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Posts posted by wildcat09
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14 minutes ago, G650 said:
Â
I really want to know what fucking planet these people live on that they were shocked by any of this. I mean, I know it's true, I just can't conceive of how it's possible they have insulated themselves that completely.Â
Even the fucking poll dorks know this shit!Â
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14 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
I was in a meeting a few weeks ago with a group of Democrats between 25 and 35, a person whoâs thinking about running for office, and a couple of longtime Democratic consultants.Â
The perspective candidate and the consultants were shocked that the  young Democrats said that cost-of-living was their biggest issue and healthcare was their second biggest issue. They were also shocked that the group was unanimous that the Democratic party had allowed housing and healthcare costs to destroy their prospects of attaining the American dream.Â
ÂThis thread is a beating because this party is feckless, toothless, spineless, out of touch and has institutionalized losing. The national party has followed the example of the Texas Democratic Party, and is achieving the same results.
Anyone involved in Democratic politics who is shocked that young people are worried about the cost of living should be thrown into a fucking volcano. That's not some obscure ideological issue that the kids these days are fixated on.Â
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Just now, Valmy77 said:
Yeah? And that state hates him now.
Republicans approve of the job he's doing. I'm not sure how that helps non-fascists, though.
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Have you, uh, seen Fetterman's approval ratings lately?
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4 minutes ago, LCHorn said:
FWIW, Ezra Klein had Jared Abbott from the Center for Working Class Politics on and they discussed a vision of Dem or Independent candidates taking this position electorally. Â
ÂI canât imagine someone like a Talarico occupying this space, but maybe someone like a Troy Aikman running as an independent in Texas-a union guy, not a historical Dem, but also not MAGA yet willing to align with Trump on issues like border security.
No, that's horrible politics and is quite literally a big part of why Dems lost in 2024 (and lost in many prior elections). Telling voters "Trump is right about immigration and the border and how important it is, and Dems are weak pussies on it, and I will be like Trump on it but just a little nicer" is just telling undecided voters to vote for Trump. Biden and the Dems were actually very anti-immigration during his administration. That's why the public shifted so strongly against immigration generally between 2020 and 2024, and look what good that did. Trump's overreach provides another opportunity for Dems to embrace immigration as a fundamental part of the American dream. Legal immigration used to be pretty popular even among white Americans and it could be again.
If Dems want to try to appeal to some of the racists on immigration, they should yell about how Trump cut a deal with the cartels and brought a bunch of high-level cartel guys into the country and that they'll send those guys back.Â
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28 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:
See the bullshit with John Deere. If a farmer wants to use his tractor to do X, or he needs to make repair Y.....he fucking can't. Not without paying an extra fee, or not without bringing it in to the dealer for some proprietary "process" that costs 10X what his repair in the field would cost.
I grew up in a world where farmers and ranchers kept a whole shed of spare parts, bits and bobs that could be used to fashion spare parts or makeshift repairs, etc. When something went wrong with a piece of equipment, the first place we went was the shed, to see if we could find something to use to fix it ourselves. Now? Get fucked. You just breached the "license agreement" (that's right, you don't even fucking own the whole tractor, you just have a license to use some of its features), voided the warranty, etc. etc.
Make a product. Sell it at a fair price that provides a decent profit. Buy that product. Own that product. Use it as you wish. That model is fucking DEAD.
I don't really want to overstate the connection here with the "masculinity crisis," because it's somewhat tenuous, but I do think there is one. One of the healthier forms of masculinity for boys and young men to aspire to is basically "responsible guy who can fix shit when it breaks." The massive decrease in standardization and interoperability in literally anything that exists physically makes that much harder and much more expensive. Fuck, just changing the oil in a car made after like 1995 is way more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be.
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17 minutes ago, Valmy77 said:
Yeah Fetterman isn't bringing some kind of bold centrist vision that will be more inclusive and popular. He just kind of cries about people being mean. I don't see how that wimpy energy is going to help the Democrats win.
It's pretty striking how much Platner's current whining resembles Fetterman's behavior. At least Fetterman has the excuse of he had a stroke and clearly has never really recovered fully from it.Â
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33 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
No, Iâll give you Sinema because she stopped being a co-belligerent but Fetterman and Manchin are exactly what Iâm talking about Democrats welcoming more of. And if they donât want to do that they should try not losing so much.
