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Forums - Politics Discussion - Official 2020 US Election: Democratic Party Discussion

Bofferbrauer2 said:
Jaicee said:

Updated Real Clear Politics polling averages for the last five major polls (all since the last average I posted):

Biden: 29.3%
Sanders: 15%
Warren: 14.5%
Harris: 10%
Buttigieg: 5%

(Do we really even need to keep track of those below 3%?)

Bottom line: the national situation has substantially reverted back to its pre-debate situation. That worries me. I mean in the sense of Biden seeming to be a teflon candidate.

Yeah, I can see that also with the Morning Consult results, where he again won a point this week (from Sanders). At the same time, Harris is dropping again in most polls.

Do American voters have such a short memory span that the first debate is already fading away?

Well, events have short term effects and long term effects. Every campaign announcement was followed by a boost for said candidate, which afterwards faded away. Similarly with the debate effects: the short term effect of the emotional impression the debate made is fading.

Still, this has long term effects. It has moved the fallback base opinion people have a bit for well known candidates and have given them a first fallback base opinion about lesser known candidates.

So I see two long-term effects. Before the debates most people only knew about Biden and Sanders. So they tended to give either one their vote, because you usually avoid the unknown. Now then they start to have a base opinion on formerly lesser known candidates, they become an option, but that doesn't mean they change their first vote immediately. If the candidate with their first vote makes stumbles, some might be persuaded to switch to a second option. But this is impossible if no second option is known. So this already helps, that people know about their options through the debates.

The second is, that one single event like a debate, doesn't change the opinion on candidates completely. But it may chip away and transform the internal image you have. This takes time. So people are bouncing back to Biden, but not all of them. If something happens next, he will lose or win support (depending on what happens) that stays too. This effects adds up over time.



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Jaicee said:

Bottom line: the national situation has substantially reverted back to its pre-debate situation. That worries me. I mean in the sense of Biden seeming to be a teflon candidate.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Yeah, I can see that also with the Morning Consult results, where he again won a point this week (from Sanders). At the same time, Harris is dropping again in most polls.

Do American voters have such a short memory span that the first debate is already fading away?

Oh, just saw that Nate Silver wrote an article abut this effect:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/harriss-debate-bounce-is-fading/



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https://thehill.com/policy/technology/454746-tulsi-gabbard-sues-google-over-censorship-claims

I haven't seen this news posted yet in this thread. I'm far from a fan of Gabbard, but you have to admit the timing of Google's actions is very fishy, and if they are indeed trying to influence things in that way, I'm not okay with it. Essentially, the accusation is that Gabbard's search ad account was shut down in the hours after the first debate, and that Google's claims that this was automated are false and that actually this is a result of them deliberately meddling so as to influence the election.

The article makes comparisons between Gabbard's claims and conservative claims of Google bias and censorship, but while Gabbard is using the same "free speech" rhetoric, the core accusation is different from and more coherent than the claims of certain conservatives. As such, I don't think the article's comparisons to conservative complaints are valid. Tech companies do have undue influence due to their positions as platform owners of platforms that are monopoly marketshare holders in their respective domains of the industry. While I wouldn't categorize it as a threat to free speech per se, this phenomenon does give unfair control of public discourse to private companies, and something needs to be done about this.



I'm not a progressive so I'd prefer a more Moderate Obama esque candidate. Of Yang, Buttigieg, Harris, Biden, Beto and some of the minor moderate candidates win then I'll most likely vote for them in the general. I just can't see myself voting for Bernie, Warren, Gillibrand, and Gabbard.



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the-pi-guy said:
I really hope other candidates start pulling ahead of Biden.

I would prefer a more progressive candidate like Sanders/Warren. Hopefully when things start clamping down, that we see more votes go towards one of them.

I also worry about the baggage that comes with Biden.

Yeah, people don't get that about the baggage. Biden has baggage, and while Trump has baggage too, it doesn't matter for him, because what is baggage for a Democrat isn't baggage for a Republican. That means Trump will be able to exploit Biden's baggage to discourage his potential voters from voting for him. They likely won't vote for Trump, but they might be discouraged into not voting at all. That's how Trump beat Clinton. Not many people were so mad at the Dems for screwing Bernie that they'd actually vote for Trump. But when Trump said that Bernie got screwed, and that this means the Dems were corrupt, and that Bernie was a sellout loser for endorsing the woman who cheated him out of the nomination, that got through to a lot more people, and while they didn't usually vote Trump, it often discouraged them from voting Clinton. While the specifics would be different this time, Trump would be able to do it again with Biden. He could call Biden Creepy Joe or something and harp on some of his creepy with women baggage, and even though Trump is almost certainly a straight up rapist and an admitted sexual assaulter, and thus it'd be crazy hypocritical of him, that hypocrisy wouldn't hurt him with his base because his base has already decided not to believe or care about anything bad about him and vote for him anyway. Meanwhile, Biden's base is made of of Democrats, who do hold their own candidates to certain standards, and don't hide from reality, and thus could be discouraged from voting for him.

This is why Don is teflon. His entire coalition is made up of voters who won't ever care what he does, who he couldn't turn away from him even by publicly murdering someone. It's also why no Democrat is teflon, or at least not nearly as teflon as Trump is. Democratic voters have principles to which they hold candidates to as a standard, Republicans only standards for their candidates are the degree to which they uphold a tribalistic, almost religion-like brand. There are tribalistic thinkers on the Dem side too, and those voters tend to be Biden voters, which is why Biden seems like teflon compared to the other candidates. However, that teflonesque nature won't hold up in the general, because Trump is a whole other level of teflon from Biden, not at all due to any individual characteristic of either candidate, but rather to the characteristics of their voter bases. Trump is teflon to his entire coalition of voters, because his entire coalition of voters thinks tribally. Biden is teflon to a small subset of Democrats, because only a small subset of Democratic voters think tribally to the degree that Republicans do. This is why the electability argument for Biden is just wrong, and is a recipe for a repeat of 2016.



jason1637 said:
I'm not a progressive so I'd prefer a more Moderate Obama esque candidate. Of Yang, Buttigieg, Harris, Biden, Beto and some of the minor moderate candidates win then I'll most likely vote for them in the general. I just can't see myself voting for Bernie, Warren, Gillibrand, and Gabbard.

I wouldn't even talk about progressive vs. moderate with you though. Yang's UBI idea is more progressive than anything Bernie has to offer. Yet you like him anyway. And if UBI can work, than so can Medicare For All. I think some part of you knows this. What you don't like about "progressives" that you think "moderates" are better on is the identity politics issue. Face it, that's why Yang appeals to you so much when he has the most expensive, revolutionary, decidedly un-moderate plan of the entire group. He has myriad other plans as well, many of them not moderate at all. Yet you like him anyway, he's the most interesting to you. That's because he finds ways to make big ideas be about everyone, and doesn't focus on just helping one group or another with their problems. The very nature of UBI would mean that everyone would pay in, and everyone would get out, of the UBI program. Sure, what they get out wouldn't make a difference to a rich man, while it would make a world of difference to a poor man, but that's not the point. Everybody helps as best they can to support the system, and everybody gets out of it, so that everybody feels involved, and everybody knows that when the chips are down and they're counting on the system, the system has their back. Yang has tons of appeal to Trump voters and progressive voters alike, and to the best I'm able to figure out, that is why.



HylianSwordsman said:
jason1637 said:
I'm not a progressive so I'd prefer a more Moderate Obama esque candidate. Of Yang, Buttigieg, Harris, Biden, Beto and some of the minor moderate candidates win then I'll most likely vote for them in the general. I just can't see myself voting for Bernie, Warren, Gillibrand, and Gabbard.

I wouldn't even talk about progressive vs. moderate with you though. Yang's UBI idea is more progressive than anything Bernie has to offer. Yet you like him anyway. And if UBI can work, than so can Medicare For All. I think some part of you knows this. What you don't like about "progressives" that you think "moderates" are better on is the identity politics issue. Face it, that's why Yang appeals to you so much when he has the most expensive, revolutionary, decidedly un-moderate plan of the entire group. He has myriad other plans as well, many of them not moderate at all. Yet you like him anyway, he's the most interesting to you. That's because he finds ways to make big ideas be about everyone, and doesn't focus on just helping one group or another with their problems. The very nature of UBI would mean that everyone would pay in, and everyone would get out, of the UBI program. Sure, what they get out wouldn't make a difference to a rich man, while it would make a world of difference to a poor man, but that's not the point. Everybody helps as best they can to support the system, and everybody gets out of it, so that everybody feels involved, and everybody knows that when the chips are down and they're counting on the system, the system has their back. Yang has tons of appeal to Trump voters and progressive voters alike, and to the best I'm able to figure out, that is why.

Eh i think UBI is a good idea because it's going to be needed in the future and he has other plans for automation also. Currently im college i'm taking some accounting and business classes and accounting is going to be an industry that will suffer from automation and ai so i'm kinda worried and Yang wants to address that. Also you don't need to be progressive to support UBI. It's implemented in Alaska and the Nixon administration got their UBI plan passed in the house twice.

As for identity politics I don't really pay much attention to that. I'm like 1/4th japanese to it would be nice to have an Asian president but I wouldn't support someone because of their race. But I do like how his campaign has not been focused on only one demographic or policies that benefit a certain demographic like other candidate have.



It's a little interesting seeing the difference in the US perspective as to what is "odd" in terms of politics. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kristen Gillibrand are in touch with the political positions of mainstream Western Civilization. It's the more neo-liberal types who are trying to push for laissez-faire unregulated markets that are the odd ones: this is the policy to establish third-world style corporate imperialism and its predecessors (as it has been since the dawn of modern Imperialism, over five hundred years ago). The Western identity established in the enlightenment was when governments became representatives of the people, not of business models and nobles/merchant castes. Neoliberalism and neoliberal politicians are out of sync with Western Civilization. Nothing Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Kristen Gillibrand are proposing are odd, even as far as the US goes: Bernie Sanders is not going outside of the parameters of the 1940s-1970s economic policies aside from universal healthcare, which is commonplace in the West. Even Canada, which is right next door to the US, has universal healthcare (for like 50 years) and serves everyone despite the fact that there is a GIANT greed-based market sucking up its doctors existing just beside them; something a universal healthcare system in the US would not even have to contend with.

To me, the big oddballs are Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang. Marianne Williamson seems to be heavily interested in fulfilling the unfinished US Revolution; Andrew Yang wants UBI. These are still somewhat radical ideas as far as Western civilization goes, even though the US revolution began something like 250 years ago. It is one of the most progressive leftist movements of all time, a product of enlightenment thinking which we still have yet to see fully envisioned: and aims further than most European nations even dared to strive for as a whole... I shouldn't even be trying to articulate this, go listen to Christopher Hitchens about it.

Anyway, speaking of Yang and Williamson, they have an interesting ~45 minute conversation (admittedly, I only just started listening to).

Note: the audio isn't well balanced and Williamson is in a room with really bad acoustics; that plus the fact that she has a cold. My apologies.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 26 July 2019

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