dagblog - Comments for ""The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel" (?)"

The problem here is that the

artappraiser — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 04:58:58 +0000

In reply to "The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel" (?)

The problem here is that the GOP sees class as being about education while democrats still see it as being about income, allowing both parties to lay claim to the being "the party of workers". And by their own made up definitions, they're both correct https://t.co/xL0sFYtPLe
— Tony (@realtonys1) November 27, 2020

A barista with a liberal arts degree making $20/hr in Boston and the owner of a plumbing business in Indiana making 6 figs both feel like they're the ones losing in our society. And they're both right, they're just talking about two different things
— Tony (@realtonys1) November 27, 2020

The impact of income on GOP affiliation depends *so much* education.

For whites, moving from the lowest income to the highest:
HS or Less: 36% -> 53%
Some College: 31% -> 46%
College: 23% -> 29%

Non-White:
HS or Less: 8% -> 33%
Some College: 7% -> 24%
College: 7% -> 21% pic.twitter.com/3M0bXeod7U
— Ryan Burge (@ryanburge) October 11, 2020

Now, class - apply that

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 07:01:00 +0000

In reply to also LOVE this, it's so true

Now, class - apply that lesson.

Why do people at state level approve of and tolerate DeSantis, who's presided over horrid levels of Covid breakout while claiming it'd be done by Memorial Day?

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5fc04d82c5b68ca87f82d5b8

I'm afraid i was goofing off rolling a speed in the back row, so so still don't quite understand.

also LOVE this, it's so true

artappraiser — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 04:57:59 +0000

In reply to I was especially entranced by

also LOVE this, it's so true simply because so few pay attention to what's going on in their statehouses but they are actually doing most of the stuff that affects daily lives the most:

It depends on what level of government you’re talking about. When you’re talking about state legislatures, that’s all really low-salience stuff. And the reality is that state parties have to do some ethically questionable things to keep the lights on because small-dollar donors generally don’t donate to their campaigns. So in state and local politics, corporate money is absolutely a big driver.

The last sentences in the

artappraiser — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 04:54:10 +0000

In reply to I was especially entranced by

The last sentences in the above excerpt starts another one of many really trenchant points made. That basically explains many things--that while you need a moderate to win the presidency, Congress can end up swinging back and forth more radically in mid-terms.

And in sections before that excerpt, why Obama-to-Trump and Romney-to-Clinton voters are the important ones that you spend the most money and time on and forget the rest. They're not partisans, that's rare and valuable.

I was especially entranced by

artappraiser — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 04:46:54 +0000

In reply to Liked Caldwell's piece a lot,

I was especially entranced by the David Shor piece from mid-July "David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics", hadnt' seen it before.It's real long but lots of secret campaign operative truths were told in there that were born out in November. I feel almost as if it's a waste of time to discuss anything related with anyone who hasn't read it with care first. For example, stuff like this excerpt about reality that counters a lot of the crap one ends up wasting time reading and debating, you start here instead or fuggedaboutit. This is global:

[....] What is your understanding of why there’s such a profound divide between college-educated and non-college-educated people on these so-called cosmopolitan issues?

Education is highly correlated with openness to new experiences; basically, there’s this divide where some people react positively to novel things and others react less positively. And there’s evidence that this relationship is causal. In Europe, when countries raised their mandatory schooling age from 16 to 18, the first generation of students who remained in school longer had substantially more liberal views on immigration than their immediate predecessors. And then, college-educated people are also more willing to try strange foods or travel abroad. So it really seems like education makes people more open to new experiences.

But politically, this manifests on immigration. And it’s ironclad. You can look at polling from the 1940s on whether America should take in Jewish refugees, and college-educated people wanted to and non-college-educated people didn’t. It’s true cross-nationally — like, working-class South Africans oppose taking in refugees from Zimbabwe, while college-educated South Africans support taking them in.

Other research has shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that emphasizes zero-sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated people. Arguably, this is because college-educated professionals live really blessed lives filled with mutually beneficial exchange, while negative-sum conflicts play a very big part of working-class people’s lives, in ways that richer people are sheltered from. But it manifests in a lot of ways and leads to divergent political attitudes.

We’ve been talking a lot about the education split among white voters. But the polling results you just referenced from South Africa suggest that education-based splits on cosmopolitanism manifest across racial and ethnic lines. Are Democrats losing ground with nonwhite, non-college-educated voters?

Yeah. Black voters trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters. We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about this fact.

