Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Ilios]

You can't recount disenfranchised votes, dipshit.

What did you just say?

Politics really turns everyone into raging madmen...

[MJW (ya that one)]

IIRC only Michigan would plausibly flip due to voter ID laws. Having said that they are just to give GOP an edge because voter fraud is non-existent (electoral fraud does happen but not voter fraud).

Wisconsin as well.  There are some underlying assumptions that are dubious, and Snopes has it as "unproven" as of now.

Trump won for the same reason Brexit won, their opponents ran on a boogeyman message (contrast this with Obama's "yes we can" campaign) and unsurprisingly their base didn't show up at the polls.  Not facing that reality makes it more likely to happen again, which would totally suck.


Darrell

Things were close enough that every little bit hurts. So you can sub anything and say that "Clinton would have won". But that's BS. Trump got unlucky too sometimes. So it's like losing by five in a fantasy football game and saying you would have won if you picked someone else (but they could pick someone else too).

[MJW (ya that one)]

Now it's down to 30% and that's BEFORE he tackles labor laws which should take another 5% off ; still a long way to go to Yeltsin's 2%.

Menendez is down to 10% at Predict It which makes it likely he'll get convicted... If that happens and the DEMs say "we need to wait for appeal!!!1!!!" then Trump would get a free pass to do whatever he wants. It's pathetically obvious he would have no chance for a successful appeal. Trump is ether stalling the debt ceiling for that to happen or has no idea what he's doing and the DEMs get a free ride to he promised land of 2024.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

RIP your stupid fucking wall

[MJW (ya that one)]

RIP your stupid fucking wall

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/t...ocid=ientp

Pretty sure that it's not going to happen.

[darrelljs]

He seems to imply the general maintenance of the existing border fence is actually construction of "The Wall". One possibility is his ego has fooled him into believing this so that he can continue to see himself as a winner. The other option is he is laying the groundwork for a political compromise that would allow both sides to claim victory to their base, but is essentially the status quo before he picked yet another stupid fight.

Darrell

[darrelljs]

Did Yeltsin really hit 2%? That's crazy.

I don't think Trump drops below 30%. There is a subset of the population that would, in his words, continue to support him if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot somebody.

Darrell

[scooter]

I don't think Trump drops below 30%.  There is a subset of the population that would, in his words, continue to support him if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot somebody.

I'm not so sure about this. Bush hit 25% after all after topping 90% at one point. Trump's approvals scraped 45% around inauguration, and it's now hovering around 38%. A 7% drop in 9 months despite a healthy economy is pretty rare. At that rate, he'd be below 30% before next summer. Even beyond the raw approvals, the strength of support (strongly approve vs somewhat approve) has dropped significantly too. The idea that his popularity is untouchable is kind of a myth.

I don't think it'll keep free-falling or anything, but if the economy falters in the next couple years, sub-30% seems very plausible. I think people overestimate the floor for his popularity.

[T-hawk]

Trump's approvals scraped 45% around inauguration, and it's now hovering around 38%. A 7% drop in 9 months despite a healthy economy is pretty rare.

What people and polls constantly miss about numbers like these is that those 7% or even more may disapprove of Trump but vote for him anyway.

Fred On Everything nails it in a paragraph here:

I think Trump is a horse’s ass, dangerous, naive, uninformed, and a thoroughgoing damned fool. I detest the KKK (which barely exists, but never mind) and disagree with the Alt-Right on many things. Yet when I look at the other side, the armed bands, the censorship, thought control, indoctrination, the re-writing of history, their media arm, the identity politics, the push for control, control, control—I think,“I’ll take Trump—gack–and certainly the Deplorables.”

That sums up my viewpoint and that of just enough voters on the margin to have elected Trump.  He doesn't need approval ratings, he just needs less disapproval ratings than the other side.

[Dreylin]

As far as "Approval numbers" go there's also evidence that partisanship can be more important than ideology, which supports the floor at a higher level.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/opini...icans.html

Barber and Pope found that people who identified themselves as strong Republicans were among the most malleable voters. When told Trump had adopted a liberal stance, these voters moved decisively to the left; when told Trump had taken a conservative position, they moved sharply to the right,

Citizens pick a team, but they don’t naturally think like the team leadership does. And when Trump tells Republicans to think in a new way, lots of people happily adopt that new position because they were never that committed to the old ideas anyway. They’re just committed to the label.