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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Trump did appear to be the more moderate candidate in 2016. That's a bit a lot of people are missing out.
Also, since this is a point that people keep missing as well, an election is not just about turning out your base but also about not turning out the other side's base.
I am not keen on Biden but the problem is that most of the things that we cite in opposition to him are either shared by other Democrats or just words. There is much bigger fish to fry.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanThere were polls that found voters thought Trump was more moderate than Hillary. This was most likely a result of misinformation, but I expect that to be in full force in the 2020 election as well. Most American are stupid and selfish, so they'll pick Trump over a progressive candidate any day of the week.
I was reading the comments section of a New York Times article on this, and it was full of of older Democrats railing against the idea of "free college". "free healthcare", and "open borders". Make no mistake, America is so afraid of change they'll gladly elect a racist hatemonger over anything that so much as has a whiff of "socialism" about it.
^^Because people don't judge politicians by their base.
Besides, "moderate" also includes economic policies and Trump did talk about helping workers and all that. Of course later he adopted the classic Republican playbook and that's why he no longer is seen as a moderate, but that's hindsight. Here is a piece where the Trump is moderate thing is explained a bit more
.
Well, it's both race-baiting and a bait-and-switch, since neither Trump nor any other GOP candidate has any intention of actually doing anything to help the working class. Note as evidence Trump's "eat the poor" tax cuts, the only significant piece of legislation that his government has passed.
The idea that he is a moderate is just smoke and mirrors pushed by the centrist media.
Edited by Fighteer on Aug 16th 2019 at 12:55:51 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Basically, "help the working class" for Republicans means "help the white workers who live in rural towns and are the backbone of America, and they deserve everything, unlike those elitist snobs who live in cities, the Jews who control the economy, the underhanded black people who steal everything they have, and the illegal Mexican immigrants who do no work and take all the government's resources.
Man, that physically disgusted me to even write out, ew, I want to take a shower.
The weirdest take I've seen are people on the left - even self-proclaimed socialists - saying that Trump was much less bad than Clinton because "he's gonna destroy the American Empire".
So yeah, spite and misguided "anti-imperialism" turns people into morons, apparently.
We learn from history that we do not learn from historyThe nasty truth is that politics doesn’t run on a single left-right axis, it doesn’t even run on two axis making a square.
Trump was portrayed as moderate because he claimed to want infrastructure spending, government supported healthcare and some level of gun control.
Trump got called moderate because he pretended to break with fiscal conservatism.
As for the risk without Biden, that again assumes a binary left-right world, it’s far from that simple, Trump showed that there are a segment of voters (the Obama-Trump voters) who can be motivated by either promises of economic improvement or by racism.
Being a ‘moderate’ doesn’t mean a person is fiscally conservative, it might mean they’re a non-rich racist, it might mean they’re a evangelical black person, it might mean they’re a libertarian.
Clinton didn’t just lose the ‘moderate’ vote, she lost a lot of voters from across the spectrum. Picking up any one group may well be enough for 2020.
Democrats need someone who can win, but current polling has all of the 4 defeating Trump in 2020, so Biden isn’t a keystone candidate.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranTHEY were accelerationists. They definitely thought Trump was the worst option, but their plan was to deliberately choose the worst option with the expectation that it would reach some kind of critical mass of bad and implode on itself, generating a counter-movement that would drag the USA left. It was a dumb long game strategy that posited that Clinton, as the status quo option, was somehow the greater of two evils in the long term.
"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."Why? You think racists can’t vote for a black man when it’s in their (blindingly obvious) economic self-interest to do so?
No voter is truly a single issue voter, they can be motivated by a failing economy one election and by racism another.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

"But electability, guys"
But seriously, the conversation over who should be the Vice-President nomination is an important one, even if it's being packaged alongside some nonsense. Primarily, it should be a Democrat who can appeal to demographics that the Dem running for President doesn't.