I don’t think there are obvious answers as to why this is happening. But non-college-educated white voters and non-college-educated nonwhite voters have a lot in common with each other culturally. So as the salience of cultural issues with strong education-based splits increases — whether it’s gender politics or authoritarianism or immigration — it would make sense that we’d see some convergence between non-college-educated voters across racial lines.

American politics used to be very idiosyncratic, because we have this historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and all of these things that don’t have clear foreign analogues. But the world is slowly changing — not changing in ways that make racism go away or not matter — but in ways that erode some of the underpinnings of race-based voting. So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons, occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church. So I think you can tell this story about how the America-centric aspects of our politics are starting to decay, and we’re converging on the dynamics that you see in Europe, where nonwhite voters are more left wing than white voters, but where they vote for the left by like 65 to 35 percent, rather than the 90-10 split you see with African-Americans.

To be clear, if that happens, it would take a long time. But if I had to guess, I’d say young African-Americans might trend 4 or 5 percent against us in relative terms. But they’re a small percent of the Black electorate. These are slow-moving trends.

Are all of the trends you’ve studied unfavorable for Democrats? If the party is losing young African-Americans and non-college-educated whites, is it making compensatory gains? What is the outlook for the party over the coming decade?

I’ll start with the good news. The fear I had after 2016 was that Romney-Clinton voters were going to snap back to being Republicans, but Obama-Trump voters wouldn’t snap back to being Democrats. And that hasn’t happened — we’ve retained Clinton’s gains. We see this in 2020 polling. We saw it in 2018, with Democrats making big gains with these voters in the Senate, House, and state-level elections.

And those don’t just reflect discrepancies in which college-educated professionals decided to turnout for a midterm?

Some of it was. But roughly 75 percent was people changing their minds. So college-educated professionals have basically become Democrats. These voters aren’t optimal for winning the Electoral College. But they have other assets as a demographic. [....]

Trump appealed to a

Orion — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 20:24:04 +0000

In reply to "The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel" (?)

Trump appealed to a conglomerate of people who were kept out or living in the past - Democrats largely are made up of various people who see the future coming and have differing ideas about how to deal with it. (Hillary and her team were also living in the past but that's a side note.)

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/08/toward-the-next-frontier-the-case-for-a-new-liberal-nationalism/

Liked Caldwell's piece a lot,

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 18:46:30 +0000

In reply to "The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel" (?)

Liked Caldwell's piece a lot, as I did 2 of Shor's. Now i get to figger out where I'm missing the conflicts in their assessments.

I did like the perception of Biden as a "do nothing McClellan" who will eventually need to do something, but not as quick as people think. Along with that brief note:

In the 1860s, three major Western countries—Germany, Italy, and the United States—each fought similar wars of national unification, in which the more dynamic part of the country subjugated the more bucolic (or backward) part.

which should but won't stun people who think there was only 1 single issue at play.

Tom Sawyer, er Steyer - where have I heard that name... He blew his cred as a donor who made things happen to an overentitped candidate with not enough ideas, charisma and name recognition.

The description of South Carolina's non-urban landscape is nice and germane.

The description of the economy a nd the other factors that would have given Trump an easy win if not for Covid is frightening. Even more frightening is the little good Trump did responding to Covid (or intentional malpractice), yet it *also* was almost enough.

We dodged not a bullet, but an atom bomb or at least a messy shrapnelled-up IED. If this was a cinema, I'd be looking at my watch to see if the horror movie tails out here, or is just winding up for the even scarier part II. But we don't have that info. I'm going with the "just gear the economy to spread money out to lots and lots of voters", a bitcoin chicken in every pot. It's like the ugly joke, "i carefully evaluated all the job candidates, and hired the one with the biggest tits". Yet here, it's largely "the one who gives me the biggest kickback". With the caveat "but doesn't give me the clap". Seems politics is pretty simple after all.

Insofar as the one percent

artappraiser — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 17:45:33 +0000

In reply to "The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel" (?)

Insofar as the one percent and the expropriators of the one percent are the same faction within the party, the conflict may be less than Caldwell thinks... https://t.co/utxrqFHlSa
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 26, 2020

So these constituencies that previously did a lot to uphold conservative power are now liberal pic.twitter.com/YImZYMwgKD
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 26, 2020

https://t.co/3MqVBqaiQn
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 26, 2020

Yes. Donor class really thinks they are advocating for people they got no clue about. Makes them feel morally superior, glosses over their eco luxury & also makes it far harder to argue with them, because they really believe their own absurd shit
— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) November 26, 2020

Would almost prefer if they were doing it out of just calculated cynical politics, and while that is some of it. Most believe they really are on the right side of history bullshit. Privileged warriors
— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) November 26, 2020