The Kingfish posted:

It doesn't matter if the GOP has failed to demonize the poor among the poor. We wouldn't need to demonize the billionaires among the billionaires. They are already extremely class conscious anyhow.

Fulchrum posted:

So this is you sticking with no poor person ever respecting or envying a rich person ever for any reason?

I'm genuinely curious how far this goes in your head. Do you think every fan of Batman or Iron man is themselves a billionaire industrialist?

Fulchrum posted:

I'm genuinely curious how far this goes in your head. Do you think every fan of Batman or Iron man is themselves a billionaire industrialist?

Crowsbeak posted:

I love that Fulchrum literally thinks that people think some guy who their told screwed them out of their home or their job is like Bruce Wayne.

Fulchrum posted:

You're the idiots who say they're exactly like Oprah. I'm asking where you think the line is.

KomradeX posted:

The gently caress is wrong with you? How could you seriously make this argument?

Fulchrum posted:

I'm not. If you could follow an argument, that's the logical extension of what Kingfish is saying.

The claim is that no poor person in America respects, envies, or wishes to be a rich person ever, for any reason, purely because they are rich, and so there is no form of downside to demonizing all rich people. This is his insane delusion. I point out that if this were the case, which its not, then something that is clearly untrue would be the case.

Do you grasp this yet, or do I need to break this down to pictographs for you?

KomradeX posted:

You're insane if you think the logical end point of targeting the rich is people rallying around them because of comic book superheroes or Oprah. Jesus Christ Trump just won an election in part by being a rich person talking about how they've set the rules to benefit him and not regular people.

BI NOW GAY LATER posted:

Yes, and Schumer who was DSCC at the time, and Reid as leader, both tactically endorsed that plan because they were busy fighting other fires and figured that Sanders was better than splitting a vote and letting some rear end in a top hat Republican take the seat.

Tight Booty Shorts posted:

Good luck finding a young vibrant woman of color that is a socialist and willing to go through what Bernie went through

GlyphGryph posted:

Why is everyone just ignoring his ludicrous claim that 200k puts someone in the .1%

Thats actually below the 20 percent line. Half of 1% of those people are in the top .1%

I have only seen Nazi memes quote that number as the 1% line so I guess we know where Fulchrum is getting his news now

Fulchrum posted:

Yes. He did. He did not say all Billionaires are all evil and all should be hated.

Did you get that? Like how he was specifically attacking the ones who rigged the system in their favor? Not all of them indiscriminately? Do you think there may be a reason for that?

Ze Pollack posted:

Fulchrum posted:

The claim is that no poor person in America respects, envies, or wishes to be a rich person ever

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/844916211024572418

Main Paineframe posted:

It's correct that Youngstown and Reading have very high poverty rates...but do you know what else they have in common? They're both less than 50% white. Why is a city with almost as many black people as white people being portrayed as a place where votes are decided entirely by the "white working class"? Why is her failure to carry that city being blamed on a failure to carry white voters, without even a single mention of the low turnout among the just-as-numerous black voters? The same goes for Reading, which has more Puerto Ricans alone than people under the poverty line. Why is the fifth-largest city in PA, whose population is 56% Hispanic and 14% African-American, being cited as evidence of failure to appeal to the rural white working class?

quote:

Youngstown, Ohio, where Mr. Obama won by more than 20 points in 2012, was basically a draw. Mr. Trump swept the string of traditionally Democratic and old industrial towns along Lake Erie. Counties that supported Mr. Obama in 2012 voted for Mr. Trump by 20 points.

The rural countryside of the North swung overwhelmingly to Mr. Trump. Most obvious was Iowa, where Mr. Obama won easily in 2012 but where Mr. Trump prevailed easily. These gains extended east, across Wisconsin and Michigan to New England. Mr. Trump won Maine’s Second Congressional District by 12 points; Mr. Obama had won it by eight points.

