highdesert wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 10:31 am The assumption now is that Biden will be the Democratic nominee and Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024. The electoral map based on polling shows Trump ahead with 241 electoral votes to Biden's 193 electoral votes and 104 tossups. The pundits see it differently, with Biden at 241 electoral votes and Trump at 235 electoral votes and 62 tossups. It still comes down to the battleground states, how California and Texas vote is meaningless. Still a very long way to go to June 2024.

jc57 wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 12:14 pm What would be extremely healthy for the democratic process would be for both Trump and Biden to no longer be in the running when it came to the beginnings of primary voting. It would be raucous and unpredictable, as all of the different candidates and all of the newcomers who throw their hats into the ring scramble in a very short period to gain enough votes and support. It would be unlike the pre-determined slate we are all handed every year, decided on in back rooms, and the primaries and caucuses more of a publicity stunt.

Primary voting would be crucial, and your vote would count in those primaries no matter what party you were in or what state you live in. Political parties' "platforms" would have to add all manner of planks to be able for form coalitions to get their candidate nominated, just like in the olden days when you did not always know who the nominee would be until after the party convention.

Sure, it will be like that in 2028, assuming the election process still runs like it does now, but that will be much more controlled and vetted with the pre-selected winners bought and paid for well in advance. But a scramble just months before the primaries, where both front runners drop out, would completely upend that and have the chance for decent candidates from both sides and a decent president as a result.

CDFingers wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 2:07 pm

jc57 wrote: Sun Dec 03, 2023 12:14 pm What would be extremely healthy for the democratic process would be for both Trump and Biden to no longer be in the running when it came to the beginnings of primary voting. It would be raucous and unpredictable, as all of the different candidates and all of the newcomers who throw their hats into the ring scramble in a very short period to gain enough votes and support. It would be unlike the pre-determined slate we are all handed every year, decided on in back rooms, and the primaries and caucuses more of a publicity stunt.

Primary voting would be crucial, and your vote would count in those primaries no matter what party you were in or what state you live in. Political parties' "platforms" would have to add all manner of planks to be able for form coalitions to get their candidate nominated, just like in the olden days when you did not always know who the nominee would be until after the party convention.

Sure, it will be like that in 2028, assuming the election process still runs like it does now, but that will be much more controlled and vetted with the pre-selected winners bought and paid for well in advance. But a scramble just months before the primaries, where both front runners drop out, would completely upend that and have the chance for decent candidates from both sides and a decent president as a result.

2028 is gonna be rip roarin'. Let's hope we all make it.

CDFingers

The fourth Republican primary debate is scheduled for Wednesday in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, just weeks before the crucial New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucus. But only four candidates will show up to the face off at the University of Alabama. The Republican National Committee announced Monday that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy qualified for the debate.

To qualify, GOP candidates must have polled at least 6% in two national polls or 6% in one national poll and one poll from two separate early voting states recognized by the RNC. They must have also had a minimum of 80,000 unique donors and have signed the “Beat Biden” pledge, agreeing to support the eventual Republican 2024 nominee. The fourth debate marks a smaller crowd, and some familiar faces missing on stage include South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.

Scott, who participated in the third GOP debate last month, dropped out of the presidential race shortly after the event. Burgum, who participated in the first two GOP debates suspended his campaign Monday. Hutchinson, who only qualified for the first event, did not make the stage. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump said he’d skip the debates altogether, citing his large lead in national and state polls. The former president has also said he wouldn’t sign the “Beat Biden” pledge to support any GOP nominee, even if it isn't him.

By design, breaking out survey results into subgroups results in smaller sample sizes, and thus larger margins of sampling error.

Crosstabs from individual polls — which as a reminder, are snapshots in time, and are not necessarily predictive this far out from the election — are better signals of directional insights into subgroups’ vote preferences.

Disengaged voters using their responses to these polls to express their frustration with Biden, the incumbent, rather than thinking about the 2024 election as a binary choice this far out from the election.

Some pollsters group/define young voters as age 18–29 and some as age 18–34. This may seem like a trivial difference, but the polling margins are, surprisingly, drastically different for these two groups.

At a campaign fund-raiser in the Boston area on Tuesday, Mr. Biden said that “if Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” suggesting just how much his predecessor motivated his decision to run again at age 81.

While polls show most Democrats would rather have someone else represent the party in next year’s election, Mr. Biden’s case for another nomination has been bolstered by the reality that there is no obvious replacement who inspires widespread confidence among Democrats that they could beat Mr. Trump.

Mr. Biden faces only long-shot challengers in the Democratic primaries in the form of Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and Marianne Williamson, the author. But several other ambitious Democrats are waiting in the wings in case for some reason Mr. Biden changes course and drops out, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois.

Wino wrote: Thu Dec 07, 2023 7:07 pm Anyone not republican is better than turd.

YankeeTarheel wrote: Fri Dec 08, 2023 5:00 pm

Wino wrote: Thu Dec 07, 2023 7:07 pm Anyone not republican is better than turd.

Including Bob Menendez

tagsoup wrote: Sat Dec 09, 2023 4:19 pm I read polls a lot. Last week there was a Yougov/economist poll, they asked people is they thought the Holocaust was a myth. 20% of 18 to 29 year olds say ya. We're counting on them?

On December 5th, for over five hours, lawmakers grilled the presidents of elite universities in a congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. In one of the testiest exchanges a Republican congresswoman, Elise Stefanik, asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates university rules. It is “context-dependent”, replied Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania. Clips of the exchange went viral on X, formerly Twitter. Yad Vashem, a Holocaust museum and research centre, issued a condemnation and stressed the importance of “raising awareness about the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust”.

