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The Race For 2024

TSwizzle said:
Derec said:
TSwizzle said:
Harris is unpopular with a wide array of people, including people in her own party. This is because Harris is, pause, a moron.
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I would not say that. She is obviously intelligent.
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Obviously?

Derec said:
Her problem is the lack of judgment. Just look at all the boneheaded decisions she made during the primaries.
Her other problem is that she does not seem to have a core of political beliefs. Again, look at the primaries. How quickly did she decide that her prosecutor past would not play well with the Bernie-crazed base and therefore she decided to contest the Bernie/Warren lane, even though it was a poor fit for her?
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Harris and Newsom are two of the biggest morons on the stage right now.
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Says the guy supporting the sleepy dementia patient who shit his pants in court.
 
Dear Mr. Swizz,

We do get the impression that you do NOT advise your followers to vote Biden-Harris in November. How DO you hope voters make their selection in swing states? If D.J. Trump is not your dream candidate, who would be?

Jarhyn said:
TSwizzle said:
Harris and Newsom are two of the biggest morons on the stage right now.
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Says the guy supporting the sleepy dementia patient who shit his pants in court.
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No cameras in the courtroom? How about audio recorders?

And what's the latest technology for automated detection of fragrances and odors?
 
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Former Rep. Peter Meijer ends his longshot bid for the GOP nomination in Michigan's Senate race | AP News
Meijer announced his candidacy in November and contended for the Republican nomination against former U.S. Reps. Mike Rogers and Justin Amash, in addition to wealthy businessman Sandy Pensler.

Meijer met an April 23 deadline to turn in petition signatures to get his name on the ballot for the August primary but withdrew from the race on Friday, a Michigan Secretary of State spokesperson confirmed to The Associated Press. Meijer’s name will not be on the ballot since he met a 4 p.m. deadline Friday to withdraw from the race.
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Peter Meijer voted for the second impeachment of Donald Trump but not for the first one. So the Trumpies don't like him.
 
South Dakota governor, a potential Trump running mate, writes in new book about killing her dog | AP News
noting
Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book | Books | The Guardian - "South Dakota governor includes bloody tale in campaign volume – and admits ‘a better politician … wouldn’t tell the story here’"
In 1952, as a Republican candidate for vice-president, Richard Nixon stirred criticism by admitting receiving a dog, Checkers, as a political gift.

In 2012, as the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney was pilloried for tying a dog, Seamus, to the roof of the family car for a cross-country trip.
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KN went even further.
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.

What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season.

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She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.
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Then on how troublesome Cricket was, chasing pheasants that KN wanted to hunt. The dog was “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”. She tried to get the dog under control, including using an electronic collar. But nothing worked.
Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.

Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.

When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.

Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”
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She got her gun, then led Cricket into a gravel pit.
“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
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She also had to do that to a troublesome goat.
Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.

Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.
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She didn't stop there.
Noem herself posted a screengrab of the Guardian report – and an admission that she recently “put down three horses”.

“We love animals,” she said, “but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down three horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.”

The governor also said her book contained “more real, honest and politically incorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping”.
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Why write a book?
Like other aspirants to be Trump’s second vice-president who have ventured into print, Noem offers readers a mixture of autobiography, policy prescriptions and political invective aimed at Democrats and other enemies, all of it raw material for speeches on the campaign stump.
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Something common among Presidential candidates. The article mentioned MTG's and Tulsi Gabbard's books.

From half a year ago, MTG review: far-right rabble rouser makes case to be Trump’s VP | Books | The Guardian - from Nov 2023 - "Marjorie Taylor Greene’s book swims with venom, score-settling, fiction and self-absolution: a very Republican stew"

Tulsi Gabbard repeats false Hillary Clinton ‘grooming’ claim in new book | Books | The Guardian - "Ex-Democrat, reported contender for Trump running mate, sued Clinton for Russia remark but dropped case"
Accusing Democrats of making up “a conspiracy theory that [Trump] was ‘colluding’ with the Russians to win the election” in 2016, Gabbard claims: “Hillary Clinton used a similar tactic against me when I ran for president in 2020, accusing me of being ‘groomed by the Russians’.”

