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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   38655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Kamala is not going to win. She's going to say things like "space is neat" and "who doesn't love a big yellow schoolbus" on the debate stage.

What she might do is salvage some senate races for the democrats. This is unfortunate, but Hung Cao was a longshot anyways and he'd only be able to get one term.

Trump is not popular! His approval/favorability is terrible compared to past presidential candidates. He's only winning the election because Dems managed to nominate someone worse. Kamala isn't eighty, she can say more than ten words in sequence without pausing or stuttering. She's not a good Dem, but she's still just a mediocre generic Dem, and that's good enough for a lot of voters.

Trump wasn’t popular. I’m curious if his shooting / immediate reaction to it won’t change the popularity. Fifty Cent did a concert with Trump’s face superimposed on his face for a song.

The Dems are trying to create wild conspiracy theories precisely because otherwise they’d have to admire what Trump did.

I would expect it to boost him by a point or two, and for that boost to fade out over the next few months. He's down by much more than a point or two

I don’t think he is down — what’s your source

This requires independent voters to ignore that the Democrat party as a whole, INCLUDING Kamala, pulled the wool over their eyes and just created this mess without even putting the candidates through primaries.

In a sane world, this kind of chaotic revelation of the lie would result in a few weeks of terrible polling for the mainstream party until they manage to re-establish a cohesive narrative and/or Trump shoots his mouth off again. Misleading constituents this badly should provoke backlash.

I don't really know how it plays in our actual world.

How it plays is people thank God we finally have a normal candidate and no one cares how we got here (even if Kamala is a bit of an oddball) (just my prediction)

Yeah, my sense (which is admittedly based off of about two people on twitter) is that democrat voters aren't so angry because they were treated dishonestly but because the cover-up of Biden's cognitive state put the party in a much worse situation vis-a-vis the election against Trump. I don't think there's gonna be any electoral fallout for retributive reasons.

Hard to be certain of that when Kamala's got such low approval. I'm not sure if she qualifies as a 'normal' candidate, either.

But we're in weird times.

Kamala is not going to win. She's going to say things like "space is neat" and "who doesn't love a big yellow schoolbus" on the debate stage.

These pithy, assured pronouncements are tedious and call to mind the expression often wrong, but never in doubt. The betting market consensus now is that Harris has a nearly 40% chance of winning in November; it's moronic to declare that "Kamala is not going to win."

60-40 is a big lead but any election easily could be won by a major party candidate.

Debates do not matter that much. Even Biden's polls did not budge after the worst debate performance ever. Swing states are what matter, and this is why trump will win. Her problem is that expectations will be higher compared to Biden.

How do you reconcile this statement with what has unfolded over the last month or so?

If debates didn't matter, Joe Biden would be still favored to win the election in November.

meant in terms of polling. 538 unchanged

538 isn’t the five thirty eight of old. See Nate Silver’s recent post.

so what? does not change my point that biden did not see a polling decline after bad debate performance

There was a decrease. By about a point or two. That’s big when Trump already had a lead

That does not answer the question.

Ill ask again how do you reconcile your claim that debates dont matter with the observation that Biden's poor debate performance effectively killed his chances of winning the election come November?

my original post explicitly mentioned polling

Then we can reasonably surmise that to the degree that "debates don't matter" polling matters even less.

Serious question why are people quoting 538 at this point? Didn’t they recently have Biden up on Trump and it all boiled down to incumbent advantage?

I haven’t tracked them but it feels to me like that’s gone down as a purely partisan site at this point. Nate Silver himself has recently trashed 538. Now 2 people in this thread quote them?

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1814062597152600198?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

then what polling site is more accurate? even if the model does not work as well or nate is a partisan hack, the data clearly shows biden did not lose approval points after his bad debate

538 is a model, only slightly based on polling

Are you serious? Biden got kicked out by his party after the debate. Debates definitely matter.

meant in terms of polling. 538 unchanged

You should use this as an opportunity to re-evaluate your esteem of 538. Nate Silver left and it’s not what it once was.

OK, debates matter if they reveal your staff and inner circle has been engaged in a years-long conspiracy to hide the fact that you're non compos mentis and probably aren't actually capable of exercising the powers of your office consistently - let alone engaging in the strenuous work of campaigning.

I think if she debates Trump and makes it clear that we could have a 59 year old spring chicken like her leading the country there will be an excitement bump

Trump and allies will be spending BG millions upon millions introducing voters in swing states to Harris.

I'm picturing her own words with a subtitle of "Kamala Harris, presidential candidate".

it cannot be worse than Biden's performance.

Not when your dump stat is charisma. Then it is possible.