Sorry!
Fetterman spends most of his time attacking Democratic voters and saying we shouldn't oppose Trump so much. He's probably a year away from switching parties. We'd be better off right now if Connor Lamb had won that primary.Â
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1 minute ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
Exactly. Not a hard call. Iâm not sure he knows how to fight them, but he recognized early on what weâre collectively up against and broke with it at great personal and professional cost. Same deal with Liz Cheney.Â
ÂWeâre fighting for our lives here. Democrats need to understand that being in the opposition means accepting the co-belligerents who are willing to work with Democrats to defeat a common threat. Whether inside or outside of the party, thereâs no reason to worry about policy differences unless and until they win.Â
I'm worried about welcoming people who appear to be co-belligerents but aren't. People like Fetterman, Sinema, and Manchin actively hinder the fight. Manchin was a bit of a special case because he was still preferable to literally anyone else who could win a senate seat in West Virginia. I don't think Platner is that.
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2 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:
MAGA is no longer about political ideology itâs demonstrating unwavering fealty to the orange god. She will soon be labeled a rino and drummed out of the party if she doesnât fall back in line.Â
Âthat being said I donât think she ends up in the Democratic Party especially since people like Cheney and Kinzinger havenâtÂ
MTG will never shift left because she's authentically crazy in a specific, reactionary way.Â
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If he had a good primary challenger I probably wouldn't vote for Walsh in a Dem primary, but one thing you absolutely know about him is the only thing he really cares about today is the destruction of Trump and the modern GOP, and I could certainly live with that.
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Israel
in Cloak Room
3 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:Do you believe the cease fire isn't real, too?
Am I the only one under the guise that the cease fire was real?
No, it wasn't ever really real, except for the hostages that got to go home. Trump insisted on Israel agreeing to a pretend ceasefire because he thought it could get him a Nobel prize and now that's over with he's moved on and Israel is back to doing what they do, which is mass murder.
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Israel
in Cloak Room
27 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:Finally a single, non-partisan source (but I'm still skeptical because no AP or mainstream sources are reporting):
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/red-cross-condemns-staged-recovery-113635726.html
Let's say this is accurate, then what? Sounds like Hamas was the first to breach the ceasefire terms and invite reprecussion, right?
Hey, congrats on actually quoting what you linked to this time!
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The real test would be someone like Joe Walsh, who was never MAGA but was definitely pre-MAGA and still doesn't align with Democrats on much, but hates MAGA more than he ever hated Dems and knows how to fight them. Â
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7 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:
They're not crimes when committed by pasty white boys, they're just little oopsies we shouldn't rush to punish them for because they've got such potential.Â
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Naw, he won't run as VP, his ego won't allow it. He'll just threaten SCOTUS until they cave and let him on ballots.
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It all boils down to nerds trying to make themselves seem useful so they can get positions of influence within campaigns and the party apparatus (to the extent that exists) to ensure lucrative careers. In a properly-functioning party these people would be treated the way Ryan Gosling treats his quant in The Big Short (but without the racism).
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Just now, Bozo_Casanova said:
I think heâs handling this in a stupid way but it depends on what kind of points you are giving.Â
Depends on how my trip to Vegas this weekend goes. I'll let you know.Â
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G. Elliott Morris has a good breakdown of that report:
QuoteI was going to write todayâs post about social media, attention, and politics â specifically, why I think the increasing use of AI algorithmic recommenders on the major platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and soon, Twitter, makes them less useful for political analysts, journalists, and users alike, and why theyâre bound to further increase polarization and destabilize politics. As a former Twitter addict and data journalist, I feel I have something useful to say on the subject.
Then, when I was writing, someone sent me a new report about Democratsâ losses in 2024, written by the centrist Democratic group WelcomePAC, that consumed my attention for the rest of the day (go figure). So I will return to social media and attention another time.
