According to Luntz and the host here , the answer is no. (Assuming of course that Trump is the candidate.)
We didn’t really see the traditional debates in 2020, the Trump campaign loaded them down with so many format demands they almost did not happen at all - and Trump still came off poorly. It would not be a surprise to see something similar, refusing to debate while blustering that Biden is afraid to debate him would run true to form.
I kind of agree that Biden has absolutely nothing to gain in sharing a stage with Trump , and an awful lot to fear. If Trump wants to claim that he’s running scared then the obvious retort is that he (Biden) is not prepared to share a platform with an election denier and an insurrectionist. It’s still a very state of affairs however.
This is a bit nerdy, but a really fantastic conversation about the current threat from the right wing courts to gut the capacity of government to enact effective regulation of business by overturning what is referred to as the Chevron Doctrine
In short, the govenment works in this area by congress passing laws that set a direction, or a high level expectation of behavior and outcomes, (e.g. pollutants are a threat to public health so should be regulate to that end by the EPA), and the respective federal agencies then use their expertise to set the plan for how that will be implemented practically (what qualifies as a pollutant? how do we determine what levels are problematic for public health? What regulations to we put in place to achieve these outcomes?). It has long been understood that the courts should give a very wide berth to regulatory bodies to interpret the laws as they see fit based on their expertise and this has been formalized in judicial terms in the 80s as something referred to the Chevron Doctrine. In essence what this says is that the courts should only intervene in a regulatory agency decision if 1) the language in the relevant is specific and explicit, and 2) the intention of the agency is clearly in conflict with that.
In this they talk about the recent increased willingness of the conservatives on the Supreme court to interpret what the agency is trying to do as being in conflict with the respective law. It’s less an discarding of the Chevron Doctrine, but more a political motivated judiciary hiding behind it to justify clogging up the regulatory mechanisms. The take home point is that Chevron doesnt need to be overturned. The court just needs to create enough uncertainty over the likelihood of regulatory oversight being left unchallenged that their capacity to effectively regulate is undercut.
That Iowa thing isn’t really relevant, it’s just like a pre season friendly against Tranmere.
Hot issues are the price of pig feed and should there be a stop light on Orchard and Vine.
Surprised to see that Haley didn’t do better though.
Big win for Trump, as expected. Let’s see what the numbers look like when it moves to slightly less rural and more educated states.
I suspect overall the gap will close to his nearest rival, but he will still have a commanding lead.
In the end it will be up to the justice system to stop him, on several counts, or, as a last resort, the electorate when it comes time for the Presidential vote in November. Ugh.
Those Midwestern Great Plain states like Kansas and Iowa have gone deep MAGA, the ashes of their progressive traditions have not even been smoking for 30 years.
This is a potentially really interesting result
https://x.com/Scott_Maxwell/status/1747689065242103822?s=20
While Florida isnt much of a swing state anymore, when it was Central Florida was typically the bellweather region. This district though is not what most people would have thought was particularly swingy or winnable for Dems. That he won seems to be down to disaffected Republicans turning up to vote for the other party.
Trump makes trends difficult to extrapolate to his race, and there is a reading where one could be more frustrated and acting out against DeSantis than Trump driven dysfunction, but its positive.
This is a good piece, skates over the core issue with the latino vote that all pieces of this type do.
It covers the conventional wisdom that Cubans are a different voting block than other latino group. Due to their history and the reason they are in the US, they are generally staunchly anti-communist and so tend to be Regan Republicans. However, the reason there was an migration from Cuba was as much due to the Authoritarianism as the communism. The Cubans never acknowledge this, in part because it isn’t part of the propaganda that has been fire hosed at them, and in these sorts pieces they are never asked to. They are never asked to consider how much closer the modern Trump led GOP is to being authoritarian than any Democrat could be to being communist. With the massive influx of Venezuelans into Florida in recent years (who generally have the same politics), this has turned this dynamic from a niche one to one big enough to shape the state’s direction and with it the country’s, and so I think it’s really odd than no one ever grapples with the disconnect.
What this piece also starts to address then waves its hands at is the disinformation angle. There were only a couple of niche places I saw cover the story I saw first happening first hand, and that was how much Bannon type actors flooded latinocentric communication channels, specifically messaging apps like whatsapp, with this sort of propaganda. They think Biden is communist because where they get their information is being flooded by messages that he set being sent by people trying to lay the groundwork for an authoritarian to win.
