American Politics: Discuss and Debate (Page 28 of 57)

They're also upset that the Dems are getting hammered in the House races and probably won't take the senate.  Biden's weak ground game cost them in down ticket races.

Trump and the GOP had their people out working, pandemic be damned.  Many of them got sick and some died, but their sacrifice paid off for the party.

Whether or not that's something Biden and company should have done is debatable.  The price for not doing it is being paid now.

As of 3 PM, Biden had an over 90,000 vote lead but with about 600,000 left to count. It was definitely called too early.

I've always admired how you watch FOX and CNN.

I don't really have much to say. We don't have full results yet. Once we have them, we'll know how right or wrong we all were, whether or not we trusted the right experts, and whether or not any of us knew what the hell we were talking about. But I am guardedly optimistic about some areas and very concerned about others. The blue shift is real. But there are red mirages that turn out to be red certainties.

Lots of count questions.  As of this morning, Georgia has either 25,000 or 50,000 ballots left from mostly-blue areas.  So he needs either 75% of them or 60-something percent to win Georgia.  Since Nevada seems more likely to go Biden than any of the others, a Georgia win would give Biden 270 without even needing the Arizona or Pennsylvania cushion.

Pennsylvania seems to be trending Biden big time.  There are count questions there too, especially in Philadelphia.  Some reports say that there are enough votes in Philadelphia alone to get Biden over the top.  Some say there aren't, but even they think that the gap will close and Biden will overtake.  And that might be when networks finally get to call this thing for Biden.  It would be nice if Biden can win by enough votes to avoid a recount and also to win without any votes that came in after Tuesday to avoid that legal headache.

Arizona is still Biden, and Fox and the AP haven't retracted their call yet despite most people thinking they should.  They must know something or they'd pull it.  That something could be wrong, but they're still very confident and Fox has to have tons of pressure to retract.  The fact that Trump still needs a decent majority should be worrisome to the president.  The majority are from an area that is both deep red and deep blue, but there are also others from Pima county which should lean Biden.  If those votes go Biden (and they make up between 1/8 and 1/6 of what's left), Trump's going to have to get a huge amount of those to win Arizona.

North Carolina seems certain to be Trump.  Nevada only matters if Pennsylvania goes to Trump, but that one should be resolved or mostly resolved today either way.

It doesn't make sense (for me) to comment on results we don't entirely have yet. However, Slider_Quinn21 made a prediction about Trump:

This has proven entirely correct. Trump is calling for ballots to no longer be counted... just because. There's no legal basis for that and it isn't working. He's declaring the election a fraud before the count is complete and the results are clear; this too has no legal traction. He attempted to claim victory in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan and was reminded that campaigns don't reveal state victories. He says he'll go to the Supreme Court; there is no case before the Supreme Court to stop counting votes and no legal grounds to do so. His comments, made publicly, will undermine any potential lawsuit he engages in to contest the results because they're not based on evidence; he just doesn't like losing.

Why can't Trump seem to steal this election? It's because even though his employees want to steal it, he keeps interfering and leading the charge and his arguments, methods and measures are simply to shriek that any vote that isn't for Donald Trump is a fraudulent ballot because he doesn't like them. He is self-destructing.

Jon Ralston covers elections in Nevada and seems to think there's no way Trump wins.  The reason why it hasn't been called, as speculated by Nate Silver, is that Nevada going to Biden actually gives him the election on Fox and the AP.  Now Fox and the AP could stand by it and just roll with "we show Biden has 270, he's the next president" but mis-calling Arizona and mis-calling the winner are two different things.  So it could be the media deciding to let Nevada sit, blaming the number of ballots, to allow Arizona to get a bit more clearer so that Fox and the AP don't have to look stupid.

I agree with this, but what is the plan?  You can point to 70 million voters and say "those people will defend him and they're well armed" but what would that level of rebellion even look like?  And how would you organize it?  And even if you did, what's the endgame there?

Any sort of coup attempt would need full support of the military, and I don't think enough people in the military support Trump.  You could argue that maybe his best case is that police support him, but military trumps police.  And I think the jump from "I support Trump" to "I'm willing to participate in a coup" might be fairly big.

