Just look at his figure 5.

I mean that's about as bad as it gets. Its like 3x worse than Nate's favorability linear regressionment.

Actually it's the exact approach that most of society in general takes because it's easier to generalize about a group then to spend time to develop a well-researched, nuanced opinion. It isn't a partisan problem. It's a people problem.

I believe I have said this before here. Something like Dems need to run someone who is pure as the driven snow and equally important who is perceived as being pure as the driven snow. Sorry for the uncomfortable white / pure adjacency here, it is not intentional.

^^^ get's it.

/thread, oh, except now forming that message is the next step.

It's hard to say who the best Presidential candidate will be from election to election. The Democratic party should focus on finding better candidates from the bottom up so they have a deeper pool to chose from given the temperature of the country at the time. The current leadership is old as hell.

Don't want to derail, but not sure why you keep putting that 538 favorability article on blast (which wasn't written by Nate, by the way). The author himself posits that favorability might not matter as much when both candidates are disliked.

Not the impression I got from his headline. Nor is it the impression I get when people kept quoting it and saying how it's proof that Hilary didn't have a favorability problem.

In any case, chart 5 in that electionado article is just the worst. I hope we can at least agree on that.

So I was totally wrong about how this election went and this is going to sound crazy, but I don't think the basic playbook is bad! Still killing it with young people and minorities:




Obama still has high favorability numbers. The GOP is still stuck having to win the old white vote by historically unprecedented margins every election. Trump got fewer votes than Romney, fewer votes than McCain, hell, even got fewer votes than Hillary. They lost because Hillary was a very bad, terrible, no-good candidate who is not ever ever going to be president and also because they ran a 100% negative campaign that did a great job tearing down Trump (historically unprecedented unfavorables IIRC) but gave us no reason to vote for Hillary.

I don't know how to turn this into a long-form editorial, but the take-home lessons are

1. Sweet Mary, Mother of God, throw the entire Clinton family into a time vortex and do not let them try to be president ever again.

2. Charisma matters. Sucks for guys like John Kerry, but voters have to be enthused to go out and vote. We need a better slogan than "lesser of two evils!"

3. Also, it turns out that all the polling outlets are completely wrong for some reason. Kind of a pisser to just figure this out now, but apparently the whole industry is broken.

So no, I really don't buy these arguments that we have to find some white guy from Kenosha to run and stop talking about low-income issues because man we just had a black guy from Chicago who gave out free healthcares to poors and that guy just dunked on the other team back to back and would easily win again if he was allowed to play.

Underreported stat re: young people, btw: young whites (18-29) favored Trump 48-43

Not that white people are special snowflakes or anything, but I think a lot of us like to think that our generation is better - that's still very much in question, gonna be a lot of old racist white people yelling at clouds in 40 years still.

Also, though this is so terrible it probably hurts to think about: minority votes in all those Republican-controlled swing states are going to be suppressed pretty effectively for the next 4-8 years. Like someone pointed out recently, the DOJ isn't going to be filing lawsuits against North Carolina et al anymore starting in January, and those states are gonna do whatever the **** they want while the ACLU ties them up in court for years trying to fight it.

Plus, SCOTUS may side with those states for decades if Trump gets to stack it (which he likely will).

Trump passed Romney's vote total. He even got more Hispanic votes. This makes me sad.

JoltinJake, I hope you don't think I am trying to be an arrogant self promoter and I thank you for being the only one to do my thought experiment from a while back. You must admit that that particular article which we won't name led you to the wrong conclusion.

I put these kind of data analysis on blast because I want you guys to be more thoughtful and rigorous when looking at data. I wish I looked at the data people were using to predict a Hilary landslide win before the election as i might have figured out something was off.

I think it is about time we did a bit more critical thinking of our own.

Ya, if they can pull off whatever vote rigging shenannigans they want, all this strategy talk is pretty much moot.

I'm seeing conflicting info on this.

I think it's pretty close to how I assume you imagine it. A family of four can get by on $60k/yr if you define getting by as owning a house, car, putting food on the table, and buying clothes/school supplies for kids. They can probably comfortably save money doing that. It's when you start to want more that things get tough, like when you decide you want a 3000 sq. ft. house instead of 1500, want to drive an F-250 and a suburban and replace them every 3 years instead of two mid-sized cars until the die, want a bunch of the newest smart phones, need to have hbo, want to send your kids to private school, need to eat out 4 times a week, etc. Like there's a whole huge range of results and some they can afford while others they can't. It won't help that they have to see people drive nicer cars and have nicer phones or whatever.

Since the 70s the left has conceded ground again and again to the right on the economic case.

Post war till the 70s, tax and spend, growth in welfare state, redistribution of wealth and unionisation of workforce was the centre.

Then after the 70s the right regrouped and has been on a rampage, the left barely if at all stands by any of the above, it has conceded the economic argument, leaving identity politics its only crusade left to fight.

Thing is though, the technocrats of the right, were ready to concede on identity politics. Any cultural legacies remaining from gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation are irrelevant to the logics of their system, neo liberalism, they are irrelevant in regards consumption, if anything they are vectors for consumption. No one wants negative cultural overhang getting in the way of $.

For example, David Cameron ex Tory Prime Minister cites his proudest achievement in office to be the legalisation of Gay Marriage.

The rub is that the right has cultural hang ups that can not be simply dissolved by capitalism. Authority, religion (which overlays sexual orientation) and race.

Their was a huge dissonance between right base and right political representatives over culture.

Its this dissonance that created the alt-right and ultimately made Trump possible.

Now the left has to consider its postion.

Soul crushed.

Lost the economic case.
Lost the culture war.

Lost.

Those two loses are not unrelated, they are indeed intimately linked.

If you give up the economic argument, if you accept and indeed internalise the arguments of the right as can be seen in Bobmans "no way can we tax the rich", almost elevating them to transcendental truths, then the game is being played deep in your half all the time, pretty much on the ten yard line, the opposing team hardly has to push much to score a game winning touchdown and take home the whole enchilada.

The centre has been shifted so far to the right, that you only have to move the arrow a little off centre to arrive at crazy town. Which is were we are now, absolute ****ing crazy town.

This is why the left has to come up with a new economic mythos that rejects neoliberalism, which is itself just a mythos, don't let people tell you its a transcendental truth.

Not because Trump voter is economically anxious, but because the whole framing of the debate has to be moved way,way,way,way back from where it is now, the game has to be move to the middle of the pitch, away from the ten yard line.

The only way to do this is with an economic and social argument that rejects or at least challenges the compromises of the last 40 years.

The left has spent the last 40 years letting the right carry the ball up the field.

There needs to be a renaissance.

And the Democrat response to those people is a middle finger.

The Republicans too which probably went a long way toward electing Trump.

What help would you like someone in those circumstances receive?

I think you are vastly overestimating how far 60k goes. House, car, food, utilities, clothes school supplies, taxes, medical care, insurance, has is a lot of money. Save comfortably on top of that?

How much do you think monthly groceries for a family of 4 runs?

What do you think a 1500 sq foot house in the Midwest cost?

I don't think we disagree much tbh. It's good to be skeptical and rigorous. I just thought the article in question was mostly fine as the author himself mentioned the trend may not hold in this case and he admitted he was guessing in his conclusion. Those are the types of qualifiers we need in statistical analyses. I do agree with you that the title needed a qualifier, though.

I think Trolly's take is largely correct. The electorate is still trending Democrat. There's no crisis here. Put up candidates with some charisma (Cory Booker would do fine) and craft a more inspiring message and I don't think there's a problem.

What motivates them economically when voting is:

1) Whatever makes them think getting a step up the ladder is more likely.
2) Whatever makes them think falling down steps on the ladder is more/less likely.

They dont need help in the way someone who is genuinely deprived does, if their vote is economically motivated it will be in relation to economic aspirations.

Median income in the US is 51k.

So like I get it, life is legitimately not a bowl of cherries and no one should be sticking up middle fingers for real, no sarcasm here, it's not easy to raise a family on that. But man I don't get how people making more than median income in the most successful nation in the world think that saying "**** YOU" and putting a TV gameshow host in charge is an adult response. I dunno, maybe I've become the Uncle Ruckus of white Midwestern America, but these people have a level of anger that is completely out of all proportion.

That Trump even exists as a potential is a problem.

That the potential can be realised, well, do I even need to type the words?

Should be noted he's also now well below Romney's % - currently at 46.8% to Mitt's 47.2% - and will likely continue to deep, possibly near 46-flat, by the time they're done.