Human subjugation is not, in fact, analogous to one political party telling you that someone less qualified than you deserves a job more than you because of the color of their skin, or that your daughter needs to compete with biological men.
I think the majority of unqualified people that are actually getting hired are from nepotism or connections, not DEI. I think not wanting transgender women in women’s sports is a potentially defensible position depending on how you go about it but the person I was replying to didn’t mention that, they just used a slur lmao.
Brian said, "Transgender women competing in women's sports is an indefensible position."
Men. Just call them what they are, men. Men trying to perpetrate a fraud, yes, but still just men, unless they are eunuchs, which most of them are not. It's time, in my opinion, to stop with the terrible confusion that this fake Woke labeling engenders.
This is cruel. You just don't understand and that qualifies you to make judgments on them? What you don't like is a really dumb thing. If everyone was such a stickler for conformity life would just be boring and we'd be living in some horror movie from the 50s. Which some people still are, thanks to you.
Failing to recognize that transgender women are women is an indefensible position. Cause, you know, science and medicine and stuff.
I'm not for transgender women competing in women's sports. I am for women competing in them, though, regardless of the sex they were assigned at birth.
I'm a woman. Had a baby and everything. Some guy eagerly becoming a eunuch chemically and through surgery ---- have to tell you, that's no woman. If you are confused about that, I'm guessing you are single.
Is this supposed to be understandable and logical. It appears to be the doublespeak usually associated with those who want to claim that basic biology is unscientific, yet in other areas proclaim that we should “accept the science” espoused by charlatans such as Fauci.
A mainstream party telling you that men can become women is absolutely one of many valid considerations to factor into your vote. Such a position is incompatible with reason and dangerous to the future of western civilization.
Saying that biological men can bare children or being unable to define a basic biological term (women) makes a political party seem absolutely extreme and invalidates any actual good points they may put across.
Agreed completely. The sports thing is so minor an issue to most people, but I think most of us want women’s sports to be fair. We don’t want to make trans people feel ostracized such that their typically high suicide rate and other dangers and hardships remain
Maybe you should tell them to stop being trans. I am sure that will work. Do you think that if these people could just decide to be comfortable in the body they were born in, they wouldn't take the opportunity? They deal with such a difficult life, not to mention the near constant harassment from trolls like you.
"I think the majority of unqualified people that are actually getting hired are from nepotism or connections, not DEI." statistics from major corporations do not support this. They all have DEI quotas to meet and are regularly hiring middle-of-the-pack people due to their skin color rather than from among the most qualified
ie, a simple example of this is that people with diagnosed mental and atttention disorders are being actively sought as hires to be TSA controllers (the role that lands planes). This was extensively reported on the right a few months ago
Transexuals who never got on board with the trans identity ideology still call themselves trannies. If anything, "birthing persons" is more of a slur because women never called themselves that. But I bet you don't care about the double standard.
No parties are telling anyone that. That moment has passed among the majority of democrats, who decide things based on facts and a desire to help those in need via equitable and non-discriminatory practices. The recent manifestation of DEI has been deconstructed quickly even at colleges and stuff. But it’s reasonable to try to consider hardships faced as a strength. And pragmatism above all.
I don’t mean to invalidate diversity, equity, and inclusion, all three being very important to me. I guess what I’m saying is it’s unclear if we’ve managed to perfect policies such that those things are met, even recent ones. according to things I’ve read at least
what is this a response to? Women are still being subjugated. Someone look up NON-PARTISAN statistics on who is still receiving unequal treatment in hiring by percentage, with people with the same qualifications but different names. You will see that white people, especially white men, are still doing pretty darn well. And all of this subjugation is actively being sought to be restored by many in the GOP, who really don't care about this, and really only act in the interest of big business and corporations because these heartless, profit-driven organizations--including highly pernicious ones who promote war and exploitation for sheer money--who don't care about their employees more than they are required by law-shareholders in the top ten percent or higher of the population---but only because these people bestow the representatives with power--or else they're some kind of traditionalist who is wildly misinterpreting Jesus's message to mostly just mean women should be forced out of having any say or role in society beyond being baby machines and unpaid laborers for their husbands... But my basic point is, efforts to equalize things for job applicants or whatnot have not been perfect but have helped. The more we get rid of discrimination, the more stable and functional our society as a whole is. But this isn't even something someone like Kamala Harris would even be in charge of. And if you have personally experienced, or feel you have, discrimination in hiring, that isn't okay, but there are legal ways that are more effective at making changes to this than voting for a leader who could actually give two craps about anyone who votes for him that doesn't make him wealthier and feel like a big shot and have absurd and frightening amounts of power for someone that selfish.
I don’t think that’s true. I think all humans are susceptible to both of those and that being fair, compassionate, and peace-minded is best for promoting literally everyone’s holistic wellness, ability to act wholeheartedly toward all others. Things like trauma have ramifications and it’s very much worth looking into latest, profound scientific discoveries on PTSD
Think about that. Maybe read about Africa more also, the effects of colonization. But Africa doesn’t equal Black. Racism entails repeated scars. But every invalidation causes trauma, and so have yours. There is Trauma with a capital T, like from intense singular violence, but science has now shown that repeated invalidation or any kind of wounding whether from prejudice or parental lack of concern or dismissal (or abuse) affects the same nerves and has very similar effects. The effect is called “emotional disregulation,” which is when your prefrontal cortex’s reasonable and non-fear-centered ability to control you is overrides by fight, flight, fear, or freeze. We need to be inclusive of all people’s sensitivity so we can all treat each other well through the many tribulations that impact all of us where our neighbor’s help is a boon. When I said “Wowww,” for example that was invalidating. I only meant to suggest you think or read and feel about slavery’s reality day-to-day. Read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or watch a documentary. These people worked with zero pay rights (including to a family) physically so hard, no breaks, painfully, their entire lives literally, and bore constant and various abuse to enable our country to prosper. That is not something anyone including you would actually conclude some group of people was better off ultimately for having done.
Oh, come on --- it's the DEI Way of the Democrat. Every guy has a right to -- do that -- and call himself a woman, see. And then we're all supposed to be forced to cooperate with that fraud. Good luck with that.
It's not some kind of rampant problem. Just try to let go of it, and it won't do you any harm, I really feel. But people on this very chat are being harassed without being known at all.
I do take joy in knowing communism will lose eventually as it always has.
Meritocracy and freedom made this country great, not the nanny state, reparations and a government with its boot on the throat of companies and citizens.
Yours is essentially the argument that all change is good. Not so. The modern left’s ideas are increasingly just objectively bad. DEI for instance. King was right in the 60s when he was pushing for color blind policies; DEI goes backwards from that.
I think your got those backwards: probably should've said when brown people were property and women knew their place. But hey, when you're losing an argument, just shout that the other guy is a racist misogynist nazi fascist... or whatever.
Is that "know their place" comment serious? Because that is pretty much the exact definition of misogyny. You're describing yourself as a misogynist...
this entire discussion has been appalingly like that. I started out thinking people were just angry and lashing out. Now it seems like being prejudiced is a weirdly prominent value for people who are pro-Trump. I thought you guys were subscribers to this because you acknowledge the importance of rigorous, data-driven skepticism and the hesitancy to make sweeping judgments without even suggesting you might be in error. I guess that was a much more sweeping judgment than I thought.
Neither is hemodialysis, but we do it when necessary to save a life. Did you know that the majority of transgender women don't get bottom surgery and would thus still have a penis? Why do you care what is in a random woman's pants that is walking down the street. Weirdo.
Ok? I don't want those men pretending to be women anywhere near the locker rooms or bathrooms my daughters use. You guys keep pushing this but it's one of many reasons that Trump is about to win every swing state.
I can tell you don't have kids, increasingly common in the party that is anti-children. No, kids are naturally deeply disturbed by men pretending to be women, especially in a personal space like a bathroom. This is a natural instinct, as I haven't discussed it with them at all, but there have been instances where they were on their guard around people like that.
I always find it interesting that it's transgender women who get the most hate. The fact that most conservatives don't give a flip about transgender men shows that their hatred is driven by misogyny. They're fine with a "woman" (which is how they view it) becoming more masculine, but not with a "man" becoming more feminine.
My very conservative dad will use a transgender man's preferred pronouns and name, but not a transgender woman's. It makes absolutely no sense.
That said, I do understand that transgender men also suffer a lot of discrimination, and it's not my attention (edit: "intention") to minimize that.
As I mentioned above it is because transgender women scare them. They are afraid that they will find themselves attracted to something with a penis and that will just shatter their masculinity and their entire worldview of sexuality and opinion of themselves. That is how fragile their masculinity is.
I mean I’m not that sure most cis-gender men are entirely good with “masculine” women, but regardless, it’s a tough subject to discuss given how socially constructed (for thousands upon thousands of years, in varied ways across many cultures “masculinity” or “femininity” itself have been.) It’s all a bit of a doozy trying to find a more loving and inclusive way to describe ourselves and others out of the language we’ve largely inherited.
That's easy: I care a lot about whether a man is pretending to be a woman. Gender is the FIRST thing people identify about other people approaching, because men are so dangerous --- to men and especially to women. Sorry, guys, but you know it's true. (Age and race are the next things we quickly identify, and then go on to physical condition, etc.) This is something people need to know accurately; and if a man is pretending to be a woman, he's not only dangerous ipso facto, but also is crazy as a hoot owl and plainly dangerous for that reason.
c'mon. like, why be so judgmental about people you probably don't even know and who probably never harmed you? did someone hurt you in some way? being excluded is a horrific experience, and it is just normal in a free society to let people be themselves, and not go around being mean all the time
we're not, and i know that. i have an illness that can be cured and you heartlessly and callously throw me and thousands more to the side because the pundit you watch happened to think it was immoral or something. why shouldn't i get the care i need? can you even give an actual reason other than some vague LGB bullshit?
most anti-trans stuff that comes from the right is directed toward things like minors and sports right? what are they doing that violates your autonomy?
republicans have taken away women's rights. it's not a small thing. it's a whole entire life and also at least nine months of highly invasive transformation. why don't you imagine this happening to you if you're a man. imagine the government forcing your body to undergo all that. go to all the appointments. gain all that weight. suffer all the things, like nausea, etc. possibly suffer complications giving birth. then, after that, it's not at all easy to give a baby up, especially if the father isn't with you. how about we load all of that on the father? but does this happen? no. 18 years and more of your life doing so many things, and likely having to take off work and getting behind in your career or not even being able to go to college like my cousin. what happens to the man in this case? very, very little. I'd like the government to force any man to go through literally every physical, emotional, and financial/time transformation it is forcing us to do before considering outlawing abortion. do they? no. because they don't think women NEED autonomy of this kind. "don't have sex"? please. I wish they forced that on all of us. Men are the ones who need it the most. Then they'd see. What right does the government have to be such a moralistic dickwad? Eh??? And, of course, autonomy of trans people to extricate them from horrific discomfort and depression by a procedure that really is the cure. That intimately affects trans people on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. What kind of question is that??? And what rights are YOU concerned about? The right to be religious? To have a gun? Those aren't being taken away, aren't threatened. The right to religiously judge others is another backwards concept that people portray as some kind of right being taken away--but this country is not about persecuting people because of religion or lack thereof. The second amendment isn't even being applied reasonably by DEMOCRATS. "Regulated militias" or psychos who seem to think they need machine guns because some outlying group or maybe just a class of first graders deserve to have THEIR autonomies taken away. I'm just so confused as to how you could wonder, "whose autonomy."
Well thanks for thinking over half the population aka women deserve no such consideration. This is all perception on your part. What rights of yours have been taken away????? And I’m sorry but the right to a psycho automatic weapon doesn’t count. That means a right to mow down hundreds of people in seconds. What about their rights eh?
Just want to say that I hope you know you're not totally alone and that there are millions of people in the US who support your right and your fight for your rights! As one of them I recognize you fighting the good fight here (to just simply exist) and hope you're in a safe blue state or can get to one where you will find lots of friendly faces.
Right: This is what a real unbiased report says:” FBI data shows the rate of violent crime fell by a quarter over the past two decades “ Of course, this requires a deep dive instead of the low info/Fox reader mindset. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4glxxreed7o
Your statistics are out of date. The original attempt to hide the increase in crime has now been restated. Sorry to inform you of the facts. You must watch and read the biased MSM which refused to report the revisions, it didn’t help with their narrative.
Yes! I just read today that the FBI stats have been revised to say violent crime increased by 4.22% since 2022 ---- instead of being 2% down. These FBI LIARS. I guess they were hoping to get through the election with the fake stats and help Harris win.
I'm a US citizen and this is my third US Presidential election. Keep posting under your fake name because it will be hugely embarrassing for your friends and family if people find out who you are.
You think mega-corporations and billionaires didn't do well during the presidency of the guy who gave huge tax cuts to corporations and billionaires while giving tiny and temporary tax cuts to the middle class?
You’re suggesting a non Harris win would reestablish normalcy? You’re fucking hilarious. I submit people also do not want to live in a world dominated by a fascist asshole he may win, but we’ll see.
Both candidates have some fascist tendencies, the difference is that the elites an MSM back Harris because they agree with her fanciest tendencies and so would rather she be in power. They despise Trump because he appeals to those that they consider “deplorable”.
If it were true that normalcy always wins, Clinton would've triumphed in 2016. Trump was not the candidate of normalcy, he was (and remains) the outsider candidate.
Clinton wasn't running on normalcy. She was running on hiring less qualified people because their ancestors happened to have a different skin color etc.
It's still not normal. And I am not sure why we're pretending it's good, either. Stop patronizing black people.
I'm saying Clinton's campaign (and her candidacy in general) was based around her experience as a politician and Washington insider for 3 decades. And I'm saying Trump's campaign was based around his identity as a political outsider who would "drain the swamp" and sweep aside established persons and structures in Washington.
Clinton was seen as the status quo in 2016, because she basically *was* the status quo. Trump was the candidate of change, and his election was a symptom of frustration with "politics as usual".
And I can bring Barack Obama's election in 2008 as another point of evidence against "normalcy always wins". And if you still insist that Trump is normalcy, and that normalcy always wins, I'll point to the results of the 2020 election, and the extremely normal behavior he exhibited after the loss.
Trump is not a normal candidate, and that's a key part of his appeal. If you don't notice this, it's got nothing to do with political leanings, and everything to do with not paying attention.
Jim, with all due respect, she was not a politician for 3 decades. She was the wife of a Governor and then the wife of a President. Then she was handed the senate seat in a state she had never lived in and then was appointed Obama's Sec of state as a consolation prize. In this roll, most rate her performance as poor. The truth is she lacked her husband's political skills and her rhetoric alienated large swaths of the population.
Unsure why you're saying "with all due respect", but I'll say the same:
With all due respect, this is a contradiction without substance, because I can grant you all of that (not 3 decades of being a politician, just a decade and a half of being a high-ranking politician and more than two decades of being a Washington insider, and I'll even grant you that she sucked at all of it for argument's sake), and it doesn't move the needle on what we were talking about. She was the insider, standard, candidate who represented conventional thinking in Washington... right?
I'm confused that anyone would even argue this point. Trump was not the candidate of normalcy... he was a rejection of the "normal" approach to domestic and foreign politics, policy, media... and the fact that he was a political outsider was a key idea that Trump ran on. Right?
And so... when just 8 years ago the world (and even many Republicans, like my parents, who voted for him) was stunned that such an unusual, unprecedented candidate could win, a person today saying something like "normal always wins" should immediately draw criticism from across the political spectrum...
Correct. Every other reason given in this post is a cope. They've tried to distance themselves from it for the last six months, but we all know it's coming back full force after the election. Harris is horrible, but it honestly doesn't have much to do with her in particular. Nor does it have much to do with Trump in particular. You could swap both of them out and I'd still vote the same.
You may be right, but that doesn't mean Trump is or should be anything approaching normal. As Nate says, Dems have failed to capitalize on his weaknesses, but the idea that he's actually the candidate of "normalcy" is laughable.
Maybe Trump wouldn't "normally" be the candidate of "normalcy," but in a time when one party enthusiastically affirms that men can turn into women by wishing, that it's fine if homeless take over all our cities and camp on the sidewalks, that we should have open borders and all the criminals in Latin America rush up here to prey on us, that no one should have to pay for goods in stores if they don't want to ---------------- yep, Trump is suddenly the candidate of normalcy.
Is this what people think Democrats think? I assumed the only people who thought this about Democrats were people who got their news from Facebook. Maybe, in some extreme cases, people who got their news on Fox (which is better than Facebook, at least).
