I thing they are equally good at PR, I think they use the PR in different ways. My interpretation is that democrats like to concentrate more on philosophical things while republicans use it more on bread and butter type things. I do think the media on a whole is more liberal.
Agreed that no one looks at BLS data to figure out if they are happy about the economy, but that is very clearly not what I am saying. Instead, peopleâs perceptions of anything are impacted by a lot of factors, and in this present day a lot of those inputs are very unreliable. When someone tells you something that is very clearly at odds with the data then a lot of consideration should be put into why people believe/perceive what they do.
However, it is very apparent to me that LOTS of people are resistant to the idea that they are susceptible to bad information. That they are above being influenced by influence campaigns. This psychological drive is precisely why disinformation campaigns are so effective. There is simply no way for a large section of the country to not think crime has sky rocketed given the months long wall to wall dystopian Fox coverage of BLM and Antifa âriotsâ. I know people who worked in downtown portland who were completely unaffected by what Fox was showing yet had family members (who lived elsewhere) utterly convinced that Portland was a war zone. You dont need to be a fox consumer for that information to work its way into your brain and influence how you interpret everything else you see and experience. There is no way to not see high profile job lay offs at a company like Microsoft and think it signals economic troubles given the wall to wall coverage for 3 quarters of last year about a pending inevitable recession. This is just how our brains are wired to work. And once a perception is formed it can take a LOT of evidence to undo it. That is how you reconcile being conscious that Trump offers a very real threat to winning this fucking thing while offering absolutely nothing to anyone other than those in Hillaryâs basket of deplorables (which is a relevant thing to bring up, because this discussion was the very basis of that comment - not that Trump voters are deplorable, but that the large section not in that basket were winnable and were winnable by convincing them the doom mongering they believe in is an artifice).
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Yes Fox News says WHO, CNN says WHAT, MSNBC WHERE, and the real âanswerâ is WHEN. There is no one media that speaks to the entire country, there is no one media that can convert a democrat to a republican and vice versa. I am sure that there are still people that think the âlaptopâ is Russian interference, the Steele dossier is legitimate and still believe that Hillary blew up her house in order to delete 30,000 emails.
I donât disagree with you. I am just pointing out the reality of elections. Hilary was ahead in the poll leads. Trump data team projected he only had a 15% chance of winning 2 weeks before the election. Then all the shit turned of all the conspiracy, all the email shit. And that was all enough to turn the tables on her. If we had believed the poll leads, she should have won easily, all the data showed she should be the president but ultimately sentiments won. Of course data plays a big part to form sentiments but how many times have we seen people making decisions based on sentiments and disregarding data? Data is dead, sentiments and feelings and emotions are not.
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And the media in the USA has alot to be blamed and I say it for both sides of the camp. Watching from afar, I find it amusing that media like Fox will say Democrats are absolutely bad. And something like CNN will say Republicans are absolutely bad. I donât even bother to listen to their analysis because I know there is only one conclusion they each will arrive. The other side is shite. Unfortunately the Americans have only this system where they have to choose this or that. And similarly media is either this or that. So naturally people listen to what fits most with their concerns.
But as a person with no meat in the game, the moment someone tells that the other party is absolutely shite, I switch off. I hardly see any impartiality when it comes to politics commentary in USA.
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The problem is, the GOP at present really is absolutely shite. There are good, thoughtful Republicans who care about their country, and most of them are in quiet despair at what has happened to their party.
Ok, but right now one side is trying to find a solution to the question of immigration and the other is preventing those efforts because they want the problem to remain as a stick to beat their opponents with.
That is simply not a situation where both sides are equally trying to do the best for the country.
Itâs all very well trying to be even handed, but sometimes one thing is better than the other.
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What I was suggesting before as a strategy, on why bother fixing it, and on the other hand the republicans have been fighting for border reform (illegal immigration) for the past 3 years so why should they all of a sudden help the opposition only when it suits them? Its a harsh way of handling things, and they both wrong.
Ironically thatâs because of misunderstanding of how polls work. The polls were showing her ahead, and largely matched up with her final popular vote margin.
How she lost was due to the electoral college.
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Itâs obviously not their party anymore, and it would be criminal from them to vote for that big, formerly orange c*nt. Hopefully theyâll see sense when the time comes.
Also, whatâs preventing these reasonable people from either expulsing the MAGA cretins out of their party, or if itâs not possible, creating a new party more akin to what they believe in? Iâll never understand that obsession about keeping only two political parties.
