Now that we’ve removed all government-mandated safety features, the US cat industry is going to be yuuuuge!
Oh, wait, you’re telling me we removed safety features for imported cats, too? The US cats still have to compete? We didn’t think this through well enough…
Because of the way we do these kinds of stats, you will see that headline at most 36 more times.
Of course for Nixon it was because he was literally a criminal. For Bush it was after it was widely known he lied to bring America into an foreign war and after the disastrous handling of hurricane Katrina. I never exactly understood what people hated about Carter, not being a student of American history and seeing how people see to think he’s great now.
Bush, who managed 25% late in his presidency, was 59% at this point in his presidency. Nixon was around 70, Carter was above 70. So in one way, Trump is pretty far off the lowest approval rating in modern history, but in another way, he’s way below it. Not enough data points to do a real analysis, but for a president two months after being sworn in, Trumps approval rating is unfathomable, and suggests that if he were to somehow last 8 years it might since to unheard-of lows like low teens or single digits.
One by one, they’ll decide that it’s all broken eggs and no omelettes. People supported him with all kinds of goals in mind, I think almost none of those goals will be realized. I think in 2018 the Republicans will have done basically nothing, the Democrats will take over at least the senate, and the Republicans will go back into full opposition mode, railing against he Democrats for not letting them do anything (since Paul Ryan’s “growing pains” comment made it clear they regard anything other than a super-majority as being an “opposition” party). And when Trump is up for re-election, people who voted for him to cause the chaos necessary to change will realize - nothing has changed.
I think the only thing that can redeem Trump is impeachment. If he’s thrown out of office then he can say, “They were afraid of the change I was bringing!” If he’s not impeached, his supporters will turn their backs on him.
That is unlikely, to say the least.
The Dems are far more likely to win back the House, compared to the Senate.
Of the 33 seats up for grabs in the Senate in the next election, 25 of them are already held by Democrats.
They’d have to pretty much sweep the board in order to get the Senate back.
OTOH, the entire House is elected every two years.
The Republican majority in the senate is only 52-48, so they only need to flip a couple of seats. My understanding was the congressional districts were gerrymandered to make change very difficult. I don’t actually know the numbers all that well, it just seems like political commentators seem to think the house is fundamentally skewed Republican in a way the senate is not.
Then again, gerrymandering has an side-effect of promoting catastrophic losses, so who knows.
23 Democrats (plus the two independents who caucus with the Democrats), 9 Republicans.
Dean Heller in Nevada is an obvious target for the Democrats, as is Jeff Flake in Arizona.
The ones they’ll struggle to defend are in Indiana, West Virginia (which is why they shouldn’t try to primary the dreadful Joe Manchin, nobody decent can win there), South Dakota, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin. Maine could be close, as could New Mexico.
Trump’s appalling Presidency could really help them. If Clinton had won, with the President’s party generally losing votes in mid-terms, they could have been facing a wipeout. Democrats will need to improve their generally useless turnout in mid-terms, though (again, Trump will probably help here).
In the house, Clinton won just about as many districts as they need to flip to take it back. So they just need to turn out the vote, and resist further vote disenfranchisement. The 6th in Georgia will be an interesting race to watch. V. safe Republican seat normally, but Trump only won by 1.5%. He could be a real albatross for Republican candidates.
This is, IMO, the best possible outcome.
⊥rump struts and frets his hour upon the stage, revealing to those who voted for him that which has been obvious to all of the rest of us since he announced his candidacy.
I don’t want him impeached, for two reasons
Bush 2 and Truman both got to 22%.
He is rapidly approaching the Blagojevich Line.
Yes but congressional districts are gerrymandered as fuck.
I thought about making a new Game thread this morning titled “What would Trump have to do to alienate more of his core supporters,” but decided that whatever it was, it would end up being ten times worse for the rest of us, and that speculation about it was too depressing.
No argument there.
The advantage of gerrymandering is that you can concentrate your opponents’ supporters into a few electoral districts, which means that if you each get ~50% of the vote, but you have a dozen districts where you’re winning 58%-42% and they have six where they win by margins of 65%-35%, then as long as you can stay near 50%, you’re going to win more districts than you should.
Of course, the disadvantage of gerrymandering is that if you rig districts so that you win yours 55%-45% and your opponent wins theirs 65%-35%, then your opponents can survive a 10-point swing without losing any further ground, whereas you can get massacred.
Here’s hoping.
My understanding was it is the dove problem.
If you are a dove and nothing bad happens then great, but something bad happens then your political opponents will claim it was because you are too peace loving, therefore you are weak. if you are a hawk and nothing bad happens, you tell your political opponents it was because of your hawkish actions, if something bad happens it is justification for more hawkish action.
The bad thing that happened to Carter was the Iranian hostage crisis. His negotiations got the hostages released, but Republicans give the credit to Reagan because it happened after his inauguration.
When you can look at a district map and tell exactly where the people of color live, you know something’s wrong.
WIN was Gerald Ford’s idea. Carter appointed the Fed chair who brought inflation under control. Carter was just the wrong man at the wrong time.
Carter was the right man for a changing country at the wrong time.
Carter was (is) smart, humble, and a true Christian - which is why the opposition can’t stand him. He is everything they aren’t. However, his faults were that he tended to be a micro-manager who thought good policy would win over politics. He tried to appeal to people’s intellect rather than emotions. It failed miserably because most people are sheep and want “strong” leaders even if they are incompetent - something the Republicans figured out and have exploited ever since.
He was also the victim of a lot of unfortunate circumstances that coincided at the same time - oil embargo leading to the energy crisis, civil war in Iran (which resulted in the hostage crisis), rise of leftist paramilitaries in central America, poor monetary policies from previous administrations which led to a deep recession and dramatic inflation, and the hangover from Vietnam and Watergate. Taken together, these events would have sunk any administration.
That’s good. A just and accurate characterization of Carter.
However he leaves office, his supporters and their embrace of authoritarianism will still be a threat to our democracy. We must have a plan for governing that keeps them mollified.
Also: Trump Approval Rating Stays at 36% for 2nd Day in a Row
This is the first time it did not tick up the day after a new low.
One inch at a time…
Question- is it really a new low, or is it just the same low within a statistical margin of error?
