BTW what's happening with the USPS and reports of machines and boxes being removed and destroyed has to be criminal.
If I were an American I'd be absolutely furious about this. Sadly, unless the GOP suddenly grows a spine and puts a stop to Trump's corrupt bulls**t, there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
Voters will just have to make sure that they either get it in the mail quickly (like today), drop their ballots off themselves before election day, or just put on a hazmat suit and show up to vote in person.
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Working class white america doesnt care about coal mining anymore than the Kippers that voted for Brexit care about the fishing industry but its symbolic of an age they want to go back to and shysty right wing scum bags can and will harness that anger every chance they get
I will say that in this particular area they definitely care about coal. WV is huge with coal, tons of people who live in the Pittsburgh region and south have family in WV, many of who worked in coal, and many of those small WV towns have been dying slowly for decades as coal has died off. But the only way coal stays around is if you completely take away worker protections and go back to the days when mining was even more dangerous than it is now (which is still pretty dangerous). Coal just isn't as profitable as it once was, because there are so many other energy options. Coal is hard to get, it's dirty, it's dangerous. But all these people see are regulation killing coal, and Trump swears he'll bring it back.
That he says awful things about people, that he's a liar, that he's crass and rude, racist and sexist--they can overlook all of that stuff, as long as they have their guns and he brings back coal. It doesn't matter if other people suffer, as long as it makes life better for them.
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I think all of news media is in major need of reform. I don't watch fox news because I know what it is and despise it. But at the same time whether I turn to CBS or ABC or CNN or others, its news with spin, the media has become far too influential and powerful and they know it and take advantage of it.
News services don't report the news as much as they shape the news and slant the news.
I almost miss the days when channel 2 had the flow of text news.
I think there's a almost lack of critical thinking as our lives have become more rushed as well. We want people to almost tell us what to think.
There's an 'infotainment' aspect for sure and the 24hr news cycle has replaced news with punditry, where facts are interchanged with opinion.
i don't share the view that the other major outlets spin the news like Fox does however (though I admit i've never watched CNBC)...Fox is basically state run media (so long as the 'State' is Republican). CNN has been leaning towards slant the last 3 years, but i think that's a reaction to Trump more than anything else.
Unfortunately, Pandora's box is open, and i don't see things going backwards... Fox News made it's name on slinging mud at Clinton, and, like a junkie, when the spurious lies were not getting the same bang, they switched to the salacious and ultimately to flat out lies. When Tucker Carlson's show GAINS popularity despite the BS he spouts, in spite of some major advertisers pulling out, it tells you something about where the right is headed...
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Didn't Clinton win both the working class vote and the poor white vote?
Both the GOP and the progressives love to say that the Dems have lost the working class and the poor whites, but it really isn't particularly true. It's just a narrative that fits with their purposes.
The truth is the working class isn't a particularly unified voting block. Some of them vote AOC, some of them vote Trump.
Didn't Clinton win both the working class vote and the poor white vote?
Both the GOP and the progressives love to say that the Dems have lost the working class and the poor whites, but it really isn't particularly true. It's just a narrative that fits with their purposes.
The truth is the working class isn't a particularly unified voting block. Some of them vote AOC, some of them vote Trump.
Yes, this is a very difficult thing to measure and it depends on every voters personal situation. Usually it comes down to, are you better off now then you were four years ago personally. Not what the media or anyone else says.
One of the most dangerous things for a incumbent president or incumbent party is "more of the same". More of the same might be great for some and terrible for others. In 2016, there were people who had been unemployed for nearly two years, their 99 week unemployment benefits exhausted.
As witty said, the path to re-training is probably the better path long term, but not if you're 50 and not if you don't want to move. You live in a town where all anyone knows is to graduate high school and work in the mines or factories, generation after generation. That's a hard thing to break. And then they are called 'uneducated' on top of that, because a high school diploma is considered a failure these days. Hillary was more of the same, an Obama presidency without Obama and people had nothing to lose voting for Trump as he promised a lot. Now you can turn around and say, well, too bad, you need to move and you need to change, globalization isn't going to stop. And that's fine, but just remember, their wrong people's vote count too and they're more likely to vote our of anger.