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Numbers and power - they simply donât have enough of it in most states, since at least 2008. The institutions of the United States make it incredibly difficult to start a third party, and you certainly wonât produce one with what amounts to a disaffected elite as the base.
The Senate has been sort of a holdout, but over the years since the Tea Party, more and more of the GOP Senate have become creatures of the new GOP.
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I think itâs tied into the electoral system. You can see the same in the UK as Iâm pretty sure most traditional Conservative voters are horrified by the modern Tory Party and there are many traditional Labour voters who no longer feel represented.
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Because that is what the legislative chamber is supposed to do. That is literally their job. To refuse to work on something they claim to think is important solely to provide talking points for election in an independent branch of government is a move so cynical and dismissive of their responsibility that it should be career enders for everyone involved. The fact they, seemingly correctly, think they can get away with this without meaningful blow back is a shining illustration of the failures of our media to hold them accountable. This is precisely why the so commonly stated idea that âthe US media is liberalâ and âCNN is just the democrat version of Foxâ are so wide of the mark.
Again, you are talking about something completely different. I am not making predictions. I am simply pointing out the discrepancy between the stated sentiment supposedly driving people and the reality of those situations, illustrating that the sentiment is a largely invented construct. That is it. I understand that what matters for elections is what people believe (or tell themselves they believe) more than what is objectively supportable and have not made any argument to the contrary.
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Well then change it.
Nothing is ever written in stone. If a system doesnât work anymore, you donât keep doing the same mistakes, you fix it. How was Einsteinâs definition again: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
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There is no constituency for their ideas. The thing that very few people are willing to admit, but that has been very well chronicled (see https://www.amazon.com/Right-Hundred-Year-War-American-Conservatism/dp/1541600509), is that US conservatism has always relied on the themes underlying the MAGA movement to pull enough people into their tent. The people who cover politics have always been unwilling to call it like that contemporaneously and so instead created a fiction that what these high minded supposedly respectable conservative leaders spoke about is what the party represented.
The reality is not enough of their voters every cared about those things. Those in power understood they needed the proto-MAGA voter sentiment to be ratcheted up to pull people in and so were constantly playing with that force, turning it up when they needed more energy behind them, and then turning it down to try to keep it under control. The problem for them is the election of a black man with a muslim middle name got elected during a financial collapse and the result was that force rose to a level where their dial broke - they could no longer turn it down and any attempt to do so saw the thing that would soon be called MAGA come for them. Trump rode this wave, but that was only possible because the GOP had already created a monster it could not control. Remember, even before Trump you had honest supposedly decent guys like Mitt playing with birtherism and leveraging known lies about Bengazhi to try to whip up support in this base in 2012.
If you are looking for any rational explanation for why so many republicans caved to Trump when they clearly hated him and what he stood for, it is because of this sense of self interest. Numerous powerful people had already been eaten by the movement - losing their job, their power, their place on the stage, their dignity - by offering even small push back against the tea party. That ushered in the generation of âbroken politics is good for my brandâ GOP politicians like Cruz, Rubio and later guys like Cotton and DeSantis, for whom the right thing to do was only ever what would advance their personal brand.
That means if you take people like Mitt and ask them to form a third party. Even if you ignore the issues with developing a party infrastructure across every state required for them to perform in elections, in an environment in which the Republican party represents MAGA, theyâd get tiny %s of the vote.
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I understand that, was just thinking out aloud/speculating. There are plenty of ways to not do something and then place it at the feet of someone else, or slow walk it.
Oh for sure. No one would be at all surprised if good faith discussions on reform resulted in both parties walking away unable to find enough common ground to do something. That has defined the politics of immigration in this country since the late 90s and would be a dynamic on which they could mount an election argument.
But that is why it is important we have first hand accounts from the room telling us that is not the case. That SHOULD handcuff them from making the hay the plan to make with the tactic. It just wont because the press are utterly incapable of connecting parts of the story two days apart and so will credulously report on republicans concerns over Bidenâs âopen border policyâ while ignoring that there is no such thing, and the republicans are actively disinterested in doing what is in their power to make things closer to what they think it should be.
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Iâll never understand how such a guy is still allowed to run for the presidency. The term banana republic springs to mind.
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Iâm more @cynicaloldgit about this, a lot of these accusers crawl out the woodwork to self serve. Trump has been a well know entity way before the presidency. Iâm not a believe all women type. I think Joe has had an accusation, Clinton.
Itâs a lot stronger than an accusation.
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