Trump vs. Biden

[The Cat]

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Just one time though. Just one election I'd like to see florida not fumble the ball to the other team.

really, electorally, he just has to win the states Hillary won plus Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

 

[Virtual ghost]

Just one time though. Just one election I'd like to see florida not fumble the ball to the other team.

Well, from what I heard the key demographic for that are Cubans. So highlighting out Trump's pro Russian statements and even press conferences could really shake this up. Since it is well known who is the main sponsor of Cuba for decades.



On the other hand I was scaring people here with how my own corona elections went and what I said about that was kinda simplistic. We got unexpected right wing landslide, since the left didn't vote so much and some even voted right (or third party). However in economic sense our entire political spectrum is clearly to the left of US. Therefore my main right wing party is to the left of Biden on just about about everything in economics. While on at least some of the issues they are surely even to the left of Bernie. Therefore creating direct parallel is perhaps unwise. In other words the right got it's landslide exactly because they offered a vision on how to cope with COVID. While our left didn't do that and they even intellectually attacked and trashed some of the healthcare professional. Plus for the top position they nominated the person that is kinda the clown. Therefore the situation is kinda reverse if we are going to project this on US. The left and right should be overlooked and we should judge this by talking points. In other words this actually indicates Biden's victory.

 

[Jaguar]

.

 

[Virtual ghost]

To be honest I can't wait for the first debate. Since after that many things will be much clearer.

 

[ceecee]

To be honest I can't wait for the first debate. Since after that many things will be much clearer.

What do you think will be much clearer?

 

[Virtual ghost]

What do you think will be much clearer?

Well, so far we only have polls as conclusions. But after the first debate we will probably have much better guess in judging if those polls will hold in their conclusions to the November. Since thus far the numbers are kinda in the air. Plus it will probably bubble to the surface that Biden isn't some ANTIFA overlord.

 

[ceecee]

Well, so far we only have polls as conclusions. But after the first debate we will probably have much better guess in judging if those polls will hold in their conclusions to the November. Since thus far the numbers are kinda in the air. Plus it will probably bubble to the surface that Biden isn't some ANTIFA overlord.

Really?? lol

It would be fucking amazing to see Joe Biden wearing this shirt..

Carrying this flag..

 

[Virtual ghost]

Really?? lol

For you and me this is kinda obvious but it seems that for many it isn't. So I want to see this "reality check".


Actually I came across some pieces that make an interesting point. That perhaps Trump completely missed in strategy with trying to paint Biden as some far left lunatic. Since the odds are that in debates Biden will likely look more like some person for which the right voted some 20 years ago than some far left pop icon. Therefore if this "connection" happens Trump could find himself in real trouble.

 

[Virtual ghost]

Two more polls that claim that SC senate seat is a toss up.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Is this hair thing in the news because - like the golfing - it's taxpayer money? Because if yes, anyone who paid more than $750 federal tax last year pays more for his hair to look like this than he does.

eta: The hair thing is because he allegedly claimed $70k business expense on taxes for his hair, when he was working on The Apprentice. *But* if you did pay more than $750 in federal taxes last year, then you did pay more for him to golf than he did.

 

[Virtual ghost]

German chancellor hopeful says Trump win risks transatlantic collapse

US President Donald Trump avoided tax for years, report finds

 

[Virtual ghost]

A little about big picture


From what I see this entire month Trump didn't win a single poll in Pennsylvania on the 538 list of them, some are quite close but from about 25 of them there is not a single red one. Similar is in Wisconsin, only one random online poll is Trump +1. While in Michigan there is also only one red poll by known biased pollster that also has Trump +1. Therefore if this holds as well as Clinton states the electoral college will go blue.

 

[The Cat]

The resident white house squatter will not be fact checked.

 

[Jonny]

Non-Partisan Watchdog Accuses Trump Campaign Of ‘Laundering’ $170 Million

Brad Parscale, Senior Adviser To Trump Campaign, Is Hospitalized After Call To Police : NPR

I wonder if these two things are connected?

I just cannot even keep up anymore with the degree of malfeasance in this administration. It is unbelievable. The worst, most corrupt administration in the history of our country. They will take us all down with them if we let them.

 

[Coriolis]

An interesting review of how the upcoming election is likely to play out.

Start with Trump's assertion that there is no way he can lose in a fair and honest election:

All of which is to say that there is no version of the Interregnum in which Trump congratulates Biden on his victory. He has told us so. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention on August 24. Unless he wins a bona fide victory in the Electoral College, Trump’s refusal to concede—his mere denial of defeat—will have cascading effects.

Now consider his desire to suppress voter turnout, especially among groups less likely to vote for him. It is notable that most measures with the intent and effect of discouraging voting are the work of Republicans.

There is no truth to be found in dancing around this point, either: Trump does not want Black people to vote. (He said as much in 2017—on Martin Luther King Day, no less—to a voting-blessrights group co-founded by King, according to a recording leaked to Politico.) He does not want young people or poor people to vote. He believes, with reason, that he is less likely to win reelection if turnout is high at the polls. This is not a “both sides” phenomenon. In present-day politics, we have one party that consistently seeks advantage in depriving the other party’s adherents of the right to vote.

The expiration of the consent decree (court ruling) mentioned below means Republicans will be free to intimidate voters in areas that historically have voted Democratic.

Of all the favorable signs for Trump’s Election Day operations, Clark explained, “first and foremost is the consent decree’s gone.” He was referring to a court order forbidding Republican operatives from using any of a long list of voter-purging and intimidation techniques. The expiration of that order was a “huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” Clark said.

The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district court’s opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people’s eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police.

Voter fraud has long been documented to be a red herring. Restrictive measures taken in the name of preventing fraud may stop a small handful (single digits) of invalid votes, while disenfranchising thousands of eligible voters. That's like amputating your arm to treat a hangnail.

Voter fraud is a fictitious threat to the outcome of elections, a pretext that Republicans use to thwart or discard the ballots of likely opponents. An authoritative report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the rate of voter fraud in three elections at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Another investigation, from Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, turned up 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States from 2000 to 2014. Judges in voting-rights cases have made comparable findings of fact.

Nonetheless, Republicans and their allies have litigated scores of cases in the name of preventing fraud in this year’s election. State by state, they have sought—with some success—to purge voter rolls, tighten rules on provisional votes, uphold voterblessidentification requirements, ban the use of ballot drop boxes, reduce eligibility to vote by mail, discard mail-in ballots with technical flaws, and outlaw the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward. The intent and effect is to throw away votes in large numbers.

Again, Trump admits that high voter turnout is bad for his chances in the election.

In part, Trump’s hostility to voting by mail is a reflection of his belief that more voting is bad for him in general. Democrats, he said on Fox & Friends at the end of March, want “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Some Republicans see Trump’s vendetta as self-defeating. “It to me appears entirely irrational,” Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, told me. “The Trump campaign and RNC and by fiat their state party organizations are engaging in suppressing their own voter turnout,” including Republican seniors who have voted by mail for years.

The remainder of the article goes into the various ways each party might contest the election results, how the dispute would be decided, and what influences might come to bear on the outcome. Wouldn't it be ironic if we got our first woman president because there was still no acknowledged winner on inauguration day, and Nancy Pelosi was sworn in as specified in the Constitution.

The worst case for an orderly count is also considered by some election modelers the likeliest: that Trump will jump ahead on Election Night, based on in-person returns, but his lead will slowly give way to a Biden victory as mail-in votes are tabulated. Josh Mendelsohn, the CEO of the Democratic data-modeling firm Hawkfish, calls this scenario “the red mirage.” The turbulence of that interval, fed by street protests, social media, and Trump’s desperate struggles to lock in his lead, can only be imagined. “Any scenario that you come up with will not be as weird as the reality of it,” the Trump legal adviser said.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

The right calls every democrat a far left lunatic, even the ones they supposedly like. Had Tulsi gotten the nomination, they'd have turned on her too and they'd be calling her the second coming of Hillary right now. They do this with pretty much every moderate democrat, to the point that the meaning of 'far left' is so diluted. This is their strategy, they'll pretend to support the anti-DNC dems like Sanders and Tulsi, but ultimately they're all a bunch of 'radicals' when it comes campaign time.

the average republican voter seems to have a really skewed frame of reference when it comes to concepts like right, left and the center. all the more skewed when you compare USA's left right and center to that of most other developed nations--the "far left" dems that frighten them are center-right liberals by most developed nations' standards--even the dems who are left wing by USA standards are barely so by the rest of the world's standards.

Oh but I forget, these people actually use the terms "left" and "liberal" synonymously and unironically. They actually think these are the same things. Half the time you get in a discussion with them, you can't even get very far because you have to spend the entire time schooling them on basic concepts.

Just trying to understand what goes on in their heads, or what doesn't go on in their heads, why the lack of critical thinking and understanding of 9th grade level civics and politics escapes so many of them...

Is it something like the "faith gene"?