One man’s gaffe is another man’s folksy charm. I think people are overestimating the impact of things like this when compared to Trump or Biden

There's like four levels of jokes in:

Hung Cao: He's a Bull in a China shop!

She isn’t skilled enough to deal with the fact she’s going to have to eat a lot of lack of credibility for participating in covering up Joes decline.

Sure it was to a great extent her job, but a few median voters have lost trust.

Biden’s decline is now yesterday’s issue. This was a powerful issue for republicans 3 hours ago and just like that it’s over.

You realize that Biden's decline by itself is only one part of this drama, right? The rest has been watching the Democrat party panic without direction and reveal themselves as dishonestly providing cover for a senile old man.

As long as the party running in November is the party that managed this embarrassing shitshow, you might want to reassess how 'over' this is.

And now we get to gleefully hammer home the point that Dems are going to nominate for the position of Commander In Chief a casting couch girl. Any man with an ounce of testosterone will be viscerally repelled by the image of their Executive on her knees under a mahogany desk.

There's a way to make this argument as a legitimate (if debatable) talking point, and then there's culture warring as you gleefully sneer at a hated political enemy. This is way too much of the latter.

Any man with an ounce of testosterone

A man (generously, 6 L of blood) with a reasonably high amount of testosterone (1100 ng/dL) has about 2 * 10^-8 ounces of testosterone in his body.

Do you really think this passes an ideological turing test and accurately models the reaction of marginal democrats and independents? Also, why do you think a 30-year-old sex scandal would hurt Harris when multiple such scandals haven't hurt Trump?

There's a big difference between sex to get ahead and sex once you get ahead.

Harris is accused of using sex to get her first job in politics. Trump is accused of using his wealth/Fame/position to get sex.

This is mostly a gendered dynamic, but it's also more elemental than that. Consider: if instead of fucking Willie Brown to get ahead for politics, Kamala had used her position as Senator or VP to sleep with AJ Brown the eagles wide receiver for pleasure. Totally different dynamic, different accusations would be hurled towards her.

Sex-for-promotion has the principle-agent problem, absent in power-for-sex. Feminists might accuse Trump of abusing "power dynamics" and make Clinton's affair tantamount to rape of Lewinsky, but in the end the only victims are their sex partners.

But if Kamala got her job only because of her skills in bed, then the aggrieved party is the organization in which she was unfairly promoted by a guy she is said to have gave head to.

Men and women are not the same. A man sleeping around is powerful. A women using her sexuality for favors is not powerful.

Because there are fundamentally different optics for the two of them. They're competing for the office of the presidency, a position in which it helps to have a fearsome reputation among your enemies. Trump plowing through women is a sign of strength and vigor, moral arguments notwithstanding. Kamala sucking dick for clout makes her sound incompetent and submissive. These are not Commander In Chief qualities.

Because she's a woman.

Doesn't that just make people more sympathetic to her, and more likely to give her the benefit of the doubt?

While I think the extent of the double standard is overstated, it really is much more acceptable for a man to be promiscuous than a woman.

Men and women are not the same, so different standards apply, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise (even some radfems are, funnily enough).

Not in cases of sexual immorality. The double standard exists for a lot of reasons but it does exist.

The guys who care about that are already voting Trump. The vulnerability is more with female voters (ironically, likely more those who are of a racial minority).

During the debate, Donald Trump can sound the alarm that the country is in danger because the commander-in-chief is incapacitated, and then demand that Kamala Harris must either agree with him or give evidence to refute his claim.

I'm curious to see how the spacetime continuum is going to be changed. I expect the entire Biden administration - the last 1292 days, to be precise - to go straight down the memory hole. Joe who? Is that supposed to be somebody important?

Joe's decline is yesterday's issue. That VP Harris willingly concealed his decline is a now-issue. Plenty of footage of a grimace-wearing Harris standing next to doddering old Biden to sell the narrative that she's especially duplicitous. The emperor had no clothes and she knew. This will be the angle Republicans use against her.

"Loyalty"

"Trust in the system"

There are various ways this angle could be played to seem righteous and honorable.

"Conflict of interest"?

She should have said something, but she may be at the bottom of the list of people who should have. It would have seemed creepy if the only person sounding the alarm about Biden was the one person with the most to potentially gain personally from that.

You think the Democratic brand suffered 0% damage for doing a closed primary and protecting Biden who was mentally gone the entire time?

Kamala running as Bidens replacement isn’t the same thing as Kamala running after winning the primary. A lot of trust has been lost and now voters will rightfully asks what else are the Dems lying about.

In my view everything she says on stage will rightfully be question by all but the 30-40% of the solid blue electorate.

i don't think it matters that much. The debate performance already caused voters to lose confidence in him. Him stepping down does not come as a surprise.

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