- cross-posted to:
- nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz
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lol. Okay, “young people.” If you don’t vote for Biden, you get Trump. And it won’t be the “burn it down and rebuild it” you think it will. It will be right-wing totalitarianism for the next hundred years.
I don’t like it any more than you do. But sometimes our choices are limited.
Well, in his defense, the burn it down part is true.
In all seriousness, he’s already caused damage that far outlasted his term. The Supreme Court, District court, and Appeals court appointments will affect them for decades. His environmental and industrial regulations repeals will take over a decade to reenact. His tax reform exploitatively widened the already oppressive wealth inequality. We may not fully recover from a second term in their lifetime.
That’s what everyone kept saying in 2016, but he didn’t destroy the oligarchy. He raided the coffers and shat in the well water. His destruction of the status quo was entirely self-serving, and he left in place all of the systems he could abuse to benefit himself at the expense of everyone else.
Few people realized how much damage he caused until after he left office. He created a noise screen in the news like a magician diverting your attention.
Proof in point: We’re still suffering from the lingerings of Reaganomics. Both Bushs caused their own shifts against a progressive society, often by throwing out things built up by the previous administration to improve things. Trump did a lot of things too, but the ironic one is where he dismantled the very things that GWB helped create to fight worldwide pandemics (credit to George there for reading a book, asking his advisors how true it was, and doing something).
All it takes is one Supreme Court nomination during Trump’s term and we’re fucked for that much longer. There’s a good chance Thomas dies in the next 4 years, do we really want 40 more years of some young right wing radical in that seat?
I think that’s what young people really don’t get. It’s not just 4 bad years (although even that argument is a pretty privileged thing to say).
Thomas won’t even have to die. If Trump wins you can be sure we’ll see at least 1 resignation and replacement. They aren’t going to make the same mistake that RBG made, especially since they’ve had their eye on the ball when it comes to packing the courts with conservative judges at every level for decades.
Everything is in place for Trump to perform an autocratic authoritarian takeover of America. People need to be mentally prepared to fight or flight.
A lot of people can’t understand 10 years in the future. Our animal inside wants now now now. Gotta store up for winter.
The problem with the Democrats is they are poorly selling the future, while the Republicans are “promising” the now, at the expense of the future.
Have we replaced all 3 of the democrats with younger ones so we don’t have another fucking nightmare from someone’s pride about their job?
He repealed 112 environmental regulations in one term and wrote a record 220 Executive Orders, without any familiarity with the job of holding office, and during a pandemic. Imagine how much more effective he’ll be at destroying our progress this time around.
This ^
Alito and Thomas are the two oldest on the court at 74 and 75 respectively. So there’s a good chance that whoever is elected in '24 gets a shot at replacing one or both of them.
DEFINITELY whoever is elected in '28.
So, for safety’s sake, we need a D win in BOTH '24 AND '28.
Replacing them flips the court from 6-3 Conservative to 5-4 Liberal.
BUT - then the next two oldest are Roberts, who would be the swing vote, and Sotomayor. Both 69 currently.
So in '28, they’ll be the same age as Alito and Thomas now. Likely to be replaced in either the '28 or '32 cycle.
If we get Trump, I’m fairly certain we won’t have another real national election again. It’ll be like Russia with massive “voter fraud” bills and EOs passed that completely neuter the ability to vote. The treasonous Project 2025 would gut the government and we’ll probably get that Schedule F bullshit that brings back the spoils system.
So while Biden is wonderful (he’s done a bunch of good stuff recently at least), Trump is so far down the fascist ladder there really isn’t any choice. I’m not excited to vote for Biden, I’m terrified of Trump being elected.
He had his chance to effect massive change, and he made everything he touched worse. His plan for healthcare was just “undo Obamacare” because everything was perfect before. I’m very glad he didn’t get a chance to touch that.
Burn everything down and rebuild is clearly not the panacea some folks wish. I get it, though. In 2016, most of the pro-Trump voters I knew self-identified as anarchists.
We have to fix this shit without burning it down. Too many people rely on things as they are (for good and ill) to enact dramatic change overnight.
Yes I know right?
Marriage equality? Who needs it.
Giving unions the biggest win/shot in the arm they’ve had in the last 50 to 75 years? Poppycock!
Eliminating non compete agreements for most Americans? For fucks sake we don’t like competing!
BIG / S ENERGY
I’ll be real. There was only one candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary that I disliked more than biden. And that was culty gabbard. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the last two presidential primaries. Biden is so far from perfect or what we really need. But has still been astonishingly good on so many things. Granted in our current state that’s a low bar. But I honestly struggle to think what Sanders could have done in a meaningful sense that Biden has not. I’m sure Sanders would have spoken out against the violence in Palestine sooner. It would still be happening exactly as it is now. But he would have spoken out sooner. So that is a plus.
But it really boggles the mind to try to comprehend how people can still be this uninformed. To think everything he touches turns to shit. No it just goes to prove the old adage. The left doesn’t need enemies with allies like the left.
If you don’t vote for Biden, you get Trump.
Thanks to our Constitution you get Trump even if you do vote for Biden.
Elaborate
I think they’re talking about popular vote vs electoral college.
In that case yes, fuck the electoral college.
