There no way Trump wins in 2016 if he was going against somebody that was actually popular.

No way he would have won the primary without Hilary’s Pied-Piper Strategy

This isn’t even entirely an optics problem. Democrats in leadership believe they are best served when they are the centrist running against fascism rather than a progressive running against some boilerplate business conservative. So they actively encourage the freaks in the GOP while fighting tooth and nail to keep greens and socialists off their end of the ballot

Brandon also filled his administration with a competent team

I haven’t seen much evidence of this

Imagine if Biden has initiated prosection of Trump within his first 100 days, rather than waiting until his last year in office to press charges.

When third parties start winning races, you see states and other election institutions finding new ways to exclude them.

I’m reminded of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which was created to freeze out the League of Women Voters (who had been running debates since '72) by transferring governance of the debates to the heads of the RNC and DNC. This effectively cartelized the debate process.

After 1996, when Republicans blamed the third party contender Ross Perot of throwing the election to Clinton one too many times, the CPD raised the criteria for participating in debates to each candidate needing 15% support in national polling, functionally excluding all non-major parties.

But this pushed the more radical elements into the primaries, as we witnessed in 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. Long-shot candidates could find a podium on the stage with as little as 2% national support in the Dem or Republican primaries. The primaries have become a de facto third party venue, as a result. And this has created a crisis of “elect-ability” that party leaders are attempting to tame in their own way, by freezing out challengers through their own arcane procedures and rules.

It feels increasingly like we’re going back to the old Smoke Filled Room model of candidate selection.

So arguably, the easier it is to change your legal gender, the less of a problem gender-based affirmative action is.

Gender-based public sector affirmative action exists to counterbalance discrimination in the private sector. I would argue that becoming trans to undermine gender-AA is penny wise and pound foolish, unless you were already tending towards that inclination.

But what I’m seeing here is “I’m changing my gender but only for the purposes of gaming the system, then I expect you to recognize me as my original gender again”. And that’s on par with carrying a pair of crutches in your trunk so you can park in handicapped spaces.

You don’t really want to take on the burden of being recognized as a woman. You just want to pocket a benefit in the public sector and then go back to your privileged position in the private sector.

Were you get your info from Facebook?

Huh?

Being a defeatist isn’t helping anyone.

Being realistic means not spinning yourself up into a lather and bashing yourself against a brick wall until you break.

People staying home historically effects Democrats far more than Republicans.

Trump has changed the math, somewhat. High energy elections tend to benefit Trump-y candidates and hurt the milquetoast Dems. Low energy elections favor Bidencrats.

:-p Disastrous typo

That isn’t true. Far more involved than that

Step 1: Collect, analyze and adjust polls

The entire baseline for his predictions, plus or minus some additional adjustments. Everything after that is rooted in the original poll-aggregate foundation.

Nate went further post-debate performance, knowing where Biden stands in a variety of polling and that this was the worst debate perhaps in the history of debates

He was not telling Biden to drop out the day before the debate. He was telling Biden to drop out the day after, but before he actually inserted “bad debate performance” into his model and rerun a thousand model elections. This is what always gets Nate in trouble. He shoots from the hip on hot-button issues, rather than remaining academic.

More importantly there will be no major positive event that overrides it.

Trump tanked two debates against Hillary and still squeaked through on election day. Nobody is going to be thinking about this debate by the time the Olympics are over.

Nobody can provide me a single data-point where Biden isn’t performing significantly worse than his 2020 race where he won by merely 40,000 votes across 3 battleground states.

2020 had some of the highest turnout in US history, thanks to mail-in voting and quarantine. 2024 is going to see a huge drop off in participation. It isn’t immediately clear which candidate is going to suffer the worst from the deficit in support, as Biden has banked hard on appeasing moderate conservative voters while Trump trundles further and further out into right-wing.

They’re both deeply disliked candidates.

Something of a joke that Soros made his fortune speculating against the economic fallout of the post-Soviet Eastern Bloc’s collapsing currencies. His fortune was effectively harvested from the skyrocketing inflation that plagued countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Hungary as they lost access to cheap publicly produced consumer goods and real estate.

Then he turned his fortune towards philanthropy in those same failing countries and that made him “woke”. So he became an icon of right-wing hate, as a result.

Running a Pritzker/Fetterman ticket on the theory our candidates can beat the Republicans in a wrestling match

Also should be noted other reputable science-based algorithm designers like Nate Silver advises Biden to step down.

Nate’s algorithm is just a poll of polls. And his reasoning is incredibly short term and superficial.

Nate wasn’t suggesting Biden drop out back in January when other candidates could run to replace him. He’s only saying it now, because Biden’s polling is at an all time low.

If Biden recovers (likely, as the memory of the debate fades behind other current events) the pundits will start singing a different tune quickly enough.

There’s still plenty of room for a senile fumbling corporate puppet to be retained in office, assuming mass media and the party continue to back him.

But quite a bit of mass media is owned and operated by ultra-conservative ghouls and wanna-be fascist demagogues.

The real fear is that they cash out Biden and start running an endless train of hit pieces, like they did against Hilary and Bernie. Biden’s senility seems to be acceptable to majority of Dem voters, on the grounds that “Trump is worse”. It’s all the low info Indies who are yet to be swayed. And they’re only interested in the news cycle a couple weeks outside the general election.

Wages need to be increased and the best way to do that is to stop businesses undercutting wages by hiring cheap foreign labour.

Urban density increases the efficiency of public services. Wage rates do not.

Trying to keep populations small and fragmented does nothing to improve domestic quality of life. And rising domestic populations don’t hurt overall household incomes. Cartelized labor markets are what do that.

Inflation is largely a global issue.

Prices vary enormously by local regions. And price gouging is increasingly difficult over large distances.

Inflation is most commonly a consequence of local commodity monopolization, not global price trends.

Am I denying the existence of a branch of international foreign intelligence dedicated specifically to Lemmy.world?

Yes. 100%. Absolutely.

It’s pure paranoia.

tax cuts on the poorest people in society

Are functionally no different than higher wages. But without public infrastructure - housing, education, health care, etc - what does an extra couple grand actually buy?

We’ve seen this in the US for decades. A pittance of tax cuts pitched as a percentage of income is presented as this enormous boon. But then wages stagnate, prices skyrocket, and debts soar in the face of new privatization.

And then we’re worse of than when we started.

The tax cut doesn’t buy anything in an inflationary economy

Posted on ShitJustWorks for extra irony

Other positions are easier to flip blue

Not under the current gerrymander.

I think helping everyday working class people is a good thing

Just cut taxes bro. Just one more time dawg. I promise it’ll work this time, dude. Just one more tax cut. One more time bro I promise. It’s going to stimulate the economy homey. This time we swear.