few months, or that millions of people remain unemployed? That America gets the coronavirus under control, or that new outbreaks tear through state after state? The escalating number of infections and hospitalizations, as The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein recently pointed out, is wreaking havoc in the very suburban counties of Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and Texas that Trump needs to carry.

Even before the pandemic, the American political landscape had changed dramatically since Trump’s election, and not in ways that favor the incumbent. Biden’s big poll lead should not make Democrats complacent, but neither should members of my party shake their heads and think, Here it comes again. Rather, the current polls should persuade Democrats to work for the greatest possible rejection of a widely distrusted U.S. president and the political party that enables him.

From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/isnt-hillary-clintons-polling/613690">the Atlantic:

Which scenario is more likely: that Biden will blurt out something in the next few months that alienates women voters whose support he needs, or that Trump will express support for white supremacists that alienates almost everyone? That the economy suddenly kicks into high gear after a few months, or that millions of people remain unemployed? That America gets the coronavirus under control, or that new outbreaks tear through state after state? The escalating number of infections and hospitalizations, as The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein recently pointed out, is wreaking havoc in the very suburban counties of Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and Texas that Trump needs to carry.

Even before the pandemic, the American political landscape had changed dramatically since Trump’s election, and not in ways that favor the incumbent. Biden’s big poll lead should not make Democrats complacent, but neither should members of my party shake their heads and think, Here it comes again. Rather, the current polls should persuade Democrats to work for the greatest possible rejection of a widely distrusted U.S. president and the political party that enables him.

Broadly agree but “almost everyone” is doing a lot of work in that first sentence considering Trump already has expressed support for white supremacists many times.

He's not even trying to hide it:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eb4NNZGUEAEKLXx?format=jpg&name=medium

An amusing aside from this Reuters piece:

Trump's falling poll numbers worry some fellow Republicans they will lose control of the U.S. Senate, having already lost leadership of the House of Representatives in 2018.

The source said perhaps as soon as August, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may have to advise Republican Senate candidates to distance themselves from Trump if needed to win election and keep their majority.

McConnell's office did not respond to a request for comment.

It would be incredible to see Asshole spend the last few weeks/months of his "campaign" raging at Republicans on twitter.

So another job for Kushner, aka the Dauphin.

"ma'am, what's your name?"

"Donna Rhia"

^^^ Reminds me of my all time favorite punk rock stage name - 45 Grave singer Dinah Cancer.

Kusnher should be spit upon by every New Yorker that sees him. I hope they make it so bad him and the princess cannot live in their tower no more.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/928628/white-house-reportedly-scrapped-national-testing-plan-because-virus-mostly-hitting-blue-states

I also guess this is why I got a couple of media mail orders that got scanned in Lexington nearly a month ago and not moved since.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/postal-service-backlog-sparks-worries-that-ballot-delivery-could-be-delayed-in-november/2020/07/30/cb19f1f4-d1d0-11ea-8d32-1ebf4e9d8e0d_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most

I bet this is a big damn mess considering it makes total sense to cut hours when everyone in the f-ing country is doing mailorder more than ever.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/trump-says-he-will-ban-tiktok-through-executive-action-as-soon-as-saturday.html

That'll Learn 'Em

cool another thing he can't do that'll languish in courts for months

another thing he can't do

There's probably some overly broad law passed by a supine Congress that allows the president to declare TikTok a threat to national security, or an unfair competitor to US business, or some other vague bin it can be shoved into without much in the way of defined and measurable criteria. There are an amazing number of such laws and all it takes is a phalanx of assiduous lawyers searching the gazillion pages of the US law code to find some suitable fig leaf Trump can claim gives him that power.

another good point pointed out by Aimless, thanks Aimless

oh well fuck TikTok anyway

We beat Obama 4 years ago, he worked harder than Crooked Hillary, and we’ll do it again! https://t.co/oaqnlkr7bW

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2020

this seems like one of the questions that would've been on the cognitive test

he's referring to the peepee incident

"Crooked Hillary"...dusting off the old chestnuts.

Banning TikTok might be the trigger to drive record 18-24 turnout.

be so good if Tik Tok helped ban him, probably going to happen anyway isn't it.
nice precedent from tulsa anyway.

What's the real motivation behind the tik tok thing? I suspect it has little to do with security, or even China. Is it just another "I can do what I want" gesture, or merely trying to piss a certain demographic off? This is so bizarre

Sarah Cooper's videos, probably.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/31/portland-protests-latest-peaceful-night-federal-troops-withdrawal

does this mean the americapocalypse is cancelled

dusting off the old chestnuts

Sounds like a euphemism

New month, new thread?

still voting for The Country Is In Very Good Shape Other Than If You Look South or West

"The August 2020 US Politics Thread is highly thought of, but nobody likes me. It can only be my personality. That's all."

So many good options, sorry Morbs.