Ok grampa, it just so happens that condescendingly blaming young voters for Biden’s piss poor policies while in office won’t be the get out the vote motivating factor you seem to think it will. If Biden wants votes, he needs to appeal to voters, not just donors.
I put it in quotes to mock the article, asshole.
I dislike doubting polls, but there’s just some odd stuff in here.
- 10% go for RFK Jr, and it’s equal siphoning from both parties? 10%?!
- 20% more people blame Biden for Roe being overturned than Trump?
- They’re TIED with Gen Z voters? TIED?!
- After the absolute thrashing that Republicans have received on abortion, only like 50% of women would break for Biden?
This is a poll of just the 5 key states, but this part of their methodology gives me significant pause as well: "To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. "
Emphasis mine. There could be a huge skew. And these results don’t make sense. The other NYT poll from several months ago was also incredibly unusual and had very weird findings – to the point that the Guardian wrote something was very fucky with the results.
This isn’t to say this can’t be what’s going on, but we need corroboration from other polling groups. And it isn’t summer yet, which makes polls rather inaccurate too.
TLDR: Something’s fucky, we need more information and to monitor this.
we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree
Oooooohhh
All of sudden it makes sense
Here’s their methodology page, with in addition to that fuckin fascinating tidbit you quoted, some other things of note:
- The New York Times/Siena College Poll is conducted by phone using live interviewers at call centers based in Florida, New York, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. Respondents are randomly selected from a national list of registered voters, and we call voters both on landlines and cellphones.
- In the end, fewer than 2 percent of the people our callers try to reach will respond. We try to keep our calls short — less than 15 minutes — because the longer the interview, the fewer people stay on the phone.
- We call more people who seem unlikely to respond, like those who don’t vote in every election.
- But the truth is that there’s no way to be absolutely sure that the people who respond to surveys are like demographically similar voters who don’t respond. It’s always possible that there’s some hidden variable, some extra dimension of nonresponse that we haven’t considered.
It is, indeed, always possible.
To be clear, polling theory is totally valid and an established science within statistics.
But the challenge is always with methodology, because you can never get a perfect simple random sample. And the methodology here certainly seems terrible.
Something fucky is going on. From the page:
If the 2024 presidential election were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were
Then it lists the usual suspects including third parties. The only age group for that question voting for Biden is 65 and older. Maybe so, but that doesn’t seem right.
I suspect that out of the 2% of people who answered the phone (and the smaller percentage that stayed on for the whole poll), there were some number of young people whose parents answered the phone and then answered all the poll questions for them, or something weird like that.
Maybe not. But in general, the whole methodology starts to look like a big pile of garbage the closer you look at it. It’s not surprising for some answers to come out of it that are very obviously wrong.
A lot of polls have been putting RFK Jr at 10+ percent. There are a ton of low-information voters who see the name and not much else
I mean that’s pretty dismissive.
The largest cohort of people in this country want neither Biden nor Trump. Some of that cohort are willing to step out on a limb and support a third party.
It’s really hard to support somebody like Kennedy when you know his actual positions, and that they’re driven by the fact that a worm ate part of his brain
I’d vote for the worm before I voted for Kennedy, but whomever you are trying to convince isn’t listening. If you want to convince people of something, you need to understand them and why they do what they do.
Clearly at least 10% of voters see having a complete brain as less of a deal breaker than being either Biden or Trump. We should be curious as to why that is.
I’m listening — and when you talk to people, a lot of them don’t know.
Huh. Well I’m willing to believe that’s reality then.
Not only putting RFK at 10%, but in states where he isn’t even on the ballot yet and likely will never be.
He’s on the ballot in WI and NV, which is enough that he has the potential to serve as a spoiler
If you’ve been following the polling there is nothing different or unique about this one. It’s consistent with pretty much all polling over the past 400 days. Biden is losing. Polling is definitely still broken, but it’s consistent. There is no fuckery.
Biden needs to be up by 4-12 in those states if he wants to win.
See my posts in !data_vizualisations@lemmy.world . I make a map of the offset in polling Biden needs to win a given state based on the fact that polls consistently overestimate how well Biden will do, and underestimate how well Trump will do.
When you see these poll numbers, you should subtract 4 for Biden, and add 8 for Trump. That was the offsets we observed from the 2020 election.
So keeping in mind data you already have about Trump, Biden, polling and it’s departure from real election results, it’s not even a question. Mortgage you house and out all your money on Trump to win. You have a differential polling error of 12 points in a Biden Trump head to head. Biden needs to be in the mid to high fifties across the board to have a chance.
He’s in the low forties.
If you don’t end up clicking the link: Relative polling error for Biden V Trump, 2020.
If you’ve been following the polling there is nothing different or unique about this one.
They posted their methodology and to me, as an unqualified lay person, it’s clearly shit, and there’s no reason to think it’ll yield anything even resembling an accurate picture of how people are going to vote in the election. It’s not surprising to me that recent polls in general tend to be as inaccurate as you’re saying they are.
I would be interested to go back and look at some of the polling that led up to recent special elections where Democrats won, and see how the poll results compared with the election results – if you follow polling in detail (which again, I don’t), do you happen to know where I could look to find that?
