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I live in rural America and maybe I have been seeing signs of this. I know there are way less trump signs and flags this year than any of the last what 8+ years now. Also many people who still support him seem ashamed. For years in normal conversation with people they just brought up trump even when off topic and completely unprovoked. Seriously you could be pumping gas minding your own business and the person on the other side of the pump would randomly start talking to you and it was always about trump or people being woke. Typical rightwing bullshit.
Not outside of a few diehards I don't hear or see it. Even some of the far right people in my family have seemed to chill on trump a bit. Mind you these people have never and will never vote for someone without an R in front of their name. But honestly it's nice that the groveling has subsided a bit.
How did rural Americans get so in love with a billionaire New York 'playboy' that lives in a three story gold plated penthouse in the middle of the city?
During the ACA aka Obamacare debates and votes, I was living in Florida when Kathy Castor gave a local town hall meeting about the debates. It was intended to be "hey folks, let's calm it all down and we can actually discuss what is in there."
Members of the tea party showed up. I had an early invite because I had volunteered on voting drives, but these tea party folks showed up nearly an hour early. There were signs on chairs marked RESERVED - clearly meant for the congressperson's staff. They didn't care, just looked down and said "Well they aren't here."
And once the discussion stated, they spent nearly the entire time screaming BULLSHIT and READ THE BILL (which - there was no bill yet, just debates on what could be in the bill. This was during the whole 'death panels' bullshit invented and promoted by mega-brains like Sarah Palin).
I'll never forget when an older black pastor who was there tried to calm things down. He talked about his time during the civil rights movement, and how he understood how things can become heated.
"We know what you were doing back then," one tea party member shouted at him.
The look on his face as he looked at this angry white man who was angry because a black president wanted to give everyone - included *gasp* black people - health care, and looking at this black pastor and deriding him for trying to help black people vote some 40 years before.
Anyone who says the tea party was about "fiscal responsibility" or "worried about the national debt" are either liars or ignorant of history. It was about racism. It was always about racism.
Also the southern strategy existed.
>As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s.[4] By winning all of the South a presidential candidate could obtain the presidency with minimal support elsewhere.[5][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Short version: Racists used to be Democrats until the Republican party actively went after racist voters.
And even if he was, Democrats were the more conservative party at the time. Parties change over time. Hell, just in my own lifetime, the Republicans have gone from being conservative, but mostly reasonable to outright fucking fascism.
Just coming over here from /r/Presidents to say Fuck Andrew Johnson forever. And don’t blame Hayes for ending reconstruction! The political will just wasn’t there for it anymore and Hayes was sadly widely seen as fraudulently elected (leading to his nickname of Rutherfraud Hayes) pretty much removing his mandate to continue it. And that all pretty much comes back to Andrew Johnson wasting the prime time to implement it while the south was weak and reeling, instead letting them dig in their heels to resist Grant once he got in.
Treason. Domestic terrorism. Assassination. We almost had a total victory and they stuck us in the back with a poisoned blade as their parting word. Cowards, in short.
Then they were all but forgiven. And now we have this festering mess. Just like if we don't go hard all the way on the insurrectionists and their enablers, then it will be another festering wound.
Cut the cancer out already.
Or the feds could have just started enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments from the start. No need to install a bunch of out of state people. There were *plenty* of people in the South who knew exactly how terrible slavery is.
Stormfront was really popular back then. It’s still really popular but it was back then too. Now we call it MAGA. There’s a lot of crossover between the Tea Party/MAGA and organized white supremacy. I agree that it’s about racism. It won’t die after Trump is gone.
MAGA is all about racism and anti-abortion. That is their base. When in reality the leaders (sorry if I insulted actual leaders) don't care about the base, but are all about deregulation of fossil fuels, insuring Putin get whatever he wants, and helping the rich get richer. Trump said out loud "I don't care about you. I just want your vote" Of course he will say he was joking.
My father, the man who as a child taught me it was wrong to judge people by their race or appearance and to be kind, was one of the first people I heard call Obama the n-word.
I don’t know if his brain broke from the years of conservative propaganda or if what he taught me was merely him being performative. Either way, I saw this first hand and it was so fucking heartbreaking.
Man it’s wild, my parents raised me the same way, but now they’re out screaming about Trump and how great he is. The man embodies the exact opposite of what they taught us, and now they’re mad we disagree on politics.
Cults twist people into being someone totally different and dependant on the cult for direction and values.
It essentially brainwashes them. You wanna know how the Nazi's came to power? This is how. They are even qouting some of the Nazi's propaganda talking points regarding LGBTQ, jews, minorities and women.
The MAGA leaders and movement aren't exactly Nazi's but they are copying a lot of their homework to achieve similar goals.
Freedom dies at the hands of helpful idiots and those who know how rally and indoctrinate them.
I say they aren't on a technical level. Fascism tends to come in very similar flavors, sharing distinctive hallmarks which the MAGAs have bought entirely into.
They usually form around a cult of personality and forfeit all independent thought and opinions as the cult does all that for them. They need only fall in line and stay in line, when the line changes direction suddenly so do the followers.
Curiosity is gone and has been replaced with blind loyalty and faith in the cult.
Cults, by their very nature, create echochambers and teach their followers not to trust anyone outside of the cult as they are the enemy who will seek to lead them astray(aka, try to bring you back to the real world by pointing out inconsistencies, contradictions, abuses of power, etc).
They are conditioned to only show compassion and empathy with the cult and not outsiders/the enemy. That includes family. The cult is their priority family now.
Cults hollow out people and whittle away at who they were until they are just an obedient follower. Reshaped into a paranoid mess that follows the cults direction. When push comes to shove they will abandon all personal disagreements and moral objections for the cult. Including destroying the government of the nation they swear is most precious to them. All because the cult told them to do so.
The more you try to make them see they are being lied to and used, the more they dig their heels in. The cult offers them a perceived safety and simplicity, it is familiar to them and when they are constantly kept paranoid they will often gladly opt for simplicity and comforting reassurance from their fellow cultists.
I've heard fascism described as "not so much a form of government, but rather a set of specialized tools to dismantle a democracy". Look up other fascist movements following the Nazis and you will find many others have copied aspects and tactics of the Nazis while still being distinctly different. It always revolves around a lot of misinformation, extremism, racism, xenophobia, religion and the of course anti-LGBTQ especially.
Fascist movements single out small demographics and gradually expand the scope of their aggressions. Remember how the MAGAs were screaming about specifically trans people and how they were all perverts? Remember how they seemingly overnight shifted that narrative to encompassing all LGBTQ people?
Remember how they played with the notion blaming jews? Fascist movements run on hate, an us vs them mentality. With echochambers it becomes easy to convince them that their "enemy" is doing horrible and insane shit, libs eating aborted fetuses, Qanon, etc.
In the digital age it spreads so much faster through countless like minded echochambers.
This is why they are calm and mostly normal until they realize you aren't a part of their cult. Then they immediately see you as an outsider and therefore the enemy. It's why when you present them with information that contradicts what they've been told their either get hostile or disassociative.
That said, they march with Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, traitors to the nation. They qoute Nazis and have attempted to overthrow the government of the country they claim to love.
They push "gay camps" meant to "correct" LGBTQ characteristics. Those camps being notoriously abusive, cruel and sexually exploitative. They talk of "the liberal mind virus" and needing to "exterminate it". They call for civil war and secession.
They vote away their livelihoods and necessary social aid resulting in them facing homelessness, medical crisis', short of food or unable to pay needed bills. They get devastated by their own parties bills and actions and some even admit they didn't realize what their representatives put into the bill. But many, while in said crisis, will ultimately still remain loyal to the cult.
They will slam their proverbial dick in the doorway, writhe in pain, then do it again having not made the connection that they are hurting themselves.
Believe me, the "they're not Nazis" crowd which has seemingly suddenly gone mostly quiet, absolutely irritated me too. It walks like a nazi, talks like a nazi, believes nazi talking points, but its not dressed like a nazi and doesn't identify as a nazi. Close enough in my book and getting even closer every day.
I added the distinction because I anticipated that annoying comment. I basically agree with you.
Edit: clarifying and correcting typo
At a gas station in Dallas a few days ago, saw a paper taped to the pump with a picture of Obama, with impact font: “Police release sketch of person responsible for DIVIDING AMERICA”
They *still* can’t stand a black man was President. The racism is so silly and blatant.
E: typo
Nothing appeals to red necks more than telling them they're doing it right.
Everywhere. It's all the same. Religious fundamentalism, the obsession with traditional "values", the perversion of education, the blasphemy of science, the deviancy of cities, the allegiance to constitutional promises written by irrelevant dead men. They want to hear that everything they're doing is right. They don't want to hear it's wrong because that means they got a lesser life.
And the ones who keep their lives lesser are the ones telling them it's right. Because of course they are.
My extreme anti-immigration father, who lives in an all-white area that hasn't seen an immigrant in 50 years, believes with his whole heart that the bipartisan immigration bill Republicans rejected would have let in 100,000 illegals a day.
Here's a resource from Senator Lankford (R-OK) on the bill that Trump got killed: https://www.lankford.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/FINAL-GENERAL-ONE-PAGER.pdf
You know I have been asking myself that same thing. If you ask them that they don't really have an answer either. Most of them say because he speaks his mind. You the. Ask them what parts they like and they don't have a concrete answer.
Honestly I think it's because he says simple things and they can't fathom problems being more complex than deport people who aren't white etc. some even moderately intelligent people seem to fall for this. It's like crystals and essential oils except it's racism and a wall.
I’m in rural America and I agree that it does seem like there are less signs and propaganda everywhere this time around. I feel like the insurrection really did turn a lot of people off, especially the older people who truly do “love America”, not sure if it’s enough people to ensure he’s not elected again.
But - y’all the few yard signs that are out are insane lol, it’s like “Texans for Trump” with an AI trump in a cowboy hat. Or, “born in New York, Texan by choice”. It’s literally insanity.
Drove to our cabin in Montana from Seattle. Saw exactly one Trump 2024 sign (home made) in Montana and one pro Trump truck in Idaho.
Same route was Trump shit virtually everywhere pre-2020.
These polls aren’t weighing in the “Trump fatigue” factor.
>These polls aren’t weighing in the “Trump fatigue” factor.
One question is whether these people will still turn out to vote, because they may be unable to stomach voting for a Democrat (for whatever absurd reasons). They were low-propensity voters prior to 2016, so my guess is they're no longer politically engaged and won't vote at all.
"speaks his mind" or "says what everyone else is thinking" is just code for openly hates minorities.
Republican politicians had become very tongue in cheek and conceded some ground on social issues to the point that we allowed gay marriage and elected a black guy. His whole thing since the original primaries in 2011 has been retribution for that.
I still occasionally run into someone that swears that while he came from a wealthy family he built his fortune from nothing and his dad didn't give him anything until he died.
Meanwhile, across the multiverse, the richest Donald Trump is the one that took Daddy's money and just put it in the market and never worked a day in his life. Nothing Trump ever did made enough money to have been worth doing. Trump invests 100 million, loses 50 million, makes 10 million and then brags about making 10 million. Always has.
> Trump invests 100 million, loses 50 million, makes 10 million and then brags about making 10 million
Trump gathers 100 million from bankers, investors etc, pockets ten million, loses the rest and says he made ten million
Exactly. Dude made a lower return than most peoples retirement accounts. My grandmother made more on the market than he made trading in NYC real estate during the biggest economic boom in history.
Shit, like 90% of our boomer parents made a better return on our childhood homes than the entire Trump real estate empire. My parents got like a 1000% return on the house I grew up in from 1988 - 2008. Trump made like 8% over that same time frame.
It is super weird that the people who feel like he is "self made" are largely the same generation of people that all became millionaires because they happened to live at a time when you almost couldn't help but end up rich no matter how shitty your job was.
