Election 2020

[pbrower2a]

(01-01-2021, 04:33 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-30-2020, 03:00 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(12-29-2020, 07:43 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-20-2020, 01:47 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Quite true. The right wing has a lot in common everywhere, and especially between the USA and Israel.

To me it reminds me of how my boomer cohorts were in childhood. Most were bullies to some extent, or just overly macho guys. I preferred the company of girl playmates for a while at school. They denounced me for this too.

The game is, feel good about yourself and gain admiration by picking on others. Pick on them, oppress them, keep them down. That stokes my own sense of identity.

Funny. I'm the most picked on poster here and you're whining about being picked on, oppressed and kept down so to speak.

Maybe if you weren't so predictably, obnoxiously, and often hilariously wrong!

Maybe if you weren't so pathetic and such a drama queen and you didn't have a mental disorder then we'd be able to relate better with each other these days.

I have Asperger's. At times I must act just to seem normal.

[pbrower2a]

Here is analysis from one of Trump's pollsters on how 2020 really went. It is from December, and it subdivides the states that were within 10% of going to Hillary Clinton in 2016 that went to Trump. The states in question were those, and not others.

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000177-...e8c950000S

A synopsis is in this cover article:

Former President Donald Trump has blamed the election results on unfounded claims of fraud and malfeasance. But at the top levels of his campaign, a detailed autopsy report that circulated among his political aides paints a far different — and more critical — portrait of what led to his defeat.

The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And while Trump spread baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing in heavily Black cities, the report notes that he was done in by hemorrhaging support from white voters.


The 27-page report, which was written by Trump chief pollster Tony Fabrizio, shows how Trump advisers were privately reckoning with his loss even as the former president and many of his supporters engaged in a conspiracy theory-fueled effort to overturn the election. The autopsy was completed in December 2020 and distributed to Trump’s top political advisers just before President Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration.


It is unclear if Trump has seen the report.

The findings are based on an analysis of exit polling in 10 states. Five of them — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — are states that Trump lost after winning them in 2016. The other five — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — are states that Trump won in both elections.

The report zeroes in on an array of demographics where Trump suffered decisive reversals in 2020, including among white seniors, the same group that helped to propel him to the White House. The autopsy says that Trump saw the “greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men,” and that he “lost ground with almost every age group.” In the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump’s biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older.

Suburbanites — who bolted from Trump after 2016 — also played a major role. The report says that the former president suffered a “double-digit erosion” with “White College educated voters across the board.”

The picture of the election presented in the report is widely shared by political professionals in both parties, if not by Trump and his legions of his supporters. Trump never offered a concession to Biden, and up until his final days in office, he clung to the debunked idea that the election had been stolen.

Fabrizio declined to comment on the post-mortem. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s personal behavior, the autopsy makes clear, contributed to his defeat. “Biden had a clear edge over POTUS on being seen as honest & trustworthy,” Fabrizio writes.

Trump’s response to the pandemic was also critical. The autopsy says that coronavirus registered as the top issue among voters, and that Biden won those voters by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. A majority registered disapproval of Trump’s handling of the virus.

Most voters said they prioritized battling the coronavirus over reopening the economy, even as the president put a firm emphasis on the latter. And roughly 75 percent of voters — most of whom favored Biden — said they favored public mask-wearing mandates.

The report also indirectly raises questions about the reelection campaign’s decision to pause advertising on TV over the summer and save resources until the fall. According to the findings, nearly 9-in-10 voters had made up their minds about whom to support by the final month of the race.

Fabrizio isn’t the only Trump adviser who has presented a post-mortem since Nov. 3. John McLaughlin, another Trump pollster, published a report on the conservative Newsmax website the week after the election.

Meanwhile, advisers to former Vice President Mike Pence brought in multiple pollsters to brief him on their conclusions after the election, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Among the takeaways was that Trump was gaining during the final weeks of the race and that his rallies had helped propel Republicans running in House and Senate races. But the pollsters also made clear that while there was substantial support for Trump’s policies, there was widespread exhaustion with the president.

Within Trump’s inner circle, Fabrizio had long espoused the belief that Trump needed to prioritize the pandemic in order to win reelection. Last summer, he penned a 79-page memo arguing that Trump needed to focus first on dealing with the pandemic rather than reopening the economy and recommending, among other things, that he should have been encouraging people to wear masks rather than mocking the practice.


https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/01...eat-464636

Comment:

So this explains why Trump could lose the Presidential election while Republicans did well in gaining House seats and (until the two Senate run-offs in Georgia) holding onto the Senate majority. This analysis comes before Warnock and Ossoff defeated Republican US Senate incumbents in Georgia.

Trump surprised people among Hispanics, who weren't as strongly D as usual. To be sure, the Hispanics in Florida are heavily Cuban-Americans who have a very different political heritage than do the largely Mexican-Americans in Arizona.  2020 may not have been the wave election that many (including I) expected, so he probably lost on issues of integrity.