Jealous Cow posted:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/844950037016731648

Majorian posted:

Crossposting from the "Trump Administration" thread:


From the NYT article:


Those are comparatively huge swings - too huge to discount the role that the white working class swinging away from the Democrats played. The reason why I didn't mention the depressed turnout among black and Latino voters in the other thread was because we were talking about whether or not the Dems' position on white working class defectors should be, "gently caress 'em, they'll die from lack of health care anyway." Plus, white people tend to have higher voter rates than black people or Latinos, which is a bad thing, but a fact.

e: Voter suppression plays a role in that, and it undoubtedly played a role in this election as well. But the Democrats aren't going to be able to do anything about voter suppression tactics unless they retake power from the Republicans. They're not going to be able to retake power unless they bring back in some of the '08/'12 Obama voters who stayed home or defected to Trump in '16.

e2: Also crossposted from Trump Admin thread:

Main Paineframe posted:

You're missing a few links in the chain, though. You're just pointing at places that had a large percentage swing and saying, "see, it must be the working class whites" - despite the fact that those areas are less than 50% white.

quote:

Anyhow, I couldn't find results for just Youngstown itself, but I checked vote tallies for Mahoning County in 2012 and 2016, even though (as I pointed out in the other thread) the county is a lot less black and poor than the city itself is. While there was certainly a big swing in percentage, from 63-35 in 2012 to 50-47 in 2016, the real story is in the actual vote numbers: Trump got 9,000 more votes than Romney did, while Hillary got 18,000 fewer votes than Obama did. That means that half the change from 2012 to 2016 wasn't due to Obama voters flipping to Trump, it was due to Obama voters staying home and not voting at all.

quote:

And while I see you jumped straight to voter suppression as the only possible explanation for non-whites staying home, there's another possibility: that just like white people, they might have felt that Hillary wasn't offering them enough! Deeply embedded in the whole "white working-class" narrative is the idea that programs that help poor people aren't good enough for whites and that poor whites need specially-targeted programs for poor white people only, which is one aspect of the New Deal mindset I'd rather see gone.

Majorian posted:

I don't think anybody actually claimed that.

GlyphGryph posted:

Why is everyone just ignoring his ludicrous claim that 200k puts someone in the .1%

Thats actually below the 20 percent line. Half of 1% of those people are in the top .1%

I have only seen Nazi memes quote that number as the 1% line so I guess we know where Fulchrum is getting his news now

Majorian posted:

Also, you don't really have to work hard to convince the rural and Rust Belt poor that Wall Street is loving them over.

Fulchrum posted:

Wall Street is not the entirety of the rich, and leftists need to grasp this.

Fulchrum posted:

You might think Frijolero wouldn't be that stupid, but, no, he did claim that. When I pointed out you cannot attack someone the audience innately respects or envies without your messaging falling flat, he said that wasn't a problem since only billionaires respect or envy billionaires. I assume he thinks all poor people have perfect class consciousness understanding from birth due to the way their brains react to the magnetic fields of the earth.


Wow, you're seriously actually using the "$200,000 per year isn't that much" HENRY argument.

Is there literally no Republican argument that you won't gleefully adopt to attack Democrats?

Wall Street is not the entirety of the rich, and leftists need to grasp this.

Fulchrum posted:

Wow, you're seriously actually using the "$200,000 per year isn't that much" HENRY argument.

Is there literally no Republican argument that you won't gleefully adopt to attack Democrats?

Ze Pollack posted:

There is nothing you can think of to do to win back the working-class voters, white, black, and hispanic, that your cowardice lost than try sucking up to the rich and powerful a little more.

Your existence is a sick joke.

Fulchrum posted:

You are a dumb dense fucker

Fulchrum posted:

Whereas you think if we just attack their heroes that will make them love us.

You are a dumb dense fucker who cannot comprehend a difference between "don't rail indiscriminately against all rich people and instead try to attack just the bad ones" and "we need to slash taxes and regulations on the ultra rich".