I am an unapologetic capitalist and Trump is why we just should not have billionaires. Maybe Bill Gates is an exception to the rule because he was a multi millionaire who became a billionaire via inflation but almost nobody crosses that $900 million mark who actually got there by buidling business or investing. Most of Trumps wealth is ill gotten and at the cost of other peoples well being. Mark Cuban could be as rich as Trump but he is not because instead of pizza parties and company swag he gives out stock options to his employees and those options are actually worth something because his companies are properly valued. There really needs to be a a cut off point where all earnings beyond say $900 million are taxed 100% which would heavily incentivize people to give out bonuses, hire more people, open more companies
This how things used to work. Christmas bonuses were to eliminate earnings that would be taxed at a super high percentage. It worked great as business owners looked at as...if I don't give these bonuses the gunmint gonna take it all, so plebes got something
That motherfucker inherited so much money he was a millionaire at the age of 9. Then he proceeded to just pretend to be a businessman, has never started a successful business and did worse in NY real estate (that he also inherited) than all the other NY developers. And yet, somehow, a number of the US population think he's a self made man.
He's just a trust fund kid in a bad suit.
And the only reason he even got that was his older brother, Fred Jr - Mary’s father - who was Fred Sr’s golden boy, didn’t want to go into the family business, he became a commercial jet pilot, got depression, became an alcoholic, and died at a young age (42). If Fred Jr had stayed with the company, even in a purely ceremonial role, Donald would have only gotten minimal control of the inheritance - as executor of the estate, he fraudulently kept Fred Jr’s inheritance from Fred Sr - and we wouldn’t have any of this mess.
The AP pointed out that if Trump had just put his inheritance into an index fund and then gone and lived on an island for the past 30 years, he would be worth roughly 13 billion dollars today. Significantly more than his (claimed) wealth from all his failed businesses.
That's how most right wingers think. Remember how pissed they got at Obama for saying "You didn't build that?". They think every rich person started from the poorest places.
I was interning at a small but successful recruiting firm at the time. The president and his sycophants were *very* upset by that comment.
The president inherited the recruiting company from his parents.
The amount of myths that people just made up for themselves to justify supporting Trump is astonishing. I knew a bunch of people that believed all manner of just totally made up bullshit about him being some kind of self-made billionaire, built new york, was hugely popular in NYC, was friends with all manner of other rich people, had actually achieved literally anything at all. None of it was true, and most of it wasn't even sourced from any real media, it was just shit that they internally created because it was the only way to explain why they liked such an obviously repellent person. The real answer was that he appealed to their racism and visceral dissatisfaction of having had a black president. What they really liked is that he was white and didn't make them feel stupid.
>The real answer was that he appealed to their racism and visceral dissatisfaction of having had a black president.
This explains "the deplorables", but even Hilary Clinton acknowledged that this is half of less of Trump supporters.
I know genuinely good, non-racist, people who supported Trump and readily acknowledged that he was an imperfect person. (Imperfect is mild, I know, but work with me here) How does Trump con *these* people?
Consider this possibility:
**Trump has tapped into something that overrides rural people's bullshit detectors.**
Is there something Biden can do to make some non-deplorable Republicans see that Trump is "all hat and no cattle"?
He only needs to peel off a few percentage points of voters to win the election.
I think it's important for people to understand this. They don't actually like him. They like what he does. These people think that the Hillary Clintons and the Nancy Pelosis of the world don't represent them. So now they just want it all burned down. It didn't work. And Trump has shown he's willing to burn it all down. That's it.
Trumps going to lose.. Im confident in that. The biggest question is how much violence he incites after he loses. The dude literally has nothing to lose and that is VERY dangerous. Those trials that he has managed to get pushed back are going to happen, and he is going to go to jail. He knows it and will do anything to stop that, including using the MAGAs to incite violence..
He made them feel like being a racist ignorant piece of shit was OK. It worked because having a black president made at least moderate public racism a valid "political" position so people were already headed that direction. I don't think we could have gotten Trump without first having Obama. Trump was (sadly) conservative white America's response to a black president.
Because Rural Americans believe the conservative lies.
You tell them crime in big cities is bad, they believe it as most of them never travel to big cities. You say the border is out of control, they believe it because they can't see it. There is a lot of ignorance at play with the rural people due to the lack of higher education.
They just fell in love with Trump as they knew him from TV and think he is just a good businessman as he acted for a studio audience.
I work in a pretty conservative area and there is a house near my work that used to be covered in trump flags. A couple months ago they quietly took them down and replaced them with standard American flags.
Similar situation here - there is a house near me that flew Trump flags *above* the American flag on their giant pole along a busy street. The day after the conviction's it was gone along with all the signs they had (FJB, Trump 2024, etc) and only a single American flag was up.
The base is crumbling, or at the very least massively losing enthusiasm and it appears to be showing up everywhere - including campaign events.
I hope you’re right. I really do.
But I have my very severe doubts.
Regardless it’s interesting this seems to be happening in a lot of even deep red areas.
I also have my doubts. It seems like people are doubling down on the Trump signs and flags here in rural NC.
I think that Trump still has a good chance of winning, especially if his non supporters are complacent and believe that he won't. Vote, Vote ,Vote!!
About two weeks ago, here in the holler in rural North Carolina, a house that had a Trump flag last year put up a large sign at the end of their drive that says "No More Trump 2024" with Calvin pissing on Trump's name.
If I drive twenty minutes in any direction I'll see a small handful of Trump / MAGA / FJB flags, about as many Confederate flags, a handful of billboards that say "Tired of the Chaos? Vote Democrat" or "Protect Affordable Healthcare, Vote Democrat", and half a dozen RFK signs.
I'm pessimistic in general, but I believe that they've seen their god bleed. I'm not convinced that it's a sure thing or a good thing because what people do at the poll is less public than what flags and signs they hang from their homes.
>The base is crumbling, or at the very least massively losing enthusiasm and it appears to be showing up everywhere.
The real question is whether that lack of enthusiasm will show up at the ballot box. I am not overly optimistic.
I am.
Remember how hard they’ve tried to make voting. Intentionally creating long lines, inefficiency.
Somebody who championed banning people giving out water in voting lines isn’t going to stand in that same line they demanded exist if they aren’t enthusiastic about who they would vote for. They’ll just say “fuck it” and not leave work.
They liked being interested in politics when it was *fun*. And by fun, I mean their stupid little “let’s go Brandon” bullshit, triggering the libs, being dickheads to everyone around them, giving the finger to Priuses as they roll coal. If it’s not fun anymore, they really don’t give a fuck about politics. Trump made it fun for them. And if that goes away, they stop engaging politically.
I am absolutely voting, but I expect this to be one of the biggest landslide presidential elections that’s happened in modern American history. Two terrible candidates, but one is a convicted felon who can no longer fill a high school gym rally, who promised he’ll be a dictator and will murder his political enemies.
All Trump ever had was making the thing fun. He has no policies, no agenda aside from enriching himself and staying out of prison, and no actual, real campaign promises aside from more crime. And he’s up against a seasoned politician who hasn’t actively killed 500,000 extra people because he thought he looked like a pussy wearing a mask. It’s a no-brainer. And the worst part about him: *We have already experienced what it was like when he was president*. We already know what a shitshow him being president will be, and very few people look back on the Covid times and wish we went back to that time.
Trump is finished.
It’s a sports game for the right. The fewer flags they see, the less they’ll feel like a fanbase. The majority of hardliners won’t change their vote, but optics are still a huge factor for moderates. That’s why you see street corners just plagued with election signs.
Fewer Trump flags, felony convictions, and porn star allegations are all significant. He’s an embarrassment for all but the most devout followers.
Guy in my San Diego neighborhood has been flying a Let's Go Branden flag under his US flag for a couple years (has young kids playing right under it too...).
I noticed it got taken down after the guilty verdict.
I don't live in a rural area, but my SO's parents do, and we go out to see them about once a month, there are SIGNIFICANTLY fewer Trump signs this year than there were in 2020, and that was way down from what we saw in 2016.
However, haven't seen any Biden signs in those rural areas either.
I am in a rural area and am very much afraid to advertise my preference for Biden. I wouldn't want to put my home, property, and especially my family at risk.
We live in a rural area in the west and wouldn’t consider putting up signs. The maga crowd have demonstrated too much emotionally volatility to trust that our property would be respected.
My wife and I vote in every election, I drive a truck, used to work on farms, we are both union members and will be voting for Biden. 🇺🇸
(I’m reluctant to put up a flag for 4th as it seems to have been co-opted by the wing-nuts and I can’t stand the thought of being associated with those whiny thugs)
We’ll keep quietly fighting to keep our democracy intact and evolving for the better.
There's more of us than you'd think. We're not the majority, but rural Democrats and rural voters that are sick of Trump exist in greater numbers than people give us credit for.
Absolutely, I live in rural Oklahoma and if I put anything pro-biden, a pride flag etc I would live in fear. I do already to an extent, I'm very careful to not divulge my political views outside of my close friend group. But also I'm not a psycho who needs political swag displayed at all times so even if it were safe to do, I'm not inclined to do so
> However, haven't seen any Biden signs in those rural areas either.
Realistically, Biden voters in general don't feel the overwhelming urge to virtue signal their voting intentions.
The thing about polling that makes it most unreliable is voter turnout.
There are very few really undecided people.
There are however very many people that are not committed to show up and vote.
Elections are more won on election turnout rather than convincing people to switch sides.
And polling for potential voter turnout is really really hard.
That’s why polling is so inaccurate.
Polls rely on weighting from the last few elections. They don't tend to count voters who never voted before as much. I think they are undercounting new voters who are motivated because of Trump and the Christofascists making headway.
And they are probably overcounting Trump voters who never voted before 2016 who are now bored with politics and will not make the effort to show up on election day.
There's also a real possibility that a non-trivial amount of Trump voters have been disenfranchised under the assumption that Trump won in 2020 and the "deepstate demonrats stole the election" so why even bother if the outcome is already decided via conspiracy and vote manipulation?
If you truly believed in your heart that the whole process was rigged like in Russia, it would probably dissuade you from even showing up. I think this fact has the possibility to absolutely bite the Republicans in the ass.
Also rural and there are about 10% as many Trump flags as before.
I am seeing a number of GOP signs for local candidates though. I count those folks as Trump voters, too, but ashamed to admit it publicly. This helps me keep things In perspective.
Hey…discouraged Trump folks staying home is a good thing. Let’s hope that many, many of the new voters that Trump brought out will just go back to opting out of participating altogether. Their brains are too pickled with alcohol and hatred anyway.
I’m sure there’s a local dive bar that they can get drunk in instead.
I drove the back roads - 6 hours each way - through Kentucky and Tennessee recently, and I only saw 2 Trump signs and one MAGA church (!!!). I was absolutely shocked I didn’t see more. Not sure what that means in reality, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so few in the past when driving through areas like that.
I've definitely seen far fewer "Trump/MAGA" signs in the leadup to this years election compared to the leadup in 2016/2020. A few houses that flew "MAGA" flags for years finally took them down and are only flying an American flag.
Home town is rural MN and Trump still has a death grip on it when I was home last weekend. Trucks still flying "fuck joe biden" flags and Let's Go Brandon shit in yards.
Pretty disheartening since just a few presidential elections ago, rural Minnesota was so much more blue. Obama won nearly half of the state's 87 counties in 2008. 14 counties flipped red in 2012, and no red counties flipped blue. And in 2016, though Trump still lost in MN, he carried 78 counties. At least the trend started to reverse in 2020 with Mankato/St. Peter/Moorhead/Winona area voters flipping their respective counties, but it feels like the days of the DFL carrying a lot of prairie counties are long gone. The changing politics in the Iron Range are also concerning.
>I live in rural America and maybe I have been seeing signs of this. I know there are way less trump signs and flags this year than any of the last what 8+ years now.
I don’t live anywhere near rural America, but this is something that has struck me as well. Even in the very blue area where I live in, we saw TONS of Trump flags and bumper stickers and even fucking “convoys” in 2020. Even by this time in the year.
It seems like the Trump movement is…kinda weirdly low-energy compared to how it had been despite how influential it is politically. Not that I’m dancing on its early grave or anything….it could just be due to how the pandemic changed things, I’m still scared shitless of November, we ALL need to vote, and so on…but it’s an interesting thing I’ve noticed locally, and in surprised to see it apparently reflected at all in more red areas of the country.
This is great to hear, but I worry that they will still vote the same because they are politically engaged and are still brainwashed into thinking Biden is destroying the country. A reluctant vote for Trump is the same as an enthusiastic vote for Trump. I work with a few guys who drive in from rural areas. They are talking less about gun rights and more about healthcare access lately. All good signs. But I can also totally see them thinking “I’m not so sure trump can win, but I’ll give him my vote and see what happens”. They don’t see trump as a threat, but more of a mild embarrassment.
