rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

We'll see what happens down the stretch, but Biden's Hispanic problem looks very real. Looking at pre-election polling from 2016 and now, it seems Biden's ~10 pts off the Clinton pace among Hispanics in FL and nationally. https://t.co/GWmMOsnhrY

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) September 15, 2020

i know i was asking about this recently, re: poor performance with hispanic people in FL. FL seems like an especially complicated situation.

anyone have thoughts on what is driving this, elsewhere? it's baffling to me, but i am obviously underinformed

Startd listening, Karl, at the 30-min. mark. The dude interviewed by Silver is an acquaintance, a Cuban American and former MIamian:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/why-some-latino-voters-are-backing-trump/

I totally get why one would be wary of noted Castro copycat Joe Biden.

from the Enten story. Fascinating:

Perhaps not surprisingly, Biden's best path to the White House largely relies on winning states Trump won four years ago and where Hispanics voters make up less than 5% of the electorate. Specifically, Biden has been up by at least five points over the last two months in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Indeed, Biden can struggle with Hispanic voters and still win the election. It's, in fact, something he's doing right now. Biden is up by seven points nationally and has at least a trivial advantage in the six closest states Trump won four years ago: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Biden is able to do so because he has countered his relative weakness with Hispanic voters by doing extremely well with White voters. Biden has cut Clinton's deficit among White voters in the pre-election polls from about 13 points in 2016 to a scant four points now.
The result is a Biden lead nationally and in the swing states because White voters make up about seven times the percentage of the electorate Hispanics do nationally and at least three times (though in some cases many more times) in the closest swing states Trump won in 2016.

thanks alfred!

That interview I linked to is even better than I thought; this is what I'd share with white friends struggling to understand the complexity of the "Hispanic vote."

Can I guess? Respectability politics, evangelical beliefs, fear of the fake bogeyman of Communism?

I don't know how you define "respectability politics" here. I'd add: fear of immigrants, fear of a wobbly economy.

Fair enough. In this case, respectability politics means the sort of talk about 'well we worked hard and came here the right way and these new people are just lazy' etc etc.

Oh, yeah! That's certainly a trope with those Cubans who came here before 2000.

came here the right way

under the most lenient and generous immigration status granted by the US government to any population in the world

I've heard that from non-Cubans, too, though.

Perhaps Biden needs to be photographed eating a taco bowl

https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/3479ac3/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048x1365+0+0/resize/1680x1120!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F27%2Fcc%2F54445f484154aeb8d9c652b69d20%2Flat-bidengarcetti-la0094685552-20190508

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/media-mistakes/616222/

I need a mask to protect me from that gastronomical horror.

There's yet another article from The Atlantic magazine linked upthread, this one about the news media and its failures in covering Trump. The article is otm from start to finish. It's thesis is here:

if it doesn’t adapt, fast, the press will stand as yet another institution that failed in a moment of crucial pressure.

Narrator: ... (eh, you can fill in the rest of the joke that is increasingly less funny and more sad every day.)

I need a mask to protect me from that gastronomical horror.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, September 15, 2020 1:36 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

just looks like they are eating tacos

lol I read that as "locusts"

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/joe-biden-youth-vote-turnout/616168/

Some of the messages Baumann tried on the group didn’t perform very well. For instance, participants didn’t like being told that Trump is so bad, they simply must vote for Biden, even if they don’t particularly want to. “They needed positive reasons to do it,” Baumann told me. The “You must stop Trump” strategy didn’t work.

They’re catching on!

He came up with what NextGen now calls “the Democratic Avengers,” after the Marvel movie featuring an ensemble of superheroes.

... oh

The critical 12 year old demographic is going wild for Biden

Scientific American just endorsed him, apparently.

He came up with what NextGen now calls “the Democratic Avengers,” after the Marvel movie featuring an ensemble of superheroes.

as I quoted on the Biden thread:

In May, NextGen announced it planned to spend $45 million to help Biden beat Trump. […]

The Democratic Avengers has since become one of the group’s most popular messages about Biden, according to its surveys[…]

The Avengers-style ad by NextGen had 145 views on YouTube when I last played it.

My 15-year-old, who has watched all the Marvel movies, really liked the Democratic Avengers thing -- I don't think it was the official NextGen thing, it was some homemade mod of the big battle sequence from Avengers 4 with Democrats' heads pasted over the Avengers? Anyway, he can't vote.

I think the 154 YouTube views thing is a bit silly, political ads aren't supposed to be watched that way.

How do you think political ads that exist only on social media are supposed to be viewed?

Generally speaking, those ads are uploaded separately to Twitter; they're not YouTube embeds. So thousands of people will see the tweet, but only a few hundred will see the ad on YouTube (unless they pay for it to run as an ad in front of someone else's video).

Yes, exactly.

Very few ads have people searching them out to view them by choice, they still can be successful ads without going viral.