They posted their methodology and to me, as an unqualified lay person (…)
So like, if you know the above statement to be true, that’s exactly where you should stop in your reasoning. This is something that I find Americans to be guilty if constantly, which is to have the humility to understand that they shouldn’t have an opinion, and the proceed to arrogantly have the opinion they just acknowledged they shouldn’t have. I think it’s a deeply human thing, that we evolved to have to deal with missing information and so our brain fills in gaps and gives us convincing narratives. However, you have to resist the tendency when you know you really don’t know: and even more so when your beliefs go against what the data is.
If you can find me some sources of data on special elections, I’ll happily analyze it for you. I think it would be interesting if nothing else to see the offset. I’m not on my desktop machine, but I’ll give you some sources for data since you asked.
Surely as a qualified non lay person you’ll be able to do a detailed takedown of all the criticism I arrived at for the poll’s methodology from like 2 minutes of looking, instead of just making a broad assertion that if the polling was wrong by a certain amount in a previous year we should add that amount to this year’s polling to arrive at reality, and that’s all that’s needed and then this year’s corrected poll will always be accurate.
Because to me, that sounds initially plausible but then when you look at it for a little bit longer you say, oh wait hang on, if that was all that was needed the professional pollsters could just do that, and their answers would always be right. And you wouldn’t need to look closely at the methodology at all, just trust that “it’s a poll” means it’s automatically equal to every other poll (once you apply the magic correction factor.)
To me that sounds, on close scientific examination, like a bunch of crap once you think about it for a little bit. But what do I know. I’m unqualified. I’ll wait for you to educate me.
I think the right answer is to do what you described, in the aggregate. Don’t do it on a pollster to pollster basis, do it at the state level, across all polls. You don’t do this as a pollster because that isn’t really what you are trying to to model with a poll, and polls being wrong or uncertain is just a part of the game.
So it’s important to not conflate polling with the meta-analysis of polling.
I’m not so much interested in polls or polling but in being able to use them as a source of data to model outcomes that individually they may not be able to to predict. Ultimately a poll needs to be based on the data it samples from to be valid. If there is something fundamentally flawed in the assumptions that form the basis of this, there isn’t that much you can do to fix it with updates to methods.
the -4, 8 spread is the prior I’m walking into this election year with. That inspire of their pollsters best efforts to come up with a unbiased sample, they can’t predict the election outcome is fine. We can deal with that in the aggregate. This is very similar to Nate Silvers approach.
If there is something fundamentally flawed in the assumptions that form the basis of this, there isn’t that much you can do to fix it with updates to methods.
On this, we 100% agree.
This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing!
My only critique is that I don’t think 2020 skew is valid anymore. After Dobbs, the landscape seems to have significantly changed. 2022 was predicted to favor Republicans by a strong margin, but it ended up being a tie pretty much. And a lot of special elections have had surprising results too.
My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we’re getting a picture now that’s skewed right, versus left from beforehand.
It’s really hard to say though. There weren’t a lot of great polls to start with in 2022, and special elections don’t have significant polling either. It’s a weird position where the only good data set we have is from 2020, but there have been so many changes in the national environment that we have reason to doubt the skews from 2020 are still valid. But at the same time, what else do we have? Vibes and feelings and anecdotes. And the engineer in me dislikes dismissing data in favor of vibes. It’s important to consider still I think, because none of this is infallible. But I honestly couldn’t tell you what the “right” outlook to have is. Maybe I’m onto something, but maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement.
All I know is that I don’t know.
My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we’re getting a picture now that’s skewed right, versus left from beforehand.
I won’t say that you’re wrong about what the pollsters are doing – but to me this strikes me as very obviously the wrong way to do it.
If you find out your polls were wrong, and then instead of digging into detail as to what exactly went wrong, and then fixing the methodology going forward, using non-phone polls, doing a more accurate calculation to make sure you’re weighting the people who are going to vote and not the people who aren’t going to vote, things like that … you just make up a fudge factor for how wrong the polls were last time, and assume that if you just add that fudge factor in then you don’t have to fix all the things that went wrong on a more fundamental level, that seems guaranteed to keep being wrong for as long as you’re doing it.
Again I won’t say you’re wrong about how they’re going about it. (And, I’m not saying it’s necessarily easy to do or anything.) But I think you’ve accurately captured the flaw in just adding a fudge factor and then assuming you’ll be able to learn anything from the now-corrected-for-sure-until-next-time-when-we-add-in-how-wrong-we-were-this-time answers.
I mean if we’re stepping off the data into editorialism, Trump out performed all other Republicans in 2020, like he also did in 2016. As well, Trump endorsed candidates struggled in 2018, and 2022, and special elections. My read of this evidence and I’ve seen it suggested elsewhere, is that whatever property it is that causes Trump to consistently over perform isn’t transitive. So evaluating how well Trump will perform against how well Republicans are performing is misguided. You should evaluate candidates individually, and that would agree with their performance.
Also, this is one poll. The aggregate of polling agrees with this one poll. The minor methodological changes they make from year to year are infact extremely minor and they are doing the appropriate statistical accounting afaict. There is nothing weird or wonky about these polls: Biden is just performing very very poorly. I’ve been saying this for months to an onslaught of downvotes from people who simply don’t want to believe this to be the case.
