Did Putin and Xi vote early? I’m betting they did. Will Trump allow their early mail-in votes to be counted? If he values, he has up to this point, his life he will. As for all the other mail-in votes, “f*ck ’em” is Trump’s motto.
Breaking News: Anonymous sources within the Trump Administration have indicated Trump will hold a press conference at 10:00am EST to announce his victory in the 2020 election before the polls have closed.
If you’re hoping for a Biden win, don’t listen to Bannon’s war room pandemic show, today. He’s claiming the Trump administration ginned up a massive ground game, while the Democrats cannibalized their in-person voting, due to covid fears, which they took a lead in exaggerating. The Democrats “have nobody on the ground”.
Well, thank God. All those Trump voters that store owners in NYC, and elsewhere, were afraid would loot their stores, will soon be pacified, if not rejoicing; so store owners can now start removing their plywood. We all know its the Republicans who were behind the rioting, this year, don’t we?
On the plus side, for Biden supporters, I finally saw a video, of recent vintage, where Biden had more than 100 people in the audience.
While Biden “does block the possibility of a good candidate for longer than Trump, since the presumptive next candidate is Kamala Harris” as I have said a few times here and Ian echoed yesterday. The ray of hope in a Biden victory is that Hillary’s faction of gilded-age-econs+neocolonialist represented by Harris will help R’s bring about an impeachment of Biden after the mid-terms in the hope of a 10 year presidency run by Hillary Inc. Since Hillary’s destructive nature has always generated failure at the national polls, the Biden presidency could be over as soon as 2024…
…assuming “liberals/lefties/Democrats” had even a whiff of FDRism left in them and then had the guts to primary then President Harris with somebody who wasn’t in cahoots [see Bernie Sanders] with the gilded-age-econs+neocolonialist that rule the DNC …no wait, I am laughing too hard..gotta stop. Real liberals/lefties/Democrats don’t exist in this country and if they did the “liberals/lefties/Democrats” on this blog would burn them at the stake.
The fact of the matter is, Biden is a Republican for all intents and purposes. A better Republican than Trump could ever hope to be. Trump is a party of one. The Narcissist Party.
Rickards is confident Trump will be reelected. He also believes Melania has been wonderful as a first lady. If vacuous is the measure by which Rickards judges Melania’s achievement, then I agree, Melania has been excellent as first lady. Rickards, like Michael Moore, predicted Trump’s win in 2016. Can lightning strike twice as the saying goes? We’ll see. This lightning is the equivalent of 50 megatons. If it strikes again, bye bye birdie.
If Trump hasn’t already, he needs to build a wall around the White House to keep the snowflakes from attacking. We all know how deadly those snowflakes can be.
When I was a kid people noticed things. And they remembered. Experts were experts and clowns were clowns.
Today there’s this guy on ESPN named Mel Kiper, who claims to be an expert at draft and talent analysis. He stands behind his controversial predictions going as far as proclaiming that he’ll retire if they don’t pan out exactly as he predicts. Sadly, he’s really bad at analysis and wrong all the time. Even more sad, he keeps his job. Apparently, it’s all about the entertainment value.
Today people will make their bad predictions, stand by them, be proven utterly wrong, then be back another day to make worse predictions, assuming nobody will notice or care. Maybe that’s half the fun, I dunno.
metamars, well but in the Dems’/media’s defense, they did their best to get word out, that communists are immune from the virus while politicking. But I guess they undercut that message by pushing vote-by-mail so hard. Too clever by half, I guess.
“The fact of the matter is, Biden is a Republican” – Plague Species
====================================
“Rather than making an empirical case that Biden being elected would be better for the country than Trump being re-elected, [Democrats] have resorted to empty hyperbole: “Protestations that Biden is beholden to elites are true but beside the point. The lesser evil is evil, but in this case, the greater evil is simply off the charts.”
How the difference in perpetration of evil between Trump and [Biden] a man with a 47-year career of war crimes and corrupt, bigoted, and ecologically catastrophic policies who, like Trump, has been credibly accused of rape is “off the charts” was not explained. It’s hard to imagine that Republican extremists such as John Kasich, John Negroponte, Bill Kristol, and Rick Snyder who have endorsed Biden do not consider him sufficiently evil for their tastes. More likely, the broad bipartisan coalition of members of the ruling class who have endorsed Biden consider him the “more effective evil.”
…voting for lesser evils in an attempt to stop evil has an extremely poor track record. Voting for Hindenburg did not stop Hitler and the Nazis, and voting for an alliance of republican and social democratic parties did not stop Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War…What matters most is the presence of a militant mass movement that refuses to sell out its principles to the lesser-evil flavor of the month.”
My prediction is that Biden will win and we’ll spend the next four to twelve years with our thumbs up our asses tinkering on the margins while the world gets worse and worse. I would honestly love to be proven wrong, though.
I went to pay my monthly bill at the residential co-op office where I live. Our polling place is around the side of the building.
I remember in the Obama vs. McCain election there was a line of a couple of hundred people or so waiting to vote when I went to vote. This time I saw a line of zero and only a few cars in the parking lot and no major traffic coming and going. I wonder if most of the people who were going to vote voted early and once like I did, to avoid any potential polling place excitement on election day.
I notice the “vote early” ballot was heavy paper with places to make an ink mark. A “legal paper ballot” as they say. Our election-day ballot-casting is on legal paper ballots which are then fed into opti-scan machines. But the first step in the trail of ballot-casted footprints is a mark in analog ink on analog paper.
If anyone voted early or mail-in in states where election-day voting is done on touch-screen machines, can they tell us if their early-voting ballot was “legal analog paper” for casting a ballot by making “legal analog marks” with “legal analog ink”?
FWIW: “The reason I say that I think Biden has a chance to be the most progressive president since FDR is that is exactly what Joe Biden said to me” –B. Sanders
It seems that Bernies only capability at this point is to play the good angel on the left shoulder of Biden, while the bad angel on his right shoulder does what it always does: whisper every possible lie, grift, temptation and threat imaginable.
Biden loses, its because people don’t want uncompensated lockdowns and blame the Democrats, that and they are sick of identity politics which are ironically racist.
In effect another giant fuck you to the establishment using a human Molotov Cocktail Troll in the form of Donald Trump.
Too early to call this and we won’t know till 1 in the morning, that said. Shaping up to be a Trump Victory.
I think the early vote favored Biden. These were people who were informed about Covid and took the time to find out and use an early voting option. They likely form a cushion that Trump simply can’t overcome. Trump also made some comments today that sounded like he knows the jig is up for him.
I voted for Biden, nor because I agree with him on very much of anything, but to honor my sister who hated Trump’s constant lying, his contempt of ordinary Americans, and the Trump brand of dishonesty. She didn’t get a chance to vote. So my vote this time around was for her, the vote she would have cast.
The whole article is worth reading but I snipped this:
“To pass signature legislation like Medicare-For-All, the left must establish a Senate majority. This means that somehow, rural red states have to elect senators who are willing to get behind these proposals.
The left hates thinking about this problem, because it requires acknowledging the limitations of its existing approach. The strategy that seems to work well in New York and California has no traction at all in Middle America. Proponents of the coastal strategy love to daydream about circumventing the problem. They indulge in idle fantasies of abolishing the Senate and electoral college, they delude themselves about demographic shifts, and they mock red state voters for choosing their cultural values over their economic interests. Of course, they never consider making cultural concessions to red state voters because they themselves care more about progressive cultural commitments than securing economic rights. They have the same priorities they mock.
A Republican who speaks to their economic needs without threatening their values would be more compelling than the establishment Republicans.
