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hussyknee · 6 months

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The wild thing about the Vote Blue rhetoric is that according to them, Biden is an uwu helpless baby who's had no power to stop any of the shit that's gone down the last three years but if Trump comes to power he can end democracy as you (don't) know it. You just have to get through this election cycle because the GOP can't find its own ass with both hands and a mirror on a stick and they're breaking apart, but they're also about to transform into the Third Reich. If Biden gets a second term you can totally push him further left when he isn't even up for re-election, but not with half the country on the streets a year out from when he does still need their votes. Biden can't get Netanyahu to stop because he has no power over Israel, but Trump will be able to destabilize democracy all across the world. The enemy is either weak or strong, y'all can't have it both ways.

Also, "If democrats haven't earned your vote, what has the republicans done to earn your complicity"????? You think this is how democracy works??? But oh, that's right you don't have a democracy, you have Evil (genocide without personal enjoyment) and Super Evil (genocide with personal fun). But you need to Vote Blue to save the democracy you don't have. Which they've had three years and one more to get around to saving, just like they had two years to legislate Roe vs Wade and eight before that, but they need another four to do anything.

"We cannot afford to divide the left and alienate voters!" you yell, as you harrass people whose relatives are currently being starved and blown to pieces as the entire world watches, a full year before elections, proving you have no intention of holding the Dems accountable even for a literal genocide. Because your winning strategy here is to scream at people for having a moral compass and basic empathy for their fellow human. These are luxuries you cannot afford because the GOP doesn't have any either, but the two parties are different bro, I swear bro, pay no attention to Hakeem Jeffries standing next to Mike Johnson and Christian Zionists bro, don't look at how much AIPAC has bought and paid for the whole of Congress bro, don't look at the bipartisan support for sending billions to Zionists overseas while cutting funding for every public service bro, don't look at how much more land for fracking they've sold off than Trump ever did bro, don't look at cop city and the border wall and ICE crackdowns and kids still in cages three years later bro, Biden totally controlled COVID and saved millions of lives unlike Trump and the pandemic is definitely not still raging bro, queer and reproductive rights are definitely not flaking off piecemeal under the Dems right now bro, Project 2025 can definitely happen when Obama couldn't even push through Medicaid with a trifecta bro, bro where are you going bro—

#vote blue #genocide joe #vote biden #blue no matter who #shit liberals say #free palestine #gaza genocide #knee of huss

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decolonize-the-left · 6 months

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Real talk

You know it's funny, the way liberals sound saying "if you don't vote blue then you're allowing project2025 and fascism" sounds just like an abuser saying "it's not My fault I'm hurting you, you're the one who didn't wanna talk to me"

Like actually you could just vote 3rd party. That's an option. Like 63% of Americans would. Most. The majority would.

In fact!

Source

You know what this means?

It means now is the time if you've wanted a 3rd party president. Those are good polls for this early in the campaigns. 20% is a lot of votes.

For perspective: 33% would be the even divide between 3 parties.

Which means the only people in the way...are in fact Democrats. The singular people unwilling to sway from their shitty party.

The rest of us are fed up and are just waiting for an actually good candidate

"if it had votes" they say, holding the votes hostage. Not even all Democrats would have to vote 3rd party if RFK is gonna split republican votes too 👀 just the progressive Dems probably

Like nobody even WANTS Joe. People say it, social media says it, polls say it.

Why are y'all arguing if you meant it when you said "if third parties had more support, I would"

Now is objectively the best time to try risking it.

And before y'all something: Bernie started out by having events in peoples backyards.

You know who made him big? Fill stadiums?

Progressives. Leftists. Socialists.

So don't tell me that we can't do it or there's no chance of it's unrealistic when it's already been done before.

The only reason he lost is because Democrats scared voters with threats of fascism to settle for a conservative democrat. Cuz they said she had the "best" shot of fighting trump.

And you know what happened? She lost. And she wasn't even commiting an active genocide.

But you think that people will stay loyal to the party of the guy currently being referred to as Genocide Joe and Genocidin' Biden?

And Democrats (before at least) agreed on Hilary- progressives wanted Bernie but Dems wanted Hilary, you know? But even those people are now swearing they're never voting for Joe specifically, that they don't know Who to vote for but it ain't blue.

....and I see y'all still trying to push the same tactics and rhetorics expecting it to work the way it has before and no. Y'all can learn right alongside Israel that you're gonna have to step your propaganda game up for that. Cuz we aren't buying it. I'm even making this post half out of posterity to say someone called y'all out.

Wake the fuck up.

Anyone further right than Bernie Sanders does not stand a fucking chance; has no business running. This is me telling you, telling any dem listening.

Just like we meant it when we said we'd rather Not Vote than vote Hillary, I mean I'd rather not vote than vote Biden.

Please don't take this as an invitation to harass me or change my mind. You won't. You wont gaslight me into consenting to genocide. You aren't going to change a LOT of minds. People have watched that genocide play out on our phones for a month. Some of us have fundamentally changed as people and renewed our values and humanity.

And humanity is more important than comfort. Than Democrats.

And this year that won't be something we compromise.

Listen to yourselves ask us otherwise, do you hear yourself? And each time you ask, understand our resolve is stronger because it shows how little you care for human lives.

Understand that's why you'll lose the vote and election. Not because anyone split the vote by exercising their right to vote in a democracy, but because your party is undeniably supporting genocide and it disgusts us to even think about supporting that same party.

For those undecided:

Learn about Claudia de La Cruz. She supports Palestine and her party has organized events for BLM, for Palestine, against ICE, etc. They're politically active, aware, engaged, and on the ground. Most importantly, they have not ever funded or committed genocide. As far as I know they also actively challenge bigotry of all kinds meaning they also fight for women's rights, queer rights, and civil rights.

I think if we rallied behind her like we did with Bernie this would be a piece of cake for her to win. She just needs the voices of support online to get the ball rolling.

#Democrats #liberals #progressive #3rd party #Claudia De La Cruz #2024 elections #usa elections #presidential elections #voting #electoral politics #decol rants a bit

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qqueenofhades · 9 months

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I just saw an article that said like half of trump supporters would vote for someone else if given a good option, and now all I want is someone else to get the nomination but have Trump refuse to drop out so he splits the vote. I would love nothing more than for the republicans to get 0 electoral votes…well that’s not quite true, what I would really love more than anything is for republicans to get 0 votes in general, but unless all of them forget when the election is and forget to vote for themselves that seems unlikely 😂

Basically, there is about 30 to 35% of America that is just outrageously cruel, racist, stupid, evil, and anti-everything (science, medicine, progress, voting, reason, education, history, civic society, gay people, women, non-white non-Christians, immigrants, anything that is not a fascist white nationalist theocracy) and they are beyond help. They will go down with Trump and his awful cronies to the bitter end, because they think that the primary function of government is to punish their enemies and nothing else. There is no public, social, or economic policy you can offer that will ever appeal to them, because they don't care. Nothing matters as much to them as Hurting The Other. In other words, they suck, and they are loud, dangerous, and militant, but they are not by any means the majority, they consistently suffer when their views are exposed to the mainstream public, and candidates backed by them have been regularly defeated in general elections, because they are just too extreme.