I think that it's really easy to buy into ideas about Democrats and our leaders that suggest the far left wing of the party is in charge. Although, for the most part, compared to Western Europe or Canada or something, the far left wing is not that far left. No one, even someone like Bernie, is advocating to do a whole lot to regulate capitalism itself. Most of us are motivated by trying to make things better for all of us, including ourselves. But right now, we just want normal things like equality, justice, and peace.
this isn’t true of Kamala Harris’s centrist campaign and pledges in the first place. “Normalcy” is a hurtful word though in this comment to me, simply a “cis-woman” who has dug deep into my past to find that things like the Bible and its pronouns have fundamentally formed my own feelings of inferiority vis a vis men. These kind of societal underpinnings are not even in the jurisdiction of a president, but inclusivity, acceptance of harmless difference, and fairness and equity ARE central to our current state, where only citizens under 18 are not allowed to vote. A president should strive to respect represent and help all voters, and undermine prejudice, which just isn’t good for our continuance as a just, SAFE, and free America, only causing division and instability, and the necessity for things like peaceful protest to call attention to people not being heard.
I graduated from Yale. I love California, my dad and his family went to Berkeley, majoring in the maths and sciences and are not idiots by any measure. Why not start trying to understand the people you are shitting on constantly and accusing of things that have no bearing on your life and take a compassionate high road? We are all susceptible to prejudice, all of us. But we all know that the people in our lives just do their best to be good and make the best of our lives. No one is so different as it seems
Okay, my sister went to Yale, too. (She hated it.) She didn't come out talking jargon, but I suppose that's this new unfortunate leftwing college indoctrination. I like the plain communication in the rest of your post: that's straightforward language that can easily be understood.
I graduated in 2004. I do think that real universities have a reason to lean liberal, by virtue of that value's association with an openness to alternatives to received wisdom. This doesn't mean that they don't have rigorous processes of research and thoroughly high standards for citation and for the validity of their sources. This means that by virtue of valuing finding out truth, they throw out some ideas that might not have been solidly based in fact and study. I really think being increasingly accepting of all people is just good for oneself and makes these people see you as human too.
However, there is an anti-conservative bias in general. I really think, also, though, the academic field is something left-leaning people are more idiotic and self-sacrificing enough to even consider doing. I had a mixed time at Yale. I loved my friends very much and didn't find one person unqualified to be there of a particular race or whatever. I did find it fairly painfully stressful. I can see feeling like a minority being a Republican and that feeling hard. Lots of unfun ways to be a minority eh!
Ok, well, I take back what I said about you, Phebe, but please research a little bit more about the trans experience before thinking these people are doing something horribly wrong that needs to be decided by the President of the United States.
I know three people very intimately, and have known many others, who are trans, have suffered greatly to get where they are, and are sweet and good people. Perhaps think about it this way: would you choose to be a woman if you could be a man? I don't even really see the advantage of this at all.
I myself am pro-peaceful protest, as is the Democratic Party. Many peaceful protests feature outliers that cause mayhem and chaos. This effect is overly emphasized, but no, I don’t advocate for destructive protests
Oh, DEI you say? You know what's the biggest DEI project in mankind history, the electoral college, funny republicans hate dei but it's helped them have a chance at presidency cause a majority of American disapprove of their politics every 4 years. Count your lucky stars for dei sir or madam.
Harris is a horrible candidate truly. If they had just forced Biden to be a transition president, like he said, in the beginning, when he first ran, they could’ve done a real primary and had the momentum behind them. It’s no doubt that there are more Democrat voters, but the problem is, they made them the same mistake with an anointed nominee , they did in 2016 with Hillary. Americans don’t like not being given choices or to feel as though they don’t have the power to make a decision for themselves (hence why ROE V. Wade is so powerful of an election issue).
And I feel the same way about Harris...what is an American voter to do with such bad choices??? Pick the one who when they were governing did not screw up so badly....Biden/HARRIS administration has been a disaster....but did not see all these screw ups under Trump....yes, did not like his Tweets but so what
How many thousands of Americans died because of his Covid-19 policy? Because he didn't advocate for masking and precautions early? Health experts say at least 10's of thousands. Probably hundreds of thousands. It wasnt his tweets that were he biggest issue, at all, and saying that is pretty revisionist.
I do not know where you lived during Covid but I lived in Los Angeles and the lockdowns were severe....it was not up to Trump, but up to the individual states....know your facts before you accuse but as a Dem facts mean nothing to you (by the way, I am a registered Dem haha)...and what experts are you listening to???? His tweets did nothing, it was the stupid Dems who locked us down....I lived under Newsome and Trump could not help me
@Sheila R. Schwartz == Yesterday, Harris agreed with a protestor at her small rally that "Israel Is Committing A Genocide Against the Palestinian People Of Gaza. = Her true colors finally emerge from under the veil of duplicity.
Funny how leftist Dems think she is a complete Israel shill while Reps think she supports Hamas. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle of those ridiculous extremes?
Death rates in Democrat run states were not demonstrably lower than Republican run states during covid. Stricter lockdowns and policies were largely ineffective, and in fact much more damaging to the social fabric of this country
Do you actually have data for this, because everything I have seen and read says you are wrong. Early in the pandemic Democrat led counties had higher death rates as they tend to have a higher population density, but as he pandemic continued Republican led counties suffered higher mortality when compared to similar cohort.
Read what you wrote again and apply common sense. The states with lower population density took longer for the virus to spread, so yes their death rates were higher in later years on the pandemic. Which means policies we implemented to stop its spread did little to nothing (as the people who were going to get it all eventually got it), but the damage it did to our social fabric and children’s’ development was tremendous.
but ultimately, we got past Covid. No one country did everything right. I don't really think this lockdowns thing is necessarily true, but Trump did lockdowns. But not at the right time. He made quite a lot of mistakes in the Covid thing, and it really did kill him in the election, meaning it's not really a helpful way to help him.
We recovered more efficiently than most comparable nations economically--inflation is not a Biden-created thing, and European nations etc have faced much tougher inflation. Both parties passed major funding bills to help people recover. Russia became a factor later in this matter. Inflation is this thing that happens and is not really the fault of the president anyway. Nor are they the people whose primary function is fighting inflation. That's the Fed. Just in case this is something that people blame Dems for.
What are you talking about? By countless accounts of super highly regarded economists and historians Biden’s presidency has been among the most successful. In that survey of preeminent historians, people who’ve won Pulitzers and been rigorously fact-based, Trump was dead last. He is literally evil and constantly, non-stop lies. He has gone bankrupt several times and has been found guilty of actual rape, besides having numerous other accusers and being a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. JD Vance is a fraud who created projects designed to help his own people, whether with jobs or with opioid treatment, and did not do anything for them and instead pocketed the money. He is willing to say anything he knows full well is a lie for power. Trying to overturn a fair election is a grave offense. Kamala Harris was a highly effective by all measures attorney general of CA. You are seriously making shit up about Biden. He has been worse on foreign policy but didn’t start the negotiation with the Taliban—he was forced by his predecessor to leave there early—and also didn’t start the attack on Israel that has led to chaos there. Nor the Ukraine thing which he has orchestrated effectively and has kept us out of that conflict with Russia which would be a nuclear disaster for the world. Trump denies CLIMATE CHANGE! The planet is still moving towards 3 degrees and icebergs are melting faster than expected! The democrats didn’t make up climate change—the entire world acknowledges it’s really grave threat. If we back out of the really effective forward progress Biden has turned us towards on this front and go backwards, you really think this will incentivize China to cooperate? The GOP has mercilessly used the boogeymen of minorities and poverty-stricken, desperate for their very lives immigrants and people who did not choose their difference and are oppressed by it to make people think these are cogent arguments against Kamala Harris. No. And Trump has effectively rendered all women second-class citizens in the U.S. no power over our own bodies. Any legislation demanding men get invasive 9-month procedures against their will?
on top of climate, Democrats did not invent the vaccine nor were we the only country to push it because guess what, it works! it did work! And Trump himself got the vaccine to happen. I think you'll find a lot of people have been quite grateful for the vaccine, way more than not.
How rude. I'll have you know I am fluent in over 3 millions dialects.... I'm sorry you don't have a firm grasp on reality. Someday I hope you will wake up.
I don’t fully buy this take. I think Harris is a *fine* candidate, and I think there’s a higher probability than not that, given a primary, she may well have come out on top of it anyway.
I think the bigger issue is she was only given 100 days to get this done. The media has been all over her for not being differentiating herself from Biden enough, and not setting out her own policy, but not having a primary, and the time to allow those ideas to bake and get feedback, has been her real Achilles Heel. It’s hard to create an entire platform to run on in that time, and I would say it’s generally more risky to put one out there *without* time for a potential feedback loop than small policy ideas like she’s done.
I think she ran the best campaign she could in the time she had. That’s not to say it’s been perfect, but the fact she pulled out of a 5-7 point Biden deficit to come even with Trump, and have a viable path to the presidency, is a solid indicator she actually has some concept of what she’s doing.
When the dust settles, Harris will be (rightfully) viewed as a disastrously bad, unserious candidate. Joe set this all up when he promised a black woman running mate, for no reason at all, before taking an actual look at the field.
Harris had loads of time for her 2020 presidential run and was knocked out before the first primary after a disastrous 2019 debate take-down by Tulsi Gabbard.
Oh, most definitely, but I assume you mean things would be better if she had longer, which I think is patently false. The more the swayable/undecided see of her, the less they like her. This last minute media blitz was a Hail Mary, and it's failing.
You may not have realized, but she was running for reelection as VP since 2023. She’s been campaigning for a long time. The party elders, donors and activists selected her as a more appealing figurehead atop their agenda. The agenda hasn’t changed - it just never was the rationale for either Biden or Harris (and can’t be given the wrong track readings). The whole campaign since 2023 has been “not Trump”, and that is all we are going to see for the next few weeks. The whole vibe thing didn’t work. She is not a celebrity and she obviously has no deep thoughts - not as VP, not as part of the ‘24 Biden Harris campaign and not as presidential candidate. She’s not Trump - that is all.
By circumstances you mean he was not winning until he made a deal to pick a black female running mate. He promised Coburn this, as you well know, to get the black vote to fall in behind him.
No. He promised to nominate a woman early, in 2019. Then he became presumptive nominee. Then, you might recall, there was a bit of racial unrest, and some of the white contenders, like Klobuchar, withdrew. The finalists were, indeed, all black, but that was not the initial promise
You are both right, I was misremembering (even the name, the SC dude was Clyburn :). What I get for posting before I've had my coffee. He did promise a black Supreme Court candidate, and had long said he wanted a female or black VP candidate. Turns out he picked the worst VP possible, I'm sure he wishes he had a do over.
I just feel like Katanji Brown Jackson was highly qualified, more so than other justices. Like, I don't know if you're a white man, but I'm a white woman, and I can see how men are ridiculously blind to their own enduring overwhelmingly disproportionate presence in positions of power. I can also see how it feels threatening to have people selected PARTLY because they aren't one's own identity. But the selection was one to include more people in the conversation. On a topic like abortion rights, black women more than deserve a place on the Supreme Court. The conservative justices are making out-of-normal-legal-bounds-of-precedent-and-mainstream-judicial-consensus all over the place, because they can. They are doing this to people who are not white men, nor Catholic, nor benefiting from the weath of big business, etc. I don't think you'll find that Justice Jackson is even remotely accusable of being a "DEI hire"--someone not sufficiently qualified. Amy Coney Barrett, maybe. How long did she have experience being a judge before this? Wasn't someone older more qualified? etc etc
Also, the Dems have a very light bench, unlike the many able candidates the GOP has. Newsom had better sense to agree to jump in with all the fundamentals against the incumbent party, and Newsom is really about all they've got. And he's saddled with the catastrophe of California.
This is not really true at all. We have plenty of governors, Senators, long-standing Executive Branch vets who could do a great job. I don't think what you are saying is something any actual Democrat would say, or someone independently assessing the situation. Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, who happens to be a favorite of mine, etc etc. A lot of these people are highly skilled at compromise and have long resumes of efficacy.
Keep dreaming. The more time she has had as the campaign has progressed, the more support she has lost. She has glaring weaknesses and is a lackluster politician, as many have pointed out she didn’t even make it to Iowa in 30#0. If she had been able to get on the ballot 20 days before the election, her vibes would have won in a landslide , everyone would have focused on Trump’s many negatives.
You say this, please show me data that Kamalas polling number have gone down with undecideds with increased exposure. Everything I have seen and read shows he opposite.
You mean after soaring to completely unexpected heights they're down a bit from the initial high yes. But that conveniently ignores the initial capture.
Her initial polling numbers weren't relevant to the comment. You conveniently ignored the context in which I made my comment. Also initial polling doesn't matter nearly as much as where she is polling at now.
I’m voting for Harris, and I’ve given… a lot to her campaign.
I strongly feel that if Biden had made an announcement last year that he was stepping aside, and refused to immediately endorse anyone, someone other than Harris would’ve been the candidate. She has way too much baggage from running to the left in 2020 on a lot of issues, and this makes it hard for her to pivot to the center plausibly.
I agree with you on that. Dems would have a better chance with someone NOT associated with the Biden presidency. Of course, what makes it even harder for her to pivot is that she is, in fact, a far-let socialist. If people are dumb enough to believe her positions have changed from what she talked about in 2019 then that is on them (sadly, there are plenty of dumb people out there).
I don't think she is a far-left socialist. She's been totally unable to capture any of the Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren style populism because she doesn't hold their positions. She had a very left-leaning voting record in the Senate because if she didn't, she'd get destroyed in a primary. And she has done about as much as any politician in Washington to support Biden's rather traditional agenda.
Her 2019 run, and the more extreme positions she took in that race, had a lot to do with the zeitgeist of 2020. Her campaign was defeated by (of all people) Tulsi Gabbard, who attacked her from the *left* on law enforcement. The reason this worked was because Harris wasn't a plausible leftist.
She isn't far left. She is whatever her people tell her will get her votes. Most politicians are like this, but most don't emerge from the most left city in the US then become the mainstream Presidential nominee.
Regardless, she was cooked from the beginning. The two potential candidates that could have the absolute disaster at the border hung on their neck are the two candidates the Democrats put forward this cycle.
If Trump wins it will be because Biden and Harris were so proudly strident in undoing Trump's signature policy, the border wall.
Literally any other Democrat candidate except maybe Mayorkas himself could have dodged the blame for the border and cost of illegals insanity.
But she is plausibly centrist. Here's why: she is motivated by our system to win our elections. Besides that, she has been a VP for four years, and studied with admiration Biden's methods and moves. She's also pragmatic. My personal view is she could be a better interviewee, but otherwise she's excelled as a candidate.
I don't buy the She Hasn't Had Time argument. Harris first announced her intention to seek the presidency in 2019. She had 5 years to cement her image including the last 3.5 as the second most powerful person in the country.
You think Biden created his 2024 agenda? You think the donors and activists want Harris to do anything differently? We all know what the agenda is and that she has no ideas. Her job is to lie about the agenda because demonizing Trump (Biden’s strategy) may not be enough.
She's running about even with where Biden was before the debate. Her overcoming that deficit was accomplished by not being publicly senile.
She's a really bad candidate. And I say this as someone who ultimately wants her to win and someone who is EXTREMELY frustrated with both parties for not being able to find someone to beat Trump.
Jesus it’s hilarious how all you people do is try to find excuses for EVERYTHING. The polls are biased. The betting market is rigged and wound up by overseas bets. Anything to help you believe your shitty ass candidate is actually liked. The least approved VP in United States history that couldn’t get a single primary vote in an open primary and they you want to believe she became Americas Sweetheart in 30 days 🤣🤣🤣
Biden seemed to run as a wink-wink nudge-nudge one-termer anyway with the "transitional presidency" thing unless I grossly misread it. I was surprised they didn't do the Kamala swap much earlier with better marketing.
Whether it was Biden stubbornness or concern that she wouldn't win '24 I guess we'll find out years from now, but I'm amazed the Democrats have placed themselves in this position..
I think Biden running for a second term was a profoundly poor decision on every level, don’t get me wrong. His advisors, and Democratic Party leaders that supported it, should never work in politics again.
Winning forgives a lot. Should she win (and she's still enough of a favorite that "why Trump could pull this off" is more of an attention-getter than "how Kamala could win") agreed there will be many sighs of relief. The circular firing squad that I expect if it goes the other way will be incredible. The left taking the "stolen election" narrative back from the right would also be welcomed (showing my own bias here, I admit).
Whatever backroom stuff happened between the debate and him stepping down, sign me up to pre-order the book on it.
Is it because she is still favored to win or is it because her winning is favored by the majority of subscribers that "why Trump could pull this off" is more of an attention getter than the same article about Harris?
Good point --- I noticed this all over the media yesterday; it's always titled about how HARRIS could win, lose, pull it off, lose somehow: the focus is on Harris, not Trump. That's media bias, presumably. And subscription bias in many cases: never annoy the nice subscribers to WaPo, NYT, etc. The rightwing press has the other slant, of course, but the leftwing press has legacy attention.
