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| Thread: So. You guys still think Trump is no problem? |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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blizzard
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posted April 18, 2025 06:53 PM |
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Within party lines, not across party lines. So, among Democrat candidates in primary elections, women struggle to get the female vote.
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Galaad
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posted April 18, 2025 06:55 PM |
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Edited by Galaad at 19:15, 18 Apr 2025.
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Salamandre said:
@ Galaad,
Sorry that you can't connect simple dots and need to resort the the vague "complex social issues" refrain, when it is about an ideology written in stone followed by actions and attitudes derived from, hence the link to how Islam considers women. You are making circumvolutions around the core of the problem.
You evacuated in a second the data acknowledging that 77% of street rape assaults in Paris are caused by foreigners (we don't have ethnic statistics but we know from which countries the majority of them are, Algeria, Tunis and Maroc), linking instead to a study acknowledging that 13% of physical violence of women are caused by foreigners, which is already asserting they are hugely over-represented. But what that study doesn't say is the ethnic and religious background of such "nationals" - since is prohibited in France -, and here is the key.
The irony is, self called feminists keep spinning in a whirlpool and insist to defend, tooth and nail, all minorities, despite them conflicting each other, so that's it. I don't believe in your "social issues" diversion, because if there was such reality, then we would not have all Islamic countries at the bottom line of how women are considered, spoiled from fundamental rights and freedom of instruction. And that's factual.
We import a culture, as simple as that. That culture is today, the closest to fascism you can get.
You're repeating a claim that’s already been widely misinterpreted. The "77%" figure from the Europe 1 article comes from a single police report on street rapes in Paris, not total sexual violence, and it was never officially published by the SSMSI. And even within that narrow scope, it only applies to the minority of cases that were solved —less than a third. It’s anecdotal at best, and cherry-picking it while ignoring broader national data is misleading.
The SSMSI’s official 2023 data says that 13% of suspects in violent acts against women were foreigners —a figure that reflects overrepresentation, yes, but far from your conclusion of a "core problem". And importantly, as you yourself noted, France doesn't collect stats by ethnicity or religion. So linking "foreign suspect" to "Islam" is purely speculative.
This is the issue: you're filling in statistical gaps with assumptions based on cultural bias, not evidence. When we talk about complex social issues, it's not to "evacuate" the problem, it's to avoid making simplistic, emotionally charged claims that can't be backed by data.
Yes, misogyny exists in parts of the Islamic world —just like it exists in many forms across the globe, including in Western societies. But crime and ideology aren’t one-to-one. We can’t solve real problems with cultural shortcuts that ignore the nuance of context, integration, socioeconomics, or urban policy.
Reducing everything to "we import a culture = we import violence" isn’t clarity, it’s ideological framing dressed up as fact. If you want to use data to make a case, stick to transparent, sourced, and reproducible data, not anecdotes and assumptions.
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Rimgrabber 
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posted April 18, 2025 07:49 PM |
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blizzard said:
Appealing to moderates can work. Hillary did that and she won the vote, but that is because she actually is more moderate. It was a mostly transparent presidential run.
Kamala tried to do it. Problem is, while the public's memory is short, it isn't that short. People could remember Kamala Harris 2019 and Kamala Harris 2024 and how 2024 Kamala Harris was strangely more moderate all of the sudden. It was not a believable campaign. Also, when she ran for president on her own, she never got past the single digits.
This is the conventional wisdom, but it isn't true anymore because that's not how people think about politics anymore. Only pundits and politicians think of politics in terms of left and right and moderate. Regular people do not understand what these terms mean, largely because these pundits and politicians use them incorrectly in order to push their preferred agendas. That's why you get polls that say people want more moderate candidates but then when you poll them issue by issue the American people are by in large on board with policies that these politicians and pudits consider "far left" like a medicare for all healthcare system, and that's also why people consistently vote aganinst their own insterests. The entire political entertainment complex is designed to confuse and mislead people with a flood of contradicting information that confuses opinions and hypotheticals with analysis and facts. Because of this, people don't vote based on policy or a candiate's record. They vote based on a candidate's vibes and who is telling them what they want to hear.
