That’s what everyone kept saying in 2016, but he didn’t destroy the oligarchy. He raided the coffers and shat in the well water. His destruction of the status quo was entirely self-serving, and he left in place all of the systems he could abuse to benefit himself at the expense of everyone else.

Proof in point: We’re still suffering from the lingerings of Reaganomics. Both Bushs caused their own shifts against a progressive society, often by throwing out things built up by the previous administration to improve things. Trump did a lot of things too, but the ironic one is where he dismantled the very things that GWB helped create to fight worldwide pandemics (credit to George there for reading a book, asking his advisors how true it was, and doing something).

What people thinking this don’t understand is how much and how long it will burn.

Certainly all the “burn it all down” voters are going to get is they’ll spend the rest of their life in the fire they helped start. Maybe they’ll watch all the people they care about burn first, via health care, LGTBQ rights, prosection of political enemies, etc.

Thomas won’t even have to die. If Trump wins you can be sure we’ll see at least 1 resignation and replacement. They aren’t going to make the same mistake that RBG made, especially since they’ve had their eye on the ball when it comes to packing the courts with conservative judges at every level for decades.

Everything is in place for Trump to perform an autocratic authoritarian takeover of America. People need to be mentally prepared to fight or flight.

He repealed 112 environmental regulations in one term and wrote a record 220 Executive Orders, without any familiarity with the job of holding office, and during a pandemic. Imagine how much more effective he’ll be at destroying our progress this time around.

A lot of people can’t understand 10 years in the future. Our animal inside wants now now now. Gotta store up for winter.

The problem with the Democrats is they are poorly selling the future, while the Republicans are “promising” the now, at the expense of the future.

This ^

Alito and Thomas are the two oldest on the court at 74 and 75 respectively. So there’s a good chance that whoever is elected in '24 gets a shot at replacing one or both of them.

DEFINITELY whoever is elected in '28.

So, for safety’s sake, we need a D win in BOTH '24 AND '28.

Replacing them flips the court from 6-3 Conservative to 5-4 Liberal.

BUT - then the next two oldest are Roberts, who would be the swing vote, and Sotomayor. Both 69 currently.

So in '28, they’ll be the same age as Alito and Thomas now. Likely to be replaced in either the '28 or '32 cycle.

Have we replaced all 3 of the democrats with younger ones so we don’t have another fucking nightmare from someone’s pride about their job?

it goes further, a lot of them don’t trust the court anymore at all. to them it’s beyond redemption so it doesn’t matter who gets appointed by whom.

Yes I know right?

Marriage equality? Who needs it.

Giving unions the biggest win/shot in the arm they’ve had in the last 50 to 75 years? Poppycock!

Eliminating non compete agreements for most Americans? For fucks sake we don’t like competing!

Forgiving $146 billion in student debt alone? Who are we kidding. Everyone knows debt is an asset. And that since I didn’t get any debt relief no one else should either!

BIG / S ENERGY

I’ll be real. There was only one candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary that I disliked more than biden. And that was culty gabbard. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the last two presidential primaries. Biden is so far from perfect or what we really need. But has still been astonishingly good on so many things. Granted in our current state that’s a low bar. But I honestly struggle to think what Sanders could have done in a meaningful sense that Biden has not. I’m sure Sanders would have spoken out against the violence in Palestine sooner. It would still be happening exactly as it is now. But he would have spoken out sooner. So that is a plus.

But it really boggles the mind to try to comprehend how people can still be this uninformed. To think everything he touches turns to shit. No it just goes to prove the old adage. The left doesn’t need enemies with allies like the left.

Elaborate

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including but not limited to wielding the military in a way that I bet will cause disasters we didn’t even really have on the radar as possibilities before they arrived.

Everyone who paid attention during 2020 and has read the Project 2025 plans should know that this will happen.

But it doesn’t even have to be malicious, though he will for sure be malicious, stupidity is enough. A million people died because Covid was so much worse here than it could’ve been, all because he was too petty to say “Put on a mask, save your country” which his base would’ve inevitably eaten up.

But no, his stupidity caused a million avoidable deaths.

Yeah, Biden is a warmonger, are you implying that Trump isn’t? Because that’s fucking insane.

And Hitler also was a dictator, something orange hitler desperately wants to be.

To be clear, polling theory is totally valid and an established science within statistics.

But the challenge is always with methodology, because you can never get a perfect simple random sample. And the methodology here certainly seems terrible.

Something fucky is going on. From the page:

If the 2024 presidential election were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were

Then it lists the usual suspects including third parties. The only age group for that question voting for Biden is 65 and older. Maybe so, but that doesn’t seem right.

Not only putting RFK at 10%, but in states where he isn’t even on the ballot yet and likely will never be.

Huh. Well I’m willing to believe that’s reality then.

I mean that’s pretty dismissive.

The largest cohort of people in this country want neither Biden nor Trump. Some of that cohort are willing to step out on a limb and support a third party.

they are voting for his name. not him

This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing!

