Stabbey_the_Clown posted:

Checking the composition of the sample...

That leaves 327 voters who didn't specify an affiliation.

The survey has more Democratic-leaning voters, but also thinks the Democratic party is the greatest threat to democracy? The only way that makes sense is if the vast majority of "no specified affiliation" are hard right-wingers. I would just toss that survey into the trash where it belongs and not worry about it. EDIT 2: Fine, I see how it could be valid.

EDIT: The age breakdown of registered voters might be a clue:

18 to 29 - 16%
30 to 44 - 23%
45 to 59 - 27%
60 or older - 34%

61% of those polled are 45 or older.

Fame Douglas posted:

Are there really that many people into overzealous parents on school boards?

VideoGameVet posted:

Just 34 NYPD Went On Unpaid Leave Rather Than Comply With Vaccine Mandate

https://www.thedailybeast.com/only-34-cops-sent-home-without-pay-for-flouting-vax-mandate-nypd-says

So much for the 10,000 threatened by the Union.

"On Thursday the union representing 50,000 current and former New York City Police Dept. officers claimed Mayor de Blasio’s vaccine mandate would force “10,000” officers off the streets."

Gripweed posted:

So safe money is on the Dems blaming critical race theory for their loss here, right? I wonder how that's going to effect races in the midterms. They don't have a good response to Republican complaints about CRT, because the complaints are absurd and nonsensical, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see some Dem candidates come out against CRT too.

Trazz posted:

Is California the only state to figure out that we need to completely purge the GOP?

Neurolimal posted:

With the election safely decided, Trump's decided to start the gloating. Can't say he's particularly wrong, about Terry's strategy & hopefully that the democrats will find a new schtick. They tried to rope Trump into repelling Virginia independents and his handlers managed to rein him in; if they manage to do the same in 2022, with a heavily neutered BBB bill, it could be a slaughter.

socialsecurity posted:

The fact that "the Dems did nothing" is being used as an argument in a state like VA where they actually did a ton shows how hollow that argument really is. It doesn't matter what the Dems actually do they will just get hated on, it's similar to the usual "the Dems should do this, oh wait they have been? Well I didn't hear about it from my media bubble so they did it wrong'

TheDisreputableDog posted:

Does McAuliffe have a bottle of hot sauce in his purse at all times like Hillary though.

Nix Panicus posted:

Do you think Terry McAuliffe ran an ad campaign that effectively highlighted democrat victories in Virginia that materially improved the lives of potential voters? My understanding of the race is that McAuliffe mostly focused on Trump, a person who was not even eligible to run in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, with the occasional generic call to vote. I would be happy to be shown ads where McAuliffe focused on the improvements made to the state since the last election.

If McAuliffe ran on democrat material victories and still lost that would be alarming, but if McAuliffe ran on opposing someone not even in the race that seems like wasted energy and a terrible strategy.

Do not run on Trump. Please stop mentioning Trump at all in any campaign ads, unless your opponent is literally Donald Trump, and even then confine the focus on Trump to no more than 1/3rd of ads at most.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Seattle seeing another situation where the "pro-police" candidate is being driven to victory by minority voters.

Kind of surprised by the Republican winning the city attorney position with such a big margin when no other Republican got close to any major elected office. Maybe a local/personal reason specific to her? I'm not really familiar with that race.

https://twitter.com/ByMikeBaker/status/1455754463512199171

Hellblazer187 posted:

At one time "The Dems" brought The New Deal and The Great Society programs. So I don't think it's simply the "Democratic Party" label that is so fatal. Officials operating under that label have done decent things, brought real changes to lots and lots of people.

But it's really not that party anymore. I had long operated under the belief we could capture the party via the primary process and make it help people again, but the India Walton thing has my really shaken and angry. I guess Murkowski's write in win ten thousand years ago didn't prevent the tea party/trumpist/outward lunatic takeover of her party, so a single instance of this isn't the end. But holy poo poo it's bad, IMO.

Srice posted:

It didn't have to be this way but McAuliffe just ran a terrible campaign and shot himself in the foot in plenty of ways. Like one of the lessons the dems should take away from this is to never run on a platform of "I'm not the other guy". The other big takeaway is that they need to focus on putting together some really good messaging on education because a lot of republicans are gonna look at what Youngkin did there and try to follow up on that. If they don't have an effective way to counter that narrative they're just gonna bleed more and more, losing elections that they should be able to win.

Sadly the realistic outcome is that they are gonna find a way to pin this on progressives instead of doing anything introspective.

FlamingLiberal posted:

This is really a big red flag for the midterms

https://twitter.com/politicsmaps/status/1455883420848967682?s=21

The Dems’ coalition of suburban voters that allowed Biden to win has already collapsed

Willo567 posted:

If Trump got reelected in 2024, could America actually survive another term with him after he tried to do an insurrection? He's too mentally unhinged and his fanbase is full of cultists

Peter Daou Zen posted:

A. Biden is older, yet still president. So Kamala 2024 or...?
B. How is Trump senile, but Biden is not senile by this metric?
C. Was it?
D. Anyday now. . .

Bugsy posted:

https://twitter.com/elwasson/status/1455892096536268804

Ed Markey is also again st voting for Rahm, and hopefully this will be enough to scuttle him.

Yinlock posted:

The correlation seems fairly substantive. Biden's current poll numbers are dipping precisely because his administration are somewhat justifiably seen as do-nothings, while Trump was actually clawing his approval back up via actively fighting for things he wanted(even if those things were all horrible) until the pandemic really hit and he nosedived again

e:

A lot of things people are suggesting isn't even ignoring the rule of law, it's just being rude. When Trump was stumbling around breaking things we learned that a lot of rules are actually just established norms and there's no real punishment for breaking them.

Jaxyon posted:

This reads like someone who got so mad at Dems they started ingesting rightwing propaganda.

Trump was the laziest president in decades. He didn't fight for very much at all. He just made noise.

His handlers got him to appoint awful people, which he did because he didn't give a gently caress about anything. They aggressively tried to tear everything down because they didn't care about legal consequences because they are fascists who own the courts.

The only thing notable legislation passed during his presidency by the GOP alone was tax cuts which his base loving hated and were bog standards GOP policy from before he ever ran.

Jaxyon posted:

Yep.

And again, Biden sucks, I'm not defending Biden.

But if you ever have convinced yourself that one of the laziest men in history, Trump, was a fighter, you should probably unplug for a bit.

morothar posted:

Try “we shouldn’t do x, because it will look like we’re disproportionately favoring a small group of people that already is relatively better off. It will not meaningfully improve our chance of electoral victory, but instead will piss off the rest of the electorate - some of which in the very core group that we rely on”

rscott posted:

You're really overestimating the number of people who actually go to college and accrue significant debt

Vorik posted:

https://twitter.com/byHeatherLong/status/1456599818835570694?s=20

https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers/status/1456600426216837125?s=20

https://twitter.com/Neil_Irwin/status/1456600132930125829?s=20

Very good job numbers today plus the first vote on the BBB.

and then there's this as well

https://twitter.com/ashishkjha/status/1456598629599354886?s=20

Things are looking good going into 2022. The best thing that can happen is the economy getting back on track, keeping kids in school and COVID surges becoming less pronounced if no new variant pops up.

Mizaq posted:

Wait, I thought the usual thing to do in regards to the unemployment stats was to not count people who stopped receiving benefits. And in September the pandemic benefits ended. Are we just juking the stats as usual again?

Harold Fjord posted:

It's not being proposed as a strategy, which would also require doing other things too. Each right thing Biden needs to do might not directly benefit 51% and could be argued to be "bad electoral strategy" but that's not why he should do them and that attitude is part of why so many people loving hate the Dems

VitalSigns posted:

Lol oh yeah I forgot about this.

All wrangling about optimal electoral strategy is pointless when Biden's priority is clearly to reassert the power relationships of capital and labor that existed before the pandemic, with getting reelected a distant second.

A few months ago on this board I was told that Biden will use the moratorium as a backdoor permanent forgiveness program. It doesn't trigger any crab-bucketing, it's ongoing relief for young people with debt who will be energized to come out and vote to defend it, and even when Republicans finally do retake the White House it may be too established by then for them to risk tampering with

I even believed the people who told me that. But lol nope, Starbucks CEO is complaining he can't find enough baristas at wage-slave pay. Gotta force debtors to get second jobs and refill that reserve pool of labor so wages can race back to the bottom. Can't even wait until after the elections, gotta gently caress millions and millions of millennials and Gen Z right before the midterms for maximal electoral damage.

Motto posted:

It's really funny that democrats will see themselves do better with college grads and decide the best thing to do is make college less accessible and punish those who do go.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Now that the numbers for Virginia are finalized you can look at some of the trends.

- Overall turnout was a new record for a Governor's race - looks like it will be ~56% of eligible voters

- Democratic turnout was up around 21% from the previous Gubernatorial election.

- Republican turnout was up around 26% from the previous Gubernatorial election.

- Democratic margins in NoVa/the Northern suburbs held to almost 2020 levels.

- Youngkin demolished in southwestern and rural Virginia - on both margins and turnout he ended up with over 50% more net votes from those areas than Republicans had in 2017. He matched or exceeded Trump's margin in every single county in the SW.

- Even though those rural areas are small, when Youngkin was winning 91% of the vote in some of them + exploding turnout, it made the difference.

- Some people hypothesized that Youngkin's dog whistle politics would be somewhat countered by increased minority opposition to him, but he did about the same as every other statewide Republican governor. He didn't improve, but wasn't seemingly hurt by it.


The only 100% clear conclusion that you can draw is that the idea that increased overall turnout will always benefit Democrats clearly isn't true.

The other thing is that Democrats need to find a way to either demotivate or change the votes of the large amount of rural voters who are energized by racial rhetoric and politics. I have no idea what the surefire way to do that would be. They can get blown out by 40 points with these voters and still win easily, but they can't get blown out by 80+ points.

Not sure what you can do with that information on a national level (or if it even applies outside of VA, it didn't happen in California where Newsom got blown out by the "normal" amount among those voters).

Edit:

Sort of the opposite happened in New Jersey, where it looks like Murphy saw a general all-around drop in support from every geographic area with a larger drop in southern Jersey (similar to what happened in SW VA, but to a much smaller level).

Shammypants posted:

Hearing seemingly normal people in various places complain about how angry they would be if current loanees or existing loanees received relief and they didn't actually surprised me. I think the backlash would be fairly substantial, and the electoral consequences uncertain, particularly since younger people would tend to benefit more and vote less.

morothar posted:

Virtually everything in the Infrastructure and BBB bills benefits young people, often most or exclusively. $4T+ in spending that would never have materialized without the Democrats being (barely) in power.

Truly, young people have no reason to vote Democrat ever again.

Hellblazer187 posted:

The people arguing against student loan relief in this thread did more to radicalize me than a thousand CSPAMers on a thousand typewriters could in a thousand years.

Sharkie posted:

If someone tells me they want to hang out, then they keep giving me endless excuses about why they can't, eventually I decide they don't really want me around. Then once every four years when they hit me up for money, I can tell them to gently caress off. Politics works the same way.

selec posted:

My best friend for about 35 years now was a high school art teacher. He’s also painted an album cover for a major You Would Know Them rock band in the last decade, and now supports himself as an artist, meagerly. He quit his union education job with insurance to live on less money with no insurance because the state absolutely poo poo all over educators during the pandemic, and so now he’s resigned himself to never paying off his student loans, which at age 45 are still in the mid 5 figures, and just makes enough payments on the mortgage lien his dad dying uninsured left him with to not be homeless.

I don’t know many better human beings, and the idea that he doesn’t deserve or it’s not electorally feasible to help him enrages me. I have committed myself to never letting him fall too far, but the state has utterly abandoned him.

And he’s just one of the several left-behind men and women I know, all of whom demographically should be loyal democrats, and most of whom are now just no longer voting because it will change nothing about their lives to do so.

That these lives do not matter to the state or to the party is depraved.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Manchin now saying his problem with the bill is that, because they had to shrink it (partially because of demands from Senator Joe Manchin III), that now some programs are scheduled to end in 6 years, 4 years, or two years instead of 10 and that they should fund everything for 10 years.

https://twitter.com/BenjySarlin/status/1456612937406296065

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

The NRCC memo advising candidates on the issues to run on in 2022 seems to be the official plan as of now. The Republican Study Committee has now released a memo with the same conclusions.

I guess it depends on where the most vulnerable seats are, but I am kind of surprised that they are only doing a sort of half-hearted "high taxes" angle and downplaying jobs, the economy, and healthcare.

Maybe education and all those umbrella issues are evergreen, and it makes sense to plan around that because the economy and other issues can change in a year.

I could be wrong, but minimizing the economy in favor of "education" seems like a bad midterm strategy.

https://twitter.com/akarl_smith/status/1456725342853509132

VitalSigns posted:

Why would this Nigerian Prince not share his Swiss bank account with me after I sent him my life savings as a good faith gesture? Your is an up is down black is white conspiracy theory.

Anyway, re: the student loan discussion from the other day, looks like the DoE is fighting to get the administration to extend the moratorium which is a good thing, but if politco's source is reliable lmao at the administration's argument for not doing that.

https://twitter.com/StrikeDebt/status/1455873658698805252
https://twitter.com/StrikeDebt/status/1455875199535026185

morothar posted:

Want some more bleakness?

The Economist just pointed out in an article that while the US has a median age of 40, and a population where only 60% consider themselves white, the electorate has a median age of 53 years, with 75% identifying as white.

That type of electorate cannot but react negatively to most kinds of social spending, especially more radical stuff like student debt forgiveness.

One solution would be to go all-out, and hope that social spending, student debt forgiveness etc. will mobilize enough young voters to change the makeup of the electorate.

In reality, it will mean that Dems won’t be able to distance themselves fast or hard enough from progressives in the run-up to the election, because the majority will see their Safe Harbour in centrist policies.

eXXon posted:

FlamingLiberal posted:

Have some good news on a Friday

https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1459262561061412867?s=21

Bugsy posted:

Bannnon has turned himself in, saying "We're taking down the Biden regime."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/15/politics/steve-bannon/index.html

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

International Space Station evacuated.

The debris from the weapon test will likely last "years" and there is no way to track the long-term trajectory of all of the pieces. As of now, they have confirmed ~1,500 pieces in orbit.

https://twitter.com/18SPCS/status/1460388384078139399
https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1460387353768382465

"Actually, the treaty only prevents WMDs from being positioned in space, but we could also launch nukes into low orbit if we wanted" is not a super reassuring statement from Russia.