[Eric the Green]

That was a good article I had seen before. What is critical is that the people learn that it is Trump's policies, and his Party's, that are the real problem with America. Some Republicans need to get past the idea that Trump had "accomplishments." He did not. Almost everything he did is destructive. Biden is correcting a lot of it. The voters will need to support this in Nov.2022.

It is to be noted that Trump's failure on the coronavirus was due to his neo-liberal trickle-down philosophy. Advocates of this, like Classic Xer, say that if Trump had developed a federal plan that could have reduced the virus' spread and resulting deaths, that would have been autocratic. Trump just let the states and localities handle it, who have no funds or budgeting ability to do so, and have no ability to invoke the National War Production Act for emergency needs. The result was chaos, with states competing for scarce PPE and other resources. In our system, only the federal government can borrow the money as needed to meet a crisis or issue emergency declarations like the NWPA. Trump just ignored this fact, even though he borrowed heavily to do such unnecessary things as rebuilding the military and building a wall.

[Eric the Green]

(12-29-2020, 09:23 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I still like the age boundaries.

The four are hunter gatherer, Agricultural, Industrial, Information.  The weapons are rocks, swords, gunpowder and nukes.  Power is provided by humans, animals, steam engines and renewable.   Information is stored by memory, writing, printing, computer networks.

Feel free to develop alternate names, but it is an established field of study.

I like them too, and think they apply in Planetary Dynamics, which just fills those four in with a few more. I note too that Spiral Dynamics basically misses the Agricultural (which I call the Venus meme), and lumps it in with their imperial epoch of the "power gods" meme, which I call the Mars meme.

http://philosopherswheel.com/planetarydynamics.html

Two more agricultural-age meme eras followed, the Jupiter (centered on the religious-dominant, Age of Faith as Will Durant called it), and the Saturn (the age of secular kings and early-modern Renaissance era).

[David Horn]

(02-09-2021, 01:57 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: ... What is critical is that the people learn that it is Trump's policies, and his Party's, that are the real problem with America. Some Republicans need to get past the idea that Trump had "accomplishments." He did not. Almost everything he did is destructive...

I fully agree, but I'm not the target audience.  That crowd wouldn't believe it unless Trump said it was so, and maybe not even then.  The Kool-Aid did its work.

[Eric the Green]

"The parallels between Mizrahi voters in Israel and Trump voters in the United States are impossible to miss, Professor Mizrachi said.

Both see themselves as their countries’ most patriotic citizens, and demonize the left and its allies in the news media, academia and other liberal redoubts as traitorous enemies. Both, he said, feel disdained by those elites, who dismiss their views as racist, ignorant or unwittingly self-defeating.
“You keep ridiculing us and presenting us as undemocratic and dangerous,” he said, articulating the non-liberal view. “But we are the people. Who are you?’” "

quote above is from the article about Israel quoted a page prior.

It is such an ironic, and deliberate, mis-perception on the part of the anti-liberals. They call the media, academia and Hollywood "the elite," and say they are not the people, while their own votes keep in power the real elite, the corporate and wealthy bosses, who are the only ones who really benefit from their conservative Partys' neo-liberal slogans of blaming welfare and ethnic groups and opposing taxes and regulations that help them and themselves.

It is very harmful to the intelligence of the people and the nation for so many of them to think that using your brains, learning stuff and being informed makes you a member of the elite. Wrong. ALL citizens have the ability to be informed and to think critically about what's happening in the country. If they would do that, they would be liberals again like they used to be.

[pbrower2a]

(02-09-2021, 02:15 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: "The parallels between Mizrahi voters in Israel and Trump voters in the United States are impossible to miss, Professor Mizrachi said.

Both see themselves as their countries’ most patriotic citizens, and demonize the left and its allies in the news media, academia and other liberal redoubts as traitorous enemies. Both, he said, feel disdained by those elites, who dismiss their views as racist, ignorant or unwittingly self-defeating.
“You keep ridiculing us and presenting us as undemocratic and dangerous,” he said, articulating the non-liberal view. “But we are the people. Who are you?’” "

quote above is from the article about Israel quoted a page prior.

It is such an ironic, and deliberate, mis-perception on the part of the anti-liberals. They call the media, academia and Hollywood "the elite," and say they are not the people, while their own votes keep in power the real elite, the corporate and wealthy bosses, who are the only ones who really benefit from their conservative Partys' neo-liberal slogans of blaming welfare and ethnic groups and opposing taxes and regulations that help them and themselves.

It is very harmful to the intelligence of the people and the nation for so many of them to think that using your brains, learning stuff and being informed makes you a member of the elite. Wrong. ALL citizens have the ability to be informed and to think critically about what's happening in the country. If they would do that, they would be liberals again like they used to be.

