Trump approval rating "in the toilet"

“A dead girl or a live boy”

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Opposition isn’t worth beans when it can’t vote in the district where the opposed candidate is running. If the country weren’t gerrymandered to hell then that would be a realistic viewpoint. But as it is, that ~40% approval is of the total population, when you look at likely republican voters, grump’s approval is still in the high 80s.

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The effect of mobilizing an opposition is change who is likely to vote and which districts are competitive. The Republicans have gerrymandering working in their favor (for now), but even so the backlash he’s provoking is so considerable that its made enough districts vulnerable to put the House in play. The word “unprecedented” was tossed around a lot in 2016, and there’s no reason to suppose that the surprises are over.

But looking forward to 2020, recall that his victory in November was narrow and attributable, in no small part, to apathy toward Hillary Clinton. In two short months, he’s transformed that apathy to unbridled rage, while showing no apparent interest in expanding his base. That leaves him in an untenable position. He needs to either ameliorate the opposition or expand his support, or else the apathy/rage modifier that worked to his advantage in 2016 is going to defeat him in 2020.

Which is why they’re so desperate to start a war.

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…or disenfranchise his opposition.

They don’t need to suppress every vote in order to render majority opposition meaningless. Just enough to swing the balance in a handful of states.

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True enough, but the fact that the Republicans are so desperate to game the system underscores just how vulnerable their position is. You can write checks on next week’s earnings and use one credit card to pay off another, but eventually the trend will catch up to you and you’ll be worse off than when you started.

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As with the slavers in the 1850’s [1], they know that they’re a minority but they don’t care. They’ve worked out how to establish minority control, and they fully intend on locking it down permanently.

Once Gorsuch is on the USSC, the possibility of effective legal/democratic resistance to the TrumpGOP is gone.

After that, you’re faced with the choice of turning to illegal tactics, or waiting to somehow be rescued by a civil war within the GOP (on the incredibly-unlikely hope that the winner would inexplicably surrender minority rule and restore representative democracy).

[1] Yup, I’m re-reading Battle Cry of Freedom again, and I’m still finding that the antebellum political machinations of the slave power caucus are strikingly familiar.

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I guess I’m having a hard time picturing that they will be able to lock it down. To me it seems like they’ve overextended themselves and that they’re aware of the fact which, again, is why they’re so desperate for a war or 9/11-like event that they can use to consolidate their power. Those are the possibilities that worry me the most.

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They’ll be as subtle as they think they can afford to be.

Disenfranchisement in the USA already has:

  • The gerrymander.

  • Felon disenfranchisement combined with racially-biased mass incarceration.

  • Weekday voting combined with minimal industrial rights, making it functionally impossible for many working class people to vote.

Recent additions are:

  • Voter ID laws, deliberately targeted to exclude the poor.

  • The near elimination of postal and early voting across the red states.

  • Racially targeted mass purges of voters from the rolls, combined with restriction of the ability to meaningfully appeal deregistration.

  • The annihilation of the Voting Rights Act by the USSC.

They spent the last election loudly suggesting that they were going to ramp up in-person voter intimidation, but didn’t follow through; just the threat was effective enough this time.

But they will ramp it up to whatever degree is necessary. If they can do it with just ID laws, they’ll do that. If they have to have a posse of open-carry Trumpeters standing outside every voting booth and threatening every non-white person they see, they’ll do that.

Again, these tactics don’t have to be 100% effective to work. They just need to have enough of an effect to skew that 40% vote into 51% of the seats.

You can do that with gerrymandering alone if you’re sufficiently shameless about it.

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Interestingly Uber seems to be run by people as dysfunctional as Trump, and the result is that the company president has quit over the behaviour of the management.
Perhaps in a reversal, the US should quit over the behaviour of its president.

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Respectfully, Democrats can and absolutely should obstruct Trumpublicans on their endeavors to gut regulation and hand everything to plutocrats on a tax-sheltered plate. That legislation absolutely does not need to happen. I agree that Pence would be worse. It would never get to Ryan because if Trump got impeached for treason and the Senate upheld the conviction and his removal (an unlikely and unprecedented outcome), Pence would not be half as careless. Even if Trump did commit treason, the Trumpublican Congress won’t impeach him. So we’re stuck with him for at least two years and probably four.

Either way, I agree local is key insofar as we need to take back the Congress if only to block Trump’s fire-sale of the federal government.

But people seem to be celebrating his unpopularity a little prematurely. Perhaps they forget the lesson of the election, that there’s a big pasty demographic that doesn’t answer polls but worships trollies.

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I guess I am using the word Obstruction with a very narrow definition. Voting down a bill is the legislative process, and is their damn jobs. Using arcane rules based on traditions made in back room talks to prevent bills from even reaching a vote is obstruction.

Always define your terms, @japhroaig, otherwise people won’t know what the carp you are saying :sunglasses:

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It’s really hard to vote down bills when you’re in the minority and the majority has circled the ideological wagons so tightly that defections are basically unheard of.

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So you’re saying it’s hard these days to get Lieberman’ed?

(Yeah, I should keep my day job :yum:)

In that case, while I’d prefer things get decided by coming to a vote, my idealism takes a back-seat to the Black Knight Paul Ryan using budget rules to gut the Affordable Care Act because he can’t get the votes to actually repeal it. 25 million people’s health insurance > my idealism. At this point, it’s war by other means and enemies aren’t defeated in war by clean fighting.

I know that doesn’t sound like my usual high-principled outlook. All I can say is that 2016 took my ideals about fair above-board play and stuffed them through a wood chipper.

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Oh, I understand. And I am not so arrogant to think I have the answers. I just have this sneaking suspicion that playing by the idealistic rules while building populist support is a better strategy. Not tactic, but strategy.

The biting irony here is that the budget proposal and sequestration are literal death panels. Yet the idea is so toxic we can’t have a rational discussion across the aisle.

If we have to play dirty, we will. I don’t think I’ve ever won a fair fight. However my idealism defines my character.

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This headline is an insult to toilets, which while admittedly full of shit also perform a useful function.

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Trump is what happens when the sewer backs up.

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For the purposes of your comment, ignore the focus on McCain, and note how the chart has become even more skewed to the right. Note, this is for all senators, not just ®

link

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Interestingly, after a couple of years experience with ACA I get the sense - mainly from watching several town halls - that people now realise that ACA didn’t introduce death panels, and that what came before ACA, and what’s coming down the pike with AHCA, is the kind of thing that involves actual death panels; Republican ideologues deciding which classes of people will be allowed to die coupled with faceless insurance-industry functionaries making the some decision on a one-by-one case-by-case basis.

On the upside, the prompt (R) effort to re-brand AHCA as ‘RyanCare’ (c.f. the (R) effort to demonise ACA as ‘ObamaCare’) probably tells you as much as you need to know about the likelihood it’ll ever actually pass.

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