From an article in last month’s slate about what is supposedly the most controversial issue of all:
“Abortion rights in the U.S. are as popular now as they’ve ever been. Last year, nearly every major poll on abortion rights found support for Roe v. Wade at record highs. A June CBS poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans want to keep Roe v. Wade’s protections in place, while less than one-third want to overturn them. It wasn’t just Democrats: A strong majority of independents and a plurality of Republicans said they wanted to keep Roe v. Wade around, too. As NBC News has tracked views on abortion over the past decade, support for legal abortion has risen among most measurable demographics: Women, men, Democrats, and Republicans have all grown more supportive of abortion rights, a unified trend in opinion rarely seen on such a purportedly controversial topic.“
I am surprised the media hasn’t paid as much attention to the flat-earthers as they have to the small but very loud and whiny minority of Republicans who want to live in the Dark Ages.
Trump should be polling in the 20% range. How is it possible he still has anyone supporting him beyond his cult base? I won’t be breathing easy until Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20th.
But it will be interesting to see what Trump does in the transition after he loses next week. Cohen said he thinks Trump will resign and walk away. Based on things Trump has said at campaign rallies over the last week and his past behavior in the face of failure, I’m starting to see that as a real possibility. So, more chaos to look forward to, but at least he’ll be gone.
The real question is whether or not the media will see it as an opportunity to ramp up the division narrative once Trump’s gone, especially if Democrats have a clear mandate from the voters and Republicans are floundering in the obscure minority in Trump’s wake, even though everyone seems to like Joe Biden and things are calm and actually being accomplished. Will the media be that stupid?
The media's premise is that the only rightful rulers are Republicans. Democrats never have mandates, even if Trump were defeated by 90 points. And when, like 2018 when they enjoyed resounding success, the media always warn the Democrats not to get too full of themselves so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of Republicans and the voters who love them. OTOH, when Republicans squeak by or steal their "victories", they have a mandate.
Most of the news media is now in the category of entertainment. It's necessary (to them) to keep us on the edge of our seat as if we are watching a summertime blockbuster movie. Sadly one must now search for good hard journalism such as your blog. It's out there but only if you look for it. It's not just showing up on the TV anymore. In a fair election Trump loses as no other incumbent ever has. But that's the key word-fair. We are about to find out who we are, a country whose majority leans toward progressive values as the numbers show or a country that is ruled by a minority who goes to court to prevent votes from being counted. And from the military no less! The party that's always kissing the military's ass now wants to discount all of their votes after Election Day.
I know what you are saying to be true. The majority of this country are well intended, thoughtful and caring people who believe we should all have health care and work to heal a strained and damaged planet. Unfortunately the Republican Party and now with the help of Trump has eroded our institutions and cater to just the super wealthy, all others drop dead. We still are suffering from PTSD of the 2016 election. The polls are clearly showing Biden should win but it doesn't stop us from freaking out about what another four years of this shit show will do to us, our country, and our planet.
For at least a generation the GOP has been learning how to exploit the bothsiderist narrative that is so deeply embedded in our political media ecosystem. That narrative persists for intransigent structural reasons not just journalistic laziness (though obv. that's a factor), which is why it has been remarkable, and encouraging, to watch the fizzling-dud failure of the Hunter Biden "scandal." Must be SO frustrating for them, b/c on the surface they've done everything according to the tried-and-true formula. "Email" dumps are great for it b/c in a couple-ten thousand you can always find something to build your innuendo on, "more remains to be exposed," "questions have been raised," "if only the candidate would address the questions it would go away" (i.e., it will persist because all answers raise more "questions" etc etc. We've seen it over and over again. Only there's one key failure point: they need the so-called MSM to pick it up, and that pressures offiicial bodies to have a look, and then you've got a self-sustaining feedback-loop "scandal" that generates tons of smoke that obscures the fact that there's no actual, y'know, fire. That's what the impeachment phone call was about: they needed there to be someone, not them, to say there was an investigation. There didn't need to BE one. But they got caught in the act, which caused the whole thing to misfire. The key is that it has to catch on outside of the fever swamp or the whole thing just fizzles. And it seems like, mirabile dictu, the wider media culture are for once NOT PLAYING. Partly b/c the whole thing just has the stink of hoax all over it (the wildly improbably provenance, lack of meta-data, involvement of known-shady players starting with Giuliani). But none of that would have really been a real obstacle before. I think what's really made the difference is Trump. Four years of Trump have broken the media taboo of calling a lie a lie, to the extent that new reflexes, new muscles--feeble and atrophied to begin with, but stronger every day due to being exercised due to Trump--are actually being flexed. You can see the astonishment on their faces. "How can it not be working? It ALWAYS works!!!" For once, it sucks to be them.
