papajim2jordan wrote: Fri Aug 02, 2024 12:34 pm Decision via indecision. That settles that.

I think they all just want power, and will say whatever to get it. The Constitution gets in the way of emperors (empress's?).

Vice President Kamala Harris is putting her stamp on her presidential campaign, bringing a slew of high-profile Obama veterans into senior advisory roles. Harris wants to win the White House with a different campaign than the one Biden was running. Some of her rhetorical changes have been subtle. These personnel moves are not. But the new hires — including Obama veterans David Plouffe, Stephanie Cutter and Mitch Stewart — are not supplanting any existing employees.

Jen O'Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign chair, will remain in charge, with a direct report to Harris. Harris's brother-in-law, Tony West, is already asserting himself as an influential adviser in the campaign. Sheila Nix will stay in her role as Harris' chief of staff. Quentin Fulks, Harris' deputy campaign manager, will take on an expanded role leading the campaign's paid media. Most of the new hires will be acting as consultants. With the exception of Plouffe, they will keep their old clients and affiliation.

Plouffe, however, will sever ties with TikTok and he will no longer host a podcast with Kellyanne Conway, who ran Trump's 2016 campaign and remains a close Trump adviser. Cutter, who has been helping Harris prepare for media interviews, will keep her role in Precision Strategies, the firm she founded with Jen O'Malley Dillon, the campaign's chair. Harris is building out her team with political players that were left off the field for most of 2024.

These are heady days for Democrats. After a near-death experience with the fading Biden candidacy they have been revived by the Biden-Harris switcheroo. The presidential race has tightened considerably and, though Trump is still favored to win, they’re feeling mighty good about themselves. Inspired by their historic standard bearer, exuberant partisans proclaim the second coming of the Obama coalition, which will decisively sweep away Trump and his deplorable legions. They’re getting the band back together! Or are they? In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition…but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition…but with far fewer white working-class voters. Indeed, that people would analogize Harris’ emerging coalition to Obama’s shows how much they’ve forgotten (or perhaps never knew) about the Obama coalition and how little they understand about how the party has changed in the last 12 years. Here are some facts about the Obama coalition (based on 2012 election data from Catalist): 1. In 2012, Obama carried both college-educated and working-class (noncollege) voters. And there wasn’t much difference in the margins; he carried the college-educated by 6 points and the working class by 4 points. 2. Obama carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points; overall he carried nonwhites by 64 points. 3. Obama lost both the white working class and college-educated whites, the former by a comparatively modest 20 points and the latter by 8 points. All this is very far from the Harris coalition today and how it seems to be evolving. The following data illustrate this. I use the post-switcheroo New York Times/Siena poll (one of only four pollsters rated “A+” by Nate Silver) for comparison. I also provide intermediate figures—Clinton, 2016 and Biden, 2020—so that the political evolution from the Obama coalition to today can be clearly discerned.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Times poll is losing them by 15 points. Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today. That’s because Democratic support in the two groups has gone in completely different directions. You miss this and you can’t possibly understand the Obama coalition and why it is so different from the Democratic coalition we see today. Similarly, consider the class trajectories within the white vote. In 2012, Obama lost the white working-class vote by 20 points, a bounce back performance after the Democrats’ catastrophic performance with this demographic in the 2010 election. Gaining back some of Democrats’ lost white working-class support was a widely-ignored key to his re-election, particularly his success in Midwest/Rustbelt states. But famously Clinton in 2016 did much less well, losing these voters by 27 points (and the election in the process because of these voters’ defection in three key Rustbelt states). Then in 2020, Biden lost this demographic nationally by a slightly lower 26 points, which included slight improvements in those key Rustbelt states—an underrated factor in his victory. But today in the Times poll, Harris is losing these voters by a whopping 38 points. The trajectory of the white college vote has gone in the completely opposite direction. Obama lost these voters by 8 points. Then Clinton moved this demographic to the break-even point, followed by Biden’s solid 9-point lead among these voters in 2020. Now Harris has a 15-point lead over Trump among white college graduates. That’s quite a trend. And it’s taken the class gap among white voters from 12 points in the Obama coalition to 53 points (!) today.

Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34. It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years. Of course, none of this means Harris can’t win. But no one should kid themselves that, even if successful, Harris’ coalition will represent the second coming of the Obama coalition. Instead it is likely to be a more class-polarized version of the post-Obama Democratic coalition with even more reliance on the college-educated vote, particularly the white college-educated vote. This seems consistent with how the nascent Harris campaign has been unfolding. Layering on top of Biden’s themes before he dropped out—"saving democracy” and abortion rights (particularly the latter)—we have seen a great deal of emphasis on social media and the production of memes that capture the “vibes” of the Kamala! campaign. The latter has certainly garnered a lot of attention but, as Freddie DeBoer acerbically remarks, Harris is not running for President of Online America but rather America as a whole. He detects, not without reason, a whiff of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their misplaced faith in online success. Related to this, we have seen a rather strange online manifestation of the identitarian politics that still dominates the Democratic Party and is certainly alive and well in the Harris campaign. This is the raft of sex- and race-segregated zoom fundraisers for Harris. This has included the “White Women for Kamala Harris” fundraiser and the just plain embarrassing “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” extravaganza. And there were many other and more finely-grained identity group fundraising calls for Harris. This aggregation of identity and interest groups approach to organizing and coalition-building is exactly what Obama wanted to get away from. As Obama memorably put it 20 years ago:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.

We need to get back there….and fast. And that includes the Harris campaign. Right now, they’re on a narrow, polarized path to November and their reckoning with Donald Trump. They can do better, starting with remembering what the Obama coalition really was—and really was about.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.

In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?

(Asked of independents) As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?

VodoundaVinci wrote: Sat Aug 03, 2024 5:48 pm When Obama was running, and won, I felt that if America could elect a black man as president, it showed that there was hope that this nation could right itself and continue The Journey. That his election meant that we had reached the end of the dark ages and would begin to claw ourselves and this world into the light and a better future. 8 years later we stumbled and fell down the well - we aren't on the path to getting it fixed and a brighter future. The retribution for electing a black man as president from those backwards thinking minds that are all about money and power is now fanatical. I hear it every day.....Conservatives, the Righteous Right, blaming our continued and renewed failure on God's Will and punishing US for electing a black man/Liberal. America is fractured beyond repair. All of US couldn't put America back together again after 2016 and the Democrats forsaking democratic process and forcing an un electable candidate to stop a brutal and brutish candidate from pushing us over the edge of Hate and Nationalism.

I can't believe we can come back from here by voting. The System is simply over balanced and has lost it's kuzushi. It can't be fixed by voting and choosing anymore.

Hope I'm wrong. Know I'm not.

VooDoo

The phrase "Trump is a coward" is currently trending among users on Donald Trump's own social media network, Truth Social.

CDFingers wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2024 9:00 am Walz was a good choice. GenX.

CDF

It would be hard to find a more vivid representative of the American heartland than Walz. Born in West Point, Nebraska, a community of about 3,500 people northwest of Omaha, Walz joined the Army National Guard and became a teacher in Nebraska. He and his wife moved to Mankato in southern Minnesota in the 1990s. That’s where he taught social studies and coached football at Mankato West High School, including for the 1999 team that won the first of the school’s four state championships. He still points to his union membership there. Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard before retiring from a field artillery battalion in 2005 as a command sergeant major, one of the military’s highest enlisted ranks.

In his first race for Congress, Walz upset a Republican incumbent. That was in 2006, when he won in a largely rural, southern Minnesota congressional district against six-term Rep. Gil Gutknecht. Walz capitalized on voter anger with then-President George W. Bush and the Iraq war. During six terms in the U.S. House, Walz championed veterans’ issues. He’s also shown a down-to-earth side, partly through social media video posts with his daughter, Hope. One last fall showed them trying a Minnesota State Fair ride, “The Slingshot,” after they bantered about fair food and her being a vegetarian.

In his first term as governor, Walz faced a Legislature split between a Democratic-led House and a Republican-controlled Senate that resisted his proposals to use higher taxes to boost money for schools, health care and roads. But he and lawmakers brokered compromises that made the state’s divided government still seem productive.

Bipartisan cooperation became tougher during his second year as he used the governor’s emergency power during the COVID-19 pandemic to shutter businesses and close schools. Republicans pushed back and forced out some agency heads. Republicans also remain critical of Walz over what they see as his slow response to sometimes violent unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.