US Election 2024

Away End - General Chat
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It is quite possible. One of the scenarios that could have emerged was a replay of the 1968 Democratic campaign, where a sitting President (LBJ) had a clear run to a second term, but was unpopular in some segments of his party due to the Vietnam War. An anti-war Senator, Eugene McCarthy, ran knowing he had little hope of winning. When he finished within 7 points of Johnson in NH, Johnson’s position suddenly looked weak and two more viable candidates entered.

Biden is not the confirmed candidate until he is voted so at the convention.

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What’s a write-in vote?

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Newsom is a clear example of the Democrats’ problem. Their best possibilities come from states that are solid Democrat, and they need a candidate to win the battleground states. Many of their more prominent figures who are quite viable in their home environment are seen as too far left to be viable. The inevitable trade-off when they do select a centrist like Biden is that most Democrats aren’t actually that thrilled with him. That is just a continuation of his career in the Senate where he was seen as a pragmatist, first and foremost, who could certainly work with both parties. When he was appointed as a VP, it was to shore up perception that an Obama administration would be too left wing.

What the Democrats are all yearning for is another Clinton, young, strong appeal in key battleground states, and somehow able to send a fuzzy policy signal that appeals to the left but ends up not being scary and left at all.

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125

When you write-in the name of your preferred candidate, rather than select from one of the options. Due to a squabble with the Democratic National Committee and the NH Democrats, Biden was not on the ballot. The State insists on being the first actual primary (I believe it is in the state constitution!), but that loads up the first two signals as Iowa-New Hampshire, significantly more conservative and frankly whiter than the mean Democratic voter. The DNC wanted to balance that a little, putting a southern state earlier. NH refused, so Biden is not actually on the ballot.

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Again, depends on what you mean by “The Democrats.” The party is still holding a nomination process, it is just getting zero coverage because it is more or less uncontested, as is typically the case with an incumbent president deciding they want to run for a second term. “Democrats” can within this process choose to elect someone else if there is someone else who puts their hand up to run and galvanizes enough support.

Can the “Democrats” as this powerful centralized thing that gets to unilaterally decide what happens do anything about it? No, because no such thing exists. Did people really learn no lessons from Trump’s win in 2016?

It is worth noting when discussing Biden’s supposed poor candidacy that last night he was not even on the ballot in NH (due to procedural technicalities). The one elected Dem who has put their hand up to run is someone with loads of money behind his campaign and has generated a ton of media interest in his candidacy. More people wrote in Biden as their choice than voted for this supposed challenger.

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There was an incredibly robust nomination race in the following cycle. To the degree that the people who make up the party can qualify as “the Democrats” in this context, they did this. I think probably with the exception of Newsome I don’t think there was anyone with any constituency who was not involved.

Once Biden won in 2020, this cycle was always going to depend on what he wanted to do and how successful his presidency was viewed as being. For all the supposed bad polling, there is still a feeling that at least prior to the Hamas attacks, he had massively exceeded expectations making it difficult for any Dem to mount a credible challenge against him in the event he decided to run again. The Israel-Gaza issue is a legit weakness that could have opened a door for a challenge, which was largely what happened with LBJ in 68. But by the time of the Hamas attack it was largely too late to start a challenge from scratch.

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On every single poll I have seen, two of the most important things are

  1. The border.
  2. The economy.

Biden has done badly in both, and both have been self inflicted.

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Lots of people certainly believe that, but there is no real argument that the Biden admin’s management of a peri-pandemic economy during a war in a region that significantly impacts global trade has been anything other than successful. The stock market continues to hit highs and that is achieved in the context of…

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The entire world’s economies suffered shocks from these two effects. On almost every relevant metric the US responded quicker and more robustly than the other economies we compare ourselves to.

