2024 ELECTION THREAD

Democrats since JFK can't win with leftist candidates. The only Presidents since LBJ that are democrats have been Jimmy Carter (moderate from Georgia), Bill Clinton (moderate from Arkansas), Obama (somewhat moderate Senator from Illinois but won most likely because the US was in massive economic meltdown) and Biden (moderate from DE, born in PA).

Kamala Harris was an Attorney General who prosecuted drug abusers and all types of criminals. And while she has been considered leftist in the Senate (some of which is based on not supporting any of Trump's judge nominees) my guess is she will steer towards the middle at the convention and at the debates.

As a VP she has not been in charge of the border as many right wing posters have made up (she was asked to look into 3 Latin American countries where there was a huge rise in Asylum seekers as a result of the state of affairs in those countries). It is a campaign tactic that will fail because:
1) Trump killed the bipartisan immigration bill that would have increased border patrol among other things,
2) Kamala has come out in support of that bill and would try to get it passed as President,
3) The current immigration rate at the border in the last 5 months is now at Trump presidency levels before Covid
4) Immigrants do not increase the crime rate in the US (as Trump has been lying about) - simply because if they are caught committing a crime they will be deported
5) Immigration does help to reduce inflation because food in the fields actually gets picked in the US (similarly for construction and landscaping)
6) Countries are not releasing prisoners who are immigrating to the US (as Trump has repeatedly lied about)
7) Many Hispanic US citizens that feel the prejudice being unleashed by Trump, will either not vote or vote for Kamala. This is basically why Trump lost Arizona and Nevada in 2020

The other things not really discussed much are all of Trump's lies. About immigrants being rapists (this one is ironic since Trump twice lost cases in court where he was trying to deny he had sexually assault E. Jean Carroll) and drug dealers (the vast majority of drug dealers aren't even immigrants and aren't crossing the border illegally). Politically the lie that might cost him the most is the lie about Kamala becoming Black only recently (she went to Howard University a basically all Black college and she lived there in a Black sorority). Already Black support for Trump has dropped (Polls on 7/23 had Kamala up by 23% with Black voters and 4 days ago she was up by 53% and my guess is it will continue to increase).

The one thing that will alter the way people in the middle think about Kamala is how close to the middle she comes out. Her stance on guns is likely not to hurt her because 90%+ of Americans want there to be background checks on all gun purchases and something like 60% want assault rifles banned again (when they were previously banned for 10 years the number of people killed in mass murders dropped). Aside from immigration I am guessing she will try to take positions that appeal to working class Americans. Like backing away from banning fracking which she has already done (this may be how she wins PA). And allowing tips to be not taxable (LOL)

Your eyes have deceived you, your memories are wrong.

Republicans have grown increasingly comfortable simply
denying inconvenient facts or constructing false histories to avoid
having to deal with being associated with unpopular policies and events.

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
It was their final most essential command." - George Orwell, "1984"

You think Trump's lying isn't discussed much?

being "fit for office" is a complete nonsensical term. we have a senile man doing genocide and trying to start wars with Russia and China in office right now. Trump will be fine, he already did it once. we are at the stage of the Caligula makes his horse Consul part of the Empire. its fine.

I don't think I have ever seen a right wing poster talk about Trump lying and how damaging it is to have a dishonest person be President. I guess I could be wrong about that.

Left wing posters (like myself) do talk about the lies. But it is never a topic of conversation with everyone (again I could be wrong about this but I think it is mostly true)

I didn't realize that your comment was specific to right wing posters on this forum.

Trump's enthusiasm for lying has been discussed ad nauseum in the MSM, but I agree it isn't much of a concern for people like bahbah.

Concern? More like an example to follow.

It could take 10+ years and it might be very hard to say who it will be right now. W Bush was re-elected in 04 with what will likely by a 40 year minimum high water mark for republicans. After the Bush Kerry election people were legit talking about how democrats may have to completely reinvent themselves going forward. Instead Bush collapsed by 06 with mounting examples of incompetence (Iraq, both decision and execution + Katrina).

It took them a decade to move beyond Bush and it would have been quite hard to see in 08 how important the McCain Arab lady clip is. Both in Republicans embracing nonsense, racially motivated conspiracies and the expulsion of people like McCain who's instincts were that you can't win elections or base a party identity on that stuff.

The typical rightwinger denies the idea that democrat candidates lie less (or that their lies are less dangerous), they consider all of them serial liars like trump or worse, and i can see why.

I think a lot of independents think the same as well, all politicians lies all the times, presidential candidates more than the others, of all stripes.

that Trump lies in a more grotesque matter is actually refreshing, it's harder to think he has nefarious intention in his lying because he does it when he has nothing to gain from it, for stupid topics a lot of the times.

It's far more dangerous to have someone perceived as "serious" that will lie strategically in important moments of the country history, because he could be able to convince enough people when he does so.

The "weapon of mass destruction" lie alone is a lot worse than all trump lies combined for example, speaking about rightwing lies. Like not even close. That lie caused trillions of wasted money, tens of thousands of american deaths and so on.

The "mostly peaceful" lie about BLM terrorist urban guerrilla is a lot worse than trump lies, especially when it came from people who usually don't lie too much. And so on.