Finally, I’ll argue that the ‘right’ outlook is always the one that aligns most closely with the data. We should believe stories we tell about data less than data itself. There is nothing to suggest that this election will really be anything that different than the 3 previous, and in terms of landscapes, the best proxy appears to be 2016 in terms of contested states. You should believe the data that is telling you that Joe Biden is losing this election. Biden has been setting up to lose the upper Midwest since December. These are the same states Hillary lost.
maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement
I agree. It’s also what the political pundit class did when they completely wiffed on 2016, and it’s what they’re doing right now. 90% of Lemmy also agrees with your sentiment, and in both Lemmy’s and the punditry’s refusal to be critical of Biden, to drag him towards more popular policies, they’re setting Trump up for victory.
Yeah I don’t see 10% of people voting for a guy who had a fucking worm somehow get into his brain, chew through part of his frontal lobe, and then die, and is still in there.
It’s definitely worrying as I sit here North of my American brothers and sisters, to see the sheer amount of “Yeah but Biden sucks”. Sure 100% agree, but you’re welcoming in Orange Hitler if you don’t vote, or vote Republican.
So definitely worrying sleeping beside this particular elephant.
The elephant will do damage to the whole fuckin world if he gets elected, including but not limited to wielding the military in a way that I bet will cause disasters we didn’t even really have on the radar as possibilities before they arrived.
So don’t worry. Being close up to the carnage probably won’t make it any worse, and being far away wouldn’t make it any safer.
including but not limited to wielding the military in a way that I bet will cause disasters we didn’t even really have on the radar as possibilities before they arrived.
Everyone who paid attention during 2020 and has read the Project 2025 plans should know that this will happen.
But it doesn’t even have to be malicious, though he will for sure be malicious, stupidity is enough. A million people died because Covid was so much worse here than it could’ve been, all because he was too petty to say “Put on a mask, save your country” which his base would’ve inevitably eaten up.
But no, his stupidity caused a million avoidable deaths.
A million so far
Exactly, even just his incompetence will hurt us for years to come.
40% of voters are Gen Z or Millenial…
Throw in Gen X and it’s the majority
I wish the DNC started treated them as the main chunk of Dem voters and not a bunch of spoiled children for wanting politicians that represent them instead of their grandparents
It should be comically easy to beat trump, but people just don’t like elderly neoliberals, because of their policies, actions, and often lack of actions.
Gen X does not vote with Gen Z and millennials. They tend to vote alongside the boomers. Therefore, we get Biden.
That is completely unbelievable and I would be very surprised to see a source instead of just an opinion that Genx are Biend supporters with boomers.
Hell, boomers don’t even vote for Biden, most of them go trump.
The Democratic party’s main base has always been the youth, but the party fucking hates them because their more liberal than someone 60 years older.
If the party embraced them, we’d never have another Republican president.
I looked at that article and it doesn’t seem at all related to your claim…
I voted for Clinton with a funeral dirge in my heart at an empty polling place. Then I voted for Biden.
I despise Neoliberals. I’m a socialist. If I can swallow my pride and volunteer to be fucked with no lube instead of being hit by a fascist freight train yet again, you can too.
That said, this country is over, Rejecting the Reagan giveaway was the last chance to begin righting this ship now halfway under water from decades of celebrated antisocial avarice made legal. I’m voting Biden to minimize needless cruelty and scapegoating of vulnerable groups as we collapse from capitalist greed rot and firesale. That is the extent of our vote’s power as our owners bought both parties on economic policy allegiance decades ago, so be kind with it.
We don’t need to collapse AND have our chosen Nero in the white house using their bully pulpit to blame it on everyone from undocumented immigrants to pregnant women to lgbtq, etc and getting them murdered in the streets for what Wall Street profiteers, safe in their guarded towers and luxury bunkers, have wrought.
The impending food shortages and mass homelessness crises will be bad enough.
I will vote as every serous socialist in America has since debs lost, as far left as can win. Every capitalist will bring the crisis of capitalism
Republicans in the courts and the legislation block anything that helps those key demographics the article talks about
“bIdEn IsN’t DoInG eNoUgH!!”
Kids need better civics education so they can keep their expectations of what our government is capable of as low as possible, that way they don’t feel like voting is useless and give up.
It would have been the easiest dunk of his life to go to Manchin or sinema’s districts and hold a rally for legislations that they are blocking and would have garnered support from younger people because he is actually trying and applying pressure. Not just making a statement and saying “owell I tried”.
You want Biden to go into ruby red districts where a dem-in-name-only got into power by the skin of their teeth, and campaign for Democratic policies, and you think those people will welcome him? You think it will be easy??
You’re in a bubble, dude. There’s no silent majority of progressives out there. Just because all of your friends are doesn’t mean the whole nation is.
Manchin got elected because he blocked Dem policies. Not in spite of it.
Then fuck Manchin. If you don’t want to play ball the dems should do everything in their power to make you toe the line. Run as a republican if you want to vote against dem policies.
He DID play ball. That’s why we keep him.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62328875
Manchin is better than a Republican because we can work with him sometimes. You don’t want him to be able to hold up bills? Don’t give us a bare bones Senate majority. Get more Dems in Congress.
