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On top of all that Pants Donkey said, I wouldn't be surprised if several of the people running are actually setting up for 2028, in a climate where Trump is more likely to be dead and/or disgraced and the Democrats are either running Harris or someone new to the national stage. They'll run for a bit, do everything they can to be non-confrontational with Trump (because they'll want his supporters behind him in four years), and 'gracefully withdraw' after achieving the high of a second or third place result in a few states to prove they have appeal to future bankrollers. The GOP has been pretty supportive of also-rans later getting the nom (McCain from 2000 into 2008; Romney from 2008 into 2012). This is one of the places where DeSantis is hosed, because he's the annointed "not Trump", and so he's both in a confrontational role, and the expectations around him are much higher. Tim Scott can gently caress around, withdraw before New Hampshire, and still look viable for 2028. If DeSantis doesn't win at least a few states through Super Tuesday, he won't look viable in 2028 at all, and DeSantis is not on a trajectory to win any states. Edit: Honestly, now that I think about it, DeSantis' clearly doomed candidacy might be pulling more people into the race than would happen otherwise, because no one else has to risk being the "major contender" and actually run a viable campaign skeleton warrior fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Jun 13, 2023 |
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Jun 13, 2023 15:56
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I mean, it’s a rock and a hard place for DeSantis. He’ll be out of the governor’s office in 2026, and running in 2028 assumes that anyone remembers him, cares, and that his positions are relevant and likable by whatever makes up the GOP base at that point. And if he’s drinking his own supply, he’s pretty sure that 2028 is going to be Trump anointing a successor or some other Republican running for re-election and then he’s completely out of it. So his best shot had to be a 2024 run, with the hope that Trump bows out/dies and leaves the road clear for DeSantis to run the table as the most organized, most serious, most known candidate. Which could still happen. But DeSantis’ run has also turned out to be based on a much larger hope that is being clearly dashed, which is DeSantis’ hope that he has any charisma and appeal at all. And he just doesn’t. Every anecdote being told so far about his campaign is how clearly awful he is at basic politics and at coming across as someone human and relatable. Which is nice.
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Jun 22, 2023 07:16
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He's Nixon without the charm.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:01
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Note that the MoE on that is 7.2, so take it more as generalities than specifics, but yeah, whoo, it’s a cult
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Aug 20, 2023 16:57
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:
hahahahaha what no that’s not even close to true In an off-year election, yes, the out party has the advantage, but during the Presidential years that advantage doesn’t exist, the President has a massive advantage from media attention and being in the news every day Like, since 1952, the incumbent President has won 7 out of 11 times. It’s not a sure thing, but you’re casting it here as an uphill battle and it’s not Biden absolutely has the advantage here. He won the same match up 4 years ago, Trump’s base is older so has had more deaths while 70 - 80% of new young voters are Democrats; all of January 6th, the indictments, the response to the indictments all happened after that election, and Trump has done literally nothing to expand his base beyond his cult. He’s no longer on Twitter, and the media isn’t treating his rallies as must-watch-TV any more. I am not saying there is no possibility that Trump wins, because Americans are loving stupid and awful, but it’s absolutely less likely than his re-election in 2020.
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Sep 30, 2023 16:03
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StumblyWumbly posted:Yeah, the Right had a struggle nominating a Mormon. Romney had to give a speech talking about his religion, the first sentence was "Religion shouldn't matter", and the second was "Of course I believe Jesus is our lord and savior". Conversely, more Republicans see Donald Trump as "a man of faith" than they do Mitt Romney or Mike Pence so it's fully possible that Ramaswamy's psychopathy towards the poor is all the religion they need to see. Likewise, while Ramaswamy isn't white, he's a member of a model minority, so there may be a lot less racism against him than you'd immediately expect.
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Sep 30, 2023 21:31
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Mooseontheloose posted:Also, one of them is hoping to catch fire somehow and change the race. The only way any of these gormless assholes are going to do that is by impersonating a Buddhist monk
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Oct 5, 2023 21:32
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You guys are babies. I live in Virginia, with odd-year state elections, so every year is an election year. The last football game had back-to-back-to-back commercials from local Republicans trying to convince me that the Democrats were happy to let rapists loose in the streets.
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Oct 24, 2023 00:12
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I mean, “won’t anyone think of the children; also, gently caress the children and all future generations” has been a GOP plank since Reagan
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Nov 3, 2023 14:19
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The poll mostly states that Republicans remain 1000000000000000% in lock-step behind Trump and no number of felonies or indictments or statements he makes will peel them away, while Biden is having serious trouble keeping young and minority voters interested in supporting him. Nevada support collapsing is because the Democratic party in Nevada is overwhelmingly young and minorities, so the demographic effects hits there harder. Nate Cohn goes into more detail, but basically 'generic Democrat' or even Kamala Harris runs hugely ahead of Biden; Biden is in a position where all of the political failures of the last four years are laid on him and he's thought of as old and out of touch. https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1721158482127466507 Is it real? Does it matter if it's a year out? I'm not sure either does when it will be what all of the pundits natter about for the next two weeks.
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Nov 6, 2023 05:55
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This Is the Zodiac posted:Take a look at the Freep thread Please do not encourage other posters to self-harm Actual serious comment: I agree with Zwabu - between the rise of social media and the gritting class and the push for gerrymandering and anti-democratic elections, the GOP has become much much more beholden to its primary voters and are going to chase the extremes in their party rather than moderate their views. And their answer to how to win elections will be either to work harder to rig voting and voting rights; to wait for the Dems to have a bad cycle and ram things through when another 2016 happens; or to not care because the people in power are getting elected and gritting and actually winning more power might upset the grift.
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Nov 8, 2023 20:43
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I suspect Ronnie is just a moron and reddit freaks were the most competent idiots he was able to hire. Every article about his meme team screams that he doesn't know how to hire competent people, doesn't know how to lead, and just kind of expects people to miracle solutions for him. Which is working marvelously for him. Well, for marvelously for us who like watching him flail. Morrow posted:DeSantis's plan involved the seas parting for him as Trump declines to run and instead endorses him for President. This did not occur. Instead, Trump is running and DeSantis can't attack him. Plan B involved Trump suddenly dropping dead and DeSantis inheriting his voting bloc, functionally identical to Plan A, because DeSantis has gone all in on running in 2024 and spent a lot of political capital in Florida to do so. And as a result his entire campaign strategy has been "prevent defense" in trying to not lose votes or fall out of second place, and every football coach will tell you exactly how effective "prevent defense" is. Of course, DeSantis' plan also involved him being seen as competent and presidential and we've seen how well he achieved that, too.
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Nov 9, 2023 16:36
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PoopShipDestroyer posted:I wonder sometimes what would happen if Trump just keeled over and died tomorrow? Would they all rally behind DeSantis again? Is that his only chance at the white house? A bunch of them would just sit out, as they only care about Trump and will just disengage from politics again when he's gone. I have no idea what drives them - his celebrity, his idiocy, or his saying the quiet parts loud, but he clearly has a bunch of voters who only make it out for him. The rest would scatter around the other candidates, and there's no real telling who. Not to mention that if Trump died this far out, you'd have four or five people who were sitting out to avoid fighting Trump suddenly jump in now that the coast was clear - Hawley or Youngkin and such. I think it's pretty fair to assume that DeSantis would fall back into the middle of the pack; his campaign numbers have been a constant slide downwards and I can't imagine him suddenly inspiring confidence or support after his mediocre campaign. But you're right that it's his only chance at the White House, so he's full in for the humiliation tour.
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Nov 9, 2023 17:52
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It’s for three reasons: 1) In the modern media environment, maintaining support and enthusiasm for years is really really hard. The media always wants new and fresh and will jump on every new bandwagon to try and generate views and clicks, and so you’d always rather be the new hot commodity than the old news fighting to get attention. 2) DeSantis can only get attention by power stunts. Literally every reason you’ve heard of him is because of a bill he signed or a fight he picked, one of which would matter if he wasn’t a sitting governor. He loses that in 26 and has nowhere to go, so he’d both be old news and have no way to get people to notice him in ‘27 and ‘28. 3) The GOP is brain poisoned and sure they’re going to win in ‘24, and no one wants to be running against the GOP incumbent or incumbent-anointed candidate in ‘28.
