Who gives a shit?

Indeed. It articulated a lot of what I’ve seen since I graduated high school about 20 years ago, and it helps explain the hypnotic allure of toxic shitheads like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. It also helped me understand a little more about Trumpism and why it’s so weirdly intoxicating to people like my father in law and uncles, who really are just sad, old, ugly, many-times-divorced white men with limited education and very little to offer to the rest of society. They’re fucking angry, and it was hard to figure out what they were so mad about until I started reading stuff like this. They’re completely unmoored and irrelevant, and they’re lashing out in what’s really a cry for help, even if it’s too deep within their subconscious to be actionable.

Anyone curious about this trend should read this:

Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.

Seems we did.

Touched a nerve, did we?

I’m sure you think you sound like you have integrity, but it sounds like privilege to me.

But that’s why some people can’t pick, because the Democratic party has become significantly more “conservative” since 2012.

My god your penchant for historical revisionism is insufferable:

In an unexpected move Thursday night [August 5, 2010], Senate Democrats won approval of a $600 million bill that includes money for 1,500 new border personnel, a pair of unmanned drones and military-style bases along the border. The bill by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), which fulfills a request from President Barack Obama, heads to the House for a final vote as early as next week.

There was no single provision of the 1996 law [signed by Clinton] that was as dramatic as the 1986 “amnesty” law, signed by President Reagan, which is why he gets credit for the last major immigration reform. But the ‘96 law essentially invented immigration enforcement as we know it today — where deportation is a constant and plausible threat to millions of immigrants. It was a bundle of provisions with a single goal: to increase penalties on immigrants who had violated US law in some way (whether they were unauthorized immigrants who’d violated immigration law or legal immigrants who’d committed other crimes).

Also: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/19/694804917/democrats-used-to-talk-about-criminal-immigrants-so-what-changed-the-party

Also: https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/both-white-and-nonwhite-democrats-are-moving-left/

Also: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-democrats-have-shifted-left-over-the-last-30-years/

Also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/28/democratic-party-has-moved-left-so-has-us-this-explains-how-why/

Coming from a state (NC) where Republicans regularly use asinine amendments any time they need to fluff a presidential candidate…

Yes it is. Suck on it, dickbag.

Don’t give that crooked fuck undue credit. He didn’t suddenly grow a moral compass:

“What I am going to be doing is supporting legislative candidates, supporting judicial candidates and supporting Trump,” Tillis continued. “I won’t be campaigning for Robinson, and how I vote is less relevant than what I am focused on. Trump needing to win, our legislatures needing to be strong, making it clear that North Carolina got turned around in 2011 because Republicans took control, and we need to maintain control of North Carolina once more.”

Part of me keeps hoping that there’s some kind of systemic right-wing bias of modern polling methodologies, and that as time goes on we can count on the gap between polling and election results to get larger in the leftward direction. Gods what I wouldn’t give for a systematic, nationwide trouncing of the GOP like the one Dems got from them in 2010. Instead it seems like we keep getting hope dangled in front of our faces and results are always middling, at best, with the rare exception of a Georgia runoff or an Alabama one-off.

I sure hope you’re right that Cruz is in trouble. For all our sakes.

What a bullshit, clickbait headline. The actual story is at the end:

Baris claimed that conservative polls showed that Trump was tied or had a “believable” edge against Harris.

“And when you look at the track records of the pollsters in those two courts, right in those two camps, really, you know the ones who are showing the tighter race with Trump with an advantage, have better track records,” he insisted.

He’s not saying her numbers are “unbelievable” as in, “holy shit that’s awesome!” He’s saying they’re literally unbelievable, as in, “I don’t believe that’s real.”

Current polling data has Cruz trailing by 1 point

You’re citing the only poll where Cruz is behind, so if we’re talking about polling more broadly that’s very much not true. His lead has been fairly consistent in the +3 to +5 range for months. Scott’s lead is the same or bigger, again with one polling exception.

What does any of that have to do with the comment you replied to or the article?