As for the border crisis, the difficulty in describing what failures the admin have had in this area are again difficult to characterize in any way that should be an electoral issue (as pretty much all the criticisms are from the left from being too strict and not humanitarian enough)

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The border simply shows the dysfunctionality of the American political discourse. Trump beat the drum about building a wall, and otherwise was utterly useless on the issue. In every single year of the Biden presidency, apprehensions at the Mexican border have been higher than any year of the Trump presidency. Deportations have been higher in every Biden year than any Trump year. By definition, we don’t have great data on the actual flows, but there are very few estimates that suggest the net flow has increased. Trump was useless in controlling the Mexican border, despite it being a flagship issue.

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To add to that, the discussion largely reflects the reflexes of American political discourse. When a Republican is in the white house the reflex kicks in that makes people feel our economy is better and national security is stronger. It is so ingrained it not only doesn’t need objective empirical support for this to happen, it exists even in the context of empirical evidence that disagrees with it.

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But to the common person on the street, perception is reality. The common person don’t really look beyond what is placed in front of them in terms of their needs. Do I feel safe? Do I have food? Do I have work? Affordable healthcare? And when the optics of things that can affect these things, these will form my “reality”.

If I keep seeing news of the new York city migrant problem in the last 2 years and the inability to deal with it, I might infer that on a bigger scale, Biden is just shite at it. Or how about Chicago?

So while data is important, alot of times, people vote on sentiments that affect their bread and butter. It’s not wrong or right, it’s just “reality” to them.

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Crime is down, economy is strong. Any talk of crisis is entirely the work of the right wing media.

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Yes sure, but as I said, sentiments matter to alot of the people on the ground, sometimes more than data. If winning an election is just all about data, then why do an election, just do a powerpoint presentation who has the better data wins. Data is just data, for good or for bad.

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I believe you are missing the point. These are not feelings that come from things the data miss. They are ideas made up out of whole cloth, based on long standing tropes and amplified by a information ecology that exists solely to advance the cause of the RW. And furthermore, a modern RW that now does nothing than say up is down and black is white in an attempt to play on this dynamic

The fact a large number of people believe them is a problem to face, but the response to hearing a falsehood cannot be to say “ok you have your truth and I have mine.”

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If things are so incredibly good, Biden will walk this election without breaking a sweat, or maybe this right wing media is just so good and expansive that they can convince the other half of the voting population that everything is not rosy.

I mean according to word here, inflation is ok, the economy is fine, immigration is not an issue, crime is only something you read about, etc. I don’t see anything for Joe to worry about, except those fictitious, right wing poll numbers that have Biden approval rating at an all time low. I’m begging to think I’m actually a conspiracy theorist.

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Things may be good (or bad depending on the glass) but if you are forced to vote between one view where the sky is falling but the wizard can fix it, and the other where things are more realistic then the voters sticking to the party line of the wizard have to make the reality fit.

The question for me is how can there such polar views of the constitution. Ultimately the selling power of the US was the constitution and the messaging behind it.

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It has been a global problem the existence of which in the US is unrelated to what the president has done, but the overall performance of the economy, with booming employment creating conditions of strong wage increase, has meant we have navigated that better than everyone else

Yes, it really is. By any metric conservatives would use to support their oversight of an economy it is doing great. This does not preclude the existence of people who are hurting, but the data that provides the most insight into what is happening here is the discrepancy between how people feel about their own economic circumstances (very strong) vs what they think of the economy as a whole. Basically people are hearing the economy is having problems, assume it is, but themselves are doing quite well

Immigration is an incredibly difficult issue as there are tensions caused by the different perspectives on the role of immigrants in our country that are utterly unresolvable. This is why there has been no meaningful immigration reform for 30 years across multiple presidents of both parties despite it supposedly being top of agenda. The difficulty of navigating different constituencies is why you see something like Marco Rubio writing a reform bill and then voting against it. So yeah it’s always going to be a problem, but what are the criticisms of the people saying it is an issue

  • Biden has “open borders” (from the right)
  • Biden has done enough to restore the humanity of the process from the monstrosities of the Trump regime, or with the long running issues of the CBP (from the left)

The open borders criticism is propaganda and is not remotely supportable based on spending or level of enforcement. The criticism from the left, something you may see in the polls as “immigration” being a key issue, is certainly not going to result in votes for Trump.