But it must be true. Visitors from the DC political media brothel (the chief chucktodd of them all, madam) found economically anxious voters who went for the republican in 2016 and weren't in the least bit racist.
Right before the last debate MSNBC interviewed a young black woman who didn’t vote for Trump last time but can’t decide if she wants to vote for Biden. She was angry that Democrats have done nothing about her high mortgage rates. The interviewer, Chris Jansing, never pointed out that Biden had talked explicitly about that problem as well as redlining in the recent town hall. (HIllary also had plans to get rid of discrimination in housing.) The fact that NBC gave a platform to someone so uninformed and unrepresentative is inexcusable. The fact that Jansing let that false impression stand was irresponsible. When are political journalists going to realize their first responsibility is to do everything they can to make sure voters have the information they need to make an informed decision? Focusing on such fringe voters as if they are important or allowing misinformation to go unchallenged is irresponsible in the extreme.
Never. Political journalists' responsibility to their brands and book deals. I wonder if like NYT, the angry woman was connected with the Republican Criminal Cabal or one of its affiliates.
I doubt we can, but it would be great if we had a press that wasn't dependent on making money. I don't know of a solution that would keep the press free and fair in this age. But, as long as they need to keep the matchup close in order to drive ratings and advertising rates, we're going to be in this situation. Nobody's tuning in to watch the Chiefs play the Jaguars. But, if you can sell that the "game" is going to be a close one, they can make more money.
That's why I'll often look for other (related) pieces - either from outside the US, or from less raggy local ones - to read for less bias. The Guardian is a very good "paper" and they self-fund, basically, so are as objective a news outlet as I've seen in a while.
1) They love the horse race neck-and-neck narrative because it draws eyeballs and lets them furrow brows in concern while playing ominous music and graphics. The internet era has made them drama queens.
2) Decades of messaging from the right has made them skeptical/hostile to anything left of center - and the Overton Window ‘Center’ has been shoved rightward for years. It’s shifting back but the press hasn’t adjusted yet.
3) The press picks up and amplifies right wing talking points as a conditioned reflex so they won’t have the dreaded ‘liberal bias’ and can pretend to be ‘fair and balanced’. That plus the sheer volume of noise coming from the right is hard for them to discount.
I live in Madison so I'm insulated from much of the wingnut lunacy in the Iron Ring suburbs around Milwaukee and the Fox River Valley, but the 2010 gerrymandering has completely unbalanced the state's democratic systems.
Which is why the first thing the Democrats have got to do when they take over Congress and the White House in January is enact legislation to make gerrymandering illegal, across the board in all 50 states, and upgrade and reinstate The Voting Rights Acts to apply universally across all 50 states (52 once D.C. and Puerto Rico are included) federal voting rights and procedures. This should have been done the moment Obama took office in 2008, but is even more important now.
Our legislators on the local and national level seem to have bought into the divided-country narrative effectively hamstringing all sorts of forward-thinking laws.
The astounding thing to me is how many opportunities he has ignored, blown off, or actively failed to capitalize on to actually BE a unifying, hugely popular figure. The sporadic gestures in that direction during his original campaign scared the sh** out of me because if he'd lived up to it--if he'd actually done the "infrastructure" thing, if he'd actually come up with an improved ACA--would have locked him in as the authoritarian Great Leader he liked pretending to be. Obv. the biggest blown opportunity was the one that's taking him down: C19 itself. If he'd just done the basic stuff right, same as ANY normal president of either party--let the CDC do its thing, NOT dissolve the agency set up to deal with this exact situation, treat the initial hot-zone states fairly and not as an opportunity for extortion, above all just make the right noises and gestures that communicate we're all, blue red and otherwise, in this together, he'd be riding an unstoppable electoral wave of his own. And the only thing that prevented him from doing that was, well, HIM. Time after time all the fears and hungers that drive him ran counter to him achieving the Great Leader status he fantasizes himself to be. His fantasies have always "trumped" reality, but ultimately reality wins. Heraclitus nailed it: character is destiny.
Is it really that the press in general is just that lazy? Like a music writer lifting text from a band bio? It is astonishing. We thank you for calling attention to it.
Thanks Eric. Looks like some push back today in the comment section.
The divide that concerns me is "loyalty vs. merit." Whether it is the white male type, or religious type, or some other, this divide leads to incompetency at the highest levels. There is much to complaint about Justice Kennedy, for example, but the idea that he can't provide accurate and rational legal reasoning is deeply troubling.
