Well, it’s been a whopping 83 days since Biden’s inauguration. In that time, he’s filled his cabinet (remember - no transition from TMFWWNBN and his enablers), fixed the vaccine supply chain, inoculated over 72 million people (that’s more than 20 percent of the population), HR1 has passed the House, he’s cancelled all of TMFWWNBN’s heinous executive orders and started to address the disaster at our borders.
Again, that’s in 83 days…
But yeah, you can go with “dithering” and “pissing time”, if that’s what you’re comfortable with…
If you mean would federal judges be able to stay enforcement of one or more provisions of a new VRA, the answer is yes. It’s hard to imagine grounds for enjoining the whole thing. Whether any judges would try to enjoin anything remains to be seen, of course.
Coming from my unwashed corner of the universe, I don’t get any of those things being the main motivator of Republican turnout. My gut reaction as a plebe is that the turnout was a direct response to the Black Lives Matter protests. People vote against things more than they vote for things.
This was a backlash vote amplified by having a women of color on the ticket. This was a racist reaction pure and simple. If Biden is able to keep doing good things for people then hopefully this won’t be as much of an issue.
This puts Manchin’s behavior in a whole new light. He is starting to show his true colors, and it ain’t pretty.
Brad Parscale’s primary election strategy was identifying, registering, and turning out new MAGA voters. That effort appears to have been quite effective, and it largely predated last summer’s protests. I don’t doubt that they were motivating to a lot of his voters, but his campaign should actually get a lot of credit for its turnout efforts. Thank goodness it wasn’t enough, and let’s hope they go back to not voting without Trump on the ballot.
The thing with voting is that once you get people in the habit of doing it…they keep doing it, and they pretty much stick with the party they are voting with.
I agree, but Trump won’t be in office like he was in 2018. He was a factor behind the motivation of Democrats turning out to vote in 2018. People wanted to express their distaste for the MF at the ballot box and turn the House over to Democrats as a brake on his agenda. Both were accomplished.
Results are going to depend a lot on how Biden’s performance is perceived during the midterms by the majority of the voters.
This is historically true, but there are good reasons to believe that it won’t hold with a lot of Trump’s new voters. They’re single-issue voters, and their issue is Trump.
Another factor in 2020 was the glorious work of Stacey Abrams and folks like her. The new round of voter suppression laws might just backfire and people determined to exercise their franchise will jump through all the hoops. Better still, they’ll help other people navigate the hoops.
I think a saving grace here is that a lot of their rhetoric is effective at demoralizing their base. There’s a great deal of “futility” in their discussion of “fighting” the government and even if they aren’t intending to dampen turnout, I think that they have a decent chance of having that effect because they are saying the things their people want to hear for ratings, without considering the negative impact it will have on their actual political engagement.
Meanwhile, I would like to think that the Democrats will take this data into accordance unlike the Priebus 2012 post-mortem the GOP quickly dispatched as soon as the milquetoast wing of the party lost all semblance of control. Being a data-minded party should help the Dems adapt to a changing world (some more than others clearly), whereas the GOP have soundly rejected data as a relevant factor in their electoral strategies.
My cynical take is this: Biden (and McConnell) knows Manchins game and will play it out to the point that Dems offer Manchin just about everything he wants and then “boom” Manchin will discover GOP bad faith double dealing and sign the bill to rave reviews. Biden is willing to let Manchin play it and take credit.
Dems aren’t dithering. There are literally just two senators possibly holding it up. Let’s hold them accountable by not pretending it’s the whole party.
Yes, and let’s not forget the voter registration disadvantage of Dems being unable to do registration drives at party events and large gatherings. All those summer concerts and festivals that got cancelled had to have left a pretty big void.
Agreed, and I have no doubt that all this talk of stolen elections aided by cowardly Republicans who refused to do the right thing has to be a net negative in which many of their voters have decided it isn’t worth the trouble anymore. Add that to the Qcumber crazy in which they also believe that any day now Trump is going to just take over and claim his rightful place as president of the world and that all the Dems and disloyal Republicans will be executed/are being executed. If you believe any of that then what’s the point of voting?
Polling may have been substantially wrong, and media strategy may have been somewhat off, but the Ds did generate 81 million votes for Joe Biden so they didn’t do everything wrong. It’s just that a lot more Rs showed up than expected – even for Trump – and the extra voters not only stuck with Trump, they also voted for Rs down ballot. A lot of Rs and R-leaning independents voted for Biden, but stuck with Rs down ballot as well hoping to put a check on him.
The Ds can run the Biden v. Trump race again but without Trump on the ticket boosting his loyalists’ turnout and enthusiasm. 2022 will not be like 2010 and could resemble 2002. “You’re either with us or your with the insurrectionists.”
Biden’s approval rating is holding firm and is even steadier than Trump’s. He gets a lot of leeway after Trump and non-Trumpers have no respect for anything Rs have to say about anything.
One other point I haven’t seen mentioned but deserves some discussion. The Rs gerrymander the House and state legislative districts based on 2010 data and at a time they had a decent share of the suburban vote. But with the 2020 census, population growth will be more concentrated in the cities and suburbs. So in 2020’s election, D popular vote gains were understated by a decade of growth and their gaining with suburban voters.
Rs will find gerrymandering much more difficult for 2022 now that they don’t have suburban voter advantages and the census will more closely resemble actual population counts. It’s one reason Ds dominated 2018 despite previous gerrymanders. Rs can try to carve up D-leaning suburban areas with heavy-R rural areas, but there simply aren’t enough people to do that effectively. Ds will probably pick up a seat in PA and maybe two, especially since the PA Supreme Court will invalidate obvious gerrymanders.
Florida could be problematic, but again the growth around Orlando and other D-dominated areas should help.
TV ad spending isn’t working well — go digital instead.
A memo from Priorities USA, a major Democratic Super PAC, highlights the wasted dollars spent on TV ads last cycle, many of which were shown to people who’d already voted early. The group also found that 75 percent of TV ads in House races aired outside the district they intended to target.
It’s a known problem here in western Wisconsin and even Tammy Baldwin is trying to get this fixed.
I don’t get any Wisconsin TV on Comcast or on DirecTV. All the ads I get politically are Minnesota ads. Nothing for WI. All of my neighbors and the entire western half of the State is in the same boat.
Biden is not Nancy nor is he Schumer. Biden is filling the cabinet with the help of the Senate. The vaccine supply chain has nothing to do with Congress (other than the funding through the COVID relief act, which is already passed and gone from the House and Senate), HR1 is still on the Senate docket and in action in the Senate. Executive orders are strictly Biden.
The Congress just came off of Spring recess. Of all the things you mention, maybe half are in the control of the Congress (and some of those are already complete). No. This needs to get moving already.
Dems are still not proving they can walk and chew gum at the same time, which the GQP does with amazing calm and alacrity.
As much as the pandemic was thought to aide Democrats, I think it was probably a push. The pandemic prevented so much of Dems traditional registration and GOTV efforts. They couldn’t do registration drives at festivals like Black Family Reunion and Bonnaroo and they couldn’t go door to door. Also, many of the people in the Dem party who have long been in the trenches organizing these things were of the demos most vulnerable to Covid. Plus, the backlash to the restrictions may have been equal to the support of those measures. That would certainly explain why we didn’t do better down ballot. That, and of course, “defund the police” surely didn’t help us there.
I disagree. The Dems have stayed on point, Bidens polls are holding steady while the GOP is floundering with no central leadership, and what they do have, Tshit, is off the charts insane.