 

[Z Buck McFate]

The right calls every democrat a far left lunatic, even the ones they supposedly like. Had Tulsi gotten the nomination, they'd have turned on her too and they'd be calling her the second coming of Hillary right now. They do this with pretty much every moderate democrat, to the point that the meaning of 'far left' is so diluted. This is their strategy, they'll pretend to support the anti-DNC dems like Sanders and Tulsi, but ultimately they're all a bunch of 'radicals' when it comes campaign time.

the average republican voter seems to have a really skewed frame of reference when it comes to concepts like right, left and the center. all the more skewed when you compare USA's left right and center to that of most other developed nations--the "far left" dems that frighten them are center-right liberals by most developed nations' standards--even the dems who are left wing by USA standards are barely so by the rest of the world's standards.

It's difficult to know what's meant anymore by "Republican" or "right", since Trumpublicans seem to be a whole different animal than Republicans.

************

Do all Trumpublicans buy the narrative that ALL the left AND the Republicans that don't support Trump are all "extremist left" now? They're gobbling down this narrative that most of the protesting is rioting, and can't bring themselves to bring up the protests without using scare quotes. People I used to consider relatively sane are now posting heated comments on Fb left and right about pure bullshit. Like about how the Coronavirus is the real propaganda; the reasoning seems to vary a bit, but it's like they think "underlying condition" means the person only had maybe a month to live otherwise and no matter how they "actually" died, if they test positive for it, that HAS to be the cause of death on the death certificate. They're going further and further down the rabbit hole of Q. And Trump is doing things like giving (taxpayer money) to the causes that align with the conspiracies - like human trafficking - to support their veracity. eta: I would leave Fb, but that doesn't stop it from being the cesspool echo chamber for Trumpublicans that it's become and I can't help but think it's better to keep one eye on it than ignore it. I would be 100% cool with Fb shutting down until after inauguration though, to save the country. /eta

Anyway, though I call them "the right", I think it's a misnomer for them to be called such. In the past four years, all the terms for party have been kinda turned on their head and now point to alliance or opposition to Trump. I think the fact that we're using the familiar party terms to describe that divide actually helps fuel Trump's cultish hold on them - calling them "extremist left" piggybacks on residual, pre-Trump partisan rancor. But the reason most people - among Democrats and Republicans alike - hate him so much has little to do with party affiliation*and far more to do with the fact that he's a pathologically lying con man with regard for the law only when it comes to using it to punish others (and it's not about whether they've done something wrong so much as whether they're "loyal" to him and treat him like the authoritarian emperor he seems to believe he is).

*The disgust spreads to people like Mitch McConnell, but again, that's really more about McConnell's soulless, inscrupulous power grabs than it is about his party. If the SCOTUS nominee is voted in, she'll be the fifth one nominated by a president who won by electoral vote only (does not represent the majority opinion of the country). That means the majority of SCOTUS represents the minority more than it does the majority of US citizens, and that's the result of unethical GOP power grabs (gerrymandering is another example). The actual values of the GOP don't disgust me anywhere near as much (if at all) as their means of getting what they can't get democratically, as the minority.

 

[Virtual ghost]

From what I have seen on a number of places there is a serious gender divide in how people will vote. What isn't that surprising.

 

[Coriolis]

The right calls every democrat a far left lunatic, even the ones they supposedly like. Had Tulsi gotten the nomination, they'd have turned on her too and they'd be calling her the second coming of Hillary right now. They do this with pretty much every moderate democrat, to the point that the meaning of 'far left' is so diluted. This is their strategy, they'll pretend to support the anti-DNC dems like Sanders and Tulsi, but ultimately they're all a bunch of 'radicals' when it comes campaign time.

the average republican voter seems to have a really skewed frame of reference when it comes to concepts like right, left and the center. all the more skewed when you compare USA's left right and center to that of most other developed nations--the "far left" dems that frighten them are center-right liberals by most developed nations' standards--even the dems who are left wing by USA standards are barely so by the rest of the world's standards.

Oh but I forget, these people actually use the terms "left" and "liberal" synonymously and unironically. They actually think these are the same things. Half the time you get in a discussion with them, you can't even get very far because you have to spend the entire time schooling them on basic concepts.

Just trying to understand what goes on in their heads, or what doesn't go on in their heads, why the lack of critical thinking and understanding of 9th grade level civics and politics escapes so many of them...

Is it something like the "faith gene"?

When one party is trying to encourage and facilitate voting and the other is trying to discourage and impede it, it says much about their relative approaches to governance, and their views on democracy and citizenship in general.