Gabbard ran for the Democratic nomination. Clinton did not accuse her of being “groomed by the Russians”.

What Clinton said, in October 2019 and on a podcast hosted by the former Barack Obama adviser David Plouffe, was that she thought Republicans would encourage a third-party bid in 2020, aiming to syphon votes from the Democratic candidate in key states as Jill Stein, the Green candidate, and the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, did four years before.

“They are also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said, “and I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”
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On the book itself,
Her book – For Love of Country: Why I Left the Democratic Party – will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

On the page, Gabbard presents a mix of memoir – from growing up in Hawaii to service in Iraq, from entering Congress to her failed presidential run – and pro-Trump screed. Light on detail and heavy on invective, the book includes excoriations of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It will hit shops, however, in the aftermath of the passage in Congress of billions of dollars in new Ukraine aid.

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She also accuses Democrats of planting evidence and stories with a compliant press, aided by a “deep state” consisting of “active and retired officials from within the justice department and other national security agencies”.
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She seems like MTG, with her vicious conspiracy mongering.
The deep state conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent government of operatives and bureaucrats exists to thwart populist leaders, is popular with Trump and followers notably including Liz Truss, a former UK prime minister. However, one of its chief creators and propagators, the Trump aide and ally Steve Bannon, has said it is “for nut cases”.

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Gabbard also claims that “the propaganda media repeated Clinton’s lies over and over, without ever asking for evidence or fact-checking her themselves”.
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Who else might be Donald Trump's Vice Presidential candidate? I'm guessing Vivek Ramaswamy. He seems like he has plenty of zeal, even if no experience in public office.
 
‘A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose’: can Allan Lichtman predict the 2024 election? | US elections 2024 | The Guardian - "The professor on his famous 13 ‘keys’ to the White House, a method for predicting election results that’s been right nine times out of 10"
He has been called the Nostradamus of US presidential elections. Allan Lichtman has correctly predicted the result of nine of the past 10 (and even the one that got away, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). But now he is gearing up for perhaps his greatest challenge: Joe Biden v Donald Trump II.
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noting
The 13 Keys to the White House | American University, Washington, D.C.
hen, in the Washingtonian magazine in April 1982, Lichtman used the keys to accurately predict that, despite economic recession, low approval ratings and relative old age, Ronald Reagan would win re-election two years later.

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Atwater asked him what would happen if Reagan did not run for re-election. Lichtman reckoned that a few important keys would be lost, including incumbent charisma.

“Without the Gipper, forget it,” Lichtman says. “George Bush is about as charismatic as a New Jersey shopping centre on a Sunday morning. Atwater looks me in the eye, breathes a huge sigh of relief, and says, thank you, Professor Lichtman. And the rest is history.”

For the next election, Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis by 18 percentage points in the opinion polls in May 1988, yet Lichtman correctly predicted a Bush victory because he was running on the Reagan inheritance of peace, prosperity, domestic tranquillity and breakthroughs with the Soviet Union.
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His work was rejected by the punditry establishment for having too much subjectivity. He says
When I first developed my system and made my predictions, the professional forecasters blasted me because I had committed the ultimate sin of prediction, the sin of subjectivity.

Some of my keys were not just cut and dried and I kept telling them, it’s not subjectivity, it’s judgment. We’re dealing with human systems and historians make judgments all the time, and they’re not random judgments. I define each key very carefully in my book and I have a record.

It took 15 to 20 years and the professional forecasting community totally turned around. They realised their big mathematical models didn’t work and the best models combined judgment with more cut-and-dried indicators. And suddenly the keys were the hottest thing in forecasting.
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He predicted that George Bush I would be beaten in 1992, even though some Democrats were discouraged by the conventional wisdom that he would win again. But one Democrat wasn't: Bill Clinton, and AL got a call about the keys from one of Bill Clinton's assistants. BC won.
 
