Rock the Vote '24: update (09/10) - It's "Debate Night" - do yourself a favor and play a video game instead

[PaladinSolo]

 

Trump wanting to undo part of his 2017 tax law, lol. 

 

Meanwhile Rand Paul is over here doing this.

 

"Sen. Rand Paul just introduced a bill which "seeks to curb the president’s ability to tax Americans by implementing tariffs without congressional approval"

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

Thank goodness Rand Paul is not a team player and also he’s not on my team

[PaladinSolo]

 

Presidential Polling:

Harris (D): 52% (+3)

Trump (R): 48% (-3)

 

HarrisX / Sept 13, 2024 / n=3018

 

First lead for either Biden or Harris with this pollster.

[SaysWho?]

Harris is doing her NABJ interview:

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

MSNBC/CNN/Fox are covering the NABJ event so it's getting coverage.

[Keyser_Soze]

Something tells me it will go better than it did for Trump.

[ihavebigtitties]

3 hours ago, Uaarkson said:

He’s just nervous cuz of ur Big Titties

Most men are. These titties are a heavy burden to bare.

[Reputator]

2 hours ago, ort said:

I just think of the old saying...

 

"You never wrestle with a pig, because you both get muddy and the pig likes it"

 

Oh you saw the Sunday Morning interview with Hilary Clinton

[Reputator]

20 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Something tells me it will go better than it did for Trump.

 

Naaaahh.

 

15 minutes ago, ihavebigtitties said:

Most men are. These titties are a heavy burden to bare.

 

[SuperSpreader]

26 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Something tells me it will go better than it did for Trump.

 

She needs to tell them about black jobs

[Signifyin(g)Monkey]

1 hour ago, SaysWho? said:

Harris is doing her NABJ interview:

 

 

I'd say this is the best interview I've seen her do.  Way more concise and focused answers than in previous ones, (even the one she just did in Philly!) less flowery sloganeering and more details and specifics when it comes to policy.  Addresses the big issues (especially the economy) directly.

 

More of this please!  

[Reputator]

23 minutes ago, Signifyin(g)Monkey said:

I'd say this is the best interview I've seen her do.  Way more concise and focused answers than in previous ones, (even the one she just did in Philly!) less flowery sloganeering and more details and specifics when it comes to policy.  Addresses the big issues (especially the economy) directly.

 

More of this please!  

 

Yeah right out of the gate she actually answered the question of if we are better off now than we were four years ago. The area she struggled with the most was the Gaza War peace deal but I think she answered as honestly as she could without pandering. There's only so much she's allowed to say.

 

She did well with the gun reform question as well, talking about gun show loopholes which she hasn't brought up before. But her best answer by far was on the racism and terror against Haitian immigrants. It was deep, insightful, heartfelt, and on a level the other team couldn't even dream of reaching.

[ort]

LOL, check out this essay VD Vance wrote when he was 28.

 

Center for World Conflict and Peace: November 2012

WEB.ARCHIVE.ORG

 

A Blueprint for the GOP

 

When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking: maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons. You can’t nominate people, like Sarah Palin, who scare away swing voters. You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate—Blacks, Latinos, the youth—and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate—Whites. And yet, four years later, I am again forced to reflect on a party that nominated the worst kind of people, like Richard Mourdock, and tried to win an election by appealing only to White people. The 2008 election, it seems, taught Republicans precious little.

At no time was this more obvious than last Tuesday. During the weeks before the election, conservatives I spoke to were confident—even hubristic—that Mitt Romney would win. But even before Tuesday, I thought that confidence was misplaced. The New York Times’s resident prognosticator, Nate Silver, had the odds of an Obama victory somewhere between 85 and 90 percent. Every non-partisan poll had the president winning the states he needed to secure a comfortable victory. Yet conservatives remained confident. The worst of the ideological conservatives criticized Nate Silver as a political plant of the “liberal media.” Even the best, from George Will to Michael Barone had constructed complex arguments for why the public polling was undercounting Romney’s strength. Whether you were an average Joe who listened to Rush on the way home from work, or an Ivy League reader of the National Review, if you were a conservative, you were likely to believe that Romney would win.