Indeed. The more widespread that learning is, the less a cause it is for any perception of elitism, and the less likely that people will have the chance to abuse mass ignorance. It was a longstanding assumption that education was for purposes other than vocational advancement -- like improving the person so that if one had moral challenges one would do right. Of course it is possible to succeed in some milieus if one is ill-educated, as some mobsters have shown. Their success depends upon cold-hearted brutality as necessary for achieving one's ends. Ideally from a good education one got a firm moral compass, a willingness to look to the long term as the test, and a recognition of higher purposes in life than personal indulgence and gain. To be sure, many jobs require that one act in the here-and-now, and anyone looking ten years into the future and wanting anything more than more of the same  (which is ideal for an extended career as a laborer or servant, and the System needs more of this sort of person than any other kind), and for such jobs a high-quality education would cause one to chafe. 

The essence of freedom would seem to be competition among the elites. Competition among the masses

Furthermore, widespread education makes people able to judge injustice for what it is (which explains why the struggle for civil rights for blacks took off when education went beyond primary education) and better able to understand scams and demagoguery for what they are. An aside -- the people who initiate 419 schemes use deliberate misspellings and grammatical errors to avoid drawing the attention of people wise enough to recognize those scams for what they are. 

I doubt that he was original on this idea, but the "Waterfront Philosopher" Eric  Hoffer suggested that tyranny of some kind arises from the concentration of power in some privilege, whether in wealth, business opportunities,  education, or access to the political system. Where only a few have land and land ownership is the sole source of income, the proprietors become lords and invariably abuse the helpless serfs or even slaves.  Where few people have the opportunity to own a business, a few tycoons or bureaucratic elites dominate the economy and treat workers badly. Where education is a rarity, those few with education get the dubious right to exploit the ignorance and helplessness of the masses. Where political power goes to one cadre that determines who can join and participate, one has the horrid one-Party dictatorships. Freedom comes from the dispersal of property, education, and opportunity (whether political or economic).   

Competition among potential elites is the source of real freedom. Elites can exploit the masses by compelling those other than themselves to scrap for everything  necessary or vital to life in a race to the bottom in which life for most people reduces to the physiological needs. Such indicates that a society offers life as a privilege, liberty as "freedom for me but not for thee", and drudgery as a sordid substitute for the pursuit of happiness.

[Bob Butler 54]

I watched a little bit of the second impeachment trial today. One point was made in various ways. This must not be allowed to happen again. It reminded me of the 'never again' phase indicating the end of a crisis, that you tried to make sure a particular crisis issue never happened again. I put it late in the crisis, where the problems are already solved. when you are ready to move on to the high and building infrastructure.

Methinks it is a little soon for that turning theory wise, but feels right from other angles. It cannot be allowed to happen again.

[David Horn]

(02-11-2021, 02:49 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I watched a little bit of the second impeachment trial today.  One point was made in various ways.  This must not be allowed to happen again.  It reminded me of the 'never again' phase indicating the end of a crisis, that you tried to make sure a particular crisis issue never happened again.  I put it late in the crisis, where the problems are already solved. when you are ready to move on to the high and building infrastructure.

Methinks it is a little soon for that turning theory wise, but feels right from other angles.  It cannot be allowed to happen again.

I think it's still a plea, rather than a statement of fact.  Worse, it may never become one unless things change soon.  The GOP position is getting fully sclerotic, so fracture seems more likely than ever.  After that, who knows?

[Eric the Green]

(02-12-2021, 11:28 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(02-11-2021, 02:49 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I watched a little bit of the second impeachment trial today.  One point was made in various ways.  This must not be allowed to happen again.  It reminded me of the 'never again' phase indicating the end of a crisis, that you tried to make sure a particular crisis issue never happened again.  I put it late in the crisis, where the problems are already solved. when you are ready to move on to the high and building infrastructure.

Methinks it is a little soon for that turning theory wise, but feels right from other angles.  It cannot be allowed to happen again.

I think it's still a plea, rather than a statement of fact.  Worse, it may never become one unless things change soon.  The GOP position is getting fully sclerotic, so fracture seems more likely than ever.  After that, who knows?

The Republicans seem ready to exonerate Trump, claiming that he never explicitly told his followers to violently break the law. I don't know about that, but with Republicans still solidly behind Trump, unless he is jailed for most of the rest of his life, he will continue to be the dear leader of a fascist, violent mob Party who seemingly has permission from their politicians to wage whatever violent attacks against Democrats and non-Trump Republicans they want, and who still represent over 40% of USA people. 

We are only in the middle of this crisis, and my prediction is shaping up. If the Democrats maintain power through the decade (which won't happen if Kamala Harris is nominated for president in 2024), then they will be able to crush this new civil war, which will amount to further rebellion by this Trump-inspired mob, especially if the Democrats successfully push for higher taxes, more welfare programs, gun control, climate change regulations, immigration reform, and their other priorities. 

If the Republicans (perhaps led by Tom Cotton) take back power in Nov.2024/2025, God help us all. Biden's choice for VP could have been the fatal mistake.