Can we please stop with the whole “if the Republicans make the country terrible enough, they will start losing!”
No. That’s a terrible strategy. It worked once, with the repeal of abortion protections, and even then it didn’t work super well. And the tradeoff was not worth it. Women are dying.
Voters, especially Republican voters, are so stupid and brainwashed that they will believe the GOP when the GOP tells them that it’s actually Democrats (and immigrants etc etc) who have made their lives worse.
What blows my mind is how many people these poles seem to say think that Donald Trump’s economic policies are so great. The fact is that he, in four short years, undid nearly all of the economic growth that Obama built on for eight full years. And that was before he mishandled the pandemic so unfathomably badly that our country is still recovering from it four years later.
It is just mind boggling that there are people, that aren’t a part of his moronic base, who see him as anything but a buffoon.
The people still supporting Trump, by and large, live in an entirely different reality than the rest of us. Even among Republicans, the belief that Biden actually won the last election or that Trump has done anything wrong is strongly correlated with Fox News viewership.
The economy is a really easy target for someone to point to to claim a president is doing well or poorly. Really whenever someone makes a claim about “the economy” in general without specifying which metrics they’re talking about and why those are relevant, they’re full of it and just using it to make the list of pros or cons longer.
I’m still in my 20s and I’m more or less a layman as far as economics go. Ever since I started paying attention to politics, the economy has simultaneously been doing extremely well and poorly depending on who you ask, and they can use a whole mess of different metrics to explain why they’re right. Meanwhile the only thing I really notice is the price of gas, groceries, or rent.
It seems that we live in two different economies: a good one for people that support the president, and a bad one for those that don’t.
Trumps presidency was 80% pre-covid, and entirely pre-inflation. Bidens was all covid, all inflation that saw the average person lose 20-30% of their pay.
This is how stupid and simplistic the average voter is, and it’s why conservative propaganda works so well. Their feelings don’t care about facts.
And have pretty much always been that way, at least in semi recent memory, and the GOP have used this fact constantly by taking credit for their Dem predecessors’ economic policies and by the time the negative impact of their policies start to be seen, the Dems are back in power and the GOP blames them for the hardship
The average voter does not and apparently will never understand that economic policy takes years to fully see and feel the impact
I’ve been working for three decades. In that time, we’ve had some legitimate financial crises such as 9/11, 2008, and COVID.
Those aside, what I’ve mainly witnessed is people who fail in business or lose their job via incompetence never say, “Man, I should’ve hired a legitimate bookkeeper and stopped using my corporate card to cut rails in the strip club bathroom,” or, “Man, maybe I should’ve shown up to work more than twice a month and maybe I shouldn’t have slapped the receptionist on the ass when I did show up.”
No. It’s always, “My business failed and I lost my job because of the economy”
“The economy” is some great catch all bogeyman scapegoat that has very little basis in meaning when used in daily conversation, especially as it pertains to personal finance.
We can talk about corporatocracies or consolidation of wealth or two tier justice because those things are real and should be addressed, but they are rarely what people are referring to when they blame “the economy.”
Obama floated a single-payer option for healthcare, he was stopped by Republicans. People also need to realize that the Democrats scraping by means they have to compromise to survive.
You want them to do more? They need a mandate, not a razor thin slice. The Republicans have gerrymandered the fuck out of your country and made it so that even when they aren’t elected, they can control or block everything. They’ve made it impossible for Democrats to get a landslide, blocked absolutely everything they can, stirred up as much voter apathy as possible, so that even when they lose, they win. And you’re buying right into it.
This is also why everyone should vote Democrat. You only have two parties in your country. If the Democrats always win because the Republicans are too right wing, they will forced to abandon their most repugnant social policies to save the golden goose, tax cuts and cutting social programs.
This will force Democrats to move left to differentiate themselves, and so forth. Short of electoral reform which will never happen, it has to become political suicide to be against abortion, LGBTQ issues, etc like it is in other countries.
Obama floated a single-payer option for healthcare, he was stopped by Republicans.
You might want to check that one out again. The Ds had a majority in Congress and managed to fuck themselves on that one.
Single payer will never pass, big insurance owns too many congress people on both sides of the isle. A couple million dollar payoff for a dissenting vote is much cheaper than the billions they’d lose if either ACA is repealed, or we cut them out of the game with something like universal healthcare.
Lieberman, Manchin, Sinema. There’s always going to be a rotating villain. Our political landscape is designed to invest the least amount of political capital for the preservation of the status quo. Our Congress is beholden to the interests of the ruling class and that money flows to both sides of the aisle.
but we need to vote for the republicans cosplaying as Democrats so that they can continue to be the reason we don’t get anything instead of Republicans. The fatal flaw in the idea that people like Manchin, Sinema and other blue dogs are another obstacle the Dems need to overcome is that Dems. Chose. Them. Those people are in congress getting in the way of the democratic agenda because democrats put them there.
Presidents can’t just make laws without going through Congress, despite what pretty much every news media organization likes to imply. For two years Biden had an obstructionist Senate and now it’s the obstructionist House.
To your point though, I think Democrats could do a better job promoting all the changes they would make. Say you’ll “enshrine the right to an abortion” into law, say you’ll establish a minimum wage that keeps up with inflation, say you’ll let doctors heal and teachers teach, say you’ll take the title away from China as the leader in renewable energy, and for fuck sake say you’ll stop kowtowing to the Israeli government.
I was responding to the second paragraph where they said that Democrats need to message better. I believe a lot of the topics they gave as examples that the Democrats could push in their messaging was in the State of the Union.
If you read the article, it says the Republicans are proposing raising the age to collect full Social Security benefits to 69 (it is now currently 67). That’s not quite the same as ‘cutting’ social security.
BTW, the surplus SS currently has in its account will run dry in about 10 years. Once that happens, Social Security will become a pay as you go program if nothing changes, which means benefits will be reduced by about 25% (i.e. the amount of money coming in from SS taxes will only cover about 75% of projected outlays).
I did read the article. The current age to collect full benefits is 67. They are proposing it be raised to 69. Please illuminate for me what I am missing.
So when you paid into it, you were told you would get money out at 67.
You will no longer be getting paid for those 2 years, thus are getting less money back from the gov (and forcing 67-69 y/os potentially back into the work place).
Now who has no idea what Social Security is? If this proposal passes, I can still retire at 62 (with reduced monthly benefits). The proposal is to increase the age at which you receive ***full ***benefits.
“You will no longer be getting paid for those 2 years” - That is absolutely not true. I would not receive full benefits for those two years if this proposal passes.
One additional fun fact I gleemed from the article that no one here has mentioned: according to this article, if this proposal passes, it would amount to a 14% cut. But if nothing changes, the Social Security trust fund will become insolvent in 2033 (just 9 years away!!) which will result in a 23% cut.
I don’t think GOP voters really care about policy at this point. They have voted against their own interests all the time. I’ve seen it 1st hand working at the SNAP office in my state. People voting/worshiping guys like DeSantis while he makes it harder for them to get food or help.
But it’s not about the core voters that always vote for the same party. It’s about the people that are switching and still (somehow) unsure. And they can be reached.
Which actual candidate was either running in the Democratic Primary or has any statistical chance of winning the presidency without being either the Democratic or Republican nominee?
Who is this “actual candidate” you keep blustering about? You’re all “fuck genocide joe and the neolibs” but never once have any of you offered a viable alternative. Special, urgent emphasis on viable, by the way. Otherwise, I am going to assume you do want Trump to win as some sort of accelerationist gambit so the proletariat revolution can finally begin… well, guess what, in the power vacuum you want so bad, you’ll be surprised to see who actually ends up against that wall.
…respondents said that Trump would do a better job by double-digit margins.
…in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 40 percent of voters said that Trump’s policies had helped them personally, while just 18 percent said the same of Biden.
So these polls are just showing that Trump gets all the Republicans because they don’t actually care about policy, and Biden only gets a few Democrats because these questions are actually about issues, and his entire platform is that he isn’t Trump
All my life, I voted for the greater good of the greater whole, at my own expense. I am not a Biden fan and many who voted lockstep for the neolibs are most certainly voting on the issues.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the GOP recently lost two more special elections in places they normally wouldn't & nationwide the Democrats are still beating polling by 9+ points at the ballot box post Roe V. Wade fuckery by SCotUS. Also, the GOP's bank accounts are literally being looted by the Trumps which will devastate down-ballot politicians.
I'm assuming they are using AI or a something similar for targeting polling to get the "answers" they want,
Polling hasn't been anywhere near accurate since 2016, but the Media needs its horse race. Make sure you vote & make sure 3 other people vote & we've got this.
EDIT: the silly little fascist symp @syllogi has been blocked by everyone, so all they can do is sad little downvotes. How pathetic you are, fash.
Exactly. Who do you think is more likely to answer a phone poll? A rural landline to an older man with nothing better to do then shout “Trump” into the receiver OR an urban mobile number owned by a young non-white woman with two kids?
These polls oversample loud conservatives and undersample quieter Democrats with actual lives. Remember 2020 when Trump had lots of “enthusiasm” at his rallies? How’d that work out?
It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic your vote is, it matters if you vote. Just vote and help others to do the same. Sign up for a Biden or local Democrat’s GOTV effort. That’s actual democracy.
Dude exactly, also a bunch of us dems are just of the type who wouldn’t participate regardless even if they got a hold of us. If they want my time they have to pay.
I have believed this for a long time. They could make the world better for everyone but focus on making sure that others suffer just a little bit more than they do.
There is a study about this (link); many people would rather have less as long as their peers are worse off. This is our inner caveman brain telling us this is a zero sum world.
Many Americans are too idiotic to realize the president is not the legislature. They can champion laws/policies, but the Executive is not the Legislative. It feels so weird to me that so much focus goes to the presidential slot when senators and house reps are the primary power brokers. It’s equally weird how we’ve allowed so much power creep to seep into the presidential office, where presidents have routinely exercised powers that are way out of their constitutional lane on numerous occasions. It sometimes feels like Americans want a totalitarian form of government.
Worse, when they blame the economy, they are ignorant to the fact that Republicans passed a law to specifically make the US Central Bank (the Federal Reserve) a PRIVATE entity that is outside the reach of the president.
Can someone explain to me what would stop dems from infinitely fillibustering any of the Republicans bullshit laws if they got control, similar to how the Republicans have?
Nothing, though the budget reconciliation process allows for one filibuster-proof bill a year if it primarily deals with the budget.
That said, the filibuster is just an internal Senate rule. A majority could simply eliminate it at any time, but that of course may come back to bite them when the balance of power shifts.
He was offered a $1*million/year for life if he retired. It’s not about the money, it’s about the corruption he is able to provide to his rich “friends”…
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