And then reality intervened. Nate Silver, that political hack from the Times, correctly predicted that Obama would win 332 electoral votes. Dick Morris, a conservative pundit on Fox News, was left apologizing for the Romney landslide that didn’t materialize. Conservatives lost, they lost big, and now it falls to the party’s leaders to explain why.

Many movement conservatives are already trying to deny the undeniable. Dave Wiegel, in an awful blog post on National Review, blamed the election results on an electorate that has become dependent on government and the Democratic politicians who make such dependency possible. The problem with this logic is that the people who depend most on government—retirees—are the Republican Party’s base—to the degree that the party even has a base. Wiegel similarly blamed public sector union beneficiaries, despite the fact that federal government workers in the DC suburbs broke decisively for Romney. Others blamed the party’s frontrunner and the “establishment wing” of the party that nominated him—essentially arguing that Romney was insufficiently ideological. The problem is that Romney did better than virtually every Republican Senate candidate in every competitive state. One glaring exception was Wisconsin senate candidate Tommy Thompson—an “establishment” Republican if there ever was one—who lost by a slightly narrower margin than Mitt Romney. Others pretend that the Democratic win wasn’t that impressive. After all, we are in the same place we were before the 2008 election: a split Congress with a Democratic president. But this ignores the inherent weakness of an incumbent party in a tough economic climate, and the fact that Democrats were able to overcome all of these problems to gain seats in both houses of Congress and re-elect the president. In short, the Republicans lost big, and they can’t blame Mitt Romney or the American electorate for their problems.

The Elephant in the Room--Demographics

The party's problems start with an inability to connect with non-white voters. The Republicans electoral confidence depended on their belief that a lack of enthusiasm from Democrats would push turnout among white voters to 2004 levels. But this was a pipe dream: Blacks and Latinos are growing segments of the population; whites are shrinking, and the racial composition of the 2004 electorate is a thing of the past. To win, the Republicans must turn the tide with non-white voters.

The unfortunate reality is that attracting non-white voters is about far more than communication—political ads in Spanish are great but won’t move the dial absent fundamental platform changes. Republicans lose minority voters for simple and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are tired, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-whites. Take tax policy, for example. A good friend recently told me that he was becoming more liberal because he just didn’t believe in “supply-side economics” anymore. I was almost speechless. Supporting supply-side economics is like supporting Soviet containment—it’s anachronistic to the extreme. Reaganomics was a response to a particular phenomenon—an overregulated, overtaxed, and sluggish economy in the 1970s. It was never meant to become party orthodoxy, and during the Bush years, supply-side economics produced median wage stagnation and growth that was either illusory (as in the housing sector) or extremely concentrated (as in the financial sector). To the average Latino or Black voter, one party speaks about education reform while the other repeats platitudes that have long outgrown their use. Is it any wonder that they support the former?

On immigration, Republicans are similarly tone deaf. I became a conservative in large part because I felt that the Right was far more honest about the real state of the world. Yet a significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self deporting” them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.

The Way Forward

Despite all the depressing things I’ve read in the past few days, there is one shining exception: the increasing popularity of Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio is an almost perfect politician—young, handsome, articulate, thoughtful—but he is also the first popular figure to question the party’s approach to immigration. And his career has shown a very keen interest in the promise of the American dream and the nature of social mobility.

But there are dangers to putting all of my (or the Republican Party’s) eggs in the Rubio basket. For one, no single man is a panacea to the problems of an entire political movement. Additionally, Rubio makes it easy to excessively focus on the Latino problem. In Charles Krauthhammer’s most recent column, he suggests that a softer immigration position could solve the Republican Party’s problems with Latinos. But even were that true, it ignores the fact that Latinos are just one of the party’s many demographic time bombs. Romney might have won Nevada, Colorado, Florida, and Virginia with more support from Latinos. But he still would have lost the election thanks in large measure to Obama’s strength with Black voters in the Midwest. The so-called “Ohio” firewall would not have fallen were Mitt Romney a regular Julian Castro.