The report, which deserves credit for its breadth of data and the depth of its empirical investigation (I reckon it was more work than some PhD dissertations), makes the argument that Democrats lost the presidency in 2024 because they embraced too many progressive policy ideas. The authors conclude that for 2028:
Democrats should pick a nominee who understands what it takes to win elections in difficult terrainâand is willing to run on positions that majorities of Americans support, even if this sometimes requires breaking with the unpopular demands of progressive advocacy organizations, corporate interests, or the Democratic donor class.
I have some criticisms of the way the authors come to their conclusions. For one thing, while making prescriptions for the future of the party, the authors are surprisingly ignorant of current data that shows the Democrats rebounding with voters who care about the economy, and Republicans doing as poorly as or worse than Democrats on issue focus. The report also spends little time discussing the role of inflation in Kamala Harrisâs loss in 2024, and frames the economy as an exclusively Democrat vs Republican problem instead of acknowledging an incumbent vs opposition dynamic at play last year â a big mistake that I have covered before.
The group also reads too much into unadjusted, uncertain differences in the electoral performance of âmoderateâ and âprogressiveâ congressional candidates â the same mistakes plenty of other people are making recently. The issue is not just that these patterns are highly subject to the way a person defines âmoderateâ or âprogressive,â but that past data is not a good predictor of future results. The individual skill of a member of Congress, in my research, changes significantly from cycle to cycle (in the WelcomePACâs own data, overperformance by a candidate in one year predicts just 25% of future overperformance by that candidate. Ideally, that number would be 100%).
But my biggest problem with the report is with the conclusion itself. The report suffers from something Iâm going to call the âStrategistâs Fallacyâ in politics â the tendency for campaign consultants and political strategists, especially on the Democratic side (where quantitative analysts are overwhelmingly focused on policy positions and ideological point-positions), to map their mental model of how they make political decisions onto voters. They implicitly assume all voters make choices and select candidates the same way elites do. This is wrong for several reasons, which I will explain.
The report also uses some pretty comically inaccurate data to make its case â for example, saying it was part of the Democratic policy agenda in 2024 to abolish prisons, make DC a state, and pass Medicare for All. I touch on this after diving deeper into the Strategistâs Fallacy:
The Strategistâs Fallacy, simply put, is the incorrect belief that voters think like strategists â i.e., that they hold concrete issue positions and ideological labels and match them up to candidates, like a customer picking an entree off a dinner menu â so the way to win is for a candidate to tweak their individual positions on policy. This mental model does not hold in reality, leading individuals to provide poor assessments of votersâ decisions and organizations to give candidates poor advice.
Imagine, for a moment, the world that the average Democratic strategist lives in. Most are college-educated (many to most by elite institutions), live in dense urban cities, experience the world through a hyper-polarized digital simulacra of politics through traditional and social media, and live and breathe politics all day. They are intensely exposed to political information from all over the political spectrum (and the world) and hold information about candidates, parties, and issues in their heads all at once. The strategist is constantly consuming news and sorting politicians into buckets based on their positions and comments.
This is not how the average person experiences politics, to put it mildly. Most are unaware of the minutiae of everyday political news, and many donât know basic facts about the political system. Almost half of voters arenât engaged in the process at all. According to Gallup, just 32% of adults pay very close attention to national political news. In 2015, a third of U.S. adults did not know there were three branches of the federal government. Nearly 40% of voting-eligible Americans in 2024 didnât even vote.
The strategistâs mental model of the way average voters make their decisions is often equally divorced from the reality of the average voter. This is evidenced by the hyper-focus on policy positions in the WelcomePAC report. The report makes no mention of identity, social networks, or even media diets in analyzing why Democrats lost in 2024.
The voter decides who to vote for based on a variety of inputs. The strategist, on the other hand, formulates a mechanical model of politics where voters make decisions to minimize their ideological distance from their representatives, where âideological distanceâ is determined entirely by (a) the policy preferences of the voter and (b) the policy positions of the candidate. In doing so, they create a hammer that hits a very narrow and specific nail in American politics.
But if the only tool you have is a hammer (marked âpolicy positionsâ), youâre going to see everything as a nail (a policy selection problem). The median strategist today (especially the Democratic quant) ignores external factors, media narratives, and the social aspect of politics in favor of the narrow thing they think they can do something about. The strategist ignores the big, complex, over-determined mess that is human political psychology in favor of one neat variable: the distance between an individual's policy positions and the partiesâ.
