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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I've always found "X would have won if they were more popular with voters" to be tautological. Technically accurate but functionally useless.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Yeah, I'd vote for either Sanders or Biden if it came down to one of them versus Trump, but, to not put too fine a point on things, electing a rich old white man to fix the problems created by electing rich old white men strikes me as doing the same thing expecting a different outcome, and you all know what THAT is, right?
(so, naturally, I expect that the Democrat ticket will have BOTH of them in some order or another)
Edited by Reflextion on Apr 23rd 2019 at 1:22:45 PM
Someone did tell me life was going to be this way.There is also such a thing as "white Jews." The fact that Bernie is Jewish does not obscure his whiteness. In fact, before anyone responds to this point, I want everyone to read this article.
It's pretty much brimming with all sorts of Unfortunate Implications and dismissive racial attitudes.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
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To be fair, socialist. If you didn't expect a framework of class struggle to be at least somewhat relevant to his politics I'm not sure what you think this whole leftism thing is about exactly, although it's obviously possible to moralise that rather too much.
The only observation I really have about Warren other than "policies good, please do and then expand upon greatly" is a certain distaste for the kind of politician that treats all problems as technical problems that can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction with a little bit of program X, executive order Y and policy Z, because at some point you lose the actual politics of competing and contradictory interests there. Warren seems to mostly get this from what I've seen, but I'm still distinctly wary of anyone who runs in an election on "look how good a policy wonk I am".
Edited by DeathorCake on Apr 23rd 2019 at 5:38:54 PM
She doesn't, amongst the activists 538 are speaking (which are early state activists and D.C. ones) she has a nearly 60% rate of “I would not consider supporting her to be the nominee” and a 9% rate of support. That’s with activists being able declare they’d support or not support as many people as they like.
Even Bernie only gets 50% of activists saying they wouldn’t consider supporting him.
If 538s numbers hold Bernie would have a tough fight getting the nominee even in a one on one against another candidate on his choice, Gabbard would find it impossible.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranWarren’s got a compelling personal story and a unifying theme, though. That’s big.
Warren was a republican law professor who took conservative economic theories at face value. Then she researched bankruptcy cases and found almost all of them were about bad luck- dad lost his job, mom got cancer, parents got divorced, etc. She was shocked; the narrative at the time was that deadbeats took advantage of bankruptcy. Warren fought to protect consumer bankruptcy rights from the late 1990s-2005, when the bankruptcy bill passed making it much harder for average people to get bankruptcy relief. Then she got really mad because all republicans and half of Dems didn’t care. She learned more about economic inequality.
During Obama’s first term, Warren created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from scratch in a year. She was supposed to head the agency, but republicans threw a fit and opposed her nomination so Obama withdrew it. She then ran for Senator in 2012 and won.
Her entire through line for all her proposals is basically anti-corruption and anti-inequality. Give everyone a fair shake. If you’ve gotten massively rich, pay some of it back into society. Etc.
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You know, I actually didn't given the general trend of what was being said about both was nearly identical. Don't skim and post, kids. Sorry about that. Yeah, screw Joe Biden.
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Of course you need to do things to solve problems in the most basic sense, but what state of affairs constitutes "a problem", "not a problem" or a way to get from the former state to the latter is informed by relative position within society, personal ideology and other even more nebulous things, and treating a policy goal as this objective thing that you can use to Convince People often misses the whole arena of politics as a contest of varying kinds of force between fundamentally contradictory interests.
The best example I have of that is that for the capitalist classes of the developed world massive deregulation and neoliberal assault on the poorest on society was a solution to the 70's era crisis of profitability, but a pretty major problem for, say, the 3 million unemployed under Thatcher and the trade unions.
The most extreme cases of this technocratic worldview seem to think that government works like The West Wing, where you can Destroy the Conservative/Leftist/Whatever Argument with Facts and Logic, which will make them vote for you and make society better without actually having to do any actual politics.
Edited by DeathorCake on Apr 23rd 2019 at 6:12:42 PM
It does seem like Warren has a bit of an issue with the actual politics stuff. Hence her underperforming in Senate elections like Septimus mentioned a while back. It may also explain why some of her current polls have her behind Buttigieg, a relative newcomer who only really started campaigning a couple weeks ago.
Edited by M84 on Apr 24th 2019 at 2:28:27 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised
538 did a bit about that and concluded that the media was not the main factor.
Silver Bulletpoints: We’ve Got Your Backlash To The Buttigieg Backlash
Yes, it’s complicated. Public interest and media attention have a self-reinforcing, symbiotic relationship. The CNN town hall was itself a type of media coverage. But this looks like a reasonably organic surge in voter interest in Buttigieg and not just a media fixation.
Basically it was that first town hall that sparked interest in Buttigieg.
Edited by M84 on Apr 24th 2019 at 2:31:03 AM
Disgusted, but not surprisedFWIW, Nate Silver in that article notes that while it's tough to rank the Democratic candidates at this early stage, he's got Biden as the likely winner, with Sanders and Buttigieg as the next tier, followed by Warren and Beto.
I have mixed feelings about this exercise. On the one hand, ranking the candidates without a model or some other rigorous methodology is exactly the sort of thing that can get me in trouble. On the other hand, I have a mental list of candidates and tiers in my head at all times, and I feel like I owe y’all an occasional, explicit glimpse into that thinking rather than forcing you to guess.
But this is a tricky race to diagnose. Most primaries either take the form of a follow-the-leader race where everyone is chasing a single clear front-runner (say, Hillary Clinton in 2008 or 2016) or a free-for-all in which there’s no obvious heir apparent (say, Democrats in 1992 or 2004). This year is somewhere in between; there are two sort-of front-runners (Biden and Sanders), but for lots of reasons (age, lack of support from party elites), they’re much less formidable than someone like Clinton. I feel reasonably comfortable comparing Biden and Sanders to one another — I have Biden higher because he’s polling quite a bit better than Sanders — but comparing them to the rest of the field will be a challenge until other candidates become better known.
Edited by M84 on Apr 24th 2019 at 2:38:13 AM
Disgusted, but not surprisedI want to emphasize that Silver's fairly explicit that it's not an empirical list, it may very well be right but as my link demonstrated primaries can shift rapidly and making strong assumptions about who is or isn't going to win is generally a bad idea.
Things can and have shifted, those kind of rankings are IMO far too hasty and unreliable.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang@Reflextion: You would like Tulsi Gabbard to fix the country's problems? Or Candace Owens? The problem with bad policies is not the attributes of the person behind them, but the identity of the people it affects.
Life is unfair...

To be clear, part of my concern with Sanders', Biden's and Warren's old age was also that it's not encouraging for the future of progressive liberalism in the US. When almost all of your star candidates are septuagenarians, it isn't exactly a good look for the future of your movement.
Granted, I suppose their primary opponent is also around the same age, albeit with the mental age of a particularly immature fifteen-year old.