Google Jeb Bush posted:

Inflation was basically global and largely driven by supply disruptions, followed by price manipulation and oligopolies with the excuse of supply disruptions. If your media sources are telling you it's government spending that drove inflation - which is my inference from your posts, maybe I'm wrong and you are instead blaming the administration being slow on the draw to punish price manipulation and its shiny new software facilitators- then you need to reevaluate them.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Are you posting from 2020

Queering Wheel posted:

- Not everyone's last four years were lovely

- Even though they were lovely for many people, not everyone blames Biden for that

quote:

quote:

This survey was conducted online within the United States from December 13-14 among 2,034 registered voters by The Harris Poll and HarrisX.

Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, education, political party, and political ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be online.

DeadlyMuffin posted:

Is your issue that Biden has run too far to the left? I also expected him to be Obama 2.0 and so far he's exceeded that. I'd love to see him handle Israel differently but I don't think Obama would've.

The United States Federal Reserve's own research posted:

The COVID-19 pandemic hampered firms' ability to produce and consumers' ability to consume. In response to economic disturbances, many governments resorted to large fiscal stimulus. This policy was successful at boosting consumption which, together with relatively inelastic supply, may have led to supply chain bottlenecks and price tensions.

However, one should also recognize the positive role played by generous government support throughout this unprecedented crisis. The large spending supported a strong economic rebound, with both GDP and employment recovering at a remarkable pace, likely preventing worse outcomes despite the price pressures that may have resulted from the spending.

12 years a lurker posted:

I generally want someone who is competent and on the moderate wing of their party.

12 years a lurker posted:

Haven't decided yet if I will be voting for Biden, Trump, or leaving the presidential ballot blank if the likely rematch happens.

This board has gotten partisan enough that a lot of ability to empathize with and understand non-partisans has been lost.

Pantaloon Pontiff posted:

It amazes me that there are people who seriously contemplate voting for Trump, and yet in the same post will accuse other people of having a lack of empathy. If Trump's actions to date have not been enough to ensure that a person won't vote for him, that person's inability to empathize with the many victims of his policies and the policies he enables makes any accusation of other people losing the ability to empathize absolutely absurd. Trump is an awful person who does awful things to people on both a personal and political level, seriously contemplating a vote for him and the explicit support for his personal and political actions, plus the political actions he enables, indicates an absolutely breathtaking lack of empathy. "I'm not sure if I'll voten Biden or leave it blank (or vote third party, which is practically the same thing)" I can empathize with, but voting for Trump is something I do not have any empathy for and do not wish to.

I'm also rather skeptical of anyone who cares enough to post about it claiming to be 'non-partisan' or 'undecided' - my experience is that people in that category (as well as 'centrists' or 'socially liberal, fiscal conservative's and the like) are solidly Republican but don't like that Republicans have taken the mask off and don't want to be associated with the outright bigotry and hatred even though they're fine with voting for it. (I certainly believe there are people who don't pay much attention to news and politics or feel so disenfranchised that they tune it all out, but I don't buy that they come to a debate and discussion board to talk about their lack of interest in voting).

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Please explain how, judging by these criteria, one could rationalize a vote for Trump when the alternative was Joe Biden


I mean you're right in that that criteria is how a theoretical Haley candidacy beats Biden but anybody claiming Trump is any kind of "moderate" or even capable of faking any kind of competency at all, is more deranged than a Q cultist.

12 years a lurker posted:

I can't rationalize a vote for Trump. Trump had the same thing happen as Biden were he was fine as a candidate and awful as a sitting president. This isn't a universal opinion of liking the winner as a candidate and not once in power: Clinton was good, Obama was good, Bush was bad but only narrowly because of global warming and Iraq. The choice between by far the worst management of the economy in my lifetime and disrespect for Democracy is a terrible one, and I was really hoping not to have to make it.

celadon posted:

If its reasonable to vote for Biden despite his policy on mulching Palestinians, its reasonable to vote for Trump despite his policies on "insert whatever you want here' All you need is a single policy you agree with and the your decision on who to vote for is entirely internally justified and cannot be challenged.

12 years a lurker posted:

Trump had the same thing happen as Biden were he was fine as a candidate and awful as a sitting president.

socialsecurity posted:

What was fine about candidate Trump?

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

The problem with this is that Trump doesn't actually have policies, or positions, he just has things he's waving his dick at in a particular moment. Nothing he says can ever be taken as a true statement of his intent, and even if you do, you can't expect him to competently execute on that intent, because he's incompetent. Voting for him is like voting for a bomb with a lit, broken fuse. It's not just evil, it's moronic.

socialsecurity posted:

What was fine about candidate Trump?