Yet most voters do not share this model of politics. As I wrote in my Sunday post, empirical studies show that upwards of just 10% of voters have a coherent mental model of where the parties stand on most issues. The vast majority of the public has no sense of political ideologies, are âgroup-interested,â or are ânature of the timesâ voters, to use Philip Converseâs old categories. Simply put, most voters cast their ballots based on pre-conceived preferences and identity, on information from their friends, or as a reaction to how the economy is doing.
Additionally, much political science finds that when it comes to their attitudes on the issues, voters are very fickle. People change their policy preferences based on input from party leaders, and also seemingly at random across surveys. The mass public is not as ideological as the people who read The New York Times â or, frankly, this Substack. Additionally, moderates in the electorate have a mix of liberal and conservative views (sometimes very extreme ones) across issue domains, not moderate issues across all of them.
The strategist devises a way to win the 10% of voters who see the world as they see it. It is not a strategy that meets most voters where they are.
Below, I have included four screenshots from the âDeciding To Winâ report that form the empirical heart of its authorsâ conclusions. The authors polled supposed Democratic and Republican policies and lined them up according to what voters did and did not favor.
From the Democratic side, voters favored things like expanded government negotiation of prescription drug prices, preventing any cuts to Social Security and Medicare, increasing Social Security benefits for low-income seniors, and raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour. And voters opposed âDemocraticâ policies such as abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, expanding the Supreme Court to 13 members, and banning fracking.
On the Republican side, voters favored prohibiting transgender women from competing in womenâs sports, eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits, and lowering the gas tax by 10 cents per gallon. Voters rejected Trump launching a Trump-branded cryptocurrency, extending the Trump 2017 tax cut for high earners, cutting the top rate of federal taxes on corporate profits, cutting Medicaid/letting the ACA tax credits expire, and pardoning January 6th participants.
Do you notice the asymmetry in these lists?
The list of unpopular Republican policies is full of examples of things that Trump has already done as president, or which he or his cabinet have raised as potential priorities for the second Trump administration, whereas the list of Democratic policies is full of examples of things no national Democratic candidate supported in 2024.
By my count, 12 to 13 of the policies on that âUnpopular Republican policiesâ list are things Trump has already achieved, and most of the rest of possible in the future. In contrast, the official Democratic Party platform for 2024 mentions at best 5 of the 26 items on this list of supposed âUnpopular Democratic policies,â and even those are a stretch. The most prominent âDemocratic policiesâ are things that, at best, a handful of Democratic elected officials voiced support for in the years before 2024.
This is, at best, poorly explained by WelcomePAC, or at worst, an example of how the organization is basing its analysis of the Democratsâ left flank on the type of biased arguments popular with Republicans and in echo-chambers online, particularly on Elon Muskâs X. Frankly, if I didnât know anything else about this group, Iâd think this research were coming from a pro-Trump Super PAC.
The WelcomePAC will likely say, by way of counterargument, that they have included these policies as Democratic proposals for the purposes of demonstration; If some voters believed these were the partyâs beliefs, surely they factored into their decisions and should be explored as real positions, right?
I have two responses to this. First, I think this is actually a classic example of how anti-progressive/pro-moderation organizations do the Republican Partyâs public relations work for them. Endless Democratic infighting and finger-pointing at the left contribute to the publicâs view that the party is dominated by the left, even if/when itâs not! The pages of national media outlets today are filled with journalists citing this report as evidence that the Democratic Party has moved too far left, based on policy examples that arenât actually part of the partyâs agenda. This forms the publicâs image of the party regardless. If youâre a Democratic organization, this is extremely counterproductive.
Second, this argument undercuts their proposed solution, which is for Democrats to talk only about the most popular parts of their agenda. Remember, Biden actually accomplished much on the following list of popular Democratic policies in his first term â including several in the top ten! â and the party had proposed many of the rest.
This did little good for Kamala Harris, though, because the perceptions of the party as a vehicle for far-left ideology had already been set. There was nothing she could say â indeed, because she tried saying it â that could differentiate herself from the negative party brand. And on the other side of the aisle, Donald Trumpâs many negative policy proposals did not sink him.
Why should we expect different results for the Democrats if they try this same strategy in the future?
