Bill Barr?
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The phrase was intended to refer to persons who still held power after an adverse election result-- between election day and inauguration day.
Neither McConnell nor Trump are lame ducks-- they are theoretically motivated to make decisions that will not cost them votes.
The problem for us is that motivation does not protect the liberties of people who are pissed at Trump-- Republicans may well be rewarded at the polls if they replace a member of the Supreme Court.
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Exactly.
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I’m guilty of that. You may be right.
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That. Very true. Many things can happen and many people trying hard to make them happen.
I’m not seeing any Democrats or American leftists anywhere getting complacent. It’s more like a mix of wary pessimism, and genuine trauma from 2016. Meanwhile, by all accounts, it’s Trump who’s getting complacent, because he’s convincing himself that the polls are lying, and that the coronavirus is going to go away any day now, and the economy’s doing great, and he’s got YUUUGE hands. Abandoning reality is not a sign of a successful re-election campaign.
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Better yet, volunteer.
In, or targeted at, swing states.
1 volunteer is worth 100 to 10,000 votes.
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I’d definitely agree about leftists and mostly agree about rank-and-file Dem voters. I’m talking about the DNC establishment: complacency is one of their jams. It’s not just about 2016, either – the complacency goes back as far as 1996, when it was at least grounded in the reality of the candidate’s charisma. I remember it vividly from 2000 and 2004.
There are a number of factors informing this complacency:
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The delusion that all of their Presidential candidates are as compelling as Bill Clinton and Obama (or, alternately, that those two won mainly on Gore-style bloodless policy instead of personality). Sorry, but that’s a rarity unless you have a strong farm-team and talent-scouting system (something the GOP has but that the Dems think they can do without)
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Laziness. This manifests in things like the on-going dismissal of the youth and minority votes, leaving it to outside groups to GOTV; related, there’s the continuing reliance on big donors and party hacks who bring out the remaining traditional blocs (for a price, often a nasty one when the blocs are religious).
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Then there’s the notion, quaint from a party with its own long history of ratf*cking and cheating, that the GOP (and now its allies in Russia) will play fair in any given election. This matches with the naive notions of comity and co-operation with the party across the aisle that have been expressed by Biden himself.
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The final, and perhaps most important, part is a continuing underestimation of how much the average GOP voter revels in spite, and of how increasingly awful candidates that the GOP offers them aren’t margin-breaking turn-offs but quite the opposite. Not grasping this, they keep thinking they can peel enough of them off by taking a centrist approach to meet them halfway.
One way or another, this is going to come to an end after this election. Either we’ll be seeing the death knell of liberal democracy in America or (I hope) politicians under age 55 like Ocasio-Cortez will use the four years purchased by Biden to start pushing for more dynamic party leaders who aren’t mired in complacency.
This goes to point 4, above. In 2004, the chief political strategist of the Bush administration explicitly rejected the views of the “reality-based community” in an NYT article. “Surely this…”, liberals and progressives once again expressed, knowing that this neoCon attitude was now resulting in dead Americans. And yet, less than a month later…
The Brits could be forgiven for asking that question, but the Dem establishment – addled by their complacency – still were asking it as well. They were asking a similar question in 2016, and I sincerely hope they’re not asking it again a few months from now.
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…said the country that elected both Theresa May and Virus Johnson
EtA:
Typo. Supposed to be Boris but I stand by it.
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Critically important in this election (downticket) is that the state legislatures will be setting constituency boundaries for the next decade. Republicans will burn the country to the ground rather than lose control of their gerrymandering and voter suppression powers.
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That’s actually an argument against wholesale destruction this year to the extent that it produces a wave downballot as well.
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I seem to recall Trump’s previous opponent polling so far ahead that his loss was considered a done deal. It’s a good thing his strategy doesn’t depending on people voting to win.
…and since he’s painted a very clear picture that there will be no consequences for getting caught throwing an election for him, what does he have to lose by playing dirty?
What I meant is that there is no regulation or standard that will remain unbroken in their attempt to retain power.
15 points seems like an outlier. 538 has had Biden’s lead in national polling at around 9 points, about 50-41, and holding essentially steady for weeks now.
The Daily Mirror is a centre left newspaper which consistently supports Labour, most of their readers wouldn’t have voted for May.
De Pfeffel is another matter, it is probably still popular in the working class red wall areas (I haven’t checked recently).
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Barr would not be able to have much influence over election results. Campaigns can challenge each state’s results in their state courts. He’d have to pull a W and force every case to go to the SC, and I don’t see Roberts standing for that. Or even sitting for it.
Then they should be asking why their own damn country is so dumb before they ask that of us.
The Dumbening is a worldwide phenomenon.
They didn’t accuse the US of being dumb, they accused George W Bush voters of being dumb.
And I would love to have a time machine to go back to 2004 to tell people what has gone wrong since then but I don’t, and neither do the Daily Mirror.
No disagreement there.
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