Then there are the rest of the Republican voters, who like low taxes, guns, and "small government" (aka that which doesn't run any risk of helping black people), but aren't quite the militant deranged TrumpCultists. They want a less openly criminal or at least slightly more palatable "moderate" old school GOP alternative, which has absolutely zero chance of getting past the primary-voting rancid shitgibbons mentioned above. We often get various thinkpieces wondering whether the indictments will strip these voters away from Trump, and yes, on the one hand, it is possible -- if, and only if, someone apart from him is the nominee, which for many reasons is deeply unlikely. If it is not, then anyone thinking that Republican voters will vote for anyone other than the Republican candidate, i.e. Trump, is kidding themselves. These people show up every election and vote for every R-name on the ballot. The fact that Democrats have to be wrangled and argued at so hard to do the same is one reason among many that we are in our present mess.

It is true that Trump is barely statistically viable as a candidate at this point, two-thirds of Americans think the charges (especially the J6 charges) against him are serious, and a plurality think he should suspend his presidential campaign (he won't, since it is his last chance to keep from going to jail for probably the rest of his life). It's also true that post-Dobbs, Democrats and Democratic-voting independents have been incredibly more motivated to turn out, and that Trump has never won the popular vote in any election (he only won in 2016, as we all painfully recall, because of the Electoral College). The Republicans have also consistently underperformed in every election since the Greasy Orange God King came along, and this trend is only accelerating.

None of that, again, means that we are safe or can relax or let our guard down about 2024, but it does mean that the only way these shitbags can win is by cheating up the wazoo, which they always try to do. There legitimately are not enough Americans who actually support their heinous crap to properly vote for them otherwise, and if nothing else, we can and should take comfort in that.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #the giant orange monster

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 months

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By: John Burn-Murdoch

Published: Mar 11, 2024

NEW 🧵:

American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.

I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood.

Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.

Averaging all recent polls (thnx @admcrlsn), the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.

People often respond to these figures with accusations of polling error, but this isn’t just one rogue result.

High quality, long-running surveys like this from Gallup have been showing a steepening decline in Black and Latino voters identifying as Democrats for several years.

And America’s gold-standard national election surveys show a similarly sharp decline, with non-white proximity to Democrats now at its lowest since the 1960s, before the civil rights movement and the 1964 election which aligned Black voters with the Dems and against the GOP

So the non-white shift away from Dems seems very real. But what’s driving it?

One factor is fading memories. The civil rights movement and 1964 realignment formed very strong political bonds for the people who lived through it, but this is less true for more recent generations.

The bond between young Black Americans and Democrats is far weaker than among older cohorts.

I don’t think everyone appreciates that the familiar "young favour Dems, old favour Republicans" gradient we see in the US population overall is *inverted* among the Black population.

The oldest Black Americans, whose political allegiances were formed in the 1960s and ’70s, identify as Dems over Reps by a margin of 82%.

Among the youngest Black voters, who have grown up in a very different socio-political environment, the Democrat advantage is just 33%

The changing image of the parties regarding class and income is also a factor.

In 2020 the richest third of voters favoured the Dems for the first time, and the Republicans improved with the poorest. The GOP now appeals to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities

But fading memories and increased competition for working class votes are fixable problems.

As long as these voters’ values remain fundamentally aligned with those of the Democratic party, the right person, policy, or rhetoric can win them back.

However…

Much more ominous for the Democrats is a less widely understood dynamic:

Large numbers of non-white Americans have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest.

Their values are very much *not* aligned with the party.

To show you what I mean by that, I will refer to the brilliant work of @IsmailWhitePhD and @ChrylLaird, whose 2020 book Steadfast Democrats explores why Black Americans historically voted Democrat in such large numbers *despite* often holding very conservative views.

Take deeply conservative positions like support for gun rights, opposition to abortion or the belief that government should stay out of people’s lives.

Very few white voters with these views identify as Dems, but much larger shares of Black, Latino and Asian conservatives do.

This anomaly has historically given Dems a huge boost, but it has begun to unwind.

In 2012, the vast majority of Black conservatives still identified as Democrats, but that has since fallen to less than half. Latino and Asian conservatives show similar but less sudden trends

Once you realise this, the Dem -> Rep migration among non-white voters that we’ve seen in recent years becomes not so much a case of natural Democrats drifting away because they’ve become disillusioned, but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party.

We can also use this chart, which I adapted from White & Laird and @PatrickRuffini’s excellent book Party of the People.

It shows people’s self-reported political views from left to right, and their Rep-Dem margin top to bottom

Liberals vote Dem, conservatives vote Rep. Simple.

Except here’s how it actually looked in 2012: white voters were very well sorted, matching ideology to voting patterns

But Asian, Latino and especially Black voters were misaligned, with large numbers of non-white ideological conservatives voting Democrat in that year’s election

But just look at the realignment since then:

Latino conservatives are now a very solidly Republican group, and Black conservatives favoured Republicans over Democrats for the first time in 2022.

All groups are increasingly matching vote choice to ideology.

So you can see the problem for the Dems.

The non-white voters they’re losing are conservatives.

They won’t be won back by a bold green policy or defunding the police. Their historical support for Democrats was an anomaly and a further rightward shift is as likely as a reversal.

So this explains the big shifts we’re seeing, but why is the racial realignment happening *now*?

@IsmailWhitePhD & @ChrylLaird find that social pressure is key.

When everyone around you votes a certain way, you feel pressure to do the same. Political norms are hard to overcome

In a brilliant piece of research they found that when Black voters with very conservative views have almost exclusively Black social groups, they still vote Dem.

But if they have a more mixed social group, the weaker norm for voting Dem lets them vote in line with their beliefs.

I’ve extended their analysis and I find the same thing, with a similar effect among Latinos.

When people have more diverse social groups, there’s less social pressure to vote for the dominant party in the community, so non-white conservatives feel they can vote Republican.

There are echoes of Britain’s Red Wall — the English communities identified by @JamesKanag which had conservative demographics and attitudes but had stopped short of voting Tory due to a long-held sense that the party was not for them. In 2019 that changed

Non-white Americans are in a similar position.

Strong community norms have kept them in the blue column for decades, but those forces are weakening.

The surprise is not so much that these voters are shifting their support to align with their beliefs, but that it took so long.

So you have: • Decline of church attendance (key source of political norm policing) • The US becoming more racially mixed, less segregated, fewer people with no friends/family of other races

The friction preventing non-white conservatives from voting Republican is diminishing.

And crucially, that weakening of political norms doesn’t only come from people of other races.

As the number of Black Republicans has risen from ~5% to 15% (the figure among young Black adults today), the Democrat-voting norm is eroded and the stigma of voting Republican reduced

This can happen very quickly in a “preference cascade”, where people who previously masked their true feelings to fit in, start discovering that other people actually share their beliefs, so suddenly lots of people shift their behaviour at once (screenshot from @PatrickRuffini)

And ‘a rapid shift in [voting] behaviour as people who were previously masking their [political] beliefs discover that others hold the same views as they do’ fits well with these charts.

Viewed in this light, the size of the shifts in current polling is entirely plausible.

To be clear, nothing in politics is guaranteed to last.

Some shifts are temporary, and many of those deserting the Democrats will become swing voters rather than solid Republicans.

These people can be won back and should absolutely not be written off.

But if you take one thing away from this thread:

The left’s challenge with non-white voters is much deeper than it first appears.

A less racially divided America is an America where people vote more based on their beliefs than their identity. This is a big challenge for Dems.

And here’s my column in full:

Prediction: Trump is elected, and the media blame white Americans, rather than the Dems or the arrogant assumption that non-white people would always vote for them.

#party politics #Democratic Party #Republican party #US elections #black voters #hispanic voters #asian voters #racial realignment #US politics #religion is a mental illness

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mightyflamethrower · 6 months

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A poll was released Sunday taken by the New York Times and Siena College. The poll is a disaster for Joe Biden’s re-election hopes. In five out of six of the most important battleground states, Donald Trump is ahead of Biden.

To say that a panic has set in among Democrats is an understatement. David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist credited with Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, suggests that Biden drop out. Axelrod pointed to the NYT/Siena College poll for justification of his opinion. The poll shows that Trump leads Biden in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Biden won all of those states when he ran against Trump in 2020.

Axelrod posted his thoughts on X (formerly Twitter) and acknowledged it would be difficult to “change horses” now. Only Biden can make the decision, he notes, and Biden’s staff say Biden is determined to run.

Age is a big factor in the discontent with Biden. That is something Biden can’t change.

I think it is interesting that Axelrod asks the question of whether it is in his (Biden’s) best interest to run or in the best interest of the country. A majority of Americans do not want another Biden-Trump race in 2024. Joe Biden is not popular, in fact he has historically low polling numbers across the board. We are one year out from the election tomorrow. According to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll, three-quarters of Americans (76%) believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. That is a devastating number for a president up for re-election. Republicans are most negative about the direction of the country, with 95% saying so. 76% of independents and 54% of Democrats think the same.

It’s interesting that Axelrod said that Biden wants to run on his successes. What would those be? Democrats are proud of ramming through the Green New Deal 2.0 with the misleading titled bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. They point to infrastructure bills and the reduction of insulin costs for seniors, but there really is no real record of success for Joe Biden. That is shown in the unhappiness of Americans with his presidency.

The southern border is open, inflation is high, cost of living expenses are up, mortgage rates are high, rent is up, gas prices are still higher than they were during the Trump years, and Biden drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for a momentary reduction in gas prices with little success. Biden’s parade of horribles goes on and on. On top of poor results, Biden looks and sounds feeble and just too old. He is about to turn 81-years-old. He should be permanently at his beach house enjoying time with the grandkids, not trying to run the United States.

That brings us to another thorny aspect of the Biden administration. Barack Obama is running the White House. It is his third term. This is how it was always meant to be. It was reported last week that Obama has been advising the Biden White House on AI for months. Obama has made himself more available to the press lately by releasing his thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war, as wrong-headed as his thoughts are. Obama can’t give up control, as we all knew would happen. Who would think that Biden is calling the shots in the White House? He’s dazed and confused just entering or exiting a room. I think it is Obama and Jill Biden running the place.

The NYT/Siena College poll found that Trump is preferred over Biden on the issues of immigration, national security and on the current war in Israel. Those issues are on everyone’s minds since October 7. Biden is already going wobbly on full-throated support for Israel because he is losing support of Arab and Muslim voters in states like Michigan. He now calls for a “pause” which is a ceasefire. It’s unacceptable.

Biden is losing support of young voters, black voters, and Hispanic voters. Those are all the groups of voters who brought him to victory in 2020.

Less than half of Black people (49%) and Hispanic people (33%) have a favorable impression of Biden. Both of these groups voted overwhelmingly for him in the 2020 presidential election. According to ABC News’ 2020 exit poll, 87% of Black voters supported Biden in 2020 as did 65% of Hispanic voters. If someone other than Trump or Biden is the nominee of their respective party, about three in 10 Americans say they would be more likely to vote for the candidate of that party, but many more say that it would not make a difference in their vote. By a 23-point margin (31% to 8%), Americans would be more likely to vote for the Republican candidate if someone other than Trump is the party’s nominee. That margin is slightly higher among Republicans (37% to 9%) and independents (38% to 9%). Just under half (48%) say someone other than Trump being on the ballot would make no difference in their vote. Similarly, by a 25-point margin (29% to 4%), Americans would be more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate if someone other than Biden is the party’s nominee — with 55% saying it would make no difference. The margin is somewhat higher, 35 points, among both Democrats and independents.

Inflation and the economy are still the most important issues for voters. Voters vote with their pocketbooks and a majority do not feel better off today than they were four years ago. That is to Trump’s advantage. Voters think back to his term in office and how good the economy was and how most aspects of life were better for Americans. Biden, on the other hand, has brought nothing but pain to families as they try to manage their budgets and keep the bills paid. More than 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

Axelrod is right to point out it would be difficult to change candidates at this point. However, what is the point of bringing it up if he doesn’t want to encourage the party to get someone waiting in the wings – like Gavin Newsom? Newsom is chomping at the bit to parachute in and run. If David Axelrod is publicly pushing the panic button, it means that privately Democrats have their hair on fire. You hate to see it happen. Just kidding. Democrats asked for it.

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 years

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Ben Sargent's newest Loon Star State cartoon, from the September / October issue of our magazine: [Texas Observer]

* * * *

This past Monday, Associate Justice Elena Kagan said of the Supreme Court’s current reputation in the wake of the most recent term:

“The very worst moments [in the court’s history] have been times when judges have even essentially reflected one party’s or one ideology’s set of views in their legal decisions. The thing that builds up reservoirs of public confidence is the court acting like a court and not acting like an extension of the political process. Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves when they don’t act like courts, when they instead stray into places that looks like they are an extension of the political process or where they are imposing their own personal preferences. If, over time, the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that is a dangerous thing for democracy.”

On Tuesday, Samuel Alito, author of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, retorted, telling the Wall Street Journal that, “It goes without saying that everyone is free to express disagreement with our decisions and to criticize our reasoning as they see fit. But saying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line.”

It is rare for a justice to issue such a statement when asked for comment about an ongoing controversy, but the justices on the court now are unlike those who have been there before, with three that would never have been there had it not been for The Federalist Society, Mitch McConnell and the willingness of Donald Trump to go along with anything that “sticks it” to the people who refuse to recognize him for the “stable genius” he truly is.

A new Monmouth University poll finds that nearly 60% of Americans think the Supreme Court is out of touch, and two-thirds (66%) of the public would support creating term limits for Supreme Court justices. This includes clear majorities of Democrats (86%) and independents (63%) and just over half of Republicans (51%).

I’ve never felt toward the court the way I do now, not even with the conservative makeup of the court as it was prior to 2016.

But now...

Hey, Sammy boy, why don’t you go FUCK OFF? And when you’re done, go over there and FUCK OFF. And when you’re done, go over there and FUCK OFF. And then come over here and FUCK OFF. And keep FUCKING OFF, you fucking fuckwitted fucker.

And if you thought last term was bad, this one that started today has the potential to make that one look like the proverbial Sunday morning walk in the park.

[TC in LA :: That’s Another Fine Mess]

#TC in LA #That's Another Fine Mess #Corrupt SCOTUS #Ben Sargent #Opus Dei SCOTUS #Political

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mariacallous · 2 years

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I wanted to take a minute and thank so many of you for the kind words in response to my last update. I also want to fill you in on what I'll be working on this summer and fall. Nothing short of democracy is at stake and I am already hard at work. Frankly, I am tired of the media, all the talking heads, and even certain Debbie Downers in the Democratic Party continuing to predict nothing but doom and gloom for Democrats this fall. Clearly, we are facing some headwinds because of inflation, high gas prices and the history of midterm elections that have not been kind to the incumbent party. But it is time for Democrats to seize the moment and not allow others to continue to define the midterms going forward. Here’s how we do it. First, let’s remind people of the good things that this Administration and Democrats in Congress have accomplished. They saved our economy and created more jobs per month than any President in history. They moved life back to normal after a global pandemic through an aggressive vaccination program. They rebuilt our partnerships with Allies to counter Russian aggression and threats to democracy around the world. And they pushed through a historic infrastructure bill to repair our nation’s aging infrastructure while tackling the climate crisis. Second, we do have to understand and appreciate that people are concerned about our economy right now. Between Putin’s gas price increases, inflation and rising interest rates we have to acknowledge that folks are worried. But Joe Biden and Democrats have a plan. Republicans do not. The Administration is using every tool they can to bring down gas prices, bring down prescription drug prices and ease the supply chains to get more goods out there. The only plan that any Republican has put forth would raise taxes on just about everyone, even folks earning $50,000 or less, and that is totally unacceptable. Third, we have to make sure the findings of the January 6th Committee are being heard. What we are seeing is that we came so close to losing our fragile democracy because of Donald Trump and the MAGA faction of the Republican Party. The good news is that in recent polls, half of Republicans approve of charges being brought against "elected officials who have attempted to overturn the results of an election". When I heard Judge Luttig, beloved by conservatives, say in the hearings “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” it's clear to me that they are starting to break through. Finally, on a candidate by candidate level, Democrats have the upper hand. Looking at places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia -- the GOP nominees are more extreme than they've ever been, often with tremendous baggage. Think back to the Tea Party years. The MAGA faction of the party is even more extreme now, and I believe voters will make the right choice. If we bring them the contrast, they will listen, historical headwinds or not. I know -- and you reading this email know -- that it is possible, even in states where Democrats have not won in decades, to achieve victory. We have to make this a clear choice between responsible leadership and extremism. If we can do that, we are going to win this fall. I'm proud to have you with me as I continue this work. But I also need your help. Please consider making a donation now to help me elect Democrats across the country this fall. There are a number of good people running in winnable races, and I'll reach out soon with individual races that I think need your attention. Thank you for all your support. -Doug

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ausetkmt · 1 year

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On the eve of Georgia’s Senate runoff, Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, warned his supporters about being overconfident. Herschel Walker urged Republicans to flood the polls on Tuesday.

ATLANTA — In the final day before Georgia’s Senate runoff, Senator Raphael Warnock pleaded with supporters to tune out pundits predicting his victory and instead vote “like it’s an emergency” in a bitterly contested race that is closing out the midterm election cycle.

His Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, the former football star recruited into the race by former President Donald J. Trump, made a circuit of north Georgia counties he won easily a month ago, urging Republicans who have avoided early voting to hit the polls Tuesday. “Got to get out the vote,” he said.

The two men are vying in an election with major symbolic as well as practical ramifications. A Warnock victory would deliver Democrats a 51st vote in the Senate, where the party has for the past two years relied on Vice President Kamala Harris to break 50-50 ties. If Mr. Walker wins, Republicans would maintain joint control of Senate committees and two centrist Democratic senators, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, would maintain effective veto power over all legislation in the chamber.

But the broader political stakes are just as significant. Democrats believe a victory would deliver proof they have transformed Georgia into an indisputable battleground, heralding a new era of Sun Belt politics and reshaping their strategies for winning the White House. A Walker victory, after his deeply troubled campaign and the G.O.P.’s clean sweep in statewide races this year, would reassert Republican dominance in the state.

And for Mr. Trump, who three weeks ago began his third presidential campaign, Tuesday’s contest represents his last chance to claim victory in a battleground for one of his closest political acolytes.

More than $380 million has been spent on the race, the most of any election this year, according to OpenSecrets, a group that tracks money in politics. The runoff was prompted when neither candidate received 50 percent of the vote in last month’s general election.

The number of early votes cast has topped 1.89 million, about half the turnout on Nov. 8. Both campaigns believe that group skews heavily Democratic. Republicans involved and allied with Mr. Walker acknowledged that tilt left the candidate needing to win about 60 percent of the in-person vote Tuesday to catch up. He won 56 percent of the Election Day vote in November, according to data from the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

“There is still a path for Herschel Walker to win this race — he still could win,” Mr. Warnock told reporters after speaking to supporters at Georgia Tech on Monday. “We had a massive lead during the general. And so we know that there are differences in how people show up when they vote in this state. And so if there’s anything I’m worried about is that people will think that we don’t need their voice. We do.”

In some ways, Mr. Walker was running a final-day get-out-the-vote campaign ripped from a generation past, when the vast majority of votes were still cast in person on Election Day. Mr. Warnock — who also won a runoff election two years ago — had adjusted to modern voting patterns and Georgia’s voting rules, which allowed for a week of early voting.

At Mr. Warnock’s recent events, it was difficult for him to find supporters who are waiting until Tuesday to vote. When asked who had voted early, nearly every hand went up at stops at colleges and Black churches the last two days.

“I’ve been preaching long enough to know that I am preaching to the choir,” Mr. Warnock, the pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, said on Sunday at a Black church in Athens.

On Monday, when a food delivery app driver dropped off sandwiches for the Warnock campaign at its event at Georgia Tech, a pair of energetic volunteers pressed him about whether he had voted already. (He hadn’t, and said he wasn’t sure he would on Tuesday.)

“This final push is all about building enthusiasm and momentum into Election Day,” Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, a close Warnock ally who has appeared at many of his campaign stops, said during an interview Monday. “We want to mobilize as much energy as possible to get out the vote to reach folks who might not otherwise hear from campaigns.”

In November, Mr. Warnock finished 37,700 votes ahead of Mr. Walker out of nearly four million cast. Mr. Warnock consolidated Democratic voters, while Mr. Walker struggled to rally his party behind him.

At Mr. Walker’s final rally on Monday, at a gun range in Kennesaw, a conservative exurb about 45 minutes from Atlanta, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina spoke to a crowd of about 100 supporters. She encouraged them to turn out to vote and get others to the polls.

“There is no red wave. There’s either turnout or not,” she said, adding that she asked Mr. Walker to fill up his campaign bus with voters to take them to polling places.

“We can show America that we’re about to right the ship.”

In the runoff, Black voters, a slice of the electorate that has overwhelmingly rejected Mr. Walker’s bid, make up about 32 percent of early voters, a figure six percentage points higher than in the November election.

“I come from a family where we’ve all done early voting,” said Jordan Artis, a 21-year-old international affairs student at Georgia Tech who said she waited 80 minutes to vote last week and came to see Mr. Warnock on Monday. Her close friends, Ms. Artis said, have already voted too.

While his advisers and allies quietly lowered expectations, Mr. Walker on Monday said he was feeling “pretty good” as he shook hands and took photos with voters at a popular diner in Flowery Branch, an Atlanta exurb in a county where he took 71 percent of the Nov. 8 vote.

He later delivered unusually short remarks — free of his signature long tangents — to about 75 supporters at a vineyard in Gilmer County, another Republican stronghold.

“Tomorrow is a big day,” he said, asking the group who had voted. Two-thirds of the crowd raised their hands. “This is what we’ve got to do — we’ve got to vote.”

Mr. Walker’s supporters on Monday brushed off worries that poor weather — rain is in the Tuesday forecast for the Atlanta area and North Georgia — or low energy would diminish Election Day turnout.

“I’m feeling very encouraged. I think he’s got this,” said Judy Shinall, 77, a Walker supporter from Ackworth. Ms. Shinall acknowledged the party has fallen short at clutch time, most recently two years ago when Mr. Warnock won a runoff for a special election. “Republicans sometimes, you know, won’t get out there. And this is crucial. Tomorrow is it,” she said.

Mr. Walker was wrapping up a campaign that appears to have failed to consolidate the disparate wings of his party. He ran hard toward the party’s Trump-aligned base, repelling moderate elements of the coalition that propelled Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to victory.

Mr. Walker was pummeled by damaging headlines throughout the campaign, including accusations from women he has dated and been married to that he was physically abusive. Two other former girlfriends said he urged them to have abortions, although he ran as an abortion opponent. (Mr. Walker denied the claims.) He also faced questions about his residency, after living in Texas for decades before moving back to Georgia when he began this campaign.

Mr. Kemp kept some distance from Mr. Walker during the general election. But in the runoff, he turned over his political operation to help, recorded a television ad and appeared at one campaign event alongside Mr. Walker.

Other Republicans never got onboard. In recent days, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan of Georgia, who did not seek re-election this year after repeatedly condemning Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, has done a media tour explaining why he stood in an early-voting line for an hour but then declined to vote for Mr. Walker.

“I think Herschel Walker will probably go down as one of the worst Republican candidates in our party’s history,” Mr. Duncan told CBS News in an interview broadcast Tuesday.

The runoff is taking place under new voting rules written by Georgia’s Republican state legislators and signed into law by Mr. Kemp. After the victories by Mr. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff in January 2021, Georgia law now forbids new voter registration between the general election and the runoff.

Republicans also cut in half the period of time between the two contests, limited the early-voting period and made voting by mail more difficult, among other restrictions on mail voting and drop boxes.

Some Republican voters expressed confusion about the runoff rules.

David Mathews, 74, a retired manager at a petroleum company who was having breakfast with his fiancé and a friend at the Flowery Branch diner, where Mr. Walker began his Monday campaign swing, said he did not realize that his polling location had been open for early voting, which ended on Friday.

“They didn’t have the signs out,” he said, before digging into biscuits and gravy with bacon. Mr. Mathews said he planned to cast his ballot Tuesday for Mr. Walker.

Mr. Warnock’s campaign and his allies spent millions pushing supporters back to the polls. “One more time, Georgia,” screamed his ads on billboards and cellphones that urged supporters to vote early for him. By the campaign’s final hours, he acknowledged that his supporters might be worn out.

“I know you might be tired,” he said at a Black church on Sunday night in Athens. “I get tired, too.”

#Georgia Senate Runoff 2022 #Georgia #Black Votes Matter #Raphael Warnock #Warnock Claims Momentum in Georgia #as Walker Banks on Election Day Turnout

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the-river-sage · 5 days

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can't say that i'm particularly a fan of the new Macklemore song that everyone seems to be clamoring about, given that he felt the need to include a couple lines with the lazy (and inaccurate) take laying the blame for the situation almost entirely at Biden's feet and also boast about the counterproductive inaction he will be taking this election by not voting for him. you don't like Biden? fine. you're upset about the situation in Palestine? absolutely justified. but can we fucking NOT with the moral grandstanding to such an extent that it actively causes more fucking problems?

whether you like it or not, come election time you have two options to help shape the direction of this country: you vote Democrat even if you (mistakenly) believe that Biden is a bad candidate, or you vote Republican and support everything that that entails. you don't vote or go third-party? congratulations, you've accomplished nothing other than to feel as if you made a statement by throwing a tantrum when there are tremendous stakes at play. frankly, get off your high horse and check your privilege, cause the difference between a 2nd Biden term and a 2nd Trump term would be massive

some of y'all really out here acting like "there's no difference" between the two candidates and i'm sick of seeing this childish, edgelord apathy. it is 2024 and if you're spending hours on Tumblr or TikTok then you have access to so much information that very clearly demonstrates how false that tired old rhetoric is. and it pisses me off, cause here's how that mentality is going to play out: half a dozen months of "Trump/Biden are the same" and/or "Biden's not worth voting for" or similar -> Trump winning the election and these people being shocked that this happened despite deliberately contributing to sabotaging Dems' chances over this single issue which they are divided on -> acting surprised at the horrific agenda that WILL be carried out under a repeat Trump administration while fully ignoring the role they played in letting it happen -> everyone loses.

and if you think i'm being heartless and just don't care about what's happening in Palestine, kindly go fuck yourself. i've been pro-Palestine since some of y'all were still shitting your diapers and sucking your thumbs. this isn't about not caring about Palestine, this is about recognizing the very real additional harm that would come about if large groups of people decide that "they'll never vote for a politician who supports genocide!" and while you're patting yourself on the back for taking that stance and collecting all the social capital and internet points you get from talking about it constantly, other folks will literally be dying at the hands of freshly enacted Republican legislation.

do not let perfect be the enemy of good. do not pride yourself on some bullshit moral purity of doing nothing wrong by avoiding actions that may not always be 100% good. please, do not be fucking stupid. recognize that politics are not a game and have significant consequences. some of y'all been talking like you really want to fuck around, and i just hope that when November comes... the rest of us aren't gonna have to find out.

#us politics #palestine #long post #my thoughts

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saltypiss · 2 months

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The biden speech everyone's cheering was decent to okay. Didn't have much of a problem until he started discussing the genocide by israel to Palestine as a war and as if it was defense.

