quote:

Those subpoenaed to provide testimony and documents include scholar John Eastman, who outlined a legal strategy in early January to delay or deny Joe Biden the presidency, and former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who led efforts to investigate voting fraud in key states. Both were present at the Willard during the first week in January.

The list also includes three members of the Trump reelection campaign: campaign manager Bill Stepien; Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign; and Angela McCallum, the national executive assistant to Trump’s campaign. The committee also issued a subpoena for Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

is pepsi ok posted:

What if instead of chasing the right wing understanding of patriotism they tried to redefine the term as caring for your fellow Americans and made that the central messaging of a new bill of rights that guaranteed healthcare, jobs, and a living wage to all citizens?

Sub Par posted:

Yeah I mean the shamelessness with which John Kerry was mocked in 2004 should put to rest the idea that "all we need to do is run a troop".

is pepsi ok posted:

What if instead of chasing the right wing understanding of patriotism they tried to redefine the term as caring for your fellow Americans and made that the central messaging of a new bill of rights that guaranteed healthcare, jobs, and a living wage to all citizens?

Ogmius815 posted:

I think at this point the most rational conclusion is that the left-wing populist message is not, indeed, as powerful as its adherents suppose.

eXXon posted:

Angry_Ed posted:

There have been several military veterans who ran as Democrats since 2016. There was one in Missouri who i can't remember who lost. And of course...there was Amy McGrath.

Basically it's not a slam-dunk at all. Tammy Duckworth won but she was an established name.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Everyone is going to view things through their own lens - and the vast majority of people don't really have much of a knowledge base in economics -, but if there are a significant group of people who self-describe their economic situation as "I have more money than I did before and I have more savings than I did before, but gas prices are high, so the economy is bad," then it is going to be incredibly difficult to do many of the things that are necessary to transition away from fossil fuels if gas prices are the metric people use as short-hand for the economy.

Ogmius815 posted:

I think at this point the most rational conclusion is that the left-wing populist message is not, indeed, as powerful as its adherents suppose.

Willa Rogers posted:

I think that's a pretty reductive take that misses "my employer-provided insurance doubled my out-of-pocket costs for next year" and "I'm spending 20 percent more on groceries than I was two years ago" and "evictions are starting to trickle in & now rents are 10-20 percent higher" and "I can't afford to buy a used car without a major loan" and "I'm not a parent but I'm a working poor who isn't getting any assistance" and "I couldn't afford a tutor when the schools closed so my children are doing badly now that they're back to school & I still can't afford a tutor for them."

But yeah, if it's all gas prices then *brushes hands* there's nothing we can do & there's no such thing as a bully pulpit while oil & gas companies continue to donate to elected officials of all partisan persuasions to prevent meaningful action against climate change.

yronic heroism posted:

No one thing is a checkmate move but prior service record seems like it helps more than it hurts. Jason Kander in Missouri kept it close and certainly did better than Clinton, for example. Like, you can’t really run a control group of “if X candidate were not a veteran” but in a conversation where we’re talking about how Democrats have a huge rural voter gap, I don’t think a thing that gets you cultural affinity outside of strong blue areas (and that only extremely online leftists seem to vocally dislike) is somehow a bad/neutral thing. For the right campaigns especially it can be a powerful theme. Yeah someone’s still going to lose by a couple points in R districts but that sure beats getting blown out by 20+ points.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

There's a focus group going of women who voted Northam -> Biden -> Youngkin in Virginia.

Run by Georgetown Law and a political opinion data group.

Group is disproportionately white and suburban/rural.

Here's the highlights:
https://twitter.com/dannybarefoot/status/1457774253810458634

Dubar posted:

Picking Harris over Duckworth seemed like a bad idea at the time, and, upon further consideration, still seems like a bad idea

Fritz the Horse posted:

There was a segment on NPR during my commute this morning trying to analyze what happened in VA and NJ. They had on a journalist with the Atlantic who attributed it to "bad vibes" which... whatever.

Specifically he was talking about while there are a number of factors, a big one that swung suburban voters is that the economy and daily life for those voters has not returned to "normal." A lot of moderate Dems and swing voters voted for "normalcy" and we don't have that yet. I'm not saying "normalcy" is good but I think that's a reasonable take on what many Democratic voters were expecting with the Biden administration in office.