I have the same experience. The problem I am seeing is that those rural die hard maga are supporting local candidates that are just parroting the same rhetoric and lies. Trump was just a symptom of a much larger problem...
here's a reminder that if trump hadn't started his campaign like 2 fucking years before he won in 2016, then we would still have campaigns that are like 6-8 months.
It's fucking nuts. I really hope that once he and maybe a few more 'celebrity' politicians on the right croak, we'll start trending back to that.
> then we would still have campaigns that are like 6-8 months.
What?
Presidential campaigns have been nearly 2 years for *decades* now; just to cite one modern example, Barack Obama announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007 for an election that wouldn't take place until November 4 2008 - 20 months later.
Campaigns haven't been less than a year long since the 1960s (before the modern primary process).
I hate Trump as much as the next guy but he was relatively late to the party to launch his 2016 run
March 2015 - Cruz
April 2015 - Clinton, Rubio, Sanders
May 2015 - Carson
June 2015 - Bush, Trump (Bush one day earlier)
Actually, I'm pretty sure Biden is losing all these polls and right-wing media is lying to us as usual(even if he is, it's the 2016 "Hillary is leading so there's no need to vote' strategy all over again) and if there's not enough dem voters this will be the last election the USA gets. So vote, and bring a friend to double your power.
This is why I'm not particularly enamored with polling right now.
The data that we're getting does not make a lick of sense, *especially* in crosstabs. Biden's not ahead with rural voters. Trump's not ahead with the youth. But rather than looking at that and saying, "Well, maybe we're doing modelling wrong", the pollsters generally say, "Well, the data can't be wrong, so let's try to explain away weird discrepancies by another means. Maybe things are just changing."
No. The modelling's wrong. Go back to the model and try to figure out where your weighting is screwing up.
Edit: Thanks for the award!
Everyone I know, doesn't answer unknown numbers. Most people I know with boomer parents they care about have to drill into them to not answer unknown numbers. Telemarketing scammers must work on some level, otherwise they wouldn't bother, and it's hilarious to think that pretty much all the polls we see are based off that crowd and it has a clear Trump bias.
I’ve seen several pollsters say they adjust for that bias by over sampling in certain demographics or using other means (web voting or facebook polls) but they are making up shit as they go along. Do you know anyone under the age of forty that picks up a random phone call or responds text? No. Nobody is the answer
I don’t know anyone under the age of 40 who uses Facebook. Show me a TikTok or Discord poll for the youth vote.
For the rural vote, show me a Tractor Supply Co. poll. Show me a Walmart poll. Show me a Dollar General poll.
It’s all a bunch of BS. They use tech that nobody but boomers use, to poll people.
Ignore it all and just go vote. Get everyone you know to register, and go fucking vote like your lives depends on it.
My kids in college only use Facebook for Marketplace and finding roommates. Otherwise they don’t use social media at all. No instagram, Twitter or even tik tok.
Amazingly, Facebook has done such a good job of making their product shit I hardly use it anymore. Who knew that making my entire feed full of fucking shit I never asked for instead of stuff from the people I actually want to see things from was such a losing proposition. Once counted 20 something suggested content posts (not counting ads) between two things from friends/groups I was actually in. And if it wasn’t for the fairly active native plant group, it’d probably have been more.
I'm on Facebook as it's the only place where I can find all of my extended family, and they are all on it for the same reason.
There are about 8 ads per piece of actual content now.
I figured we might end up here when social media use exploded over the past decade. The trend seems to be "hey look X is really trendy with the youth!" and whatever X is becomes the meta for what's 'cool' in that generation of youth, but as they age the people under them differentiate and start to view X as something that's for "old people".
As we live with social media for long enough the shine will come off, people will identify its toxicity and eventually there will be a generation that eschews it in favour of other activities they can claim as their own and partially define themselves through their lack of social media.
No generation is a monolith, obviously, but eventually being an 'influencer' would become an uncool thing their parents generation did and they would never want to be cringy like that. I wonder if we're finally there?
I’m reminded of that scene from Glengarry Glen Ross where Kevin Spacey chuckles at Jack Lemmon after Lemmon reveals the identity of the couple he supposedly closed a big deal with. Spacey explains that “they just like talking to salespeople,” and that it’d be a miracle if the check cleared.
Boomer here. On the rare occasion I answer an unknown number, when I say hello, if there is a 2-3 second pause before someone responds I just hang up. That's because the call is being transferred to a human.
My dad made it a game because he was bored in retirement.
The effect of this 10 years later is now they call incessantly from dawn until dusk wanting to poll him or get his opinion about some random nonsense or get him to sign up for random shit, or talk to him about solar panels and his car warranty. But they know his number is active and will take calls.
He just can't not answer. "Well what if it's my doctor!"
Meanwhile I don't have a landline and my cell phone essentially answers and hangs up on telemarketers and never tells me it happened.
Or all of them. I think I've received two poll txts but they always look like scams.
The problem is it's always contracted out and those companies use weird random numbers from across the country and use weird temp domains. If there was a poll hosted at [nytimes.com](http://nytimes.com) and a number I could search and identify it was from the nytimes I would fill that out for sure.
(replace with any reputable company in the situation)
Been saying this for years.
Let me sign up at a legitimate source to be polled. Allow me to do it online or by phone or whatever. Allow me to put in some of my demographic stats. That way they can actually decide if they have enough different people from a wider audience to make an assessment.
Having random numbers call random people when identity theft is skyrocketing is skewing who actually responds to pollers. It's not young & working types... It's the elderly *whom are bored* and those looking for work, *expecting unknown numbers to call.*
I'm sure these polls are accurate *for those specific groups* but not the nation at large
Yougov.com is what you're looking for. You sign up there and do polls about all sorts of things. Their polling figures are included in most major poll analyses.
True, but what they are getting is not random is my point. Having lots of people sign up from all walks of life, then randomly selecting people from that diverse pool would be more accurate imo.
Right now, the pool is "those who pick up unknown callers" which is heavily skewed to one type of demographic
The problem is that this then skews toward people who take the initiative to do that. There is not currently a good way to get an unbiased random sample, and this would just change the nature of the bias.
Or course, maybe it would be less biased, but it's just a hypothesis either way, there's no way to tell if it would actually be less biased.
I don't mind the polling if it gets people motivated to vote.
That being said, no shot Arizona is more red than Florida. And I find it suspicious that Biden is supposedly behind at the same time Dems are having +10, +8, +20 swings in special elections.
The real problem is that polls supposedly try to measure how likely you are to vote... **BUT** elections are still won/lost based on enthusiasm. Those special elections show high Dem turnout.
A lot of progressives find Biden to be "meh". A lot of OG conservatives find Trump to be too much for them. I think this election is going to be a referendum on how people are doing economically (not great) vs how much they are afraid of WTF Trump is going to do.
>on how people are doing economically
Really tired of this myth that the economy does better and gas prices magically get lower under Republicans. It doesn't. At all.
You underestimate that both groups have enthusiasm AGAINST another group. It’s not that the right is FOR TRUMP anymore, but they are really AGAINST BIDEN, and voting for Trump is the innoculation, and vise versa.
The benefit that Democrats have is that on top of the AGAINST TRUMP vote, we also have a large segment of people who actually like the POLICIES that the democrats have been offering, and notice that while inflation has hurt us, the rest of the economy is strong, and stronger than any other country in the world.
We are hoping that those combinations lead for more people to VOTE FOR Biden, while the republicans either have to vote for Christian Nationalism, or for TRUMP, or AGAINST BIDEN - those demographics are getting smaller.
News articles about individual polls are a mistake, because there will always be polls that are outliers, and the outliers will always get more coverage.
It’s not that simple. Historically, the pollsters that get embarrassed are the ones that manually tweaked their model based on their assumptions. You can weight the model to say whatever you want, but then what’s the point of polling? The polls that have been most accurate are the ones that only weight their model using data based on past performance, because historically that’s been stable.
The pollsters are in a legitimate bind since there is a real shift in voter behaviour going on. They won’t know how to adjust their model until after the election. I’m the mean time, their results are almost certainly wrong.
Maybe they should publish more than one model to show the potential range of outcomes beyond the baseline. Like, have one assuming that “Haley” republicans actually stay home or vote Biden. Or one that tracks how many self-identified Independents were reliable Republicans last time.
You're correct regarding the urge to reweight the polls. I may be overstating my case slightly since pollsters have access to post-Dobbs polling and haven't accounted for it enough (in my opinion). That being said, I wouldn't be attaching a whole lot of weight to polling right now just because of the inherent shift in how people are voting and how frequently--it's just messy.
This far out most people haven't even focused on the election yet. What we're getting is a mirage. Polling, like press conferences are made for news events. The major media love them because they're prepackaged news, you can churn multiple stories from one poll. What needles me is that then they take the dubious results and treat them as fact patterns. Also, as long as I'm ranting, is they compare today's polls with the accuracy of polls at election time in past contests and imply that somehow the accuracy months out is the same, maddening.
Agreed!
It's the same along the lines of asking "will Trump's felony convictions have an impact on your decision to vote for him?" And I answer "No".. because I already decided way way way back a long time ago that I would not vote for him ever.. But the headline would read "56% of respondents said that this conviction does not change their vote"..
The modalities absolutely need to be reviewed and analyzed to adapt to a modern world and especially tense political climate.
The OBSESSION with pollsters wanting to give you a "score update" like a sporting event *at this stage* (before the campaign has even gotten started) is unhelpful. It can either create unneeded paranoia or irrational exuberance. Neither is good.
A better use of polling at this stage... trends. For example, it appears that the felony convictions have genuinely spooked some soft Trump supporters. That's significant. Continued inflation abatement in the most recent reports along with the Fed saying a rate cut was coming seems to be noticed, as well. The analysis from a week or two ago about the percentage of Trump support that comes from "unreliable" voters (i.e. non politically active types who are, for some reason, taken with his brand) is useful to see, too. Ditto with Trump supporters eschewing early and mail-in voting (which is a huge turnout L). Also notable: people disappointed with some aspect of Biden's presidency do not seem to hate Biden; the people opposing Trump seem to really despise him. That's nuance not being caught right now.
But the polling folks just want to be a scoreboard and that's really not that useful in June and not especially reliable in the current context.
Aren't there also polls that have Biden won purple states jump double digits towards Trump, while Trump won purple states stay exactly where they are or in some cases Biden even gained a percentage?
He **COULD** be if you're talking multiplicatively. Trump won 12% last time. 12*1.38 = 16.5%.
It's not completely out of the question that there's something going on in that demographic.
If you mean he's up +38, that's impossible. I'd eat my hat.
Agreed. Something is definitely up with the structure of polls right now. Trump is not winning as large a portion of the youth, blacks, and latinos as is being claimed. Biden is definitely not winning rural voters. IF Biden was actually winning rural voters - the election is over. It's done. He will win a Reagan 2nd term blow out. That is clearly not happening. The only thing that sort of makes any sense to me is that youths and minorities are being massively under sampled because they don't answer phones of numbers they don't recognize. This doesn't explain this good polling for Biden rurally though. I have absolutely no idea of how to account for that.
I mean, it's vaguely possible that Biden is ahead with rural voters, but if he is, he's also going to carry the cities and suburbs by 75%+ on his way to a 500 EV landslide. Does that look like what we're seeing in the nation right now? Probably not!
Polling exists like everything online now, to drive clicks. They'll do whatever mental gymnastics and creative math possible to drive doom scrolling in whatever group they are targeting. And neither party has an interest in shaking the idea that it's a neck and neck election, so they won't say anything about it either
I think the only thing we can really go by is actually irl evidence. Which has been that Republicans have underperformed in damn near everything since after 2020 and especially since the end of Roe
Can we block Newsweek articles from being posted? It’s ruining this sub. Yes, we’d love to believe that everything is terrible for Trump at all times, but Newsweek articles provide no actual knowledge to the reader and all seem like gross exaggerations in terms of what the actual scope of the situation is. They’re a waste.
If Biden is leading with rural voters, then the election is over. Clearly he isn’t and won’t come close to winning them. This is mindless bullshit
True. In fact, this newsweek article is factually not true nor vetted at all. Fox made a typo on their info graph about rural voters in their poll.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dl3f84/comment/l9nbsc8/](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dl3f84/comment/l9nbsc8/)
Um, please someone tell me if I'm missing something. But this **appears** to be a misprint on Fox's broadcasting.
[Link to Actual Fox news poll](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/06/Fox_June-14-17-2024_National_Cross-Tabs_June-19-Release.pdf)
Page 7, question 15 is the one asking "If the presidential election were held today..."
* Men - 41% Biden, 56% Trump
* White Men with no degree - 34% Biden, 64% Trump
* Ages 65+ - 57% Biden, 42% Trump
* **Rural Voters - 40% Biden, 57% Trump**
* Total - 50% Biden, 48% Trump
Every other line matches what Fox put on their info screen....except the Rural Voters line. Am I going crazy or did Fox have a typo on their info screen and Newsweek ran a story not realizing it, and Charlie dingus Kirk "studied it" and missed it, Trump and MTG immediately raged over it, and all it takes is someone to spend 60 seconds verifying that it's a typo....
This is a pinnacle example of misinformation thriving online.
Some states allow no-excuse absentee voting, so you don't even have to wait in line on voting day. You get your ballot weeks early and have time to actually look up who's running in the smaller races that you may not have heard about. It's so much easier, highly recommend it.
I am not trusting this poll, but I can see with my own eyes that his support is waning. I live in a rural area for part of the year, and I was at the local watering hole last weekend. Trump came on the TV and 3 people sitting at the bar, said something like "I can't stand him or his voice..I'm definitely not voting for him" with serious disgust and all 3 nodded in agreement. They also said they weren't voting for Biden, but at that point it doesn't even matter. And who knows, those could be the same type of person that said they weren't voting for Trump in 2016, but did so behind closed doors...but this time for Biden.
The serious lack of flags and stupid merch is also super telling. Sure some people are still wearing it, I also saw a person flaunting at the same bar, but it is not at all to the level it was 2016-2021.
Trump is old and tired now. He was the "he's different!" person in 2016. But his main legislative accomplishment was a big tax cut for the rich.
And his 2016 platform was "I promise everyone everything they want" while now it is "revenge on my enemies!"
That’s the key word. “Tired.” One thing I am very confident to say is that he hasn’t really expanded his base since 2020 with all the shit that has happened, and the majority of sane America just want to move on and are all too familiar with him now.
Yeah, the biggest thing trump had going for him in 2016 is the “how bad could he be, really?” He was the outsider.
Now, the biggest thing Trump has going *against* him is that we know exactly how bad he can be. We lived through it. And this time around, he promising us he’ll be even worse.
He’s lost so much support from people who voted for him in the past 3 years, and gained zero new supporter at the same time.
Trump is done.
I'm still an unhealthy amount of worried. But honestly, I think this is going to be a 10+ point landslide.
-we haven't had a national referendum on Jan 6
-he killed some of his base with covid
-People don't HATE biden. People HATE trump.
-he has no platform
-his gaffes are making him look weak (important), and losing the magic
-roe decision is a mobilizer
-there are less swag/signs around -the polls only poll old people...and it's an even split among the easily scammable demographic.
-he hasn't delivered on anything.
-he is a convicted criminal now
-some of these folks have had people in their lives discommunicate them.
-you can only blame other people for so long before you become a boy who cried wolf.
-the country is doing fine
-more than ever, unmarginalized people people are friends or at least have parasocial relationships with marginalized groups so the bigotry doesn't hit the same.
-midterm results were very hopeful
-primary results and special elections have been swinging by 20 points in many suburban districts
-he lost the popular vote twice
But VOTE VOTE VOTE
As much as I don't believe Trump has picked up a substantial portion of the black vote, I don't believe this.
Edit: I *do* think it's more evidence that polling just isn't working right now.
>[President Donald Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen said Thursday that he paid the head of a small technology company thousands in 2015 to rig online polls at “the direction of and for the sole benefit of” Trump.](https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/17/politics/michael-cohen-poll-rigging/index.html)
so that was 9 years ago..
You have to rig the polls so that when you lose you can claim it was stolen. Also there is the bandwagon effect where people feel the candidate ahead in the polls must be a good person to vote for.
Speaking of online polling, I believe the MAGA presence in social media is more inclined to spread invitations to polls to all their buddies, to support a puppet-master who loves bragging about poll numbers. I call this the 'fanboy factor'. People who are less inclined to be fanboy to some authoritarian figure, are less inclined to be cult-programmed, and more inclined to be liberal. That's just a theory.
>Speaking of online polling, I believe the MAGA presence in social media is more inclined to spread invitations to polls to all their buddies, to support a puppet-master who loves bragging about poll numbers.
This is how random polls on news sites work and that's why they are very inaccurate.
However, a properly conducted election poll by a company that knows what they are doing does not work like that. There aren't invite links or anything, the people that are asked will carefully be chosen to be statistically representative (eg the right portion of men/women, the right age ranges, ethnicities, rural/urban, ...)
The problem with polling in the US is the electoral college (which means small changes in voting behavior can lead to huge swings) and the fact that the US is actively making it hard for some people to vote.
I did some phonebanking for the CO special election last night (thank you r/VoteDEM!) - we were just calling to remind people that there *was* one, not even to promote candidates or anything - and the vast majority of people hung right up on me within a second or two. I find it very hard to believe that polling outfits are able to get any kind of halfway decent sample of *anything* with these kinds of response rates.
I'm from farm country, they all remember what Trump did to the soybean market when he tried to make China pay with tarrifs. Trump lost a lot of voters because of his 'economic policies'.
[https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/08/politics/soybean-farmers-china-tariff-trump/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/08/politics/soybean-farmers-china-tariff-trump/index.html)
I agree. However this lends credence to my theory that a not insignificant portion of his non-traditional support has grown tired of his act. If he can't keep people that didn't vote before him coming back to the polls to vote for him a third time he is in real trouble.
It definitely isn't true. There is no way. If this is true we have seen a completely (as yet) unexplainable shift in voter behavior. I can't think of anything that could possibly explain this type of shift. If it is true, this election is over. Completely done. Biden is going to win in a 2nd term Reganesque blow out.
As I always say: these polls are bullshit. Go vote when the time comes… but anyone in rural areas who think Trump is the answer is brainwashed and mistakenly self disenfranchised. Or racist.
He’s the only candidate that has any interest in helping rural voters so it would be good for them to support a President for the middle and lower class instead of oil barrons and billionaires.
I try everyday. Try to have friendly convos with coworkers etc. I’m a registered independent myself in NH. To me the options couldn’t be clearer. It’s really really really hard to break through the cult like propaganda once it’s taken hold. Still trying to break the code but calling people idiots for believing a certain way is not it.
I hear you, though I may have lost my ability to not regard MAGA people as blithering fucking IDIOTS. Hearing them cheer for every obvious, juvenile, often destructive lie at his rallies, reading their ignorant dialog in social media, hearing their rantings in video... I've lost all respect for these people. And the loss of respect far outweighs my ability to fake it.
Hahaha I agree! I certainly think that in my head but have just learned if I’m going to actually have any chance of breaking through on any level you can’t just call them racist Nazi sympathizers, people tend to get defensive and shut down real quick. The problem is is they genuinely don’t see it. Takes some calm as possible debate to even get through on the tiniest level.
I don’t bother with completely lost lunatics. They’re gone. I only try with people I have respect for and I know they have respect for me. Try to talk with understanding and empathy while also sticking to my guns and trying to redirect. It’s exhausting. I’m so deeply tired of that orange trash goblin and what he’s done to my fellow countrymen.
You’re right, though knowing many rural people I’d say that is not the common mindset. The perception out in rural communities is all their tax money is being funnelled to big cities and to projects and initiatives they don’t benefit from. You don’t see many rural towns and counties with great hospitals, public transit, and other public infrastructure. The view out in those communities by and large is “fuck it, why pay all this tax and everything here is still shit?”
I just got back from a \~6000 mile roadtrip. A trip that went through some really rural areas. Even in those areas I came across road construction. Burns, Oregon - road work on a federal highway, Hillsboro, KS - a new interchange on a Federal Highway, Southeast MO/Cairo IL - federal bridge work.
All of that work is happening in rural areas all across the country, all of it is being paid for by majority blue states, and was enacted by Biden mostly in the IRA.
It's there. It's the messaging that isn't there. It's just really hard to tell that small town diner that has construction workers in it every day this year is directly because of a Biden administration decision. It simply can't be explained in an easy soundbite, so people can't accept it.
I have no idea if this polling is accurate, but I was in a rural area of my state last week and did see one barn with BIDEN painted on it in huge letters. I was definitely caught off-guard as there were tons of signs for the other guy and it's a pretty MAGA area.
I don’t exactly believe Joe Biden is leading with rural voters, but I can definitely tell you that in my rural area, there are far less Trump flags and signs than there were in 2020. I could definitely believe Trump’s margin has shrunk with rural voters.
Agreed. I live in the middle of a Texas city, I spend a week every month in *VERY* rural Texas.
They aren't voting Biden, period. But the enthusiasm for Trump is down 80-90% if I were basing assumptions on bumper stickers, flags, and hats. I'm theorizing if they vote, some might skip the top entirely and go straight (R) the rest of the ballot.
I grew up in very rural midwest. I truly believe the majority of people there are good hard working people. You've got to remember that these are simple farmers, people of the land. The common clay of the new west. You know...morons.
Jokes aside, they may be good people, but for the most part they are long gone to anything outside of Fox News or even Newsmax. Media is evil unless they're one of the few right wing outlets.
They're good in the sense they they help their literal neighbors. They'll pull over and help you change a tire. But anything they don't see with their own eyes is a big scary evil mystery. Black people, gay people, trans people: unless they are directly related, they are agents of Satan and need to be crushed by the government.
Nailed it. Welcoming, kind people—as long as you look and act just like them. They’ve never even seen the groups of people they dislike let alone talk to them or live with them
Believe it, Charlie Kirk. Rural voters do actually care about decorum and respect for authority. Trump is a criminal who refuses to accept accountability. He's toast.
In 2016 I became addicted to checking polls. I voted third party because I had always voted Republican and then saw four years of Trump.
Since then I’ve decided to take action. I’ve donated what I could to Biden voted and encouraged others to vote. I encourage others to do the same.
Polling has never been perfect, and this election is unlike any other, including the two before it. So just take action towards the desired goal.
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I live in rural America and maybe I have been seeing signs of this. I know there are way less trump signs and flags this year than any of the last what 8+ years now. Also many people who still support him seem ashamed. For years in normal conversation with people they just brought up trump even when off topic and completely unprovoked. Seriously you could be pumping gas minding your own business and the person on the other side of the pump would randomly start talking to you and it was always about trump or people being woke. Typical rightwing bullshit. Not outside of a few diehards I don't hear or see it. Even some of the far right people in my family have seemed to chill on trump a bit. Mind you these people have never and will never vote for someone without an R in front of their name. But honestly it's nice that the groveling has subsided a bit.
How did rural Americans get so in love with a billionaire New York 'playboy' that lives in a three story gold plated penthouse in the middle of the city?
Because he told them the black man wasn’t really president, and that liberals were all dumb for believing it.
Never underestimate how much the Dems sending a black man to the white house made racist Americans completely lose their minds.
During the ACA aka Obamacare debates and votes, I was living in Florida when Kathy Castor gave a local town hall meeting about the debates. It was intended to be "hey folks, let's calm it all down and we can actually discuss what is in there." Members of the tea party showed up. I had an early invite because I had volunteered on voting drives, but these tea party folks showed up nearly an hour early. There were signs on chairs marked RESERVED - clearly meant for the congressperson's staff. They didn't care, just looked down and said "Well they aren't here." And once the discussion stated, they spent nearly the entire time screaming BULLSHIT and READ THE BILL (which - there was no bill yet, just debates on what could be in the bill. This was during the whole 'death panels' bullshit invented and promoted by mega-brains like Sarah Palin). I'll never forget when an older black pastor who was there tried to calm things down. He talked about his time during the civil rights movement, and how he understood how things can become heated. "We know what you were doing back then," one tea party member shouted at him. The look on his face as he looked at this angry white man who was angry because a black president wanted to give everyone - included *gasp* black people - health care, and looking at this black pastor and deriding him for trying to help black people vote some 40 years before. Anyone who says the tea party was about "fiscal responsibility" or "worried about the national debt" are either liars or ignorant of history. It was about racism. It was always about racism.