Truthfully I'd have walked away thinking it was an okay speech. But the second that hit? Total wash. Contradicting himself hard to justify the genocide.

Then it played a different speech and man, he really is tired. Like not trying to be a bitch "he's old and sleepy!" genuinely the dude just has no energy and looks genuinely exhausted. Definitely had drugs in his system for the speech before, but I don't care, I want an olympics based on how far drugs can push someone to jump anyways.

The only realistically solvable problem I have left with Biden anymore is aiding and partaking in a genocide and working with terrorists to do so. But my problem with dems continues to be their utter disdain to criticise this complete joke of a person.

Like god damn ya'll. Just say you're not voting trump at this point. It's embarrassing how republican democratic voters have become. Seriously the instant he's out every one of ya'll are turning on him. Just disgusting and overwhelmingly telling of your character how far you're willing to go to ignore reality to "protect" yourself at the expense of actual lives you deemed beneath you.

I look forward to a decade from now when I get to say "Told ya so" on so much shit when it comes to this administration.

Seriously republicans are at least "debating" who to vote for in the elections. Ya'll don't have a Single Motherfucker lined up for after Biden. Republicans got at least 6 faces of the same flavor to choose from. Biden ain't getting a third term either and the very idea that seems to be everyone's plan is pathetic.

"If you criticise biden it means you're voting for dump!" Like my man no, I'm just not voting for the genocider who did less than the bare minimum in the 4 years he's been in charge to inspire anything in me. "Oh so your plan is to withold your vote for Biden? That's just a vote for dump!" Oh so your plan is get Biden in and then.... And then what?

Does the genocide end? No. Is marijuana legalized? No. Is student loans cancelled? No. Is minimum wage going up? No. Are tax rates for the rich going up? Pfft, 25% yeah, better than what we had but what a damn inch forward. Is he going to lower prices? No. Which is something he mentioned surprisingly, but he's corporate as fuck and we all know the law that'll pass will be a nothingburger that gets removed next election by the innevitable desantis victory against Literally No One.

Go ahead and continue keeping the status quo and establishing that genocide is not enough to even make you blink towards utter devotion. I'm gonna vote third party and continue to do so until we have more than 2 genocidal parties that are completely incapable of criticising Dear Leader. Ya'll have fun with your faux politics where dems are setting up an R victory, I'm gonna Try Something Else and hopefully it's not all a completely rigged and broken system where it doesn't happen even when it should.

Remember: You cannot change an anti-genocider's stance. You can only change yourself. I'd vote biden if he rescinded support and shamefully hid that part of himself for the rest of his presidency, because at least then I know he can be held accountable. I know we didn't elect a different flavor of dictator.

Really have to understand that Dems will do the bare minimum when they feel they actually have to listen to the people. Dump absolutely showed that dems needed to step up their game, and while I appreciate not aiming for charisma, maybe they could've also tried anything worth a shit.

A whole hour n a half long speech and not a single thing he said helped me or anyone I know. Fascinating. Ya gotta love all the nebulous "we got taxes!" going on but here we stand feeling absolutely none of it. Tell me, when does the government gaining money benefit me? Because my roads are shit, my hospitals private, our prisons bloated with pot smokers turned drug experts, and every single fucking time I've tried for government assistance, they Always Deny Me.

So uh. Yeah when's the government gaining money going to positively affect my life? As it stands, it's literally just the stock market. Line goes up, I feel nothing, line goes down, my entire life turns to shit, but not for politicians or the rich.

How about a fucking UBI or god I dunno, make it possible to get government assistance in the first place? Maybe make unemployment catered to, you know, the employee? Hell, fight greedflation like he claims. Bro's on stage acting like he's never noticed shrinkflation, buddy, I was a Child when I first noticed a Chocolate Bar do this shit. Cmon. How much is a banana, old man? How much is the banana?

Regardless. I'm tired of faux good PR and multitudes of claims of accomplishments when not a single one of those affects my day to day. Yes. Good on being green n shit. But you can do more than the bare minimum of ensuring the planet doesn't die with us all on it. Yes that is the bare minimum, and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

All anyone had to do, was just criticise the guy. Not pull your vote, but simply, point out mistakes? Oopsies and gaffs? Perhaps even just have a giggle? It's painfully obvious this admin is shit but simply better than we were expecting from the US government in general thanks to Dump.

As it stand though, well, Biden ain't losing, and he's gonna find out pretty fucking quickly that if a Genocide isn't going to get Dems to be self-aware, god damn near nothing will. And the next dem president after that, and after that, and after that. Literally, just be anti-genocide? It's kind've the most rock-solid, future-proofing you can do for your character, and of course other people, of course. But that's kinda a backseat item for dems anymore. I mean, hey, Biden simply had to send bombs and guns to aid a genocide, maybe it's okay if he does it to some other group of people I only just heard about but Instantly Violently Hate. After all, a genocide is good for Biden!

Again. Just to reiterate a final time: I would've stayed Dem if ya'll could give or take even the slightest criticism of this fuck. I cannot stress enough that it's not a guerilla program to make biden look bad. He just does it himself. But I understand the game. Shit like this can happen with such a compromised country, but jesus christ, the voters? The voters are even pro-genocide? Like, vehemently, pro-genocide, Very Overwhelmingly Pro-Genocide. Like...ya'll, nah. I'm out. No party should overwhelmingly support a genocide.

That's why I'm anti-republican. That's why I was a Dem. Because republicans want a genocide of black people, gay people, other countries.

And here we stand. Biden and his entire admin are pro-genocide. This isn't a hard concept to understand. You either compromise and criticise, or you lose your most rational. Because, and again, this cannot be stressed enough: You Cannot Change an Anti-Genocider's Stance. This is on Ya'll. Not the people who don't want thousands and millions dead.

If ya'll are overwhelmingly, and Vehemently against a compromise, a compromise consisting of "Genocide Bad" then the party is compromised and not worth working with.

Change has to come from ya'll because it will not from republicans. But the fact remains that a Shitload of you are fully invested in justifying a genocide for some old fuck with nothing to show for 4 years and desperately doesn't want to show anything before those 4 years.

Just so we're clear a final time:

Genocide is Bad.

If someone is telling you otherwise, that's telling of their character, and you should trust that tell to inform you of the character. Not justify it. Not defend it. Because when you do, you push away rationality and accountability. When you trust the mask more than the person, the person will always be there, while the mask will not.

Are you willing to defend a genocide for 5 years maximum? Are you willing to justify the actions of someone who's aiding in a genocide until it's no longer convenient? How many corpses need to pile before the end of the genocider's term to hasten your innevtiable switch of opinion?

Because here's the facts: Most of ya'll couldn't care less about the genocide. But by golly, if 4 years of faux safety is enough to justify one. Until it's no longer social convenient. Then, and only then, will you recognize your entire online personality, even real life personality, resulted in the death of multiple generarions of people. Only then will you recognize, you were on the wrong side of history.

Because as easily as you forgave Biden for aiding a genocide, rational people just as easily can drop you out of their life. Good luck getting rid of that digital footprint, the world, and history, will only remember your face for one thing: Aiding a Genocide. Because it was socially convenient at the time. Congrats.

