UPDATE: Wednesday, Apr 19, 2023 · 9:11:26 PM +00:00 · Dem
Gallup says that there is a strong relationship between a president’s job approval rating and how they perform in the election.
Some commenters here don’t like the fact that they are free agents and are culpable for the choices that they make regarding voting. That’s too bad. The reason for that is that for the vast majority of registered voters, if they try to vote, if they put forth any effort at all, they will be able to vote. And if they want a reliable and accurate source of information regarding candidates and their policy views, then that information is available to them. Almost everybody has access to the internet in some way or other and they can find reliable sources of information on the internet.
The data points are not guarantees of an outcome. However, taken together they are important predictors. The same commenters don’t like being told political reality. However, if somebody is on the wrong path, then that person needs to be told reality. And that applies to voters whether it offends some people’s sensibilities or not. If people don’t respond to truth, then that’s on them. That applies to political reality as well. We don’t want to find out on election day that they didn’t understand political reality.
You can vote for President Biden in 2024 because you think he did a great job or you can vote for him because if you don’t, then you are helping the anti-democracy forces prevail, or for both reasons.
In the final analysis, there are only two possible outcomes for the 2024 presidential election, either President Biden wins or the anti-democracy forces prevail and they eradicate our democracy. Those are the only two possible outcomes. The former is far preferable to the latter. And when a voter makes a choice, their choice is not morally neutral. They are free agents and are responsible for that choice. And if a voter decides not to vote, then this choice is not morally neutral either. That's just how the world works.
UPDATE: Wednesday, Apr 19, 2023 · 7:53:16 PM +00:00 · Dem
About Willow
President Biden said on Friday that he had the “strong inclination” not to approve of the Willow Project — a major oil project in Alaska — but did so out of concern for the legal ramifications.
“My strong inclination was to disapprove of it across the board but the advice I got from counsel was that if that were the case, I may very well lose…that case in court to the oil company and then not be able to do what I really want to do beyond that,” Biden said during a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I thought it was the better gamble and a hell of a trade off to have the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Sea and so many other places off limits forever now,” he said.
The president likely meant to refer to the Beaufort Sea, where his administration recently announced sweeping protections, rather than the Bering Sea.
UPDATE: Wednesday, Apr 19, 2023 · 6:53:59 PM +00:00 · Dem
I am quite confident that President Biden is doing the best he can, giving everything he can to his office as president. He and his team are doing their best to communicate to voters. And they work harder than you know. And all the information needed to make the right choices for president in 2024 and for US representative and US senator is available to anybody who wants it. The information is there. What message voter A finds compelling is different than what message Voter B finds compelling. And how time should be spent is not a binary question. There is not one provable right answer. You as the voter are responsible for your action or inaction, what you did do or didn’t do for democracy. You are responsible for you. If President Biden doesn't win, then we lose our democracy. And whatever President Biden does do or doesn't do, you will still be responsible for your choice.
UPDATE: Wednesday, Apr 19, 2023 · 5:48:32 PM +00:00 · Dem
The fact that I could not even write “ the support of all those who caucus with the party in the Senate” and instead had to write the support of “ all those who voted for Majority Leader Schumer as majority leader” shows the traitorous nature of one of the members of those whose votes he needed. And yet he still got legislation passed.
Undoubtedly, this won’t be popular here, but frankly this should be called out. If they refuse to be members of the reality community, then that’s on them and there’s nothing I can do about that. They’ll be responsible for convincing themselves that their poor arguments somehow prevail. The LA Times reveals the ignorance of many in our political party.
“In addition to relatively low levels of job approval, a recent CNN poll found just one-third of Americans said Biden deserved reelection. Large shares of Democrats and independents said he did not.
In the Monmouth poll, for example, liberals and Democrats younger than 50 were especially keen to see Biden step aside- … Similarly, the state-by-state Morning Consult surveys found that Biden’s low ratings in several battleground states stemmed in part from significant numbers of Democrats disapproving of his job performance. Almost half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 45%, said the party would have a better chance of winning the White House in 2024 with someone other than Biden as the nominee, according to an NPR/Marist poll taken in February. A similar share of Democrats, 44%, said in a recent Monmouth University poll that they would like Biden to step aside and allow someone else to run, although there was no agreement on an alternative candidate. Just 25% said they wanted Biden to run again,...”
What the actual fuck? President Biden doesn’t deserve re-election? Huh? He passed a shit ton of good legislation despite a very narrow majority including the most serious and consequential climate change legislation in this nation’s sorry history. He had two turncoats in the Senate and zero margin and still got legislation passed that only had the support of all senators who voted for Majority Leader Schumer to be leader. His administration oversaw an economy that created more than 12 million jobs with record breaking deficit reduction, has the lowest unemployment rate in 54 years, near record low unemployment for African Americans and Hispanic unemployment hit a record low last year, and created 800,000 manufacturing jobs. He did what many said was impossible and proof of his naivete by passing good bipartisan legislation. And if you think that Bernie Sanders could have done better, I am going to tell you that you are dead wrong. You think Joe Manchin would have voted for anything that Bernie Sanders supports?
Here’s a start at the legislation that has been passed:
Democrats' accomplishments don't seem to be registering with the public — at least not yet.
One of Biden's first acts as president was to try to get the coronavirus pandemic under control by passing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
The White House sent Americans in the low-to-medium income range a $1,400 payment to help fund basic necessities like rent and groceries. Biden also extended a $300 a week federal unemployment benefit for some 9.7 million people out of work at the time, temporarily expanded the child tax credit program, allotted $7.25 billion for small business loans and $128 billion in grants for state educational agencies.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
The first major gun-safety bill in decades
Building semiconductors at home through the CHIPS Act
The Inflation Reduction Act
Not long after securing his seat in the Oval Office, Biden worked to pass the Build Back Better Act, a massive social spending bill to the tune of nearly $2 trillion. It included many promises Biden made on the 2020 campaign trail, such as major health care reform, universal pre-kindergarten and paid family leave, $550 billion dedicated to combatting climate change and more, paid for in part by increased taxes for corporations and the uber rich.
That original piece of legislature stalled, but after months of negotiations, resurfaced under a different name; the Inflation Reduction Act.
It took almost a year for Biden's ambitious package to pass through Congress, with Vice President Harris' vote breaking the Senate's 50-50 party line vote. It cleared the House in a 220-207 vote along party lines, without a single Republican voting in favor.
The bill aims to tackle inflation by reducing the federal deficit, promote production of certain goods and limit the cost of some prescription drugs, as NPR previously reported.
Support for Ukraine
The PACT Act —
In his first State of the Union address, President Biden called on Congress to pass legislation to make sure veterans impacted by toxic exposures and their families get the comprehensive care and benefits they earned and deserve. In August of 2022, President Biden signed the PACT Act – the largest single bill to address our service members’ exposure to burn pits and other toxins in American history.
Protected marriage equality
In December of 2022, President Biden signed landmark legislation that enshrined marriage equality protections into federal law. The bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act provides security to millions of LGBTQ+ and interracial couples by guaranteeing that the federal government will recognize and protect their marriages.
Student Debt Relief
It’s relatively uncommon for an incumbent president to run and lose? Trump was Trump and that’s once since 1992. The author points out that incumbents who lost faced some serious primary challenger and that this included Presidents George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. Giving up the advantages of incumbency without an obvious leader who is extremely popular with the entire political party is dumb.
President Biden has been very involved on issues that mean a lot to most of the democrats I know of, being a visible advocate when African Americans are victims of gun violence like Ralph Yarl and of fighting for choice and opposing the guy who lied to get his federal judge seat and whose decision was riddled with errors according to analysis I read.
Is President Biden older? Yes, but he’s in very good shape and has the best health care in the world. And he has the benefit of an incredibly accomplished, intelligent, and talented vice president, Vice President Harris. The Democratic Party united around him after South Carolina for a reason. If the party had coalesced around somebody or there were one and only one obvious choice to head the ticket last time around and that person had a good chance of defeating an incumbent Trump, then President Biden likely would not have run. He’s done an outstanding job. There is one and only one obvious choice for our political party to nominate, President Biden. Not nominating him would be a catastrophe for many reasons, not the least of which would be providing an opening for republicans to attack the progress we made thus far in his presidency. There would be division. South Carolina only confirmed that Biden is the choice for the party’s base, our backbone, our most loyal, consistent, and committed voters. For me, Vice President Harris was my first choice. However, President Biden was the choice and there’s no reason to believe that’s changed. Ignoring our base, our most loyal, consistent, and committed voters would be an egregious error.
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update: Somebody thinks that our democracy isn’t in any real danger and that the rhetoric is overblown. It’s almost as if this person didn’t watch the insurrection or doesn’t understand the danger to our democracy from the insurrection. Of course, first you have to understand how our electoral college system works and most people here probably understand it very well. However, it is more complicated than the popular vote would be. Since an understanding of how that works is essential in order to understand the danger that our democracy was in last time and will be in next time, I will present a simplified version of how it works. My apologies to the vast majority of the readers here who already understand how it works.
A brief review although I am confident that you know this, but keeping it in mind helps to see the danger of January 6th.
When we go to vote for president, we are voting for a party’s slate of electors, a group of people picked out by our political party’s leadership because they are very loyal to the party. Suppose PA has 18 US Representatives (# of representatives is based upon population). Then, PA has 20 electoral college votes because PA has 18 US Representatives and 2 US Senators. So, early voting, absentee / mail in voting, and voting on election day takes place. The PA Secretary of State looks at the election. If the margin of victory was less than .25%, then there is an automatic recount paid for by the state. If the margin of victory is less than .5%, then the losing candidate’s campaign can request and get a recount if they pay for it. Suppose that's completed. The PA Secretary of State looks into any allegations of voter fraud along with other entities. Then, apart from some damn compelling reason, the Secretary of State (and sometimes other parts of the state government look at and certify parts of the state like a congressional district and then it goes to the Secretary of State) certifies the election.
Then on the first Monday after the first two Wednesdays in December, the electors (again let's stick with PA) meet at the the state Capitol or wherever the state legislature has designated. Suppose that Team D won PA according to the certified results. Then, there would be 20 people, 20 electors who would meet at the state Capitol in PA to cast their ballots for president. In some states, there is a law against a “faithless” elector, meaning the electors are all, by law, required to vote for the party's nominee for president. In other states, the elector is free to vote consistent with their conscience although they would not have been chosen by their party’s leadership if they were not extremely loyal to their party. Let’s suppose all 20 cast their ballot for President Biden and Vice President Harris. This same scene is taking place all across the country in all 50 states.
Then on January 6th, the ballots and their results, are brought to the US Capitol. The vice president, then, has a purely ceremonial role in which they count all the electoral college votes for all the states to determine who wins. The candidate who wins 270+ electoral college votes wins the presidential election. If they are tied, then the tiebreaker is who has the greatest number of state delegations in the House of Representatives. In other words, suppose that there are 13 congressional districts in Georgia, and, thus Georgia has 15 electoral college votes. Then it is determined which political party has a majority of those 13 congressional districts and that party gets credit for that state. So that party would essentially be given one point for Georgia. And this would be done for all the states and whichever party has the most points, wins this tiebreaker.
Now, even though all of the state’s election results have been certified, Congress can object to counting that state’s electoral college votes. There can be oral objections resulting in a discussion and then a vote in 2 hours or if there is at least one member in each chamber of Congress which wants to sign onto a written objection to counting the electoral college votes of a state that has already certified their election results. Now, there is a written objection and so it is formal. However, this matters not unless there is a majority in each chamber. If that happens, then we likely to to SCOTUS, and we possibly have a genuine, honest to God Constitutional crisis although I suspect that the states would prevail given the deference the Constitution gives the state legislatures.
Have we had a written objection to counting the electoral college votes of a state whose results had already been certified by the state recently? Yes, in 2004, this did happen. However, it was completely different than what happened in 2020.
In 2004, John Kerry had already conceded. So, there was zero chance that Kerry would become president out of this mess. In 2020, Trump had not conceded and was still attempting to become president. In 2004, John Kerry asked Senator Boxer, who was the lone senator to join the OH Democratic delegation of US representatives, to not do this, to not sign off on a written objection to counting the electoral college votes of Ohio. In 2020, Trump encouraged every republican in Congress to sign off on a written objection to counting the electoral college votes of the swing states. In 2004, Senator Boxer made it clear that she was merely highlighting voter suppression in Ohio, not disputing who won Ohio. In 2020, Trump and the R Trumpers in Congress were indeed disputing who won the 2020 presidential election. In 2004, there was only one US Senators and a few dozen OH Dem US Representatives who supported the written objection. In 2020, there were 8 Senate Republicans and 139 House Republicans (about 2/3 of all House Republicans) who signed off on the written objection to counting the electoral college votes.
So, what happened in 2020 was different than what happened in 2004. Trump knew what happens on January 6th. He knew that the electoral college votes are counted at the US Capitol. He invited a violent mob of people to be wild at a rally near the Capitol. Meanwhile the violent Trumper influencers started to explain the plan as they inferred it from the date and the “wild” reference in Trump’s tweet. Trump incites the mob that was already the wilder and more violent part of the Trumper voters.
My view is the most obvious one. Trump’s plan was to use the violent mob by being on scene at the Capitol and to direct them to scare and intimidate enough members of Congress to get a majority in each chamber to sign off on a written objection to not count enough states in order to take away enough Biden electoral college votes so that Trump ended up with more electoral college votes than Biden or more easily to scare Pence into turning his ceremonial role into an administrative one in which he alone could decide not to count whichever state’s electoral college votes gave Biden more than Trump had. Of course, that ends up meaning that one person gets to pick who is the leader of the federal government and nothing could be more antithetical to our American democracy than that.
And we saw in the January 6th Committee hearings just how close they came to the members and to Pence. And if they take the members hostage and threaten them and kill others and eventually a majority of the members who remain with a quorum present in each chamber do sign off on the written objection to not count enough of the electoral college votes of enough Biden states to make it so that Trump had more electoral college votes, then his hope is that it goes to the Supreme Court.
Of course, we would hope that even this radical Supreme Court would not allow this coup attempt to prevail and I don't think that even this SCOTUS would allow such an event to trump, pun not intended, the states’ certified election results. But we don't know.
The insurrection was an attempt at a coup and it might have been close to success. Therefore, this idea that I am making up the existential threat to democracy that Trumpism represents is unrealistic. And this time around, if Trump gets in power, he will have more people in power in the right places, people who will do what some brave republicans like Brad Raffensperger would not do this last time around, do whatever Trump says in order to keep Trump in power. This next time, he would likely have an even more realistic attempt at a coup, a plan that would come to fruition earlier when it is easier to take the election from the Democratic Party’s nominee for president and give it to Trump who doesn't care if only two terms are allowed now or give it to some other republican without integrity, perhaps another member of the Family.
Hence, deciding that this rhetoric is overblown and democracy isn’t really in danger is a terrible, terrible mistake. And when you realize that, then you take the president’s job approval numbers very seriously as Gallup says that they are strongly correlated with an incumbent president’s performance in the president’s reelection campaign. If you take that seriously and you look at modern presidential elections, then it becomes clear that if the polls of these lean D voters are to be believed, then it becomes clear that it's time to explain political reality to them.
Political reality is that our country faces an existential threat to its democracy. The political reality is that if President Biden doesn’t win reelection, then there is a good chance that we lose our democracy. If a person in the office of president is able to stay in office when they lose the presidential election or the incumbent president is able to put their preferred candidate for president into office even if that preferred candidate loses the election, then it’s hard to see how we can restore our democracy. You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube once it’s out.
None of this is difficult to understand. The January 6th Committee hearings were and are easily accessible for anybody who wants to watch them. This information is not hidden away in a corner of the internet. You don’t need to know a secret password or a secret handshake. It's in plain view. The algorithms reveal your preferences and your critical thinking skills, your ability to determine which sources of information are trustworthy and accurate. They are like a mirror.
Pretending that the threat to democracy isn’t real is a terrible mistake.