The same interview predicted that we'll be more back to "normal" in 2022 so the "bad vibes" element might not play as much of a role.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

I'm referring specifically to the ~2/3s of people in the NYT article the other day who said, "I'm doing much better economically, I expect that I will continue to do better economically next year, but I think the economy is bad because of high gas prices and everyone else is probably not doing as well as I am."

quote:

The reasons seem to be tied to the psychology of inflation and the ways people assess their economic well-being — as well as the uneven effects that rising prices and shortages have on different families.

Data Graham posted:

I had this big post all typed up about how we could exhort the country to regain our lost leadership on the world stage by reinvesting in the things other countries once looked up to us for, our achievements, our resources, our founding principles of equality and opportunity, and how we could leverage nationalist sentiment to bring about leftist goals as a point of pride in what we as a country can do for our people, but then I realized I'd just combined MAGA and some form of "national" "socialism"

Data Graham posted:

I had this big post all typed up about how we could exhort the country to regain our lost leadership on the world stage by reinvesting in the things other countries once looked up to us for, our achievements, our resources, our founding principles of equality and opportunity, and how we could leverage nationalist sentiment to bring about leftist goals as a point of pride in what we as a country can do for our people, but then I realized I'd just combined MAGA and some form of "national" "socialism"

FlamingLiberal posted:

I mean, anyone is an improvement over Harris except for like Mayo Pete

quote:

“The major issue is rising inflation and falling confidence in economic policies,” said Richard Curtin, who has overseen the University of Michigan survey for decades. “Consumers see rising prices, and they see no policies that would correct it.”

***

The details of what a person buys can have an outsize effect on how acutely he or she feels the pain of inflation. For someone who has had no need to buy an automobile this year, steep inflation in cars and trucks has been a nonissue.

Now consider someone whose car broke down and who needs another one to get to work. A rise in prices of 40 percent for used cars and trucks since the start of the pandemic amounts to a costly burden. The same applies to many other physical goods that have been in short supply, like home appliances.

quote:

I'm referring specifically to the ~2/3s of people in the NYT article the other day who said, "I'm doing much better economically, I expect that I will continue to do better economically next year, but I think the economy is bad because of high gas prices and everyone else is probably not doing as well as I am."

quote:

Workers have seized the upper hand in the labor market, attaining the largest raises in decades and quitting their jobs at record rates. The unemployment rate is 4.6 percent and has been falling rapidly. Cumulatively, Americans are sitting on piles of cash; they have $2.3 trillion more in savings in the last 19 months than would have been expected in the prepandemic path. The median household’s checking account balance was 50 percent higher in July of this year than in 2019, according to the JPMorgan Chase Institute.

***

Yet workers’ assessment of the economy is scathing.

In a Gallup poll in October, 68 percent of respondents said they thought economic conditions were getting worse. The share who thought things were getting better was lower than in April 2009, when the global financial crisis was still underway.

Willa Rogers posted:

In other words, people are trusting their lying eyes when it comes to all inflation, not just gas prices, as I pointed out in my prior response to the take that it was just gas prices.

Willa Rogers posted:

Ok, having read that NYT piece I can say that Leon's take was most definitely reductive, because people's concerns about inflation are far broader than focusing on just gas prices.

Further, people don't feel as if anything's being done to address their concerns:

In other words, people are trusting their lying eyes when it comes to all inflation, not just gas prices, as I pointed out in my prior response.

Willa Rogers posted:

eta: As far as the Dems' foothold with policies, I wonder if it's based on the sort of things Dems campaigned for (and polls were including till just recently) but can't be arsed to pass, such as $15 min. wage, meaningful prescription-drug price controls, and 12-week family leave, among the multitudes of promises.

Willa Rogers posted:

Ok, having read that NYT piece I can say that Leon's take was most definitely reductive, because people's concerns about inflation are far broader than focusing on just gas prices.

Further, people don't feel as if anything's being done to address their concerns:

In other words, people are trusting their lying eyes when it comes to all inflation, not just gas prices, as I pointed out in my prior response.

eta: There's also nothing in the piece that comes close to the framing of:

but is rather presented as:

Iow, 2/3 of voters say that economic conditions are getting worse, but nowhere near that number comes close to the contention that 2/3 are "doing better economically"; the figures cited in the NYT piece are all average-this & median-that of hand-chosen metrics.

