Now that the RNC and the DNC have happened, has anyone changed their minds since the first thread? Who are you now voting for come November? I added more options this time. I included Gary Johnson and Jill Stein because Gary Johnson is the nominee for the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein is the presumptive nominee for the Green Party.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/soc...&tid=ss_tw

Quote:Sam Wei, a 26-year-old financial analyst in Chicago, has not had sex since her last relationship ended 18 months ago. She makes out with guys sometimes, and she likes to cuddle.

“To me, there’s more intimacy with having someone there next to you that you can rely on without having to have sex,” she said. “I don’t want to do anything that would harm the relationship and be something that we can’t come back from....



https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/soc...&tid=ss_tw

https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/52789-t...r-30-years

Quote:Editor's Note: Below is a brief excerpt from an institutional research note written by Hedgeye Demography Sector head Neil Howe. This is the first of several pieces he is writing about the election. To access our institutional research email sales@hedgeye.com.
 

 
Let me say at the outset that I get a lot of questions from readers about how Clinton v Trump fits into the predictive schema laid out in a couple of books I co-authored in the 1990s (Generations in 1991 and The Fourth Turning in 1997). I will respond to these questions in my upcoming notes.
 
Let me just say here, as a preview, that I regard the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders to be the most significant development in American politics going back to the early 1980s—not because of who Trump or Sanders are personally, but because of what their popularity says about a decisive mood shift in the electorate. (And not just here in America, but around much of the world.) In our earlier books, we foresaw this shift as driven by generational aging and occurring on a “seasonal” timetable that has demonstrated remarkable regularity through history.



https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/52789-t...r-30-years

For those with Right leaning views, ignore this thread - it's really really boring and  2020 is too far away to be of any care.

For everyone else, not too soon to be thinking about this.

A fantastic place to start is with the recent analysis done by Stephen Wolf -

 http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/8/2...le-in-2020

A good look at state elections coming up that Dems need to pour money into over the next couple election cycles to build a foundation for 2020.

My favorite map/analysis is those states where the ballot initiative could be used to set up independent commissions like what was done in California and Arizona -



The synergy of getting a more true representation of districts in the swing states of OH and FL could provide enough Party infrastructure in both these states to put them solidly behind the Blue Wall for both Presidential and Senate seat elections.  For the other states, even if they remain in the Red, there would likely still be district pickups for the Dems with a non-partisan commission determinations.

Getting Clinton in the WH in 2016 to change the SCOTUS is huge in the effort, but there is much more that can be done to undo the 2010 gerrymandering that is keeping the GOP holding on as a national political force.

Comments welcome from those on the Left (those on the Right can go about their business of offering support/apologies for The Donald.

What will happen if Donald Trump is elected President?  This is a poll.

I found this article comparing Donald Trump to Senator McCarthy. Here is the URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/postevery...-same-way/

Here is the article:

Quote:Sixty-five years ago, America faced the challenge of a snarling demagogue, who captured the imagination of millions by fusing legitimate fears of an external enemy with the cultural, regional and demographic resentments of people who disliked the changing nature of our postwar country. Then, as now, a demagogue could draw upon widespread weariness with imperfect and occasionally complacent liberal leaders, important or petty security scandals, the grind of military stalemate in an inconclusive long war.

Then, as now, the demagogue benefited from apologists and enablers who privately wanted him defeated, but who would not take risks or bear political costs to openly confront him. Then, as now, his political adversaries were divided and hesitant in their efforts to formulate an effective response. Then, as now, parts of the Republican Party gave a vicious demagogue a congenial political home.

Of course, history doesn’t repeat itself. Donald Trump is no Joe McCarthy. For one thing, President Eisenhower and other Republican gatekeepers never allowed McCarthy near their party’s nomination for president. For another, America is a far more cosmopolitan and diverse nation today than it was at the close of the Korean War.

But history does sometimes rhyme. The Democratic National Convention brought an unexpected echo of the McCarthy era. The occasion was a speech by the 65-year-old immigration lawyer Khizr Khan, of Charlottesville, Va. Khan’s son Humayun, a posthumously decorated Army captain, was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq. The elder Khan immigrated in 1980. He has spent more than half of his life in the U.S. His oldest son founded a biotech company where his younger son now works.

Khan brought no written speech to the DNC. He didn’t load anything into the TelePrompTer. He brought instead his personal eloquence, and his proud memories of a deceased son. In six minutes, the grieving father delivered the blistering response Donald Trump deserved: Khan dispatched Trump’s bluster with an anger made more powerful by its lack of political artifice or the usual focus-grouped finish.

“Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery?” he asked. “Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”

Khan’s words call to mind another unexpected moment from more than 60 years ago, when another dignified lawyer rebuked Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Joe Welch, a lifelong Republican, was special counsel to the army and a partner at Hale and Dore. He was sitting in on a hearing about special treatment for a McCarthy aide. McCarthy was on the defensive, and he lashed out. On live TV, the senator accused Fred Fischer, Welch’s young associate, of belonging to a “Communist front organization,” the National Lawyers Guild.

Welch drew blood from McCarthy with his famous question: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

The question answered itself. It emboldened McCarthy’s enemies and gave new reasons for McCarthy’s prior defenders to move on. Welch cut through a national debate powered by fears of secret enemies in our midst. He called attention to McCarthy’s cruelty toward a single sympathetic person. In these early days of television, millions Americans watched it live, and had never seen anything quite like it.

