Elephants and Jackasses...

I figured that was the only reason she was still running?

 

If you think about it from the perspective of the electorate, it's a fucking nightmare: Nimrata somehow becomes who they are supposed to vote for, despite Trump being the de facto head of the party, to the extent that he tanks legislation from his couch, after the electorate has been propagandized to believe the 2020 election was stolen and the various legal issues are all a conspiratorial witch hunt and that J6 was a peaceful protest. The idea that your average GOP voter who has been vocally supportive of Trump for nigh on a decade will somehow just shrug and vote for her is absurd, especially if Trump's sidelined with nothing better to do than tweet about her.

From a procedural standpoint, there is a bizarre turn of events that puts her as the nominee, where she hopes for a reverse of 2020 (she wins based on a vote against Biden, not for her).

She's raised money and structured her campaign to be a long shot. With Trump's pending legal issues, the fundraising question is fascinating, and thus far it seems no one is spending a ton. God bless her, she actually has a platform that isn't "fuck yo couch", but I cannot imagine anyone giving a shit about any of her policies until the last few weeks. If this long shot flames out (which is the most likely outcome), she'll be well-positioned to head for 2028, which is looking like a race against Harris or Newsome.

 

You don't seriously think the Dems would be dumb enough to try running Harris... Do you?

While we're on the subject of Trump being on the ballot: isn't it true that it's the Republican parties of those states trying to keep Trump off, because he's hurting down-ballot races?

 

Yes

 

Yes and no. In Colorado the lawsuit was initiated by Republican voters, because in order to have standing it had to be someone who would vote in the Colorado Republican primary. In Maine it was a decision by the Secretary of State applying election law. In Illinois it was based on a lawsuit, but I'm not 100% who the complainants are. In terms of motivation in the two lawsuits, it's probably a general dissatisfaction with Trump more than any specific calculus re: downballot races, especially given the unlikelihood that they'll manage to replace Trump with a different candidate.

 

I think 'Nerds and I were talking about all of the times where the Dems had an easy win, but chose to shoot themselves in the foot, IE: Hillary '16, forcing Al Franken to resign, playing nice with the GQP in general.

There's an old saying: "Nobody is better at beating the Democrats than the Democrats."

 

I'm kinda scared Trump has a better chance beating Biden than he did in 2020. Hear me out. Has his base shrunk substantially? I'm betting not enough. The states that keep him off the ballot, he wouldn't have won anyway, so that matters little, I imagine. It may widen the difference in the popular vote to something very hilarious looking, but Trump still pull the needed EC votes. While Biden has done little to nothing to prove he isn't senile and convince people like @Juice to not throw away their vote on a non-party candidate, he's said it many times.

 

In Aus we have 'compulsory' voting. in reality it just means you have to have your name ticked off the polling list, accept a ballot paper and place it into a polling box. No law to say you have to put anything onto the ballot paper. And the only reason it has to go into the box is account for the number of ballot papers issued.
That aside, I tend to vote in reverse order of preference from who I don't want elected the most to the least disliked candidate. By placing an invalid vote I am effectively giving the least preferred candidate a free vote. I don't see any difference with the USA system where you have an option to vote or not. By not voting you are giving the biggest moron a free ride. There's only so much the world can take, even though we're pissing ourselves laughing at 'carrot top bozo' and 'who am I', seems to me the choice is going to be who's going to do the least damage. The one who will do stuff just because they can or the one who might do something if they remember to do it. Good luck, I'm off to get a couple more beers and some bar snacks.....

 

The way the abortion debacle has unfolded, the number of new Gen Z voters, the number of Trump voters who have straight up died since 2020....I think the electorate has some wild shifts going on, and the polls are unreliable, because the margin of error is wider than the margin of victory. Trump will win some states, sure, but I think he still loses the popular vote and the election. It's technically a 50/50 shot Trump wins, and I'm genuinely curious why that doesn't scare some people.

If you're in the sphere of Trumps influence, you have to reckon with a long history of bullshit that simply didn't happen, with increasingly tenuous logic. At a certain point, you have voters who stay home because they believe the election is rigged anyway. Trump's great for primary voters, but terrible for everyone else, including the down-ticket races.