So Republicans need to change, and no single solution will do the trick. Much of the commentary has focused on whether the Establishment or Tea Party wing of the party is to blame for its recent failures. But both are blameworthy. The Establishment wing believes the party can win with articulate candidates, strong fund raising, and good organization. The Tea Party wing believes the party can win so long as it nominates “true conservatives.” But strong messaging and ideological purity are poor remedies to the perception that Republicans can't solve the country’s problems.

The way forward then, is primarily about a new approach to policy, one that need not abandon conservatism, but apply it to a changing world. Conservatives believe in pro-growth tax policy, but the problem with current tax policy is that it’s too complicated, and too friendly to certain special interests, not that rates are too low. Conservatives believe in the virtue of society’s mediating institutions—family and church—but the emphasis on prohibiting gay marriage is utterly misplaced. The biggest challenges to the American family are economic—stagnating wages that stress relationships to the breaking point and family leave policies that make American children less likely to spend time with their parents than children in any other country on the planet. Conservatives believe in the power of the market economy, but say nothing about an industrial policy that is more hostile to technological innovation and entrepreneurship than many “socialist” countries in Western and Northern Europe.

It remains an open question, however, whether conservatives will embrace the obvious or continue droning on about makers, takers, and the collapse of the American dream. Two decades ago, reeling from its third straight landslide presidential election loss, the Democratic party nominated a southern centrist who reinvigorated the American left—not just intellectually, but electorally. It had taken three very bad elections for the Democrats to reject the political bankruptcy of its party’s most radical elements. In 2012, the Republican Party can chart a new path and apply its philosophy to a changed country, or it can hunker down and refuse to engage with the world as it is. Unless it chooses wisely, three bad elections will seem like a walk in the park.

 

[MarSolo]

One thing I’m noticing with tv ads, ESPECIALLY last night watching the Eagles game, is Kamala’s are very hopeful, showing what could be, and making a QUICK contrast with Trump (especially in regards to taxes and abortion).

 

The Trump ads are all doom and gloom and “this person died because of the border” nonsense. Shit, YouTube TV kept asking me if I wanted to skip Trump ads in favor of something relaxing.

[SaysWho?]

He's not talking about Pennsylvania.

 

Kamala Harris just got one of her best polls of the year | CNN Politics

WWW.CNN.COM

---

One of the best pollsters in America recently came out with its latest survey, and it’s good news for Kamala Harris.

 

Selzer, an excellent Iowa pollster, has her within the margin of error in Iowa. This is a state that Trump won twice by 9.41% and 8.2%, respectively.

 

Quote

What makes the Selzer survey so important is that it’s been accurate in an era when other pollsters have struggled. Four years ago, it had Trump up in Iowa by 7 points days before the election, when other polls had Democrat Joe Biden in a much better position. I noted at the time that “this one poll is giving Trump backers hope and Democrats anxiety.”

 

Democrats had good reason to worry. Not only did Trump end up winning Iowa by 8 points, he also vastly outperformed his polling in Wisconsin – nearly winning a state where he had trailed by high single-digits in preelection polling. Trump would do significantly better in many other battleground states as well.

A similar scenario played out in 2016. Selzer’s final poll had Trump ahead by 7 points in Iowa. He went on to win the state (by 9 points) and the election over Hillary Clinton, doing better than most swing-state surveys said he would.

 

This suggests her good Wisconsin polling is real and not inflated:

 

Quote

Selzer’s latest Iowa poll, however, suggests that other pollsters who show a race that is way too close to call are not underestimating Trump at this point.

 

The result also makes sense when you look at the numbers coming out of neighboring Wisconsin, which has comparable demographics. Wisconsin is one of the seven battleground states where the polling remains tight. Harris, though, has received some of her best polling from the Badger State.