Obama won in 08 in large part because he understood the power of the internet better than everyone else and so connected with people in a way no one was doing. Yes his message was important, but he needed that modern vision and infrastructure to get it to people. The problem today is Dems are still operating 15+ years later as if the environment is still the same. MAGA’s biggest strength is in having people like Bannon who are putting the work in to find out how to reach people in 2024 and flooding them with information in those places to a degree that no positive jobs report that argues against their perceptions of the economy and communicated through the traditional channels will even penetrate.
@Bekloppt An empirical example of the new reality I was trying to explain a few backs
https://x.com/AaronBlake/status/1748358066150523185?s=20
Biden underwater in terms of approval yet still significantly ahead in who would you vote for polling. We need to recalibrate what “right track/wrong track” and approval polling means for elections.
Majority hates both candidates but just have to unfortunately choose the lesser evil, whoever they think that is between the two?
Putting this in this thread because it is bigger than Trump or the election
The key thing about Trump supports is to listen not to what they say, but to what you hear. So much coverage of his supporters since Trump won has been focused on addressing a supposed gap in our understanding of them by actually listening to them. But it seems its mainly the press who struggled with this even in 2016 - constitutionally incapable of framing people as being rotten (unless they are on the left then you can start throwing hay makers). And they are still struggling with it now, even after nearly 8 years of doing the same story over and over.
This is a guy who is motivated by the russia hoax, by the crimes of the Biden Crime Family, by Jan 6th being a Patriot’s day out, and has a brother who refused to talk to him anymore because of how MAGA twisted he has become. And they set up this profile of him in the belief he was going to vote for Haley. Now, shock horror, he has decided to support Trump so the angle of the piece has shifted to trying to understand the complex machinations that could explain that change of direction. Hey genius, there has been no shift. He was ALWAYS going to vote for Trump.
Why are these people whose job it is to understand what is happening and explain it to us so bad at being able to even tell their arse from their elbow? All these pieces do is reinforce that even in 2016 we understood who these people were. We didnt need the press the get to the know them and explain it to us. We needed them to cover these people honestly
it’s all about column inches. the journalists whom we grew up to, who actually reports facts and didn’t write op-ed pieces are long dead.
I think it’s more about who those in the press are comfortable clearly criticizing.
There is a convention that those who write the news are not the same people as who are often called the “real americans” and so the awfulness of the things that comes from that part of the world is very rarely described soberly and straight forwardly. Instead, those who cover them bend themselves into pretzels trying to justify it and explain to us why there is some defendable reason for such awfulness. Hence the multi year cycle of pieces with the premise of “we cannot just call these people racists, we must go to where they are and talk to them to understand why they are so focused on persecuting mexicans and not wanting black people flying their planes.”
Anyone left of center though? Fuck those guys! Why are they so more comfortable criticising these people? They were their university dormmate and so the journos feel less concerned about being seen to be condescending and punching down.
who would you rather get punched by? The Tri-Lambs or the Alpha Betas?
Credit to Mitt on this.
https://x.com/mkraju/status/1750549690221752806?s=20
Mitt’s reputation for the decency and compassion of his politics has taken an unearned rise in the advent of the MAGAification of his party, and his history is far more complex and checkered than that story suggests. But there is very definitely an honorable guy under there and he is increasingly coming across as a guy who views himself on his final lap and wants to make sure some wrongs are righted on his way out.
Just did my taxes this morning and I am left owing a big chunk of money for the first time ever. I am full time employed and have fairly simple taxes and so have a reasonable expectation backed up by 25 years of paying taxes that the taxes taken out of my paycheck should be sufficient. The tax breaks that come from owning a house normally give me enough back to do something nice with. Normally
This changed with the GOP tax change from 2017. The high level message was there was a simplification of the code that reduced the number and size of breaks in favour of offering a larger standard deduction. This was marketed as populist as it meant people who could not afford their home now had some of the break that homeowners were previously getting. However, there was also a catch in that the initial breaks would start to disappear over a multi year period. That has now kicked in and so someone with basic taxes who would normally get $1500 or so back every year now owes $700. All to pay back some of the big gap created by giving the 1% huge breaks