Where I grew up there was a little country store that had the basics a mile from the house down a dirt road. I don't think there was what you would consider a grocery store within five miles. I was 16 before I saw a pizza, 18 before I saw a taco. There was one or two kinds of mustard, ketchup or mayonnaise. As late as the early 70s , there was only one single malt scotches, Glenfiddich and two kinds of rye, 80 proof Jim Beam and Wild Turkey 101. The list goes on and on. There are fruits and nut either available all year and a lot that we never even heard of.
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EXIT POLLS & TURNOUT DATA - The Red Shift
- Thread starter nycfan
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- Politics
superrific
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1. That's what I want you to say. The track record of running against a same-party incumbent is terrible. And your very next sentence is a good rejoinder: past performance is no guarantee of future results.
I've said that I think Biden stepping aside in 2022 was a bad idea, but upon reflection, I think what I really mean is that it was a risky choice. Basically, "past performance is no guarantee" can be translated as "I don't really have a strong reason to think this will work, but the status quo seems bad." And when the status quo is a fast lane to a Trump presidency, I can understand the appeal. Personality-wise, I don't like doing things without good reason. Sometimes that's a good strategy in life, and sometimes it is not.
2. To build on this point, if we interpret my position retroactively as more of a concern about the riskiness of the choice, then my other point also requires a bit of change. It's not necessarily that Biden made the right decision, as much as I don't think he made a wrong one. Not all decisions that turn out poorly are bad. Sometimes things just don't work. The case for jettisoning him in 2022 was not strong. It was largely based on vibes and speculation. I don't think it's fair to fault a lot of people for failure to jump on board a highly unorthodox strategy that is based on speculation and feels. After all, we really don't know what would have happened if Biden had said he wouldn't run in 2022.
3. I don't remember all the details and the timing, but I think I was chastising folks who were talking about Biden's age after the time for a real primary process had passed. Once it was clear that Biden was going to win the primaries, the time for lamenting his age was over. If I was chastising people for talking about it in early 2022, then that was a mistake on my part.
4. Pelosi and others are talking about how we would have done better with a primary.
5. Generally, I'm a believer in not talking shit in public about your party. I didn't always used to be that way. 2000 and 2016 opened my eyes. Maybe I've taken it too far, but the overlap between "liberals talking shit about Dems" and "Dems losing elections" is quite high and we can add another item to that list now. In fairness, there's a chicken-and-egg issue. Maybe liberals start talking shit in elections when the elections are going badly for Dems on other grounds. I'm pretty sure that's not the case in 2000. 2016 is mixed. 2024 maybe the shit talking was reaction, not cause.
BlooVooDoo
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And beer. I remember when Lowenbrau was the good stuff. The availability of a variety of food has definitely never been better. I don’t remember any boxed foods for special/sensitive diets. Gluten free? lol
lawtig02
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It is well known or discussed that globally incumbents are having problems, here are some specifics in this twitter thread (sorry anti-twitter folks)
threadreaderapp.com
"Three big lessons here IMHO - (1) voters have been punishing incumbents everywhere, regardless of political orientation, length in office etc (2) Voters have been switching to all kinds of opposition, regardless of political orientation but...(3) radical anti-system parties (of right and left) have done well in many places, again regardless of who's in govt"
Thread by @robfordmancs on Thread Reader App
@robfordmancs: Decided to go through this systematically. Incumbent government performance in wealthy democracies since March 2022, when Ukraine invasion really spiked things upwards: 🧵 South Korea President (March ...…
threadreaderapp.com
"Three big lessons here IMHO - (1) voters have been punishing incumbents everywhere, regardless of political orientation, length in office etc (2) Voters have been switching to all kinds of opposition, regardless of political orientation but...(3) radical anti-system parties (of right and left) have done well in many places, again regardless of who's in govt"
JCTarheel82
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uncjhodges
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I don’t think anything Nate silver writes is fascinating lol.
UNCBAdookJD
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I think the better way to counter that would have been to ask Trump why he didn’t implement all these great ideas 4+ years ago. Trump was actually POTUS. For half his term he had a Trifecta. And yet he never moved to eliminate taxes on tips or overtime or any of the other pie in the sky BS he promised in this campaign.
Paine
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You’re kind of proving his point though.
uncjhodges
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No, I just feel like professional contrarians are not worth the time and definitely not fascinating. His self selecting population on substack is not indicative of anything.
My personal experience doesn’t match with his at all
Paine
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I mean, I agree with this population being self selecting but I don’t think it tells us nothing. I think liberals and leftists are a lot more averse to disagreement in general.
The inability to confront disagreement within the Democratic Party isn’t a good recipe for a successful political operation. Silver isn’t a “professional contrarian” just because he says things liberals don’t like to hear.
uncjhodges
Distinguished Member
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I’m not going to argue with you cause i just don’t want to lol but
1. If his point is that online liberals are more annoying and disagree with him more than moderate republicans who pay for nate silvers substack, No shit. That is not fascinating, Which was what i initially said. The left is notorious for purity tests- hell it’s cost us 2 elections in the last quarter century.