Dems have a majority in the Senate but we need to “VoTe HaRder”. Nah you neolibs will come up with every excuse to be goo lite and cry and piss your pants when people don’t want your shitty crumbs anymore.
51-50 is enough to give Manchin and Sinema power.
55-45 would negate Manchin and Sinema.
60-40 would negate the GOP.
So, yes. Fucking vote harder. It matters.
Two things can be true.
The president is not, and should not, be an all-powerful individual.
If these idiots stay home he will be and they will be fucked with a capital F.
I agree the president is not, and should not be, all-powerful.
But he’s still a politician. He’s still, ostensibly, the leader of his party and his nation. If he can’t convince idiots to leave their homes and vote for him, he’s failing all of us. We’re not failing him. Idiots will always exist, and conservatives never have any trouble getting their idiots to the polls.
👏👏
Care to elaborate on what Biden can realistically do with the current congressional breakdown?
What he finally started kind of halfway doing and not sending the weapons and ammo.
The only things I have wanted since the beginning were: only send defensive munitions( Iron dome missiles) and get more aid in there.
If he would have clearly announced to the world his intentions to put one American soldier per aid truck and driven right through, either they wouldn’t have done shit, and the aid would have got through, or they would’ve pulled a USS liberty combined with a WCK and proved they weren’t our allies.
Either way, this war would be different.
Either we would have safe civilians.
The main thing I wanted from Israel was them to protect the civilians.
I said a long time ago that they could have done exactly what they are doing now, except the tents would have been maybe a kilometer into Israel.
It could have had fences and dead lines around it.
They could have setup a whole are with an, easy, efficient, and safe living area with food, bathing, electricity, medical stations and open live-streamed cameras everywhere.
The us would have fucking paid for those and then Israel could slowly let people in while vetting them carefully.
Would there still have been people that called them concentration camps? Oh fuck yeah, but they would have been easily countered by the livestreams.
Would some hummus members slip in? Yes, but there is only so much they could do in an area where they were searched with body scanners before they allowed in and that cameras are covering every square inch of.
It would have accomplished more, while gaining the Israelis international repute instead of the opposite.
I think there’s plenty he could be doing, but the common thread would be “making the case.” What he can accomplish and what he can fight for are different categories, and the fights he loses with the House can be the talking points downticket challengers use to unseat members of the House.
Only if the media covers it, and if the Tiktok generation pays attention. Which it’s not, and they’re not.
This is extremely concerning, not just because of the reality, but the reaction to this news. We should all be terrified, not because young people are too stupid to vote against Republicans, but because Democrats are blaming voters for their fuckups. This is the same fucking bullshit Hillary pulled in 2016, and it’s why she shat the bed so hard and left us with the Cheeto Mussolini.
IT’S THE CANDIDATE’S JOB TO WIN VOTES!!
Joe Biden isn’t a reluctant general lifted out of obscurity by the adoring masses. He wanted this job, fought really hard to get it, and now it is his responsibility to win reelection. And it’s really important that he does, because Trump was a terrible president and will be worse the second time around.
If you’re mad about this news story, you should direct your anger at the party and the candidate. Being mad at Gen Z for choosing not to fall in line is like being mad at drivers in traffic. Sure, if we all slow down and leave more space to avoid excessive braking, we can avoid a lot of traffic and have more time to sing kumbaya together. That’s not a productive avenue for fixing the problem.
Donald Trump is literally on trial for fraud. This shouldn’t even be close. If Biden can’t win in a landslide, it’s because Joe Biden sucks, not because the youth are entitled, bourgeois, ignorant, lazy, or any of the other insults being thrown around in this comment thread.
Counterpoint: If Biden can pass the biggest infrastructure bill since the New Deal, the biggest climate bill ever, erase tens of billions of dollars of student debt, pull us out of the pandemic economy without a major crash, put together a global coalition to help Ukraine fight against Russian imperialism, reschedule cannabis, etc., then I’m going to blame the stupid voters for not (a) recognizing his achievements and (b) not recognizing the threat that Trump and the Republicans pose to our democracy and the global climate.
Biden has a razor-thin majority in the Senate and has no control of the House. Trump has already personally appointed 33% of the SCOTUS, and has another 66% eating out of the palm of his hand. And people are going to hand our country to the Republicans again (even though they are openly speaking out against democracy every fucking day) because… why…? Because there isn’t peace in the middle east and somehow that’s Biden’s fault?
I’ll accept your premise at face value, let’s say he has accomplished a lot. Personally, I’d like to see him doing more, but let’s set that aside and say that his accomplishments would be enough to win the support of the progressive youths, and yet it hasn’t. The problem is still not with the “stupid” voters failing to recognize Biden’s achievements or the existential threat Trump represents. It’s still Biden’s job to sell it to the voters. It’s up to Biden and his campaign to put those issues front and center, to talk about what he’s trying to do and what his vision is for America. If he isn’t getting the message out, then he is failing at one of the critical aspects of his job.
But really, I don’t think the problem is messaging. I think the problem is that Biden isn’t the guy people want him to be. He’s a moderate neoliberal who backs progressive issues when he believes it will help him in the polls. I think he doesn’t put those issues front and center or push very hard or make persuasive arguments because he doesn’t want to piss off the center (or his donors).
Biden has a problem with the House. Why hasn’t he done more to push progressive candidates in downticket races? Biden has a problem with the court. Why isn’t he packing the court and working to eliminate corruption? We still have a massive infrastructure debt, catastrophic climate change, crippling economic inequality.
Yes, his half measures are better than the swift kick in the balls that comprises the Republican agenda. But he needs to recognize that he isn’t fighting hard enough to win the support of people who are looking down the barrel of extinction. That’s not hyperbole. My generation doesn’t expect to retire, and the next generation doesn’t expect humanity to survive. They’re not having kids because the future is that bleak.
Are they stupid? Sure, of course. Kids are often stupid. We were stupid. Our parents were stupid. If Biden is shocked that he has to convince stupid people to vote, then who’s really stupid? Sometimes you gotta make the airplane noise to get kids to eat their vegetables. Biden isn’t even trying, though. He’s blaming them, calling them anti-Semitic, and acting entitled to our votes.
He needs to win. You think it’s frustrating to see stupid people vote for a third party in protest? Imagine how frustrating it is to watch the Biden campaign drive young voters towards third parties.
If Biden is shocked that he has to convince stupid people to vote, then who’s really stupid? Sometimes you gotta make the airplane noise to get kids to eat their vegetables.
I like this bit in particular.
Biden isn’t even trying, though. He’s blaming them, calling them anti-Semitic, and acting entitled to our votes.
I don’t really blame Biden. He’s part of a giant political machine that has been shit at messaging since 1980. Democrats seem to be lead by the sort of try-hard, type-A, rule-follower nerds who were in Student Government in high school. They can’t relate to normal folks, and then resort to insults and guilt to get them to do something.
I believe, if I were an oligarch, I would want to craft an opposition party that looked and acted exactly the way Democrats have since Carter. I would push out progressives and independents, and I would back centrists and pragmatists who claim we can’t really have anything good unless we first settle for better.
The problem is that, for the first time possibly ever, that is precisely the situation we have. If Trump wins, we’re all of us fucked. Biden is the only man who ca possibly beat him.
And yes I can blame Biden for his failings. He’s been a politician for longer than I’ve been alive. He should be better at this.
I guess we can blame Biden. But it could be literally any Democrat in there doing the exact same thing because the political consultants they hire are so ridiculously out of touch.
Nope, but that was a nice try to trivialize the actual problems.
The problem is Biden sending American weapons, paid for with American tax money, to another country to use to indiscriminately kill civilians.
I’m not even going to claim that they want to kill all the gazans.
They were too loose with how they were using them. Too many civilians were being killed, 35,000 minus 15,000, using Israel’s terrorist death count, leaves 20,000 innocents killed in about 6-7 months
IT’S THE CANDIDATE’S JOB TO WIN VOTES!!
It’s the news media’s job to report the reality of what’s going on, not just filter people’s explicit-propaganda-created misunderstandings of what’s going on through the most slanted methodology they can possibly find and then report it back to us like a money fueled human-centipede machine, but what can you do. We all have bad days doing our jobs sometimes.
The news media is a for-profit industry with a fiduciary duty to shareholders to sell the news as a commodity. If you expect anything noble, moral, or objective, you’re being naive.
The news media is a for-profit industry with a fiduciary duty to shareholders to sell the news as a commodity.
Absolutely true, and it’s one of the major problems with it in this country, because that’s the wrong model for it, and it more or less can’t exist in any other form.
It’s one among many reasons I regard the OP article with some sadness and suspicion; because I do not expect anything moral or objective (let alone noble) to come out of the US news industry the majority of the time.
Well said!
If Biden can’t win in a landslide, it’s because Joe Biden sucks, not because the youth are entitled, bourgeois, ignorant, lazy, or any of the other insults being thrown around in this comment thread.
I don’t think “kids these days” are entitled, lazy or ignorant but to a degree both these types of things can be true. Biden is unappealing, yes, but everywhere I turn are people arguing that both parties are the same and that Democrats have done nothing for them. In these cases, when pressed it turns out they just don’t actually know one way or the other. It’s a generalized sentiment of “politicians bad” and many are surprised to learn of even a handful of things Dems and Biden have done that they support.
So I guess you could argue that Democrats suck at marketing. But I’d also argue that many of us suck at understanding politics.
A wise philosopher once said, “Peoples is peoples.”
Politicians need to win votes. Whinging about a lack of support in a key demographic just comes off as entitlement.
Do these voters have even a passing familiarity with Ronald McDonald and his plans for them?
They do not
New York Times doing its thing again
Presenting the poll results for registered voters, with candidates limited to Biden or Trump with no RFK involved, both of which are decisions which will swing things towards Trump and away from reality, is a decision that I’m hard pressed to explain any other way than that they’re looking for the worst numbers they can present.
It’s not even like the answers to the more accurate question were even any better for Biden. To me they look more or less the same (i.e. serious trouble for Biden). My only explanation is that a lot of these likely voters don’t know their ass from their elbow (e.g.
Oooooh
This is interesting.
Look at the question “What one issue is most important in deciding your vote this November?”