We know that Republican voters hate their party establishment. They voted for Donald Trump because they don’t like the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney types. Most Democratic voters still like Barack Obama, and many of them still like Hillary Clinton. They aren’t interested in voting for outsiders. They want to bring the insiders out to the red states. Red state Democrats get so excited when beltway insiders from the coasts visit the provinces. They like the liberal technocrats and view them as celebrity icons. They think Pete Buttigieg is cool because he speaks a bunch of languages and went to Harvard. Left-wing candidates need to win the voters who are mad at the elite. There are more of those voters in the Republican Party than there are in the Democratic Party.
Of course, this strategy requires left-wing candidates to be tolerant and understanding of conservative and Christian cultural perspectives. For many even the idea of this is a deal-breaker. But there’s nothing inherently hateful or bigoted about liking small towns and traditional families. And the traditional family is threatened by the economic policies of establishment Republicans. People in red states want to get married, buy a house, and have kids, and these things cost money, and the Republican establishment is making it harder and harder for them to get this stuff. It’s okay to be straight and monogamous. It’s okay to like church weddings. It’s no big deal. It’s okay to have these preferences and to want to live in a traditional way. In America we shouldn’t stop good citizens from doing things their own way.
If it’s more important to you to look down on these people, how badly do you want Medicare-For-All?
Presidential elections are bread and circuses for 21st century plebs. The endless hyping of this spectacle maintains the illusion that who you vote for significantly changes the trajectory the country is on. It doesn’t. As for Trump being worse than Hitler etc. I seem to remember prominent donor class Dems making it clear that if Sanders gets the nomination they will vote for Trump. Also, didn’t 2016 show that the Democratic Party is horribly corrupt and will even bring the kibosh down on its own candidate if he’s 1/8” to the left of the neoliberal centrists? That they’d rather lose with a neoliberal than win with a “socialist” aka an FDR social democrat?
Propaganda and social engineering works. Many “serious leftists” and even “anarchists” like Noam Chomsky bought into the Trump is the most evil dude ever myth (so vote blue no matter who). Plenty of people still buy the Russian/Chinese/Iranian “interference” BS even though not a shred of credible evidence has been provided. It’s not just rust belt deplorables that fall for partisan nonsense.
Politically active Americans across the spectrum have a difficult time accepting the system is broken and can’t be fixed by the same forces that broke it. So against all reason and evidence they cling to the fantasy that it matters who wins.
Left-leaking Democratic Party supporters are the worst suckers here. They get disrespected, spit on and ridiculed year in and year out and still faithfully come back and cast their vote for the latest abusive neoliberal huckster. At least Republicans make sure they get something out of their candidates.
There could never be a left-wing Tea Party-type protest movement because Dem supporting leftists always vote for whoever they are told to vote for and thus have zero leverage over their party and candidates. They are masochists who since 1980 have been told that they can “push” the Dem president to the left and yet every year they get worse and worse candidates. I mean Biden is a senile creep who is to the right of Reagan on most issues and considers Dick Cheney a great guy.
This guy Biden is your party’s answer to Trump and you’re gonna push him to the left? Yeah, good luck with that. Wait let me guess, from now on it’s going to be completely different and “real” leftists are soon going to control the Democratic Party. Bernie! AOC! Omar! Any day now they will rise to the top and bye bye corruption, Wall Street and neoliberal billionaire’s party! But the important thing right now is to get rid of Trump so vote for Biden. Am I right?
Here’s a fresh bucket of sand for you to stick your head into. Don’t mention it, it’s the least I can do.
I think Trump will win. Biden is a horrible candidate and Kamala only makes the ticket weaker. The pundits are out of touch with the average American. I never believed the polls that Biden would win by a significant margin. Trump is still hugely popular and amazingly has made inroads with black and Latino voters.
Wouldn’t surprise me if neither candidate reached 270 and the election went to the house where the GOP has some sort of numerical advantage and may give it to Trump. I always thought this election would be too close to call either way. The pollsters like 538 ought to just quit what they’re doing cause they are not reach enough typical Americans. Regardless of the outcome, it seems like Dogpatch USA came out in force for their Grand Wizard of the United States.
