I heard a fascinating argument last night I’ve never heard before about the limitation of the Trump is a danger to democracy angle.
There are data about how likely/lean Republican voters view Trump’s dictatorial/fascist impulses and how they respond to the “danger to democracy” campaign line that seem at odds with each other. The explanation offered is that the people who are trying to be won over by the argument associate small d democracy with what is in the inherent interest of the capital D Democratic party. Seemingly, if you switch the wording to Trump is a danger to the constitution the conflict between the two positions disappears.
The person who put this forward was Ann Selzer, probably the most respected pollster in the business who has a fantastic track record of not just understand the dynamics in Iowa but what issues are motivating people in their support of which candidates
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Their inability to no longer be able to distinguish the difference between the two is probably a marker of how good a job twenty years of Fox has done to their brains.
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She made the contrapoint that this was something Pelosi seemed to understand and while taking hits galore for it, all of her comments about Jan6th referenced the threat to the Republic rather than Democracy
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She’s one smart cookie Nancy.
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It’s a good insight. Trump is a danger to the Constitution/Republic.
Phrasing matters.
Get the right phrasing, then hammer it to death so it has a chance of becoming the narrative.
The Democrats lag behind the Republicans on that score, but this issue is too important to come second.
DeSantis is such a clown.
Happily slams the Canadian healthcare system, then complains about the price of drugs in the US.
This is how George Santos is earning a living nowadays , charging $350 a pop for video messages. Entirely predictably , pranksters and trolls have been having a field day. Here’s a message he recorded for a woman who transferred her dead husband’s spirit into a mannequin. (lol)
https://twitter.com/onlineryn/status/1744151478313304354
If he wasnt such a grifter, him running away with that baby and saying it wasnt his “yet” would be one of the most endearing and humanizing things a politican had done in generations.
According to Luntz and the host here , the answer is no. (Assuming of course that Trump is the candidate.)
https://www.rawstory.com/presidential-debates/
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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@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.
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