POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[spmetla]

I support ranked choice btw, or more precisely ranked pairs. I don't know about Libertarian voters deciding anything (except maybe Georgia or Arizona, and almost certainly the Ossof-Perdue runoff ramp), because in this election they constituted only 1% of the national vote. That is to say, as expected the third party vote share collapsed to its usual level in high-salience elections, meaning that most of the people voting Libertarian now are not poached Republicans but the hard core of the third party vote. On the other hand, I'm perfectly fine with the Republican Party going to war with the Libertarians.

Tangentially, if there's ever going to be an electoral structure for third parties in this country, they have to stop being joke organizations that seemingly only exist to grift followers or troll/hinder the major parties. At least, say, the Working Families party has some local existence in the Northeast, in contrast to the Greens or Libertarians.

Wouldn't you like it if it was okay for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to run as independents or lead one of the many progressive/socialist parties in existence without it gleaning votes away from the primary Democrat running? I think one of the reasons the third parties are jokes is exactly because they to grift followers and hinder major parties. A the local levels is where they can make a difference before taking things nationally.
That's why the new Republican tactic of running a third party candidate with a simliar last name to glean off votes from the competition is dangerous, will likely be repeated elsewhere and only a ranked voting system could totally mitigate.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/pol...247132821.html

NO-PARTY CANDIDATE IS A FACTOR
Much mystery remains around the network of unknown candidates with no party affiliation (NPA) who ran in three competitive Senate districts, most notably in Senate District 37, where the third-party candidate netted more than 6,300 votes and likely influenced the outcome.

Voters in Senate Districts 9, 37 and 39 were targeted by similar-looking political mail ads funded by a mystery donor that aimed to confuse voters in an apparent effort to shave votes from Democratic candidates.

One thing I will push back against is the idea that even more gridlock in Congress would somehow produce compromise and good governance. It never has in history; meanwhile our backlog of crippling problems is just accumulating. I believe this country would have a clarifying experience, and be much better off, with a cycle under each party of total majoritarian control. Well, not under Republicans, simply because there is a serious chance of them implementing a single-party dictatorship. But if that impulse could be contained I would relish the opportunity for, say, a Democratic government to implement Medicare for All, only for a subsequent Republican government to abolish it and Social Security.

Constant incremental change may even be preferable to violent upheaval, but violent upheaval only becomes available/necessary because reform was lacking or absent! When there is a revolutionary regime change, sometimes one is sad to see the new regime. One is never sad to see the old one go.

The divergent and self-contained environment of the Georgia runoffs will be an interesting comparison point and testing ground. IMO Democrats should strive to make it very explicitly clear that Biden's ability to act as President is limited by control of the Senate. I would go so far as to promise that, if Republicans retain control their state will go bankrupt and schools will close, whereas if Democrats win then the country (and Georgia) will get bailouts and stimulus checks. Put everything else on the backburner for 2 months besides the immediate material consequences for Georgia and Georgians of this election.

I don't want more gridlock but as each party becomes more extreme it means that daring to work with the opposition loses you your own re-election against a competitor from your own party. The idea of making medicare for all and then it being repealed a few years later is dangerous to fabric of the nation. I'd prefer that we edge the ACA toward that option, creating a public option would be a step in that direction, after people see that it's not the end of the world then take another step.

I agree on the Georgia runoffs, will be very interesting testing ground.

[Montmorency]

Something that occurs to me: Biden at times made it a plank of his campaign that conservatives should split their tickets against Trump in order to hold both parties accountable.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...-thing-923669/
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/17/polit...ach/index.html

I can't find it now, but I recall reading of one Biden talk in which he stated directly a recommendation that Republicans vote for him for President while voting Republicans downballot to keep him in check.

Might that have had some effect? Seems like suboptimal messaging at any rate.

Perhaps....but then there's Sen. Joe Manchin (D) W. Virginia to consider:

Regarding Manchin, from what I've been able to gather he has never opposed the caucus on a vote that really mattered. Although West Virginia's finances appear to be relatively-good in the short term, so that might remove some incentive.

Wouldn't you like it if it was okay for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to run as independents or lead one of the many progressive/socialist parties in existence without it gleaning votes away from the primary Democrat running? I think one of the reasons the third parties are jokes is exactly because they to grift followers and hinder major parties. A the local levels is where they can make a difference before taking things nationally.
That's why the new Republican tactic of running a third party candidate with a simliar last name to glean off votes from the competition is dangerous, will likely be repeated elsewhere and only a ranked voting system could totally mitigate.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/pol...247132821.html

Maybe if we transitioned to a parliamentary-type system, but in our social and political environment we work better as a Popular Front. Remember, this is not a normal country and won't be one for our lifetimes probably. These lights aren't coming on anytime soon.

I don't want more gridlock but as each party becomes more extreme it means that daring to work with the opposition loses you your own re-election against a competitor from your own party. The idea of making medicare for all and then it being repealed a few years later is dangerous to fabric of the nation. I'd prefer that we edge the ACA toward that option, creating a public option would be a step in that direction, after people see that it's not the end of the world then take another step.

For sure. But would such an undisguised legislative confrontation be worse than the current - Cold War?

As for polarization, bipartisanship will spring eternal among liberals. It's the psychology. Meanwhile, think about McConnell's posture toward Obama/Biden as published in Obama's memoir (see above). If there were a Republican with ideas worth hearing, to whom we could impute a good-faith willingness to collaboratively address identified issues, they wouldn't be a Republican in the first place. How many times do I have to post that Mars Attacks clip?

In my view, this utopia is what I sense coming from elated crowds in the streets and some people here. And you seem to partake in it with your metaphors of tearing opponents' throats and not taking things lying down. Add to it вставание с колен and the electoral rhetoric practiced by Americans will be remerkably close to the one used in current Russia.

I don't understand how any of those sentences relate to each other or to the contents of this thread.




Now for a rant directed at the idea that leftist ideas or activism are damaging vulnerable elected Democrats.

Here is an ad that Sen. Loeffler's (R-GA) campaign aired. (Further proof that American reactionaries outpace European ones btw.)
https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/s...02428240359424 [VIDEO]

Sen. Kelly Loeffler's new spot is all about how she's "more conservative than Attila the Hun," and includes an actor portraying a grunting Attila who delivers orders to, among other things, "eliminate the liberal scribes."

Why is it that Republicans can run on how conservative they are, and paint their opponents as socialists, and that works, but when Democrats run on how moderate they are, and correctly label all the reactionary and harmful things their opponents want to do, moderate voters get angry because they think Dems are overreacting and being hyperbolic about Republicans?
Something tells me this isn't the fault of community organizers in Minneapolis or Louisville. It's that branding and messaging thing again.

Can you imagine if a Democratic candidate in a purple district ran unironically with this as a platform?



And it received no negative attention from either party?


One lesson is becoming clear: Liberals need to be taught to resent and fear these reactionaries, so that they too can be mobilized at ever-higher rates.


Because White Evangelicals, who make up ~15% of the population, MAY have formed up to half of all Trump voters.

I was startled this week when, during a conversation with a prominent figure in Democratic circles, he blurted out to me: “People who want to live in a white supremacist society vote Republican. Those who don’t vote Democrat.”

Yes, those Evangelicals, the voting bloc who emerged in the 1970s as a reliable Republican base, forged as they were in reaction to the Democrats' civil rights turn in the 1960s, who vote for Republicans at rates comparable to the Democrats' vote share among African Americans.



Notice that Republicans (though not just evangelicals) have finally come round to abandoning the American flag, because their abstracted instincts outpace the symbolic content of it.

Many of us over the past 4 years have had to come to terms with it, but the truth is that at least 1/3 of the population is a hardcore fascist element that is spiritually animated by the Confederate mindset - which was never defeated, but rather prevailed for a century and is still in contention!

As this prescient post from 2014 says,

The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

... The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change. When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

Why do Republicans and Democrats get disparate reception and treatment in the media and their audiences? Well, Republicans by and large know what they want in a way that liberals don't. It maps onto Yeat's quotable formulation that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Painful as it is, we can't fight an invisible war against those who have mastered the art of insurgency on American soil and in the American mind for 150 years. The people must be apprised of the threat.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Regarding Manchin, from what I've been able to gather he has never opposed the caucus on a vote that really mattered.

Not so fast... His voting record on environmental issues is abysmal, and he now stands to chair the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...e-manchin-iii/

Voted against S.J.Res. 53 which would have rescinded Trump's relaxation of emission standards for power plants; voted for the appointment of Andrew Wheeler (a former coal industry lobbyist) to head the EPA (W. Virginia is the 2d largest producer of coal in the US); voted against H.J.Res. 36 which would have relaxed regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas industry operations (a +1 for Manchin); voted for the approval of Scott Priutt as Administrator of the EPA (who later had to resign amid a slew of ethics scandals); and who voted for nearly every one of Trump's government appointees.

A mixed bag to say the least, but his stance on energy production is quite clear----he won't do anything to piss off his corporate donors in the coal industry. If he gets to chair the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to get any clean air proposals through the Senate even if the Dems pick up the two seats in Georgia.

[Hooahguy]

Excellent interview with Obama in The Atlantic, talking about how American democracy is in trouble:

I come out of this book very worried about the degree to which we do not have a common baseline of fact and a common story. We don’t have a Walter Cronkite describing the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination but also saying to supporters and detractors alike of the Vietnam War that this is not going the way the generals and the White House are telling us. Without this common narrative, democracy becomes very tough.

Remember, after Iowa my candidacy survives Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright, and two minutes of videotape in which my pastor is in kente cloth cursing out America. And the fact is that I was able to provide context for that, and I ended up winning over a huge swath of the country that has never set foot on the South Side of Chicago and was troubled by what he said. I mean, that’s an indicator of a different media environment.

Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring. This stuff takes root. I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories. The fact is that there is still a large portion of the country that was taken in by a carnival barker.
[..]
If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.

I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate change. I can even accept somebody making an argument that, based on what I know about human nature, it’s too late to do anything serious about this—the Chinese aren’t going to do it, the Indians aren’t going to do it—and that the best we can do is adapt. I disagree with that, but I accept that it’s a coherent argument. I don’t know what to say if you simply say, “This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up, and the scientists are cooking the books. And that footage of glaciers dropping off the shelves of Antarctica and Greenland are all phony.” Where do I start trying to figure out where to do something?

Well worth the read.

[Montmorency]

Not so fast... His voting record on environmental issues is abysmal, and he now stands to chair the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...e-manchin-iii/

Voted against S.J.Res. 53 which would have rescinded Trump's relaxation of emission standards for power plants; voted for the appointment of Andrew Wheeler (a former coal industry lobbyist) to head the EPA (W. Virginia is the 2d largest producer of coal in the US); voted against H.J.Res. 36 which would have relaxed regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas industry operations (a +1 for Manchin); voted for the approval of Scott Priutt as Administrator of the EPA (who later had to resign amid a slew of ethics scandals); and who voted for nearly every one of Trump's government appointees.

A mixed bag to say the least, but his stance on energy production is quite clear----he won't do anything to piss off his corporate donors in the coal industry. If he gets to chair the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to get any clean air proposals through the Senate even if the Dems pick up the two seats in Georgia.

But that's what I mean when I speak of votes that really matter. On confirmation votes, Manchin never seems to have been a deciding vote because the Republicans had a majority anyway. On Kavanaugh he was the 50th vote, but it was widely contextualized at the time as not being worth the prospective damage to his imminent reelection (the confirmation was a month before the midterms) to go out on a limb to force Republicans to choose a slightly-less reprehensible candidate for Supreme Court. Manchin being, of course, an idiosyncratically-tolerated Democratic holdout in what had become the most Republican state in the country*. For the named resolutions on environmental regulations, I believe they too will fall into the pattern of being symbolic votes from a minority position. If the strategy is to shore up his centrist bona fides in West Virginia, probably no use in visibly voting with a minority to no effect.

Let's see what happens with Manchin (hopefully) among 50+. Of course, with a razor thin margin , the thing we had always hoped to avoid with a fat buffer in the majority, there will be hard limits on what one can demand of him or a number of other frontline Dems. But I find it hard to believe Manchin would flatly oppose a handful of Dem priorities on electoral reform and pandemic relief, to start.

Get the man some pork.

An executive jubilee for most student debt wouldn't depend on Manchin though, and it would be pretty high-impact. I bet it also spurs productive electoral participation among people in their 20s and 30s, as well as those currently in their teens.

*Before 2008, West Virginia had been a swing state. Suddenly, it became the most Republican state in the country, or at least alongside Idaho and Wyoming. I wonder what happened...

[ReluctantSamurai]

But that's what I mean when I speak of votes that really matter. On confirmation votes, Manchin never seems to have been a deciding vote because the Republicans had a majority anyway.

Let's say, for sheer fantasy sake, that the Dems take both Georgia seats making it a 50/50 split in the Senate. Now let's imagine a vote comes up on a key clean energy bill in Congress. Which way do you think Manchin will vote? I have no doubts based on his voting record (nevermind that the GOP already had more than enough votes for a particular bill) for putting not one but two fossil fuel advocates as head of the EPA (the first, Scott Pruitt had to resign amid ethics scandals). And he's already come out as philosophically against "Green Energy". This man is really a corporate Republican in the disguise of a Democrat.

And you are overlooking the damage he can cause as a potential chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. A quick look at what that committee does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...ural_Resources

Coal production, distribution, and utilization; energy policy; energy regulation and policy; energy research and development; oil and gas production and distribution; solar energy systems......

This senator, who is most obviously beholden to his coal industry donors, is possibly going to be in a position to be the next Dr. No when it comes to Biden trying to get clean energy legislation passed. We can reference this conversation for later where I can say 'I told you so', or you will be saying the same to me. It's a moot point if the Dems don't take both Georgia seats as far as the chair position is concerned.....

[Montmorency]

Let's say, for sheer fantasy sake, that the Dems take both Georgia seats making it a 50/50 split in the Senate. Now let's imagine a vote comes up on a key clean energy bill in Congress. Which way do you think Manchin will vote? I have no doubts based on his voting record (nevermind that the GOP already had more than enough votes for a particular bill) for putting not one but two fossil fuel advocates as head of the EPA (the first, Scott Pruitt had to resign amid ethics scandals). And he's already come out as philosophically against "Green Energy". This man is really a corporate Republican in the disguise of a Democrat.

And you are overlooking the damage he can cause as a potential chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. A quick look at what that committee does:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...ural_Resources

Coal production, distribution, and utilization; energy policy; energy regulation and policy; energy research and development; oil and gas production and distribution; solar energy systems......

This senator, who is most obviously beholden to his coal industry donors, is possibly going to be in a position to be the next Dr. No when it comes to Biden trying to get clean energy legislation passed. We can reference this conversation for later where I can say 'I told you so', or you will be saying the same to me. It's a moot point if the Dems don't take both Georgia seats as far as the chair position is concerned.....

You have to set what we know of an individual lawmaker's characteristics against the context of the agenda and operating environment. With a razor-thin 50-50 (+VP) majority, it would be widely accepted that there is only political capital for one or two significant legislative items. One of them would have to be pandemic response, though we could finesse that through the reconciliation process (without filibuster abolition) if we stripped out regulatory changes and new programs. And if we could put pandemic response through reconciliation, there would almost certainly be no unanimous appetite to scrap the filibuster and move on. Therefore, sadly, there are almost no circumstances where a serious climate bill would be allowed onto the floor. I imagine everyone would agree it's not getting through ahead of more immediate necessities. If the case sounds dire, it is, but Biden and Schumer and the rest will be privately making all these calculations about priorities and sequencing and how much of their designs can survive - unless they're Republican-tier incompetent.

But stipulating that somehow Biden actively and vocally made a climate bill his top priority out of them all, while I believe Manchin would put out I agree that his baseline tells us he would be given free rein pick it clean until it was threadbare and not comparable even to Biden's paper designs.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Therefore, sadly, there are almost no circumstances where a serious climate bill would be allowed onto the floor. I imagine everyone would agree it's not getting through ahead of more immediate necessities.

Obviously, the pandemic takes front and center. A vaccine production and distribution system will need to be set up, and a relief package of some kind will need to be hashed out. Then...comes the PR blitz that will be necessary to convince enough people to actually take the vaccine to make it effective in controlling the virus. This probably takes the entire first year of Biden's presidency. Climate bills will have to be entertained at some point....

[a completely inoffensive name]

You have to set what we know of an individual lawmaker's characteristics against the context of the agenda and operating environment. With a razor-thin 50-50 (+VP) majority, it would be widely accepted that there is only political capital for one or two significant legislative items. One of them would have to be pandemic response, though we could finesse that through the reconciliation process (without filibuster abolition) if we stripped out regulatory changes and new programs. And if we could put pandemic response through reconciliation, there would almost certainly be no unanimous appetite to scrap the filibuster and move on. Therefore, sadly, there are almost no circumstances where a serious climate bill would be allowed onto the floor. I imagine everyone would agree it's not getting through ahead of more immediate necessities. If the case sounds dire, it is, but Biden and Schumer and the rest will be privately making all these calculations about priorities and sequencing and how much of their designs can survive - unless they're Republican-tier incompetent.

But stipulating that somehow Biden actively and vocally made a climate bill his top priority out of them all, while I believe Manchin would put out I agree that his baseline tells us he would be given free rein pick it clean until it was threadbare and not comparable even to Biden's paper designs.

Just look at Manchin's submitted bills and see what can be passed which makes both the Senator more amenable to passing climate change bill but also works to make Dems look good.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-...5/text?r=3&s=1
Here is a good one, expand internet connectivity into more communities, make this a message to the people of WV that Dems got them internet, not GOP.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-.../text?r=16&s=1
Continue funding Black Lung Disability Trust Fund

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-.../2431/text?s=1
Require voice service providers to to provide call blocking programs for free.

I mean, these are all good PR type stuff and all Sponsored by Manchin.

This is a situation where we can't be thinking so big that we do nothing with a 50 seat Senate. Just pass safe bills that are PR friendly and most importantly help people. Even if it is not the biggest most bestest thing we could pass.