Congressional staff say the mood inside the Capitol is tense, stifling and bewildering as members brush off their constituents’ outrage.

  • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Let’s see how the strategy of ignoring calls from your base a year before a contested election that your opponent polls higher in key states works out for them. It feels like the DNC is trying to lose in 2024 right now.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      It feels like the DNC is trying to lose in 2024 right now.

      And this is new, how? It feels like they’re trying to throw every election. They never even bother to call out Republicans on their shenanigans and they spend a lot of time being like “We know the fascists passed these very fascist laws, but everything falls apart if we don’t take the obviously fascist laws they passed with the seriousness they deserve by enforcing those fascist laws. We have to play by these rules they’ve set that benefit them and harm us, because if we did that, it would be unfair and undemocratic.” (Conveniently ignores Republicans being unfair and undemocratic.)

        • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Ehh. It’s more like… what other choice do you have? Don’t gotta outrun the bear…just the GOP.

          This is why we need ranked choice voting.
          Anyone who’s even brushed the surface of game theory knows fptp is the easiest to manipulate and a race to the bottom.

          • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Every place that has winner take all and every simulation of winner take all always boils down to a two party system.

      • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Controlled opposition!
        The democrats indeed find the Republicans very useful for moderating Democrat policies without taking the blame.

    • constate368@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Lose to who? The republicans?

      Sweetie, we’ve already established the gridlock of ‘lesser evil.’ All democrats have to do to win is be slightly less worse than the republicans, which is incredibly easy.

      • zout@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Which works every time, unless it doesn’t work.Like when Hillary Clinton lost against Donald Trump.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Except that right now Trump polls higher than Biden nearly across the board in the battleground states. You’d like to think it should be an easy victory against someone with multiple ongoing criminal court cases, but Biden is just that bad of a candidate.

          • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3, 2023. When all states are joined together, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points for all registered voters and plus or minus 2 percentage points for the likely electorate.

            It wasn’t just landlines because they know that’s bad polling.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              How many younger people answer unknown calls on their phone? I’m 46 and I don’t do that. And if I got a voicemail saying they wanted me to take a poll and to call them back, I would assume it was a scam.

              • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Well, you don’t have to guess because that’s part of the statistics as well. 40% of the people polled were 44 and under. Also, they weighted the poll to help account for age. It’s not like professional pollsters and statisticians don’t know how to account for these sorts of things.

                https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/07/us/elections/times-siena-battlegrounds-registered-voters.html

                I know it’s scary that if the election were held today, Trump would have a very real chance at winning, but that’s the reality we live in. And right now, it is because Biden is such a weak candidate. A lot can change in 1 year. I hope that when it comes down to it, people will do the right thing and not vote for the insurrectionist. However, we have no reason to believe they will.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  40% of the people polled were 44 and under.

                  That doesn’t mean it represents what those people think, it means that they chose a group out of the 40% of people under that age who would answer their phones when an unknown caller calls them to poll them.

                  Maybe the poll is accurate, but I am very dubious of any telephone poll’s accuracy at this point because so many people simply will not respond to an unknown caller.

                  Focus group polling might be more accurate because you can pick the demographics ahead of time, but I don’t know.

                  • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Be skeptical, that’s okay. Polling is never exact. It is good at giving you trends, and right now, the trends are not good. As someone from Wisconsin, I’ve seen firsthand that running a weak candidate and assuming they will do well can cost you the election. Ron Johnson has literally spent a July 4th in Moscow, he had fake electorates in hands ready to over turn the election. Mandela Barnes initially polled well against him, but his numbers degraded because he ran such a weak campaign. Barnes lost that election, yet we voted for the democratic governor. Barnes was such a weak candidate that enough people voted a split ticket to re-elect Johnson.

                    The point of the story is don’t just stick your head in the sand and make up excuses about polls.

                    Edit: Also 40% is 1465, which is a good sample size.

    • timicin@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Let’s see how the strategy of ignoring calls from your base a year before a contested election that your opponent polls higher in key states works out for them. It feels like the DNC is trying to lose in 2024 right now.

      the “vote for the lesser evil” crowd are an overwhelming majority and, they not only don’t care that dems don’t deserve your vote; but will use that overwhelming majority voice to blame you for enabling trump.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Okay, but the fact is there are only two viable choices and every vote that isn’t for Biden supports and enables Trump. That is true despite Biden being terrible. And he’s nowhere near as terrible as Trump. Read about Project 2025. People need to know about it. That is what Trump wants.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

        It is vital that be stopped. And that means voting for Biden.

        • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          This election there actually could be 3 viable candidates. Both major parties have such awful candidates that RFK Jr is polling the highest a 3rd party candidate has in a very long time. They show Biden and Trump both in the 30s percentile wise and RFK Jr at 24%. The “protest vote” seems to get stronger and stronger.

      • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        I think the crowd of apathetic voters is much larger than the “lesser evil” crowd. But the lesser evil crowd sends their hate towards third party voters rather than the apathetic.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The cold, hard truth is that with a winner take all system, it will always be a lesser of two evils situation. Just like they want it to be.