Willa Rogers posted:

Ok, having read that NYT piece I can say that Leon's take was most definitely reductive, because people's concerns about inflation are far broader than focusing on just gas prices.

Further, people don't feel as if anything's being done to address their concerns:

In other words, people are trusting their lying eyes when it comes to all inflation, not just gas prices, as I pointed out in my prior response.

eta: There's also nothing in the piece that comes close to the framing of:

but is rather presented as:

Iow, 2/3 of voters say that economic conditions are getting worse, but nothing in the piece comes close to the contention that 2/3 are "doing better economically"; the figures cited in the NYT piece are all average-this & median-that of hand-chosen metrics.

quote:

Americans seem to be relatively optimistic when asked more narrowly about the outlook for their incomes, or for the job market.

“They’re telling us, looking ahead they expect business conditions to get better, they expect more jobs, and they expect incomes to rise,” said Lynn Franco, senior director of economic indicators at the Conference Board, a business research group. Its consumer confidence index fell a bit in late summer but rebounded in October.

quote:

Rising costs for staple goods tend to influence people’s perceptions of inflation. Gasoline prices, for example, are visible on big signs on every street corner, and have risen 74 percent from their pandemic lows of May 2020.

But they are below their levels for most of 2011 to 2014, and average earnings have risen sharply since that period. To look at it one way, in October it took about six minutes of work at the average private sector wage to earn enough to buy one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. In October 2013, it took almost nine minutes of work.

morothar posted:

In practice? How is that not the case?

Main Paineframe posted:

The revealed focus group results don't contain the slightest hint of this, though. It's all fine and good to interpret vague stuff like approval numbers any way you please, but this is a pretty detailed look at what a small group of specific voters care about, and I'm not really sure it makes sense to feed in a narrative with no real connection to anything they actually said.

The part you quoted is a hypothetical offered up by the author based on statistical data, though, not drawn from actual polling on people's perception of inflation. Kind of a weird thing to use as basis for a smug-rear end series of ultra-sarcastic "people trusting their lying eyes instead of the statistics" remarks.

And if we're going to talk about reductive takes, how about yours? The paragraph right before the bit you quoted says that inflation is mostly being felt by upper-income workers, due to massive wage growth among lower incomes. And the part right after what you quoted says that rising staple prices may be causing a perception of inflation, even if prices are actually much lower than they were just a few years ago.

Judakel posted:

So we can have democracy, but we gotta vote for this one party or else? Listen, I think the Democrats increasing police funding over even what Trump increased it by is fascistic and enables the type of environment that is moving us closer towards fascism. Sitting here and pretending we're not steadily moving in that direction on all electoral fronts is ridiculous.

How are u posted:

Well yeah, it's so much more than "run a troop".

It's more like don't tell people that they are bad and the country they love is bad. Don't scold people and condescend to them.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

He's almost certainly more (ugh) electable. Whether he'd be a better president is... unclear, but I'd say he was probably the best CAMPAIGNER in 2020 - "mayor of middling Indiana town" is not exactly who you would expect to be a solid number two Not Bernie.

Willa Rogers posted:

eta: Yeah, by all means, let's tell voters they're doing great economically and that it's their perceptions of the economy that are amiss.

quote:

To get a better idea of why elevated inflation can contribute to such negative assessments of the economy, it helps to go beyond the details of wage and price trends in 2021 and turn to a piece of economic research from the 1990s, conducted by Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist.

He led surveys to try to ascertain why inflation, even at moderate levels, frustrated ordinary citizens so much more than economic theory implied it should.

He also found that people believed it would hinder overall economic growth; that it would be harmful to national morale; and that it could fuel political chaos or damage national prestige.

“In answering questions about what is really important and what our national leaders really ought to pay attention to, people may tend to rely on some deep intuition derived from life’s experiences,” Professor Shiller wrote in 1997. The idea of inflation, he continued, evokes “arbitrary injustice, arbitrary redistributions and social bitterness,” and “memories of social situations in which morale and a sense of cooperation were lost.”

That may be what makes the inflation surge such a tricky policy problem: It can be about something more profound than dollars in people’s pockets and the price of a gallon of gas.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The point is that voters themselves are saying they are doing "good or excellent," but that the economy overall is not. The voters themselves believe that their wages and job opportunities are going to continue to grow in the next year, but also think the economy is doing bad overall.

That is the interesting disconnect.