12 years a lurker posted:

Picking this one out of the flood, it kind of boils down to this:

1) For people in the middle, the Democrats are too far left, the Republicans are too far right. I generally want someone who is competent and on the moderate wing of their party. I think this is reasonably representative of swing voters. Obama was a Good President by this metric - not too extreme, very capable. I particularly value recognizing that Climate Change is a problem and doing something about it (Biden has been great here, even if I don't like him overall) and not discriminating against people like me (I'm a white jewish male, so this generally pushes me to the Republicans on the white male part and the cesspool of antisemitism and alliances with antisemitism of the last few months [you can be antizionist without being antisemitic or allying with antisemites in theory, but there's been a lot of antisemitism and allying with those people in practice] has not been helping even if Biden individually is fine) but those are personal things and not really extendable like preferring competent centrists is.

2) I do think that the trillions of dollars of deficit stimulus spending without offsetting tax increases caused our recent inflation problems. This is partially Trump's fault too, although the 2021 stimulus was the straw that broke the camel's back. If you print and spend a ton of dollars they are worth less. Spending gets paid for one way or another - I'm okay with it within reason and when paid for with progressive taxation. That it landed on food and housing specifically and a handful of corporations with monopoly pricing power pushed things even further was really bad luck. It's a hard problem to solve now that the genie is out of the bottle. I would have been fine with the administration if they admitted they screwed up, stated that they learned from it and wouldn't do massive spending bills without tax offsets again, and apologized for the damage done. Instead we got gaslighting that it was just transitory, and then when that no longer became credible blame shifting and attempts to say it was worthwhile and necessary to whittle unemployment a bit below average. As an middle/upper-middle class renter I was personally hit a lot worse by the housing end than the food end, but have enough awareness of others that the food part was the real killer for the general public.

12 years a lurker posted:

I can't rationalize a vote for Trump. Trump had the same thing happen as Biden were he was fine as a candidate and awful as a sitting president. This isn't a universal opinion of liking the winner as a candidate and not once in power: Clinton was good, Obama was good, Bush was bad but only narrowly because of global warming and Iraq. The choice between by far the worst management of the economy in my lifetime and disrespect for Democracy is a terrible one, and I was really hoping not to have to make it.

celadon posted:

If its reasonable to vote for Biden despite his policy on mulching Palestinians, its reasonable to vote for Trump despite his policies on "insert whatever you want here' All you need is a single policy you agree with and the your decision on who to vote for is entirely internally justified and cannot be challenged.

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

I remember half this forum ironically loved Trump because he made the rest of the field look like clowns

12 years a lurker posted:

He campaigned from the moderate end of the party (if you remember 2016 all the extreme right people wanted Cruz), clearly wasn't a true believer in the religious-right social stuff, and didn't seem likely to actually do much if elected from a policy standpoint except maybe build a fence on the border with Mexico and crack down on one-sided trade with China which aren't key issues for me but things I generally approve of. For what it's worth I liked candidate Hillary too and none of my local races were competitive and so didn't bother to vote that year.

Inglonias posted:

No republican candidate has won the popular vote in the 21st century. I'm not worried about that. Unfortunately, that also doesn't mean anything 'round these parts.

12 years a lurker posted:

He campaigned from the moderate end of the party

Main Paineframe posted:

You said you wanted a competent moderate, but from the sound of your specific complaints, what you really want is the one who most benefits you personally, regardless of where they actually sit on the political spectrum. You feel the Republicans are better for upper-middle-class straight white males, so that's who you're going with.

Tax offsets wouldn't have saved us from those years of inflation. Whatever the impact of the stimulus may have been, major supply disruptions were definitely a major contributing factor to quite a few of the price increases. Our just-in-time global production chains are hyperspecialized for maximum profit, but that means they're not very resilient against disruptions or unexpected shifts. And not only did the pandemic throw global supply chains way out of whack, but a number of high-level business types were convinced it was going to cause a massive recession and tank customer demand, so they made the wrong decisions and screwed up their production in ways that took quite a while to untangle.

I feel like "a couple of years of high inflation in the wake of a historic global pandemic" and "literally fascism" shouldn't be balanced quite so evenly on your scales.

socialsecurity posted:

Ok define moderate then, what positions did he campaign on that were more moderate than Cruz and thus made him appealing to give your vote to.