We are 50 different countries that are clearly out of touch with each other.
So Kamala would become President and Hillary VP. That alone would make a lot of people furious. Then the ladies would govern as economic neoliberals, which would ratchet up public outrage even more. Meanwhile Amy Conehead Barrett would inspire the Supremes to escalate their crimes against women and main street, helping life to get much worse for everyone even faster. When people were finally desperate enough to elect Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley they would be able to push women back to the 50s or worse with a stroke of the pen, what with public outrage against women at the pitch it would be at.
PMC women don’t have an electoral base beyond the confines of their own cohort. Thomas Frank pointed out that while the Hillary crowd treat the glass ceiling as the holy grail of feminism they are happy to yank the floor out from under working class women. To me a Harris/Clinton administration would look like an in-your-face fraud engineered to sidestep the fact that neither of them could get elected honestly. The backlash against this at the polls would be epic.
Also don’t forget (just because things can never be too crazy) that while Kamala and Hillary would be smirking and creating failed states at home and abroad, Trump would have his own show on Fox and even more time to spend on Twitter.
At least the Canadians and Europeans would reopen their countries to us under a Harris/Clinton administration, so escape would be possible again for a while.
McConnel and Graham won their races, flat broke and throwing everyone under the bus. Their opponents were Republican Lites and the Progressives said frack it, I’m out.
Trafalgar Polling is turning out to be on the money so far.
I did not vote. My locality instituted touchscreen voting with no credible means of audit after a long history of manipulation by means of shifting polling stations and crazy one-issue or one-candidate special elections. Democrats, of course.
Even as the system has become less responsive to the voters, it seems the ptb want the passionate cheerleading nonetheless. Do they imagine that confers a durable legitimacy? After years of Russiagate? Not to mention the ever more naked grift and corruption of Trump and his cronies or Biden’s family or the Clinton Foundation (“they are doing good work”, not that anyone could find any of it). One hypothesis is that the ptb want us to completely lose faith not in them, but in ourselves and each other: to despise people who would be so foolish as to vote for Trump/Biden/Sanders and expect a result or even a voice of integrity anywhere in the political firmament of pundits and politicians.
The ptb want the passionate cheerleading, because it’s effective propaganda. It’s the same reason all shows are “hit” shows in publicity, all leading sports figures have “iconic” moves, all concerts by leading musicians are sold out (even when most of the audience has been lured in by papering). How can you object to what’s going on, when everybody else agrees with each other that this is important? Rally on!
I wonder how many early/absentee voters voted early/absentee beCAUSE such votes are cast on legal paper ballots. Analog ink marks on analog pieces of analog paper strike some people as being less digifraudulent than hackable-by-deliberate-design digifraud voting systems.
How many people chose analog voting on analog pieces of analog paper for just exactly that reason?
Yes, I imagine that some people like to imagine mail-in voting is somehow more secure. Mail-in ballots are vulnerable to various kinds of misfeasance though.
Plague Species
Did Putin and Xi vote early? I’m betting they did. Will Trump allow their early mail-in votes to be counted? If he values, he has up to this point, his life he will. As for all the other mail-in votes, “f*ck ’em” is Trump’s motto.
Plague Species
Breaking News: Anonymous sources within the Trump Administration have indicated Trump will hold a press conference at 10:00am EST to announce his victory in the 2020 election before the polls have closed.
GlassHammer
My fellow Americans,
Try not to work yourself into a frenzy today.
After you vote, do what you would normally be doing on a Wednesday in November.
If you can, treat yourself to a nice lunch or dinner. You deserve it.
Cheers.
metamars
If you’re hoping for a Biden win, don’t listen to Bannon’s war room pandemic show, today. He’s claiming the Trump administration ginned up a massive ground game, while the Democrats cannibalized their in-person voting, due to covid fears, which they took a lead in exaggerating. The Democrats “have nobody on the ground”.
Well, thank God. All those Trump voters that store owners in NYC, and elsewhere, were afraid would loot their stores, will soon be pacified, if not rejoicing; so store owners can now start removing their plywood. We all know its the Republicans who were behind the rioting, this year, don’t we?
On the plus side, for Biden supporters, I finally saw a video, of recent vintage, where Biden had more than 100 people in the audience.
Robert Mcneilly
VOTE FOR PEDRO/s
S Brennan
While Biden “does block the possibility of a good candidate for longer than Trump, since the presumptive next candidate is Kamala Harris” as I have said a few times here and Ian echoed yesterday. The ray of hope in a Biden victory is that Hillary’s faction of gilded-age-econs+neocolonialist represented by Harris will help R’s bring about an impeachment of Biden after the mid-terms in the hope of a 10 year presidency run by Hillary Inc. Since Hillary’s destructive nature has always generated failure at the national polls, the Biden presidency could be over as soon as 2024…
…assuming “liberals/lefties/Democrats” had even a whiff of FDRism left in them and then had the guts to primary then President Harris with somebody who wasn’t in cahoots [see Bernie Sanders] with the gilded-age-econs+neocolonialist that rule the DNC …no wait, I am laughing too hard..gotta stop. Real liberals/lefties/Democrats don’t exist in this country and if they did the “liberals/lefties/Democrats” on this blog would burn them at the stake.
S Brennan
And whaddya know, I go over to MOA and what is b saying…same thing, albeit with a lot more detail:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/11/hunter-bidens-story-matters-especially-if-joe-biden-wins.html#more
Plague Species
The fact of the matter is, Biden is a Republican for all intents and purposes. A better Republican than Trump could ever hope to be. Trump is a party of one. The Narcissist Party.
Rickards is confident Trump will be reelected. He also believes Melania has been wonderful as a first lady. If vacuous is the measure by which Rickards judges Melania’s achievement, then I agree, Melania has been excellent as first lady. Rickards, like Michael Moore, predicted Trump’s win in 2016. Can lightning strike twice as the saying goes? We’ll see. This lightning is the equivalent of 50 megatons. If it strikes again, bye bye birdie.
If Trump hasn’t already, he needs to build a wall around the White House to keep the snowflakes from attacking. We all know how deadly those snowflakes can be.
Willy
When I was a kid people noticed things. And they remembered. Experts were experts and clowns were clowns.
Today there’s this guy on ESPN named Mel Kiper, who claims to be an expert at draft and talent analysis. He stands behind his controversial predictions going as far as proclaiming that he’ll retire if they don’t pan out exactly as he predicts. Sadly, he’s really bad at analysis and wrong all the time. Even more sad, he keeps his job. Apparently, it’s all about the entertainment value.
Today people will make their bad predictions, stand by them, be proven utterly wrong, then be back another day to make worse predictions, assuming nobody will notice or care. Maybe that’s half the fun, I dunno.
BlizzardOfOzzz
metamars, well but in the Dems’/media’s defense, they did their best to get word out, that communists are immune from the virus while politicking. But I guess they undercut that message by pushing vote-by-mail so hard. Too clever by half, I guess.
PS – ay-ay-ay, yo voy a votar / por Donald Trump! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTiNRYHlIkI
S Brennan
“The fact of the matter is, Biden is a Republican” – Plague Species
====================================
“Rather than making an empirical case that Biden being elected would be better for the country than Trump being re-elected, [Democrats] have resorted to empty hyperbole: “Protestations that Biden is beholden to elites are true but beside the point. The lesser evil is evil, but in this case, the greater evil is simply off the charts.”
How the difference in perpetration of evil between Trump and [Biden] a man with a 47-year career of war crimes and corrupt, bigoted, and ecologically catastrophic policies who, like Trump, has been credibly accused of rape is “off the charts” was not explained. It’s hard to imagine that Republican extremists such as John Kasich, John Negroponte, Bill Kristol, and Rick Snyder who have endorsed Biden do not consider him sufficiently evil for their tastes. More likely, the broad bipartisan coalition of members of the ruling class who have endorsed Biden consider him the “more effective evil.”
…voting for lesser evils in an attempt to stop evil has an extremely poor track record. Voting for Hindenburg did not stop Hitler and the Nazis, and voting for an alliance of republican and social democratic parties did not stop Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War…What matters most is the presence of a militant mass movement that refuses to sell out its principles to the lesser-evil flavor of the month.”
https://jeffmelton.medium.com/open-letter-battle-capitalism-in-and-out-of-the-voting-booth-88f287b01971
Chicago Clubs
>Today people will make their bad predictions
My prediction is that Biden will win and we’ll spend the next four to twelve years with our thumbs up our asses tinkering on the margins while the world gets worse and worse. I would honestly love to be proven wrong, though.
kråke
Stood in a voting line for the first time in my life. Same day voter registration line was crazy long.
different clue
I went to pay my monthly bill at the residential co-op office where I live. Our polling place is around the side of the building.
I remember in the Obama vs. McCain election there was a line of a couple of hundred people or so waiting to vote when I went to vote. This time I saw a line of zero and only a few cars in the parking lot and no major traffic coming and going. I wonder if most of the people who were going to vote voted early and once like I did, to avoid any potential polling place excitement on election day.
I notice the “vote early” ballot was heavy paper with places to make an ink mark. A “legal paper ballot” as they say. Our election-day ballot-casting is on legal paper ballots which are then fed into opti-scan machines. But the first step in the trail of ballot-casted footprints is a mark in analog ink on analog paper.
If anyone voted early or mail-in in states where election-day voting is done on touch-screen machines, can they tell us if their early-voting ballot was “legal analog paper” for casting a ballot by making “legal analog marks” with “legal analog ink”?
Willy
FWIW:
“The reason I say that I think Biden has a chance to be the most progressive president since FDR is that is exactly what Joe Biden said to me” –B. Sanders
This seems reasonable:
All Left Hands on Deck. Step 1: Defeat Trump. Step 2: Challenge Biden.
https://www.laprogressive.com/beat-trump-push-biden/
It seems that Bernies only capability at this point is to play the good angel on the left shoulder of Biden, while the bad angel on his right shoulder does what it always does: whisper every possible lie, grift, temptation and threat imaginable.
Thomas Golladay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep3LJiPXva8&ab_channel=Dr.SteveTurley
Its too late to rush people to the polls now.
Biden loses, its because people don’t want uncompensated lockdowns and blame the Democrats, that and they are sick of identity politics which are ironically racist.
In effect another giant fuck you to the establishment using a human Molotov Cocktail Troll in the form of Donald Trump.
Too early to call this and we won’t know till 1 in the morning, that said. Shaping up to be a Trump Victory.
Hugh
I think the early vote favored Biden. These were people who were informed about Covid and took the time to find out and use an early voting option. They likely form a cushion that Trump simply can’t overcome. Trump also made some comments today that sounded like he knows the jig is up for him.
I voted for Biden, nor because I agree with him on very much of anything, but to honor my sister who hated Trump’s constant lying, his contempt of ordinary Americans, and the Trump brand of dishonesty. She didn’t get a chance to vote. So my vote this time around was for her, the vote she would have cast.
S Brennan
The whole article is worth reading but I snipped this:
“To pass signature legislation like Medicare-For-All, the left must establish a Senate majority. This means that somehow, rural red states have to elect senators who are willing to get behind these proposals.
The left hates thinking about this problem, because it requires acknowledging the limitations of its existing approach. The strategy that seems to work well in New York and California has no traction at all in Middle America. Proponents of the coastal strategy love to daydream about circumventing the problem. They indulge in idle fantasies of abolishing the Senate and electoral college, they delude themselves about demographic shifts, and they mock red state voters for choosing their cultural values over their economic interests. Of course, they never consider making cultural concessions to red state voters because they themselves care more about progressive cultural commitments than securing economic rights. They have the same priorities they mock.
A Republican who speaks to their economic needs without threatening their values would be more compelling than the establishment Republicans.
We know that Republican voters hate their party establishment. They voted for Donald Trump because they don’t like the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney types. Most Democratic voters still like Barack Obama, and many of them still like Hillary Clinton. They aren’t interested in voting for outsiders. They want to bring the insiders out to the red states. Red state Democrats get so excited when beltway insiders from the coasts visit the provinces. They like the liberal technocrats and view them as celebrity icons. They think Pete Buttigieg is cool because he speaks a bunch of languages and went to Harvard. Left-wing candidates need to win the voters who are mad at the elite. There are more of those voters in the Republican Party than there are in the Democratic Party.
Of course, this strategy requires left-wing candidates to be tolerant and understanding of conservative and Christian cultural perspectives. For many even the idea of this is a deal-breaker. But there’s nothing inherently hateful or bigoted about liking small towns and traditional families. And the traditional family is threatened by the economic policies of establishment Republicans. People in red states want to get married, buy a house, and have kids, and these things cost money, and the Republican establishment is making it harder and harder for them to get this stuff. It’s okay to be straight and monogamous. It’s okay to like church weddings. It’s no big deal. It’s okay to have these preferences and to want to live in a traditional way. In America we shouldn’t stop good citizens from doing things their own way.
If it’s more important to you to look down on these people, how badly do you want Medicare-For-All?
https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2020/10/28/a-realistic-left-wing-strategy-for-red-states/#more-5203
Temporarily Sane
Presidential elections are bread and circuses for 21st century plebs. The endless hyping of this spectacle maintains the illusion that who you vote for significantly changes the trajectory the country is on. It doesn’t. As for Trump being worse than Hitler etc. I seem to remember prominent donor class Dems making it clear that if Sanders gets the nomination they will vote for Trump. Also, didn’t 2016 show that the Democratic Party is horribly corrupt and will even bring the kibosh down on its own candidate if he’s 1/8” to the left of the neoliberal centrists? That they’d rather lose with a neoliberal than win with a “socialist” aka an FDR social democrat?
Propaganda and social engineering works. Many “serious leftists” and even “anarchists” like Noam Chomsky bought into the Trump is the most evil dude ever myth (so vote blue no matter who). Plenty of people still buy the Russian/Chinese/Iranian “interference” BS even though not a shred of credible evidence has been provided. It’s not just rust belt deplorables that fall for partisan nonsense.
Politically active Americans across the spectrum have a difficult time accepting the system is broken and can’t be fixed by the same forces that broke it. So against all reason and evidence they cling to the fantasy that it matters who wins.
Left-leaking Democratic Party supporters are the worst suckers here. They get disrespected, spit on and ridiculed year in and year out and still faithfully come back and cast their vote for the latest abusive neoliberal huckster. At least Republicans make sure they get something out of their candidates.
There could never be a left-wing Tea Party-type protest movement because Dem supporting leftists always vote for whoever they are told to vote for and thus have zero leverage over their party and candidates. They are masochists who since 1980 have been told that they can “push” the Dem president to the left and yet every year they get worse and worse candidates. I mean Biden is a senile creep who is to the right of Reagan on most issues and considers Dick Cheney a great guy.
This guy Biden is your party’s answer to Trump and you’re gonna push him to the left? Yeah, good luck with that. Wait let me guess, from now on it’s going to be completely different and “real” leftists are soon going to control the Democratic Party. Bernie! AOC! Omar! Any day now they will rise to the top and bye bye corruption, Wall Street and neoliberal billionaire’s party! But the important thing right now is to get rid of Trump so vote for Biden. Am I right?
Here’s a fresh bucket of sand for you to stick your head into. Don’t mention it, it’s the least I can do.
Thomas Golladay
Hmm, Virginia will depend on the mail-in ballots.
If Trump can challenge enough of them, he takes the state as an offset to a potential loss of Ohio.
anon
I think Trump will win. Biden is a horrible candidate and Kamala only makes the ticket weaker. The pundits are out of touch with the average American. I never believed the polls that Biden would win by a significant margin. Trump is still hugely popular and amazingly has made inroads with black and Latino voters.
Seattle Resident
Wouldn’t surprise me if neither candidate reached 270 and the election went to the house where the GOP has some sort of numerical advantage and may give it to Trump. I always thought this election would be too close to call either way. The pollsters like 538 ought to just quit what they’re doing cause they are not reach enough typical Americans. Regardless of the outcome, it seems like Dogpatch USA came out in force for their Grand Wizard of the United States.
We are 50 different countries that are clearly out of touch with each other.
someofparts
S Brennan – that link from MoA … wow
So Kamala would become President and Hillary VP. That alone would make a lot of people furious. Then the ladies would govern as economic neoliberals, which would ratchet up public outrage even more. Meanwhile Amy Conehead Barrett would inspire the Supremes to escalate their crimes against women and main street, helping life to get much worse for everyone even faster. When people were finally desperate enough to elect Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley they would be able to push women back to the 50s or worse with a stroke of the pen, what with public outrage against women at the pitch it would be at.
PMC women don’t have an electoral base beyond the confines of their own cohort. Thomas Frank pointed out that while the Hillary crowd treat the glass ceiling as the holy grail of feminism they are happy to yank the floor out from under working class women. To me a Harris/Clinton administration would look like an in-your-face fraud engineered to sidestep the fact that neither of them could get elected honestly. The backlash against this at the polls would be epic.
Also don’t forget (just because things can never be too crazy) that while Kamala and Hillary would be smirking and creating failed states at home and abroad, Trump would have his own show on Fox and even more time to spend on Twitter.
At least the Canadians and Europeans would reopen their countries to us under a Harris/Clinton administration, so escape would be possible again for a while.
Thomas Golladay
McConnel and Graham won their races, flat broke and throwing everyone under the bus. Their opponents were Republican Lites and the Progressives said frack it, I’m out.
Trafalgar Polling is turning out to be on the money so far.
bruce wilder
I wonder what voter turnout will turn out to be.
I did not vote. My locality instituted touchscreen voting with no credible means of audit after a long history of manipulation by means of shifting polling stations and crazy one-issue or one-candidate special elections. Democrats, of course.
Even as the system has become less responsive to the voters, it seems the ptb want the passionate cheerleading nonetheless. Do they imagine that confers a durable legitimacy? After years of Russiagate? Not to mention the ever more naked grift and corruption of Trump and his cronies or Biden’s family or the Clinton Foundation (“they are doing good work”, not that anyone could find any of it). One hypothesis is that the ptb want us to completely lose faith not in them, but in ourselves and each other: to despise people who would be so foolish as to vote for Trump/Biden/Sanders and expect a result or even a voice of integrity anywhere in the political firmament of pundits and politicians.
nihil obstet
The ptb want the passionate cheerleading, because it’s effective propaganda. It’s the same reason all shows are “hit” shows in publicity, all leading sports figures have “iconic” moves, all concerts by leading musicians are sold out (even when most of the audience has been lured in by papering). How can you object to what’s going on, when everybody else agrees with each other that this is important? Rally on!
different clue
@bruce wilder,
I wonder how many early/absentee voters voted early/absentee beCAUSE such votes are cast on legal paper ballots. Analog ink marks on analog pieces of analog paper strike some people as being less digifraudulent than hackable-by-deliberate-design digifraud voting systems.
How many people chose analog voting on analog pieces of analog paper for just exactly that reason?
bruce wilder
@dc
Yes, I imagine that some people like to imagine mail-in voting is somehow more secure. Mail-in ballots are vulnerable to various kinds of misfeasance though.