2020 US Elections | Biden certified as President | Dems control Congress

Status
Not open for further replies.
ErranMorad said:
Loved that Gramps was a total dick to the Fox hosts. Kept dissing the network too.

Still not many details. Skirted around them like a true politician with vague answers.
As you'd expect his hearing is not the best at his age. Kept asking them to repeat.
Click to expand...
I noticed that too and I was asking myself why he didn’t answer directly. A lot of these were reasonable questions too for Fox standards.
 
ErranMorad said:
No other Republican has a semblance of a chance against Trump. May be if he ran as an independent he can take some of the votes of him and help the country.
Click to expand...
I think it's the best news the trump campaign could have got... This means they get the whole primary cycle to run rallies (whip up hate) and he will simply use the platform to attack the Dems...
Crazy Bernie... Creepy Joe... Pocahontas ... Etc oh actually has he given pet names to beto Kamala and the buttguy yet?
Trump is going to make this far nastier than it was last time... His Twitter commentary of any republican debates should be fun though... I predict a LOT of capital letters with a fair few !!! Thrown in as well
 
Loved it when Bernie turned it back on the host and said that he was probably richer than him. Fox presenters love to portray themselves as being the champion of the working and middle class.
 
ErranMorad said:
Loved that Gramps was a total dick to the Fox hosts. Kept dissing the network too.

Still not many details. Skirted around them like a true politician with vague answers.
As you'd expect his hearing is not the best at his age. Kept asking them to repeat.
Click to expand...

The best part about Sanders going on Fox is him going after votes of a viewership who are overwhelmingly pro-Trump. If he even skims 5% of them he will win the Presidency. Ultimately, he knows that just the vocal base aren’t enough to win and that most votes reside near the middle of the spectrum, which means reaching out to Republicans.
 
iKnowNothing said:
Surprising that this hasn't been mentioned here:
Click to expand...

He’s a fairly moderate Republican which means that even if he ran as an independent in the Gen, he would likely siphon votes from someone like Biden just as much (if not more) than he would from Trump. The GOP base will remain cultishly hypnotized in the MAGA camp because they have an entire information apparatus in Fox and Talk Radio keeping them there, so Weld wouldn’t do much to help in this regard.
 
I have a feeling there are a lot of Republicans who are sick of Trump. I wouldn’t count out the former governor so soon.
 
When asked about his support for Ilhan Omar, Bernie said being anti-a right wing Israeli government is not being anti-semitic.
Every Presidential year, the candidates go to kiss the ring at AIPAC.
Bernie a Jew is not their favourite cup of tea.
Yet he is the only one who can actually restart the peace process there.
Also holding S. Arabia accountable for spreading their perverted version of Islam and spreading terrorism.
If we defuse the hatred in the middle east, the rest of the world will be a safer place.

The American President and government's job is to keep the American people safe, not to kow tow to these states.

They need us far more than we do them.

It will take a real president to get things sorted.
Bernie is that man.
 
Raoul said:
The best part about Sanders going on Fox is him going after votes of a viewership who are overwhelmingly pro-Trump. If he even skims 5% of them he will win the Presidency. Ultimately, he knows that just the vocal base aren’t enough to win and that most votes reside near the middle of the spectrum, which means reaching out to Republicans.
Click to expand...

Where is your evidence that most of the 95 million undecideds and Did Not Votes in 2016 occupy the extremely narrow ideological strip in between the establishment Dem and Rep policies?

I feel like this comments makes the same error Fox probably made when pre-selecting their audience. When you start pigeon-holing the diversity and complexity of people's beliefs into 3 categories of 'liberal, moderate, conservative' on a single linear spectrum it completely distorts what people actually believe and reinforces this callow view of the electorate. A constant focus on trying to ram everyone's collective beliefs into a single data point on a line because it makes easy sound bites is a massive part of the problem.

I've never met a single person whose beliefs all reside "near the middle of the spectrum" on every issue. Most "moderates" are people who support progressive stances on some issues and conservative stances on other issues NOT that they hold milquetoast 'inbetween Democrat and Republican party mainstream views'. This is an important distinction that I think the mainstream media constantly gets wrong.

This is why Fox probably miscalculated that audience. A self-identified moderate is probably not someone who holds the mythical "average/median view" on most issues. Its more like people that support universal health/medicare for all but also oppose gun control. This is something the polling addiction obfuscates. People end up with this false impression that there is this massive "middle" that wants some narrow policy in-between Democrat and Republican platforms when in fact almost no individual wants that.

What most people actually want in America is more like a mix of universal healthcare but no strict European gun control. They want free education at public universities but they also want strong immigration control so illegal immigrants are not taking advantage of the social welfare system. Just on gun control I think most of the Europeans/Oceanics on here would be shocked how few minorities I know that support any form of strict European gun control. And the argument is always a variation of "do you see how poorly the police treat the black community? and you want use to give up our guns to protect our homes while the racist policy takes 10 minutes longer to respond to respond to 911 calls in the ghetto than in white neighborhoods?". That's why gun control doesn't pass in America - because many minority men feel like they need guns in the home to protect themselves because they can't trust the racists to give up theirs.

The only entities that actually want some "in-between Dem and Rep policy compromise" are the biggest corporations and richest individuals who can then insert themselves and their model legislation into the compromise process to benefit themselves.

This is what Sanders actually understands - that Americans want a mix of progressive (universal healthcare, free education, protection from corporate greed) and conservative policies (2nd Amend rights, immigration control, tone down identity politics) NOT that they want a compromise middle of the road policy on every issue.
 
Last edited:
This is an important distinction because if one mistakenly believes all these tens of millions of people actually reside in this mythical land of a polling 'median voter' then we end up with candidates like Kerry, Clinton and Biden who flip flop to whatever they perceive is popular at the moment then get confused when they lose because they were so good at "reading the polling".

Bernie, AOC and the new progressive movement understands this. Maybe the establishment Dems understand it too on some level but they can't break their corporate alliances.
 
It was discussed previously. There are significantly more independent voters than there are in any one of either extreme on either side. People who don’t vote are obviously not a part of this construct since they don’t vote. If a given politician like Sanders compels them to actually turn out and vote then that’s a bonus, but the fact that he is going on Fox suggests he is going for all voters and not just a small fraction in the Dem base.
 
Raoul said:
The best part about Sanders going on Fox is him going after votes of a viewership who are overwhelmingly pro-Trump. If he even skims 5% of them he will win the Presidency. Ultimately, he knows that just the vocal base aren’t enough to win and that most votes reside near the middle of the spectrum, which means reaching out to Republicans.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think it's good for the Dems to go to Fox. They have a large viewership and those folks need to listen to the other sides ideas too. Even a small percentage is going to help. Basically the contest is a few states - Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada & Florida. The rest of the states should fall as expected.
 
Last edited:
sun_tzu said:
I think it's the best news the trump campaign could have got... This means they get the whole primary cycle to run rallies (whip up hate) and he will simply use the platform to attack the Dems...
Crazy Bernie... Creepy Joe... Pocahontas ... Etc oh actually has he given pet names to beto Kamala and the buttguy yet?
Trump is going to make this far nastier than it was last time... His Twitter commentary of any republican debates should be fun though... I predict a LOT of capital letters with a fair few !!! Thrown in as well
Click to expand...

I actually wouldn't be surprised if it's Trump and the RNC who have propped up this guy. This will help the news cycle and give Trump more exposure to spout his bullshit.
 
Raoul said:
It was discussed previously. There are significantly more independent voters than there are in any one of either extreme on either side. People who don’t vote are obviously not a part of this construct since they don’t vote. If a given politician like Sanders compels them to actually turn out and vote then that’s a bonus, but the fact that he is going on Fox suggests he is going for all voters and not just a small fraction in the Dem base.
Click to expand...

Its like you completely missed the point of my post.

You keep reducing everything to vague and meaningless labels. Now its "independent voters". Maybe try to understand what that actually means. It means people are not the statistically median. People are actually a mix of progressive (support medicare for all as Bernie audience on Fox illustrates) AND oppose establishment gun control (like why minority communities don't support gun control in the percentages Europeans expect us to).

And you also seem to misunderstand the Did Not Vote selections. There is not some stark contrast between people that vote in every single election and others that never, ever vote in any election.

There is a much looser and larger group of people that vote in some elections but don't vote in others. Ignoring people that did not vote in the last election is a bigger problem than the people that don't/can't vote in every single election.

This is why voter turnout in the US sucks compared to every other advanced country. Because the snobs in both parties keep trying to ignore everyone they perceive as not enthusiastic about voting for them instead of trying to create a platform that can actually appeal to people and increase voter turnout (as AOC proved is possible).

Oh and I think you got Bernie's motivations completely wrong. He is not trying to go after this mythic statistical median. He is taking the fight directly to the enemy territory because he knows he has a compelling vision which I quoted earlier.

Bernie is trying to create a compelling vision that makes sense for working class Americans. In other words he is trying to appeal to the bottom 80% as the bottom 80% not trying to parse people into these fictional polling labels that the establishment losing strategies have done since 2000.
 
Last edited:
Raoul said:
It was discussed previously. There are significantly more independent voters than there are in any one of either extreme on either side. People who don’t vote are obviously not a part of this construct since they don’t vote. If a given politician like Sanders compels them to actually turn out and vote then that’s a bonus, but the fact that he is going on Fox suggests he is going for all voters and not just a small fraction in the Dem base.
Click to expand...

Bernie is going after the neglected Blue Collar voters.
These were reliable Democratic voters.
he knows by talking about wages, health care and education he can get them back.

Trump's lies only go so far.
 
ErranMorad said:
I actually wouldn't be surprised if it's Trump and the RNC who have propped up this guy. This will help the news cycle and give Trump more exposure to spout his bullshit.
Click to expand...

That went through my mind as well. The GOP strategy to get Trump re-elected is quite clearly to make the election a referendum between capitalism and socialism, so promoting Sanders as the viable nominee would seem perfectly logical in that regard. They are also dispatching the various GOP hacks who are on retainer at Fox to immediately shoot down the things Sanders said during his town hall, to make sure the Fox viewership don’t actually switch allegiances. Ultimately, Sanders made a lot of good points so whatever Fox are cooking up is likely to backfire against them and the Trump reeection.
 
Red Dreams said:
Bernie is going after the neglected Blue Collar voters.
These were reliable Democratic voters.
he knows by talking about wages, health care and education he can get them back.

Trump's lies only go so far.
Click to expand...

I actually think he’s going after everyone who will listen. There are plenty of GOP voters who have healthcare concerns (among other things), so taking a couple of percentage points from the Fox audience would be significant.
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
Its like you completely missed the point of my post.

You keep reducing everything to vague and meaningless labels. Now its "independent voters". Maybe try to understand what that actually means. It means people are not the statistically median. People are actually a mix of progressive (support medicare for all as Bernie audience on Fox illustrates) AND oppose establishment gun control (like why minority communities don't support gun control in the percentages Europeans expect us to).

And you also seem to misunderstand the Did Not Vote selections. There is not some stark contrast between people that vote in every single election and others that never, ever vote in any election.

There is a much looser and larger group of people that vote in some elections but don't vote in others. Ignoring people that did not vote in the last election is a bigger problem than the people that don't/can't vote in every single election.

This is why voter turnout in the US sucks compared to every other advanced country. Because the snobs in both parties keep trying to ignore everyone they perceive as not enthusiastic about voting for them instead of trying to create a platform that can actually appeal to people and increase voter turnout (as AOC proved is possible).

Oh and I think you got Bernie's motivations completely wrong. He is not trying to go after this mythic statistical median. He is taking the fight directly to the enemy territory because he knows he has a compelling vision which I quoted earlier.

Bernie is trying to create a compelling vision that makes sense for working class Americans. In other words he is trying to appeal to the bottom 80% as the bottom 80% not trying to parse people into these fictional polling labels that the establishment losing strategies have done since 2000.
Click to expand...

very true.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.