That’s the question.
They’re swing voters now.
Note to self: text castellan and get him to widen moat. #notalllords
Apropos of nothing, there are arguments that elections results are just random.
Piece from 2012 at RCP making that case:
An academic study on the subject:
Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
And a detailed review of the book: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163402
I don’t know where to put this one. This thread seemed as good a place as any.
Yeah, I think this meme of “well, Democrats seemed to care more about which bathrooms they are allowed in than they did about jobs” is a bunch of BS. I do wonder if the folks referenced in that article actual think that changes to the ACA will be bad for them, though. I mean, once they’ve been taken in by the affinity fraud represented by the 2nd amendment claims and the bathroom stuff, what’s to stop them from believing that these policy changes will help. In other words, that they will be able to pay less and still get all the coverage they need because right now the only thing stopping that is the government insisting that dudes pay for vagina exams.
Trickle-down economics seems to still be going strong, which doesn’t make me too optimistic about people voting against their own economic self-interest.
I did hear that as a reason why a co-worker who voted for Obama went for Trump this time. It wasn’t “I hate the transfolk”, but “why they bothering about that when my healthcare costs so damn much?”
I think a lack of economic focus and failure of the ACA to keep premiums down for folks making over the subsidy threshhold is what caused the better- off WWC Obama voters to switch to Trump.
ACA costs are really a sore spot at work since we have to buy our own healthcare yet make just enough not to get subsidies.
So, imagine you didn’t have the ACA. How would things be different? Describe that situation.
.
My mother called and cried to my sister about her losing Obamacare in the near future. She’s self-employed which often pushes her right out of any sort of income requirement for Medicaid, but maybe only because she doesn’t lie as well on her taxes as others do. I suspect the GOP doesn’t want single working individuals on Medicaid anyway.
Most folks blame the ACA for the severe rise in premiums, even if I think that statement is mostly untrue. (there is some rise due to the ACA, the real reason was what the ACA didn’t do instead of what it did)
Nesrie, I think your mom will end up ok, I don’t think the GOP will kill the subsidies- at least not for a few years. Too many folks would feel that one and know who did it. They’ll go after the Medicaid folks and the expanded Medicaid instead.
If she currently has insurance under obamacare, she should be ok. SHOULD, since we don’t really know exactly what the deal will be.
But, with someone like Paul Ryan’s plan, even if she has some kind of pre-existing condition, in theory she should be able to keep her current plan going without sudden and crazy jacks in prices.
The people who are really screwed, are folks who let their coverage lapse, and have pre-existing conditions. They will perhaps be LESS screwed than they were prior to the ACA, but they’ll still be screwed pretty hard, as they’ll get put into high risk pools at best, and then end up paying twice normal for health insurance, forever.
My sister is in this boat, recently left her job and became freelance, and hasn’t gotten insurance yet. She let her Cobra lapse, and I’ve been yelling at her that she needs to get a plan in place NOW before next year, because who knows what’s coming down the pike… but she’ll have a better chance if she has a current plan going.
Well my sister tried to remind her they haven’t done anything yet. We don’t know if they’re going to throw a bunch of individuals off these plans or not. It’s also a GOP target not really a Trump target… maybe. It’s hard to say with someone who says what people want to hear but may do something else.
The group on the expanded care though seems pretty concerned, and I don’t blame them although it’s not entirely panic time… yet.
While not specific to Democrats, this is a good article:
The hero we needed.
I’ve been avoiding as much as I can anything politically related (unfortunately my SO continues to follow the news and I can’t completely escape it); I’m not past the anger stage, and I’m self-aware enough to know I am incapable of it. Not only because an occupying force is now in charge of the country (aka Republicans) but also the “Democrats abandoned white working class voters” and “crying wolf” crap is almost as infuriating. So far as I’m concerned if everyone who voted for Trump spontaneously combusted I’d have to work hard from cheering (and that’s not a pleasant place to be.) With that out of the way:
Hillary Clinton lost 4 points when the letter was released. She eventually gained back some of that, but it looks like 2 points were permanent. This jibes well with Nate Silver’s estimate that the Comey letter cost Clinton 2 points.
It is traditional at this point to acknowledge that lots of things affected the election: bad campaign strategy, rural blue-collar whites, etc. This is what you’ll read about in all the post-election thumbsuckers, but this kind of stuff happens to all campaigns. The Trump campaign certainly made lots of mistakes too, though no one talks about them anymore. The difference here is that things like the Comey letter don’t happen to all campaigns. This was an egregious intervention in the campaign by the director of the FBI, who was motivated at least partly by his fear of a rogue group of agents who were dedicated to Clinton’s defeat.
This is decidedly not normal. Comey knew exactly what he was doing. He was warned that it would be an unprecedented act of interference in an election. But he went ahead anyway, and went ahead in a manner perfectly calculated to do the maximum damage. The press played along and the rest is history.
I still think those messages will matter in 2020- because the electorate will be more conservative due to voter suppression, but those conservatives might be sick of Trumpism in 2020 due to a bad economy.
Arise!
(because December 2016 was so very long ago in P&R kill me now)
This editorial from The Concourse (a Gawker joint, if you’re not familiar, but don’t let that sour you automatically) pretty much puts my feelings into words.
the DNC race is mostly important as a symbolic statement on which direction the Democratic Party is choosing to go in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory.
“Left,” is the correct answer here. The Democratic Party needs to go left. Never in my lifetime has it been clearer that the Democratic Party needs to go left. Even if you are a moderate Democrat, you should, at this point, be able to perceive the fact that the angry, divided nature of our nation right now—justified anger driven by decades of rising inequality and the ongoing collapse of economic opportunity and a political system in which both parties have utterly failed to remedy these things—is crying out for a change from the establishment of the past.
Preach.
The answer to a heavily divided nation is to divide it even more by going left? How exactly is leaving behind the moderate Democrats and losing more Independents supposed to help?
Yeah, because Clintonian centrist triangulation has been doing such a bang-up job of getting Democrats elected.
Yeah, if the Democrats are just gonna run as Republican Light, may as well just vote for the party that promises to nuke anyone who scares you while they cuddle up to big pharma and bigger banks.