Oh, Mary!!
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I have to disagree. Sandersā national profile was clearly aided by the primaries. But he drew unprecedented crowds early on. You canāt make that stuff up. People love what he stands for. Even a large chunk of people who ended up voting for Trump said they would have voted for Sanders.
This poll was state-base, not national (although heās also the most popular Senator nationally as well). At home, he won his last re-election with 76% of the vote (can you name any other Senator with polling that high?). This, with a relatively high turnout too. And you have to consider, that although VT appears to be a strong liberal, progressive state, it is much closer to āpurpleā than most people realize. Roughly 20% of VT Republicans also voted for him.
Canāt beat that kind of endorsement.
Heās popular for a very good reason. He has clear ethics, policy and political positions, he articulates them well, is consistent and unwavering regarding equality, fairness and justice, and has always been focused on addressing injustice, first and foremost.
Thereās a good reason for his popularity. I wouldnāt brush it off as merely a populist rise on primary exposureā¦
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Not in Kentucky.
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Exactly. This is such a weird poll/series of polls.
Look at ND. Since Iāve lived there and live 25 miles away, I know a bit about it, but it still confounds me.
One of the most red states in the entire country, but:
R- John Hoeven (former ND Gov.): Approve= 65%, Dis= 23, DK= 11
D - Heidi Heitkamp (former ND AG): Approve = 60%, Dis= 32, DK = 8
What? Itās hard to actually quantify who liberal or conservative a Senator is. Here are a few sites:
http://progressivepunch.org/scores.htm?house=senate
http://thatsmycongress.com/senate/
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/report-cards/2015/senate/ideology
https://ballotpedia.org/National_Journal_vote_ratings
I canāt vouch for the accuracy of these, but they all have similar outcomes. Heitkamp is a conservative democrat, and Hoeven is a moderate to conservative Republican.
How can they both have a +60% approval rating? They vote against each other the vast majority of the time!
I just donāt understand people.
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Oh, Mitch, Mitch, Mitch. If this news bothers you, just wait until the history books write you up. Your kids, and their kids, will be embarrassed to own their connection to you.
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You greatly overstate the role of circumstances here, I believe.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) ranks as the nationās least popular senator, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
My quote is from a December 2012 article. He was even more unpopular then:
The survey, conducted by Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling, showed that more than half ā 55 percent ā of Kentucky voters disapprove of their senator, while just 37 percent of those surveyed signaled support.
It doesnāt seem to have hurt him then, and it probably wonāt hurt him now.
You just answered your question by describing half of Eastern KY.
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Not saying they didnāt exist. Just saying the idea of their omnipresence and influence was out of sync with their importance to anybody but themselves.
If itās any consolation to you, though, theyāre still around. Only now they attack Sanders for being a traitor and putting his support behind Clinton. Of course, it is possible that some of those posts are Mercer and Koch funded hanky panky. They like the idea of Democrats hating on each other, and why let such a useful hatefest go?
Seems to me there might be a lesson in that, in hating on each other. You?
As Tom Lehrer once said, āI know that there are people who do not love their fellow man----and I hate people like that.ā
The BernieBro phenomenon is real, was real, and represents a danger to Democrats regaining control of Congress.
They are now calling themselves āJustice Democratsā and are working to primary sitting Democrats in the House if they havenāt signed on to the un-passable and quixotic āMedicare for allā bill.
These people are no different from the āFreedom Caucusā loonies.
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You mean Cenk whatās his faceās people?
Tell me about them when they start getting more than 79 or 100 likes for their shit on Facebook.
edited to add: Uygur. Cenk Uygur.
Pompous self-congratulatory gasbag.
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Who? Me or Uygur? And Iām smiling, please believe that.
Cenk Uygur.
But it doesnāt matter if any of us like hemābecause he loves himself enough for all of us.
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This is why voter suppression is so important. Need to keep these illegitimate voters from mucking things up.
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Supposedly constituent services was the reason Alphonso DāAmato held on so long in NY. Of course, itās even easier for someone like Sanders when your state has the population of a congressional district and is geographically the size of a western county.
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Numbers change as elections near, but itās good to see that Donnelly in Indiana is in better shape than either Heller or Flake, the two best shots at picking up Senate seats.
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Well, I must be doing something right, because I have power and you donāt.
Because many people assess āapprovalā based more or personal ethics? Or based on ability to actually govern?
I know nothing of the Senators involved, but if Hoeven said during the campaign āI believe in X and will vote and act to make X happenā and then does so, he would attract some āapproveā votes based simply on being truthful.
Meanwhile Heitkamp says āI believe in Y and will vote and act to make Y happenā, and then does so, then Heitkamp attracts āapproveā votes based on truthfulness also.
And many voters would approve of both, based on truthfulness, even if X and Y are irreconcilable.
Another route to these outcomes is that ālow-informationā voters can sometimes be āhigh-pragmatismā voters?
They donāt really care who or what your plan is or where it draws its intellectual basis from. They want the road fixed, the local school funded and the streets safe.
So if Hoeven helps pass school funding initiative and talks that up he gets approval.
And if Heitkamp helps pass a law and order initiative and talks that up, she gets approval.
Bernie was popular with the young because he promised them a lot of free things and maybe reminded them of their grandfather. He was never going to win in a country where voters are mostly clustered in the center and might vote for someone who is center left. Bernie has a pretty unsavory history in his early years, was not a team-player in Congress so got just about no legislation through. Maybe he brought home the bacon for Vermonters but he did little or nothing for furthering issues that would help the rest of the country. Hillary spent a lifetime working to help women and children and look where that got her. The jackals came after her and ate her alive.
I would love to see America move more to the left, gain Medicare for all, provide free college at state schools, have state of the art transportation and all the other nice things but after watching election after election both state and local I know one other thing about too many Americans: they donāt want to pay more taxes. They donāt see the connection between higher taxes and having nice things and this is because of decades of spending more & more on the military and weapons of war than on making life better for average Americans. And yet a lot of Americans totally approve of that priority.
Iāve learned in my old age that Americans are pretty schizo about what they want. Democrats have always been the better choice if one wants a livable country but large numbers of people in this country believe the Republican lies and they shudder at having to live in a socialistic country. They want their freedoms. It is built into the American psyche.