If the question we are asking is why the Democrats had/have a bad brand, regardless of their popular issue positions, I think a relevant explanation is that right-wing media and information networks are incredibly efficient at shaping the publicâs collective stereotype of the Democratic Party as a far-left progressive party. There are many potential explanations for why that is â and I think that should be part of any autopsy on the 2024 election, instead of just focusing on policy positioning. Thatâs how a Strategist, not a voter, would think.
WelcomePAC is trying to solve a perception problem with policy proposals.
If the Strategistâs Fallacy is over-indexing on policy menus, the practical antidote is to fix the Democratic Partyâs perception problem. And it canât do that without effective, trustworthy messengers.
Most voters donât update their beliefs off white papers and interviews with candidates that they never see. Instead, they update off people they already trust â their friends and family, other customers at local businesses, the union steward at the local factory, the Spanish-language morning host, the neighbor who coaches the youth soccer team, etc. In that environment, a party with weak, irregular, or internally contradicted messages will lose arguments even when its individual policies poll well.
For Democrats, that means the binding constraint on persuasion isnât the leftâright placement of every single policy â itâs a chronic shortage of durable, credible narrators who can message on behalf of the party. Republicans benefit from a dense, year-round ecosystem (talk radio, partisan local outlets, church networks, sheriffs, school-board figures) that repeats a simple story about what their party stands for and what the other side threatens. By and large, these marching orders come from Fox News and associated outlets.
You canât beat the right-wing messaging apparatus with a six-week digital ad program and a tidy âpopular positions onlyâ stump speech. Harrisâs 2024 election proves that even the best-funded, rigorously optimized ad-testing platform that highlights only the most popular part of the Democratic agenda, to individual voters most likely to be moved by those messages! â cannot save a bad messenger in a bad environment.
The lesson from 2024 is not âsay fewer unpopular thingsâ (since no Democrat in 2024 was saying we should abolish all prisons). Instead, it should be âbuild a more powerful and popular messaging apparatus.â If I had ten million dollars, Iâd invest it in some mix of the following, as a way to build credibility with voters and undercut the influence of the Republican Partyâs allies in the news and social media.
1. Recruiting and training community-rooted candidates and validators, especially outside the metro core
2. Making local Democratic officials a consistent presence in local media (especially small-market TV) between elections
3. Investing in civic infrastructure that isnât obviously partisan (service projects, clinics, consumer-protection help desks, buying old movie theaters to show films), so the party shows up as a neighbor first and a nationalized brand second
4. Supporting left-wing blogs, content creators, and podcasts that go on the offensive against Republicans to shape perceptions of the GOP as extreme and out of touch
None of these is cheap or easy. But the point is that winning elections is not as easy as changing the policy proposals that leaders cite in speeches. Rewriting a platform is easy. Rebuilding trust with voters is the hard part â and itâs the part that makes the policy menu matter at all.
In summary, donât be fooled into thinking that just because someone has a lot of polling data or nice charts, that means theyâve uncovered the truth of politics.
The truth is that politics and voter psychology are very complex. You should thus be very wary of people selling simple solutions to any partyâs or candidateâs woes. Often, these simple solutions are the best way to get donors involved or to get Congresspeople to take a meeting with you. But simple and slick is often an inverse indicator of predictiveness.
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17 minutes ago, softlynow said:
âIâm not a secret naziâ is more or less the same as âI am not a witchâ in the context of electoral politics. Mills could be 99 and still get the nod over Platner next June.
If anything, he's handling this issue much much worse than Christine O'Donnell handled "I am not a witch." E.g.
He handled the reddit posts much better and much more in line with the type of response that would appeal to Democratic primary voters. This whiny shit here? This is what works in the Republican party.Â
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2 minutes ago, Pancho said:This isnât my area, but how do we keep losing all of these jobs yet the Dow keeps rising?
Investors like it when companies cut jobs.
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10 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
Coming back to this- are you giving points? I may want action on this.Â
He just lost his second campaign manager in as many weeks and several additional reports have come out making it clear he's lying about the tattoo. You really want to bet on this guy?
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Trumpâs America
in Cloak Room
Posted
That thread is so fucked it's got me agreeing with a post 52-80 made.