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Nov 9, 2023 18:52
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Remember that in 2016 Trump was calling for “Second Amendment solutions” if Hillary won. He’s always been a fascist who wants to be the face of an uprising because it’s proof that he’s so loved. What’s scary for a second term is not that he’ll have more stupid, fascist ideas, because every expose revealed he had plenty of those. What’s scary is how much more likely it is he’ll appoint more Cheseboros and other fascists and usurpers because he no longer feels tied to letting semi-competent conservatives handle the hard parts of the job.
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Nov 14, 2023 18:42
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If by "last minute consolidation" you mean "most of the no-chancers drop out and endorse one person just before Super Tuesday", sure, that's like 75% of all presidential primary campaigns
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Nov 17, 2023 19:56
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VitalSigns posted:This project 2025 stuff sounds like a conspiracy theory to me because I can't reconcile the hysteria in the press with the lackadaisical attitude of those actually in power. You mean why aren't they doing the thing they're actually doing? https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/...mitch-mcconnell
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Nov 18, 2023 16:45
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VitalSigns posted:I'm sure they've done some things, the question once again isn't "have they done anything it all" it's "are their actions commensurate with the danger they are promoting with the project 2025 conspiracy" So the answer is “Democrats should do incredibly unpopular things that will destroy them in elections like cutting police funding because that will prevent Trump abuses when he inevitably gets re-elected due to Democrats doing incredibly unpopular things?” That seems terribly stupid, based on some weird idea that if we cut national funding for police budgets by 5 or 10 percent that will somehow make a coup inevitably fail Democrats have to thread the needle between “secure the government from being able to be easily couped” and “prevent Trump from walking back into office with a Senate and Congressional majority” and you are being weirdly obsessed with the idea that both of these things should be ideologically consistent
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Nov 20, 2023 19:07
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VitalSigns posted:
Except a) you’re literally the only person in this argument stating that a cut to federal police funding is making a decisive difference in whether a coup succeeds or not, and you’re making that argument specifically to downplay the idea that Democrats are serious about preventing a coup; and b) you’ve been provided plenty of evidence of other ways that the Biden administration is attempting to fight a potential future coup and you are hand waving that away with “but if they don’t cut federal police funding they can’t possibly succeed so I refuse to believe they’re taking it seriously”
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Nov 20, 2023 19:28
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VitalSigns posted:Yeah it is always possible that conservatives are planning a dictatorship and the opposition party is unable/unwilling to use their time in power to prevent it, but I wouldn't worry myself over that. Democrats can't win every presidential election for the rest of our lives, so if you're right that never losing is the Dems' only hope, then it's like worrying there's an asteroid on its way to hit earth. It's coming no matter how much or little I worry. lol, one side put forward legal arguments that states could ignore elections in naming a president, and when that didn't work they staged a coup, and now they're attempting to elect the coup leader who is calling his enemies vermin who need to be eliminated, but both sides bad so why bother choosing?