How is this liked by so many people? Harris is highly qualified. She’s won numerous statewide elections and a national election as vice president. California would be the fifth most populous NATION in the world if it were separated from the U.S. Trump has been convicted of numerous things accused by his own staff under oath who worked intimately with him of trying to subvert democracy by force
Harris would have been the strong favourite to win a democratic primary as the incumbent VP and with Biden's backing. I don't buy at all that the fact of her not participating in a primary hurt her in voters' minds, only maybe in the sense that she had less time to train her media muscle/introduce herself to voters.
Trumpers (you - btw, its cultish behaviour to make your preferred candidate your profile pic, especially his damn mugshot) love to dip their toes into Bernie 2016 trutherism, but as someone who volunteered for the Bernie campaign in 2020, there was no annointing of Hillary in 2016. She was a long term firgure in the party, and shockingly, party officials wanted her to win. There was zero rigging as a result of this and you're just trying to push your conspiratorial brain rot as usual which has infected the country since MAGA. Just like with the assasination attempts its apparently "they" trying to "get him" rather than two unrelated nutjobs.
Americans like most of all, fair players, and voters in eg. PA and AZ saw the weeks of agitation to have their votes cancelled in a fair election. Harris will win, and Trump will finally be resigned to history as a loser who barely one once, couldn't even get a majority of the votes that time, then cursed his party with a decade of lunacy and underperformance. Can't wait to have an election where the Republicans put up a reasonable choice again.
Kind of agree. I will vote for Kamala but we didn't even have a Dem primary in Florida and that has rubbed me the wrong way. It's undemocratic. The Democratic party needs to do some soul searching after this election, either way it goes
And despite all those reasons, Trump is at roughly 47%, the same as he has been for the last 8 years. People's opinion about Trump have been largely cast in concrete for a long time. Nothing moves it at all. So, I wouldn't get too hung up on any of this. We are now into the Turnout operation.
Whoever has the best TURNOUT operation will win this election.
" In a CNN poll from April, 55% of Americans said they considered Trump’s presidency a success — a big jump from the 41% who viewed his presidency so positively when he left office in January 2021"
Does that poll show a Trump Favorability of >50%. No it says that 55% of respondents considered his presidency a success. Not the same thing. His favorability rating has a ceiling in the low to mid 40's. Always has.
I assumed any reader of this substack is intelligent enough to know the difference between "favorability" (OK to date my older sister) and "approval for Presidency" (time in office was a success).
Apologies for my error.
55% of respondents in CNN's April, 2024 poll think Trump's Presidency was a success ... and he's running again, wow!
Why do you think your effort to change the conversation from what it was about (favorability) to what you want it to be about (approval for presidency) means that we should all just go along?
You’re missing the reasons people like Trump besides “he’s a con man”. Trump is a master negotiator on the world stage, he’s always been tough on the border (which especially matters now), and people actually like his personality (watch a rally and see for yourself how jovial and great he is on the mic).
One of the things the public struggles to understand is you can't change the situation in a day, you end up spending the first few years dealing with whatever your predecessor did, only after that do your changes start to bear fruit
Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had the Afghanistan withdrawal not been the mess it was. He sensed American/NATO ineptitude (and it seems miscalculated), but the cost had been tremendous. This shouldn’t have ever happened
Again we’re going to blame Trump. Biden could’ve altered the negotiations or prepared differently. Or withdrawal in a way that didn’t leave all our equipment behind
Also picking Ukraine is interesting. Trump has been pretty clear that he's going to end it by essentially giving it to Putin and then withdrawing from NATO.
I'd like to hear a masterful negotiation he executed on the world stage. The only one that comes to mind is unilaterally allowing Turkey control of northern Syria, which did nothing for us & hurt our Kurdish allies.
Off the top of my head - NATO members increasing their payments, all before the Ukraine Russia war, and the Abraham Accords were two important negotiations that went well under the previous president.
lol nope, NATO spending increased post 2014 due to the invasion of Crimea, just like it increased far higher than any Trump year post invasion of Ukraine.
Even your suggested theory, were it true, would be horrible. "Trump made America's closest allies, the only other true democracies in the world, worried that the US was not to be relied upon with his consistent threats to the greatest alliance in the world, and that was good because they're planning for post-US central realities which could save us 0.003% GDP!"
The Abraham Accords were a pretend sign of progress that did nothing to work towards a two-state solution, and Trump repeatedly inflamed the situation with his rhetoric, moving of the embassy, and steadfast support of a hard-right Israeli regime hellbent on continuing the biggest obstacle to peace, West bank settlements.
This guy, is SO CLEARLY, a bumbling fool, and people are just tripping over themselves to give him credit for events merely happening/not happening while he was President because they know there's nothing to be gleaned from his actual role/agency eg. "well Russia didn't invade under Trump! Ha they're scared cuz they think he might actually use nukes! Wait what's that? No I don't think he will and hope to good he won't! No I'm not willing to examine my internal logic"
Let's not forget, Putin didn't didnt need to invade Ukraine to destabilize NATO during Trump's term because Trump was busy. Destabilizing NATO. Don't interrupt your enemies when they're punching themselves in the dick.
Dems in 2024 have become like the GOP in 2012, they're running against their ridiculous caricature of their opponent, and can't figure out why they're losing to the real man. The mainstream media thought they'd redefine reality for the American public so that their would be a liberal supermajority for the rest of their lives, but instead just created a cult for leftists who no longer know what's real and what's not.
You people came up with the "Stupid liberals so clouded by emotion they can't see reality hahaha, #TDS" in 2017 and now just repeat it reflexively like a prayer everytime your moronic mesiah continues to fit his perception as the most damaging and caustic force in US politics in decades
What trump is is a giant “f-you” to the cultural political elites to this nation which appeals to so many people. Democrats would walk away with this election and many others if they were not viewed as the angry prissy know it alls that they aspire to be. If they just cared about regular issues and not transgender bathrooms they would crush the gop.
You clearly do no understand the context of that. Maybe if the democrats were perceived as caring about issues regular folks care about instead of a small group of folks then they would do better. If not bathrooms how about state funding for prisoners having the surgery? Or defund the police? Or boycott divest? Or no borders? Etc etc.
they only pretend (yes pretend) when there is an election then it’s banning gas stoves for everyone! You know clearly the worlds single most important issue.
Yeah, dems don't care about your made up issues. And, some people do care about your made up issues, because you've done a good job propagandizing them, but that doesn't make them not made up.
There were long exchanges just above here with pious leftists saying how wonderful trannies are, or whatever they were saying, a lot of "poor them, we should all be nicer to them and let doctors castrate them if that's what they want so much." So no, I am amazed to see there really are leftists who aren't just drinking the Kool-Aid, they're taking a bath in it. I say again: it's a known sign that you are safely in the club. You can't be a Democrat unless you believe in trannies and say so.
The MLB and NBA freaked out about the bathroom bills because they're right wing, but for some reason support left wing politics? And NPR talked about it incessantly for YEARS because they're right wing, but for some reason support left wing politics? What liberals WISH they were and what they ACTUALLY are has far too wide a gap right now, and they're suffering with voters because of it.
You are parroting fox talking points. And I think you don't even realize. That's how solid the bubble is.
edit: It's not that these things weren't things. It's that right wing media made little things into huge things so you'd have something to be upset about.
I see so many people are in the left-wing bubble where Trump is pure evil and has no good qualities about him at all. Half the country is about to vote for him. I guess we’re just dumb. Or maybe. Just maybe. You’re out of touch.
About a third of the country thinks Trump won in 2020.
Yes - those people are someplace between dumb and misguided fools.
About a quarter of the rest of the population is going to vote for Trump according to current polls.
Some of them are voting their wallet, some of them are religious zealots, some of them have real or imagined grievances and think November 5th is Festivus coming early this year.
Jan 6, 2021 should be disqualifying, but I'll let you decide what confused portion of the electorate you fit into.
I really don't know what it takes to get people to open their eyes to see what Trump did in 2020 through the lens of if it was a Democrat that did it. They would have lost their ever-loving minds, and they'd be truly looking at anyone who still supported that Democrat as the dangerous moron such a person would be. They would have no problem recognizing Jan 6 as the single most disqualifying event that's occurred in American politics since secession, and the fact that *that* wound up not being disqualifying either is probably a big part of why we're in this mess today.
Nate Silver’s page is supposed to be for people with a knack for statistics who like to analyze and crunch the numbers. I literally just tried to explain why Trump is getting more of the vote than you would like, and your response is a total 2nd-grade “you’re dumb” nonsense. You shouldn’t be on this page. Try Huffington Post instead, where it’s all about your feelings.
I would imagine that’s a future article, i.e. here’s why one candidate winning makes sense and then here’s why the other candidate winning also makes sense.
Is it a coin flip? You are assuming the polls are right, that it's a 50-50 race.
I assume the polls are so likely to be wrong, because they are broken, that we have no information beyond fundamentals and signs not connected with polling.
Besides, I have hope Nate will talk about fundamentals models. That may be the future of forecasting. Gallup has a new model based on fundamentals; I've seen it twice in the last couple weeks.
I agree. Even those who support immigration don't want chaos at the border. Biden simply needed to implement the current restrictions sooner—people expect an orderly, well-managed process, regardless of their stance on immigration.
It really doesn't matter what Democrats do about the Border. Republicans will always say it is open when Democrats are in office. They always have. And they always will. At least we aren't hearing about any migrant caravans this election
Good stuff, but you omitted the perceived threat to democracy by a Democrat administration, embodied by (1) the increasing role of the regulatory state in imposing unpopular cultural policies in schools, the military and corporate governance; (2) Biden/Harris's college loan transfers from borrowers to the Treasury in proud defiance of SCOTUS and public opinion; and (3) flagrant dishonesty and news suppression in legacy journalism and entertainment media in partisan service to Democratic campaigns. You can argue about the validity of these points, but the widespread perception is out there and motivating a lot of voters, at least outside of metropolitan bubbles.
1&2 are extra-constitutional exercises of raw political power by Progressive institutions to impose policies they can't legitimate legislatively. Progressives going at least back to Wilson openly deride the Constitution as an archaic impediment to Progress. It's reasonable to feel threatened by the prospect of an executive unbound by it. Folks who feel threatened by No 3 regard those media as adjuncts of the Democrat Party and fear they will--to put things bluntly--become the propaganda arm of a one-party state.
If they are unconstitutional scotus will block them, that's how the constitutional order works. At most you can claim that they are undemocratic, but it doesn't make them "a danger to democracy". As for "one party state" you really need to explain how you get from A to B ...
I'm explaining voter perceptions, not arguing positions. Prominent Democrats' advocating to eliminate the filibuster supports a belief among many Trump voters that, if in control of the legislature and the executive, Democrats would pack SCOTUS with partisan judges and make DC & PR states, possibly adding 4 permanent D senators. That would remove barriers to (a) further expansion of Progressive regulatory control in lieu of legislation, (b) bulletproof DOJ partisan lawfare efforts, thus (c) effectively cementing D control of the federal government for a generation. That's how you could reason your way to a one-party state if you were so inclined.
Moreover, there is widespread belief on their side that Biden opened the borders for three years in order to flood swing states with future D voters whom they will eventually make citizens. Argue about that all you like, but the perception is out there and an important factor in explaining how Trump has a real chance of winning again.
I totally agree it's awful when politician disrespect the constitution! Given that fact, how did you feel when Donald Trump posted that he should be allowed to terminate the constitution due to his perceptions of voter fraud in the 2020 election?
That guys keys are toast after this election. My guess is he is already creating an excuse column on how his keys were right but the environment changed. That guys a fraud
The Lichtman keys are actually pretty good, IMO. Lichtman's interpretation this year only, when he's as old as Biden and past his work, are truly awful. He badly wants Harris to win, and I guess he thinks twisting his model around will help.
I think these are all reasonable takes. I do caution about the inflation take, though, in so much as inflation ran rampant around the world, plus Trump contributed to a larger majority of the overall COVID-time spend than Biden’s admin did. So Democrats being facing “plausible” blame is much more an indictment to Americans’ critical thinking skills than a pure indictment on Democrats.
See I disagree on this one. I’ll be honest - my income now is higher than it was under Trump. Yet it **feels** like I get so much less for my money. If my base of goods = $100 and I made $100, then when I make $120 and those base goods cost $125 - I am losing on this. Biden is probably not to blame for most of that, but he’s in charge and someone has to be blamed.
Thinking even further democrats are without a doubt worse for the inflation even if they had been in power in 2020 because they would have locked down for longer and shocked the supply, and had just as much if not more spending.
Furthermore you can definitely plausibly argue Trump might have spent some money he shouldn’t have if he had been president last four years too. But the qn as to who would have been worse for inflation is likely Dems
I'm going to argue the opposite here. Australia had probably one of the heaviest lockdown systems during the pandemic of western democracies, and actually experienced less inflation than the US did with our incredibly tepid response.
I know folks in Australia. For them, COVID wasn't nearly as disruptive since they had heavy, effective, but temporary lockdowns. If COVID appeared in a place, that place was heavily locked down for a couple weeks until testing came back consistently negative. After that, things went right back to normal, and I mean real normal, like before the pandemic. Because the response was effective, folks felt safe resuming their daily activities. Compare that to the endless malaise we faced because nobody knew what the heck was going on. People act like we had this heavy handed lockdown in America, but much of it was self-imposed simply because people didn't feel safe.
Now, I can't guarantee that the Dems would have handled it any better. I imagine they would have done similarly to Western Europe at best. And, let's be honest, in our modern global economy, it's hard to decouple the outcomes in one nation from another. But I still doubt your assertion based on the evidence.
I don't think it's directly comparable; aus growth rate is anemic and they were not close to full employment before covid to begin with -- different starting scenario. The other thing is that locking down wasn't really effective anywhere. All the countries who tried it essentially gave up and because achieving zero covid was impossible.
America was punished more for it's insane spending because there wasn't a lot of slack in the economy beforehand
Listen to the unsubstantiated “trust me bro” attitude of an anonymous rando saying Trump’s got in in the bag, or listen to the rigorous statistical analysis of forecasting models from the Silver Bulletin, FiveThirtyEight, the Economist, etc., who all say it’s 50/50.
When you got your colonoscopy. The last cavity filled. The last time you drove on a road (thank you civil engineers and the experts who paved the roads). The last time you relied on networking experts and software engineers in order to post a random comment on a substack.
True: I was worried enough to look it up. Vance would be put in at once by the party and voted on in place of Trump. If the assassination occurred after the election, which Trump won, same as if he were already pres and vice-pres. Vance would succeed. They DID think of all these contingencies, bless 'em.
thanks for reminding me to send more money to the Harris campaign…probably will make phone calls this weekend too. The con man with 24 felonies and sexual assault charges will destroy this country and when you don’t have a country nothing else will matter
The lawfare conspiracy that convicted Trump is much more likely to destroy the country than Trump.Although I am far form being a fan of his but the Russiagate Hoax and the corruption of the FBI and DOJ are much more worrisome than Trump
Here’s why I think the polls are exactly right, and Harris will ultimately prevail—
I do not believe that Trump gained a significant number of supporters since last election. I think his floor and his ceiling are hard. And they are between the upper 30’s and the mid 40’s.
I don’t believe polls can be off by as much as 2020. If that were true, Trump would beat Harris by up to 6% in PA. Trump might win PA, but it will be by similar margins as 2016.
Trump has gained ground in low propensity voters—latino and black men.
Harris has gained ground with high propensity voters—women of all races and ages. This is important, because there are more women than men and also women vote in higher percentages than men.
Harris is more popular than Trump on 538’s popularity tracker. Harris’s popularity vs unpopularity lines are almost touching, Trumps have a noticeable gap.
Abortion is on the ballot in AZ and Kari Lake is hugely unpopular. It’s going to take a lot of ticket splitting for Harris not to come out on top in AZ. Possible, but it will be down to the wire.
I don’t think a majority of voters are ready for the threats that Trump has made against the Democratic process and the constitution to become reality.
January 6 and Trump’s role in it turned off a lot of conservative voters who already didn’t love his personality. Those switched votes will matter.
This will be a high turnout election. That will favor Harris.
I think the pollsters made serious adjustments after 2020, and I think the race is close. I wouldn’t be surprised to see either candidate win. But ultimately, I think Harris takes most of the swing states, narrowly.
I know plenty of ostensibly liberal people on policy issues who have never been politically aligned and have become trump supports since 2020. The pandemic has turned a lot of formerly apolitical people into anti-institutionals and every single one of them is now a trump support (thank you RFK). I mean I personally know DOZENS of these people, who I’ve watched all year post RFK clips and now are talking about how we need trump to save us from (insert various things here, it’s a broad tent in its own sick way). Just because you can’t imagine someone becoming a trump supporter does not mean they do not exist all around you.
I said I don’t think he gained a significant number of supporters. Any gains would be offset by losses. I believe that he has gained supporters, but I believe he’s lost supporters—and I know several of them.
I also know people who didn’t like what happened during COVID—from Trump or Biden or at the state level. They moved their kids from public to private school because the public schools were remote. However, none of those people that I know changed their support to Trump. I believe there are some that did, but being annoyed at COVID lockdowns does not equal becoming a Trump supporter.
Harris will always win the overal generic national average for one reason - 1 in 10 people who answer are from California and that will get 65/35 so she gets a natural 2-3% popular increase for that reason. But we don’t use popular vote to decide this - thank God
I grew up in Orange County, CA, then later moved to Kern County (Kevin McCarthy’s district), so it always makes me laugh when I see stuff like this. Democrats were rather few and far between most of my time in CA.
Pretty sure there are more Republicans in CA than in any other state. I guess it’s possible there are more in TX. We do know that in 2020, more Trump votes came from CA than any other state. Those are the official stats.
The “disenfranchisement” of non-swing-state voters goes both ways, and if we ever move past the electoral college, we’ll wonder how anyone ever defended it.
Harris’s support is below what Biden had in California, Illinois, and New York. Which, counterintuitively, means that her national polling average indicates more strength in states that aren’t so overwhelmingly blue.
Also, if Republicans presidents keep losing the popular vote by wider and wider margins, eventually the majority of people will get fed up. Minority rule can only work for so long.
This is a good point, but it seems it's being fixed --- Republican voter registration is WAY up, a big surprise to a lot of people. But given that, we may well take the national vote soon.
A couple people have said this recently. Two things-party registration is a trailing indicator. People will vote counter to their registration for years before they change their registration (if they ever do at all). Which is to say more registration for a party doesn’t equal more votes. The other thing to watch is that there are way more registered independents than there used to be, so the number of registered Republicans or Democrats doesn’t give as much info as it used to.
You are saying more registration for a party doesn't equal more votes --- if it's young people newly registering, that would mean more votes for the party they are choosing more, right? True apparently about the independents, and that's interesting and probably a bad sign. Showing people distrust the parties. Can't really blame them ---
I’m guessing most of those registrations are changes in registration not young people. 18-35 year olds are the most Democratic cohort, 51% to 35%, dem vs rep.
Her support is lower in the other states, but is about the same in California. Which would mean the impact to her national popular vote share will be tempered, given Cali’s huge population
Seconf point Might be true, but has no applicability to this election cycle. And in a nation so strongly divided it would be incredibly difficult to amend the Constitution.
Good point that a "cold" civil war is already started, perhaps! I think that's a good description of what is going on --- I never thought of it that way.
The way to make it a hot war, with secessions, is to try to cancel the Electoral College and make all elections depend on big city Dem populations.
While I agree with this post and ultimately think that Harris will pull out a narrow victory I do think the shortened campaign schedule has hurt her.
While she is trying to do an absolute media blitz at the moment I don't believe the average Joe has an understanding of what her policies are besides abortion.
I do think that there is something as well to voting for a known quantity. Trump was President for 4 years lest we forget and I think people are hesitant of voting for Harris as she is an unknown.
That's my guess as to what is going to swing the election either way.
Agree strongly with your last post, I think it the most significant question regarding relying on polling models this election cycle. Most of the rest of your points seem to reflect a case of wishful thinking based on mild TDS.
Are you disagreeing that women are higher propensity voters? Or that black and Latino men or low propensity voters? Because you can look that up.
You can also look up Trump’s favorability numbers. His popularity/unpopularity doesn’t change much.
As far as January 6th’s affect on voter sentiment, it’s hard to say. Anecdotally, I know past Trump voters who either won’t vote for him or are planning to vote for Harris. They are conservatives, but their vitriol for him now has surprised me.
I also think it matters that abortion is on the ballot in AZ. I read an article this morning about the Catholic Church spending a 3rd as much as past efforts to fight abortion rights legislation. Apparently they view it as a losing cause given the results post Roe. It clearly gets voters to the polls.
Does all that mean Harris will win? Of course not. But these points are about reality, hardly TDS.
I could also write a bunch on why Trump has a good chance of winning, but Nate just did that.
You could have mentioned the decision not to choose Shapiro. She's been plummeting in the polls since the VP debate, and it seems like the bubble has burst, especially with Waltz losing to JD Vance.
No, look up Ross Perot’s VP, Admiral James Stockdale. The VP debate is often cited as the turning point of his 1992 campaign. Perot never recovered from it. Keep in mind that there was actually a point where Perot was leading both Bush and Clinton in the polls.
I would like to see at least one citation of the vice-presidential debate being the turning point in Perot’s campaign, because it wasn’t. The turning point of Perot’s campaign was when he dropped out in July. He re-entered two weeks before the VP debate in October, with his strong polling totally evaporated. Stockdale’s performance was certainly embarrassing , but no one, probably including Perot, thought that Perot had any hope by that point anyway.
Prior to posting, I actually used AI to verify my recollection and specifically used “turning point” based on its answer.
Did the VP debate play a significant role in the downfall of Perot?
The VP debate in 1992 is often cited as a turning point for Ross Perot’s campaign. During that debate, Perot's running mate, Admiral James Stockdale, struggled to articulate his points and appeared disoriented. This performance led to a perception that Perot's campaign lacked seriousness and preparedness.
While the debate itself wasn't the sole factor in Perot's decline, it did contribute to diminishing his support. Polls indicated that following the debate, his numbers dropped significantly, and many voters perceived his candidacy as less viable. Additionally, Perot faced challenges from the major party candidates, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, which further complicated his position.
In summary, while the VP debate played a role in the perception of Perot's campaign, it was part of a larger narrative that included various factors affecting his candidacy.
AI response says it is “often cited as a turning point”. Since you have already made up your mind by saying “it wasn’t”, there is no reason for me to go through the trouble of finding a source that you will most certainly call unacceptable. I have been down that rabbit hole before.
I mean I guess we just disagree about whether 2% is a "massive shift," but even then, you said she was plummeting in the polls. Undecideds breaking for Trump while her own numbers stay steady is not what anyone could call "she has plummeted."
As for the most recent polls, those don't support anything about the effects of the VP debate 3 weeks ago.
I believe, if she loses, that will be one of the greatest knocks against her. But remember Shapiro is Jewish - that inflames the anti-Israel crowd of her party and America is not yet ready for an avowed non Christian president (even though it’s obvious Obama and likely Harris are not Christian’s they at least pretended to be). They would turn off black and Latin votes she critically needs.
Suggesting that Trump populist base is due to racists, sexists, homophobes, islamophobes is hilariously ironic.
The reason regular straight white guys are going in for Trump is because they are tired of being called this shit when they aren't bigoted.
Trump's populism is anti-woke, not bigoted. What do black men, hispanics, Jews and Mormons have in common? Yep. They're tired of woke policies and idpol, and are shifting toward Trump.
Your #5 here ironically attributes racist and religious bigotry among Trump supporters instead of growing support with black, hispanic, Jewish and Mormon supporters (who are the targets of actual bigotry).
Yeah, read it late and then scrolled through all the comments just now to see if anyone referenced #5 - I thought I kept misreading it or I misunderstood the qualifier of "in the Hillary sense of the word".....guess not - I'm pretty stunned. And the use of the adjective "many".....yikes, Nate. If anyone can explain how NS didn't really mean this, please let me know. I like him a lot, but this seems unnecessarily and unfairly judgmental, superior, and divisive.
"Many" is not all. If the shoe fits, wear it. If not, getting all high and mighty is disconnected from reality.
In a close election, even a 1% sliver is enough to matter, and according to polling that is a severe underestimate of the R-voting slice of the electorate that fits into that bucket.
So yes, these deplorables who decide to turn out and vote could make the difference in this election, which is what this article is about.
Regular straight white guy here. It’s the con man artistry convincing those among us that anyone cares about us and is chastising us for not being woke enough. Fun fact, Trump himself is bigoted, sexist, shallow. Folks overlook that for numerous reasons (some good some bad). I understand some of the reasons they vote for him. I actually think the median Trump voter is much smarter than him (probably than many of our politicians). It’s not fair that they get saddled with their candidate’s deficiencies. That being said, he does not care about anyone but himself and he is offering empty statements that he’ll make it all better without any substance as to how or even why he cares to attempt to do so. I wish his voters would see through it to at least vote for someone else even if it is not Harris. I’m a regular upper middle class white guy and I happily voted for Harris, even if she isn’t perfect, she respects our institutions and has some policy proposals. I love forward to when we can focus on policy and not the spectacle, sporting event everyone online acts like it is.
The true cons are the party who promised to ban fracking and legalize illegals, but now are trying to convince voters they were just kidding. Problem is, we see their horrible track record of the past 3.5 years. The time of Democrats conning the American public has come to an end.
1 reason:
People don't want to live in a world where pronouns, crime, trannies and DEI hires rule the day.
Sorry, normalcy always wins. You're not special.
Feudalism was once considered normalcy. Slavery was once considered normalcy.
Women’s subjugation was once considered normalcy.
I’m not super optimistic about this election but I do take joy in knowing that your hatred will lose eventually, as it always has.
Human subjugation is not, in fact, analogous to one political party telling you that someone less qualified than you deserves a job more than you because of the color of their skin, or that your daughter needs to compete with biological men.
I think the majority of unqualified people that are actually getting hired are from nepotism or connections, not DEI. I think not wanting transgender women in women’s sports is a potentially defensible position depending on how you go about it but the person I was replying to didn’t mention that, they just used a slur lmao.
> I think not wanting transgender women in women’s sports is a potentially defensible position
Transgender women competing in women's sports is an indefensible position.
Brian said, "Transgender women competing in women's sports is an indefensible position."
Men. Just call them what they are, men. Men trying to perpetrate a fraud, yes, but still just men, unless they are eunuchs, which most of them are not. It's time, in my opinion, to stop with the terrible confusion that this fake Woke labeling engenders.
A eunich in drag still isn't a woman.
Your transphobia doesn't really win you any arguments.
This is cruel. You just don't understand and that qualifies you to make judgments on them? What you don't like is a really dumb thing. If everyone was such a stickler for conformity life would just be boring and we'd be living in some horror movie from the 50s. Which some people still are, thanks to you.
Failing to recognize that transgender women are women is an indefensible position. Cause, you know, science and medicine and stuff.
I'm not for transgender women competing in women's sports. I am for women competing in them, though, regardless of the sex they were assigned at birth.
I'm a woman. Had a baby and everything. Some guy eagerly becoming a eunuch chemically and through surgery ---- have to tell you, that's no woman. If you are confused about that, I'm guessing you are single.
Is this supposed to be understandable and logical. It appears to be the doublespeak usually associated with those who want to claim that basic biology is unscientific, yet in other areas proclaim that we should “accept the science” espoused by charlatans such as Fauci.
The science is not on your side.
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/sex-is-not-a-spectrum
but who cares? what is it to you? you're not even a young woman. do you even watch women's sports? this is not the purview of the Federal Government.
Likely so depending on the sport
A mainstream party telling you that men can become women is absolutely one of many valid considerations to factor into your vote. Such a position is incompatible with reason and dangerous to the future of western civilization.
Saying that biological men can bare children or being unable to define a basic biological term (women) makes a political party seem absolutely extreme and invalidates any actual good points they may put across.
Let me guess. You’re not a young woman.
Agreed completely. The sports thing is so minor an issue to most people, but I think most of us want women’s sports to be fair. We don’t want to make trans people feel ostracized such that their typically high suicide rate and other dangers and hardships remain
Maybe these fake women guys should just straighten out and fly right.
Maybe you should tell them to stop being trans. I am sure that will work. Do you think that if these people could just decide to be comfortable in the body they were born in, they wouldn't take the opportunity? They deal with such a difficult life, not to mention the near constant harassment from trolls like you.
It is indicative of a broader mindset.
"I think the majority of unqualified people that are actually getting hired are from nepotism or connections, not DEI." statistics from major corporations do not support this. They all have DEI quotas to meet and are regularly hiring middle-of-the-pack people due to their skin color rather than from among the most qualified
ie, a simple example of this is that people with diagnosed mental and atttention disorders are being actively sought as hires to be TSA controllers (the role that lands planes). This was extensively reported on the right a few months ago
Transexuals who never got on board with the trans identity ideology still call themselves trannies. If anything, "birthing persons" is more of a slur because women never called themselves that. But I bet you don't care about the double standard.
Benjamin, you are not the arbiter of what's defensible.
Oy vey.
Your hate is blinding you. The world needs you, dig deep and help.
No parties are telling anyone that. That moment has passed among the majority of democrats, who decide things based on facts and a desire to help those in need via equitable and non-discriminatory practices. The recent manifestation of DEI has been deconstructed quickly even at colleges and stuff. But it’s reasonable to try to consider hardships faced as a strength. And pragmatism above all.
I don’t mean to invalidate diversity, equity, and inclusion, all three being very important to me. I guess what I’m saying is it’s unclear if we’ve managed to perfect policies such that those things are met, even recent ones. according to things I’ve read at least
what is this a response to? Women are still being subjugated. Someone look up NON-PARTISAN statistics on who is still receiving unequal treatment in hiring by percentage, with people with the same qualifications but different names. You will see that white people, especially white men, are still doing pretty darn well. And all of this subjugation is actively being sought to be restored by many in the GOP, who really don't care about this, and really only act in the interest of big business and corporations because these heartless, profit-driven organizations--including highly pernicious ones who promote war and exploitation for sheer money--who don't care about their employees more than they are required by law-shareholders in the top ten percent or higher of the population---but only because these people bestow the representatives with power--or else they're some kind of traditionalist who is wildly misinterpreting Jesus's message to mostly just mean women should be forced out of having any say or role in society beyond being baby machines and unpaid laborers for their husbands... But my basic point is, efforts to equalize things for job applicants or whatnot have not been perfect but have helped. The more we get rid of discrimination, the more stable and functional our society as a whole is. But this isn't even something someone like Kamala Harris would even be in charge of. And if you have personally experienced, or feel you have, discrimination in hiring, that isn't okay, but there are legal ways that are more effective at making changes to this than voting for a leader who could actually give two craps about anyone who votes for him that doesn't make him wealthier and feel like a big shot and have absurd and frightening amounts of power for someone that selfish.
It is much more plausible that the people calling for reparations and redistribution are the ones motivated by hatred and resentment.
I don’t think that’s true. I think all humans are susceptible to both of those and that being fair, compassionate, and peace-minded is best for promoting literally everyone’s holistic wellness, ability to act wholeheartedly toward all others. Things like trauma have ramifications and it’s very much worth looking into latest, profound scientific discoveries on PTSD
Fact: no people of African descent have better living standards than those in America.
They should pay, not get paid. They've gotten plenty.
Wowwww.
Think about that. Maybe read about Africa more also, the effects of colonization. But Africa doesn’t equal Black. Racism entails repeated scars. But every invalidation causes trauma, and so have yours. There is Trauma with a capital T, like from intense singular violence, but science has now shown that repeated invalidation or any kind of wounding whether from prejudice or parental lack of concern or dismissal (or abuse) affects the same nerves and has very similar effects. The effect is called “emotional disregulation,” which is when your prefrontal cortex’s reasonable and non-fear-centered ability to control you is overrides by fight, flight, fear, or freeze. We need to be inclusive of all people’s sensitivity so we can all treat each other well through the many tribulations that impact all of us where our neighbor’s help is a boon. When I said “Wowww,” for example that was invalidating. I only meant to suggest you think or read and feel about slavery’s reality day-to-day. Read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or watch a documentary. These people worked with zero pay rights (including to a family) physically so hard, no breaks, painfully, their entire lives literally, and bore constant and various abuse to enable our country to prosper. That is not something anyone including you would actually conclude some group of people was better off ultimately for having done.
Speaking of why many people in Africa are getting the short end of the stick, this year's Noble Memorial Prize in Economics speaks a lot to that:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/press-release/ Hint - it has a lot to do with styles of European colonization. Come to think of it, so does the political system of many US states.
Bermuda disagrees with your fake fact.
It will never be normal to chop off your penis.
Oh, come on --- it's the DEI Way of the Democrat. Every guy has a right to -- do that -- and call himself a woman, see. And then we're all supposed to be forced to cooperate with that fraud. Good luck with that.
It's not some kind of rampant problem. Just try to let go of it, and it won't do you any harm, I really feel. But people on this very chat are being harassed without being known at all.
It’s not harassment. It’s just disagreement.