 

The most recent poll from the reputed Marquette University Law School put Harris at 52% to Trump’s 48% among likely voters. An average of recent polls from Marquette, CBS News/YouGov and CNN/SSRS has Harris up by 4 points.

 

Still a while to go in the election, but this was a good read and not just because it had what we wanted to hear. This is what he wrote in 2020 about that same pollster:

 

Analysis: This one poll is giving Trump backers hope and Democrats anxiety | CNN Politics

WWW.CNN.COM

---

Poll of the week: A new Des Moines Register/Selzer and Co. poll from Iowa likely voters has President Donald Trump leading Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by a 48% to 41% margin.

 

[Brick]

2 hours ago, ort said:

LOL, check out this essay VD Vance wrote when he was 28.

 

[S3xB0t]

2 hours ago, ort said:

LOL, check out this essay VD Vance wrote when he was 28.

 

Center for World Conflict and Peace: November 2012

WEB.ARCHIVE.ORG

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

A Blueprint for the GOP

 

When the 2008 election was called for Obama, I remember thinking: maybe this will teach my party some very important lessons. You can’t nominate people, like Sarah Palin, who scare away swing voters. You can’t actively alienate every growing bloc of the American electorate—Blacks, Latinos, the youth—and you can’t depend solely on the single shrinking bloc of the electorate—Whites. And yet, four years later, I am again forced to reflect on a party that nominated the worst kind of people, like Richard Mourdock, and tried to win an election by appealing only to White people. The 2008 election, it seems, taught Republicans precious little.

At no time was this more obvious than last Tuesday. During the weeks before the election, conservatives I spoke to were confident—even hubristic—that Mitt Romney would win. But even before Tuesday, I thought that confidence was misplaced. The New York Times’s resident prognosticator, Nate Silver, had the odds of an Obama victory somewhere between 85 and 90 percent. Every non-partisan poll had the president winning the states he needed to secure a comfortable victory. Yet conservatives remained confident. The worst of the ideological conservatives criticized Nate Silver as a political plant of the “liberal media.” Even the best, from George Will to Michael Barone had constructed complex arguments for why the public polling was undercounting Romney’s strength. Whether you were an average Joe who listened to Rush on the way home from work, or an Ivy League reader of the National Review, if you were a conservative, you were likely to believe that Romney would win.

And then reality intervened. Nate Silver, that political hack from the Times, correctly predicted that Obama would win 332 electoral votes. Dick Morris, a conservative pundit on Fox News, was left apologizing for the Romney landslide that didn’t materialize. Conservatives lost, they lost big, and now it falls to the party’s leaders to explain why.

Many movement conservatives are already trying to deny the undeniable. Dave Wiegel, in an awful blog post on National Review, blamed the election results on an electorate that has become dependent on government and the Democratic politicians who make such dependency possible. The problem with this logic is that the people who depend most on government—retirees—are the Republican Party’s base—to the degree that the party even has a base. Wiegel similarly blamed public sector union beneficiaries, despite the fact that federal government workers in the DC suburbs broke decisively for Romney. Others blamed the party’s frontrunner and the “establishment wing” of the party that nominated him—essentially arguing that Romney was insufficiently ideological. The problem is that Romney did better than virtually every Republican Senate candidate in every competitive state. One glaring exception was Wisconsin senate candidate Tommy Thompson—an “establishment” Republican if there ever was one—who lost by a slightly narrower margin than Mitt Romney. Others pretend that the Democratic win wasn’t that impressive. After all, we are in the same place we were before the 2008 election: a split Congress with a Democratic president. But this ignores the inherent weakness of an incumbent party in a tough economic climate, and the fact that Democrats were able to overcome all of these problems to gain seats in both houses of Congress and re-elect the president. In short, the Republicans lost big, and they can’t blame Mitt Romney or the American electorate for their problems.

