Harris-Walz / Dems

wonko the sane?

You may test that assumption at your convinience.
Citizen
Sorry, I mean it needs to be headline news, every night and every single time. Media needs to put a magnifier on it when it happens.
 

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
Screenshot 2024-09-24 at 7.57.10 PM.png


It isn't top billing, but at least for today it is way more than 10%.
 

Pocket

jumbled pile of person
Citizen
"Why isn't the media reporting on this?" says a terminally online person linking to an article on a mainstream news site.

"I know, right?" chime in all the people who don't even read the news anymore and just wait for stuff to trickle in through their social networks.
 

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
An older lady I know posted after Trump's win in 2016 that the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, gave us the Electoral College to protect the nation from the cities and I hope someone gets it on video if she ever says that to James Madison's face. He's gonna be like "What????" Madison was from Virginia and didn't want the disproportionate electoral votes, but agreed to it to get the thing settled. Tell him you think the cities are going to run the table. Do it. I want to see his face. Because he never imagined that that would even be possible.

I wish some larger red states would have the guts to sign on with the Popular Vote pact. There's this modern conventional wisdom that the Electoral College is helping Republicans. Well, it helps the Republican Party, but it doesn't help Republican people. It's like people think that nothing else would change and all of the sudden the Democrats would always win when in fact so many things would change that the next few years after are impossible to predict, but what wouldn't change is that our elections are not close because there are two kind of people in roughly equal concentrations. They are close because two parties are competing fiercely and strategically to get power.

We wouldn't be hearing so much about fracking, that's for sure. It's a national issue that keeps getting talked about even though both candidates are on the same side of the issue.... because the parties know all eyes are on Pennsylvania on election night. The winner of Pennsylvania is probably the next President. So whatever matters to Pennsylvanians is what matters and Pennsylvania cares about fracking.
 
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Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
Citizen
I cringe any time people act like the founding fathers were all on the same page. Frankly, the fact that the Constitution was ratified at all is remarkable. Their views on states rights, slavery, the economy etc. all varied greatly.
 

Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
Citizen
I tend to agree that we shouldn't care how long dead people think things should be run in today's society, but understanding what their thoughts on the matters of their day were can help us understand the past, and understanding the past is one of the best ways to understand why things are the way they are now and can provide guideposts on how to change things in the future, so I can't be totally dismissive of their views, even if I disagree with a LOT of them.
 

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
The reason that what they think matters is that they wrote a Constitution that we have to follow. They were very proud of how easy they made it to change it, but it has turned out to be very hard.

The idea of abolishing the Electoral College is so scary to conservatives when it shouldn't be. We would no way put that in if we were writing a Constitution today. The Electoral College doesn't even meet. And even though I knew it started out with a rule (before the invention of running mates) that an Elector could not vote for two people from the same state, it took me by surprise this summer when pundits said that Rubio and Newsom would not be running mate picks because of that rule. If I had ever stopped to think about it, yeah none of the rules were ever repealed, but it is just hard to believe that could still be a rule. The Electoral College hamstrings a bunch of stuff for no real functional reason anymore. Its original reasons are totally obsolete. Its current function of giving the GOP a slightly easier path to win would be un-Constitutional if it weren't the actual Constitution. And even a swing state that would never vote to end it because of all the attention they get or a GOP leader that would never vote to end it because it gives them an edge cannot really pony up a legitimate justification for keeping it. I live in Oklahoma where Trump will get every single county and win the state 60-40 and Oklahoma would not want the Electoral College abolished even though you take a step back and think the result of this is that nothing anyone in Oklahoma is concerned about will concern the candidate unless Pennsylvania is also concerned about it and it doesn't make the slightest difference who I vote for and what sign I put in my yard. If we got rid of it, every vote in every state would matter. Oklahoma would still have only a couple million votes max, but every single one of them would matter.

Having electors at all was intended to make it possible for grownups to really look things over and keep silly states from making a mistake, but they never met after the first or second time. Mirroring the Virginia compromise in elector distribution was intended just like with Congress to protect 12 colonies from just being hangers on always having to do whatever Virginia wanted. Virginia has become SO much less scary and now we have several big states that are so different you don't have to fear one of them or a coalition of them taking control. It is too bad that the Constitution didn't have an official justification for each measure with conditions that would trigger a measure going out of effect.
 
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Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
The inertia in Wisconsin and Michigan continues to move toward Harris. If Trump doesn't actually manage to turn things around and move them, but makes Pennsylvania the win or lose for him. (And it is on the same path as WI and MI, just further behind)

It (sort of) cracks me up that the exact reason for the compromise that made the Electoral College underrepresent big states was to keep Virginia from getting to pick the President and thanks to the Electoral College, Pennsylvania will get to do it.
 

Pocket

jumbled pile of person
Citizen
Well, Trump is also going to lose the popular vote in that scenario. It's not possible for a Republican to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College, due to the demographics involved.
 

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
I'm not sure where to talk about the debate, but I've been using this one for general election information.

I'm watching. I was least familiar with Walz. Vance and Walz were both new to me this summer and Walz hasn't had a string of statements that made news.

I thought this debate was going to be a circus and it isn't. It is....what I wish the Presidential debates could look like again. Vance is saying some things I don't like, certainly. But these guys are being pretty respectful to each other. They are both staying composed. JD Vance is looking and sounding good. Don't pass this on to the GOP as a tip, but if THIS version of Vance was on the top of the ticket, they would be winning. He sounds smart and organized. Some of the things he says aren't right, but he's not saying crazy stuff. He's not losing track of what he's supposed to talk about. I like Walz. He gives me the impression that he has deep understanding of the issues and I've liked everything that he said. He isn't as good a communicator as Vance. He spends a lot of time looking at Vance and looking kinda nervous. I feel like this debate is on balance better for Vance, but I'm not sure it is good for Trump. He gets highest marks in the places where he's incidentally demonstrating his superiority to TRUMP, not Walz.

Don't run away and say I'm a Vance fan. I've seen crazy stuff he says. I've seen him be dishonest and wormy and smarmy. I don't like him. But I wish the Republicans were running guys like him instead of Trump. Probably the worst things about this guy are the things he's doing to please Trump. Remove Trump and he's probably better.
 

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
I could see these guys going out for ice cream together after.

I never would have thought so before tonight, but Vance could survive this loss unscathed. He could be the GOP candidate in 4 years that Democrats don't want winning because they disagree with him, but wouldn't tell people to vote like their life depends on it.
 
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Pocket

jumbled pile of person
Citizen
I thought this debate was going to be a circus and it isn't. It is....what I wish the Presidential debates could look like again. Vance is saying some things I don't like, certainly. But these guys are being pretty respectful to each other. They are both staying composed.
Agreed. This is the first debate I've actually bothered to watch since at least before Trump's first campaign, but it's the single most orderly one I can remember. Even at the best of times, it was the norm to start talking over each other and go off topic to repeat the one talking point they didn't want to let go. And hey, Walz even jumped right in to answering the first question instead of wasting time with pleasantries. That was shocking. The most heated things got was when Vance wouldn't stop interrupting at 9:30 and finally got his mic cut (and Walz's when it turned out that the audio was bleeding through).

More than anything else, though, I think this demonstrates the power of threatening to cut their mics.

I never would have thought so before tonight, but Vance could survive this loss unscathed. He could be the GOP candidate in 4 years that Democrats don't want winning because they disagree with him, but wouldn't tell people to vote like their life depends on it.
Yeah, he's exactly what we were all terrified Ron DeSantis could become. Someone who has the same monstrous ideas as Trump, but is actually capable of not sounding like a ranting lunatic when it matters.
 

Axaday

Well-known member
Citizen
I will have to go look at historical Vance. I know he used to be a never Trumper and he has drunk the Koolaid, but I wonder if the poisonous influence of Trump was lifted if he would become a lot less lunatic. Please understand, I'll never have his sign in my yard and he's never going to be promoting things that I want to vote for, but I just really want to go back to Clinton/Dole style where you've got two choices that don't make anyone pee their pants. I had no awareness of Vance until this summer and I've assumed he was irredeemable AND that losing with Trump would take him off the table forever, but now I am at least curious whether this guy has a future. There are several properties of his story that are sharply at odds with Trump's rhetoric.

I couldn't believe how many times last night both of them said, "I agree with him, I just don't agree with his running mate" and "A lot of his ideas sound really good". I loved hearing that from both of them. I also loved hearing Vance say very clearly that he's aware that the Republican position on abortion has a lot of unforced errors built into it. A Republican politician would hope for you to believe that abortion is spiraling out of control, but it isn't the truth. I don't have the numbers handy, so don't quote me, but the truth is something like that the numbers have been coming down every year since like 1990 and coming down per capita since 1995. It think it can be attributed to work that both conservatives and progressives have done, because let's face it, as Walz said last night, no one is pro-abortion. Walz DID land his point about immigration being an issue that doesn't need to be an issue. Things could get done if they worked together and the truth about abortion is that while politicians have fought about it, regular people have been rowing the same boat on abortion and getting things done. The politicians could be more like that. The more we lift the poor, the more we find and move resources to help families and child care, the more we educate teenagers and young adults about birth control and about understanding sexuality, the less abortion there is going to be everywhere.
 

wonko the sane?

You may test that assumption at your convinience.
Citizen
Vance doesn't have a future in politics: after trump he's going to have make moderate statements in an attempt to adapt to what comes next, and the world will simply pull up his trump era footage and demand he explain himself... and he won't be able to.

It's a similar thing with desantis: he's fucked around in florida enough that even florida man has had enough, and he's term limited. He can't run for his current position again: and his positions won't be tenable in the what comes next.
 


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