Ze Pollack posted:

They don't like them, Fulchrum. They are not their heroes. Their contempt can be heard every time they hear that an athlete is holding out for a better deal, every time someone who fucks them over gets a golden parachute, every time one of Those Fuckers *vague gesticulation upwards* have screwed them over.

There is only one demographic that views the 1% as heroes, and they are white, suburban republicans. You just saw what a democratic campaign designed to appeal to them looks like.

It did not end well.

Majorian posted:

That's still a really big issue for the Dems, though: either way, the Democratic candidate didn't get their votes. The Democratic platform did not speak to them specifically, and/or they did not trust the Democratic nominee to make good on her promises.

JeffersonClay posted:

There are many confounding factors here that have nothing to do with the democratic platform or how it was sold.

quote:

And even if we assume the change had to do with policy, it makes a lot more sense that voters in the rust belt, but not elsewhere, were concerned about trade policy than the extent of the welfare state.

quote:

If Democrats need to make some leftward concession to shore up their base, the three options seem to be trade, welfare, and wall street. My preferences would look like this:

1) Wall Street. Jailing some dudes from wall street, making GBS threads on them in speeches, and advocating strong financial regulations isn't much of a lift. Nobody likes Wall Street so it's a low risk strategy. It probably wouldn't help the average person much, although regulations might stop another financial crisis on a long-term timeframe, and it wouldn't do much to address inequality, except maybe slow it down at the edges, but it would be a political win. Policy impact C-, Politics A.

2) Welfare. Advocating a larger welfare state would actually help people the most of the three options. It might be popular, but it's a higher risk strategy because Republicans are good at using the southern strategy to get working class whites to vote against handouts to minorities. Policy impact A, Politics C+ due to unertainty.

3) Trade. Solutions that would actually help people aren't easy to explain or sexy (capital controls?). Policy impact C politics D. Solutions that are popular (repeal Nafta) would be disasterous for the poor. Policy impact D-, Politics B.

Demonizing wall street seems like the best compromise between political risk/reward and actual policy impact. It's also really easy to tie Trump to Wall Street. But if the rust belt really didn't trust Hillary because of trade, getting their votes is a lot trickier. I guess you could make arguments about capital controls under the umbrella of Wall Street regulations but I wouldn't expect anything that wonky to actually resonate with non-college educated rust belters.

Fulchrum posted:

You might think Frijolero wouldn't be that stupid, but, no, he did claim that. When I pointed out you cannot attack someone the audience innately respects or envies without your messaging falling flat, he said that wasn't a problem since only billionaires respect or envy billionaires. I assume he thinks all poor people have perfect class consciousness understanding from birth due to the way their brains react to the magnetic fields of the earth.

Fulchrum posted:

And once again I do have to ask, since Frijolero figured out it was a loving stupid idea and backed off this argument, how deeply does this delusion of yours go, that only white suburban Republicans can ever respect anyone in the 1%?

Fulchrum posted:

I guess that's why pro sports and action movies all have absolutely no audience in rural areas and you never see a bar in a working poor town that has Football on throughout the season.

And once again I do have to ask, since Frijolero figured out it was a loving stupid idea and backed off this argument, how deeply does this delusion of yours go, that only white suburban Republicans can ever respect anyone in the 1%?

Majorian posted:

But it's a significant factor that the Democrats do, in fact, have the power to change. They don't have the power to change things like voter suppression. They don't have the power to change whether or not the FBI director is going to kneecap their nominee. They do have the power to actually reach out to voters who traditionally have voted for them, but are wavering.

quote:

It's going to have to be all of these things, if the Democrats' best-case scenario isn't going to just be a hamstrung President who's forced to compromise on everything with a Republican Congress, Republican governors, and Republican statehouses.

Frijolero posted:

Honest question, wtf are you talking about?


I haven't mentioned billionaires or class consciousness once. Click here and ctrl-F for yourself.

Are you mistaking me for another poster or are you just lost in your own little discourse?


Wtf are you talking about????