The Elephant in the Room--Demographics

The party's problems start with an inability to connect with non-white voters. The Republicans electoral confidence depended on their belief that a lack of enthusiasm from Democrats would push turnout among white voters to 2004 levels. But this was a pipe dream: Blacks and Latinos are growing segments of the population; whites are shrinking, and the racial composition of the 2004 electorate is a thing of the past. To win, the Republicans must turn the tide with non-white voters.

The unfortunate reality is that attracting non-white voters is about far more than communication—political ads in Spanish are great but won’t move the dial absent fundamental platform changes. Republicans lose minority voters for simple and obvious reasons: their policy proposals are tired, unoriginal, or openly hostile to non-whites. Take tax policy, for example. A good friend recently told me that he was becoming more liberal because he just didn’t believe in “supply-side economics” anymore. I was almost speechless. Supporting supply-side economics is like supporting Soviet containment—it’s anachronistic to the extreme. Reaganomics was a response to a particular phenomenon—an overregulated, overtaxed, and sluggish economy in the 1970s. It was never meant to become party orthodoxy, and during the Bush years, supply-side economics produced median wage stagnation and growth that was either illusory (as in the housing sector) or extremely concentrated (as in the financial sector). To the average Latino or Black voter, one party speaks about education reform while the other repeats platitudes that have long outgrown their use. Is it any wonder that they support the former?

On immigration, Republicans are similarly tone deaf. I became a conservative in large part because I felt that the Right was far more honest about the real state of the world. Yet a significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self deporting” them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.

The Way Forward

Despite all the depressing things I’ve read in the past few days, there is one shining exception: the increasing popularity of Florida Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio is an almost perfect politician—young, handsome, articulate, thoughtful—but he is also the first popular figure to question the party’s approach to immigration. And his career has shown a very keen interest in the promise of the American dream and the nature of social mobility.

But there are dangers to putting all of my (or the Republican Party’s) eggs in the Rubio basket. For one, no single man is a panacea to the problems of an entire political movement. Additionally, Rubio makes it easy to excessively focus on the Latino problem. In Charles Krauthhammer’s most recent column, he suggests that a softer immigration position could solve the Republican Party’s problems with Latinos. But even were that true, it ignores the fact that Latinos are just one of the party’s many demographic time bombs. Romney might have won Nevada, Colorado, Florida, and Virginia with more support from Latinos. But he still would have lost the election thanks in large measure to Obama’s strength with Black voters in the Midwest. The so-called “Ohio” firewall would not have fallen were Mitt Romney a regular Julian Castro.

So Republicans need to change, and no single solution will do the trick. Much of the commentary has focused on whether the Establishment or Tea Party wing of the party is to blame for its recent failures. But both are blameworthy. The Establishment wing believes the party can win with articulate candidates, strong fund raising, and good organization. The Tea Party wing believes the party can win so long as it nominates “true conservatives.” But strong messaging and ideological purity are poor remedies to the perception that Republicans can't solve the country’s problems.

The way forward then, is primarily about a new approach to policy, one that need not abandon conservatism, but apply it to a changing world. Conservatives believe in pro-growth tax policy, but the problem with current tax policy is that it’s too complicated, and too friendly to certain special interests, not that rates are too low. Conservatives believe in the virtue of society’s mediating institutions—family and church—but the emphasis on prohibiting gay marriage is utterly misplaced. The biggest challenges to the American family are economic—stagnating wages that stress relationships to the breaking point and family leave policies that make American children less likely to spend time with their parents than children in any other country on the planet. Conservatives believe in the power of the market economy, but say nothing about an industrial policy that is more hostile to technological innovation and entrepreneurship than many “socialist” countries in Western and Northern Europe.

It remains an open question, however, whether conservatives will embrace the obvious or continue droning on about makers, takers, and the collapse of the American dream. Two decades ago, reeling from its third straight landslide presidential election loss, the Democratic party nominated a southern centrist who reinvigorated the American left—not just intellectually, but electorally. It had taken three very bad elections for the Democrats to reject the political bankruptcy of its party’s most radical elements. In 2012, the Republican Party can chart a new path and apply its philosophy to a changed country, or it can hunker down and refuse to engage with the world as it is. Unless it chooses wisely, three bad elections will seem like a walk in the park.