If appealing to moderates is what wins elections, Donald Trump would never have come close to the presidency. It's not the 1990s anymore. Reaganomics isn't popular. Clintonian neoliberalism isn't popular. Barack Obama was elected running as a progressive outsider promising to shake up the status quo and won decisivly twice, despite the fact that all the conventional wisdom said that Hillary Clinton was the safe moderate option and that America wasn't ready for a black president running on a left wing platform. When he betrayed his coalitoion and governed like a 1980s moderate Republican (in his own words) the white working class voters that backed him and delivered states like Ohio, Iowa, Florida, and even Indiana and North Carolina in his first run, flipped to Trump.
Nearly single poll that happened in 2016 showed Bernie Sanders having a stronger matchup against Trump, Cruz, Rubio, or Kasich than Clinton did. And while Kasich polled the best vs both Clinton and Sanders, Trump polled better than Cruz or Rubio. Now obviously polls are not a crystal ball into what is going to happen on election night. That's what people treat them as, hence the myth that the polls are "wrong," but that's not actually what they are designed to do or what they are useful for. But what this does show, is that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump appealed to the same group of working class voters who traditionally voted for Democrats but were screwed over by Obama's neoliberal outsourcig of jobs and half measures on things like healthcare, and the results of these elections showed that this demographic were the actual swing voters, not the moderate suburban middle class professionals that were the decisive swing voters in the 80s and 90s. Meanwhile, Clinton, Cruz, and Rubio represented the establishment that these people were sick of so they polled worse. I would speculate that Kasich polled better against Sanders than the others did (although he was still losing) because Kasich would have actually picked up some moderate voters that were put off by Sanders in a way that more conservative Republicans wouldn't, but since this matchup will never happen we'll never have a complete set of data to figure it out for sure.
The Democrats have over and over again refused to learn this lesson. Chuck Schumer famously dismissed concerns about this in 2016 when he said for every working class voter they lose to Trump, they will pick up 2 white collar moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and so on. Despite the fact that this obviously wasn't true, they tried this again in 2020 and barely pulled it off despite Trump's unpopularity and the horrible state of things at the time. Biden was able to peel just enough of those working class voters back not because they liked him, but because they were betrayed by Trump just like they were betrayed by Obama. And they refused to learn the lesson again, and since Biden was now the incumbent and Harris refused to distance herself from him, she lost. She doubled down on campaigning with the Cheneys who are right wing neocons, doubled down on Biden's incredibly unpopular support of Israel's "war," and ran away from the bold positions that she ran on in the past.
Not that she ever genuinely held those positions of course, which goes back to what you were saying about how she feels phony. She is. It's just that she is also incredibly out of touch with how to be phony effectively because Democratic Party strategists are professional idiots.
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JollyJoker
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posted April 18, 2025 08:07 PM |
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She ibviously wasn't "phoney", at least not in the sense that the correctly predicted what would happen if Trump won.
She was a woman who had no other agneda than "we won't go back". Trouble is, a hell of a lot of people WANTED to go back. Lots of people have fear of the future.
In the end a lie well told serves better than a truth badly told.
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Rimgrabber
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posted April 18, 2025 08:35 PM |
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She was phony in the sense that she was a careerist who stood for nothing other than advancing herself. That's why she has throughout here carrer she has flip flopped on almost every issue. She ran to the right of her Republican opponenet when she was running for AG of California on the issue of marijuanna, for example. Then she tried to reinvent herself as a Sanders-esque progressive when she ran for President, but had the inconsistency in her past to show that she didn't really care about those issues enough to actually argue for them. She argued (correctly) on a debate stage that Biden was a segregationist and unfit to lead, and then walked back her criticisms of him when he pushed back. Then, she walked back her policies like medicare for all and a green new deal which Biden was opposed to because it was more important to her that she get to be VP than it was that she fight for those policies, because she never really cared that much about them. And then she spent 4 years being a yes man for Biden despite her past criticisms of him, and refused to show leadership and stand up to him even when she became the nominee in 2024. That is what I mean when I say she is phony. She is a generic politician who will say whatever she thinks people want to hear if it means getting more power for herself.
Donald Trump can pull that off because he has a unique sort of confident charisma that makes some people just turn off their critical thinking skills. Even Joe Biden had that before he started to publicly sundown. The vast majority of politicians, like Kamala Harris, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Pete Buttigieg, Ron DeSantis, Gavin Newsome, Josh Shapiro etc. do not have that, and that is why they will fail. They stand for nothing and do not have the sheer bravado to overcome that through vibes. Bernie Sanders can overcome that because he has stood for the same policies his whole career. He passionately cares about them and will fight for them. The other democrats are cowards who melt at the slightest pushback.
You are correct that she had no agenda other than "we won't go back" and that is a TERRIBLE platform when the status quo is objectively failing people. Trump's economy in his first term was better, not because he was a better president but because we live in an era of late stage capitalism that is characterized by everything continuing to get worse over time as the system collapses on itself. Liberals have no answer to that, and neofascists like Trump have fake answers to that. If you give suffering people a choice between no solution and a fake solution, they will pick the fake solution every single time.
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JollyJoker
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posted April 18, 2025 08:55 PM |
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I agree about her being a careerist - but what is Trump? Charismatic? Give me a break. Charisma has nothing to do with it - not when Biden beat him 2020. And come on, Reagan had charisma, Obama had charisma, I mean, HITLER had charisma when he was holding a speech, but TRUMP? Trump is a clumsy narcissist who can't keep a thought over a full sentence. He is obviously no Christian, in fact everything but, a proven liar, a criminal and a dishonest billionaire, so he shouldn't appeal to Christians at all.
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Rimgrabber
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posted April 18, 2025 09:00 PM |
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No, he shouldn't appeal to those groups at all. But he does, because his brand of charisma is unique. He doesn't need to be coherent or smart or principled for it to work because that's not necessarily how charisma works. It's the intangible things that make people want to listen to and follow you. Trump has that in excess, so much excess that is has allowed him to become President twice despite no other leadership qualities and generally being an incompetent buffoon as well as a criminal and a terrible person.
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JollyJoker
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posted April 18, 2025 09:43 PM |
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That's NOT the conclusion. He WON against Clinton (albeit with the help of the internet and the rigged election rules in the US which shouldn't have seen him win). He LOST against Biden, older than Trump, more of a statesman figure, but weaker, physically. He WON against Harris.
Charisma has NOTHING to do with it. It's just that Harris and Clinton have been women, Harris even a black one. White male - black female. Good Christian, bad abortionist, liberal, communist, feminist, careerist. What other conclusion can you draw? Biden in a wheelchair might have won, charisma or not - Harris? Not so.
No Charisma involved. Well. Not more as, well, Frankenstein's creature.
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blizzard
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posted April 18, 2025 09:50 PM |
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I don't understand you JJ. It is commonly accepted that Trump uses rizz all the time. That is the whole point of putting on an apron at McDonalds and telling jokes at fundraiser dinners. It has given him worldwide appeal with a couple billion people and endangered Democrats by pulling away younger voters.
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Rimgrabber
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posted April 18, 2025 09:50 PM |
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Biden's internal polling had him losing New Jersey and New York. I would bet you literally anything that he would have done even worse than she did. As I have been over, Biden's first victory was entirely a fluke based on luck and the fact that Trump was an incumbent overseeing economic catastrophy, and that was back when it wasn't obvious that Biden was going senile. In 2024, he was the incumbent overseeing an economic disaster and a genocide. Harris could have won if she had chosen to show leadership and campaign on an actual vision. At first it seemed like she was going to when she picked Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Then, she decided to listen to her advisors telling her to campaign with the Cheneys and do the exact failed strategy that got Trump elected the first time.
Compare the polling at the beginning of Harris's campaign and the last few weeks of the election. She was running away with the election and then she let her idiot advisors that have bee wrong about everything my entire adult life run her campaign into the ground just like the did for CLinton and Biden. If sexism was the deciding factor here, Elissa Slotkin would have ever become a senator and Tammy Baldwin would have lost re-election. Americans are comfortable electing women. They are not comfortable electing people who were in a historically unpopular administration and refused against all logic to change course, unless they are given the choice between two of these people, in which case the one with more delusional followers (Trump) will win.
And no, the 2016 election was not "rigged" in any meaningful sense unless you're refering to the Clinton campaign colluding with their contacts in the DNC to crush Sanders or their pied piper strategy that they used to elevate Trump, Cruz, and Carson in the media because they thought they would be the easiest opponents to beat. Russia hired a handful of trolls which the intelligene agencies have determined ultimately did not impact the election. The electoral college is a terrible and undemocratic system but Hillary Clinton and her team knew that and decided to campaign in Texas and not set foot in Wisconsin even once the whole general election.
I understand that its somewhat comforting and feels nice to be able to have a quick simple answer to how this idiot keeps getting elected but there isn't one. Politics is extremely complicated and multifacited and being reductive like this is exactly how nothing changes. Pretending that this is entirely about sexism (which probably contributed but was objectively not the deciding factor just based on simply looking at the other races that day) absolves the morons who run the Democratic Party of responsability and is going to let them somehow figure out a way to lose to the Vance/Trump Jr ticket in 2028.
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JollyJoker
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posted April 18, 2025 10:46 PM |
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Nah. I believe in Ockhaam's razor. Politics on that level IS simple. It's simple because humans are. Most, anyway. That's why all this crap works. Because human beings are, at the core of it, simple.
Which doesn't mean I wouldn't agree that the democrats didn't run the campaign to the ground - but that doesn't make Trump charismatic. It doesn't change the facts.
And the facts are: Harris started out big, being, you know, the GOOD one, but then Trump's campaign started to play hardball and Harris DIDN'T show she knew, as a former DA, how to handle him - and Vance who may have been a lot more important to Trumps victory than you might think.
Harris would virtually have had to destroy Trump before the election to win it - but only because she's a woman. Remember, Trump is a notorious woman "handler".
So, no. It's easy. I know, you're in the job, you're biassed. But this isn't politics, not on that level - it's advertisement. Publicity.
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Rimgrabber
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posted April 18, 2025 11:06 PM |
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Trump is charismatic in the sense that he has the ability to make people shut off their brains and blindly follow him in a way that almost no other politicians have. But that's not the only reason why he won, because as you pointed out he lost to Biden (which again I cannot stress enough was an extremely close election that should have been a landslide for Biden, were it not for Trump's cult of personality and Biden's utter weakness as a candidate) it's the reason why he gets away with being an idiot. It's not just against women and it's not even just against Democrats. Look at how the primary went: Ron DeSantis is just a smarter, more coherent version of Donald Trump, and there were polls early on that showed him ahead of Trump, but he got destroyed because he doesn't have Trump's intangible personality factors or swarm of mindless fans because he doesn't have the charisma to pull it off.
I absolutely agree that being a woman made things harder for Harris. What I do not agree with is that she would have won if she was a man or that Biden would have done better than her this time. I think if Biden was the nominee Trump would have probably won Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Virginia in addition to all of the states that were expected to be competitive.
Again 3 states that voted for Trump elected democratic women to the senate that same year. That doesn't prove that America isn't sexist, I would never argue that it does, but it DOES prove that those states were willing to elect the right woman. I don't think we actually disagree on that much here, I just feel that it is important to have a more complete analysis of what happened. But if you want something simple, I think it probably came down to inflation. Trump successfully blamed inflation on the Democrats, and that's what people voted on.
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blizzard
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posted April 18, 2025 11:09 PM |
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But she did know how to handle him. She did better than most people expected in the debates. Trump even decided not to do a 2nd one, but maybe he never intended to. I don't know.
Harris isn't terribly uncharismatic, and she's pretty, but she never really had a chance to build a campaign, and everybody who follows politics knows that she shifted significantly between 2019 and 2024. She's electable in California but that doesn't mean she can win a presidency the way that Newsom probably could, and everybody who pays attention to data knows that Newsom would pull in more women voters than Kamala Harris would.
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JollyJoker
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posted April 19, 2025 12:04 PM |
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Senat, Congresswomen is something else - although the US haven't had many female Senators at all. Currently 26 are serving, a record high, sayiung a lot. Congress has roughly the same ratio of currently about a quarter.
PRESIDENT is something else entirely, though.
Fairly interesting observation after our current election in Germany, when you look at how many women are in:
AfD (very right): 152 in all, 18 women = 11.8%
CDU (Christian conservative): 208; 48 = 23.1%
SPD (Soscialdemocrats, middle to slightly left): 120; 50 = 41.7%
Grüne (Green Party; leftist): 85; 52 = 61.2%
Die Linke (The Left; left): 64; 36 = 56.2%
In all, this is 32.4% women - which isn't the most by far, due to the bad ration on the right. The result is on par with what we had 2002-2005, with the highest percentage in 2013-2017 of 36.5%.
So, Charisma. Trump may be charismatic for the nutcases - he is one himself, he does and says nutcase things, fine. But when it comes to your average protestant white family, I think what the man sees is a terrifyingly un-Christan-like un-white woman talking about abortion and female stuff - and his wife sees the same (otherwise she wouldn't be his wife), while Trump is viewed as a man with guts and American and Christian values.
We talked about the polls within muslims in another thread, but the polls made no sense - only when considering muslims and the candidates were a man and a woman (like, Harris is potentially better for our stuff, but Trump has more muscle and will use them while Harris is just a black woman).
Add to that the fact, that Harris never left her mark as VP in any way you would have remembered her for, while Trump was still all over the place in that time, and you get the result you got.
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Rimgrabber
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posted April 19, 2025 04:26 PM |
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If you're asserting that Muslims are just too sexist to vote for a women, you should know that Stein won 53% of the Muslim vote. Harris refused to condemn a genocide that her boss was overseeing against Palestine. It takes a LOT of nerve for you to look at that and dismiss them not voting for her as sexism. Stein got 53%, Trump got 23%, and Harris got 22%. The other candidates got 2% between them. So fully 3 quarters of Muslims in America voted for a woman this year
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blizzard
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posted April 19, 2025 05:59 PM |
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Edited by blizzard at 18:02, 19 Apr 2025.
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We were talking in the election thread about the Muslim vote in Michigan and the flight from the Democratic Party. Muslims prefer Stein because the major parties don't know what to do about Israel.
It didn't decide the election, but it would have if the vote came down to Michigan, which people were saying could happen.
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Rimgrabber
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posted April 19, 2025 06:05 PM |
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No it wouldn't have. There weren't any swing states when Stein 's margin was greater than Trump's margin of victory. The fact remains, if Harris wanted Muslims to vote for her she perhaps shouldn't have backed a genocide against their family members.
Stein was just overall a far, far superior candidate btw. Across all categories. I voted for her, I voted for Hawkins in 2020, and I'm probably going to vote for Butch Ware if he runs in 2028.
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blizzard
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posted April 19, 2025 06:29 PM |
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Okay, you don't have to use, like, numbers on me.
So, based on your choices, I guess you're at peace with the fact that it is about impossible for 3rd parties to win?
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Rimgrabber
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posted April 19, 2025 06:34 PM |
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It's a circular logic. Exit polls show that Perot would have won with 319 electoral votes if all his supporters had voted for him instead of their second choice. If everyone else wants to drive off a cliff every year that's their prerogative, but I'm not gonna let other people tell me what my choices are.
The two party system isn't even really a real thing. It is a very recent development for third parties to not be a major force in local and state politics around the country that has been born out of this idiotic self fulfilling prophecy and the fact that people only pay attention to presidential races. Hell even now independents get elected to positions all the time and Vermont has 3 major parties. People just don't want to do the work on between cycles or organize for something different. That doesn't mean I'm going to throw away my right to vote for a candidate I want.
So I guess what I'm saying is I think the framing of that question is wrong and (no offense) dumb. It's not a "fact" that third parties can't win. It's an ahistorical opinion that has been force fed to people en masse so that major parties don't need to earn votes and people give up on getting something better before they even try.
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blizzard
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posted April 19, 2025 06:44 PM |
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Without proportional or preferential voting, a 2 party model is going to dominate.
But, best of luck with your professional endeavors.
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