Pretty depressing seeing the responses of two of the highest earners here to a bunch of people taking the time to explain to them what it’s really like for the middle class right now and why the indicators don’t work, and why Dems need to run on doing more for the bottom 60% or whatever.
If smart middle class folks can’t convince smart upper class folks who are probably in the top 5% of rich people in empathy and giving a shit, we’re pretty fucked and the broken indicators are 100% serving their purpose.
If Biden runs on the economy being good for the working class, he’s going to get boat raced.
How about he runs on the fact that he did good things to help them and Rs put a stop to it all the moment voters gave them a sliver of power. You know, the truth.
The Republican strategy works because they intentionally isolated the stupid people and turned them into a marketable demographic. The GOP base is heavily insulated from the real economy by thick layers of blubber. That blubber is composed of raw idiocy, white privilege (which they understand just enough to realize it’s their single greatest asset), and cult style thought stoppers that they are fed 50+ times a day through every form of media they consume. It’s not just ‘claim economy good when we are in power and claim it bad when they are in power’. That’s a move they get to pull because they earned it by so totally isolating their base from reality.
It’s not an accident that the Dems seem to think the economy is doing how it’s doing (let’s stop here to recognize I don’t at all agree with what official reality says about how the economy is going). The Democrats political strategy is to do stuff that people like in real life. I’ll freely admit that the Democrats have their own bubble, I mean just look at this thread, but the GOP bubble is doing an order of magnitude more work. That’s demonstrated in that chart of how they feel about the economy vs who is in power.
Personally I blame ‘bet on stupid’ being such a strong strategy on the boomers on lead poisoning. The old people when I was a child were not like this. These people are totally out of control.
That would be a good way to go campaign wise, along with a promise to fix it if given the powee… but he did have a trifecta, and he did get caught telling wealthy donors “nothing will fundamentally change.”
Are you a R political operative or something? No, Biden is not a revolutionary and he never pretended to be one.
But if you doubt Biden’s sincerity in trying to get things like tax increases on the wealthy and corporations increased with the Congress the voters gave him to work with then you should succumb to the darkness and vote Trump and tell all your friends to do so.
Yes, Biden should personally apologize for Manchin’s failings and the fact that West Virginians are going to vote even more overwhelmingly R now that he is gone. Great campaign strategy!
Rs are telling bald faced lies about who is to blame for our problems and Ds on this board are parroting their talking points, unbelievable! God help us, with friends like these…
The way to deal with the GOP on the economy is to attack them on it. They have actively sabotaged the economy on behalf of their rich friends. They’re the people who did Citizens United. They’re the people who invented modern lobbying in the Nixon administration. They decided that 9/11 was a great reason to spend 3T taxpayer dollars on blowing up brown people instead of building the infrastructure this country needed in the 00’s. It’s their states that are the poorest, it’s their states that use all the welfare money, and it’s their states that have the lowest cost of labor, which is their real objective by the way.
You attack them relentlessly for being incompetent, corrupt, in the pocket of the very wealthy, and frankly not Christian in any way that the actual Jesus from the new testament would recognize.
You don’t do it by polishing turds until they glow. They’re still turds. You do it by making the GOP play defense, which they are hilariously bad at. You make them own those turds, which they will happily do if you play your hand at all correctly.
You tell everyone loudly and clearly that you know the GOP wants to turn this nation into a third world country because that’s what they have done in their own states. You call Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and now Florida what they are… which is places that are mired in deep generational poverty that is being intentionally fostered by their own local ruling class. People who got their start using slave labor to clear cheap land in the 1700’s and haven’t actually changed their beliefs in any tangible way since their labor was free. They resent every single cent of wealth that goes to anyone who isn’t them, the natural superior aristocrats who deserve everything they can take. You run against who they actually are.
The church people who leave fake money with religious bullshit on it for a tip at restaurants on sunday. You run against those people. You run against selfish, shitty, out of touch assholes and then you let them defend themselves and make it much, much worse.
Running against selfishness and greed seems like a pretty good plan for 2024. The best part is that based on the SOTU speech it seems like that’s basically the game plan on a tonal level.
Some of us: The economy isn’t really as great as some are saying and a message of “The economy is awesome. Vote for us!” might be sub-optimal in the current environment.
I believe he was sincere on every tax proposal he put forward that amounted to around a $5 trillion tax increase on the wealthy. Should vote Trump because if you are right then there truly is no difference between them economically. Trump is willing to cut checks too, he just is adamantly against taxing himself to pay for it.
DUCY ignored political reality and accused Biden of failing to raise taxes because his rich friends said No.
It follows that in DUCYs world there is absolutely no economic reason to vote Biden. Might as well vote for Trump’s authoritarianism because as he says “what the hell do you have to lose?” Maybe he will randomly decide to tax the wealthy this time!
I blame our political media for the self defeating drivel in this thread. Everyone has internalized the idea Presidents get blamed for things that aren’t their fault so much that they are actively blaming the President that they desperately want to win for things that obviously aren’t his fault.
I’m not sure if this is directed at me but I’d bet that you and your wife make more than my wife and I do. Granted, I live in a super cheap area and bought my house 12 years ago for $240,000 (financing all but like 5 percent of it), so I will concede that owning a home gives me an advantage, but I’m certainly no doctor, and I am also almost certainly not in the top 10 percent of income earners on this board. I work for the government and always have, I am not wealthy.
But my foray into this thread was in response to that article I posted, when all those “poor” voters were quoted on how they just have to vote for Trump because he helped them and brought down prices. Yeah, that makes me angry. And you know what? They’re going to get their faces eaten by leopards if they cast that vote. I know this doesn’t describe you, or anyone in this thread, but that was why I jumped in, because of that article, not because I was doubting the lived experience of any of the posters in this thread.
I’m not blaming Biden exclusively all of these clowns share that burden. The two parties are both a disgrace, giving the powerful players on either side the benefit of the doubt is a sucker move.
This is exactly why the eDems want Trump’s GOP. They can stand idly by while the middle class gets nuked, and say, “What’s your problem, guys? If you don’t like it, you can have a fascist dictatorship. Your choice, now stfu already.”
Not much of one, but I prefer shitty democracy to none at all, and slightly more humanity to immigrants.
That was all for show and never had a chance of passing. If it could have passed, it never would have had his support. No fundamental changes. My evidence is the complete lack of arm twisting or use of the bully pulpit. He had a trifecta. Saying you want something and writing it down on paper isn’t a serious attempt.
It wasn’t directed at you but I also doubt it (my wife is still in school), although I have no idea what your wife does. Maybe once my wife is done with school that’ll be true, then if we stop catching bad breaks (car breakdowns, ER trips, etc) maybe we can eventually buy a house and have a fighting chance. Hopefully.
I don’t have an issue with people making lots of money and having imo wrong views on the economy. My issue is with them telling middle class people that the middle class is booming and basically hand-waving away their responses.
There were a lot of more dramatic ways to play the aftermath of the Trump presidency. None of those were anything Joe Biden in particular was likely to do.