It leads off with:
- The economy (including jobs and the stock market)
- Inflation and the cost of living
- Abortion
- Immigration
- Crime
- Gun policies
… and then, way down below, is “The state of democracy/corruption” (with 6% still bucking the trend to vote for it), and “The Middle East/Israel/Palestinians” (2%).
Lo and behold, a whole lot of people voted for one of the first two options, and also tended to answer questions about how they felt about the economy overall, and whether they felt overall happy with how things were going, accordingly.
I would be interested to see how this poll was presented exactly (especially whether written or verbal, and what order for the questions), and what the numbers would be if there was a similar weight of questioning and emphasis given to “The state of democracy/corruption” as a major issue. Maybe the results would be the same. Maybe not. I’d be interested to see it.
(Edit: Someone else sussed it out better than I did; their methodology was actually much worse and more explicitly slanted than that.)
I know you’re not necessarily making this argument but you mention that the most important issue for voters includes…
and “The Middle East/Israel/Palestinians” (2%).
In Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin the margin in 2020 was less than 2%. Michigan and Nevada were under 3%.
It’s a small number, yes, but this argument that it “won’t matter because people vote on domestic issues” ignores these thin margins, imo. It really might matter more than people think.
I didn’t go into it at any length but I think the number of people who, in the actual election, will have the Gaza war impact the way they vote is way higher than 2%. About 13% of Democrats voted “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary, which presumably they wouldn’t have done because of crime, immigration, or whatever other “non-most-important” issues according to this poll.
I think hanging out on Lemmy can give you the impression that more people overall care about Palestine than the number that actually do. But the number definitely isn’t 2%. I’m not at all saying that the real number is 2% and so it doesn’t matter; I’m saying the number is definitely higher than 2% and so this poll is random-phone-number-calling-barking-questions-at-people uninformative garbage.
Gotcha! Definitely agree about Lemmy being an echo chamber for this type of stuff but I also doubt it’s only 2%. Michigan is a good example, even if it was 2% it doesn’t mean it’s equally spread across states.
Also it would be a bit of a mistake to assume only the “most important” issue would impact voting choice, or more importantly, the choice to not vote
Yeah. That whole massive list of “most important” issues which were apparently listed out verbally to people, over the phone, by a bored call center employee, and the list’s suspicious inclusion of multiple versions of “economic issues” with suspicious particular trigger words right at the beginning (where, purely by coincidence I’m sure, a lot of people decided their most important issues were), all form part of an overall picture of big parts of this poll not really meaning anything, let alone the foofaraw that the New York Times seems to want to make it into down to the resolution of individual percentage points.
I would be interested to see how this poll was presented exactly
Have you tried the article?
If that doesn’t answer your questions, it links to the poll questions and breakdowns…
But it seems like you just don’t believe in polls, which is weird because I honestly can’t remember presidential polling not getting in the margin of error of the real result.
This is the same shit that happened in 2016 and 202:
The polls say my favorite isn’t winning! Polls are lying! Everyone ignore the polls and act smug we’ll win!
If you’re somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder to do the only thing that can help him beat Trump:
Pull him to the left.
Or you could spend the run up to the election telling people not to listen to polls and instead…
I dunno? Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?
Pretend we’re ostriches and stick our heads in the sand? We won’t be able to see any warning signs but you’re gonna ignore them anyways. So sure, you go first and the rest of us will stick our heads in the sand right after you, promise.
Just you go first.
Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?
Other people in other threads have found more of the fucky things about this poll; it was a phone poll which 2% of people answered the phone for, which made no attempt to correct for “what ideological mentalities are likely to answer the phone to random numbers”, and then on top of that explicitly made adjustments like increasing the weight of non-college-educated people for some pretty dubious reason.
Polls sound great. The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp, and cause some deep soul searching for what went so wrong in the American system that we could be talking about electing Lex Luthor mayor and people are taking it seriously as an idea and it’s even a question of who is going to win the election. I think education and media are the main culprits. Concrete things Biden is doing are not unrelated, exactly (especially on aid for Israel), but they honestly don’t seem to make all that much difference, and a lot of people who are voicing concerns about him seem totally unaware of concrete things he’s been doing.
I’m by no means saying don’t be alarmed. I think we should be very alarmed. But yes, also, I think we should call out bullshit polls when they are as clearly bullshit as this one is (as part of examining the reasons why a respectable news outlet would even be reporting a close poll between Biden and Trump as anything other than the absolute looming catastrophe that it objectively is.)
If you’re somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder
That’s actually a really good point – I’ll try to come up with some concrete things I can do to help Biden win sometimes later today. I just went to verify that I’m registered to vote (I still am), and I think maybe a good thing politically overall would be a little informational thing about who to vote for in Congress. Presumably some little tool already exists that can tell if your congresspeople have been voting for aid for Israel, inform your voting accordingly instead of just blindly checking the D box, things like that, but I don’t know all that much about it.
IDK, I’ll see what I can come up with later on today if I have some time. It’s a good reminder that talking on the internet without some sort of action isn’t always a good investment of time.
The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp,
But…
It’s within 1 or points…
Unless… Are you ignoring everything but popular vote polls across the whole country?