But now Trump is the incumbent and he's is now promoting 'more of the same'. If you vote for me, you get more of this same great country, if you don't the country will go to ####. Again, is a voter better of now then they were 4 years ago? Did those umemployeds get jobs? Or are they suffering? Are people off food stamps because they got jobs or are they simply just kicked off of food stamps and dying. More of the same is double edged sword.
Itse, to me, the difference now and in 1992 is the liberal elites, The working suburban family. Clinton basically won on economics. Bush has broken a promise of not raising taxes and the Ross Perot took votes away on the right. But today, there is much more of a class divide. The suburban elites are driving the narrative, in universities and work places, that you have to be this exact certain way, this perfect citizen who is aware of everything good in the world. One false step and you're a racist or your a homophobe. The posts above are shocked where the right is going, the left, the mainstream left or the faux left, is going in a very dangerous direction of cancel culture as well. Watch how they treat anyone who even associate with someone on the right and they get fired or canceled.
This is not the world that laborers (using an old term) want to be in. Where they can't shoot this #### on a job site. Or a bunch of Mexicans are brought onto a work site and you can't even criticize them for fear of the race card. And it's not the Mexican workers fault, it's the woke management team who protects them. This is how the Democrats have lost the "blue-collar" working class. They are just fed up of having to be perfect all the time to an impossible standard, that change through no fault of their own.
__________________
Watching the Oilers defend is like watching fire engines frantically rushing to the wrong fire
It seems like the working class needs to be united against something to coalesce around an ideology. Trump gives them immigrants, while Bernie gives them corporate robber-barons; Yang offers automation; the GOP has traditionally offered "big government". The extent to which each of them has a point varies, but they all have at least a kernel of truth to them, enough to make them at least superficially plausible.
Each proposed "thing that's causing your problems" will resonate with a certain proportion of the working class, who will think to themselves, "yeah, they're right - that is the source of a lot of my problems - and this guy gets that! no one else seems to." Then they'll vote for him.
This isn't exactly a new strategy. Implicit in "workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains" is the notion that someone or something has been keeping them in chains.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
I will say that in this particular area they definitely care about coal. WV is huge with coal, tons of people who live in the Pittsburgh region and south have family in WV, many of who worked in coal, and many of those small WV towns have been dying slowly for decades as coal has died off. But the only way coal stays around is if you completely take away worker protections and go back to the days when mining was even more dangerous than it is now (which is still pretty dangerous). Coal just isn't as profitable as it once was, because there are so many other energy options. Coal is hard to get, it's dirty, it's dangerous. But all these people see are regulation killing coal, and Trump swears he'll bring it back.
That he says awful things about people, that he's a liar, that he's crass and rude, racist and sexist--they can overlook all of that stuff, as long as they have their guns and he brings back coal. It doesn't matter if other people suffer, as long as it makes life better for them.
You can get rid of all regulations and coal will still die. Utilities are responding to customer demand for them to move to carbon-free or carbon neutral forms of energy. For the most part when the Trump administration came in and started removing regulations utility companies didn’t shift their long term plans.
Yes, this is a very difficult thing to measure and it depends on every voters personal situation. Usually it comes down to, are you better off now then you were four years ago personally. Not what the media or anyone else says.
One of the most dangerous things for a incumbent president or incumbent party is "more of the same". More of the same might be great for some and terrible for others. In 2016, there were people who had been unemployed for nearly two years, their 99 week unemployment benefits exhausted.
As witty said, the path to re-training is probably the better path long term, but not if you're 50 and not if you don't want to move. You live in a town where all anyone knows is to graduate high school and work in the mines or factories, generation after generation. That's a hard thing to break. And then they are called 'uneducated' on top of that, because a high school diploma is considered a failure these days. Hillary was more of the same, an Obama presidency without Obama and people had nothing to lose voting for Trump as he promised a lot. Now you can turn around and say, well, too bad, you need to move and you need to change, globalization isn't going to stop. And that's fine, but just remember, their wrong people's vote count too and they're more likely to vote our of anger.