2. His covid takes bordered on bullshit contrarianism, but whatever, i’ll rescind that
Paine
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Fair enough. Not really looking for an argument.
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CHARLIE COOK:
More a Ripple Than a Wave
NOVEMBER 14, 2024 |
In the House, which is a far better barometer of where the country is than the Senate, after zillions of dollars were spent, the net change will be minimal—within a couple seats of the 221-214 majority Republicans held going into the election. Virtually nothing happened (unless you are or work for someone who lost). Republicans will almost certainly have a majority, though a tiny one—probably the tightest margins for the House since the 72nd Congress (1931-33), when they had 218 seats to Democrats' 216 (although Democrats did get to organize the House because of deaths of several Republican members after the election but before the swearing-in took place). The kind of change in the House may well be little more than a rounding error.
Senate races are more representative of the map and calendar than the national mood. With only a third of the seats facing the voters every two years, it matters which third, which states, and which members are up.
...Two years ago, many mistakenly laid Republicans' underperformance at the feet of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that struck down Roe v. Wade. The Court motivated voters who support abortion rights, the theory goes, and juiced turnout for Democrats. In reality, however, Democrats won 10 million fewer votes for the House than in the previous midterm election, while Republicans won 3.7 million more votes than in 2018. No, 2022 was not about Dobbs—it was about Republicans nominating about two dozen terrible candidates in critical races, election denialism being a fairly common thread. This time, abortion initiatives did fairly well but did not help Democrats up or down the ballot. This issue is neither a silver bullet nor a get-out-of-jail-free card for the party.
Not surprisingly given recent history, swing states and undecided voters did not split down the middle. They broke overwhelmingly in favor of Trump. In terms of the undecided vote, look at the New York Times average of presidential race polls, both national and in swing states. Kamala Harris’s poll average was almost precisely what she ended up winning, which means that Trump won practically all of the undecided votes. At this point, Trump has a majority of the votes counted, with 50.4 percent to 48 percent for Harris. Once all of the votes cast are totaled, mostly in Democratic states on the West Coast, he will likely be just above or below 50 percent. ..."
superrific
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The idea that "Trump is open to all comers" is the most mind-boggling take on this election that I've seen.
Do people like Nate just not pay attention at all?
Michael Lind makes the same point--as well as a number of other interesting ones--on the most recent episode of Ezra Klein's podcast:
Opinion | The End of the Obama Coalition
Michael Lind on why Democrats are losing the core of their base.
superrific
Legend of ZZL
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I think it's become clear that the undecided voters were not undecided at all. As people have been saying, they had reached their decision. They just hadn't become fully comfortable with it yet. Like my mom, who swore off Trump but then had to vote for him because Kamala was so bad. Did she have any actual reasons for not liking Kamala? You know the answer. She was undecided until the end, she said, but I knew what she was going to do. She was just searching for any way to square what she was about to do with her idealized understanding of herself.
And the way I know she voted for Trump was that she bragged to her kids in 2020 that she didn't vote for president at all, as opposed to voting Trump. She didn't do that this year.
superrific
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Part of the problem, ironically, is that all of the factions in the Democratic party are represented by intelligent people who are committed to liberal ideals and truth-seeking through dialogue. That means a few things:
1. It's hard for any faction to consistently get the upper-hand in any durable way. As much as leftists complain that they are locked out, that's a relative assessment. They aren't locked out the way dissenting views are locked out in the GOP. And while leftists like Bernie might struggle to gain traction, his ideas can gain currency or at least respect.
2. To the extent that our disagreements become vehement, it's mostly because there's so much at stake. For a decade, our collective sense has been that we put the country and the planet at risk every time we lose an election. And unlike the GOP's corresponding fears, ours isn't invented bullshit -- and just in case anyone had any doubts, Trump is doing his best to dispel them.
For instance, I think to this day that Bernie Sanders weakened HRC and contributed to her election loss. That has been known to happen in primaries. Pat Buchanan weakened Bush 41 -- and so conservatives ended up with the peace and prosperity of the Clinton presidency. If Obama had been primaried in 12 and lost, I would have been pissed but I'd probably get over it. We would have had a bad presidency, and then we'd elect a new leader and we'd go on as before. We've survived bad presidencies.
But when the enemy is literal fascism, then these disagreements become magnified.
3. Because we don't have an idiot caucus, and because our people tend to strive toward broad buy-in as a proxy for consensus (which is impossible), our factions tend not to attempt to crush each other. Dems would never try to destroy our Adam Kinzingers. The closest examples we have are Manchin or Sinema, and our extreme frustration with them wasn't a) because they are "disloyal" to the leaders; and b) because they were blind to what was coming (see point 2). Well, at least my extreme frustration was because of that. It's not that Sinema's ideas are always wrong; she just didn't meet the moment.
So the upshot of that is that we disagree a lot. And it gets emotional when so much is at stake. And none of us are willing to crush the others with an iron boot. That's what differentiates us from the GOP. We don't have an idiot caucus who has to resort to naked power because of its inability to muster anything like a coherent set of policies, world view or even articulate basic political values.