Not if you’re trying to stop them from getting medical help. And this discussion has been harassing, it just has
That's funny, I thought circumcision is considered quite normal.
Which is probably why it's an extremely rare surgery that's only done in very specific circumstances
You wouldn't mind it being banned, then, since it's barely going to affect anyone.
And if you would mind, then you shouldn't gaslight others that they aren't allowed to care about an issue that you care about.
I do take joy in knowing communism will lose eventually as it always has.
Meritocracy and freedom made this country great, not the nanny state, reparations and a government with its boot on the throat of companies and citizens.
Yours is essentially the argument that all change is good. Not so. The modern left’s ideas are increasingly just objectively bad. DEI for instance. King was right in the 60s when he was pushing for color blind policies; DEI goes backwards from that.
I take joy in knowing communism will lose as it always has.
Astounding that you are so unaware you are living in the past. Best wishes for making it to the 90s one day my friend.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward my opinions.
🙄
Normal, like back when women were property and brown people knew their place, right? You guys aren't conservatives, you are regressives.
I think your got those backwards: probably should've said when brown people were property and women knew their place. But hey, when you're losing an argument, just shout that the other guy is a racist misogynist nazi fascist... or whatever.
Him: You want women to be property.
You: No no no, I just want them to know their place.
How dare we suggest they are misogynists.
No, just regressive.
Is that "know their place" comment serious? Because that is pretty much the exact definition of misogyny. You're describing yourself as a misogynist...
this entire discussion has been appalingly like that. I started out thinking people were just angry and lashing out. Now it seems like being prejudiced is a weirdly prominent value for people who are pro-Trump. I thought you guys were subscribers to this because you acknowledge the importance of rigorous, data-driven skepticism and the hesitancy to make sweeping judgments without even suggesting you might be in error. I guess that was a much more sweeping judgment than I thought.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/09/start-with-a-lie/679625/
yeah although women have been property and sex slaves throughout history
Chopping off one's penis is not normal.
Neither is hemodialysis, but we do it when necessary to save a life. Did you know that the majority of transgender women don't get bottom surgery and would thus still have a penis? Why do you care what is in a random woman's pants that is walking down the street. Weirdo.
Ok? I don't want those men pretending to be women anywhere near the locker rooms or bathrooms my daughters use. You guys keep pushing this but it's one of many reasons that Trump is about to win every swing state.
Guess what? Your daughter also doesn't care and also thinks you are weird.
I can tell you don't have kids, increasingly common in the party that is anti-children. No, kids are naturally deeply disturbed by men pretending to be women, especially in a personal space like a bathroom. This is a natural instinct, as I haven't discussed it with them at all, but there have been instances where they were on their guard around people like that.
I always find it interesting that it's transgender women who get the most hate. The fact that most conservatives don't give a flip about transgender men shows that their hatred is driven by misogyny. They're fine with a "woman" (which is how they view it) becoming more masculine, but not with a "man" becoming more feminine.
My very conservative dad will use a transgender man's preferred pronouns and name, but not a transgender woman's. It makes absolutely no sense.
That said, I do understand that transgender men also suffer a lot of discrimination, and it's not my attention (edit: "intention") to minimize that.
As I mentioned above it is because transgender women scare them. They are afraid that they will find themselves attracted to something with a penis and that will just shatter their masculinity and their entire worldview of sexuality and opinion of themselves. That is how fragile their masculinity is.
I mean I’m not that sure most cis-gender men are entirely good with “masculine” women, but regardless, it’s a tough subject to discuss given how socially constructed (for thousands upon thousands of years, in varied ways across many cultures “masculinity” or “femininity” itself have been.) It’s all a bit of a doozy trying to find a more loving and inclusive way to describe ourselves and others out of the language we’ve largely inherited.
100% agree. I wasn't sure if I should write the comment that you're replying too, because it was such an oversimplification. Thank you for sharing!
That's easy: I care a lot about whether a man is pretending to be a woman. Gender is the FIRST thing people identify about other people approaching, because men are so dangerous --- to men and especially to women. Sorry, guys, but you know it's true. (Age and race are the next things we quickly identify, and then go on to physical condition, etc.) This is something people need to know accurately; and if a man is pretending to be a woman, he's not only dangerous ipso facto, but also is crazy as a hoot owl and plainly dangerous for that reason.
That’s so mean
Why is that your go to response lol.
So random and just betrays your lack of substance.
Uhh excuse me, we prefer “reactionaries”. Please respect how we identify.
>You guys aren't conservatives, you are regressives.
boohooo
c'mon. like, why be so judgmental about people you probably don't even know and who probably never harmed you? did someone hurt you in some way? being excluded is a horrific experience, and it is just normal in a free society to let people be themselves, and not go around being mean all the time
😂😭
i'm a tranny. i don't want to rule the day, i just want to live
Sounds like a you problem.
all i advocate for is a smaller government that doesn't violate my autonomy, is that too much to ask?
I don't really care. Sad for the gays you guys think you're part of the same club, though.
we're not, and i know that. i have an illness that can be cured and you heartlessly and callously throw me and thousands more to the side because the pundit you watch happened to think it was immoral or something. why shouldn't i get the care i need? can you even give an actual reason other than some vague LGB bullshit?
most anti-trans stuff that comes from the right is directed toward things like minors and sports right? what are they doing that violates your autonomy?
sending love and total acceptance your way. i think this will all get better, someday.
You all know this is some fake troll poster, don't you? BOGUS!!
what about other people's autonomy? or is your autonomy defined by wanting to do away with others' autonomy?
what autonomy of others is being done away with?
never mind, yes, I was confused. we are in agreement! sorrrrry!
republicans have taken away women's rights. it's not a small thing. it's a whole entire life and also at least nine months of highly invasive transformation. why don't you imagine this happening to you if you're a man. imagine the government forcing your body to undergo all that. go to all the appointments. gain all that weight. suffer all the things, like nausea, etc. possibly suffer complications giving birth. then, after that, it's not at all easy to give a baby up, especially if the father isn't with you. how about we load all of that on the father? but does this happen? no. 18 years and more of your life doing so many things, and likely having to take off work and getting behind in your career or not even being able to go to college like my cousin. what happens to the man in this case? very, very little. I'd like the government to force any man to go through literally every physical, emotional, and financial/time transformation it is forcing us to do before considering outlawing abortion. do they? no. because they don't think women NEED autonomy of this kind. "don't have sex"? please. I wish they forced that on all of us. Men are the ones who need it the most. Then they'd see. What right does the government have to be such a moralistic dickwad? Eh??? And, of course, autonomy of trans people to extricate them from horrific discomfort and depression by a procedure that really is the cure. That intimately affects trans people on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. What kind of question is that??? And what rights are YOU concerned about? The right to be religious? To have a gun? Those aren't being taken away, aren't threatened. The right to religiously judge others is another backwards concept that people portray as some kind of right being taken away--but this country is not about persecuting people because of religion or lack thereof. The second amendment isn't even being applied reasonably by DEMOCRATS. "Regulated militias" or psychos who seem to think they need machine guns because some outlying group or maybe just a class of first graders deserve to have THEIR autonomies taken away. I'm just so confused as to how you could wonder, "whose autonomy."
Well thanks for thinking over half the population aka women deserve no such consideration. This is all perception on your part. What rights of yours have been taken away????? And I’m sorry but the right to a psycho automatic weapon doesn’t count. That means a right to mow down hundreds of people in seconds. What about their rights eh?
What? How can you say this? It’s a clinical problem. It’s a matter of suffering in one’s own skin. You don’t DECIDE to do this. Just let people be.
Just want to say that I hope you know you're not totally alone and that there are millions of people in the US who support your right and your fight for your rights! As one of them I recognize you fighting the good fight here (to just simply exist) and hope you're in a safe blue state or can get to one where you will find lots of friendly faces.
If you were born male I don’t want you competing in women’s sports.
i was born male, and trust me, the sanctity of women's sports is safe from me.
Crime went up under the Trump admin and has come down under the Biden admin
You miss the FBI crime statistics revision, or something?
Yes, I have absolutely no idea of whatever right-wing conspiracy theory psychobabble you are referring to
Weird take. Mainstream news is now "right-wing conspiracy theory psychobabble"
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/10/16/stealth_edit_fbi_quietly_revises_violent_crime_stats_1065396.html
Not sure "real clear investigations" is as mainstream as you say, and you realize that is data from 2022 right? 2023 data still shows a decline?
It is quite mainstream, and there are quite a few other sources that you might like better. Your lack of knowledge is not, in fact dispositive.
Right: This is what a real unbiased report says:” FBI data shows the rate of violent crime fell by a quarter over the past two decades “ Of course, this requires a deep dive instead of the low info/Fox reader mindset. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4glxxreed7o
For now
This is widely known and reported lol.
Also, you definitely do not know what the word 'psychobabble' means.
I'm pretty sure that when "psychobabble" is used incorrectly... it is itself an example of psychobabble. Fun irony there.
https://x.com/eyeslasho/status/1846639816454164653
Your statistics are out of date. The original attempt to hide the increase in crime has now been restated. Sorry to inform you of the facts. You must watch and read the biased MSM which refused to report the revisions, it didn’t help with their narrative.
Yes! I just read today that the FBI stats have been revised to say violent crime increased by 4.22% since 2022 ---- instead of being 2% down. These FBI LIARS. I guess they were hoping to get through the election with the fake stats and help Harris win.
I just don't think that things are so different as to be alarmed, either way.
Not even close to being factual.
😂
Out & Out LIE. But, I'm sure the truth matters little to him.
Please can I buy a pouch of whatever you are smoking, Spencer?
It may be the #1 reason for you but most voters cite the economy as the #1 reason. So, your statement is just factually wrong.
OK, but we're taling about America, not whatever place you're from.
I'm a US citizen and this is my third US Presidential election. Keep posting under your fake name because it will be hugely embarrassing for your friends and family if people find out who you are.
Is this a threat?
That depends. Are you threatened by the possibility of being an embarrassment to your friends and family for being outed as a lowlife racist?
No.
Edit: do not threaten me.
Trumps last presidency was anything but normal.
True, normal Americans actually prospered. Oh no, who will think of the mega-corporations and lazy women in HR.
You think mega-corporations and billionaires didn't do well during the presidency of the guy who gave huge tax cuts to corporations and billionaires while giving tiny and temporary tax cuts to the middle class?
You’re suggesting a non Harris win would reestablish normalcy? You’re fucking hilarious. I submit people also do not want to live in a world dominated by a fascist asshole he may win, but we’ll see.
Both candidates have some fascist tendencies, the difference is that the elites an MSM back Harris because they agree with her fanciest tendencies and so would rather she be in power. They despise Trump because he appeals to those that they consider “deplorable”.
Right, Trump is seen as the return-to-normal candidate, I read, which is why he is winning.
So far.
"is seen as" being the key words here...
Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
If it were true that normalcy always wins, Clinton would've triumphed in 2016. Trump was not the candidate of normalcy, he was (and remains) the outsider candidate.
Clinton wasn't running on normalcy. She was running on hiring less qualified people because their ancestors happened to have a different skin color etc.
It's still not normal. And I am not sure why we're pretending it's good, either. Stop patronizing black people.
I'm saying Clinton's campaign (and her candidacy in general) was based around her experience as a politician and Washington insider for 3 decades. And I'm saying Trump's campaign was based around his identity as a political outsider who would "drain the swamp" and sweep aside established persons and structures in Washington.
Clinton was seen as the status quo in 2016, because she basically *was* the status quo. Trump was the candidate of change, and his election was a symptom of frustration with "politics as usual".
And I can bring Barack Obama's election in 2008 as another point of evidence against "normalcy always wins". And if you still insist that Trump is normalcy, and that normalcy always wins, I'll point to the results of the 2020 election, and the extremely normal behavior he exhibited after the loss.
Trump is not a normal candidate, and that's a key part of his appeal. If you don't notice this, it's got nothing to do with political leanings, and everything to do with not paying attention.
>was based around her experience as a politician and Washington insider for 3 decades.
Yes, and these are not normal people. Normalcy isn't what people in DC think it is.
It's usually the exact opposite, actually.
Jim, with all due respect, she was not a politician for 3 decades. She was the wife of a Governor and then the wife of a President. Then she was handed the senate seat in a state she had never lived in and then was appointed Obama's Sec of state as a consolation prize. In this roll, most rate her performance as poor. The truth is she lacked her husband's political skills and her rhetoric alienated large swaths of the population.
Unsure why you're saying "with all due respect", but I'll say the same:
With all due respect, this is a contradiction without substance, because I can grant you all of that (not 3 decades of being a politician, just a decade and a half of being a high-ranking politician and more than two decades of being a Washington insider, and I'll even grant you that she sucked at all of it for argument's sake), and it doesn't move the needle on what we were talking about. She was the insider, standard, candidate who represented conventional thinking in Washington... right?
I'm confused that anyone would even argue this point. Trump was not the candidate of normalcy... he was a rejection of the "normal" approach to domestic and foreign politics, policy, media... and the fact that he was a political outsider was a key idea that Trump ran on. Right?
And so... when just 8 years ago the world (and even many Republicans, like my parents, who voted for him) was stunned that such an unusual, unprecedented candidate could win, a person today saying something like "normal always wins" should immediately draw criticism from across the political spectrum...
Right?
What nonsense. A majority are likely to vote for democrats just as they have for the past 30 years.
20.
Ah yes, you're quite correct. W in 04.
That might be true if Mitt Romney were running.
There is nothing normal about Donald Trump
Correct. Every other reason given in this post is a cope. They've tried to distance themselves from it for the last six months, but we all know it's coming back full force after the election. Harris is horrible, but it honestly doesn't have much to do with her in particular. Nor does it have much to do with Trump in particular. You could swap both of them out and I'd still vote the same.
You may be right, but that doesn't mean Trump is or should be anything approaching normal. As Nate says, Dems have failed to capitalize on his weaknesses, but the idea that he's actually the candidate of "normalcy" is laughable.
Maybe Trump wouldn't "normally" be the candidate of "normalcy," but in a time when one party enthusiastically affirms that men can turn into women by wishing, that it's fine if homeless take over all our cities and camp on the sidewalks, that we should have open borders and all the criminals in Latin America rush up here to prey on us, that no one should have to pay for goods in stores if they don't want to ---------------- yep, Trump is suddenly the candidate of normalcy.
Is this what people think Democrats think? I assumed the only people who thought this about Democrats were people who got their news from Facebook. Maybe, in some extreme cases, people who got their news on Fox (which is better than Facebook, at least).
Lol what?
Never met anyone that matches your caricature of a Democrat.
Holy strawman, batman
👏👏👏👏👏👍👍👍👍👍
I think that it's really easy to buy into ideas about Democrats and our leaders that suggest the far left wing of the party is in charge. Although, for the most part, compared to Western Europe or Canada or something, the far left wing is not that far left. No one, even someone like Bernie, is advocating to do a whole lot to regulate capitalism itself. Most of us are motivated by trying to make things better for all of us, including ourselves. But right now, we just want normal things like equality, justice, and peace.
Sounds like someone is triggered. You really shouldn't be so sensitive. Don't let the libs live rent free in your head. Etc, etc.
this isn’t true of Kamala Harris’s centrist campaign and pledges in the first place. “Normalcy” is a hurtful word though in this comment to me, simply a “cis-woman” who has dug deep into my past to find that things like the Bible and its pronouns have fundamentally formed my own feelings of inferiority vis a vis men. These kind of societal underpinnings are not even in the jurisdiction of a president, but inclusivity, acceptance of harmless difference, and fairness and equity ARE central to our current state, where only citizens under 18 are not allowed to vote. A president should strive to respect represent and help all voters, and undermine prejudice, which just isn’t good for our continuance as a just, SAFE, and free America, only causing division and instability, and the necessity for things like peaceful protest to call attention to people not being heard.
You went to school in California, didn't you?
I graduated from Yale. I love California, my dad and his family went to Berkeley, majoring in the maths and sciences and are not idiots by any measure. Why not start trying to understand the people you are shitting on constantly and accusing of things that have no bearing on your life and take a compassionate high road? We are all susceptible to prejudice, all of us. But we all know that the people in our lives just do their best to be good and make the best of our lives. No one is so different as it seems
Okay, my sister went to Yale, too. (She hated it.) She didn't come out talking jargon, but I suppose that's this new unfortunate leftwing college indoctrination. I like the plain communication in the rest of your post: that's straightforward language that can easily be understood.
I graduated in 2004. I do think that real universities have a reason to lean liberal, by virtue of that value's association with an openness to alternatives to received wisdom. This doesn't mean that they don't have rigorous processes of research and thoroughly high standards for citation and for the validity of their sources. This means that by virtue of valuing finding out truth, they throw out some ideas that might not have been solidly based in fact and study. I really think being increasingly accepting of all people is just good for oneself and makes these people see you as human too.
However, there is an anti-conservative bias in general. I really think, also, though, the academic field is something left-leaning people are more idiotic and self-sacrificing enough to even consider doing. I had a mixed time at Yale. I loved my friends very much and didn't find one person unqualified to be there of a particular race or whatever. I did find it fairly painfully stressful. I can see feeling like a minority being a Republican and that feeling hard. Lots of unfun ways to be a minority eh!
Ok, well, I take back what I said about you, Phebe, but please research a little bit more about the trans experience before thinking these people are doing something horribly wrong that needs to be decided by the President of the United States.
I know three people very intimately, and have known many others, who are trans, have suffered greatly to get where they are, and are sweet and good people. Perhaps think about it this way: would you choose to be a woman if you could be a man? I don't even really see the advantage of this at all.
"Peaceful Protests?" Do you mean the George Floyd Summer Of Peace?
I myself am pro-peaceful protest, as is the Democratic Party. Many peaceful protests feature outliers that cause mayhem and chaos. This effect is overly emphasized, but no, I don’t advocate for destructive protests
>“Normalcy” is a hurtful word though in this comment to me,
Good. The world shouldn't cater to you. Sometimes, reality is brutal. Suck it up.
Reality isn’t brutal, you are
Oh, DEI you say? You know what's the biggest DEI project in mankind history, the electoral college, funny republicans hate dei but it's helped them have a chance at presidency cause a majority of American disapprove of their politics every 4 years. Count your lucky stars for dei sir or madam.
Meh, these are only big things when you're caught in right wing echo chambers.
Harris is a horrible candidate truly. If they had just forced Biden to be a transition president, like he said, in the beginning, when he first ran, they could’ve done a real primary and had the momentum behind them. It’s no doubt that there are more Democrat voters, but the problem is, they made them the same mistake with an anointed nominee , they did in 2016 with Hillary. Americans don’t like not being given choices or to feel as though they don’t have the power to make a decision for themselves (hence why ROE V. Wade is so powerful of an election issue).
Trump is an unacceptable candidate on so many levels it’s absurd anyone with any sense of American responsibility is even entertaining voting for him.
And I feel the same way about Harris...what is an American voter to do with such bad choices??? Pick the one who when they were governing did not screw up so badly....Biden/HARRIS administration has been a disaster....but did not see all these screw ups under Trump....yes, did not like his Tweets but so what
How many thousands of Americans died because of his Covid-19 policy? Because he didn't advocate for masking and precautions early? Health experts say at least 10's of thousands. Probably hundreds of thousands. It wasnt his tweets that were he biggest issue, at all, and saying that is pretty revisionist.
I do not know where you lived during Covid but I lived in Los Angeles and the lockdowns were severe....it was not up to Trump, but up to the individual states....know your facts before you accuse but as a Dem facts mean nothing to you (by the way, I am a registered Dem haha)...and what experts are you listening to???? His tweets did nothing, it was the stupid Dems who locked us down....I lived under Newsome and Trump could not help me
Maybe you should know your facts?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7525014/
@Sheila R. Schwartz == Yesterday, Harris agreed with a protestor at her small rally that "Israel Is Committing A Genocide Against the Palestinian People Of Gaza. = Her true colors finally emerge from under the veil of duplicity.
Funny how leftist Dems think she is a complete Israel shill while Reps think she supports Hamas. Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle of those ridiculous extremes?
Death rates in Democrat run states were not demonstrably lower than Republican run states during covid. Stricter lockdowns and policies were largely ineffective, and in fact much more damaging to the social fabric of this country
Do you actually have data for this, because everything I have seen and read says you are wrong. Early in the pandemic Democrat led counties had higher death rates as they tend to have a higher population density, but as he pandemic continued Republican led counties suffered higher mortality when compared to similar cohort.
Read what you wrote again and apply common sense. The states with lower population density took longer for the virus to spread, so yes their death rates were higher in later years on the pandemic. Which means policies we implemented to stop its spread did little to nothing (as the people who were going to get it all eventually got it), but the damage it did to our social fabric and children’s’ development was tremendous.
but ultimately, we got past Covid. No one country did everything right. I don't really think this lockdowns thing is necessarily true, but Trump did lockdowns. But not at the right time. He made quite a lot of mistakes in the Covid thing, and it really did kill him in the election, meaning it's not really a helpful way to help him.
We recovered more efficiently than most comparable nations economically--inflation is not a Biden-created thing, and European nations etc have faced much tougher inflation. Both parties passed major funding bills to help people recover. Russia became a factor later in this matter. Inflation is this thing that happens and is not really the fault of the president anyway. Nor are they the people whose primary function is fighting inflation. That's the Fed. Just in case this is something that people blame Dems for.
The vast majority of deaths from Covid were to those who already had preexisting conditions,
I guess granny deserved to die 10 years early because of her CKD. 🤷♂️
Preexisting conditions like old age, you mean?
how many DIDN'T die!!!!!
What are you talking about? By countless accounts of super highly regarded economists and historians Biden’s presidency has been among the most successful. In that survey of preeminent historians, people who’ve won Pulitzers and been rigorously fact-based, Trump was dead last. He is literally evil and constantly, non-stop lies. He has gone bankrupt several times and has been found guilty of actual rape, besides having numerous other accusers and being a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. JD Vance is a fraud who created projects designed to help his own people, whether with jobs or with opioid treatment, and did not do anything for them and instead pocketed the money. He is willing to say anything he knows full well is a lie for power. Trying to overturn a fair election is a grave offense. Kamala Harris was a highly effective by all measures attorney general of CA. You are seriously making shit up about Biden. He has been worse on foreign policy but didn’t start the negotiation with the Taliban—he was forced by his predecessor to leave there early—and also didn’t start the attack on Israel that has led to chaos there. Nor the Ukraine thing which he has orchestrated effectively and has kept us out of that conflict with Russia which would be a nuclear disaster for the world. Trump denies CLIMATE CHANGE! The planet is still moving towards 3 degrees and icebergs are melting faster than expected! The democrats didn’t make up climate change—the entire world acknowledges it’s really grave threat. If we back out of the really effective forward progress Biden has turned us towards on this front and go backwards, you really think this will incentivize China to cooperate? The GOP has mercilessly used the boogeymen of minorities and poverty-stricken, desperate for their very lives immigrants and people who did not choose their difference and are oppressed by it to make people think these are cogent arguments against Kamala Harris. No. And Trump has effectively rendered all women second-class citizens in the U.S. no power over our own bodies. Any legislation demanding men get invasive 9-month procedures against their will?
on top of climate, Democrats did not invent the vaccine nor were we the only country to push it because guess what, it works! it did work! And Trump himself got the vaccine to happen. I think you'll find a lot of people have been quite grateful for the vaccine, way more than not.
Trump 2024! Third win in a row incoming, followed by 8 years of Vance as president. The country and the world will be a better place
You should get over that 2020 loss already.
Why lie to myself? I’ll leave that to you.
I think this bot didn’t quite get the LLM result its dev was looking for.
How rude. I'll have you know I am fluent in over 3 millions dialects.... I'm sorry you don't have a firm grasp on reality. Someday I hope you will wake up.
I don’t fully buy this take. I think Harris is a *fine* candidate, and I think there’s a higher probability than not that, given a primary, she may well have come out on top of it anyway.
I think the bigger issue is she was only given 100 days to get this done. The media has been all over her for not being differentiating herself from Biden enough, and not setting out her own policy, but not having a primary, and the time to allow those ideas to bake and get feedback, has been her real Achilles Heel. It’s hard to create an entire platform to run on in that time, and I would say it’s generally more risky to put one out there *without* time for a potential feedback loop than small policy ideas like she’s done.
I think she ran the best campaign she could in the time she had. That’s not to say it’s been perfect, but the fact she pulled out of a 5-7 point Biden deficit to come even with Trump, and have a viable path to the presidency, is a solid indicator she actually has some concept of what she’s doing.
When the dust settles, Harris will be (rightfully) viewed as a disastrously bad, unserious candidate. Joe set this all up when he promised a black woman running mate, for no reason at all, before taking an actual look at the field.
This is a disastrously bad, unserious comment.
Sure, let's see where things stand November 6. Deal?
I’m not arguing if she will or won’t win. I’m arguing that time has been her enemy in this campaign, not herself. You are welcome to disagree.
Harris had loads of time for her 2020 presidential run and was knocked out before the first primary after a disastrous 2019 debate take-down by Tulsi Gabbard.
Oh, most definitely, but I assume you mean things would be better if she had longer, which I think is patently false. The more the swayable/undecided see of her, the less they like her. This last minute media blitz was a Hail Mary, and it's failing.
You may not have realized, but she was running for reelection as VP since 2023. She’s been campaigning for a long time. The party elders, donors and activists selected her as a more appealing figurehead atop their agenda. The agenda hasn’t changed - it just never was the rationale for either Biden or Harris (and can’t be given the wrong track readings). The whole campaign since 2023 has been “not Trump”, and that is all we are going to see for the next few weeks. The whole vibe thing didn’t work. She is not a celebrity and she obviously has no deep thoughts - not as VP, not as part of the ‘24 Biden Harris campaign and not as presidential candidate. She’s not Trump - that is all.
No, you're arguing she is a good candidate who would have made it through the primary process as the top candidate.
Which is false. She flopped the first time she had to run in a primary, there is almost no chance that she would have come out on top this cycle.
He didn’t promise a black woman VP.
He did do that for the court. Circumstances in 2020 led him to the choice
By circumstances you mean he was not winning until he made a deal to pick a black female running mate. He promised Coburn this, as you well know, to get the black vote to fall in behind him.
No. He promised to nominate a woman early, in 2019. Then he became presumptive nominee. Then, you might recall, there was a bit of racial unrest, and some of the white contenders, like Klobuchar, withdrew. The finalists were, indeed, all black, but that was not the initial promise
You are both right, I was misremembering (even the name, the SC dude was Clyburn :). What I get for posting before I've had my coffee. He did promise a black Supreme Court candidate, and had long said he wanted a female or black VP candidate. Turns out he picked the worst VP possible, I'm sure he wishes he had a do over.
Here's where he promised a black woman on the supreme court, and a woman VP (no specification of race).
https://time.com/5803677/joe-biden-woman-vice-president/
I just feel like Katanji Brown Jackson was highly qualified, more so than other justices. Like, I don't know if you're a white man, but I'm a white woman, and I can see how men are ridiculously blind to their own enduring overwhelmingly disproportionate presence in positions of power. I can also see how it feels threatening to have people selected PARTLY because they aren't one's own identity. But the selection was one to include more people in the conversation. On a topic like abortion rights, black women more than deserve a place on the Supreme Court. The conservative justices are making out-of-normal-legal-bounds-of-precedent-and-mainstream-judicial-consensus all over the place, because they can. They are doing this to people who are not white men, nor Catholic, nor benefiting from the weath of big business, etc. I don't think you'll find that Justice Jackson is even remotely accusable of being a "DEI hire"--someone not sufficiently qualified. Amy Coney Barrett, maybe. How long did she have experience being a judge before this? Wasn't someone older more qualified? etc etc
Also, the Dems have a very light bench, unlike the many able candidates the GOP has. Newsom had better sense to agree to jump in with all the fundamentals against the incumbent party, and Newsom is really about all they've got. And he's saddled with the catastrophe of California.
This is not really true at all. We have plenty of governors, Senators, long-standing Executive Branch vets who could do a great job. I don't think what you are saying is something any actual Democrat would say, or someone independently assessing the situation. Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, who happens to be a favorite of mine, etc etc. A lot of these people are highly skilled at compromise and have long resumes of efficacy.
Keep dreaming. The more time she has had as the campaign has progressed, the more support she has lost. She has glaring weaknesses and is a lackluster politician, as many have pointed out she didn’t even make it to Iowa in 30#0. If she had been able to get on the ballot 20 days before the election, her vibes would have won in a landslide , everyone would have focused on Trump’s many negatives.
You say this, please show me data that Kamalas polling number have gone down with undecideds with increased exposure. Everything I have seen and read shows he opposite.
Her polling numbers have gone done with someone. All the data you need is already on this substack.
You mean after soaring to completely unexpected heights they're down a bit from the initial high yes. But that conveniently ignores the initial capture.
Her initial polling numbers weren't relevant to the comment. You conveniently ignored the context in which I made my comment. Also initial polling doesn't matter nearly as much as where she is polling at now.
I’m voting for Harris, and I’ve given… a lot to her campaign.
I strongly feel that if Biden had made an announcement last year that he was stepping aside, and refused to immediately endorse anyone, someone other than Harris would’ve been the candidate. She has way too much baggage from running to the left in 2020 on a lot of issues, and this makes it hard for her to pivot to the center plausibly.
I agree with you on that. Dems would have a better chance with someone NOT associated with the Biden presidency. Of course, what makes it even harder for her to pivot is that she is, in fact, a far-let socialist. If people are dumb enough to believe her positions have changed from what she talked about in 2019 then that is on them (sadly, there are plenty of dumb people out there).
I don't think she is a far-left socialist. She's been totally unable to capture any of the Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren style populism because she doesn't hold their positions. She had a very left-leaning voting record in the Senate because if she didn't, she'd get destroyed in a primary. And she has done about as much as any politician in Washington to support Biden's rather traditional agenda.
Her 2019 run, and the more extreme positions she took in that race, had a lot to do with the zeitgeist of 2020. Her campaign was defeated by (of all people) Tulsi Gabbard, who attacked her from the *left* on law enforcement. The reason this worked was because Harris wasn't a plausible leftist.
She isn't far left. She is whatever her people tell her will get her votes. Most politicians are like this, but most don't emerge from the most left city in the US then become the mainstream Presidential nominee.
Regardless, she was cooked from the beginning. The two potential candidates that could have the absolute disaster at the border hung on their neck are the two candidates the Democrats put forward this cycle.
If Trump wins it will be because Biden and Harris were so proudly strident in undoing Trump's signature policy, the border wall.
Literally any other Democrat candidate except maybe Mayorkas himself could have dodged the blame for the border and cost of illegals insanity.
SF isn't as far left as you think.
We'll see what happens this year, but the Mayor is the furthest right or second most right on the Board of Supervisors.
The left fringe gets a lot of press, but they are not as strong as the national press portrays.
Harris won her first campaign by resigning from a DA who was progressive, and then running against that incumbent left fringe DA.
The Progressives have consistently opposed her because of her center left policies. See also the Jill Stein talking points.
And the border is only a top 5 issue to Fox news zealots who weren't voting D anyway.
But she is plausibly centrist. Here's why: she is motivated by our system to win our elections. Besides that, she has been a VP for four years, and studied with admiration Biden's methods and moves. She's also pragmatic. My personal view is she could be a better interviewee, but otherwise she's excelled as a candidate.
I agree it’s hard for her to pivot. But she will never be center, and whether you can see it or not, the country is sick to death of left.
I don't buy the She Hasn't Had Time argument. Harris first announced her intention to seek the presidency in 2019. She had 5 years to cement her image including the last 3.5 as the second most powerful person in the country.
You seem to have a weak grasp on the US political system.
The VP is nowhere near the second most powerful person in the country.
By her own admission she was at the table and participated in every major decision. So is she just blowing smoke?
Yawn.
Wake me up when you learn the difference between a participant and a President.
So you're saying I'm giving her more credit for being influencial than she deserves? Ok.
You think Biden created his 2024 agenda? You think the donors and activists want Harris to do anything differently? We all know what the agenda is and that she has no ideas. Her job is to lie about the agenda because demonizing Trump (Biden’s strategy) may not be enough.
She's running about even with where Biden was before the debate. Her overcoming that deficit was accomplished by not being publicly senile.
She's a really bad candidate. And I say this as someone who ultimately wants her to win and someone who is EXTREMELY frustrated with both parties for not being able to find someone to beat Trump.
Jesus it’s hilarious how all you people do is try to find excuses for EVERYTHING. The polls are biased. The betting market is rigged and wound up by overseas bets. Anything to help you believe your shitty ass candidate is actually liked. The least approved VP in United States history that couldn’t get a single primary vote in an open primary and they you want to believe she became Americas Sweetheart in 30 days 🤣🤣🤣
Biden seemed to run as a wink-wink nudge-nudge one-termer anyway with the "transitional presidency" thing unless I grossly misread it. I was surprised they didn't do the Kamala swap much earlier with better marketing.
Whether it was Biden stubbornness or concern that she wouldn't win '24 I guess we'll find out years from now, but I'm amazed the Democrats have placed themselves in this position..
I think Biden running for a second term was a profoundly poor decision on every level, don’t get me wrong. His advisors, and Democratic Party leaders that supported it, should never work in politics again.
Winning forgives a lot. Should she win (and she's still enough of a favorite that "why Trump could pull this off" is more of an attention-getter than "how Kamala could win") agreed there will be many sighs of relief. The circular firing squad that I expect if it goes the other way will be incredible. The left taking the "stolen election" narrative back from the right would also be welcomed (showing my own bias here, I admit).
Whatever backroom stuff happened between the debate and him stepping down, sign me up to pre-order the book on it.
Is it because she is still favored to win or is it because her winning is favored by the majority of subscribers that "why Trump could pull this off" is more of an attention getter than the same article about Harris?
Good point --- I noticed this all over the media yesterday; it's always titled about how HARRIS could win, lose, pull it off, lose somehow: the focus is on Harris, not Trump. That's media bias, presumably. And subscription bias in many cases: never annoy the nice subscribers to WaPo, NYT, etc. The rightwing press has the other slant, of course, but the leftwing press has legacy attention.
Valid. Any (even barely) good news for trump would attract more rageclicks than the alternative.
How is this liked by so many people? Harris is highly qualified. She’s won numerous statewide elections and a national election as vice president. California would be the fifth most populous NATION in the world if it were separated from the U.S. Trump has been convicted of numerous things accused by his own staff under oath who worked intimately with him of trying to subvert democracy by force
MAGA bots, doing what they do.
No they’re people.
Harris would have been the strong favourite to win a democratic primary as the incumbent VP and with Biden's backing. I don't buy at all that the fact of her not participating in a primary hurt her in voters' minds, only maybe in the sense that she had less time to train her media muscle/introduce herself to voters.
Trumpers (you - btw, its cultish behaviour to make your preferred candidate your profile pic, especially his damn mugshot) love to dip their toes into Bernie 2016 trutherism, but as someone who volunteered for the Bernie campaign in 2020, there was no annointing of Hillary in 2016. She was a long term firgure in the party, and shockingly, party officials wanted her to win. There was zero rigging as a result of this and you're just trying to push your conspiratorial brain rot as usual which has infected the country since MAGA. Just like with the assasination attempts its apparently "they" trying to "get him" rather than two unrelated nutjobs.
Americans like most of all, fair players, and voters in eg. PA and AZ saw the weeks of agitation to have their votes cancelled in a fair election. Harris will win, and Trump will finally be resigned to history as a loser who barely one once, couldn't even get a majority of the votes that time, then cursed his party with a decade of lunacy and underperformance. Can't wait to have an election where the Republicans put up a reasonable choice again.
Kind of agree. I will vote for Kamala but we didn't even have a Dem primary in Florida and that has rubbed me the wrong way. It's undemocratic. The Democratic party needs to do some soul searching after this election, either way it goes
And despite all those reasons, Trump is at roughly 47%, the same as he has been for the last 8 years. People's opinion about Trump have been largely cast in concrete for a long time. Nothing moves it at all. So, I wouldn't get too hung up on any of this. We are now into the Turnout operation.
Whoever has the best TURNOUT operation will win this election.
"Nothing moves it at all"
Some things move: recent polls by Harvard-Harris or Gallup show more than 50% approval for Trump's Presidency, higher than he had while in office.
Link any high quality poll that shows Trump having a favorability of >50%... We can wait.
The wait is over:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/15/politics/trump-presidency-memories-biden-analysis/index.html
" In a CNN poll from April, 55% of Americans said they considered Trump’s presidency a success — a big jump from the 41% who viewed his presidency so positively when he left office in January 2021"
Does that poll show a Trump Favorability of >50%. No it says that 55% of respondents considered his presidency a success. Not the same thing. His favorability rating has a ceiling in the low to mid 40's. Always has.
I assumed any reader of this substack is intelligent enough to know the difference between "favorability" (OK to date my older sister) and "approval for Presidency" (time in office was a success).
Apologies for my error.
55% of respondents in CNN's April, 2024 poll think Trump's Presidency was a success ... and he's running again, wow!
Why do you think your effort to change the conversation from what it was about (favorability) to what you want it to be about (approval for presidency) means that we should all just go along?
You’re missing the reasons people like Trump besides “he’s a con man”. Trump is a master negotiator on the world stage, he’s always been tough on the border (which especially matters now), and people actually like his personality (watch a rally and see for yourself how jovial and great he is on the mic).
No.. not at all. The fact that you believe all that about him is because of what a good con man he is. He is great at marketing himself.
> Trump is a master negotiator on the world stage
HAHahahaha
You're f-ing hilarious
Not even trying to hide the trollery
Only modern President to not have a new war begin under his tenure.
One of the things the public struggles to understand is you can't change the situation in a day, you end up spending the first few years dealing with whatever your predecessor did, only after that do your changes start to bear fruit
Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had the Afghanistan withdrawal not been the mess it was. He sensed American/NATO ineptitude (and it seems miscalculated), but the cost had been tremendous. This shouldn’t have ever happened
And we circle back to Trumps masterful negotiating, setting a specific withdrawal date well in advance so the Taliban had time to plan and prepare.
You are right he should not have done that.
Again we’re going to blame Trump. Biden could’ve altered the negotiations or prepared differently. Or withdrawal in a way that didn’t leave all our equipment behind
Also picking Ukraine is interesting. Trump has been pretty clear that he's going to end it by essentially giving it to Putin and then withdrawing from NATO.
Trump set up the Afghanistan withdrawal, then refused to work with Biden's transition team on managing it.
You're supporting a version of Trump that doesn't exist. He's never supported Ukraine. It might not remain a free country during his term.
I'd like to hear a masterful negotiation he executed on the world stage. The only one that comes to mind is unilaterally allowing Turkey control of northern Syria, which did nothing for us & hurt our Kurdish allies.
Off the top of my head - NATO members increasing their payments, all before the Ukraine Russia war, and the Abraham Accords were two important negotiations that went well under the previous president.
lol nope, NATO spending increased post 2014 due to the invasion of Crimea, just like it increased far higher than any Trump year post invasion of Ukraine.
Even your suggested theory, were it true, would be horrible. "Trump made America's closest allies, the only other true democracies in the world, worried that the US was not to be relied upon with his consistent threats to the greatest alliance in the world, and that was good because they're planning for post-US central realities which could save us 0.003% GDP!"
The Abraham Accords were a pretend sign of progress that did nothing to work towards a two-state solution, and Trump repeatedly inflamed the situation with his rhetoric, moving of the embassy, and steadfast support of a hard-right Israeli regime hellbent on continuing the biggest obstacle to peace, West bank settlements.
This guy, is SO CLEARLY, a bumbling fool, and people are just tripping over themselves to give him credit for events merely happening/not happening while he was President because they know there's nothing to be gleaned from his actual role/agency eg. "well Russia didn't invade under Trump! Ha they're scared cuz they think he might actually use nukes! Wait what's that? No I don't think he will and hope to good he won't! No I'm not willing to examine my internal logic"
Let's not forget, Putin didn't didnt need to invade Ukraine to destabilize NATO during Trump's term because Trump was busy. Destabilizing NATO. Don't interrupt your enemies when they're punching themselves in the dick.
Dems in 2024 have become like the GOP in 2012, they're running against their ridiculous caricature of their opponent, and can't figure out why they're losing to the real man. The mainstream media thought they'd redefine reality for the American public so that their would be a liberal supermajority for the rest of their lives, but instead just created a cult for leftists who no longer know what's real and what's not.
Jan 6th was real.
Trump lost in 2020.
Trump pretended everything was fine even after China informed him about the reality of Covid.
Trump Tax cuts added about $2T to the national debt.
You people came up with the "Stupid liberals so clouded by emotion they can't see reality hahaha, #TDS" in 2017 and now just repeat it reflexively like a prayer everytime your moronic mesiah continues to fit his perception as the most damaging and caustic force in US politics in decades
What trump is is a giant “f-you” to the cultural political elites to this nation which appeals to so many people. Democrats would walk away with this election and many others if they were not viewed as the angry prissy know it alls that they aspire to be. If they just cared about regular issues and not transgender bathrooms they would crush the gop.
LOL. You are the ONLY people that care about transgender people in bathrooms. I guarantee you. Fucking weirdos.
You clearly do no understand the context of that. Maybe if the democrats were perceived as caring about issues regular folks care about instead of a small group of folks then they would do better. If not bathrooms how about state funding for prisoners having the surgery? Or defund the police? Or boycott divest? Or no borders? Etc etc.
they only pretend (yes pretend) when there is an election then it’s banning gas stoves for everyone! You know clearly the worlds single most important issue.
Yeah, dems don't care about your made up issues. And, some people do care about your made up issues, because you've done a good job propagandizing them, but that doesn't make them not made up.
It would be women concerned with males in women’s sports and bathrooms.
You're right about the "f-you" to the elites.
But the trans bathroom thing is purely a right wing manufactured outrage.
Most people on the left don't really give a shit.
But fox et al have made a killing telling the right that the left do care about it.
This describes a lot of the things the right is outraged about.
There were long exchanges just above here with pious leftists saying how wonderful trannies are, or whatever they were saying, a lot of "poor them, we should all be nicer to them and let doctors castrate them if that's what they want so much." So no, I am amazed to see there really are leftists who aren't just drinking the Kool-Aid, they're taking a bath in it. I say again: it's a known sign that you are safely in the club. You can't be a Democrat unless you believe in trannies and say so.
Do I believe in "trannies"...
They do exist.
I believe that what they choose to do with their lives and bodies is largely none of my business. Probably not any of your business either.
But more to the point why is it republicans always want to talk about them?
It only ever comes up when republicans want to make a fuss about something.
The rest of us are generally good with "mind your own f-ing business"
Because they have no policy to run on that would benefit their base, and they know it. So they invent culture wars.
The MLB and NBA freaked out about the bathroom bills because they're right wing, but for some reason support left wing politics? And NPR talked about it incessantly for YEARS because they're right wing, but for some reason support left wing politics? What liberals WISH they were and what they ACTUALLY are has far too wide a gap right now, and they're suffering with voters because of it.
You are parroting fox talking points. And I think you don't even realize. That's how solid the bubble is.
edit: It's not that these things weren't things. It's that right wing media made little things into huge things so you'd have something to be upset about.
It’s women concerned with males in women’s sports and bathrooms.
I see so many people are in the left-wing bubble where Trump is pure evil and has no good qualities about him at all. Half the country is about to vote for him. I guess we’re just dumb. Or maybe. Just maybe. You’re out of touch.
About a third of the country thinks Trump won in 2020.
Yes - those people are someplace between dumb and misguided fools.
About a quarter of the rest of the population is going to vote for Trump according to current polls.
Some of them are voting their wallet, some of them are religious zealots, some of them have real or imagined grievances and think November 5th is Festivus coming early this year.
Jan 6, 2021 should be disqualifying, but I'll let you decide what confused portion of the electorate you fit into.
I really don't know what it takes to get people to open their eyes to see what Trump did in 2020 through the lens of if it was a Democrat that did it. They would have lost their ever-loving minds, and they'd be truly looking at anyone who still supported that Democrat as the dangerous moron such a person would be. They would have no problem recognizing Jan 6 as the single most disqualifying event that's occurred in American politics since secession, and the fact that *that* wound up not being disqualifying either is probably a big part of why we're in this mess today.
To be fair- maybe a quarter of America will vote for Kamala as well. 80 mln out of 340+m voted for Biden. That’s no where near half.
Oh a Trump would be the same but saying the % is misleading.
Sorry - I'm referring to percentages as reported in polls of likely voter.
It may be incorrect to extrapolate to the rest of the population, so I realize that my note was ambiguous.
To be clear, the 25% non-loony fringe I mentioned voting for Trump was about a sixth of the likely voters.
You can scale that down to the fraction of total population if you want.
Nate Silver’s page is supposed to be for people with a knack for statistics who like to analyze and crunch the numbers. I literally just tried to explain why Trump is getting more of the vote than you would like, and your response is a total 2nd-grade “you’re dumb” nonsense. You shouldn’t be on this page. Try Huffington Post instead, where it’s all about your feelings.
Who wouldn’t be jovial when he references the size of Arnold Palmer’s junk. What a statesman.
Can you also write other 24 reasons why Harris still polled around 50% given the 24 Trump advantages?
I would imagine that’s a future article, i.e. here’s why one candidate winning makes sense and then here’s why the other candidate winning also makes sense.
Long winded way of saying Kamala is the worst candidate of all time
If that's the case why is the election a coin flip?
Because her opponent is Donald fucking Trump
So Trump is the second-worst candidate of all time? I think that smells like recency bias.
Is it a coin flip? You are assuming the polls are right, that it's a 50-50 race.
I assume the polls are so likely to be wrong, because they are broken, that we have no information beyond fundamentals and signs not connected with polling.
If you assume the polls are broken, why are you on a blog about using polls to predict election results
It's where the action is, right?
Besides, I have hope Nate will talk about fundamentals models. That may be the future of forecasting. Gallup has a new model based on fundamentals; I've seen it twice in the last couple weeks.
Hillary was worse and it’s not even close.
You may have a point
It is not
Good list. Biden should never have let #6 get so bad. It was obvious that border crossings needed to be constrained sooner than later.
I agree. Even those who support immigration don't want chaos at the border. Biden simply needed to implement the current restrictions sooner—people expect an orderly, well-managed process, regardless of their stance on immigration.
It really doesn't matter what Democrats do about the Border. Republicans will always say it is open when Democrats are in office. They always have. And they always will. At least we aren't hearing about any migrant caravans this election
To be fair Democrata haven't really done anything to counter that narrative. Until there is an election right around the corner then they want to try.
Biden dropped Trump’s border restrictions on his first day in office. I have no idea why but he did.
Good stuff, but you omitted the perceived threat to democracy by a Democrat administration, embodied by (1) the increasing role of the regulatory state in imposing unpopular cultural policies in schools, the military and corporate governance; (2) Biden/Harris's college loan transfers from borrowers to the Treasury in proud defiance of SCOTUS and public opinion; and (3) flagrant dishonesty and news suppression in legacy journalism and entertainment media in partisan service to Democratic campaigns. You can argue about the validity of these points, but the widespread perception is out there and motivating a lot of voters, at least outside of metropolitan bubbles.
This list only scratches the surface. A comprehensive list would have several hundred entries.
I get why you may oppose policies 1&2 but why do you think they threaten democracy? As to no.3 how is that a matter of the administration?
1&2 are extra-constitutional exercises of raw political power by Progressive institutions to impose policies they can't legitimate legislatively. Progressives going at least back to Wilson openly deride the Constitution as an archaic impediment to Progress. It's reasonable to feel threatened by the prospect of an executive unbound by it. Folks who feel threatened by No 3 regard those media as adjuncts of the Democrat Party and fear they will--to put things bluntly--become the propaganda arm of a one-party state.
If they are unconstitutional scotus will block them, that's how the constitutional order works. At most you can claim that they are undemocratic, but it doesn't make them "a danger to democracy". As for "one party state" you really need to explain how you get from A to B ...
I'm explaining voter perceptions, not arguing positions. Prominent Democrats' advocating to eliminate the filibuster supports a belief among many Trump voters that, if in control of the legislature and the executive, Democrats would pack SCOTUS with partisan judges and make DC & PR states, possibly adding 4 permanent D senators. That would remove barriers to (a) further expansion of Progressive regulatory control in lieu of legislation, (b) bulletproof DOJ partisan lawfare efforts, thus (c) effectively cementing D control of the federal government for a generation. That's how you could reason your way to a one-party state if you were so inclined.
Moreover, there is widespread belief on their side that Biden opened the borders for three years in order to flood swing states with future D voters whom they will eventually make citizens. Argue about that all you like, but the perception is out there and an important factor in explaining how Trump has a real chance of winning again.
That’s actually very helpful in clarifying anxieties on the other side. Thanks !!
I totally agree it's awful when politician disrespect the constitution! Given that fact, how did you feel when Donald Trump posted that he should be allowed to terminate the constitution due to his perceptions of voter fraud in the 2020 election?
Disgusted. You?
Except the population as a whole likes DEI policies. Which could be because white men are only 30% of the population
No, we don't! That's why Trump is winning, because we definitely don't like DEI over merit. DEI = Didn't Earn It.
That's not the point, whether it's true or not.
But, but the keys, Nate! The KEYS!
That guys keys are toast after this election. My guess is he is already creating an excuse column on how his keys were right but the environment changed. That guys a fraud
The Lichtman keys are actually pretty good, IMO. Lichtman's interpretation this year only, when he's as old as Biden and past his work, are truly awful. He badly wants Harris to win, and I guess he thinks twisting his model around will help.
And the article about THE KEYS!
hahaha...nicely done.
I think these are all reasonable takes. I do caution about the inflation take, though, in so much as inflation ran rampant around the world, plus Trump contributed to a larger majority of the overall COVID-time spend than Biden’s admin did. So Democrats being facing “plausible” blame is much more an indictment to Americans’ critical thinking skills than a pure indictment on Democrats.
See I disagree on this one. I’ll be honest - my income now is higher than it was under Trump. Yet it **feels** like I get so much less for my money. If my base of goods = $100 and I made $100, then when I make $120 and those base goods cost $125 - I am losing on this. Biden is probably not to blame for most of that, but he’s in charge and someone has to be blamed.
So what do you think trump’s tariffs will do to inflation?
Biden had all that talk about not taxing anyone who made less than $400K, but nobody talks about inflation adjustment.
This is my family right now, too.
But the irony is if you push that critical
Thinking even further democrats are without a doubt worse for the inflation even if they had been in power in 2020 because they would have locked down for longer and shocked the supply, and had just as much if not more spending.
Furthermore you can definitely plausibly argue Trump might have spent some money he shouldn’t have if he had been president last four years too. But the qn as to who would have been worse for inflation is likely Dems
I'm going to argue the opposite here. Australia had probably one of the heaviest lockdown systems during the pandemic of western democracies, and actually experienced less inflation than the US did with our incredibly tepid response.
I know folks in Australia. For them, COVID wasn't nearly as disruptive since they had heavy, effective, but temporary lockdowns. If COVID appeared in a place, that place was heavily locked down for a couple weeks until testing came back consistently negative. After that, things went right back to normal, and I mean real normal, like before the pandemic. Because the response was effective, folks felt safe resuming their daily activities. Compare that to the endless malaise we faced because nobody knew what the heck was going on. People act like we had this heavy handed lockdown in America, but much of it was self-imposed simply because people didn't feel safe.
Now, I can't guarantee that the Dems would have handled it any better. I imagine they would have done similarly to Western Europe at best. And, let's be honest, in our modern global economy, it's hard to decouple the outcomes in one nation from another. But I still doubt your assertion based on the evidence.
I don't think it's directly comparable; aus growth rate is anemic and they were not close to full employment before covid to begin with -- different starting scenario. The other thing is that locking down wasn't really effective anywhere. All the countries who tried it essentially gave up and because achieving zero covid was impossible.
America was punished more for it's insane spending because there wasn't a lot of slack in the economy beforehand
Nate getting his excuses in early. The only way Trump doesn’t win is if they finally succeed in killing him (in which case Vance will win)
It’s a 50/50 election. Either candidate could win.
Keep telling yourself that 🤣
Listen to the unsubstantiated “trust me bro” attitude of an anonymous rando saying Trump’s got in in the bag, or listen to the rigorous statistical analysis of forecasting models from the Silver Bulletin, FiveThirtyEight, the Economist, etc., who all say it’s 50/50.
Tough choice.
Hilarious. Yeah, “trust the experts”, now where did I hear that before…?
When you got your colonoscopy. The last cavity filled. The last time you drove on a road (thank you civil engineers and the experts who paved the roads). The last time you relied on networking experts and software engineers in order to post a random comment on a substack.
It’s your fellow republicans and gun nuts that are shooting at him. That’s how dysfunctional your party is.
Excuses for what? Giving him 50+% odds of winning?
True: I was worried enough to look it up. Vance would be put in at once by the party and voted on in place of Trump. If the assassination occurred after the election, which Trump won, same as if he were already pres and vice-pres. Vance would succeed. They DID think of all these contingencies, bless 'em.
thanks for reminding me to send more money to the Harris campaign…probably will make phone calls this weekend too. The con man with 24 felonies and sexual assault charges will destroy this country and when you don’t have a country nothing else will matter
The lawfare conspiracy that convicted Trump is much more likely to destroy the country than Trump.Although I am far form being a fan of his but the Russiagate Hoax and the corruption of the FBI and DOJ are much more worrisome than Trump
Nearly 200 pages in the Mueller report show that Trump's campaign was in fact connected to Russia.
Your talking points are not connected to reality.
Giving money to either of these folks is just giving money to consultants and the media. Give it to charity- that does more good for everyone.
Here’s why I think the polls are exactly right, and Harris will ultimately prevail—
I do not believe that Trump gained a significant number of supporters since last election. I think his floor and his ceiling are hard. And they are between the upper 30’s and the mid 40’s.
I don’t believe polls can be off by as much as 2020. If that were true, Trump would beat Harris by up to 6% in PA. Trump might win PA, but it will be by similar margins as 2016.
Trump has gained ground in low propensity voters—latino and black men.
Harris has gained ground with high propensity voters—women of all races and ages. This is important, because there are more women than men and also women vote in higher percentages than men.
Harris is more popular than Trump on 538’s popularity tracker. Harris’s popularity vs unpopularity lines are almost touching, Trumps have a noticeable gap.
Abortion is on the ballot in AZ and Kari Lake is hugely unpopular. It’s going to take a lot of ticket splitting for Harris not to come out on top in AZ. Possible, but it will be down to the wire.
I don’t think a majority of voters are ready for the threats that Trump has made against the Democratic process and the constitution to become reality.
January 6 and Trump’s role in it turned off a lot of conservative voters who already didn’t love his personality. Those switched votes will matter.
This will be a high turnout election. That will favor Harris.
I think the pollsters made serious adjustments after 2020, and I think the race is close. I wouldn’t be surprised to see either candidate win. But ultimately, I think Harris takes most of the swing states, narrowly.
I know plenty of ostensibly liberal people on policy issues who have never been politically aligned and have become trump supports since 2020. The pandemic has turned a lot of formerly apolitical people into anti-institutionals and every single one of them is now a trump support (thank you RFK). I mean I personally know DOZENS of these people, who I’ve watched all year post RFK clips and now are talking about how we need trump to save us from (insert various things here, it’s a broad tent in its own sick way). Just because you can’t imagine someone becoming a trump supporter does not mean they do not exist all around you.
I said I don’t think he gained a significant number of supporters. Any gains would be offset by losses. I believe that he has gained supporters, but I believe he’s lost supporters—and I know several of them.
I also know people who didn’t like what happened during COVID—from Trump or Biden or at the state level. They moved their kids from public to private school because the public schools were remote. However, none of those people that I know changed their support to Trump. I believe there are some that did, but being annoyed at COVID lockdowns does not equal becoming a Trump supporter.
Harris will always win the overal generic national average for one reason - 1 in 10 people who answer are from California and that will get 65/35 so she gets a natural 2-3% popular increase for that reason. But we don’t use popular vote to decide this - thank God
I grew up in Orange County, CA, then later moved to Kern County (Kevin McCarthy’s district), so it always makes me laugh when I see stuff like this. Democrats were rather few and far between most of my time in CA.
Pretty sure there are more Republicans in CA than in any other state. I guess it’s possible there are more in TX. We do know that in 2020, more Trump votes came from CA than any other state. Those are the official stats.
The “disenfranchisement” of non-swing-state voters goes both ways, and if we ever move past the electoral college, we’ll wonder how anyone ever defended it.
Harris’s support is below what Biden had in California, Illinois, and New York. Which, counterintuitively, means that her national polling average indicates more strength in states that aren’t so overwhelmingly blue.
Also, if Republicans presidents keep losing the popular vote by wider and wider margins, eventually the majority of people will get fed up. Minority rule can only work for so long.
This is a good point, but it seems it's being fixed --- Republican voter registration is WAY up, a big surprise to a lot of people. But given that, we may well take the national vote soon.
A couple people have said this recently. Two things-party registration is a trailing indicator. People will vote counter to their registration for years before they change their registration (if they ever do at all). Which is to say more registration for a party doesn’t equal more votes. The other thing to watch is that there are way more registered independents than there used to be, so the number of registered Republicans or Democrats doesn’t give as much info as it used to.
You are saying more registration for a party doesn't equal more votes --- if it's young people newly registering, that would mean more votes for the party they are choosing more, right? True apparently about the independents, and that's interesting and probably a bad sign. Showing people distrust the parties. Can't really blame them ---
I’m guessing most of those registrations are changes in registration not young people. 18-35 year olds are the most Democratic cohort, 51% to 35%, dem vs rep.
Her support is lower in the other states, but is about the same in California. Which would mean the impact to her national popular vote share will be tempered, given Cali’s huge population
It was down. Nate wrote an article on this. So did The NY Times.
Seconf point Might be true, but has no applicability to this election cycle. And in a nation so strongly divided it would be incredibly difficult to amend the Constitution.
The second point was in response to the previous commenter, not about this election.
I didn’t say anything about amending the constitution. I think a “cold” civil war is likely. Arguably it’s already started.
Good point that a "cold" civil war is already started, perhaps! I think that's a good description of what is going on --- I never thought of it that way.
The way to make it a hot war, with secessions, is to try to cancel the Electoral College and make all elections depend on big city Dem populations.
Heaven forbid that one person’s vote counts the same as another’s?
While I agree with this post and ultimately think that Harris will pull out a narrow victory I do think the shortened campaign schedule has hurt her.
While she is trying to do an absolute media blitz at the moment I don't believe the average Joe has an understanding of what her policies are besides abortion.
I do think that there is something as well to voting for a known quantity. Trump was President for 4 years lest we forget and I think people are hesitant of voting for Harris as she is an unknown.
That's my guess as to what is going to swing the election either way.
Agree strongly with your last post, I think it the most significant question regarding relying on polling models this election cycle. Most of the rest of your points seem to reflect a case of wishful thinking based on mild TDS.
Are you disagreeing that women are higher propensity voters? Or that black and Latino men or low propensity voters? Because you can look that up.
You can also look up Trump’s favorability numbers. His popularity/unpopularity doesn’t change much.
As far as January 6th’s affect on voter sentiment, it’s hard to say. Anecdotally, I know past Trump voters who either won’t vote for him or are planning to vote for Harris. They are conservatives, but their vitriol for him now has surprised me.
I also think it matters that abortion is on the ballot in AZ. I read an article this morning about the Catholic Church spending a 3rd as much as past efforts to fight abortion rights legislation. Apparently they view it as a losing cause given the results post Roe. It clearly gets voters to the polls.
Does all that mean Harris will win? Of course not. But these points are about reality, hardly TDS.
I could also write a bunch on why Trump has a good chance of winning, but Nate just did that.
Of course women are higher propensity voters: as I like to say, there are more of us, and we vote more.
However, a lot of us are voting for Trump. Me, for one. I wouldn't rush to assume women will all vote for Harris.
I believe abortion is also on the ballot in GA
I don’t think so. But it is in Nevada.
You could have mentioned the decision not to choose Shapiro. She's been plummeting in the polls since the VP debate, and it seems like the bubble has burst, especially with Waltz losing to JD Vance.
"Plummeting" is far overstated. Anyway if this VP debate had such a major effect on the election, that would be an all-time first, wouldn't it?
No, look up Ross Perot’s VP, Admiral James Stockdale. The VP debate is often cited as the turning point of his 1992 campaign. Perot never recovered from it. Keep in mind that there was actually a point where Perot was leading both Bush and Clinton in the polls.
I would like to see at least one citation of the vice-presidential debate being the turning point in Perot’s campaign, because it wasn’t. The turning point of Perot’s campaign was when he dropped out in July. He re-entered two weeks before the VP debate in October, with his strong polling totally evaporated. Stockdale’s performance was certainly embarrassing , but no one, probably including Perot, thought that Perot had any hope by that point anyway.
Prior to posting, I actually used AI to verify my recollection and specifically used “turning point” based on its answer.
Did the VP debate play a significant role in the downfall of Perot?
The VP debate in 1992 is often cited as a turning point for Ross Perot’s campaign. During that debate, Perot's running mate, Admiral James Stockdale, struggled to articulate his points and appeared disoriented. This performance led to a perception that Perot's campaign lacked seriousness and preparedness.
While the debate itself wasn't the sole factor in Perot's decline, it did contribute to diminishing his support. Polls indicated that following the debate, his numbers dropped significantly, and many voters perceived his candidacy as less viable. Additionally, Perot faced challenges from the major party candidates, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, which further complicated his position.
In summary, while the VP debate played a role in the perception of Perot's campaign, it was part of a larger narrative that included various factors affecting his candidacy.
I can't tell from this answer if you think AI is a citation or not. It's not.
AI response says it is “often cited as a turning point”. Since you have already made up your mind by saying “it wasn’t”, there is no reason for me to go through the trouble of finding a source that you will most certainly call unacceptable. I have been down that rabbit hole before.
AI frequently hallucinates and should not be used to verify anything.
Pretty quaint. An era when mental health and sanity were valued.
Yes, look at some other national polling average, like the NYT.
Okay, I'm looking at the NYT polling average here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/elections/polls-president.html
On October 2, the day of the VP debate, the average was Harris 49%, Trump 46%.
Today, the average is Harris 49%, Trump 48%. Doesn't look like a plummet to me.
2% is a massive shift if you consider the size of the national electorate… plus the late polls like Atlas, Fox News and Tipp are all +2 Trump.
I mean I guess we just disagree about whether 2% is a "massive shift," but even then, you said she was plummeting in the polls. Undecideds breaking for Trump while her own numbers stay steady is not what anyone could call "she has plummeted."
As for the most recent polls, those don't support anything about the effects of the VP debate 3 weeks ago.
Yeah, that's today, Sunday. That is a national vote; seems too good to be true, really.
Same result in RCP and Nate's numbers that Tom mentioned for NYT.
Harris is not plummeting.
Trump is gaining support.
I believe, if she loses, that will be one of the greatest knocks against her. But remember Shapiro is Jewish - that inflames the anti-Israel crowd of her party and America is not yet ready for an avowed non Christian president (even though it’s obvious Obama and likely Harris are not Christian’s they at least pretended to be). They would turn off black and Latin votes she critically needs.
And if she chose Shapiro, the youth turn out would have been awful. Most college students are pro-Gaza and would have sat out the vote.
Suggesting that Trump populist base is due to racists, sexists, homophobes, islamophobes is hilariously ironic.
The reason regular straight white guys are going in for Trump is because they are tired of being called this shit when they aren't bigoted.
Trump's populism is anti-woke, not bigoted. What do black men, hispanics, Jews and Mormons have in common? Yep. They're tired of woke policies and idpol, and are shifting toward Trump.
Your #5 here ironically attributes racist and religious bigotry among Trump supporters instead of growing support with black, hispanic, Jewish and Mormon supporters (who are the targets of actual bigotry).
Yeah, read it late and then scrolled through all the comments just now to see if anyone referenced #5 - I thought I kept misreading it or I misunderstood the qualifier of "in the Hillary sense of the word".....guess not - I'm pretty stunned. And the use of the adjective "many".....yikes, Nate. If anyone can explain how NS didn't really mean this, please let me know. I like him a lot, but this seems unnecessarily and unfairly judgmental, superior, and divisive.
I didn't like point #5 either and thought it was unlike Nate to make a point like that.
"Many" is not all. If the shoe fits, wear it. If not, getting all high and mighty is disconnected from reality.
In a close election, even a 1% sliver is enough to matter, and according to polling that is a severe underestimate of the R-voting slice of the electorate that fits into that bucket.
So yes, these deplorables who decide to turn out and vote could make the difference in this election, which is what this article is about.
Far more 'deplorables' on the left out there attacking elderly Jews on their way to synagogue or blocking Jewish students from going to college.
The bigotry is very one sided in this election cycle. And it is clearly leftists.
Those people aren't voting for Harris. They blame her for being part of the Biden administration.
Get a grip.
Lol, what?
They are voting for anyone who isn't Trump. Of course they are voting for Harris lol.
No indication that the radical pro-Gaza loons are voting for Harris.
Ah yes. All those ANTIFA Republicans lmao.
Regular straight white guy here. It’s the con man artistry convincing those among us that anyone cares about us and is chastising us for not being woke enough. Fun fact, Trump himself is bigoted, sexist, shallow. Folks overlook that for numerous reasons (some good some bad). I understand some of the reasons they vote for him. I actually think the median Trump voter is much smarter than him (probably than many of our politicians). It’s not fair that they get saddled with their candidate’s deficiencies. That being said, he does not care about anyone but himself and he is offering empty statements that he’ll make it all better without any substance as to how or even why he cares to attempt to do so. I wish his voters would see through it to at least vote for someone else even if it is not Harris. I’m a regular upper middle class white guy and I happily voted for Harris, even if she isn’t perfect, she respects our institutions and has some policy proposals. I love forward to when we can focus on policy and not the spectacle, sporting event everyone online acts like it is.
The true cons are the party who promised to ban fracking and legalize illegals, but now are trying to convince voters they were just kidding. Problem is, we see their horrible track record of the past 3.5 years. The time of Democrats conning the American public has come to an end.
I like the phrase “just kidding”. Seems to come up a lot…