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Nov 21, 2023 15:03
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I do not think the next president wants to add “making sure his drink isn’t poisoned” to his list of duties
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Dec 2, 2023 23:21
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It's not just Right Wing Media, or Fox News' audience wouldn't be fracturing and going off to OANN and Newsmaxx and all these other "Real Right Wing" networks. So, yeah, Fox News plays into it by providing a constant influx of right-wing materials and propaganda to allow people to soak themselves in fake news and close themselves off from reality. But it wouldn't be nearly as successful - so successful that people have decided that Fox is actually too liberal and are running off to more right-wing news - if it weren't for the internet and social media. Fifty years ago, people moderated their views and pulled towards a general middle because you were usually in communities you couldn't curate, and so your workplace and your bowling league and your neighborhood were filled with people of different views and people shave the edges off of or hid their more extreme views to stay part of their communities. There's a lot that's wrong with that - it stifles minority views and makes questioning the monoculture dangerous and isolating - but what we've replaced it with has much, much worse results. Now you don't need to care as much about moderating views because you can ignore these communities of location to search the internet for communities of interest instead, and so you don't have to hide your racism or sexism or desire to exterminate the enemy de jure because you can find somewhere on the internet that tells you these views are cool and good. But it's worse than that! Two things have intensified how much that happens and how bad it gets: first, the proven effect that these communities of interest spin further and further into extremism as people stake out more and more outside views to differentiate themselves within these groups (think of Twitter and how there seems to be the rush to have the hottest take to get the most attention; think of some of the threads that got insular and super-weird in C-SPAM); and second, that The Algorithms our social media uses assists people in finding these extreme groups because it generates hits and views and things that are great for monetizing the internet but absolutely horrible for having a healthy community. Which is why Fox News is no longer leading that particular tiger; they have to try and keep up with what Facebook is doing to their audience. Then, add on top of that the GOP's overwhelming victory in 2010, a wonderful synergy of blowback to the idea of government doing things and to the idea of black people being the face of the nation, and they were able to gerrymander the gently caress out of the country, which was great for them in the short-term politically... but has now put them into a situation where they don't need to care about the general elections, so they only care about the primaries, and it turns out that due to the aforementioned Social Media Extremist effect the people who matter most in the primaries are the most extreme people who live in an internet information bubble. The best way to unfuck this would be to force social media companies to actually moderate their sites, to force them to be accountable for their algorithms, which of course they won't do on their own because it cuts into their profits. The way it might unfuck itself naturally is as older people who are more susceptible to Facebook-brain die off and as we raise generations used to how much social media fucks you up, some of that effect dies off. Right now, some of the extreme actions on the part of the GOP are because they know for certain that they can't win free and fair elections, and at some point their voting base will be too small to even threaten to win unfair elections, and they'll have to figure out how to expand back to a viable coalition. Or, y'know, until the suburbs decide that it's okay if we have a dictatorship that exterminates minorities if it means that they get a tax cut, or even just a potential tax cut once they finally become the billionaires they know they eventually will be.
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Dec 10, 2023 23:15
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Gyges posted:Asa Hutchinson's gonna ride tomorrow's freak blizzard, that traps everyone but his one supporter in their houses, to victory! I mean, it’s also sixty years of anger over The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and this expectation that we’re supposed to treat anyone other than white cis males as human beings. De-segregation leading to massive increases in private religious schooling leading to the rise of the Religious Right and eight years of gritting teeth faced with being expected to accept that a black man was President, which led to a movement Trump himself took leadership over because black people aren’t actually Americans and we can legally prove this one
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Jan 14, 2024 18:46
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smackfu posted:Those NYTimes percentages with +/- 10% errors sure are something. It means Asa Hutchinson may actually have -9% of the vote, which seems more likely
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Jan 16, 2024 03:24
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dpkg chopra posted:The most boring of outcomes. Trump ahead but not so ahead that it gives us any new insights. De Santis second which will keep him in the race. Haley third but close enough to second that she’ll try to keep her momentum dreams alive. Boring in that it maintains the status quo; exciting in that Trump, DeSantis, and Haley now have even more incentive to trash each other as much as possible. Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Is the GOP still doing winner take all for delegates Not for Iowa. It is for some states, though.
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Jan 16, 2024 05:34
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ponzicar posted:Trump was able to get nominated in 2016 because he was entertaining enough to get a plurality out of a clown car of zero charisma nobodies, and the establishment pick immediately crumbled under his bullying. I am still expecting Trump to get the nomination, but the anti-Trump Republicans now have a single candidate to rally around instead of splitting their votes between the jebs of the world. Yeah, but it’s also the 2024 GOP and not the 2016 GOP. Plenty of Republicans spent the last eight years stewing themselves in Fox/OANN and Facebook marinade and internalized the idea that Trump was Actually Good And Virtuous, or decided that ever admitting the party made a mistake was the worst thing they could do to their smug liberal co-workers and so quintupled down on how great and flawless Trump is. And some small sliver of Business Republicans saw the rest of the party and had enough of a breakthrough to jump ship, and won’t come back even for a “sensible” option. Trump had maybe 30-40% of the GOP voting for him in 2016, and got up to 50% near the end when momentum and voters’ desire to just loving end the race carried him over the top. He’s starting 2024 at 50% and won’t drop below that. I don’t think Haley wins a single state, especially not SC.
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Jan 22, 2024 20:30
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Some of it is also that swing voters and independents tend to be massive idiots, just completely uneducated and tuned out of politics and only step back in for presidential races where they bounce off of concepts like “maybe the government should do things” and “people who aren’t white men should have value in our society” because their main understanding of the Constitution and what crises confronts America comes from having recently re-watched 24 on a streaming service
skeleton warrior fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 03:28
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It’s a great video and you should watch it. If you want the twist and why it’s relevant: it turns out that there’s a huge overlap between Flat Earthers and Evangelical Christians, because at heart it’s all about having absolute faith in a premise no one else believes; and having a Secret Truth you share with a community of believers. And Evangelicals are of course Trump’s most fervent voting group.
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Jan 24, 2024 02:13
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:There's always side effects. Any MMO that protects one's virginity will absolutely destroy one's wrists, there's no way to save both.
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Jan 31, 2024 17:28
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Phlegmish posted:What the hell is going on in the US this year, their primary thing is even more chaotic than usual It turns out that when you make state legislatures and state constitutions the vehicle for establishing primaries, it becomes hard to change how those things happen, and even more hard to change when those state legislatures become partisan and dysfunctional. So when the parties differ on when and how they want to do things, everything gets all hosed up.
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Feb 7, 2024 17:51
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Uglycat posted:I still find it near impossible to believe that the GOP would run an ancient unstable loser whose closets have been flying open and skeletons are falling out. A lot of the GOP rank-and-file is caught in the position where they've wrapped their own egos in Trump. They wrapped themselves up in hate for the people who oppose Trump - in part because Trump and the GOP media machine was selling that hate and branding it as good and righteous to hate liberals/women/blacks/queer people/immigrants/foreigners/etc. - and to step back and say "yes, I think Trump is bad for the party" meant agreeing with and making happy those very people they hated. So to keep from making people they hate happy, they twist themselves into excuses or cognitive dissonance or just drop pretenses of following any logic whatsoever because what's most important is the hate and being allowed to hate and to do all of the transference and disassociation that hate allows them to do. But then, every time they twist themselves into a counterfactual, they inherently up the stakes. Now the next time Trump fucks up it's not just "I think Trump is bad" it's "I think Trump is bad and also I was clearly wrong before when I said Trump was right" and now the potential ego injury is even bigger. And so the need for defense is bigger, which means doubling down and screaming louder that Trump is not just right, he's the best; and next time he's the best president we've ever had, and next time he's Christ-like, and so on. And so nothing: no skeletons, no speech where Trump makes it clear he has dementia, no policy position that threatens democracy, no massive fraud or indictments or jail time or anything is going to get his base to drop him, because to drop him they'd have to admit that they're wrong, and that's an injury to their narcissistic egos. And the number of people who are this way are just enough that the GOP leadership can't win primaries if they piss them off. And every GOP leader remembers very well Eric Cantor getting destroyed in a primary in 2014 where no amount of money, DC press, or being treated as the "future of the party" by the business wing was enough to save him from a vacuous nobody whose political philosophy was "we should burn it all down and stop collecting taxes". So, yeah, they're going to let Trump run, because standing against Trump is absolutely suicide for their careers, and if Trump runs and loses, it might only be bad for their careers.
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Feb 25, 2024 07:08
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Pretty much. Trump was always going to be the nominee unless something very big happened, and nothing big ever happened. Edit: Like, the GOP was moderately pro-Trump in 2016 (he really only had about 30-40% support in the race, the rest was momentum) but the four years that followed forced most of the non-commital support to make the decision to either leave or flip to unwavering support. He's been clearly the head of a smaller, more fanatical party since, and there was no indication that any other candidate was somehow going to change voters' minds about Trump being their personal Avatar of Grievances. skeleton warrior fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 15:00
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