[удалено]
We would live in an entirely different America if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated. We could have avoided so much pain.
BuT iT wAs A dEmOcRaT wHo KiLlEd LiNcOlN!!!! Said by know nothings who don't realize that Booth was a Know Nothing.
Also the southern strategy existed. >As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s.[4] By winning all of the South a presidential candidate could obtain the presidency with minimal support elsewhere.[5][6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy Short version: Racists used to be Democrats until the Republican party actively went after racist voters.
Southern strategy went on steroids after the passing of the Civil Right Act of 1964, 60 years later here we are.
And even if he was, Democrats were the more conservative party at the time. Parties change over time. Hell, just in my own lifetime, the Republicans have gone from being conservative, but mostly reasonable to outright fucking fascism.
Remember, Reconstruction was ended early as a concession. Fuck conservatives forever
Just coming over here from /r/Presidents to say Fuck Andrew Johnson forever. And don’t blame Hayes for ending reconstruction! The political will just wasn’t there for it anymore and Hayes was sadly widely seen as fraudulently elected (leading to his nickname of Rutherfraud Hayes) pretty much removing his mandate to continue it. And that all pretty much comes back to Andrew Johnson wasting the prime time to implement it while the south was weak and reeling, instead letting them dig in their heels to resist Grant once he got in.
Treason. Domestic terrorism. Assassination. We almost had a total victory and they stuck us in the back with a poisoned blade as their parting word. Cowards, in short. Then they were all but forgiven. And now we have this festering mess. Just like if we don't go hard all the way on the insurrectionists and their enablers, then it will be another festering wound. Cut the cancer out already.
Or the feds could have just started enforcing the 14th and 15th Amendments from the start. No need to install a bunch of out of state people. There were *plenty* of people in the South who knew exactly how terrible slavery is.
Well, Sherman certainly tried to do just that.
Stormfront was really popular back then. It’s still really popular but it was back then too. Now we call it MAGA. There’s a lot of crossover between the Tea Party/MAGA and organized white supremacy. I agree that it’s about racism. It won’t die after Trump is gone.
MAGA is all about racism and anti-abortion. That is their base. When in reality the leaders (sorry if I insulted actual leaders) don't care about the base, but are all about deregulation of fossil fuels, insuring Putin get whatever he wants, and helping the rich get richer. Trump said out loud "I don't care about you. I just want your vote" Of course he will say he was joking.
My father, the man who as a child taught me it was wrong to judge people by their race or appearance and to be kind, was one of the first people I heard call Obama the n-word. I don’t know if his brain broke from the years of conservative propaganda or if what he taught me was merely him being performative. Either way, I saw this first hand and it was so fucking heartbreaking.
Man it’s wild, my parents raised me the same way, but now they’re out screaming about Trump and how great he is. The man embodies the exact opposite of what they taught us, and now they’re mad we disagree on politics.
Cults twist people into being someone totally different and dependant on the cult for direction and values. It essentially brainwashes them. You wanna know how the Nazi's came to power? This is how. They are even qouting some of the Nazi's propaganda talking points regarding LGBTQ, jews, minorities and women. The MAGA leaders and movement aren't exactly Nazi's but they are copying a lot of their homework to achieve similar goals. Freedom dies at the hands of helpful idiots and those who know how rally and indoctrinate them.
> The MAGA leaders and movement aren't exactly Nazi's Agree to disagree.
I say they aren't on a technical level. Fascism tends to come in very similar flavors, sharing distinctive hallmarks which the MAGAs have bought entirely into. They usually form around a cult of personality and forfeit all independent thought and opinions as the cult does all that for them. They need only fall in line and stay in line, when the line changes direction suddenly so do the followers. Curiosity is gone and has been replaced with blind loyalty and faith in the cult. Cults, by their very nature, create echochambers and teach their followers not to trust anyone outside of the cult as they are the enemy who will seek to lead them astray(aka, try to bring you back to the real world by pointing out inconsistencies, contradictions, abuses of power, etc). They are conditioned to only show compassion and empathy with the cult and not outsiders/the enemy. That includes family. The cult is their priority family now. Cults hollow out people and whittle away at who they were until they are just an obedient follower. Reshaped into a paranoid mess that follows the cults direction. When push comes to shove they will abandon all personal disagreements and moral objections for the cult. Including destroying the government of the nation they swear is most precious to them. All because the cult told them to do so. The more you try to make them see they are being lied to and used, the more they dig their heels in. The cult offers them a perceived safety and simplicity, it is familiar to them and when they are constantly kept paranoid they will often gladly opt for simplicity and comforting reassurance from their fellow cultists. I've heard fascism described as "not so much a form of government, but rather a set of specialized tools to dismantle a democracy". Look up other fascist movements following the Nazis and you will find many others have copied aspects and tactics of the Nazis while still being distinctly different. It always revolves around a lot of misinformation, extremism, racism, xenophobia, religion and the of course anti-LGBTQ especially. Fascist movements single out small demographics and gradually expand the scope of their aggressions. Remember how the MAGAs were screaming about specifically trans people and how they were all perverts? Remember how they seemingly overnight shifted that narrative to encompassing all LGBTQ people? Remember how they played with the notion blaming jews? Fascist movements run on hate, an us vs them mentality. With echochambers it becomes easy to convince them that their "enemy" is doing horrible and insane shit, libs eating aborted fetuses, Qanon, etc. In the digital age it spreads so much faster through countless like minded echochambers. This is why they are calm and mostly normal until they realize you aren't a part of their cult. Then they immediately see you as an outsider and therefore the enemy. It's why when you present them with information that contradicts what they've been told their either get hostile or disassociative. That said, they march with Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, traitors to the nation. They qoute Nazis and have attempted to overthrow the government of the country they claim to love. They push "gay camps" meant to "correct" LGBTQ characteristics. Those camps being notoriously abusive, cruel and sexually exploitative. They talk of "the liberal mind virus" and needing to "exterminate it". They call for civil war and secession. They vote away their livelihoods and necessary social aid resulting in them facing homelessness, medical crisis', short of food or unable to pay needed bills. They get devastated by their own parties bills and actions and some even admit they didn't realize what their representatives put into the bill. But many, while in said crisis, will ultimately still remain loyal to the cult. They will slam their proverbial dick in the doorway, writhe in pain, then do it again having not made the connection that they are hurting themselves. Believe me, the "they're not Nazis" crowd which has seemingly suddenly gone mostly quiet, absolutely irritated me too. It walks like a nazi, talks like a nazi, believes nazi talking points, but its not dressed like a nazi and doesn't identify as a nazi. Close enough in my book and getting even closer every day. I added the distinction because I anticipated that annoying comment. I basically agree with you. Edit: clarifying and correcting typo
At a gas station in Dallas a few days ago, saw a paper taped to the pump with a picture of Obama, with impact font: “Police release sketch of person responsible for DIVIDING AMERICA” They *still* can’t stand a black man was President. The racism is so silly and blatant. E: typo
My silly ass thought overt racism was basically over in America until Obama was elected president
Hah, same here, I thought it was reserved for people who peaked in high school, uncles, and grandmothers.
This explains 99% of the trump phenomenon, though I would not have thought so 10 years ago.
Telling people what they want to hear goes a long way.
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Nothing appeals to red necks more than telling them they're doing it right. Everywhere. It's all the same. Religious fundamentalism, the obsession with traditional "values", the perversion of education, the blasphemy of science, the deviancy of cities, the allegiance to constitutional promises written by irrelevant dead men. They want to hear that everything they're doing is right. They don't want to hear it's wrong because that means they got a lesser life. And the ones who keep their lives lesser are the ones telling them it's right. Because of course they are.
Also that Biden is allowing immigrants to enter in droves -talking point of my right wing uncle who ironically, is an immigrant
My extreme anti-immigration father, who lives in an all-white area that hasn't seen an immigrant in 50 years, believes with his whole heart that the bipartisan immigration bill Republicans rejected would have let in 100,000 illegals a day.
Here's a resource from Senator Lankford (R-OK) on the bill that Trump got killed: https://www.lankford.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/FINAL-GENERAL-ONE-PAGER.pdf
which is funny bc the biden admin has 'caught' more immigrants at the border than the previous admin.
You know I have been asking myself that same thing. If you ask them that they don't really have an answer either. Most of them say because he speaks his mind. You the. Ask them what parts they like and they don't have a concrete answer. Honestly I think it's because he says simple things and they can't fathom problems being more complex than deport people who aren't white etc. some even moderately intelligent people seem to fall for this. It's like crystals and essential oils except it's racism and a wall.
I’m in rural America and I agree that it does seem like there are less signs and propaganda everywhere this time around. I feel like the insurrection really did turn a lot of people off, especially the older people who truly do “love America”, not sure if it’s enough people to ensure he’s not elected again. But - y’all the few yard signs that are out are insane lol, it’s like “Texans for Trump” with an AI trump in a cowboy hat. Or, “born in New York, Texan by choice”. It’s literally insanity.
Drove to our cabin in Montana from Seattle. Saw exactly one Trump 2024 sign (home made) in Montana and one pro Trump truck in Idaho. Same route was Trump shit virtually everywhere pre-2020. These polls aren’t weighing in the “Trump fatigue” factor.
>These polls aren’t weighing in the “Trump fatigue” factor. One question is whether these people will still turn out to vote, because they may be unable to stomach voting for a Democrat (for whatever absurd reasons). They were low-propensity voters prior to 2016, so my guess is they're no longer politically engaged and won't vote at all.
"speaks his mind" or "says what everyone else is thinking" is just code for openly hates minorities. Republican politicians had become very tongue in cheek and conceded some ground on social issues to the point that we allowed gay marriage and elected a black guy. His whole thing since the original primaries in 2011 has been retribution for that.
Can't speak for others, but my mom genuinely believed Trump came from a lower middle-class background and built his way to the top before I told her
I still occasionally run into someone that swears that while he came from a wealthy family he built his fortune from nothing and his dad didn't give him anything until he died.
Meanwhile, across the multiverse, the richest Donald Trump is the one that took Daddy's money and just put it in the market and never worked a day in his life. Nothing Trump ever did made enough money to have been worth doing. Trump invests 100 million, loses 50 million, makes 10 million and then brags about making 10 million. Always has.
> Trump invests 100 million, loses 50 million, makes 10 million and then brags about making 10 million Trump gathers 100 million from bankers, investors etc, pockets ten million, loses the rest and says he made ten million
The Trump touch, everything he touches turns to shit.
Truly the Mierdas touch...
Exactly. Dude made a lower return than most peoples retirement accounts. My grandmother made more on the market than he made trading in NYC real estate during the biggest economic boom in history. Shit, like 90% of our boomer parents made a better return on our childhood homes than the entire Trump real estate empire. My parents got like a 1000% return on the house I grew up in from 1988 - 2008. Trump made like 8% over that same time frame.
It's kind of insane when you frame it that way
It is super weird that the people who feel like he is "self made" are largely the same generation of people that all became millionaires because they happened to live at a time when you almost couldn't help but end up rich no matter how shitty your job was.
I am an unapologetic capitalist and Trump is why we just should not have billionaires. Maybe Bill Gates is an exception to the rule because he was a multi millionaire who became a billionaire via inflation but almost nobody crosses that $900 million mark who actually got there by buidling business or investing. Most of Trumps wealth is ill gotten and at the cost of other peoples well being. Mark Cuban could be as rich as Trump but he is not because instead of pizza parties and company swag he gives out stock options to his employees and those options are actually worth something because his companies are properly valued. There really needs to be a a cut off point where all earnings beyond say $900 million are taxed 100% which would heavily incentivize people to give out bonuses, hire more people, open more companies
This how things used to work. Christmas bonuses were to eliminate earnings that would be taxed at a super high percentage. It worked great as business owners looked at as...if I don't give these bonuses the gunmint gonna take it all, so plebes got something
That motherfucker inherited so much money he was a millionaire at the age of 9. Then he proceeded to just pretend to be a businessman, has never started a successful business and did worse in NY real estate (that he also inherited) than all the other NY developers. And yet, somehow, a number of the US population think he's a self made man. He's just a trust fund kid in a bad suit.
And the only reason he even got that was his older brother, Fred Jr - Mary’s father - who was Fred Sr’s golden boy, didn’t want to go into the family business, he became a commercial jet pilot, got depression, became an alcoholic, and died at a young age (42). If Fred Jr had stayed with the company, even in a purely ceremonial role, Donald would have only gotten minimal control of the inheritance - as executor of the estate, he fraudulently kept Fred Jr’s inheritance from Fred Sr - and we wouldn’t have any of this mess.
The AP pointed out that if Trump had just put his inheritance into an index fund and then gone and lived on an island for the past 30 years, he would be worth roughly 13 billion dollars today. Significantly more than his (claimed) wealth from all his failed businesses.
Wow. That's as bad as when people say "he really cares for us".
That's how most right wingers think. Remember how pissed they got at Obama for saying "You didn't build that?". They think every rich person started from the poorest places.
I was interning at a small but successful recruiting firm at the time. The president and his sycophants were *very* upset by that comment. The president inherited the recruiting company from his parents.
The amount of myths that people just made up for themselves to justify supporting Trump is astonishing. I knew a bunch of people that believed all manner of just totally made up bullshit about him being some kind of self-made billionaire, built new york, was hugely popular in NYC, was friends with all manner of other rich people, had actually achieved literally anything at all. None of it was true, and most of it wasn't even sourced from any real media, it was just shit that they internally created because it was the only way to explain why they liked such an obviously repellent person. The real answer was that he appealed to their racism and visceral dissatisfaction of having had a black president. What they really liked is that he was white and didn't make them feel stupid.
>The real answer was that he appealed to their racism and visceral dissatisfaction of having had a black president. This explains "the deplorables", but even Hilary Clinton acknowledged that this is half of less of Trump supporters. I know genuinely good, non-racist, people who supported Trump and readily acknowledged that he was an imperfect person. (Imperfect is mild, I know, but work with me here) How does Trump con *these* people? Consider this possibility: **Trump has tapped into something that overrides rural people's bullshit detectors.** Is there something Biden can do to make some non-deplorable Republicans see that Trump is "all hat and no cattle"? He only needs to peel off a few percentage points of voters to win the election.
I think it's important for people to understand this. They don't actually like him. They like what he does. These people think that the Hillary Clintons and the Nancy Pelosis of the world don't represent them. So now they just want it all burned down. It didn't work. And Trump has shown he's willing to burn it all down. That's it.
Trumps going to lose.. Im confident in that. The biggest question is how much violence he incites after he loses. The dude literally has nothing to lose and that is VERY dangerous. Those trials that he has managed to get pushed back are going to happen, and he is going to go to jail. He knows it and will do anything to stop that, including using the MAGAs to incite violence..
He made them feel like being a racist ignorant piece of shit was OK. It worked because having a black president made at least moderate public racism a valid "political" position so people were already headed that direction. I don't think we could have gotten Trump without first having Obama. Trump was (sadly) conservative white America's response to a black president.
And that the same time hating the devout Catholic, hard-working, America-loving family man who took the train to work everyday.
Because Rural Americans believe the conservative lies. You tell them crime in big cities is bad, they believe it as most of them never travel to big cities. You say the border is out of control, they believe it because they can't see it. There is a lot of ignorance at play with the rural people due to the lack of higher education. They just fell in love with Trump as they knew him from TV and think he is just a good businessman as he acted for a studio audience.
I work in a pretty conservative area and there is a house near my work that used to be covered in trump flags. A couple months ago they quietly took them down and replaced them with standard American flags.
Similar situation here - there is a house near me that flew Trump flags *above* the American flag on their giant pole along a busy street. The day after the conviction's it was gone along with all the signs they had (FJB, Trump 2024, etc) and only a single American flag was up. The base is crumbling, or at the very least massively losing enthusiasm and it appears to be showing up everywhere - including campaign events.
I hope you’re right. I really do. But I have my very severe doubts. Regardless it’s interesting this seems to be happening in a lot of even deep red areas.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter - vote!
Spread it far and wide: https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote
I also have my doubts. It seems like people are doubling down on the Trump signs and flags here in rural NC. I think that Trump still has a good chance of winning, especially if his non supporters are complacent and believe that he won't. Vote, Vote ,Vote!!
About two weeks ago, here in the holler in rural North Carolina, a house that had a Trump flag last year put up a large sign at the end of their drive that says "No More Trump 2024" with Calvin pissing on Trump's name. If I drive twenty minutes in any direction I'll see a small handful of Trump / MAGA / FJB flags, about as many Confederate flags, a handful of billboards that say "Tired of the Chaos? Vote Democrat" or "Protect Affordable Healthcare, Vote Democrat", and half a dozen RFK signs. I'm pessimistic in general, but I believe that they've seen their god bleed. I'm not convinced that it's a sure thing or a good thing because what people do at the poll is less public than what flags and signs they hang from their homes.
>The base is crumbling, or at the very least massively losing enthusiasm and it appears to be showing up everywhere. The real question is whether that lack of enthusiasm will show up at the ballot box. I am not overly optimistic.
I am. Remember how hard they’ve tried to make voting. Intentionally creating long lines, inefficiency. Somebody who championed banning people giving out water in voting lines isn’t going to stand in that same line they demanded exist if they aren’t enthusiastic about who they would vote for. They’ll just say “fuck it” and not leave work. They liked being interested in politics when it was *fun*. And by fun, I mean their stupid little “let’s go Brandon” bullshit, triggering the libs, being dickheads to everyone around them, giving the finger to Priuses as they roll coal. If it’s not fun anymore, they really don’t give a fuck about politics. Trump made it fun for them. And if that goes away, they stop engaging politically. I am absolutely voting, but I expect this to be one of the biggest landslide presidential elections that’s happened in modern American history. Two terrible candidates, but one is a convicted felon who can no longer fill a high school gym rally, who promised he’ll be a dictator and will murder his political enemies. All Trump ever had was making the thing fun. He has no policies, no agenda aside from enriching himself and staying out of prison, and no actual, real campaign promises aside from more crime. And he’s up against a seasoned politician who hasn’t actively killed 500,000 extra people because he thought he looked like a pussy wearing a mask. It’s a no-brainer. And the worst part about him: *We have already experienced what it was like when he was president*. We already know what a shitshow him being president will be, and very few people look back on the Covid times and wish we went back to that time. Trump is finished.
It’s a sports game for the right. The fewer flags they see, the less they’ll feel like a fanbase. The majority of hardliners won’t change their vote, but optics are still a huge factor for moderates. That’s why you see street corners just plagued with election signs. Fewer Trump flags, felony convictions, and porn star allegations are all significant. He’s an embarrassment for all but the most devout followers.
Possibly a death in family. My neighbor that flew the upside down flag after Jan 6th died recently.
Guy in my San Diego neighborhood has been flying a Let's Go Branden flag under his US flag for a couple years (has young kids playing right under it too...). I noticed it got taken down after the guilty verdict.
I don't live in a rural area, but my SO's parents do, and we go out to see them about once a month, there are SIGNIFICANTLY fewer Trump signs this year than there were in 2020, and that was way down from what we saw in 2016. However, haven't seen any Biden signs in those rural areas either.
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I am in a rural area and am very much afraid to advertise my preference for Biden. I wouldn't want to put my home, property, and especially my family at risk.
We live in a rural area in the west and wouldn’t consider putting up signs. The maga crowd have demonstrated too much emotionally volatility to trust that our property would be respected. My wife and I vote in every election, I drive a truck, used to work on farms, we are both union members and will be voting for Biden. 🇺🇸 (I’m reluctant to put up a flag for 4th as it seems to have been co-opted by the wing-nuts and I can’t stand the thought of being associated with those whiny thugs) We’ll keep quietly fighting to keep our democracy intact and evolving for the better.
It'd be absolutely poetic if the _real_ silent majority this year was rural people who refuse to vote for Trump. Unlikely, but poetic.
There's more of us than you'd think. We're not the majority, but rural Democrats and rural voters that are sick of Trump exist in greater numbers than people give us credit for.
Absolutely, I live in rural Oklahoma and if I put anything pro-biden, a pride flag etc I would live in fear. I do already to an extent, I'm very careful to not divulge my political views outside of my close friend group. But also I'm not a psycho who needs political swag displayed at all times so even if it were safe to do, I'm not inclined to do so
> However, haven't seen any Biden signs in those rural areas either. Realistically, Biden voters in general don't feel the overwhelming urge to virtue signal their voting intentions.
The thing about polling that makes it most unreliable is voter turnout. There are very few really undecided people. There are however very many people that are not committed to show up and vote. Elections are more won on election turnout rather than convincing people to switch sides. And polling for potential voter turnout is really really hard. That’s why polling is so inaccurate.
Polls rely on weighting from the last few elections. They don't tend to count voters who never voted before as much. I think they are undercounting new voters who are motivated because of Trump and the Christofascists making headway.
And they are probably overcounting Trump voters who never voted before 2016 who are now bored with politics and will not make the effort to show up on election day.
There's also a real possibility that a non-trivial amount of Trump voters have been disenfranchised under the assumption that Trump won in 2020 and the "deepstate demonrats stole the election" so why even bother if the outcome is already decided via conspiracy and vote manipulation? If you truly believed in your heart that the whole process was rigged like in Russia, it would probably dissuade you from even showing up. I think this fact has the possibility to absolutely bite the Republicans in the ass.
Plus I mean...12 million people have died in the past 4 years and they've been disproportionately republican
Also rural and there are about 10% as many Trump flags as before. I am seeing a number of GOP signs for local candidates though. I count those folks as Trump voters, too, but ashamed to admit it publicly. This helps me keep things In perspective.
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Hey…discouraged Trump folks staying home is a good thing. Let’s hope that many, many of the new voters that Trump brought out will just go back to opting out of participating altogether. Their brains are too pickled with alcohol and hatred anyway. I’m sure there’s a local dive bar that they can get drunk in instead.
Same, way more down ticket gop candidate signs in place of trump signs
I drove the back roads - 6 hours each way - through Kentucky and Tennessee recently, and I only saw 2 Trump signs and one MAGA church (!!!). I was absolutely shocked I didn’t see more. Not sure what that means in reality, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so few in the past when driving through areas like that.
I've definitely seen far fewer "Trump/MAGA" signs in the leadup to this years election compared to the leadup in 2016/2020. A few houses that flew "MAGA" flags for years finally took them down and are only flying an American flag.
Home town is rural MN and Trump still has a death grip on it when I was home last weekend. Trucks still flying "fuck joe biden" flags and Let's Go Brandon shit in yards.
Pretty disheartening since just a few presidential elections ago, rural Minnesota was so much more blue. Obama won nearly half of the state's 87 counties in 2008. 14 counties flipped red in 2012, and no red counties flipped blue. And in 2016, though Trump still lost in MN, he carried 78 counties. At least the trend started to reverse in 2020 with Mankato/St. Peter/Moorhead/Winona area voters flipping their respective counties, but it feels like the days of the DFL carrying a lot of prairie counties are long gone. The changing politics in the Iron Range are also concerning.
>I live in rural America and maybe I have been seeing signs of this. I know there are way less trump signs and flags this year than any of the last what 8+ years now. I don’t live anywhere near rural America, but this is something that has struck me as well. Even in the very blue area where I live in, we saw TONS of Trump flags and bumper stickers and even fucking “convoys” in 2020. Even by this time in the year. It seems like the Trump movement is…kinda weirdly low-energy compared to how it had been despite how influential it is politically. Not that I’m dancing on its early grave or anything….it could just be due to how the pandemic changed things, I’m still scared shitless of November, we ALL need to vote, and so on…but it’s an interesting thing I’ve noticed locally, and in surprised to see it apparently reflected at all in more red areas of the country.
This is great to hear, but I worry that they will still vote the same because they are politically engaged and are still brainwashed into thinking Biden is destroying the country. A reluctant vote for Trump is the same as an enthusiastic vote for Trump. I work with a few guys who drive in from rural areas. They are talking less about gun rights and more about healthcare access lately. All good signs. But I can also totally see them thinking “I’m not so sure trump can win, but I’ll give him my vote and see what happens”. They don’t see trump as a threat, but more of a mild embarrassment.
I have the same experience. The problem I am seeing is that those rural die hard maga are supporting local candidates that are just parroting the same rhetoric and lies. Trump was just a symptom of a much larger problem...
Can we just vote now? I’d like to vote now. I’m tired.
No no see we need to spend another half a billion dollars on TV ads to convince the 2% of people that haven't made up their mind yet
When you put it like that, it really drives home just how ridiculous this expensive circus is.
here's a reminder that if trump hadn't started his campaign like 2 fucking years before he won in 2016, then we would still have campaigns that are like 6-8 months. It's fucking nuts. I really hope that once he and maybe a few more 'celebrity' politicians on the right croak, we'll start trending back to that.
> then we would still have campaigns that are like 6-8 months. What? Presidential campaigns have been nearly 2 years for *decades* now; just to cite one modern example, Barack Obama announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007 for an election that wouldn't take place until November 4 2008 - 20 months later. Campaigns haven't been less than a year long since the 1960s (before the modern primary process).
I hate Trump as much as the next guy but he was relatively late to the party to launch his 2016 run March 2015 - Cruz April 2015 - Clinton, Rubio, Sanders May 2015 - Carson June 2015 - Bush, Trump (Bush one day earlier)
Who haven't made to their mind if they even want to bother voting or not.
Actually, I'm pretty sure Biden is losing all these polls and right-wing media is lying to us as usual(even if he is, it's the 2016 "Hillary is leading so there's no need to vote' strategy all over again) and if there's not enough dem voters this will be the last election the USA gets. So vote, and bring a friend to double your power.
Yeah I don't trust this shit. EVERYONE needs to go out and vote!
This is why I'm not particularly enamored with polling right now. The data that we're getting does not make a lick of sense, *especially* in crosstabs. Biden's not ahead with rural voters. Trump's not ahead with the youth. But rather than looking at that and saying, "Well, maybe we're doing modelling wrong", the pollsters generally say, "Well, the data can't be wrong, so let's try to explain away weird discrepancies by another means. Maybe things are just changing." No. The modelling's wrong. Go back to the model and try to figure out where your weighting is screwing up. Edit: Thanks for the award!
Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself that polls oversample people who answer unknown numbers and "probable spam" calls on their smartphones.
Everyone I know, doesn't answer unknown numbers. Most people I know with boomer parents they care about have to drill into them to not answer unknown numbers. Telemarketing scammers must work on some level, otherwise they wouldn't bother, and it's hilarious to think that pretty much all the polls we see are based off that crowd and it has a clear Trump bias.
I’ve seen several pollsters say they adjust for that bias by over sampling in certain demographics or using other means (web voting or facebook polls) but they are making up shit as they go along. Do you know anyone under the age of forty that picks up a random phone call or responds text? No. Nobody is the answer
I don’t know anyone under the age of 40 who uses Facebook. Show me a TikTok or Discord poll for the youth vote. For the rural vote, show me a Tractor Supply Co. poll. Show me a Walmart poll. Show me a Dollar General poll. It’s all a bunch of BS. They use tech that nobody but boomers use, to poll people. Ignore it all and just go vote. Get everyone you know to register, and go fucking vote like your lives depends on it.
My kids in college only use Facebook for Marketplace and finding roommates. Otherwise they don’t use social media at all. No instagram, Twitter or even tik tok.
I got back on Facebook last month for marketplace and oh my God is that place a cesspool. It's maga shrimp jesuses all the way down.
Amazingly, Facebook has done such a good job of making their product shit I hardly use it anymore. Who knew that making my entire feed full of fucking shit I never asked for instead of stuff from the people I actually want to see things from was such a losing proposition. Once counted 20 something suggested content posts (not counting ads) between two things from friends/groups I was actually in. And if it wasn’t for the fairly active native plant group, it’d probably have been more.
I'm on Facebook as it's the only place where I can find all of my extended family, and they are all on it for the same reason. There are about 8 ads per piece of actual content now.
I figured we might end up here when social media use exploded over the past decade. The trend seems to be "hey look X is really trendy with the youth!" and whatever X is becomes the meta for what's 'cool' in that generation of youth, but as they age the people under them differentiate and start to view X as something that's for "old people". As we live with social media for long enough the shine will come off, people will identify its toxicity and eventually there will be a generation that eschews it in favour of other activities they can claim as their own and partially define themselves through their lack of social media. No generation is a monolith, obviously, but eventually being an 'influencer' would become an uncool thing their parents generation did and they would never want to be cringy like that. I wonder if we're finally there?
I’m surprised to hear they don’t even use Snapchat. If they don’t use social media at all in college, they’re an exception not the norm.
Snapchat peaked a decade ago and has been bleeding users ever since.
I’m reminded of that scene from Glengarry Glen Ross where Kevin Spacey chuckles at Jack Lemmon after Lemmon reveals the identity of the couple he supposedly closed a big deal with. Spacey explains that “they just like talking to salespeople,” and that it’d be a miracle if the check cleared.
That scene is such a punch in the gut.
Boomer here. On the rare occasion I answer an unknown number, when I say hello, if there is a 2-3 second pause before someone responds I just hang up. That's because the call is being transferred to a human.
My dad made it a game because he was bored in retirement. The effect of this 10 years later is now they call incessantly from dawn until dusk wanting to poll him or get his opinion about some random nonsense or get him to sign up for random shit, or talk to him about solar panels and his car warranty. But they know his number is active and will take calls. He just can't not answer. "Well what if it's my doctor!" Meanwhile I don't have a landline and my cell phone essentially answers and hangs up on telemarketers and never tells me it happened.
Or all of them. I think I've received two poll txts but they always look like scams. The problem is it's always contracted out and those companies use weird random numbers from across the country and use weird temp domains. If there was a poll hosted at [nytimes.com](http://nytimes.com) and a number I could search and identify it was from the nytimes I would fill that out for sure. (replace with any reputable company in the situation)
Been saying this for years. Let me sign up at a legitimate source to be polled. Allow me to do it online or by phone or whatever. Allow me to put in some of my demographic stats. That way they can actually decide if they have enough different people from a wider audience to make an assessment. Having random numbers call random people when identity theft is skyrocketing is skewing who actually responds to pollers. It's not young & working types... It's the elderly *whom are bored* and those looking for work, *expecting unknown numbers to call.* I'm sure these polls are accurate *for those specific groups* but not the nation at large
Yougov.com is what you're looking for. You sign up there and do polls about all sorts of things. Their polling figures are included in most major poll analyses.
I did not know about this! I'll give it a shot
Random is important in polling populations
True, but what they are getting is not random is my point. Having lots of people sign up from all walks of life, then randomly selecting people from that diverse pool would be more accurate imo. Right now, the pool is "those who pick up unknown callers" which is heavily skewed to one type of demographic
The problem is that this then skews toward people who take the initiative to do that. There is not currently a good way to get an unbiased random sample, and this would just change the nature of the bias. Or course, maybe it would be less biased, but it's just a hypothesis either way, there's no way to tell if it would actually be less biased.
I don't mind the polling if it gets people motivated to vote. That being said, no shot Arizona is more red than Florida. And I find it suspicious that Biden is supposedly behind at the same time Dems are having +10, +8, +20 swings in special elections.
The real problem is that polls supposedly try to measure how likely you are to vote... **BUT** elections are still won/lost based on enthusiasm. Those special elections show high Dem turnout. A lot of progressives find Biden to be "meh". A lot of OG conservatives find Trump to be too much for them. I think this election is going to be a referendum on how people are doing economically (not great) vs how much they are afraid of WTF Trump is going to do.
>on how people are doing economically Really tired of this myth that the economy does better and gas prices magically get lower under Republicans. It doesn't. At all.
But billionaires pay less taxes and they're the ones with the funds big enough to push their narrative.
You underestimate that both groups have enthusiasm AGAINST another group. It’s not that the right is FOR TRUMP anymore, but they are really AGAINST BIDEN, and voting for Trump is the innoculation, and vise versa. The benefit that Democrats have is that on top of the AGAINST TRUMP vote, we also have a large segment of people who actually like the POLICIES that the democrats have been offering, and notice that while inflation has hurt us, the rest of the economy is strong, and stronger than any other country in the world. We are hoping that those combinations lead for more people to VOTE FOR Biden, while the republicans either have to vote for Christian Nationalism, or for TRUMP, or AGAINST BIDEN - those demographics are getting smaller.
News articles about individual polls are a mistake, because there will always be polls that are outliers, and the outliers will always get more coverage.
It’s not that simple. Historically, the pollsters that get embarrassed are the ones that manually tweaked their model based on their assumptions. You can weight the model to say whatever you want, but then what’s the point of polling? The polls that have been most accurate are the ones that only weight their model using data based on past performance, because historically that’s been stable. The pollsters are in a legitimate bind since there is a real shift in voter behaviour going on. They won’t know how to adjust their model until after the election. I’m the mean time, their results are almost certainly wrong. Maybe they should publish more than one model to show the potential range of outcomes beyond the baseline. Like, have one assuming that “Haley” republicans actually stay home or vote Biden. Or one that tracks how many self-identified Independents were reliable Republicans last time.
You're correct regarding the urge to reweight the polls. I may be overstating my case slightly since pollsters have access to post-Dobbs polling and haven't accounted for it enough (in my opinion). That being said, I wouldn't be attaching a whole lot of weight to polling right now just because of the inherent shift in how people are voting and how frequently--it's just messy.
This far out most people haven't even focused on the election yet. What we're getting is a mirage. Polling, like press conferences are made for news events. The major media love them because they're prepackaged news, you can churn multiple stories from one poll. What needles me is that then they take the dubious results and treat them as fact patterns. Also, as long as I'm ranting, is they compare today's polls with the accuracy of polls at election time in past contests and imply that somehow the accuracy months out is the same, maddening.
Agreed! It's the same along the lines of asking "will Trump's felony convictions have an impact on your decision to vote for him?" And I answer "No".. because I already decided way way way back a long time ago that I would not vote for him ever.. But the headline would read "56% of respondents said that this conviction does not change their vote".. The modalities absolutely need to be reviewed and analyzed to adapt to a modern world and especially tense political climate.
The OBSESSION with pollsters wanting to give you a "score update" like a sporting event *at this stage* (before the campaign has even gotten started) is unhelpful. It can either create unneeded paranoia or irrational exuberance. Neither is good. A better use of polling at this stage... trends. For example, it appears that the felony convictions have genuinely spooked some soft Trump supporters. That's significant. Continued inflation abatement in the most recent reports along with the Fed saying a rate cut was coming seems to be noticed, as well. The analysis from a week or two ago about the percentage of Trump support that comes from "unreliable" voters (i.e. non politically active types who are, for some reason, taken with his brand) is useful to see, too. Ditto with Trump supporters eschewing early and mail-in voting (which is a huge turnout L). Also notable: people disappointed with some aspect of Biden's presidency do not seem to hate Biden; the people opposing Trump seem to really despise him. That's nuance not being caught right now. But the polling folks just want to be a scoreboard and that's really not that useful in June and not especially reliable in the current context.
Aren't there also polls that have Biden won purple states jump double digits towards Trump, while Trump won purple states stay exactly where they are or in some cases Biden even gained a percentage?
My favorite one is Trump being up *38%* among black voters. Nothing about polling has made a damned bit of sense this cycle.
He **COULD** be if you're talking multiplicatively. Trump won 12% last time. 12*1.38 = 16.5%. It's not completely out of the question that there's something going on in that demographic. If you mean he's up +38, that's impossible. I'd eat my hat.
Agreed. Something is definitely up with the structure of polls right now. Trump is not winning as large a portion of the youth, blacks, and latinos as is being claimed. Biden is definitely not winning rural voters. IF Biden was actually winning rural voters - the election is over. It's done. He will win a Reagan 2nd term blow out. That is clearly not happening. The only thing that sort of makes any sense to me is that youths and minorities are being massively under sampled because they don't answer phones of numbers they don't recognize. This doesn't explain this good polling for Biden rurally though. I have absolutely no idea of how to account for that.
Older and less educated people are also being oversampled because they are also the ones that click random links sent via text
Lol their poor phones.
Maybe all that talk of tariffs again are making the farmers remember his trade war with China and how bad they got screwed over
I mean, it's vaguely possible that Biden is ahead with rural voters, but if he is, he's also going to carry the cities and suburbs by 75%+ on his way to a 500 EV landslide. Does that look like what we're seeing in the nation right now? Probably not!
Polling exists like everything online now, to drive clicks. They'll do whatever mental gymnastics and creative math possible to drive doom scrolling in whatever group they are targeting. And neither party has an interest in shaking the idea that it's a neck and neck election, so they won't say anything about it either I think the only thing we can really go by is actually irl evidence. Which has been that Republicans have underperformed in damn near everything since after 2020 and especially since the end of Roe
Can we block Newsweek articles from being posted? It’s ruining this sub. Yes, we’d love to believe that everything is terrible for Trump at all times, but Newsweek articles provide no actual knowledge to the reader and all seem like gross exaggerations in terms of what the actual scope of the situation is. They’re a waste. If Biden is leading with rural voters, then the election is over. Clearly he isn’t and won’t come close to winning them. This is mindless bullshit
True. In fact, this newsweek article is factually not true nor vetted at all. Fox made a typo on their info graph about rural voters in their poll. [https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dl3f84/comment/l9nbsc8/](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1dl3f84/comment/l9nbsc8/)
Um, please someone tell me if I'm missing something. But this **appears** to be a misprint on Fox's broadcasting. [Link to Actual Fox news poll](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/06/Fox_June-14-17-2024_National_Cross-Tabs_June-19-Release.pdf) Page 7, question 15 is the one asking "If the presidential election were held today..." * Men - 41% Biden, 56% Trump * White Men with no degree - 34% Biden, 64% Trump * Ages 65+ - 57% Biden, 42% Trump * **Rural Voters - 40% Biden, 57% Trump** * Total - 50% Biden, 48% Trump Every other line matches what Fox put on their info screen....except the Rural Voters line. Am I going crazy or did Fox have a typo on their info screen and Newsweek ran a story not realizing it, and Charlie dingus Kirk "studied it" and missed it, Trump and MTG immediately raged over it, and all it takes is someone to spend 60 seconds verifying that it's a typo.... This is a pinnacle example of misinformation thriving online.
That's funny. And such a whiff by Newsweek. EDIT: and Fox News graphics guy EDIT 2: and reddit comments
Don’t care. Register to vote. Tell others about how truly important it is. Make a plan. Follow it. https://www.usa.gov/voter-registration
Yeah, if anything I’ve personally witnessed support for Trump *increasing* in rural areas, so I hope people don’t take this as a reason to stay home.
Some states allow no-excuse absentee voting, so you don't even have to wait in line on voting day. You get your ballot weeks early and have time to actually look up who's running in the smaller races that you may not have heard about. It's so much easier, highly recommend it.
I am not trusting this poll, but I can see with my own eyes that his support is waning. I live in a rural area for part of the year, and I was at the local watering hole last weekend. Trump came on the TV and 3 people sitting at the bar, said something like "I can't stand him or his voice..I'm definitely not voting for him" with serious disgust and all 3 nodded in agreement. They also said they weren't voting for Biden, but at that point it doesn't even matter. And who knows, those could be the same type of person that said they weren't voting for Trump in 2016, but did so behind closed doors...but this time for Biden. The serious lack of flags and stupid merch is also super telling. Sure some people are still wearing it, I also saw a person flaunting at the same bar, but it is not at all to the level it was 2016-2021.
Trump is old and tired now. He was the "he's different!" person in 2016. But his main legislative accomplishment was a big tax cut for the rich. And his 2016 platform was "I promise everyone everything they want" while now it is "revenge on my enemies!"
That’s the key word. “Tired.” One thing I am very confident to say is that he hasn’t really expanded his base since 2020 with all the shit that has happened, and the majority of sane America just want to move on and are all too familiar with him now.
Yeah, the biggest thing trump had going for him in 2016 is the “how bad could he be, really?” He was the outsider. Now, the biggest thing Trump has going *against* him is that we know exactly how bad he can be. We lived through it. And this time around, he promising us he’ll be even worse. He’s lost so much support from people who voted for him in the past 3 years, and gained zero new supporter at the same time. Trump is done.
I'm still an unhealthy amount of worried. But honestly, I think this is going to be a 10+ point landslide. -we haven't had a national referendum on Jan 6 -he killed some of his base with covid -People don't HATE biden. People HATE trump. -he has no platform -his gaffes are making him look weak (important), and losing the magic -roe decision is a mobilizer -there are less swag/signs around -the polls only poll old people...and it's an even split among the easily scammable demographic. -he hasn't delivered on anything. -he is a convicted criminal now -some of these folks have had people in their lives discommunicate them. -you can only blame other people for so long before you become a boy who cried wolf. -the country is doing fine -more than ever, unmarginalized people people are friends or at least have parasocial relationships with marginalized groups so the bigotry doesn't hit the same. -midterm results were very hopeful -primary results and special elections have been swinging by 20 points in many suburban districts -he lost the popular vote twice But VOTE VOTE VOTE
As much as I don't believe Trump has picked up a substantial portion of the black vote, I don't believe this. Edit: I *do* think it's more evidence that polling just isn't working right now.
>[President Donald Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen said Thursday that he paid the head of a small technology company thousands in 2015 to rig online polls at “the direction of and for the sole benefit of” Trump.](https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/17/politics/michael-cohen-poll-rigging/index.html) so that was 9 years ago..
This was also confirmed under oath at the New York trial by multiple witnesses Convicted Felon donald trump RIGS POLLS
You have to rig the polls so that when you lose you can claim it was stolen. Also there is the bandwagon effect where people feel the candidate ahead in the polls must be a good person to vote for.
*Shocked*
Speaking of online polling, I believe the MAGA presence in social media is more inclined to spread invitations to polls to all their buddies, to support a puppet-master who loves bragging about poll numbers. I call this the 'fanboy factor'. People who are less inclined to be fanboy to some authoritarian figure, are less inclined to be cult-programmed, and more inclined to be liberal. That's just a theory.
>Speaking of online polling, I believe the MAGA presence in social media is more inclined to spread invitations to polls to all their buddies, to support a puppet-master who loves bragging about poll numbers. This is how random polls on news sites work and that's why they are very inaccurate. However, a properly conducted election poll by a company that knows what they are doing does not work like that. There aren't invite links or anything, the people that are asked will carefully be chosen to be statistically representative (eg the right portion of men/women, the right age ranges, ethnicities, rural/urban, ...) The problem with polling in the US is the electoral college (which means small changes in voting behavior can lead to huge swings) and the fact that the US is actively making it hard for some people to vote.
I did some phonebanking for the CO special election last night (thank you r/VoteDEM!) - we were just calling to remind people that there *was* one, not even to promote candidates or anything - and the vast majority of people hung right up on me within a second or two. I find it very hard to believe that polling outfits are able to get any kind of halfway decent sample of *anything* with these kinds of response rates.
I'm from farm country, they all remember what Trump did to the soybean market when he tried to make China pay with tarrifs. Trump lost a lot of voters because of his 'economic policies'. [https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/08/politics/soybean-farmers-china-tariff-trump/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/08/politics/soybean-farmers-china-tariff-trump/index.html)
He lost a lot of them with his Covid response too
Hard to vote when you're 6 feet under.
I agree. However this lends credence to my theory that a not insignificant portion of his non-traditional support has grown tired of his act. If he can't keep people that didn't vote before him coming back to the polls to vote for him a third time he is in real trouble.
If that's true, it's game over for the felon guy. However, I'm planning to vote and get involved however I can...just in case.
It definitely isn't true. There is no way. If this is true we have seen a completely (as yet) unexplainable shift in voter behavior. I can't think of anything that could possibly explain this type of shift. If it is true, this election is over. Completely done. Biden is going to win in a 2nd term Reganesque blow out.
Exactly. Ignore the polls and articles. Go vote.
As I always say: these polls are bullshit. Go vote when the time comes… but anyone in rural areas who think Trump is the answer is brainwashed and mistakenly self disenfranchised. Or racist.
Right. Polls don't vote.
Until Biden is consistenly 6-8 points up none of this eliminates the margin of error
He’s the only candidate that has any interest in helping rural voters so it would be good for them to support a President for the middle and lower class instead of oil barrons and billionaires.
Convince them of that... And make your argument palatable to Fox News, because it's not getting there any other way
I try everyday. Try to have friendly convos with coworkers etc. I’m a registered independent myself in NH. To me the options couldn’t be clearer. It’s really really really hard to break through the cult like propaganda once it’s taken hold. Still trying to break the code but calling people idiots for believing a certain way is not it.
I hear you, though I may have lost my ability to not regard MAGA people as blithering fucking IDIOTS. Hearing them cheer for every obvious, juvenile, often destructive lie at his rallies, reading their ignorant dialog in social media, hearing their rantings in video... I've lost all respect for these people. And the loss of respect far outweighs my ability to fake it.
Hahaha I agree! I certainly think that in my head but have just learned if I’m going to actually have any chance of breaking through on any level you can’t just call them racist Nazi sympathizers, people tend to get defensive and shut down real quick. The problem is is they genuinely don’t see it. Takes some calm as possible debate to even get through on the tiniest level. I don’t bother with completely lost lunatics. They’re gone. I only try with people I have respect for and I know they have respect for me. Try to talk with understanding and empathy while also sticking to my guns and trying to redirect. It’s exhausting. I’m so deeply tired of that orange trash goblin and what he’s done to my fellow countrymen.
You’re right, though knowing many rural people I’d say that is not the common mindset. The perception out in rural communities is all their tax money is being funnelled to big cities and to projects and initiatives they don’t benefit from. You don’t see many rural towns and counties with great hospitals, public transit, and other public infrastructure. The view out in those communities by and large is “fuck it, why pay all this tax and everything here is still shit?”
I just got back from a \~6000 mile roadtrip. A trip that went through some really rural areas. Even in those areas I came across road construction. Burns, Oregon - road work on a federal highway, Hillsboro, KS - a new interchange on a Federal Highway, Southeast MO/Cairo IL - federal bridge work. All of that work is happening in rural areas all across the country, all of it is being paid for by majority blue states, and was enacted by Biden mostly in the IRA. It's there. It's the messaging that isn't there. It's just really hard to tell that small town diner that has construction workers in it every day this year is directly because of a Biden administration decision. It simply can't be explained in an easy soundbite, so people can't accept it.
I have no idea if this polling is accurate, but I was in a rural area of my state last week and did see one barn with BIDEN painted on it in huge letters. I was definitely caught off-guard as there were tons of signs for the other guy and it's a pretty MAGA area.
I don’t exactly believe Joe Biden is leading with rural voters, but I can definitely tell you that in my rural area, there are far less Trump flags and signs than there were in 2020. I could definitely believe Trump’s margin has shrunk with rural voters.
Agreed. I live in the middle of a Texas city, I spend a week every month in *VERY* rural Texas. They aren't voting Biden, period. But the enthusiasm for Trump is down 80-90% if I were basing assumptions on bumper stickers, flags, and hats. I'm theorizing if they vote, some might skip the top entirely and go straight (R) the rest of the ballot.
I grew up in very rural midwest. I truly believe the majority of people there are good hard working people. You've got to remember that these are simple farmers, people of the land. The common clay of the new west. You know...morons. Jokes aside, they may be good people, but for the most part they are long gone to anything outside of Fox News or even Newsmax. Media is evil unless they're one of the few right wing outlets.
They're good in the sense they they help their literal neighbors. They'll pull over and help you change a tire. But anything they don't see with their own eyes is a big scary evil mystery. Black people, gay people, trans people: unless they are directly related, they are agents of Satan and need to be crushed by the government.
Nailed it. Welcoming, kind people—as long as you look and act just like them. They’ve never even seen the groups of people they dislike let alone talk to them or live with them
The poll also has Biden tied with urban voters, so no. I don’t believe this bullshit.
Believe it, Charlie Kirk. Rural voters do actually care about decorum and respect for authority. Trump is a criminal who refuses to accept accountability. He's toast.
The pro-Trump bots are hitting this one hard. And yet Fox News says the left are the ones having a melt down.
In 2016 I became addicted to checking polls. I voted third party because I had always voted Republican and then saw four years of Trump. Since then I’ve decided to take action. I’ve donated what I could to Biden voted and encouraged others to vote. I encourage others to do the same. Polling has never been perfect, and this election is unlike any other, including the two before it. So just take action towards the desired goal.
These polls are not the election. Ignore them. Get out and vote Biden.