How would a fence on the Mexican border help you in any way?

12 years a lurker posted:

It's the certainty of economic mismanagement

12 years a lurker posted:

2) I do think that the trillions of dollars of deficit stimulus spending without offsetting tax increases caused our recent inflation problems.

B B posted:

Here is a similar poll from September:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/07/politics/cnn-poll-joe-biden-headwinds/index.html

Here is another from November:

https://news.yahoo.com/poll-a-majority-of-democrats-want-new-candidate-to-challenge-biden-in-2024-primary-100031348.html

Here is a poll from December showing his approval rating continuing a nose dive among Democrats:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/12/14/assessments-of-joe-biden/

Hopefully these numbers are recent enough for you.

12 years a lurker posted:

He didn't seem to want to take a complete ax to the government, clearly wasn't religious right (although he appointed bad justices to throw them a bone), and when all the far-right people I knew were enthusiastic Cruz supporters I didn't need to research all the issues to come to a general conclusion (similar to how when all the far left people backed Bernie I came to, as it turns out incorrectly, a conclusion that Biden would be good paired with him being Obama's veep).

Having a better immigration policy (i.e. less illegal immigration, more merit based legal immigration a la Australia) would be good for America on the whole. Building the wall would have maybe done nothing, maybe cut down on illegal immigration a little. Doing nothing of note and incremental positive change in the context of the American political system are both wins.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

What about Trump's first term makes you think he will manage the economy successfully in his second

Keeping in mind that these were trump-administration policies passed during COVID

Like, by your own stated criteria, you should be weighting "certainty of economic mismanagement on both sides" vs. "risk of fascism"

Kchama posted:

None of those polls are about the question that was asked, and "continuing to nose dive among Democrats" is uhh not correct as it's changed 4% in 12 months. And that same poll says his approval rating is 68% among Democratics, which implies that a lot more than just 34% want his reelection.

12 years a lurker posted:

You're right. Trump was the second worst president in my lifetime after Biden on managing the economy. I really want to vote for [generic Republican] or [generic Democrat], not either of them, and probably will protest vote by submitting a ballot with no mark or "none of the above" written in. Anyway, I don't personally matter because I don't live in a swing state currently. Down ballot I'll research whoever locally wants to allow more dense housing construction (if anyone) and single issue vote for them to help do what little can be done now to fix the rent / housing inflation.

12 years a lurker posted:

Down ballot I'll research whoever locally wants to allow more dense housing construction (if anyone) and single issue vote for them to help do what little can be done now to fix the rent / housing inflation.

B B posted:

Among Democrats, his approval rating among Democrats was 86% at the start of his presidency. When that poll was taken a little over a month ago, it was at 61% among democrats. Over the course of his presidency, he's lost 25% in his approval rating among Democrats. In other words, about 30% of the Democrats who supported him at the start of his presidency no longer do.

12 years a lurker posted:

This presupposes the existence of a huge population voting against their class interests. Most people's class interests more or less align with labor / worker / retired worker. By and large the Republicans act in the interests of capital and the Democrats act in the interests of the poor (who do already vote for them by a 2:1 margin). If you want workers to stop voting cultural issues over economic issues there has to exist a party supporting their class interests (more progressive taxation, less means tested benefits, more universal benefits) in the first place. If the economic argument is usually a tug of war between taxes you won't have to pay and means tested benefits you won't qualify for, it's very personally cheap to vote on cultural issues.

Raenir Salazar posted:

I have a feeling that we're never going to see a widely popular president ever again short of a complete new realignment.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

"I disapprove of Joe Biden" and "I no longer support Joe Biden" are not necessarily identical statements. It is perfectly possible that many people disapprove of Joe Biden but nevertheless support him [given the alternatives].

socialsecurity posted:

Why is illegal immigration a problem for you?

B B posted:

Isn't this a phenomenon that affects both candidates?



There aren't a ton of people out there who are dying to vote for Biden in November, either. It's going to be a pretty low enthusiasm election across the board.

B B posted:

Among Democrats, his approval rating among Democrats was 86% at the start of his presidency. When that poll was taken a little over a month ago, it was at 61% among democrats. Over the course of his presidency, he's lost 25% in his approval rating among Democrats. In other words, about 30% of the Democrats who supported him at the start of his presidency no longer do. I'm not sure how you define "nose dive," but I'll settle for being very impressed by Joe Biden's ability to make significant portions of his Party think he's doing a bad job.

In any case, it's pretty clear that Joe Biden is historically unpopular: