***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[gry60]

So we have Covid which has killed 100's of thousands, is crippling the economy & destroying people's mental health.... but it was worth furthering that risk to see Trump rejected..........

Completely logical

Great example of selective reading.

Did you miss the second sentence?

 

[RustyShackleford]

That can't be true. Bernie Sanders and many of his supporters said that it was because Obama wasn't a hardcore progressive that's why the Tea Party came to Washington and the 2010 Midterms were so disastrous.

They were just holding up signs calling him the n-word, and a monkey because they were economically anxious

Barry playing da identity politics again

 

[aepps20]

That can't be true. Bernie Sanders and many of his supporters said that it was because Obama wasn't a hardcore progressive that's why the Tea Party came to Washington and the 2010 Midterms were so disastrous.

They were just holding up signs calling him the n-word, and a monkey because they were economically anxious

Barry playing da identity politics again

How many times do we have to explain it? These people were tired of being called racist so they had no choice but to call Barry the N word. Economic Anxiety is a real disorder. As a Black man I only blame myself when I'm called a slur because the Democratic Party left them behind. #2024ITSMYTURN

 

[blastercombo]

How many times do we have to explain it? These people were tired of being called racist so they had no choice but to call Barry the N word. Economic Anxiety is a real disorder. As a Black man I only blame myself when I'm called a slur because the Democratic Party left them behind. #2024ITSMYTURN

As a black man, I understand
As a white man, I understand
As an Asian man, I understand
As a Latino man, I understand
As a _________ man, I understand


whichever works best I’ll switch to that account

 

[gry60]

 

[RustyShackleford]

 

[MVP]

 

[Belgium]

First a little background before this latest update on the Pennsylvania 'whistleblower' (Richard Hopkins) that Trump, the RNC and Project Veritas have been promoting.
Hopkins alleged a variety of fraudulent election activities in a sworn affidavit, however when he was questioned by federal agents, he recanted his sworn affidavit and thus admitted to perjury.
Some time after the interview, Project Veritas selectively leaked parts of the interrogation to suggest coercion and then interviewed the Hopkins about the interview with the feds.
All of a sudden, the 'whistleblower' claims that he didn't recant his sworn affidavit. That's the polar opposite of what he told federal investigators. Project Veritas continued to promote the allegations in the sworn affidavit that Hopkins recanted to investigators.

This new update however comes with another plot-twist. Hopkins also told investigators that Project Veritas penned his false sworn affidavit and that he wasn't even entirely sure what Project Veritas put in the sworn affidavit. Hopkins claimed he was in shock and didn't pay much attention to what Project Veritas was telling him. During this timespan, GOP donors gave $130k to Hopkins.

To me, what Project Veritas did sounds a lot like suborning perjury.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/usps-...ect-veritas-penned-his-ballot-tampering-claim
USPS ‘Whistleblower’ Told Agents Project Veritas Penned His Ballot-Tampering Claim


A postal worker whose allegation of ballot-tampering was at the center of Republican efforts to challenge the outcome of the presidential election has admitted to investigators that Project Veritas actually penned the affidavit laying out his claims. A two-hour audio recording released by Project Veritas on Wednesday shows Richard Hopkins being interviewed by federal investigators over his claim, first publicized by Project Veritas, that he had overheard a postmaster instructing workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, to backdate mail-in votes to meet the Election Day deadline. The audio had been touted by the conservative group as proof that Hopkins was manipulated by investigators but still stood by his allegations, despite House Democrats saying earlier this week that the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General told them Hopkins admitted to fabricating the claims.

But instead, it captured him doing the very opposite, according to The Washington Post. When he was asked if he wanted to stick with his claim about ballot-tampering, Hopkins said, “At this point? No.” He said his allegation had stemmed from “assumptions” he made after overhearing tidbits of staffers’ conversations in the mail facility. Hopkins told investigators not only that his affidavit was written by Project Veritas but that he wasn’t even entirely sure of what the group had included in it because he was in “so much shock I wasn’t paying that much attention to what they were telling me.” A spokesman for Project Veritas acknowledged having a hand in the affidavit but insisted that the “affidavit was drafted with Mr. Hopkins’ input and requested revisions,” according to the Post.

 

[Upptempo]

 

[dinyc3st]

Has anyone seen Mike Pence since the election was decided?

He’s on “Vacation“ lmao

 

[Cashflow]

Next up on the PRICE is COVID!!!

 

[IATT]

posted

 

[dmbrhs]

Wait, so trumps 4 year presidency was so he could go to rallies and make speeches saying the media is full of democratic propagandists and that the Lame Stream media was nothing but fake news, and it was all just advertising for the news network he had ready to drop?

To be fair, he never wanted to be president in the first place. Losing was part of the plan. All he wanted to do was get the nomination, and then when he lost he could blame the media and everyone else, and launch his news network with all that energy and a built-in audience.

He never considered the consequences of winning.

 

[Sharpshoeter13]

Bro this ish is hilarious, the voice box

PURE THEATER

I lost it right after when the woman started to speak

 

[Sharpshoeter13]

STOP

DA

COUNT

 

[Present]

But tell me more about bipartisanship.

 

[Upptempo]

Wasting time and taxpayer money while there's a second surge of COVID

 

[lazyj10]

They wildin out putting "Alex Rodriguez" as a goddamn nominee...

 

[gry60]

 

[aj11fan]

 

[IATT]

 

[had pants]

 

[RustyShackleford]

Everyone should read this. It is really the core issue with American politics. Basically, the GOP is made it that they don't need popular support to gain and retain power. The Democratic Party basically has to blow them out in back to back elections to have a chance of governing. With the courts gone, they need to get extremely lucky as well. So Dems snipe at each other not because they don't have a winning strategy, but because they can't figure out how to blow out the other side consistently. This is not a democracy, this is not sustainable


https://www.vox.com/21561011/2020-e...trump-electoral-college-vote-senate-democracy

The crisis isn’t too much polarization. It’s too little democracy.
If Republicans couldn’t win so much power while losing votes, the US wouldn’t be in the current crisis.
By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Nov 12, 2020, 11:40am EST


Imagine that, four years ago, Donald Trump lost the presidential election by 2.9 million votes, but there was no Electoral College to weight the results in his favor. In January 2017, Hillary Clinton was inaugurated as president, and the Trumpist faction of the GOP was blamed for blowing an election Republicans could’ve won.

The GOP would have been locked out of presidential power for three straight terms, after winning the crucial popular vote only once since 1988. It might have lost the Supreme Court, too.
And so Republicans would likely have done what Democrats did in 1992, after they lost three straight presidential elections: Reform their agenda and their messaging, and try to build a broader coalition, one capable of winning power by winning votes. This is the way democracy disciplines political parties: Parties want to win, and to do so, they need to listen to the public. But that’s only true for one of our political parties.

Take the most recent election. Joe Biden is on track to beat Donald Trump by around 5 million votes. But as my colleague Andrew Prokop notes, a roughly 50,000-vote swing in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would’ve created a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, tossing the election to the state delegations in the House, where Trump would’ve won because Republicans control more states, though not more seats. Trump didn’t almost win reelection because of polarization. He almost won reelection because of the Electoral College.

The Senate tells a similar story. It is likely, when the votes are counted, that Democrats will have won more Senate votes in each of the last three Senate cycles, but never controlled the Senate in that time. Vox’s Ian Millhiser calculates that if Senate Democrats lose the two Georgia runoffs, they will still, in the minority, represent 20 million more people than the Republican Senate majority.

I wrote a book on political polarization, so I’ve gotten the same question over and over again in the past week: What are we going to do about all this polarization?

America’s problem right now isn’t a surfeit of political polarization. It’s a dearth of democracy. The fundamental feedback loop of politics — parties compete for public support, and if they fail the public, they are electorally punished, and so they change — is broken. But it’s only broken for the Republican Party.

The asymmetry of the American political system
The simplest way to understand American politics right now is that we have a two-party system set up to create a center-left political coalition and far-right political coalition.
Two reinforcing features of our political system have converged to create that result. First, the system weights the votes of small states and rural areas more heavily. Second, elections are administered, and House districts drawn, by partisan politicians.

Over the past few decades, our politics have become sharply divided by density, with Democrats dominating cities and Republicans dominating rural areas. That’s given Republicans an electoral advantage, which they’ve in turn used to stack electoral rules in their favor through aggressive gerrymandering, favorable Supreme Court decisions, and more. As a result, Democrats and Republicans are operating in what are, functionally, different electoral systems, with very different incentives.

To reliably win the Electoral College, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percentage points. To reliably win the Senate, they need to run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republicans. To reliably win the House, they need to win the vote by 3 or 4 points. As such, Democrats need to consciously strategize to appeal to voters who do not naturally agree with them. That’s how they ended up with Joe Biden as their nominee. Biden was not the choice of the party’s more ideological base. He was not the choice of those who wanted to see Democrats reflect the young, multiethnic, majority-female voters driving their electoral victories.

Biden was the choice of Democrats who favored electability above all. Electability is a weird idea: It asks not that you vote for who you find most electable, but for who you think a voter who is not like you would find most electable.

Biden promised that he could lure back some of the white, working-class voters who’d powered Trump’s 2016 victory, and he could do it explicitly because he was an old, moderate, white guy who could talk to the parts of the electorate that feared the ideological and demographic changes sweeping the nation. Democrats bought that pitch, and Biden, to his credit, delivered on it. The Democratic Party is led by a center-left leader because that’s what it believed it needed in order to win. And winning mattered above all else.

For Republicans, the incentives are exactly the reverse. They can win the presidency despite getting fewer votes. They can win the Senate despite getting fewer votes. They can win the House despite getting fewer votes. They can control the balance of state legislatures despite getting fewer votes.

And so they do. Their base, like the Democratic base, would prefer to run more uncompromising candidates, and their donors would prefer a more uncompromising agenda. A party that needed to win a majority of the popular vote couldn’t indulge itself by nominating Trump and backing his erratic, outrageous, and incompetent style of governance to the hilt. A party that needed a majority of the popular vote to win the Senate and the House couldn’t keep trying to rip health care away from tens of millions of people while cutting taxes on the richest Americans.

Republicans are not irrational for spending down their electoral advantage on more temperamentally extreme candidates and ideologically pure policies. The process of disappointing your own base is brutally hard — just look at the endless fights between moderates and leftists on the Democratic side. What motivates parties to change, compromise, and adapt is the pain of loss, and the fear of future losses. If a party is protected from that pain, the incentive to listen to the public and moderate its candidates or alter its agenda wanes.

An argument I make at some length in my book is that polarization is not, in and of itself, a good or a bad thing. What matters is the way it interacts with the broader political system: how elections are won, how legislation is passed, how disagreement is resolved. At the simplest level, higher levels of polarization will make parties more desperate to win, which in turn will push them to adapt the strategies needed to win in the system they inhabit.

But our electoral system is imbalanced, and it’s led to imbalanced parties: It forces Democrats to lean into the messy, pluralistic work of winning elections in a democracy, and allows Republicans to avoid that work, and instead worry about pleasing the most fervent members of their own base. It forces Democrats to win voters ranging from the far left to the center right, but Republicans can win with only right-of-center votes.

America needs a better Republican Party. But it won’t get one under this system.
And that is how we come to the situation we face today: A party that adapts to anti-democratic rules will quickly become a party that fears democracy. A party that knows it can’t win a majority of the vote will try to make it difficult for majorities to vote, and have those votes count. A party that isn’t punished for betraying the public trust will keep betraying it.

If Republicans were more worried about winning back some of Biden’s voters rather than placating Trump’s base, they wouldn’t be indulging his post-election tantrum. It would be offensive to the voters they’re losing, and who they’ll need in the future. But they’re not, and so they have aligned themselves with Trump’s claims of theft — with profoundly dangerous consequences for America.

Trump is not in the White House, refusing to accept the results of the election, because America is polarized. He is there because of the Electoral College. Mitch McConnell is not favored to remain Senate majority leader because America is polarized. He is favored to remain Senate majority leader because the Senate is the most undemocratic legislative chamber in the Western world, and the only way Republicans seem to lose control is to lose successive landslide elections, as happened in 2006 and 2008.

In politics, as in any competition, the teams adopt the strategies the rules demand. America’s political parties are adopting the strategies that their very different electoral positions demand. That has made the Democratic Party a big-tent, center-left coalition that puts an emphasis on pluralistic outreach. And it has let the Republican Party adopt more extreme candidates, dangerous strategies, and unpopular agendas, because it can win most elections even while it’s losing most voters.

 

[gry60]

My Trump loving coworker keeps looking at the Google electoral map like the results are magically going to change.

 

[jville819]

My biggest fear is in 10 years joe rogan is going be the trump 2.0

or Dave portnoy

I’m going assume at least 1 of em is running for the GOP within the next 20 years

If Portnoy and Barstool ain't destroyed by that time

I think Ezra had an interview with this guy who wrote a book breaking down the Fox Trump feedback loop relationship and the possibilities of how the inevitable splinter would occur between them, It's going to be glorious either way. I'll see if I can find who it was