For every Trump supporter you can find that lives in the unpopulated country in a trailer on a swamp, there are a dozen upper class spoiled brats for whom Trumpism has become core to their identity:

Trump voters’ median income exceeded the overall statewide median in all 23 states, sometimes narrowly (as in New Hampshire or Missouri) but sometimes substantially. In Florida, for instance, the median household income for Trump voters was about $70,000, compared with $48,000 for the state as a whole. The differences are usually larger in states with substantial non-white populations, as black and Hispanic voters are overwhelmingly Democratic and tend to have lower incomes. In South Carolina, for example, the median Trump supporter had a household income of $72,000, while the median for Clinton supporters was $39,000. (from 2016)

Throwing a little bit of anecdote behind that data, the most rabid Trump supporters in my family like to complain about “government teat” liberals while lounging on their 20+ foot boats which they launched from private docks beside their $1+ million lakeside or shoreside homes. That includes my father in law, 1 of my father’s cousins, 4 of my uncles, and the husband of my own cousin. Not even exaggerating that they all either live on the waterfront or have a waterfront vacation home, and they all have huge boats. Three of my wife’s uncles who are feverish Trumpers inherited a textile fortune from daddy and have never had to work a day of hard labor in their lives. The most rabid Trump supporter in my wife’s extended network who routinely bitches and moans about how offended she is at the idea of “white privilege”, lives on a 154 acre estate and inside a 7,550 square foot home that overlooks a private lake. She’s as die-hard a Trump supporter as they come.

I wish I were joking.

the subject is mute.

*moot

I directly answered your question, and you seem to have ignored what I said. Plus you really should reexamine your assumptions about the importance of Gaza, the “ease” of withdrawing support, how much Democrats have moved rightward, and how many centrist Republicans vote for Democrats.

Your level of frustration with the process is inversely proportional to your awareness of these trends, of which Democratic leaders are likely well aware. Moreover, you seem to be valuing the strongly-held opinions of voters in non-swing states (what you’re calling “deep blue states” or “areas that effectively don’t matter”) more highly than the maybe-less-strongly held opinions of voters in swing states. If 5% of Democratic voters in California want sushi, and 5% of Democratic voters in Pennsylvania want steak, I’m picking steak and telling the California voters to take a hike. Their opinion doesn’t even register on my radar thanks to the electoral consequences of pissing off the Pennsylvanians who wanted steak.

No. If 5% of my voting base sits out over a single issue, I’m going to lose my interest in trying to triangulate their support and move in another direction to identify a more persuadable bloc of voters. That goes more if the abandonment is repetitive, and if the issues constantly change, or if the issue is something I can’t bend on for electoral reasons.

If one bloc of voters is easier to please than another, then I’m moving in their direction, even if it’s rightward. Unfortunately it’s winner-take-all, and you’re either in power or you’re not. There are no half-wins.

So, first, the way you copy+paste that response is difficult to follow, counterintuitive, and unnecessary.

Second, yes the KPD were often in violent conflict with the centrist parties. Violence had been reciprocal, unfortunately. And I’m not sure why Marx (a centrist) aligning with the DNVP years before undermines the broader point that it wasn’t Marx who elevated Hitler to the chancellorship. Sometimes US Democrats have negotiated with Republicans, but that doesn’t mean they’re responsible for everything Republicans have done or will do.

In this case, Thälmann and the BVP share the blame for not seeing Hitler and the conservatives as a bigger, more existential threat. Whatever threat Thälmann perceived from the SPD, BVP, and Marx’s former allies (the DNVP), they obviously dwarfed in comparison to the threat of the Nazis. Not saying their fears were unjustified, mind you, only that they obviously chose wrong by not looking at the bigger picture. Maybe they thought they were doing the right thing in holding true to their principles and not joining forces with the SPD and BVP, but it’s obvious now that they should have taken strategic influence more seriously, for all of their sakes.

Edit: Looks like the .ml brigade showed up in force today.

The mistake Ernst Thälmann made was not throwing his support behind checks notes Paul von Hindenburg, the man who ordered the police massacre of the Spartacus League?

Um…no? Von Hindenburg was the conservative. They’d have thrown their support behind the centrist, Wilhelm Marx, who lost by about 3%, thanks (in part) to the 6.3% Thälmann took. The rest of the blame lay with the BVP when they protested against the Social Democrats by siding with von Hindenburg.

Who elevated Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship in 1933?

Von Hindenburg, with the help of the governing coalition formed by the Nazis and DNVP, all of whom were conservative.

What point are you trying to make?