American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

https://www.npr.org/2024/12/27/nx-s1-52 ... tics-recap

Domenico Montanaro is the "numbers cruncher" for PBS & NPR. He regularly reports on polls, trends, election results and the like. He takes a look back at the political year of 2024 and lists the significant number results that defined the year. The headline on his story reads, "A wild year in politics, by the numbers."

Here are some of the interesting "numbers" Montanaro describes.
155 million
"More than 155 million people cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election. It's second only in U.S. history to the 2020 election. Turnout in 2024 represented 63.9% of eligible voters, the second-highest percentage in the last 100 years, according to the University of Florida Election Lab. The only year that beat it – again – was 2020 when universal mail-in voting was more widely available."
71%
"The share of the electorate that white voters made up. This might be the most important number of the election because it represents an increase in the white share of the electorate, which hasn't happened since 1992. White voters have been on a steady decline since the turn of the century, with the increase of Latinos and AAPI voters, so for that to be reversed in this election is eye-popping and a big reason for Trump's win. Much of that extra boost came from white voters without college degrees, who went up 4 points as a share of the electorate and went two-thirds for Trump."

49.8%
"Trump's popular vote percentage. That's hardly an "unprecedented" and "powerful mandate," as Trump has claimed, but presidents often over-read their election victories — and just how much political capital they have."

38%
"President Biden's average approval rating just before Election Day. It's hard for the party in power to do well when their incumbent president's approval is that low. His age, 81, also factored greatly in whether he could win reelection or even stay in the race.

I was not happy in 2023 when Biden decided to run. But at the same time it was a strange race, in that Harris was largely unknown. Who do we run? A governor? Of those 60% that turned up to vote maybe half had some idea who she was. The rest had a label: typical democrat.

Anyway, Biden would not have won if he stayed in, even if tha disasterous debate never had happened.

Lesson: do not run any candidates that cannot run two terms.

[Brian Peacock]

Nah. Biden was the incumbent during a post-pandemic global cost of living crisis. The electorate were always going to punish him for that.

[Tero]

RFK Jr says the polio vaccine trials in 1954 were "3 days"
they were not
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14361811/

[Tero]

Harris had the rally in Houston with celebrities. It was fancy, but the topic was abortion.

Rural voters were outraged. They might want to support abortion maybe once in their life. Like when their daughter was about to die at childbirth. But you can't actually talk about it. It's disgusting.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Lucky you have been given the opportunity to skip this image. You have nobody to blame but yourself.

[Brian Peacock]

My eyes!

[Tero]

On the one hand, we have an impossible task. On the other hand, Trump will soon sink himself. He had no solutions. Canada and Mexico will not yield.
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com/2024/1 ... -2026.html

[Tero]

Elsewhere:
Can anyone actually say what defines 'the average american"?

The average American is a frictionless sphere 1.6 meters in diameter, capable of travelling at light speed in a vacuum, conductive to electricity, and sufficiently dense to sink in water. The freezing point of the average American is -10 C, and the boiling point is 103.008101 C. An average American has a pH balance of 9, is Presbyterian, and doesn't care for badminton.

[macdoc]

[Tero]

I did this 4 years already. I'm going to monitor news on line and only watch limited tv news shows. Too bad if they lose advertising revenue. I just can't stand to listen to Trump speak anymore.

[macdoc]

[Tero]

Illegal aliens were important. But even more: vaccines.

1elizabeth_jacobs
15m15 minutes ago
If you are new to learning about the anti-vax movement, I’m grateful you’re here. And I want to be crystal clear that after conducting research on the anti-vax movement for more than decade, my conclusion is that once a person has wedged themself into an anti-vax position, facts cannot be used to convince them otherwise.
Yes, there may be a handful of people whose minds have been changed by a diligent HCW. But on the scale of the general population, this doesn’t work.

And this is why vaccine requirements for school attendance are CRITICAL. As more and more vaccine exemptions are reported, we increase risk of epidemics from diseases that we can, as of now, prevent with vaccines.
This is why I will oppose any attempts to undermine school vaccine requirements even more than they already are by existing vaccine exemptions, which are decided at the state level. If you want to use community resources, you need to be part of the community. 2/2
https://www.threads.net/@1elizabeth_jac ... RNI29pagXg

[Svartalf]

[Tero]

Liz Cheney talked a lot about our sacred institutions and democracy in her book. It got a bit repetitive in the second half. But those types of politicians are now gone or hiding.

Trump’s nine long years of decontextualized rants have played a leading role in destroying public trust in ideas and institutions most Americans once considered fundamental: Fact-based news. Democracy. Free and fair elections. Trump has succeeded enough to know that his toxic model of politics works on a sizable chunk of the American electorate. In his second term, expect Trump to push his personality cult as far as it can go — and for Democrats to once again underestimate their adversary.

...millions of Americans have told campaign pollsters that they place a personal allegiance to Trump above their belief in the Constitution. The number of people willing to consider alternatives to democracy is at a level last seen during the crises of the 1930s.

Trump knows he speaks for these people, and he’s awarded his base voters’ loyalty with a series of increasingly outlandish and aggressive statements, from a promise to seize Panama and Greenland to his more serious intention to pardon nearly 1,000 federal criminals behind bars for their roles in the violent January 6 attack on the Capitol.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/50 ... um=bluesky

[Tero]

Elsewhere (hopes for 2028)
I’m getting a bit pessimistic. Pennsylvania situation is scary…if it is “Floridaised” as it looks likely, then not much hope for 2028. Florida and Texas are now beyond reach…the margins of Republicans keep increasing and Latinos have turned red (or turning red very fast).