Mega-Thread: 2020 United States General Election

[Benggaul]

So have conservatives for the last 4 years. Sure Trump won, but the senate and house has done nothing but gain blue seats since the 2016 election. Trump hasn't really come through in any of his campaign policies. the dude is well below the Mendoza line on legal cases as President. And so on, and so on.

Well technically they lost two Dem seats in the Senate in 2018. I don't think it's going to go that way this year, though.

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And people kept taking the bait. Ignore it. People don't have to respond to every dumb posts.

Agreed. I wouldn't even see those posts if people weren't quoting it. But I'll still happily point out the stupidity when I see it.

[beanman12345]

So have conservatives for the last 4 years. Sure Trump won, but the senate and house has done nothing but gain blue seats since the 2016 election. Trump hasn't really come through in any of his campaign policies. the dude is well below the Mendoza line on legal cases as President. And so on, and so on.

But they got a total of 5 whole miles of new wall. To some of these people that is a win.

[SirBeef]

But they got a total of 5 whole miles of new wall. To some of these people that is a win.

im sure the fools who helped crowdfund some wall felt like winners at the time too.

[Endus]

It doesn't bode well when I try to google for "Biden's main policies" and I'm met with several pages of opinion pieces and news articles trying to investigate the same thing. There does not seem to be any clear messaging on what his main policies are.

Just checked this myself, and while there's a NYT and Politico breakdown and a Wikipedia specific to the topic as the first three, Biden's campaign site is #4. And the Politico link, at least, is pretty much just an objective breakdown.

I don't have any clue where you're getting this from.

[Benggaul]

I don't have any clue where you're getting this from.

Don't worry, neither do they.

[Eviscero]

Just checked this myself, and while there's a NYT and Politico breakdown and a Wikipedia specific to the topic as the first three, Biden's campaign site is #4. And the Politico link, at least, is pretty much just an objective breakdown.

I don't have any clue where you're getting this from.

Google tailors search results to individuals to some extent. So if you primarily visit fake new sites that peddle in lies, alt right blogs, and conspiracy theory YouTube channels it wouldn't surprise me if you didn't get reasonable results related to searches about Dems.

[eschatological]

So, I am getting a bit worried about the negative perception of BLM and the protests. Everyone in this thread knows that rioters are a small fraction of the protest movement, but that's not the impression average people have.

Almost everyone I know in my hometown (of Buffalo) serve as my political bellweather. They're all union guys, strong Democrats for the 90s and 00s, etc. They didn't mind guys like McCain or Romney, but still voted Obama. In 2016, whenever we talked, a lot of us who went to college would do a lot of the talking kept saying HRC was the only viable choice, and these guys were somewhat sullen and says, "fuck all of it." A lot of them voted Trump and I only found out about it after the election.

Fast forward to 2020. I'd say in June/July, these guys were vehemently on the Joe Biden train, and now can't stand Trump. A couple months later, and now all they talk about is lawlessness and disorder and burning cities. I keep making the same arguments - it's a small fraction, it's a very much justified rage, lives are more important than property, etc. They're having none of it. They think "if I have to follow all these rules, so should everyone else." They're all on board for peaceful protests, they just can't make the next step into justifying riots for the cause.

A gnawing sense of dread looms. I'm just so goddamn tired of the red rose brigade yelling shit at people eating lunch and setting fire to shit because they think they win with reactionary violence.

[Benggaul]

So, I am getting a bit worried about the negative perception of BLM and the protests. Everyone in this thread knows that rioters are a small fraction of the protest movement, but that's not the impression average people have.

Almost everyone I know in my hometown (of Buffalo) serve as my political bellweather. They're all union guys, strong Democrats for the 90s and 00s, etc. They didn't mind guys like McCain or Romney, but still voted Obama. In 2016, whenever we talked, a lot of us who went to college would do a lot of the talking kept saying HRC was the only viable choice, and these guys were somewhat sullen and says, "fuck all of it." A lot of them voted Trump and I only found out about it after the election.

Fast forward to 2020. I'd say in June/July, these guys were vehemently on the Joe Biden train, and now can't stand Trump. A couple months later, and now all they talk about is lawlessness and disorder and burning cities. I keep making the same arguments - it's a small fraction, it's a very much justified rage, lives are more important than property, etc. They're having none of it. They think "if I have to follow all these rules, so should everyone else." They're all on board for peaceful protests, they just can't make the next step into justifying riots for the cause.

A gnawing sense of dread looms.

Lean into it. "Well, this is happening because Trump is refusing to make change for the better and is just pouring fuel on the fire in his Twitter tantrums. Biden has expressed a will to examine the problem and try to enact change. Remember, this isn't happening under Biden. It's happening under Trump."

There have also been several documented instances of agent provocateurs causing many of the problems, but that's probably too deep for people who even considered voting Trump in 2016.

[cubby]

Lean into it. "Well, this is happening because Trump is refusing to make change for the better and is just pouring fuel on the fire in his Twitter tantrums. Biden has expressed a will to examine the problem and try to enact change. Remember, this isn't happening under Biden. It's happening under Trump."