 

 

 

 

1 minute ago, Brick said:

 

Let me TLDR it for you: JD Vance once held opinions that are totally contrary to the grift he’s in now. This is a surprise to no one. 

[Uaarkson]

He’s just another sociopath republican politician, who will say and do whatever it takes to win. Unfortunately he’s terrible at it.

[PaladinSolo]

"Trump says he was shot at because of, among other things, his calls for 200% tariffs on cars from Mexico. 

 

"Only consequential presidents get shot at. When i say something like that, you have countries saying 'this guy.'"

 

 

So it is trumps rhetoric getting people to try and kill him, and apparently it's Mexicans. 

 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

Mexicans being two white guys with legal access to firearms

[Jason]

 

[mclumber1]

Wouldn't a 200% tariff (or any tariff) on automobile imports from Mexico violate Trump's own USMCA free trade agreement? 

[Jason]

6 minutes ago, mclumber1 said:

Wouldn't a 200% tariff (or any tariff) on automobile imports from Mexico violate Trump's own USMCA free trade agreement? 

 

 

official act

[mclumber1]

8 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

 

official act

 

Everything is an official act if you try hard enough

[S3xB0t]

24 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

Who are all those fucking dweebs up there on the stage with him? How embarrassing for them.

[ort]

I mean, he's said a lot of truly vile things, but this might be the thing that's honestly pissed me off the most. No coded language, no dog whistles, he just came out and said it.

 

Just disgusting. Fuck every vile piece of shit who supports this literal monster.

 

This should be on the front page of every newspaper and news site across the country but it won't be.

[Reputator]

22 minutes ago, ort said:

I mean, he's said a lot of truly vile things, but this might be the thing that's honestly pissed me off the most. No coded language, no dog whistles, he just came out and said it.

 

Just disgusting. Fuck every vile piece of shit who supports this literal monster.

 

This should be on the front page of every newspaper and news site across the country but it won't be.

 

It won't be because after everything he's said, it's just noise. We're just going to have to vote him out of the race and out of politics this November.

[finaljedi]

He didn't even do a chicken shit equivocation like he did after his escalator ride with his "Some... I assume... are good people".   Just bald faced unqualified racism.  And there are still tens of millions who see that and are like "yeah, this guy needs to be President".  Fucking Wallace is looking up from hell jealous.

[Fizzzzle]

28 minutes ago, finaljedi said:

He didn't even do a chicken shit equivocation like he did after his escalator ride with his "Some... I assume... are good people".   Just bald faced unqualified racism.  And there are still tens of millions who see that and are like "yeah, this guy needs to be President".  Fucking Wallace is looking up from hell jealous.

Just your friendly reminder that Strom fucking Thurmond was a United States Senator until he finally croaked in 2003.

[finaljedi]

4 minutes ago, Fizzzzle said:

Just your friendly reminder that Strom fucking Thurmond was a United States Senator until he finally croaked in 2003.

 

Him and Kissinger just wouldn't die.

[GeneticBlueprint]

1 hour ago, Jason said:

 

That’s the family I married into he’s talking about. Immigrants. Fuck this guy. 

[Xbob42]

To be fair, it was a slip of the tongue. He'd normally pronounce it "aminals"

[outsida]

1 minute ago, Xbob42 said:

To be fair, it was a slip of the tongue. He'd normally pronounce it "aminals"

He caught himself…

[thewhyteboar]

 

Yeah we are getting a hard -r by the end of October at the latest. 

[Reputator]

Harris v Trump: 2024 presidential election prediction model | The Economist

WWW.ECONOMIST.COM

---

Our prediction model shows the chances Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have of winning the contest to be America's next president

 

 

Economist EC prediction.

 

EDIT: There isn't a map available to see (without a fee maybe), but this is likely what they're predicting: