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PoliGAF 2017 |OT4| The leaks are coming from inside the white house

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thefro

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My conservative dumbass news intake is way down these days (deleted a few people on social media after the election, those who remain have been quiet as shit thanks to how their party is operating lately), but I still get the occasional update. Current headline on my FB feed: NPR: 25 Million Votes For Clinton "Completely Fake" - A study published by NPR reveals that 25 million Hillary Clinton votes were "fraudulent," meaning she lost the popular vote by a huge margin.

Obviously I don't need to debunk this here, as you can assume NPR said no such thing (they were talking about inaccurate voter registration records, not actual votes). And yet idiots gleefully cry out I KNEW IT and hit the share button.

Can you even imagine the conspiracy involved in casting 25+ MILLION votes illegally? Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of conspirators working all over the country at a cost surely in the billions of dollars, but somehow not in the states Clinton needed to win to go over the top. Come on people.

You can mark those stories as false news in FB now if you report the post.
 
Go back and see how worried I was about Hillary going to Michigan in closing days.

And how worried I was when Florida panhandle started reporting.

Again: if you are pessimistic all the time, you will be right like 50% of the time because this is a coin flip of a country. That doesn't make you a Cassandra.

It's not a cute look.
 
Also even if like 75% of young people voted like in the U.K., there's a 1-in-4 chance you'd run into a young person who didn't, so let's calm down. Even if he loses, Ossoff will probably have higher youth turnout.
 
Also even if like 75% of young people voted like in the U.K., there's a 1-in-4 chance you'd run into a young person who didn't, so let's calm down. Even if he loses, Ossoff will probably have higher youth turnout.
Yeah, we're talking about a country that has 60% turnout at best for even the most heavily advertised, overhyped elections. It's frustrating as fuck, and there's certain sections of both parties that claim we'd get higher turnout if *only* we ran some unicorn perfect candidate who speaks to the disenfranchised, but no, unless voting is made compulsory 40% of the country is more than content to sit out.

I remember in 08 talking to plenty of people who didn't vote because they didn't trust politicians, because their vote doesn't matter, because both sides, etc. That was when our candidate was Barack Obama. People have every excuse in the world not to vote.
 
I don't really agree

MAGA works because

- It's catchy and easy to remember
- Flexible. It can be adjusted to "make cars great again" "make our military great again" and so on, while still being part of the overall brand of "great again." Whenever I see ____ great again, I instantly think of Trump.
- It can follow in speeches from literally everything, while still sounding natural. "We're taking our country back from 'them' and we'll make America great again"
- It attacks Obama at the same time as propping Trump up. America is terrible right now because of "him", and only I can fix it, but said in just four words.

It's actually a really well designed slogan.

Yeah the fucked up beauty of MAGA is that it's a slogan that can be warped into whatever nostalgia the fans want it to be and we all know that nostalgia is a very powerful emotion.

I think that "Stronger Together" was a slogan that worked well, but "Love trumps Hate" was kinda iffy and "I'm With Her" was just terrible because it didn't really focus on any policy themes.

Hopefully the next nominee has a good slogan like "America of Tomorrow" to contrast with MAGA's nostalgia or "Investing in our Future".

So on a scale from cartoon_soldier to Aaron Strife, where are we on GA-6 right now?

It's looking like best case scenario is Ossof winning by only a few percentage points, most likely scenario is he loses by less than 2%. Small pessimistic chance that Ossof gets less than 45% of the vote, which would really suck because that means our only real chance at winning this seat was the jungle primaries.
 
Can't imagine why anyone would be excited to vote for Ossoff unless they just don't like Trump or the GOP. Which is motivating for some, sure. But enough?

Are you aware of the massive amount of money that Ossoff has raised, mostly from single grassroots donors

Like, isn't that the argument that people use to talk about how Bernie makes people so excited to vote???
 
Random thought: with minority anger viewed through a consistently racist lense (firey Latino, angry black man etc) dem candidates with privelege should take advantage of the slack they're given and start breathing some fire. The perceived lack of genuine passion on the left definitely isn't great for us.
 
In theory the weather tampering down turnout would help Ossoff because Handel is relying more heavily on election day turnout.

It probably comes down to voter motivation more than anything. I'd guess that Ossoff's voters are more motivated than Handel's.

(which is the opposite of what I'd normally expect, since bad weather often hits Democrats hard)
 

Valhelm

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As opposed to the endless spree of posts from your complaining that Dems aren't adopting your policy preferences?

Populism is white and rural. That does not describe the Democrats.

Who says populism has to be white and rural?

Populism just means appealing to average people. The average person in Miami is a lot different from the average person in Wyoming.
 
It probably comes down to voter motivation more than anything. I'd guess that Ossoff's voters are more motivated than Handel's.

(which is the opposite of what I'd normally expect, since bad weather often hits Democrats hard)
The cynic in me is saying Ossoff's voters would take this as an excuse to stay home, whereas Handel's voters would walk over hot coals to vote for anyone with an R next to their name, but logically I think you're right. No one gives a shit about Handel other than being a rubber stamp for Trump's agenda, and they already have 238 of those.

Fair.

Of those people though, chuckled at how poor Panera Bread's showing for Ossoff was. The Democrats' path to victory lies through Burger King!
Thinking of the people I've eaten at Panera or Burger King with, I agree with this assessment.
 
A Vox reporter interviewed people in various fast food/casual restaurants around GA-06. Its alternately funny and scary. Especially he ran into a bunch of young people who aren't going to vote.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JStein_Vox/status/876936460594798593

I'm going to sound like a psychopath for suggesting this, but maybe the only way we are going to get these young people to actually vote is if we literally induce them into a hypnosis and then just use that state of suggestibility to tell them that they have to vote in every election they can.

It probably comes down to voter motivation more than anything. I'd guess that Ossoff's voters are more motivated than Handel's.

(which is the opposite of what I'd normally expect, since bad weather often hits Democrats hard)

I mean, there HAS to be a point where Republicans get burned out on all the "You better vote for this random republican or Pelosi is taking over" fear mongering. I remember when I worked for the democratic campaign that I could sense when some of our supporters were still our side, but were getting really burnt out from all the fear mongering.
 
OF COURSE YOU'RE NOT SURE WHO

OH MY GOD

THINK

This is good news for Ossoff because I thought the fact that she was mentioned by the shooter was going to give it her by motivating GOP turnout.

In theory the weather tampering down turnout would help Ossoff because Handel is relying more heavily on election day turnout.

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Who says populism has to be white and rural?

Populism just means appealing to average people. The average person in Miami is a lot different from the average person in Wyoming.

Umm... history. Research populist movements in this country. They almost always include the rubes in the sticks exacting revenge upon those greedy, immoral city slickers. White men get everything, and women and minorities get shit.
 

Valhelm

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I'm going to sound like a psychopath for suggesting this, but maybe the only way we are going to get these young people to actually vote is if we literally induce them into a hypnosis and then just use that state of suggestibility to tell them that they have to vote in every election they can.

Young people only vote if a candidate's platform will directly help them in a big way (Bernie, Corbyn, Melenchon) or if this candidate is exceptionally charismatic and has positive messaging (Obama, Trudeau).

Problem is that in a very suburban district like GA-06, Democrats over 35 usually don't want these policies.
 
The cynic in me is saying Ossoff's voters would take this as an excuse to stay home, whereas Handel's voters would walk over hot coals to vote for anyone with an R next to their name, but logically I think you're right. No one gives a shit about Handel other than being a rubber stamp for Trump's agenda, and they already have 238 of those.

Yeah in any normal election that's what I think would happen. But I think the enthusiasm gap is real in GA-06, since special elections are really weird
 
Young people only vote if a candidate's platform will directly help them in a big way (Bernie, Corbyn, Melenchon) or if this candidate is exceptionally charismatic and has positive messaging (Obama, Trudeau).

Problem is that in a very suburban district like GA-06, Democrats over 35 usually don't want these policies.

Except the young people didn't actually turn out for Bernie in the primaries. Corbyn I will concede managed to harness the young vote amazingly, but Bernie didn't actually manage to do so.

Charisma helps, but from what I remember working for the campaign, canvassing college students was literally the most frustrating kind of canvassing. Most of the time the student was perfectly capable of voting, but simply did not give a shit at all about politics. With any other kind of potential voter I could ask them what policy issues mattered most to them and they could give me an answer that I could work with, but the college students would usually not even have an answer. They literally didn't have an answer to a simple question like "What policy issues matter most to you?"

I literally had more success finding democratic supporters canvassing door to door in rural areas than canvassing in college areas.
 

kirblar

Member
Except the young people didn't actually turn out for Bernie in the primaries. Corbyn I will concede managed to harness the young vote amazingly, but Bernie didn't actually manage to do so.

Charisma helps, but from what I remember working for the campaign, canvassing college students was literally the most frustrating kind of canvassing. Most of the time the student was perfectly capable of voting, but simply did not give a shit at all about politics. With any other kind of potential voter I could ask them what policy issues mattered most to them and they could give me an answer that I could work with, but the college students would usually not even have an answer. They literally didn't have an answer to a simple question like "What policy issues matter most to you?"
The far left and ideologue libertarians both make the same fundamental mistake regarding people: They vastly overestimate their capacity for decency/rationality. Direct Democracy is worst Democracy for a reason.
 
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