Trump can cry all he wants, but his best argument is that Pennsylvania votes are going to come in later than Election Day, but there doesn't seem to be any indications that Democrats got their votes in late in any sort of large numbers.  As ireactions said, Biden's team did a good job of getting people to drop off their votes early, and all of them should count.  Maybe they could find some corrupt judges to get a case to the Supreme Court, but Trump's arguments are weak.  Even if he somehow got "Trump v Biden" in front of the court, even with a majority, I can't imagine he wins that case or what that case would even look like.

Even politically, he's running out of options.  McConnell is backing off him.  A lot of Republicans are.  It probably doesn't matter long term, but short term, the Republicans did really well and aren't going to want to taint that with a wild goose chase.

Trump has a really good shot at Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.  Biden might win by a fairly short margin.  If Trump wants, he could probably run for another office (Governor of Florida?) or whatever he wants.  And if he wants, he could probably be the frontrunner in 2024 and we could do this all over again.  But all of that probably starts with not being dragged out of the White House, crying.

And that seems like where we're headed.

Donald Trump Jr. said tonight “The best thing for the country is for people to go to war over this.”

He might be even more reckless than his father.

Yes, those conspiratorial Democrats rigged the election to not win in a landslide and not win in the Senate. The mythology of THE X-FILES looks airtight compared to this one.

If Trump either can't or doesn't run in 2024, this is your 2024 Republican nominee.

I just think there's a bit of a power vacuum in the Republican party.  I don't think they'll want to change too much since they had an overall great election, but who steps up?  The same Cruz, Rubio crowd?  Doubtful.  The Bushes are out.  I think there are probably some younger, lesser known Republicans.  But, especially if Trump gets the network going, I think he's going to push his son HARD.  And on name recognition alone, I think he'd get his foot in the door.  Then it's just a matter of how strong the Trump name is in 2024.

There's also a chance he tries to get Ivanka into a public office.  She's probably more palatable than Don Jr but we'll see.

I think Trump would absolutely try to run again.  He'd just be Biden's current age next time.  The only question is whether or not the dementia stuff is actually true.  If it is, he might not be sharp enough to pull it off again.

I agree that Trump is one of a kind.  I just think there are many in the party that would go back to that well again.  Don again, Don Jr, or Ivanka.  Not Eric haha.

I have to ask Temporal Flux, Slider_Quinn21, Grizzlor, pilight and Transmodiar -- are Americans bad people?

47.7 per cent of voters (at present) saw four years of global discord, mental illness, racism, white supremacism and then months of a crashed economy and federal ineptitude in the face of a national crisis -- and they voted for another four years of the same. I said that the majority of Americans were good, strong, capable people who wouldn't vote for a failure and a lunatic who was out to kill them. This majority might not vote for Biden, but it would not vote for Trump. This majority turns out to have only a 2.3 per cent edge on Trump's cultists.

Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States. But he may not have the Senate majority he needs to enact any meaningful legislation on climate change, the pandemic, the economy or to rebalance the Supreme Court. In addition, the losses that Democrats took in the House mean that they are shut out of redistricting: the gerrymandering to Republican advantage will get even worse.

Assuming the worst for the moment, that the two Senate runoffs in Georgia will not be won by Democrats, this means that the trade progressives made in supporting Joe Biden's centricism in exchange for majoritarian political power has not paid off. The point of choosing Biden was the belief that he could be mostly tolerated by progressives and conservatives: Republicans appalled by Trump could live with Biden, progressives could see Biden as a transition to Andrew Yang, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. This coalition would acquire enough votes to win the White House and the Senate, make gains in the House and get Democrats into state houses to stop and reverse Republican gerrymandering. This was James Carville Jr.'s argument for Biden, that Sanders and other progressives would never win the Senate and never have the power to turn their talking points into actual legislation.

Well, the Democratic Party under Joe Biden has not won the Senate by a landslide and will be hit by worse gerrymandering. Carville Jr.'s concept of a broad coalition to acquire political power has not acquired it. Which means this bargain of centricism over progressivism for power was a failure and if the Democrats win a Senate majority through the Georgian runoffs in January, it's not due to broad range of voters large enough to win when united as as Democrats. It's going to have been procedural intricacy that Georgia requires runoffs if no candidate for Senate wins a minimum 50 per cent of the vote.

This is the point at which we have to ask if Transmodiar was right. That Biden and Biden's vision of Democrats is so indistinct and watered down with centrist Republicanism that it doesn't speak to Democrats, doesn't inspire voters, doesn't bring turnout. That the Democrat's candidate needed to be someone with new and inspiring ideas and a real change, someone who wanted Medicare for All, who would randomly hand people a thousand bucks a month just to see what it would do to the economy. Someone like Andrew Yang who would theoretically get that progressive turnout.

Except turnout we have right now is at over 145 million votes and counting and 47.7 per cent of it -- almost half -- is for Trump. What portion of Trump's 70 million voters would have voted for Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang or Elizabeth Warren?

There has been a long argument that Republicans have triumphed through minority rule; that they represent a very small number of people and that America has gradually been moving towards progressive Democrats, that Texas is well on its way to becoming a blue state, that Americans see that Republicans are a broken cult of personality with no ability to govern and that it's simply a matter of getting a sufficient turnout for Democratic and left-leaning voters against a system that makes their votes count for less than Republican votes. But at 47.7 per cent of voters voting for Donald Trump, the Republicans' minority is at a slim 2.3 per cent. What progressive candidate would ever win over such voters? America is proving to be a far more conservative, repressive and suicidal population than I had hoped.

Smart and forward thinking people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang are the future of the Democratic Party -- but with 70 million Trump voters, I don't know how much of a future they would have, especially when the supposed majoritarian centrism of Biden only has 0.6 per cent votes over everyone else running for president or being written in.

Maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board except with Georgia's runoffs, Democrats don't have much time.

In 2016, Trump campaigned on raising the minimum wage.

Yes to a hilarious $10.  Florida's is now $15.

Look, it's terribly embarrassing. It's all terribly embarrassing.  And disappointing.  Extremely disappointing.  And angering.

Ultimately, I believe most Americans just want to live their lives.  They want to make their own decisions and live with them.  This happened tonight as the virus stricken flooded the streets of all major US cities celebrating with open champagne bottles passed from person to person - drinking after each other.

I hope that Biden will follow through with his slogans, but I fully expect a return to the old days of half the country being ignored by all politicians.  When people are ignored by all politicians for decades, they will passionately listen to the first person who acknowledges they still exist.  That was Trump.

If the goal is to avoid another Trump, then it starts with looking at who he reached and reach out to them.  I am reminded of something that was an issue early in Trump’s presidency - the idea that he would actually talk to North Korea and legitimize them.  In truth, that’s how American politicians have viewed their own country too.  Don’t talk beyond your base - you might legitimize the other side.  And so, we stay divided.

The media have sensationalized the worst parts of both halves of the country, but the majority have much more in common.  The US is one of the most charitable nations on earth; we like helping others.  I just hope that we’ll be able to continue doing so.

I don't think Americans are evil.  I agree with TF - I think most people don't think about politics that much.  I think some think about it too much, and I think those people need to ease up.  And I think Twitter becomes a furnace for these kinds of people.  But I see the same kind of things happen with sports on twitter so I don't necessarily think it's only politics.  When you isolate yourself with people who think like you, it's easy to think everyone thinks like you.

And I don't think 70 million people stand for what Trump stands for.  I think most people can put aside the man and his personality and focus on what they want to focus on.  Just like people can put aside JK Rowling's issues and still like Harry Potter.  If you are passionate about abortion issues, I think you'll vote for the person who supports your side whether they're Jesus or Satan.

And I think that's mostly the point.  When you only think about politics once every four years, you make your decision and you forget about it.  I've always wondered if Trump was a Democrat how it would work. If he stacked the court with pro-choice judges, and if he'd made it so that gun laws would be passed to make the country safer.  If Trump fully supported BLM and was doing work on police reform and knelt during the national anthem at the Super Bowl alongside black players.  If everything about Trump was the same, but his politics were flipped....would everything else be flipped?  Would liberals swallow their opinions of Trump and vote for him because the ends justify the means?  I don't know - it's a good thought experiment for another time.

So when you add up the pro-life votes and the evangelical votes and the 2nd amendment votes and the pro-police votes and the "I'm voting with my pocketbook and that means Republican" votes and the "I've always voted Republican no matter who" votes, I think that leaves the "I like Trump" and "I'm a nazi/white supremacist" votes,, and I just don't think that number is that high.  Maybe it is.  Maybe I'm naive.

But I just don't think there are enough people that like Trump.  I think there are tons of reasons to vote for him, but I don't know how many of those reasons have to do with him.  Just like a ton of the people who voted for Biden don't know the man or what he stands for - they were voting against Trump.

And since we gave everyone the right to vote, they get to make their own decisions.

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I agree with TF that the Democrats need to do much better about reaching out to people.  Just being "we aren't Trump" wasn't enough.  They didn't make a convincing enough argument or they would've won the Senate.  There are obviously people who want to vote, and a ton of those people voted Republican.  And if Joe is serious about being everyone's president, he needs to start talking to everyone. 

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I'm also horrified by the celebrations.  It's great that people are happy, but in two weeks, it'll be Thanksgiving.  Then Christmas.  It's still flu season.  We need to be much smarter than this.

They're not evil.  Trump is himself not evil, he's just a jerk off.  As I've said from day one, he's a lifelong crook with no morals or inhibitions on many things.  People looked past that for tribalism.

My iron grip on Joe Biden's decision-making remains intact, mostly because I write him letters begging him to do what he was going to do anyway.

Is anyone out there tracking what sort of lawsuits the Trump campaign is filing and which ones have been denied already?

Okay, reading all that made me feel better.

I also looked up Informant's twitter.  That made me feel worse.

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So now the only real threat to Biden is faithless electors.  But there hasn't been any legit concern about that - yet.  I'm assuming it'll ratchet up a bit in December.

Rob, you don't need to read Informant's Twitter. I don't need to read Informant's Twitter. I kept reading it because I care about him. I rant about him because I am hurt by him. But the only way anyone can hurt me with typing is because I have given them permission to hurt me.

I would never have expected him to become what he has; I'd expect him to be more concerned with being a loyal American than being a loyal conservative. But I am going to stop reading his social media. And I am going to stop talking about him as well. The election is over. And the pointless lawsuits from Trump are a waste of time and only to draw funds to pay off his campaign debts. I am still angry at anyone who voted for Trump, effectively voting to not have voting anymore. But I agree with Joe Biden that it is time to set that aside and focus on rebuilding our extremely broken world.

Nothing Informant says on Twitter takes away from all the wonderful things he did for SLIDERS and fans of SLIDERS. No vote Informant casts changes the fact that he was our friend: he worked on the SLIDERS REDUX with us, he gifted us with his companionship and perspective and friendship during FRINGE and the X-FILES revival and the Arrowverse and the DC Extended Universe. He stuck with SLIDERS long after most people had sensibly found another show and fandom. Fandom brought out the very best parts of Informant: his most generous, his most open-hearted and we were very fortunate to have the time we did with him.

I often think that writing fiction and caring about fiction will reveal who we really are; the unfortunate fact is that some writers will produce material that reveals a great compassion and love for humanity, but ultimately choose to live life as their most caustic, abrasive, antagonistic selves when they could be better than that.

I don't pray much, but when COVID hit the states, I knew before even reading Informant's Twitter that he would not wear a mask and I prayed for him and begged God to spare Informant when Informant wouldn't spare himself. I will pray for him again. Not for who he is now, but who he was when we knew him, who he chose to be for the bulk of his time with us. And I will pray that he finds his way back to that. The election is over, Donald Trump is done, Informant was our friend, he will always be our friend.

If we don't believe in inherent goodness, then we also don't need to believe in inherent evil. The truth is that people have the capacity for both and most will choose themselves. Sometimes, they will do so in a nearsighted, short-term sense that benefits them in immediacy but is catastrophic longterm. Sometimes, they will choose themselves by seeing that what benefits everyone is in their favour as well.

**

I sense that Slider_Quinn21 is frightened and afraid that Trump will sue his way into a second term. He cannot. Even if he overturned a state or two, it wouldn't get him to 270 votes. Even if he got currently uncounted mall-in ballots tossed, he wouldn't get more electoral votes than Biden. Republican run state legislatures have decided that they don't believe in alternate electors against the results of an election. The Department of Justice's call to investigate voter fraud specifies that the fraud must be significant enough to have actually altered results, and none of Trump's accusations in court would qualify. They're all small, petty, nuisance lawsuits and small, petty paperwork to briefly placate a small, petty man.

There is a danger that Biden will be treated by a not-small portion of the electorate as illegitimate because their cult leader said so. There is a danger that future elections will be contested in court by a more competent authoritarian who can tell the difference between a hotel and a landscaping company. But Trump has lost and clearly cannot process it and Republicans, not wanting to alienate Trump's voters, are humouring him even when these efforts will change nothing. Joe Biden is president-elect. No amount of whining, recounting and legal wrangling will change it.

I'd worry about Georgia runoffs. I'd worry about Biden being unable to pass any worthwhile legislation if Mitch McConnell holds the Senate. I'd worry about anti-vaxxers. I'd worry about Trumpism. I'd worry about how Trump will use his last days, although if he's distracted by pointless lawsuits, all the better. But Trump is done. And if he wants to run in 2024, he may have to do it from a jail cell as he is soon to lose his immunity to prosecution for financial crimes, tax fraud, assault; he is most definitely facing another bankruptcy; and there may be a case to charge him with negligent homicide.

Trump is outta here in January, trust me.  The bigger issue is that he's moved to railroad the transition to Biden, plus having agencies waste their time with Trump-backed budget plans they'll never use.

The Hail Mary:

https://www.axios.com/trump-electoral-c … e5149.html

Blocking certification would require court orders.  The courts have so far unanimously batted away all lawsuits the Trump camp have filed.  70-80% of Americans, by poll, agree that Biden is the next President.  Once again, it's Trump first, he's just trying to keep his fandom revved up and prove he's no loser (though he is a BIG one).

Last night, I stumbled on this guy's feed:

https://twitter.com/greg_doucette?ref_s … r%5Eauthor

He was talking about how the Hail Mary hits a roadblock - even if Trump gets the results delayed, the matter goes to Congress, and the way they do it is the key.  They do it separately - so if Trump tries the Hail Mary, the Senate and House retreat to their separate chambers and come up with a solution.  And while the Republicans would move quickly in the Senate, there's literally nothing they can do about the House.  They could simply play bridge in the chamber for a month and then when 1/20 hits, Trump's term ends whether they have a solution or not. 

And this is where it got sorta interesting to me.  Everyone mentions this is where Pelosi becomes president, but they wouldn't have to vote Pelosi in as Speaker of the House.  Apparently you don't even have to *be* in the House to be Speaker of the House.  So if the Democrats are worried about this, they would just vote in Biden as Speaker, and if the Republicans try it, he becomes acting president when January 20th happens.  There'd be no difference between Biden as president or acting president, and then they could either stalemate it or the Republicans would just give in.

I have no idea if any of that is true, but his arguments were smarter than anything I could come up with.

Well that's the thing.  Other than the attention and inability to be prosecuted, what is Trump wanting out of the job?  It's been a week and he's done *nothing*.  I don't remember who I'm quoting, but he seems to be doing everything he can to keep a job he doesn't even want.

This is my real fear.  I guess the good news is that such a person isn't really on the horizon.  If Trump is truly talking about 2024, then I think he's almost certainly the nominee.  No Republican has stood up to him yet, and I don't think anyone will between now and then.  If Trump runs again in 2024, then I think he'll do everything he can between now and 2028 to set up Don Jr. and Ivanka to run in 2028. 

None of Trump's kids are capable of anything like their father so I'd think we're at least 2032 before there's anyone who can follow in Trump's footsteps.  Hopefully 12 years down the line, we'll have the US in a more secure place.

Yeah they say 60% of it goes to pay off campaign debt, but from what I read, anything under $8000 they can do whatever they want with.

I'm wondering if they have to legally pay the money back if they don't do the recount in Wisconsin.  It feels weird for Trump to pay $3.5 million to do a pointless recount if he can just pocket it.  I wonder if he'll concede right around then and just walk away with all that money.

In other news, Trump is hinting that he may not even come to these Stop the Steal rallies.  If he won't even come to a lovefest rally, we know he's in terrible shape emotionally.