There was a spike in crime and violent crime during the early phases of the pandemic (and who was president was then?), but that has now normalized and we are back in line with the overall trend of a reduction since the 80s. Again, people who are motivated by the idea that we are in an epidemic of violent crime are drinking from the RW propaganda fire house that resonates far more because “GOP is better for law and order” is a trope Americans have internalized rather than because there is any empirical basis for it.

But despite all of this, there is plenty for Biden people to worry about. We live in a country where substantial portions of the country think Trump is a populist fighting for the common man, that Jan 6th was simultaneously a peaceful protest, patriots trying to take back their country, AND an FBI false flag. People who believe utter horse shit get to vote. And there is an incredibly large portion of the population who when they hear utter horse shit enough start believing that there must be some legitimacy to it.

None of this is to say that any preference for Trump is illegitimate, regardless of how much I despise him. There are plenty of people who would reasonably feel their slice of the pie is better under a Trump economy and that is fine. There are plenty of people who may say that no matter how strict Biden is being at border enforcement that he needs to be stricter (crueler). That is an opinion, and these responses are not meant as a counter to that. However, someone motivated to vote for Trump or against Biden because we have open borders and the economy is doing poorly is just simply not living on planet earth.

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Turns out that economic data has been released today and it is very rosy

https://x.com/washingtonpost/status/1750514049056448919?s=20

This 3% growth in a year the economic doom mongers were so convinced we were going to have a recession, and given so much airtime to air their predictions, that they convinced a significant portion of the country that we were actually in one.

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People don’t look at the economy by looking at statistics, they view the economy through the lens of going to the grocery store and buying goods, filling up the car with gas.

They view interest rates not as some number posted by the feds, they look at the real number which is what you get at the bank for your mortgage, what you get on secured/unsecured debt, on car loans, etc.

They look at taxes though the impact of the paycheque, they look at unemployment through degrees of involvement (is my immediate family working, is my extended family working, are my friends working, is it the job I was trained for, etc)

They view crime through involvement, close involvement through personal circles, on what they read in their preferred media, whether it’s extreme left, right, or moderate, mass shootings, rioting, mass shoplifting, etc.

They view immigration by looking at footage of the people crossing the border unhindered, or the immigrants at sanctuary cities that are being housed in make shift accommodations.

Once again, there is no conspiracy or intention to make one here. If everything is seen as fine by the democrats, and independents, and moderate republicans, then trump has ZERO chance of being elected. It’s extremely evident that he is unliked/detested by the vast majority of democrats, by a significant amount of independents, and to add to that there are/were a large portion of moderate republicans and independents that did not want him to run. Viewing him as a wizard that promises to fix everything is laughable when far too many people view him as the devil ( I know it wasn’t you that said that). With this being said, I can’t see how you can live in the same reality that everything is ok/fine/average/palatable AND still worry about Trump being the next president.

In order for trump to get elected there has to be several issues (economy, age, inflation, immigration, etc**) that are real to a whole bunch of people in the middle of the voting population. You can’t brush aside ALL issues by blaming previous administrations no matter if it’s true or not.

** how the public personally perceives them, not the number posted on some publication or interpreted by a professional economist.

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On this point I think the messaging is crucial.

From where I sit, the Democrats significantly under represent the good things that are happening under the Biden Presidency. They need a PR overhaul, and need to get the message across better. If they lose the Whitehouse to Trump, this will be the biggest reason for me. They were not good enough at telling their story.

The Republicans tell their story much better. It’s a horror story, and they play to people’s fears, but they are good at it, and if they win the Whitehouse it will be because of this.

The facts are clear. Trump is unqualified on any number of levels. He is an abomination. And the Democrats are doing a solid job at actually governing, as any analysis shows.

But you are right in saying that the analysis won’t be the telling factor. People will go on their perception, and the Republicans seem much better at shaping perception to me.

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