Khan’s genuine anger — “You have sacrificed nothing and no one” — provided an equally unexpected, electrifying moment. In every way, the Khan family rebuts Trump’s snarling rhetoric. Their life story puts the lie to the anti-immigrant demagoguery that bubbles over this election year.

Like McCarthy, Donald Trump did not seem chastened by the exchange. When New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd asked him about Khan’s speech, Trump replied, “I’d like to hear his wife say something.” On ABC, Trump added: “His wife, if you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.”

The ugly intimations are plain enough. For the record, Mrs. Khan participated in a heartbreaking MSNBC interview describing her grief at the loss of her son. She also thanked America for “listening to my husband’s and my heart.” And on July 31, she wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post.

Like McCarthy, Trump derives political advantage from sheer shamelessness, his willingness to wildly attack others. Yet shamelessness creates vulnerabilities and blind spots, too. Trump’s words betray a strange, indecency toward two Gold Star parents grieving the loss of their son.

Millions of voters are tempted to embrace sweeping rhetoric directed against Muslim Americans and other minorities. That’s a reality of American life. But these attacks lose their potency when they’re directed not against abstraction but particular, sympathetic human beings. Americans saw for themselves that Khizr Khan is the better man, the better American, than Donald Trump ever will be.

WHEREAS, Secretary of State John F. Kerry has suggested that air conditioners are as big a threat as ISIS, and
WHEREAS, it is the duty of our elected and appointed government officials to lead by example,
THEREFORE, we call upon the U.S. Department of State to remove air conditioning from all property that the Department owns, rents, or otherwise employs, including but not limited to embassies, consulates, office buildings, etc., all vehicles owned and/or operated by the Department, and any other property, real or movable, owned, rented, or otherwise employed by the Department.
This petition will be delivered to:

• President of the United States
  Barack Obama
  

I wrote a new article comparing this Election to the elections of the 1850s.

http://drakus79.tumblr.com/post/14814224...y-election

http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c

Quote:If there’s something that convention attendees in Philadelphia and Cleveland both agree on, it’s that America needs higher middle-class living standards. But we won’t have to wait until 2017: The Obama administration last month promulgated a new regulation that will make millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay. The regulation, which will take effect in December, doubles the annual salary threshold under which employees receive time-and-a-half after logging 40 hours a week. Labor groups are hailing this move as a victory, but many businesses are trying to avoid forking over any extra compensation. Their resistance, however, may not hold under a rising tide of laws and regulations aimed at protecting workers.

Under current law, most salaried workers who are not executives, managers, or administrators have the right to overtime pay. Workers below a certain salary level (now $23,660) are entitled to it regardless of their job duties. The new regulation extends these protections in two basic ways. One provision raises the nonexempt salary threshold to $47,476 and provides a formula to update it automatically every three years. The second provision offers more specific descriptions of job duties to determine which employees with salaries above the threshold qualify as exempt...



http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/201...19090c673c

Something strange happened on the last night of the Democratic National Convention.

After the GOP nominee lambasted the Democrats on Twitter for displaying what he viewed as too few American flags, there was a sea of waving flags as far as the eye could see when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to accept a major party's nomination on Thursday.

A small faction of protesters chanting "no more war" as General John Allen spoke were quickly drowned out by chants of "USA!" filling the Philadelphia arena. The most notable refrain from the RNC crowd last week: "Lock her up."
The evening also hammered home the stark tonal difference between the two conventions. After Trump painted America as a downcast country in need of a billionaire savior, night after night of all-star DNC speakers preached a sermon of American exceptionalism, with values that unify us all – talking points once exclusively owned by Republicans.


It was enough to give a lot of conservatives whiplash. Here are just a few of them praising the DNC and bemoaning the state of affairs in their own party.

Conservative writer Ron Fournier:

Quote:Well done, @realDonaldTrump. You made Democrats a party of sunny patriotism and values.
You sure @billclinton didn't ask you to run?
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) July 29, 2016

Quote:Why this convention is better: It's about loving America. GOP convention was about loving Trump. If you didn't love Trump, it offered nada.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) July 29, 2016

Quote:Take about five paragraphs out of that Obama speech and it could have been a Reagan speech. Trust me. I know.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) July 28, 2016

Quote:if repubs had championed their principles with specifics rather than embrace autocracy - they wouldn't have yielded this turf to dems.
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) July 29, 2016

Quote:For Republicans who are not social conservatives, I have to imagine last night and tonight at the DNC are having an impact on them.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 29, 2016

Quote:So most of conservative media and the GOP spent the week rooting for Russia, and now the Democrats get to rally around the flag.
Dreadful.
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) July 29, 2016

Quote:Snark aside: GOP needs to understand what is happening to them tonight…
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) July 29, 2016

Quote:Do you know how old I am? Old enough to remember when speeches like this would've been given at GOP convention… Not Dem one. Brutal.
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) July 29, 2016

Quote:How can it be that I am standing at my kitchen counter sobbing because of the messages being driven at the DNC? Where has the GOP gone?
— Rich Galen (@richgalen) July 29, 2016

Quote:This Democratic convention has been an unmitigated disaster for the GOP. Very well produced. Unifying. Patriotic. Bravo.#DNCinPHL
— Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) July 29, 2016

Quote:I am sure hearing a lot more about God and faith at the DNC than the RNC.
— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) July 28, 2016

Quote:Still stunned. Feel like I'm in the twilight zone. Obama just defended America & conservative values from attacks by the Republican nominee.
— (((AG))) (@AG_Conservative) July 28, 2016

Quote:Republicans could have stopped all this.
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) July 29, 2016