If you’re doing that and not understanding why it’s a bad idea, then that explains why you think polls are bad, but you’re still wrong. Your just looking at polls that don’t matter because those are the ones you agree with
Me: Explains in detail what’s suspect about this specific poll, while still expressing overall alarm at the state of Biden being in trouble in the election
You:
You know what, I don’t even want to summarize it. This is why letting shills or bad faith people participate in the discussion in the first place is a bad idea. I could be using this time to talk with other people who are above-board about what they think, who read and respond to what’s actually said, instead of me investing even a single minute in writing up a message “actually that’s not what I said or even remotely close to it, and you’re just misrepresenting me to make a bizarrely slanted attack on Biden and his supporters, which is your job apparently.”
Feel free to read what I actually said, and respond to it, otherwise please piss off.
You know what, I don’t even want to summarize it
Instead you just did a straw man?
Lemmy is a small place man, the people who constantly rant against science if it doesn’t back up their opinions stick out. Especially when it’s a topic someone knows about like statistical analysis.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation…
That’s me, I love strawmen and said a whole bunch about what your argument even was, and I hate science. You got me.
Actually, if you wanna educate me on science and polling, can you answer this question? That’s one that I am genuinely curious about that I don’t know the answer to; maybe if you’re super up to speed on polling you might know.
This is the only question there:
I would be interested to go back and look at some of the polling that led up to recent special elections where Democrats won, and see how the poll results compared with the election results – if you follow polling in detail (which again, I don’t), do you happen to know where I could look to find that?
But yes, if you can tell me what race specifically, it would take two seconds to find a poll for you.
And I’m willing to do that if you can calm down with the insults and multiple replies if I don’t respond immediately.
It’s the work day homie, you gotta give people more than 5 minutes to respond before spamming them. But this is important, if there’s a chance you’ll start believing in science again, I can spend less than a minute googling something for you.
We live in the worst timeline.
Polls have been pretty much useless since 2019.
Also, I don’t trust the NYT as far as I can throw them.
They’re not useless, but they have an error that can be several points larger than the given margin of error. What this is telling is is that it’s a close election. And that’s a big deal
The system is old and ossified. No one on the left, save for progressives, seems interested in shaking things up. It’s too bad, I would have rather had a leftwing populist revolution. At least workers would get paid fairly…but this is backwards-ass America so, instead, we’ll get what we deserve.
Been looking bad for Biden for months now, I think his key mistake is waiting for the convention to start massively campaigning.
There’s no reason for him to be doing that badly in PA.
The president has little say on the laws that Congress passes. Vote for your local senators and representatives! The only way to realize change is to vote in your local elections!
It is local and state government that is important to making changes! Republicans have figured this out decades ago and have been gerrymandering and packing courts for decades.
The president can’t waive a magic wand and make any change he wants.
The president has little say on the laws that Congress passes.
Vetoes
Executive Orders
Judicial Appointments
Fundraising for Congressional Candidates
An Attorney General that can argue against legislation in federal courts
An enormous administrative bureaucracy that authors internal policy under broader federal mandates
A Vice President who breaks ties in a Senate split 48(D)/3(I)/49®
But other than that…
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it again and again; of course you don’t like the Democrat candidate; but you’ve got to swallow your damned medicine or the outcome will be exponentially worse.
Yeah, I voted for Hillary. I hate her so goddamn much. But you know who I hate more? The orange asshole. So I did what I had to do, I swallowed my anger and voted for the bitch. No protest vote, no skipping out on it, just sucking it up and doing what had to be done. If more people had followed my example, and the example of many others, we wouldn’t be rapidly watersliding dowe the lubed-up slope to outright, unapologetic fascism.
of course you don’t like the Democrat candidate; but you’ve got to swallow your damned medicine
Tincture of Mercury and a regular bloodletting will give us the strength we need to fight off the Trump Virus.
So I did what I had to do
You did, but when the Dem Party regained office in 2020 they didn’t.
Dems had an opportunity to give DC statehood in 2021. Two free senators, a house seat, and an easy 3 EC votes. This legislation was queued up and ready to go and the Dem majority just… didn’t do it. So now 660k Americans are once again going into 2024 fully disenfranchised, in an election when every vote counts.
This isn’t the only way in which the Dems sabotage their own success. But it can’t be ignored how a party that zealously backed guys like Henry Cuellar and Bob Menendez during primaries, long after they’d been outed as crooks and frauds, are the biggest threats to their own success. Never even mind the horrifying genocide in Palestine or the slavish devotion to fossil fuel subsidies or the shameless pandering to crypto-bros.
If more people had followed my example, and the example of many others, we wouldn’t be rapidly watersliding dowe the lubed-up slope to outright, unapologetic fascism.
Every election gives the fascist party larger voter turnout. This isn’t an issue of apathy, but of escalating tensions. Election turnout over the last six years has been reaching century-long highs but its a two-edged sword. Republican activists have been very successful in building up their own local majorities.
More people are following your example. Even in the face of gerrymandering. Even in the face of voter caging. Even in the face of shameless criminal-but-unprosecuted efforts at disenfranchisement.
But that includes conservatives. More and more of them, every year, as Trump drives an enthusiasm for the GOP I haven’t seen since Reagan.
