“Nearly 60 per cent of US voters would back independent candidate over Biden or Trump”
Ross Perot made the mistake of being born too early and having to run against two fairly popular candidates. If he were alive now, he could probably beat these two! Come to think of it, I don’t think there is anything in the Constitution that requires the candidate to be alive.
Speaking of not being alive … I don’t remember how to do actuarial calculations, but I wonder about the odds that both Biden and Trump will be alive in November, 2024. They are both elderly. Biden looks more feeble every day, and Trump is obese. That would be an interesting prop bet for those online gambling sites.
My work is done here. Where “here” is doing all the work.
If we weren’t who we are, thinking like we do, we wouldn’t be here. I neither ask for nor expect any credit for how we engage & who’s still hanging around. I’m just happy about the level of realism I’m seeing. Our back-and-forths are healthier than what’s going on in social media. We’re comfortable criticizing the extremes at both ends of the political spectrum.
I’ve personally tried to push my pet peeves: at progressives for self-harm by purity; at conservatives because their are no underlying principles.
There’s no such thing as fiscal conservatism. Small govt solves nothing. Macro econ is not household finances. Right Wing ideology is BS, top to bottom. YMMV.
My own takeaway is this about conservative pushback against progress: It’s mostly about the fear of being left behind. Again, YMMV.
Anyway, I’m preaching to my own choir, here. So, I can stay, or fade away. I’m safe, either way. Basically, I’m not needed. That’s great!
In this article, the author doesn’t have the answers. Although I don’t fully agree with him on remedies, where I disagree, I don’t have the answers, either.
Amazing. We can’t even agree on this. I’d welcome an independent moderate candidate. I’m tired of extremes.
American politics is a corrupt cesspool. Just what the voters deserve.
I’ve been noticing more and more people saying things like that. Yes, it’s just what the voters deserve if the people who DON’T deserve it don’t vote. It’s only when the others turn into a real majority – not just a majority of those who bother to go to the polls – can we say “the voters deserve that”.
(Sorry about the phrasing. I am using “voters” in the sense of “potential voters” or “the general public.”
This is EXACTLY why the Republicans are mounting voter supression efforts wherever they can. They know that as voter turnout goes up, the odds of their winning go down. Or at least they don’t want to risk it.
That’s kinda drinking the Trumpist Kool-Aid. An important component of their basic strategy, in a nutshell, is to create a bunch of fake liberal scandals so they can deliver this message implicitly: “Sure, we might be corrupt, anti-democratic thieves, but so are the liberals, so why bother voting at all?” They want Joe Average to think all politicians are corrupt so he will stay away from the polls. They want you and me to think it’s a waste of time to choose between two evils. How many people stayed away from the polls (or voted 3rd party) in 2016 because they were somehow convinced that Hillary was as bad as or worse than Trump? The lower the voter turnout, the lower the chance of liberal victories.
Those guys may be corrupt and dishonest, but are also smart in a conniving way, and they are never naive. Ted Cruz is a brilliant man. You think he believes the hogwash he says? Not a chance. If we got a record of his private conversations like we just got McCarthy’s, he’d sound (almost) like a normal person. He’s just keeping his eye on the path to power.
Liberal politicians, as a general rule, think about how to implement policies. Maybe some of their policy ideas are foolish, but policy-making is their raison d’être. They will do everything they can to push those policies. The current conservative politicians, on the other hand, with a few exceptions, think only about winning elections, and will do everything they can to win them. They will try to take whatever positions lead to victory, because they don’t really care about the policies one way or the other. They have a two-part strategy: (1) condemn whatever the liberals say, even if they secretly agree with it, and (2) listen to what Trump wants, then support it blindly.
So that kinda gives the conservatives an edge in … well, the only thing they care about, which is winning elections. Sometimes liberals win when the conservatives are just too ignorant, or too corrupt, or too obviously dishonest, but if the Trumpists can gain control of the vote-counting process, even those circumstances will not create liberal victories.
If liberals don’t toughen up, America is in for a long, dark nightmare in the next decade, starting with those 2022 mid-terms.
Perot got out and then came back, shooting himself in the foot beaucoup times in iow not a serious nominee/candidate. Then picked pow “who am I” Stockdale as V-P and still got 19%. 😮
Interesting incumbent Bush41 who a couple yrs earlier had won the 1st Gulf War and was as high as 89/90% job approval rating only got 37.4% which was worse than Carter in 1980.
btw, Trump was at 37% approval just before 2016 election and became potus. Hey, he was running against train wreck Hillary. Indeed, the choice for potus is usually a binary choice ie vote for the lesser of two evils or stay home. 2016 many voters stayed home. Go figure! Digressing.
Also a day is a lifetime in politics so stay tuned! 😛
Yielding back the balance of my time …
Keep in mind Perot only ran to fuck over Bush. The hatred between the Bush and Perot clans here in Dallas is legendary. That’s the only reason he did it.
These polls are nonsense.
When given the choice of the giant douche or the shit sandwich, with a very viable third party candidate, everyone stayed home.
Nobody wants an independent candidate. Everyone loves saying they do in polls. People WANT the partisan warfare. They proved it in 2016. This bullshit is how they prefer it. It’s been proven over and over and over and over.
The only chance for the logjam to end would be the end of one of the big two, such as the proposed end of the GOP with the end of Trump, with maybe a split. That could see a four party thing erupt with a real liberal party emerging from the Dems as well.
Will that happen? Not in my lifetime, but I’m not that young anymore. But as long as the democrats and Republicans exist, this is what we’ll have.
I don’t know, Mr. Dark. There are the people who consider themselves to be “principled conservatives”. You know, George Will kind of people. They are only going to vote Democratic if the alternative is Trump or a full-on Trump follower. They want a third party so they can vote for someone like Reagan or Nixon – you know, the kind of candidates the Republican base rejected in enthusiastic favor of Trump.
Maybe Mitt Romney could head it up. He just called Democratic efforts to cancel student loan debt a bribe to voters, so they know his heart is in the right place!
Of course, you are right in general. The kind of people I describe are nothing like 60% of the electorate. But there is more real support for a third party than usual, I think.
I tend to agree. Everybody says they want a third choice, but once the party machinery starts gearing up, forget it.
Plus, if there was really going to be a viable independent movement, you’d think all of those Republicans who are too chicken to stand up to Trump would have taken that lifeline.
I think a fake third party would be a brilliant idea. Trump’s people had the germ of this idea in their efforts to keep Kanye on the ballot. I am really surprised that the Democrats have never thought of covertly financing and supporting some extreme right-wing third party effort. You know, actual explicit racism and QAnon nutbaggery. I still believe that would cut away enough Trumpist support to insure turning all of the purple states blue.
Unlike a parliamentary system, the government set up by the U.S. Constitution makes it all but impossible for there to be more than two major parties at the same time. The last time a 3rd party replaced a major party was when the GOP replaced the Whigs prior to the Civil War. So I think it is highly unlikely for a new party to replace the GOP. But both the GOP and the Democratic parties are really coalitions of different interest groups. The Democrats used to be the party of blue collar workers, but in recent election cycles they have been drawing their support from college educated whites living in cities as well as minorities. The woke college educated progressive whites have been dragging the party further and further to the left. That is resulting in the Democrats losing the support of many minorities, especially hispanics. But a recent poll reported that Biden’s approval rating with 18 to 30-year-old African-Americans was only 37%.
The GOP used to be primarily social conservatives, economic conservatives, and libertarians. Those groups are still part of the party, but it is the populism tapped into by Trump that is steering the party these days. I wish I could say it was all Trump’s fault, but he was only responding to where his voters wanted him to go. But to say Trump didn’t exactly appeal to our better angels is a massive understatement. He is a vile disgusting piece of excrement with delusions of humanity.
The problem in a nutshell is social media that allows like minded groups to network and organize and often gives the loudest voices an outsized bullhorn to magnify their apparent strength. I don’t know what can be done about it. Hopefully, the GOP nominee is someone like Mitt Romney or Ben Sasse rather than Trump or Desantis. My first choice for 2024 is Nicky Haley though. In 2016, I wanted Rubio to get the nomination and pick Haley as his VP. Now I think it should be the other way around.
I’d argue that economic conservatives and libertarians have just checked out. They absolutely aren’t part of the current GOP.
Look at the Lincoln Project. I’m one of them. Reaganite Conservatism. Entirely gone from the GOP. Wiped out. Nothing left, not even a trace of it. The neocons and the Trumpys own the party now. Big government, unlimited spending, tax breaks for the rich, support for the oligarchy, social engineering for them and their favored races/religions/sexes/creeds, complete xenophobia otherwise, zero support for small business and the total destruction of the middle class. Almost the exact opposite of conservative values. There’s nothing conservative about them. It’s a total misnomer now. They’re all about extremes. Extreme spending, extreme wealth, extreme everything. Never met a deficit they didn’t love, unless the money goes to the poor or someone brown.
Zero relation to Conservatism or the party of Reagan and Lincoln.
It appears to me that there is no place for fiscal conservatives at the moment. They are a bloc without a party.
I always commit the faux pas of calling the new right politicians conservatives, but you’re right to say that I should not do that. They are not conservatives at all, and are not Republicans in any historical sense. Indeed, for all their jabbering about RINOs, it is in fact they who are Republican in name only. They should probably change the name of their group. Call it what it is – the Trumpist Party.
A-fucking-men.
The Trumpists aren’t conservatives, they’re populists. There are still fiscal conservatives and libertarians in the GOP, but they aren’t a majority at the moment. Arguably, fiscal conservatism evaporate as soon as the GOP achieves power. The best that can be said about them in those situations is that they are less irresponsible than Democrats. That bastion of right wing media, the New York Times published an editorial the other day in which they noted that economists believe between 2 and 4% of our current 8.5% inflation rate is due to the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Where would inflation be if the Dems succeeded in passing their 3 times larger spending bill?
I am not really sure what percentages of registered Republicans fall into what categories. Part of the problem is that there are a large number of elected Republicans that are less ideologically Trumpist and more just too cowardly not to embrace the former Cheeto and Chief. I also think there are a significant number of registered Republicans that tell pollsters they like Trump because they like the way he fights the liberals.
How can the GOP be saved? I think it starts by defeating Madison “Cocaine Orgy” Cawthorn and Marjorie “Jewish Space Laser” Green and as many other Trump endorsed candidates in this years primaries as possible. Then even more importantly, the GOP needs to choose someone other than Donald Trump as their 2024 standard bearer. It would be nice to be able to vote for a Republican for president again. I haven’t done that since John McCain in 2008. I would have voted for Romney but Hurricane Sandy kept me from getting to the polls that year.
*Big government,
Reagan Loved His Deficits.
*unlimited spending
See above.
*tax breaks for the rich
Reagan loved the rich
*support for the oligarchy
See above
*social engineering for them
Reagan loved that dog whistle. Loved it.
*their favored races/religions/sexes/creeds
Also the AIDS crisis.
*complete xenophobia otherwise
Reagan was only mildly xenophobic. I’ll give him that.
*zero support for small business
Reagan loved big business.
*and the total destruction of the middle class
Reagan set the stage for modern income inequality when he torpedoed unionization in the US.
The GOP is not the Party of Trump. Its the party of Jesse Helms and has been that since 1968. Reagan was a nicer person than Trump but that’s really it.
PS All of those Neocons? Most of them worked for Reagan.
Don’t forget…raised taxes 11 times, tripled the national debt. There’s your fiscal responsibility
Raised taxes 11 times, Nature Mom?
Here’s CBS quoting a Republican …
(just to expand a little now that I’m sober) I couldn’t find an itemized list of The Eleven Times. But also found little dispute among responsible sources. He finally realized – if he didn’t in the first place – that supply-side is a crock. And propping up central American dictators and leaking away good money on nuclear weapons aren’t cheap.
I think that eleven must include some minor things like a tiny increase in the federal gas tax or something like that. Bloomberg pegs it at five increases. They also point out that those five added together weren’t enough to close the massive deficit created by the 1981 tax cuts. It took two more increases in 1990 and 1993.
The problem with Reagan’s tax cuts is that they were based on the eternally false premise of conservative economics that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy so much that the tax base will increase enough that revenues will also increase or at least hold steady. That doesn’t work, but the myth endures.
Too boring for me to dig deeper, I’ll cop to your five without clicking. But the broad strokes remain – cut taxes on the rich, raise taxes on everyone, point at “supply-side economics” as a pretext though it’s known to not work.
Thanks, Nature Mom. Given how loosely tax increases can defined – closing a tax loophole can be called a tax increase, apparently – I was not really asking for a list. I thought you might have said “raised” when you meant “lowered”, because that is how Reagan made the deficit explode.