But now Trump is the incumbent and he's is now promoting 'more of the same'. If you vote for me, you get more of this same great country, if you don't the country will go to ####. Again, is a voter better of now then they were 4 years ago? Did those umemployeds get jobs? Or are they suffering? Are people off food stamps because they got jobs or are they simply just kicked off of food stamps and dying. More of the same is double edged sword.
Itse, to me, the difference now and in 1992 is the liberal elites, The working suburban family. Clinton basically won on economics. Bush has broken a promise of not raising taxes and the Ross Perot took votes away on the right. But today, there is much more of a class divide. The suburban elites are driving the narrative, in universities and work places, that you have to be this exact certain way, this perfect citizen who is aware of everything good in the world. One false step and you're a racist or your a homophobe. The posts above are shocked where the right is going, the left, the mainstream left or the faux left, is going in a very dangerous direction of cancel culture as well. Watch how they treat anyone who even associate with someone on the right and they get fired or canceled.
This is not the world that laborers (using an old term) want to be in. Where they can't shoot this #### on a job site. Or a bunch of Mexicans are brought onto a work site and you can't even criticize them for fear of the race card. And it's not the Mexican workers fault, it's the woke management team who protects them. This is how the Democrats have lost the "blue-collar" working class. They are just fed up of having to be perfect all the time to an impossible standard, that change through no fault of their own.
I don't deny your points, but I when I said Clinton, I meant Hillary.
(I'm not 100% sure if there was confusion there, just saying to make sure.)
People love to say the Dems have lost the working class and poor white people, but at least in the last presidential election that wasn't true, and it probably isn't true now.
It was just that Trump ALSO appealed to many working class people and poor whites. Hillary didn't lose among the working class, she just didn't win it enough. Trumps winning coalition was still mostly middle-class and upper middle-class.
People voted for Trump for very different reasons. Some voted for him because they support unlimited capitalism, some voted for him because he promised to stretch US muscles more radically than before (a promise in which Trump has failed so miserably that I don't really understand why the obvious collapse in US's international dominance isn't a major talking point... I guess the Americans just don't like to accept it?), some voted for him because of racism and/or xenophobia, some voted for him because he promised to bring back coal mines and traditional factory jobs etc, some voted for him because he was funny.
This is why the US election is such a complicated chess game. Pundits and experts love to spin stories about grand narratives and they love to say things like "the Dems didn't appeal to the blue collar voter", but those are always massive simplifications. People tend to vote because of things that matter to them personally.
So like Corsi said, campaigns need to have narratives, and yeah I would agree that many of those narratives are about pointing a finger at someone or something that is the problem and promising to fix it.
But I would add that a single narrative is not enough. You need to have several "grand narratives", each of which appeals to enough people.
Last edited by Itse; 08-16-2020 at 09:02 AM.
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The big thing for Trump is that allowing mail in voting would eliminate all of the roadblocks already put in place by the GOP to reduce the lower income and often, minority vote. It opens up voting to everyone and allows people who normally had challenges to vote due to reasons like inability to take time off to vote or far polling stations from their home when they rely on public transit.
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Trump planning a visit with Putin before the elections. Traitor in Chief!
Quote:
President Donald Trump has told aides he'd like to hold an in-person meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the November election, according to four people familiar with the discussions.
Administration officials have explored various times and locations for another Trump-Putin summit, including potentially next month in New York, these people said.
The goal of a summit would be for the two leaders to announce progress towards a new nuclear arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia, the people familiar with the discussions said. One option under consideration is for the two leaders to sign a blueprint for a way forward in negotiations on extending New START, a nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia that expires next year, three of the people familiar with the discussions said.
The goal of the summit would be to check out properties around Moscow and arrange diplomatic immunity in the event of Biden winning, no US translator at those meetings eh!!
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