Ofc people on the left are going to disagree on how dangerous those lies were /are and so on. Doesn't matter, if what Rick wants to understand is how people think on the right, the above is it.

Sure it took them a decade from 2008 to move beyond Bush, which is why they gained the house back in 2010 (and kept it in 12, 14 and 16), and flipped 6 senate seats, and 6 state governors.

I honestly felt like Biden lied more than occasionally.

Obama told a big untruth in his campaign. You guys might write it off, but he was for giving college enrollment funds to people who completed community service. I thought that was awesome, and then it never happened.

"They all lie" is often said, and that seems to be true. Trump may lie more flagrantly, but does it really even matter at that point? Getting lied to hurts. TBH, I don't know why this is, but I'd rather engage with a habitual liar than someone who sneaks a huge one in underneath what otherwise seems like spotless character. I hate that.

Politics is always harder to predict than people imagine. In 2006, I would not have predicted Obama's assent to the top of the Democratic party. In 2014, I would not have predicted Trump's assent to the top of the GOP.

I'm not saying I predicted it, but there were comments in real time after Obama's 04 convention speech that were singling him out as a future. He was pretty conventional in the Kennedy/Clinton mold of good latter half of the 20th century politician. Trump not so much.

Wait wait, not being able to fulfill campaign promises isn't the same as lying. Especially when campaign promises by presidential candidates rely on powers outside those of POTUS.

He had to compromise with congress on that to pass Obamacare. He managed to fund community colleges a bit anyway.

Calling him a liar for this would be like calling Trump a liar because he wasn't able to complete the construction of the wall with Mexico. He tried and did what he could, same as Obama on college.

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

Lies are a different thing, like those from Biden

https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/c...

Examples

The media are just as much to blame for Biden’s habitual dishonesty because instead of covering him, they’ve covered for him.

Even on those rare occasions when the legacy media have acknowledged that Biden is a fabulist, they have made excuses for him. The New York Times, for example, wrote protectively of him in 2022, saying that “President Biden has been unable to break himself of the habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity.”

It’s not that he’s lying, you see. Biden merely adorns reality.

Sometimes Biden’s fabrications were just so oddball that they made you wonder if he was all there —even before he started showing signs of senility. An example of this is Biden’s insistence that his “Uncle Bosie” was eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea during World War II. The Defense Department was forced to put out a statement that Ambrose J. Finnegan was lost when his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean.

Biden has also lied about graduating in the top half of his law school class, having his house “burn down with my wife in it,” growing up in the Puerto Rican community, and once being the driver of “an 18-wheeler” to name only a handful of falsehoods that reveal a bizarre distance from reality.

He also habitually lies about former President Donald Trump leaving behind a 9% inflation rate. Inflation was 1.4% in January 2021.

Other times, however, Biden’s mendacity reveals a level of pathos that makes you want to look away. A case in point is when he told the mothers of the 13 soldiers killed in Afghanistan because of his ill-conceived pullout in 2021 that he could feel their pain because his son, Beau Biden, had also died in the war.

It was not the first time. Joe Biden has a history of saying that Beau Biden “lost his life in Iraq.” Beau Biden died tragically at the age of 46 in 2015 of cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

///

acting like Trump tells less lies than Biden is just pure #BlueMaga delusion

Nobody "acts". Its tracked. You could look it up yourself if you cared about facts

I'm afraid Trumps lies are too many and his habit too well known to dedicate half a news desk to tracking them all, but I would wager that Trump told more fragrant lies since Biden stepped down than Biden has in his lifetime. Not that it is all that relevant, because well documented liar Trump appears to be up against Harris.

Facts are just something the CIA invented in the '60s to make the Soviet Union look bad.

Mooch going in hard on Orange.

We've come a long way from these days

Yeah, my comment was pretty much rooted in the here and now, where "conservative" sphere online seems to be a bag of grifters looking to see who can screech the highest and shock the most. Trump was an early adopter with a well-known name to begin with, so I think that gave him a boost.

Of course, my take is that this modern take on "conservatism" is in large part due to how engagement works on social media. Barrages of lies and hatred causes uproar, that causes causes engagement, this which causes the algorithms to push it harder and in the end it has become the new norm. Just look to the debate on this forum. Barring a few old-fashioned holdouts, conservative views aren't individual views anymore. If arguing against them, you're just taking on a social media collective and whatever nonsense has floated to the top this week. Since there is almost no individual ownership of views, there is also precious little shame. If you get hosed outside, just return to the echo-chamber for the next hot take.

Consider every-time Trump-world does something idiotic, you get a 24 hour lull in the debate and then suddenly it is off to the races with whatever the social media swarm intelligence decreed was the excuse this cycle.

Meanwhile, us old farts who have this novel idea that politics is something you carry on your own accord have to live it down everytime we do or say something stupid. That's an uneven battlefield.

Plus facts can be AI’d so easily

What’s blue maga

and so does Biden!

it just doesnt get reported and amplified by the mainstream press, as tame_deuces actually identifies (accidentally).

Over half the cabinet ( you know people that actually work with trump and knows wtf he is …😉 of trump said he shouldn’t be president again …

Surely it’s because he was so truthful compare to other politicians .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections...