Not particularly, but at least he isn't being inflicted on the rest of the country
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As an aside, I've always found it fascinating how US mens' shirt collars remain resolutely unaffected by fashion as in the rest of the world (or at least those worn by 'serious' men)Comment
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I dunno if that's an aside. It's at least as relevant as de Blasio's campaign was.Comment
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A good article on just how many moderate independent centrists there are in the US electorate.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...dle-is-a-myth/Comment
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That article is mad. They are trying to report things as 'all over the map' when they are not really. They could just take the mean value for each plot and report it. That would be the position likely to gather the most swing voters. Every single plot has more dots on the 'more egalitarian' side than the 'more market oriented' side. Most have a bit more pro-immigration than anti-immigration (difficult to tell, the mean position would have to be calculated).
Elections aren't about winning over *all* of the swing voters, just *more* than your opponent. Another exercise would be to draw a circle of influence/catchment around the centre of each candidates position, and count the number of dots in each one. As I have done below. Trump 2016 would have been a bit more towards the egalitarian/market centre than I have drawn him below, but the number of voters are roughly the same. The DNC establishment candidates are/were chasing the unicorns amongst the 2016 and 2020 swing voters. That's probably where a lot of voters were in 1992, just after the wall fell and people were going all orgasmic about the free market liberating the world. The world has moved on. The DNC has not.
I note that 538 is owned by the Disney Corporation.
The plot also shows that if you make the campaign all about more egalitarianism and sideline immigration as an issue, then you can clean up. Totally. One way of doing this would be by droning on about income inequality, millionaires and billionaires every time you are asked a question.Last edited by anton pulisov; 26-09-2019, 16:28.Comment
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I think you're misreading the article. As I commented before The Purge, Independent is not really a meaningful term. Most Independent voters are already aligned, and aren't going to be won over during a campaign. Bernie Sanders is nominally an Independent, as are many on the left who don't want to feel bound by a centrist Democratic Party. But they didn't vote for Trump in 2016, and won't vote for Trump in 2020. Equally, a lot of people on the right think of themselves as freethinking independents - particularly people with a Libertarian tendency. There are loads of right wing independents who didn't vote for HRC and won't vote for Warren. The idea that the Independents are winnable at all is flawed.
Also, even "Moderate" isn't useful as a self-identifier. Almost everyone thinks their positions are pretty moderate and that it's other people who're extreme. Yet many moderates are also unwinnable.
The point of the article is that there's really very little overlap between "Moderates", "Independents" and actual "Undecideds" (who may not have a political outlook at all, perhaps because they're stupid or apathetic).Comment
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The scatter plots for all three groups seem to show a similar pattern, with slightly higher density in the bottom left. So there appears to be overlap in terms of how the political views of the three groups are distributed.
What you'd need to do is get the average score using all the datapoints on all three, with some kind of box plot style interval. Just plotting a load of points without reporting any simple stats is a bit weird.Comment
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Get well soon, Bernie.Comment
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Yes. Get well soon, Bernie. I don't think you're the right person to be candidate, but you're a better person than (at least) 95% of the Senators in my lifetime.
Meanwhile, I might pop downtown to see the Lizzy Warren Show tomorrow night. I've never gone along to one of these things, and I'd be interested to see what it's like. If I do go, I won't be waiting in the selfie line.Comment
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I don't know where else to put this, but good god:
Maddow’s typical fan has been branded (by Kat Stoeffel in The New York Times) as the “MSNBC Mom,” a woman who feels that the election has radicalized her; even if she has not moved to the left politically, her liberal sympathies and news consumption have swelled into a suddenly central part of her identity. (The network has monetized this lightly condescending label with a set of MSNBC Mom tote bags and latte mugs.) Molly Jong-Fast, a former novelist who once described her pre-Trump self as “completely selfish and disinterested in politics” and who is now a liberal Twitter influencer and columnist for the Never Trump site The Bulwark, told me that Maddow “made wonkiness cool.”
Recently, I went to dinner at the home of Rebecca Kee, a preschool principal in San Francisco who turned to Maddow in her depression and confusion over the 2016 election. I brought a bottle of rosé, and she poured it into glasses decorated with charms that featured Russia-investigation figures on one side and characters from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” on the other. I sipped from the Hope Hicks/Beverly Crusher glass, and we watched Maddow’s show over veggie enchiladas. “I think of her as a news doula: You know the news is going to be painful no matter what, so we might as well have someone who helps us survive it,” Kee told me. Last year, Kee had a Maddow-themed birthday party, at which her friends and her two young sons put on big black glasses and slicked their hair to the side. Also in attendance was a life-size cardboard cutout of Maddow, which is now in storage so as not to startle guests.
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After Rebecca Kee bought her Maddow cardboard cutout, she got a Robert Mueller one, too. For a time she would sit him in her front window, posing him near speech bubbles that she wrote herself. But after the real Mueller filed his report and failed to step into the role she had imagined for him, she tucked him away in the closet with Maddow. Now her car is decorated with Elizabeth Warren bumper stickers.Comment
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OofComment
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Whatever your pathological behaviour, there are a group of people in the US prepared to sell you stuff and prey on you.Comment
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It is The American WayComment
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Presume this is the end for Bernie's campaign, as his only way to survive the age question was to be completely indefatigable; he'll not shake this off as it's an easy talking point for the rest of the campaign. The natural home for his supporters should by Warren - would he endorse her?Comment
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Does that NYT article mention the male cult of personality around male podcast hosts?Comment
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Like that Rogan fucker?Comment
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No, though I am virtually certain that Hess has taken that on in her "Internetting" seriesComment
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There are a couple of "comedians" with podcasts with big followings.Comment
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She didn't endorse him in 2016. Was probably gunning for a cabinet position in a HRC administration.Originally posted by NHH View PostComment
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My flatmate has a mad pash for Bill Burr. Seems like a Professional Boston contrarian wee nyaff to me, but there you go.Originally posted by Heliotrope View PostComment
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Burr is just a really good comic with a podcast, he’s not really a guy with the captive following of Rogan.
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Are we talking about the Attorney General here?Comment
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Having only vaguely seen Rachel Maddow's name mentioned before, I clicked that link Inca posted thinking she was one of the candidates, perhaps. I now gather she's a television personality, but apart from that I'm not an awful lot wiser. There is a hell of a lot of description of what she looks like, how she dresses and entirely extraneous details about meeting fans. I glazed over and started skimming before I was a third of the way down. No wonder we have a thread for NYT articles.Comment
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