I did an advanced search on twitter for August 1 to September 4th and it just gave me people aggrieved by the Atlantic article yesterday, no postings of the video from August

Rachel Bitecofer has spoken. There's a lot to read, but things are looking not-good for the world's shittiest human (and they're not looking much better for the world's second-shittiest human, Mitch McConnell).

tossup in alaska huh

After being introduced by Luis Fonsi, Joe Biden pulled out his phone and started playing Despacito ahead of his remarks kicking off Hispanic Heritage Month in Kissimmee, FL. pic.twitter.com/7R6hUZgLW1

— Sarah Mucha (@sarahmucha) September 16, 2020

Putting this here instead of the Biden thread for reasons

Lord help us

My first day on the job as a political consultant. Getting on google and searching “what do latinos want”

— wholesome on main (@InternetHippo) September 16, 2020

someone should hip him to the best taco bowls in Manhattan

A sad truth from Rachel Bitecofer in the article unpeson linked:

the inelasticity of American public opinion is a symptom of a democracy in full-blown crisis. A healthy “body politic” does not remain unresponsive to political stimulus on an epic scale. Ours alone is the only democracy in which the public flatlined in this way.

I think a lot about 9/11 and what if something like that happened under Trump's watch. GWB infamously got up to 92% approval but I doubt Trump's wound even budge up to 50

That’s more about Trump than anything else though. Most of the public is just begging to rally around the flag during these types of national emergencies but he’s fundamentally incapable of even momentarily faking gravitas and empathy in a halfway convincing manner

the public rallied around Bush's massive erection for a year or so. god those were shit times.

The 40% of people who would approve of Trump after another attack like 9/11 would be completely convinced that the Democrats conspired to do it to hurt “us”

a friend of mine had a grandpa who was loudly screaming that Dems planted people in nursing homes so they would die of COVID in large numbers, so u probably right

I don't know ms Bitecofer, but that poll of hers looks good?

Texas a toss-up also.

He is desperate for that Hispanic vote.

bro this is literally a list of countries we've done coups in pic.twitter.com/Wg2hisEYdf

— dadpilled goat (@tamrieldude) September 16, 2020

That interview I linked to is even better than I thought; this is what I'd share with white friends struggling to understand the complexity of the "Hispanic vote."

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 15 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe someone should show that interview to Biden's team?

I would think the American press never recovered from their failure to confront the blatant lies that led to genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan

i'm excerpting this from TPM "Prime", where i am co-founder and co-treasurer. but it hits on a lot of recent anxieties, for me at least.

after briefly recounting the recent (insane) stuff from Caputo, the HHS comms chief /trump stooges, he writes:

...Caputo comes to Trump’s world as a longtime associate of Roger Stone. Stone himself is on the air calling on Trump to defy electoral defeat, declare martial law and order the mass arrests of political opponents like the Clintons and Obamas. He justifies this with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud by Democrats. Mark Levin, onetime legal commentator and now full time reactionary, is pushing the President to “use the Insurrection Act” to put down ‘insurrections’ in the country’s big cities. Levin adds that Trump needs to be ready to fire the top brass and appointees at the Pentagon when they resist his order to unleash US military troops on US civilians.

A consistent theme in all these threats and predictions is how the mix of protests, occasional looting and general civil unrest of recent months and the purported need to restore order by force morphs into post election scenarios in which the election must be decided by a resort to arms.

Seeded through all of this are increasingly histrionic and nonsensical claims of murderous violence that Republicans are allegedly responding to. In Caputo’s rant he claims that a “resistance unit” of politicized CDC scientists was plotting to murder him. This is nonsense but nonsense with a concrete purpose – it makes murderous responses sound reasonable, justified, logical.

We should note that the President himself has gotten into this. Over the weekend in an interview with Fox’s Jeanine Pirro, Pirro falsely claimed that Democrats were threatening mass rioting if they lose the election (another bogus claim now repeatedly asserted in the Fox News universe). She asked what the President would do about it.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that, if we want,” Trump said. “Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in, and we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes.”

The comments are often treated by the mainstream press as bizarre digressions by the President or random comments. But you can see from these other statements that they’re not random at all. Pirro’s question and Trump’s answer both emerge out of this drumbeat from Trump’s most aggressive supporters that the election will need to be settled by force and particularly by the President calling out the US military and declaring something like martial law.

Let me be clear as a gut check on this. I don’t think any of this stuff is going to happen. I’m not predicting. I don’t think it’s likely for many different reasons. But when we are talking about looking back in six months, we should be very aware now that the President’s most aggressive and potentially violent supporters – in interplay with the President himself – are already laying the argumentative groundwork for such an outcome – a series of justifications, an argument that the opposition started it and made it necessary, a series of purportedly legal mechanisms for what amounts to a post-election putsch against the government itself.

i guess when your daily tv diet is tucker carlson and hannity, levin seems like just another pro-trump option. but that guy is fucking insane, and it is creepy as hell to hear Trump say “Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in, and we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes", knowing that he's just echoing levin

the similarity of his voice to Master Shake makes it hard for me to parse how nakedly evil he actually is