Why did Donald Trump win in 2016? AL points to his keys. The Democrats lost in several of them.

  • [*[#1 from doing poorly in the House in 2014 relative to 2010
  • #2 from Bernie Sanders challenging Hillary Clinton
  • #3 from Barack Obama being blocked from running by the 22nd-Amendment Presidential term limit.
  • #7 from lack of big domestic accomplishments after passing Obamacare
  • #11 from lack of big foreign/military accomplishments after killing Osama bin Laden
That was enough.

AL on DT: “The pandemic is what did him in. He congratulated me for predicting him but he didn’t understand the keys. The message of the keys is it’s governance not campaigning that counts and instead of dealing substantively with the pandemic, as we know, he thought he could talk his way out of it and that sank him.”

On polls of Joe Biden losing to Donald Trump,
They’re mesmerised by the wrong things, which is the polls. First of all, polls six, seven months before an election have zero predictive value. They would have predicted President Michael Dukakis. They would have predicted President Jimmy Carter would have defeated Ronald Reagan, who won in a landslide; Carter was way ahead in some of the early polls.

“Not only are polls a snapshot but they are not predictors. They don’t predict anything and there’s no such thing as, ‘if the election were held today’. That’s a meaningless statement.
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From February, se-8801006.pdf
  • #1: Party Mandate -- false
  • #2: Contest -- true
  • #3: Incumbency -- true
  • #4: Third Party -- leans false
  • #5: Short-Term Economy -- leans true
  • #6: Long-Term Economy -- leans true
  • #7: Policy Change -- true
  • #8: Social Unrest -- leans true
  • #9: Scandal -- leans true
  • #10: Foreign/Military Failure -- leans false
  • #11: Foreign/Military Success -- leans false
  • #12: Incumbent Charisma -- false
  • #13: Challenger Charisma -- true
True: 4 -- leans true: 4 -- leans false: 3 -- false: 2

I think that #8, Social Unrest, has a danger of becoming false. That gives the risk of Joe Biden going the way of LBJ. But if JB decides to take a hard line on Israel and brings peace to Gaza, then he might give himself one or two keys.
 
"Anyone I don't like is the biggest moron on the stage right now" -the extent of conservative discourse on modern American politics.
 
Let me guess, the reply now is going to be "ORANGE MAN BAAAD" or some braindead variation.
 
The existence of braindead variations in no way casts doubt on the fact that orange man is indeed a malevolent prick.
 
Elixir said:
The existence of braindead variations in no way casts doubt on the fact that orange man is indeed a malevolent prick.
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Yeah it's just obvious to me the "orange man bad" reply is a thought-terminating cliche they use to deflect all criticism of Trump, and also predictable like all of their other stupid replies.
 
lpetrich said:
In 1952, as a Republican candidate for vice-president, Richard Nixon stirred criticism by admitting receiving a dog, Checkers, as a political gift.
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IIUC that's not quite correct. For one thing, the criticism came BEFORE the "admission." For another, the criticism was NOT about the dog.

Nixon did receive campaign contributions which, though definitely LEGAL, raised questions of propriety. (Times have changed and nowadays there'd be ZERO claims of impropriety about such paltry sums; the only questions to arise would have been about how TINY the donations were.)

Eisenhower was less than enamored with his running-mate -- who was prominent only because he was a vehement anti-communist but had managed not to tie himself too closely to Joseph McCarthy -- and would probably have been happy to replace him as that controversy grew. Instead Richard Nixon (who already had the nickname "Tricky Dick") went on TV and delivered his famous "Checkers speech." Mention of the dog, which had only trivial financial value, was sarcastic: he was only pretending that there had been complaints about it. The Checkers speech was very well received; Nixon soared in popularity; the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket went on to win in a landslide.

Richard M. Nixon in his famous Checkers speech on TV said:
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I should say this, that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything.

One other thing I should probably tell you, because if I don't they will probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention that our two youngsters would like to have a dog, and, believe it or not, the day we left before this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers.

And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.
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