I think you're spot on regarding the answer to @eschatological's concern and local discussion about BLM. All of this is Trump's America - every part of it. He fuels the fire of dissent and disorder to keep everyone angry and on edge. Biden will cool things down, find solutions to problems that cross political spectrums, just as he's done his entire life.

[Machismo]

So, I am getting a bit worried about the negative perception of BLM and the protests. Everyone in this thread knows that rioters are a small fraction of the protest movement, but that's not the impression average people have.

Almost everyone I know in my hometown (of Buffalo) serve as my political bellweather. They're all union guys, strong Democrats for the 90s and 00s, etc. They didn't mind guys like McCain or Romney, but still voted Obama. In 2016, whenever we talked, a lot of us who went to college would do a lot of the talking kept saying HRC was the only viable choice, and these guys were somewhat sullen and says, "fuck all of it." A lot of them voted Trump and I only found out about it after the election.

Fast forward to 2020. I'd say in June/July, these guys were vehemently on the Joe Biden train, and now can't stand Trump. A couple months later, and now all they talk about is lawlessness and disorder and burning cities. I keep making the same arguments - it's a small fraction, it's a very much justified rage, lives are more important than property, etc. They're having none of it. They think "if I have to follow all these rules, so should everyone else." They're all on board for peaceful protests, they just can't make the next step into justifying riots for the cause.

A gnawing sense of dread looms. I'm just so goddamn tired of the red rose brigade yelling shit at people eating lunch and setting fire to shit because they think they win with reactionary violence.

Honestly, this was always going to happen. Trump supporters swore they'd totally have voted for Biden, if he were running instead of Hillary in 2016. When Biden ran in 2020, they said it again. But, at the end of the day, they were never undecided, they were never going to vote for Biden. They would have used any excuse to justify it. If it wasn't Antifa, it would be Biden being a creepy hair sniffer, or his dementia. At the end of the day, people vote for who they truly are, not who they pretend to be. This is their way of rationalizing that they are not the shitty person that they know Trump to be, they are simply not left with any better options. They don't WANT to vote for him, outside entities are FOCRING their hand. It's nothing more than the lies we tell ourselves. It's also why libertarianism will never actually catch on. People will say they love the idea of such things, but when it comes time to actually show up, they disappear. The Great Election Lie is that there are undecided voters in an election, at least for the major candidates.

As for the Antifa fuckwads, they should be put in their place. Antifa, and a great many of their supporters are fascists. Not only that, they are not charismatic fascists. Americans have decided they love the idea of fascism, they just want it wrapped in a pretty blonde package, who sneers in front of a camera on OANN or Fox news.

[eschatological]

-snip-.

These are all my friends. Guys I know, from the age of 7, and their dads. Me and my friends have been voting since 2000, and all of them, to a man, voted Gore-Kerry-Obama-Obama up til 2016. Their fathers voted twice for Clinton in the 90s.....most of them probably voted for Bush over Dukakis, but I know a few of them who voted for Mondale in 84 over Reagan.

I still think they're gonna vote Biden. TBH, I credit it to them having a brown immigrant good friend who does all their legal work for them. My best friend is this half Irish, half German guy who grew up in Buffalo, left at 23, and for the past 15 years has been living in San Antonio - and he's never had a passport. Canada 20 minutes from where he grew up, Mexico like an hour away from where he lives now. He can't handle food much spicier than Taco Bell. But he's firmly a Democrat (even now, in Texas) despite fitting the ideal demo for a Trump voter (hell, he even married a Texan woman), and it's because 1) he was exposed to my family growing up, imo and 2) his father was a Vietnam vet who forbade him from going into the Marines and was also a Teamster.

But I expect there's a lot of these people who, rationally, know they should vote for Biden, who'll look at these riots/burnings/etc and be a little bit concerned about it, and blame it on "liberals." This is a country where "liberal" was once called "the l word" by Bush Sr on the campaign trail, as if it was a curse word, and a lot of these guys are still living in the 80s.

[Blur4stuff]

I don't think the BLM/other protests are going to matter much for votes. Most of the support is baked in at this point. Anyone who is so fragile and easy to manipulate with propaganda about minorities moving into their white neighborhoods probably wasn't going to be voting Biden anyways.

[Orange Joe]

Wrong.

If someone has to go to someone's campaign website to find a candidate's policies, then they are hard to find.

insert picard facepalm here..... Next your gonna say if someone has to go to google to google something google is too hard to use....

[Thepersona]

These are all my friends. Guys I know, from the age of 7, and their dads. Me and my friends have been voting since 2000, and all of them, to a man, voted Gore-Kerry-Obama-Obama up til 2016. Their fathers voted twice for Clinton in the 90s.....most of them probably voted for Bush over Dukakis, but I know a few of them who voted for Mondale in 84 over Reagan.

I still think they're gonna vote Biden. TBH, I credit it to them having a brown immigrant good friend who does all their legal work for them. My best friend is this half Irish, half German guy who grew up in Buffalo, left at 23, and for the past 15 years has been living in San Antonio - and he's never had a passport. Canada 20 minutes from where he grew up, Mexico like an hour away from where he lives now. He can't handle food much spicier than Taco Bell. But he's firmly a Democrat (even now, in Texas) despite fitting the ideal demo for a Trump voter (hell, he even married a Texan woman), and it's because 1) he was exposed to my family growing up, imo and 2) his father was a Vietnam vet who forbade him from going into the Marines and was also a Teamster.

But I expect there's a lot of these people who, rationally, know they should vote for Biden, who'll look at these riots/burnings/etc and be a little bit concerned about it, and blame it on "liberals." This is a country where "liberal" was once called "the l word" by Bush Sr on the campaign trail, as if it was a curse word, and a lot of these guys are still living in the 80s.

A lot of them are dead by now. Or will be by november. Remember, as brutal as it sounds, COVID affects older people in a much worse way.

[Kaleredar]

I think you're spot on regarding the answer to @eschatological's concern and local discussion about BLM. All of this is Trump's America - every part of it. He fuels the fire of dissent and disorder to keep everyone angry and on edge. Biden will cool things down, find solutions to problems that cross political spectrums, just as he's done his entire life.

I think a large degree of that cooling effect will come from the fact that Biden simply isn't Trump.

Now to be clear, the work does not end there. But it's a huge step in the right direction, in that it's a step in the right direction, period.

[PACOX]

Thats odd. 3rd result for me

Let's be honest. Most voters are not doing that kind of candidate research so it doesn't matter how many policies he has on his website.

Y'all have to remember the electorate does not operate like people on debating politics on the internet.

[Captain N]

Let's be honest. Most voters are not doing that kind of candidate research so it doesn't matter how many policies he has on his website.

Y'all have to remember the electorate does not operate like people on debating politics on the internet.

To build a little further on this. The same thing was brought out in 2016 when folks banged on endlessly about how Clinton had no platform and no policies. Folks like Endus, Didactic, and Edge must have known those policies by heart with the number of times they linked to her policy page. The folks arguing against it, continued to claim she lacked one.

[Endus]

To build a little further on this. The same thing was brought out in 2016 when folks banged on endlessly about how Clinton had no platform and no policies. Folks like Endus, Didactic, and Edge must have known those policies by heart with the number of times they linked to her policy page. The folks arguing against it, continued to claim she lacked one.

"We've tried absolutely nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"

It's so obviously bad faith.

[Underverse]

Uh, no. Only crazy people think that, or people that really have no idea what Nazi Germany was. China is nothing like that, the US is a closer comparison to Nazi Germany, and that is even a hell of a stretch. Nazi Germany was the result of a populist, nationalistic, fascist regime coming to power on a groundswelling of popular support and dramatic cultural change. Its existence was marked by extreme levels of military aggression, social and economic upheaval, and ethnic cleansing. China checks possibly one of those boxes.

China is a older, mature government that has controlled its territory since the late 1940s. It has struggled to reinvent itself, but it is fundamentally conservative in nature, not interested in the radical changes that marked Nazi Germany. It has no interest in world conquest, only solidifying its place in the world. Ruling foriegn nations isn't in China's interest or philosophy, it never had the ambitions for global communism the Soviets had. Its ethnic cleansing campaign is driven from social and economic factors, not ideological ones. The Uyghurs tendency to cling to their traditional culture, values, and religion is a threat to state authority, and is thus repressed. The fact China is fundamentally an ethno-state of Han Chinese makes political repression of non-Han regional minorities a political non-issue. These aren't neighbors to the bulk of the population like the Jews were, these are distant people on the frontiers of China, people that the average resident of Beijing or Shanghai couldn't give less of a fuck about.

China is immoral, but not apocalyptic evil. All nations are immoral to some extent, China just has a different threshold of behaviors it limits itself too. China doesn't want to rule the world, it wants to dominate it more like how the US has done since the 1940s. It doesn't want to live in anyone shadow, it doesn't want its economy to depend on the whims of another government. Part of that is exerting dominance over its immediate neighbors, and part of it is expanding its economic emphasis. However, there is no real possibility of "us all speaking mandarin". China is a rival, not an existential threat. Stop trying to make it into a Call of Duty game.

Heading towards =/= is. There are a few key similarities that have solidified over the last 10 years: Xi's power grab resulting in party-backed dictatorship, systematic ethnic cleansing of minorities, rapid military and economic development, state control of production and populace. These developments place China a lot closer to Nazi Germany than the US is. Military aggression hasn't come yet because they aren't strong enough to unilaterally bully their US-backed neighbors yet. Otherwise we might be there by now given how many claims China has to territory that isn't actually theirs, which could have been done with the intent to generate a cassus belli. Modern China may not have risen in the same way, but the state functions similarly and that's the more important parallel.

[Elegiac]

To build a little further on this. The same thing was brought out in 2016 when folks banged on endlessly about how Clinton had no platform and no policies. Folks like Endus, Didactic, and Edge must have known those policies by heart with the number of times they linked to her policy page. The folks arguing against it, continued to claim she lacked one.

I knew her policies because I actually flirted with voting for Bernie in 2016 but ended up deciding on Clinton at the caucus.