A new poll from YouGov/The Economist suggests that Yad Vashem has its work cut out. Young Americans—or at least the subset of them who take part in surveys—appear to be remarkably ignorant about one of modern history’s greatest crimes. Some 20% of respondents aged 18-29 think that the Holocaust is a myth, compared with 8% of those aged 30-44 (see chart). An additional 30% of young Americans said they do not know whether the Holocaust is a myth. Many respondents espouse the canard that Jews wield too much power in America: young people are nearly five times more likely to think this than are those aged 65 and older (28% versus 6%).

Now for the harder part: why do some young Americans embrace such views? Perhaps surprisingly, education levels do not appear to be the culprit. In our poll, the proportion of respondents who believe that the Holocaust is a myth is similar across all levels of education.

Social media might play a role. According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. More recently Pew found that 32% of those aged 18-29 get their news from TikTok. Social-media sites are rife with conspiracy theories, and research has found strong associations between rates of social-media use and beliefs in such theories. In one recent survey by Generation Lab, a data-intelligence company, young adults who used TikTok were more likely to hold antisemitic beliefs.

Though young Americans’ views are most stark, antisemitism is rearing its head in other demographic groups. The same YouGov/The Economist poll found that 27% of black respondents and 19% of Hispanics believe that Jews have too much power in America, compared with 13% of white respondents who say so. Whatever the reasons, the polling is alarming.

featureless wrote: Sat Dec 09, 2023 10:12 pm That is terrifying and fucking embarrassing.

We are so fucked as a species.

The leaders of Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn appeared to evade questions about whether students should be disciplined if they call for the genocide of Jews.

“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates.

Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said he found the responses by Elizabeth Magill, Penn’s president, “unacceptable.” Even the liberal academic Laurence Tribe found himself agreeing with Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, who sharply questioned Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay. “I’m no fan of @RepStefanik but I’m with her here,” the Harvard law professor wrote on the social media site X. “Claudine Gay’s hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends.” “It should not be hard to condemn genocide, genocide against Jews, genocide against anyone else,” Governor Shapiro said on Wednesday in a meeting with reporters. “I’ve said many times, leaders have a responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity, and Liz Magill failed to meet that simple test.” “There should be no nuance to that — she needed to give a one-word answer,” he added.

A majority of Americans agree with President Joe Biden on issues including abortion rights, capping insulin prices and hiking taxes on billionaires, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found, but his campaign faces a tough task in getting angry voters to care. The 81-year-old Democrat’s prospects for re-election have been dragged down by voters’ worries about the state of the economy, concerns about Biden's age and a general sense that the country is moving in the wrong direction. Benefiting from that unease has been Biden's likely Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, 77, who has a slight lead over Biden nationally in a head-to-head matchup ahead of the Nov. 5, 2024, election. Biden’s biggest challenge may be overcoming what the poll, concluded on Monday, showed to be the deep mistrust many voters appear to feel toward their political opponents or even politics in general.

Reuters/Ipsos presented respondents with a line from a recent Trump speech that there are "communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country - that lie and steal and cheat on elections" -- without first telling them who said it. Half of respondents said they agreed with that sentiment, including 71% of Republicans and 37% of Democrats. The poll then asked respondents if they knew that the line was said by Trump. Among respondents who were aware, 57% agreed, including 84% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats. Rage and grievance are a key driver of Trump’s campaign. A lasting challenge for Biden will be to penetrate this cloud of anger by harnessing the relative popularity of his agenda. Michael Ceraso, a Democratic strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, said the Biden campaign needs to hope that the mood of the electorate shifts to the point where more voters are open to his message. "There is no way you can reach people when they are frustrated. You have to wait for them to dial it down," Ceraso said. "Then you hope you can find the thing that moves the voter back into your column." There remain plenty of persuadable voters: While the margin between Trump and Biden is small, a quarter of respondents in the poll picked neither candidate, and 15% said they hadn't made up their mind or might not vote.

Trump’s campaign also has an opportunity to connect with undecided voters on his "America First" agenda, which has harnessed dissatisfaction over how the U.S. economy has faired in global trade and decades of military interventions. Some 37% of respondents favored Trump's proposed 10% tariff on all imports - significantly higher than the 24% who said they oppose the idea. An even larger share of respondents, 39%, weren't sure where they stood on the issue. While U.S. public support skews in favor of financial and military aide for Ukraine in its war against Russia, Republicans and independents lean toward Trump's skepticism over arming Ukraine. The new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed 38% of independents were against Ukraine aid, with 27% in favor and 35% unsure. A two-thirds majority, including similar shares of Republicans and Democrats, opposed Trump's proposal to impose the death penalty on drug dealers. There was also little support for Trump's musings about leaving the NATO alliance, with just 17% of respondents supporting the idea. Just 29% supported a Trump proposal to cease granting U.S. citizenship to all people born in the U.S. regardless of the legal status of their parents. The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, surveying 4,411 adults nationwide between Dec. 5 and Dec. 11. It had a credibility interval, a margin of precision, of about 2 percentage points.

A majority of respondents, 55%, backed Biden's call to ban assault rifles. A third of Republicans and about half of independents said the U.S. should ban assault rifles.

sikacz wrote: Wed Dec 13, 2023 10:20 am 55 percent don’t know what an “AWB” would mean. They’ve bought the biden dem bloomie BS.