#democrats #biden

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arpov-blog-blog · 5 months

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..."The idea that a “unity ticket” featuring a Republican and a Democrat could somehow produce a nominee with “a clear path to victory” is worse than a political fiction. The group behind it, No Labels, is pushing a dangerous lie that would simply serve to put Trump back in the White House.

How can I be so certain? Look at the last half-century of election results. In modern U.S. presidential history, third parties have not won much. In 1968, George Wallace won 46 electoral votes by running a regionally-targeted (and racist) campaign. Since then, they’ve won zilch — not a single state. Not Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in 2016, and not Ralph Nader in 2000. None of them broke 5 percent of the vote.

Then there’s Ross Perot, who No Labels aspires to emulate for his appeal to “the vast middle of the electorate.” Despite unlimited cash and facing an unpopular incumbent in George H.W. Bush and a near-unknown in Bill Clinton, Perot failed to win a single state. Can No Labels twist the data and make an argument that Perot could have won if he had done things differently? Sure! But that’s like saying I could have been the quarterback of the Denver Broncos — technically true, but come on!

There’s a reason for this lack of success: Our political system isn’t designed to support third parties at the presidential level.

The biggest barrier is the Electoral College. States use a “winner takes all” system to distribute their electoral votes, which is why Perot won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote but got a big fat zero from the Electoral College. This leads to two practical effects: First, parties are incentivized to form the largest coalitions possible, which naturally leads to a two-party system. Second, many voters don’t want to “waste” their vote on a candidate with no chance of winning, so they default to the major parties. Both effects make it harder for third parties to compete.

The question of whether Americans are willing to vote for a third party comes up every presidential cycle. Consider this: Two months before the 2016 election, Gary Johnson polled at 10 percent. In June 1992, Perot led all candidates at 39 percent. These polls were mirages — neither got anything close to that number of votes. Third parties often poll well during a campaign, but that support vanishes on Election Day.

This points to a larger truth: Americans think a third party is needed, even if they won’t vote for one. Voters want to express discontent with their party. Sure, nearly half of the electorate thinks a third party is necessary, but No Labels mistakenly assumes this means those voters will actually vote for one. Once Americans get a good look at the alternatives, like Perot or Johnson, they end up sticking with the major parties.

In 2016, Trump’s margin of victory was less than 50,000 votes in these states, and third parties won significantly more votes than that in each one. Did they flip the election for Trump? It’s possible. In 2020, with no third parties to contend with, Biden beat Trump in Michigan by 154,188 votes, Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes and Wisconsin by 20,682. All of those margins are smaller than what third parties received in 2016. These Blue Wall states will be close again in 2024, and if third parties perform similarly in 2024 as they did in 2016, they will deny Biden a second term.

This alone should give any responsible person pause. A No Labels candidate in these states could easily hand the election to Trump. But maybe that’s the goal. Whatever their original intentions, the people behind No Labels — including Harlan Crow, the GOP mega-donor who gifted travel and luxury vacations to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — are using dark money on this folly. The group is working to raise $70 million and has already qualified for the ballot in 12 states, including states that could be pivotal to the outcome, such as Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina.

There are serious questions about how the group’s ticket would be picked (likely behind closed doors) and whether acting like a political party without registering as one is legal. Not to mention, its own founders and staff are in “open revolt” over the group’s current aspirations.

While I’m not a fan of polling done more than a year out (seriously), The Wall Street Journal did an analysis that showed third parties would more likely draw votes from Biden. The report points to an NBC survey that has Biden and Trump tied head to head, but if you add a third-party candidate, Trump leads by 3 percent. (Of course, this math might change if Liz Cheney or RFK Jr. make a serious run.) New polling of young voters shows a similar dynamic, shrinking Biden’s lead with the introduction of third parties.

Historical data suggests the same. Based on exit polling (a highly flawed metric), No Labels believes Perot in 1992 may have siphoned votes from both parties equally. However, an American Journal of Political Science study concluded that Perot increased turnout by 3 percent and decreased Clinton’s margin of victory by 7 percent.

If we look at who helped Biden win last time, they are the type of voters who might switch parties: Voters who selected a third party in 2016 voted for Biden by 29 percent. Those voters could be the difference for Biden in 2024."

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declineofcivilizationorwtf · 1 year

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Politics in my Time

Frank Shaffer

I love politics. I been following it religiously since 1968. Yes, I’m that old. The one constant denominator in all those years is I never liked one of the Democrat or Republican presidential candidates. It’s not that I didn’t support any of them ‘cause I did. I just didn’t like them or what they represented, and usually I just lent my support for the lesser of two evils.

My first election that I was eligible to vote in was in ‘sixty-eight, and my support went to George Wallace, a third-party candidate. I believed Nixon was a warmonger, and his opponent, Humphrey—there was no way I could support him. Nixon, of course, won, and he immediately escalated the Viet Nam war. After Nixon resigned in disgrace, Ford filled the spot until Carter took over. He brought half of Georgia with him, and they failed miserably. We did a little better with Reagan. Being an actor, he performed his way thru 8 years. Then came Daddy Bush with his “read my lips” and his unfinished business with Saddam Hussein.

Along came silver-tongued Clinton. I almost liked him and believe he got a raw deal by being impeached for talking the panties off an intern. If you studied history, you would learn that just about every president, apart from maybe three or four, had extramarital sexual relationships with someone before or during their administration. Nobody cared ‘cause we didn’t believe a president’s sex life had anything to do with the way he ran the country.

Now, “W” was a work of art. He managed to start a war with the wrong country and turned us all into flag-waving patriots. As far as Obama, I don’t know. I think I slept though his entire eight years.

Out of nowhere, along came the man with the orange face who bullied his way into office. What can I say about Trump? I’ll start by stating he could have been a great president if he didn’t lie about everything. He also continually asked the wrong people for advice. Once, he even asked Kid Rock what he should do about North Korea. He also didn’t help his standing in American history by trying to overthrow the government at the end of his term. As far as Biden is concerned, he has been a total disaster, but I will give him credit for getting half of America vaccinated.

If I rated the presidents in my era of voting, I would have to pick them in this order: Clinton, Reagan, Trump, W. Bush, Obama, Nixon, Carter, H. Bush, Ford, and Biden. I placed Clinton first mainly ‘cause he managed to balance the budget. My least favorite would be Biden. His constant giveaways have made a section of this nation depend on the government, and they feel it’s their right to let the working taxpayers of America support them.

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fumpkins · 2 years

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Democrats and the endless pursuit of climate legislation

Twelve years ago, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, the country teetered on the edge of passing its first-ever comprehensive climate bill. A triumvirate of senators were negotiating bipartisan legislation that would invest in clean energy, set a price on carbon pollution, and — as a carrot for Republicans — temporarily expand offshore drilling.

Then an oil rig — the Deepwater Horizon — exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The loose bipartisan coalition collapsed. As President Barack Obama later wrote in his memoir, A Promised Land, “My already slim chances of passing climate legislation before the midterm elections had just gone up in smoke.”

Today, the sense of déjà vu is strong. The first half of 2022 has been stacked with events that have pushed climate change far down the list of priorities. The Biden administration has been caught between the war in Ukraine, surging inflation, the fight over Roe v. Wade, and, horrifically, continued gun violence. A month ago, many Democrats cited the Memorial Day recess as a loose deadline for having a climate reconciliation bill — one that could pass the Senate with only 50 votes — drafted or agreed upon. Any later, and the summer recesses and run-up to midterms could swallow any legislative opportunity. That date has now come and gone. “If you’re paying attention, you should be worried,” Jared Huffman, a Democratic representative from California, told E&E News last week.

It’s both a sluggish and anticlimactic result for a party that, in 2020 and 2021, threw its weight behind climate action. The Build Back Better Act, President Biden’s massive $2 trillion spending framework, passed the House of Representatives last November, with $555 billion in spending for climate and clean energy. The bill would have invested in wind, solar, and geothermal power, offered Americans cash to buy EVs or e-bikes, retrofitted homes to be more energy efficient, and much, much more — but it died in the Senate, when Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia refused to support it.

Since then, climate action has virtually disappeared from the public and political agenda. Activists — who during the Trump administration seemed poised to transform U.S. politics — are tired and disillusioned. Meanwhile, in Congress, Manchin has arranged bipartisan energy talks and waffled on the importance of electric vehicles and even renewables.

In theory, some form of energy reconciliation package is still possible, one that would preserve some of the major green investments of Build Back Better. Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Third Way, gave the odds of passing something before the midterms at around 50 percent. “I don’t think that’s either optimistic or pessimistic,” he said. Democrats, he argued, are going to be under intense pressure — both to further their agenda and to have concrete action to show to voters in November. He compared the state of the bill to the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Everything’s cut off, but it’s not dead yet.”

Trevor Higgins, vice president for climate policy at the think tank Center for American Progress, similarly argued that there is still a chance for significant action, especially given that Manchin is currently in talks with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “There’s just such a huge agreement across all the wings of the party on investments in clean energy,” he said. “It will come down to how Joe Manchin wants to proceed — but for the first time in a long while, his staff are in active negotiations to explore what it is that he actually wants.”

The timeline, however, will be tight. The deadline for passing a budget reconciliation bill is the end of the fiscal year, or the end of September. Between now and then, Congress has precious few working weeks to get legislation done. Given the Congressional recess in August, Freed estimates that Democrats will need to have a bill drafted and with sufficient support by late July. If not, he said, “there’s no way you can cram it all in for the last week of July and get it right.”

Chances are also slim that, come next year, Democrats will hold both the House and Senate. According to a 2021 analysis from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, the president’s party has, on average, lost 27 seats in the House and close to four seats in the Senate in midterm elections going back to 1946. With Democrats’ incredibly slim majority in the Senate, the loss of even a single seat could mean the end of climate legislation for another two years. Or four. Or even six.

It is hard to overstate the significance of the next few months. If Congress passes some version of the clean energy tax credits and investments in the Build Back Better Act, modelers at Princeton University estimate the United States would be within striking distance of Biden’s goal to halve emissions by 2030. Should Congress pass nothing at all, they estimate the country will emit an extra 5.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide over the next eight years. (Total global emissions were approximately 35 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2021.)

And yet, as drought takes over the West and heat waves rage across the nation, climate remains seemingly on the back burner. Part of that may be strategic; loudly protesting Manchin’s obstructionism has yielded no results, and the White House appears content to allow Schumer to take the lead on negotiations. But if there is no bill, the party that united around climate change will be forced to contend with what went wrong. The planet will be forced to contend with that, too.

This story was originally published by Livescience.Tech with the headline Democrats and the endless pursuit of climate legislation on Jun 1, 2022.

New post published on: https://livescience.tech/2022/06/01/democrats-and-the-endless-pursuit-of-climate-legislation/

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qqueenofhades · 3 years

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Do you feel up to a rant on “the Democratic electorate needs to be wooed and courted and herded like cats every single time.” I don’t really understand this but would like to.

I have written several posts on this issue, most or all of which should be in my politics for ts tag. The information I just reblogged about the California gubernatorial recall election is another unfortunate example: according to a LA Times poll cited in the article, over three-quarters of registered CA Republicans are definitely going to vote, compared to under half of registered CA Democrats who said the same. Thanks to CA's insane recall election rules, that could put a fringe hard-right Trumpist in charge of America's bluest and most populous state, with possibly the ability to flip the Senate back to GOP control if Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein (who is 88) dies or is otherwise incapacitated before the 2022 elections. A GOP governor will then appoint her replacement, and while he (because let's be real, it WOULD be a he) would have to run again in 2022 and probably be beaten by a regular Democrat, it would be a huge blow in the meantime. Not to mention all the other stupid COVID policies that a hard-right wingnut could inflict on California until then.

We also saw this extensively in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, where certain Bernie Sanders supporters were willing to support him and ONLY him as the Democratic nominee (regardless of the fact that Sanders isn't even a Democrat, he sits in the Senate as an independent) and spent all their time viciously trashing the rest of the Democratic field and refusing to vote for anyone who should supplant him. That cost us the election in 2016, and we're lucky that it didn't do the same in 2020. I supported Elizabeth Warren in the primaries, but I said from the beginning that I would vote for whatever sentient potted cactus got the Democratic nomination, and I did. Joe Biden was not my first, second, third, fourth, etc choice for the nomination, but in hindsight, seeing the massive pro-Trump turnout that cost us a lot of the Senate seats we were hoping to pick up for the Democrats, I honestly think an old white man with a reputation as a centrist is the only candidate who could have possibly beaten the Orange One (and the margins in the key states were all heart-attackingly close, under 100k votes in each). And Biden, despite being a flawed candidate who has made a flawed president, is still governing from a decidedly progressive perspective! The American Rescue Plan alone was one of the biggest pro-working-class pieces of legislation in generations (especially if they can make the child tax credit permanent).

Anyway, the point is, certain Democratic voters refuse to vote, or don't think it's important enough to vote, or proclaim that they will only vote for one candidate, or that it's "immoral" to vote for a flawed Democratic establishment politician instead of their latest socialist Twitter messiah (even if establishment politicians know, y'know, how to actually get things done). In short, they see it as an unacceptable compromise to take anything less than what they supposedly want, and that means that Republicans (who reliably turn out and vote in a lockstep bloc for their guy) have a built-in advantage when it comes to winning elections, even before the raft of voter suppression laws they're passing to help themselves out, and even if the Republican Party as a whole is less popular in America than ever. They just have to gerrymander the right districts and get one more vote than the other guy, and they routinely benefit from self-inflicted Democratic voter apathy in maintaining tyrannical minority rule.

Anyway. If you're a California Democrat, please vote to keep Newsom in office. If you're an American Democrat, just vote, period, in whatever election rolls along (especially the 2022 midterms). Please.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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