My only critique is that I don’t think 2020 skew is valid anymore. After Dobbs, the landscape seems to have significantly changed. 2022 was predicted to favor Republicans by a strong margin, but it ended up being a tie pretty much. And a lot of special elections have had surprising results too.

My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we’re getting a picture now that’s skewed right, versus left from beforehand.

It’s really hard to say though. There weren’t a lot of great polls to start with in 2022, and special elections don’t have significant polling either. It’s a weird position where the only good data set we have is from 2020, but there have been so many changes in the national environment that we have reason to doubt the skews from 2020 are still valid. But at the same time, what else do we have? Vibes and feelings and anecdotes. And the engineer in me dislikes dismissing data in favor of vibes. It’s important to consider still I think, because none of this is infallible. But I honestly couldn’t tell you what the “right” outlook to have is. Maybe I’m onto something, but maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement.

All I know is that I don’t know.

If you’ve been following the polling there is nothing different or unique about this one.

They posted their methodology and to me, as an unqualified lay person, it’s clearly shit, and there’s no reason to think it’ll yield anything even resembling an accurate picture of how people are going to vote in the election. It’s not surprising to me that recent polls in general tend to be as inaccurate as you’re saying they are.

I would be interested to go back and look at some of the polling that led up to recent special elections where Democrats won, and see how the poll results compared with the election results – if you follow polling in detail (which again, I don’t), do you happen to know where I could look to find that?

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What are your expectations? Biden has implemented far more policy than he gets credit for. He can’t fix everything all at once. It has taken us decades to get where we are, one presidential term is not going to be enough to right the ship.

We all have to work within the framework as it exists today - even the president. He has some challenging lines to walk just to get seemingly simple things done.

So what policies do you want? And in what ways have Biden’s progress been unacceptable to you? In what ways have they been acceptable? Given the current landscape, what do you realistically think he could or should do differently?

Fair enough. But running away stomping and screaming never helped anyone. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s incremental change. Not voting or voting for Trump will never bring about the change they are looking for.

Accelerationism is such a disgustingly privileged stance.

This comment boiled down:

It’s not apathy, it’s anger! So that’s okay!

stop criticizing people who don’t want to vote when their promised „democracy” is terrible and even worse.

How exactly do you think a democratic election that runs on votes is supposed to work? What exactly is not voting going to do, other than ensure that the folks who are voting for the candidate that is more inclined to do more damage to this country wins?

Even if you dislike both candidates, not voting isn’t going to fix anything. Vote for whoever is least likely to destroy the country and make it hell for certain people, and then focus your efforts locally and trying to inspire change on the local level.

Do you want to teach and encourage them to give up so quickly in the face of long-lasting international issues? That’s what you are doing and I hope they see that. This Isreal and Palestine thing did not start in October.

Please redirect your attention to election reform. Fix the system.

Hey, I’m all for an armed socialist revolution. Maybe a few guillotines.

Until we get that organized tho, you’ll just have to vote so that we can actually organize it.

The joke of 2020 was people screaming about how Trump was very obviously guilty of very real crimes and we needed to get him out to prosecute him.

Then we… didn’t. Ninety-one indictments and the bulk of them have been deferred or dropped. The single remaining case in SDNY isn’t stopping him from campaigning and isn’t meaningfully threatening his ability to assume office.

Sure, trump wins and everything gets even worse but stop criticizing people who don’t want to vote when their promised „democracy” is terrible and even worse.

I’m living in a city where the school district was simply taken over by the Governor. All the HISD school board elections are rendered meaningless. The superintendent is just a charter school flak who exists to dismantle public education. No democratic accountability. Outright looting of the ISD’s budget. The Feds have expressed no interest in interceding in interstate embezzlement.

And we’re told the only way to stop this is to vote. Vote for what? Nobody currently running wants to stop this dismantling of a foundational element of modern civilization. Hell, even the Dem-endorsed new Houston Mayor is just along for the ride on this shit.

That is completely unbelievable and I would be very surprised to see a source instead of just an opinion that Genx are Biend supporters with boomers.

Hell, boomers don’t even vote for Biden, most of them go trump.

The Democratic party’s main base has always been the youth, but the party fucking hates them because their more liberal than someone 60 years older.

If the party embraced them, we’d never have another Republican president.

You want Biden to go into ruby red districts where a dem-in-name-only got into power by the skin of their teeth, and campaign for Democratic policies, and you think those people will welcome him? You think it will be easy??

You’re in a bubble, dude. There’s no silent majority of progressives out there. Just because all of your friends are doesn’t mean the whole nation is.

Manchin got elected because he blocked Dem policies. Not in spite of it.

The president is not, and should not, be an all-powerful individual.

If these idiots stay home he will be and they will be fucked with a capital F.

Care to elaborate on what Biden can realistically do with the current congressional breakdown?

Agreed. She’s more of a cunt than a bitch.

I’ll accept your premise at face value, let’s say he has accomplished a lot. Personally, I’d like to see him doing more, but let’s set that aside and say that his accomplishments would be enough to win the support of the progressive youths, and yet it hasn’t. The problem is still not with the “stupid” voters failing to recognize Biden’s achievements or the existential threat Trump represents. It’s still Biden’s job to sell it to the voters. It’s up to Biden and his campaign to put those issues front and center, to talk about what he’s trying to do and what his vision is for America. If he isn’t getting the message out, then he is failing at one of the critical aspects of his job.

But really, I don’t think the problem is messaging. I think the problem is that Biden isn’t the guy people want him to be. He’s a moderate neoliberal who backs progressive issues when he believes it will help him in the polls. I think he doesn’t put those issues front and center or push very hard or make persuasive arguments because he doesn’t want to piss off the center (or his donors).

Biden has a problem with the House. Why hasn’t he done more to push progressive candidates in downticket races? Biden has a problem with the court. Why isn’t he packing the court and working to eliminate corruption? We still have a massive infrastructure debt, catastrophic climate change, crippling economic inequality.

Yes, his half measures are better than the swift kick in the balls that comprises the Republican agenda. But he needs to recognize that he isn’t fighting hard enough to win the support of people who are looking down the barrel of extinction. That’s not hyperbole. My generation doesn’t expect to retire, and the next generation doesn’t expect humanity to survive. They’re not having kids because the future is that bleak.

Are they stupid? Sure, of course. Kids are often stupid. We were stupid. Our parents were stupid. If Biden is shocked that he has to convince stupid people to vote, then who’s really stupid? Sometimes you gotta make the airplane noise to get kids to eat their vegetables. Biden isn’t even trying, though. He’s blaming them, calling them anti-Semitic, and acting entitled to our votes.

He needs to win. You think it’s frustrating to see stupid people vote for a third party in protest? Imagine how frustrating it is to watch the Biden campaign drive young voters towards third parties.

Nope, but that was a nice try to trivialize the actual problems.

The problem is Biden sending American weapons, paid for with American tax money, to another country to use to indiscriminately kill civilians.

I’m not even going to claim that they want to kill all the gazans.

They were too loose with how they were using them. Too many civilians were being killed, 35,000 minus 15,000, using Israel’s terrorist death count, leaves 20,000 innocents killed in about 6-7 months

The news media is a for-profit industry with a fiduciary duty to shareholders to sell the news as a commodity. If you expect anything noble, moral, or objective, you’re being naive.

A wise philosopher once said, “Peoples is peoples.”

Politicians need to win votes. Whinging about a lack of support in a key demographic just comes off as entitlement.

I didn’t go into it at any length but I think the number of people who, in the actual election, will have the Gaza war impact the way they vote is way higher than 2%. About 13% of Democrats voted “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary, which presumably they wouldn’t have done because of crime, immigration, or whatever other “non-most-important” issues according to this poll.

I think hanging out on Lemmy can give you the impression that more people overall care about Palestine than the number that actually do. But the number definitely isn’t 2%. I’m not at all saying that the real number is 2% and so it doesn’t matter; I’m saying the number is definitely higher than 2% and so this poll is random-phone-number-calling-barking-questions-at-people uninformative garbage.

Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?

Other people in other threads have found more of the fucky things about this poll; it was a phone poll which 2% of people answered the phone for, which made no attempt to correct for “what ideological mentalities are likely to answer the phone to random numbers”, and then on top of that explicitly made adjustments like increasing the weight of non-college-educated people for some pretty dubious reason.

Polls sound great. The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp, and cause some deep soul searching for what went so wrong in the American system that we could be talking about electing Lex Luthor mayor and people are taking it seriously as an idea and it’s even a question of who is going to win the election. I think education and media are the main culprits. Concrete things Biden is doing are not unrelated, exactly (especially on aid for Israel), but they honestly don’t seem to make all that much difference, and a lot of people who are voicing concerns about him seem totally unaware of concrete things he’s been doing.

I’m by no means saying don’t be alarmed. I think we should be very alarmed. But yes, also, I think we should call out bullshit polls when they are as clearly bullshit as this one is (as part of examining the reasons why a respectable news outlet would even be reporting a close poll between Biden and Trump as anything other than the absolute looming catastrophe that it objectively is.)

If you’re somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder

That’s actually a really good point – I’ll try to come up with some concrete things I can do to help Biden win sometimes later today. I just went to verify that I’m registered to vote (I still am), and I think maybe a good thing politically overall would be a little informational thing about who to vote for in Congress. Presumably some little tool already exists that can tell if your congresspeople have been voting for aid for Israel, inform your voting accordingly instead of just blindly checking the D box, things like that, but I don’t know all that much about it.

IDK, I’ll see what I can come up with later on today if I have some time. It’s a good reminder that talking on the internet without some sort of action isn’t always a good investment of time.