There's this business model paradigm where an alarmingly high amount of revenue is generated by less than 5% of customers. Think mobile games, porn, the super-fans of a mid-tier artist, Onlyfans, etc. Trump kind of works like that: there's a tiny sliver of very passionate, vocal people who drive a great deal of his base, but they are wildly outnumbered. The "business" gets structured around the people who drive the revenue, often scaring away anyone who's not a super-user...think games adding features that a casual player detests, but would deepen the addiction (and investment) for someone who's spent thousands of dollars and hours on it. Trump courts the "superfan" base very well, often to the exclusion of everyone else. Great for fundraising, but terrible for popularity contests.

Also, some key sub-demographic shifts have continued since 2020: fewer folks are religious, plenty of urban, liberal folks have relocated to remote work in places like Tulsa or Sioux Falls, and marriage & fertility rates have been on the decline. I think this stuff matters, because the Trump voter needs to be in a bubble reinforced by family, Jesus, etc.

The economy under Biden has over-performed, and the threat of the budget shutdown has been solely pinned on GOP disfunction. I think either side talking about the economy is muddy, because the US did better with inflation than just about any of the developed world, the stock market is insane, and most folks have seen wage growth. At the lower end of the economic spectrum, the "no one wants to work anymore" is being drowned out by a resurgence in labor unions, and a re-negotiation of work in general. It's too early in the race for the economy to be a talking point, a lot can shift in the next 8 months.

Lastly, the GOP really hasn't done anything. Biden can claim some pretty big victories, and the big-ticket policy issues the GOP talks about are immigration reform, which they did fuck-all about, and LGBT and reproductive rights, which is either wildly polarizing or completely irrelevant depending on age/gender. Trump's platform seems to focus on shit that makes no sense: vengeance on political enemies, banning sex, promoting Russia, etc. The stuff he's talked about is increasingly bizarre. Also, by putting every piece of the GOP platform onto the judiciary, there's simply nothing for them to campaign on and it's hard to feel represented when so many of these things are decided by the byzantine federal court process.

 

I agree. Personally, I’m just tired of scorched earth politics and policies designed to hurt specific groups of people. When the Dems become the party of less invasive government, we are truly in the upside down.

 

I completely agree with you and won't argue any of this. I would root for the entire thing to fail, except it means that the country would fail in the process. So in the meantime I'm just sitting back with my popcorn, pulling for maximum chaos for entertainment value, and waiting to see how many court cases trump can balance at once before all the spinning plates fall.

 

Part of the problem is our political system needs to adjust to the social media age, and there needs to be much firmer lines of accountability for political media in general. The fact that so much reporting has a bias isn't pre-determined, and we can write legislation that treats political news as distinct, in the same way we do children's programming.

The country CAN fail, and believe me, J6 was FAR closer than anyone cares to admit. If you ask any of the foreign specialists who deal with (ahem) "regime change", it's straight out of their playbook.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/29/trump-special-treatment-supreme-court-00144138

https://newrepublic.com/article/179438/liz-cheney-supreme-court-trump-trial-delay-dems-weapon

I saw this and think it might come back to bite the SC in the ass, in a big way, assuming Trump loses. I give Cheney a LOT of credit for losing her job, but not her balls and recognizing the GOP post-Trump will need people with spine.

The idea that the SC will essentially determine if January 6 is an election issue or not is some bonkers banana republic shit. Punting til after the election to prevent J6 from being an election factor is outrageous, especially when it's decided by a bunch of unelected judges, at least one of whom owes their job to the political rat-fuck of the century. It's been 4 years, and the idea that somehow this can't be resolved before November is insane.

The more I learn about the SC choosing to rule on Trump's "immunity" the more it feels like a packed court providing just the kind of political air coverage he needs, and it reeks of the 2000 election where I overheard my father saying "Republican court? Republicans win."

If the GOP majority falls, I cannot fathom a 2nd Biden administration letting this court persist as is. The shit the SC has done in the past few years was unthinkable, and with McConnell gone, the legislative masterminds that put so much emphasis on the court system and understood why it served the GOP are as well. Undoing that damage will be incredibly difficult, and reworking the federal system, packing courts, or straight up impeaching judges are grueling choices that no politician wants to deal with. I just can't see anything moving forward until this fuckery is removed.

 

It was fucked up in the late 1700's, too. But the problem now is K Street is too big. It's awful. Fix K Street, fix term limits.

 

As someone who worked in mobile games, we wish the percentage we generated revenue off of was 5%

 

lol, I think K Street in Waycross, Georgia is also lovely. But, the one I want to get rid of is in Washington, D.C.