I suggest you should not be surprised that Trump has not narrowed the divide in America. He simply hasn’t tried to do so. I can think of only a handful of efforts to reach out beyond his base. (Counting numerous “infrastructure weeks” as one)
Need I catalogue the numerous efforts Trump has made to incite his base?
Next, I assert the US is indeed divided. That does not imply that it is evenly divided. The assumption of even division undercuts your argument.
If we assume Trump voters are 45% of the populace, and the population is 330 million, that’s still 148.5 million potentially irreconcilable Americans. 35% is still 115 million.
That’s a lot of people who seem to reject the very foundations of the country. Trump’s arguing “Biden will listen to Scientists” as if it’s a rational argument.
No, America is deeply divided and I’d like to see someone address the issue of reconciliation.
His ENTIRE point is that we’re NOT as divided as the media says we are, and in fact that Trump has succeeded in uniting the country against him. How exactly did you miss all of that?
Who's blind? The man has never had an approval rating that went above 50%. That means the majority of the country can't stand him. Look how many people voted two years ago, and the results.
He can still get millions of votes, sure--but too many people also DO NOT vote. 60m is not anywhere near half the country. That's about one-fifth of 330 million. If those non-voters had bothered to check a box four years ago, we wouldn't be here--which is why the Dems keep pushing voter registration and the GOP keeps trying to stop it (and voting in general). How blind do you have to be not to see THAT?
Where and when did you learn arithmetic? A majority is anything over half, or 50%. None of the numbers you present--as others have also observed--crosses that line. 60 million is a larger percentage OF WHAT of the 125m who voted? It's still LESS THAN HALF. 40% approval is LESS THAN HALF of the country. 38% not agreeing is still WAY LESS THAN HALF. *40% of 330m IS STILL LESS THAN HALF.*
It really shouldn't be so hard to understand that "less than half" = "not a majority. 62% is, in fact, well over half.
60% in agreement is a majority, an implies far more unity than even a 50-50 split would. It's not that I'm blind, it's that you don't understand basic mathematics.
It should go without saying, but in your case, probably doesn't, so just so we're clear: Nowhere is Mr Boehlert implying that we're 100% in agreement. He's simply saying that a majority of the country is, in fact, united in the cause of removing this cancer from office. It seems you missed that point, too, in your determination to prove that water is dry and black is white.
By your own numbers below, trump voters aren't 45% of the populace. You said we have a population of 330 million and that he could get 60 million votes. That's less than 25% of the populace.
I think there are two things wrong here
1) you can't conflate the populace with the voters. Those are two different numbers as age, disenfranchisement and apathy will always keep those two numbers apart.
2) You shouldn't confuse trump's popularity with republican voters. I know this is anecdotal and anecdotes aren't facts, but I look at someone like my aunt. She's a great person - charitable, kind, caring, takes care of her adult son who has special needs, goes to church. If I listed off all of the things trump has done, she'd hate the man. But, when you put an (R) next to his name, she'll pull the lever for him. She votes Republican. That's it. That's the reason she'll vote for him. Now, I haven't asked her this time, because I love her and don't want to fight, but she voted for him in 2016. So, there will always be a certain segment of the population that will vote for their candidate simply because they have the correct letter after their name.
Today my daughter told me some older women in her neighborhood were saying that they are going to vote Republican —just not for Trump. What they are missing is that Trump is mainstream for the extremism and insanity that party has adopted since the 90s. He is just more open about it.
My dad (the brother to my aforementioned aunt), was also a Republican for 50 years. In 2008, at 72, he voted for his first Democrat. He has voted for Obama twice, Hillary and now Biden. He told me that his party has left him.
trump is the natural evolution (devolution?) of the party from Newt and Limbaugh through Cheney and Coulter and now trump, McConnell, Gaetz and Graham.
My parents who would be 110 now were also lifelong Republicans who were appalled by what Newt and the media were doing to the Clintons. But even before Newt men like Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort we’re spreading their sickness in mainstream Republican politics. The sainted GHW Bush hired Atwater and Ailes to run his campaign against Dukakis. Roger Stone and Manafort were also involved. Bush knew exactly what these men were but, as I recently read, the patrician, “classy” Bush family are fine with doing whatever it takes to win.( I guess we shouldn’t be surprised since he was raised by a father and grandfather who helped fund the Nazi war machine long after it had become clear just how evil Hitler was.)
Bush personally approved the racist Willie Horton ad after he was told he would lose if he didn’t play that race card. The Very Principled Poppy approved it then lied to the voters claiming he had had nothing to do with it. When he was dying of brain cancer Lee Atwater told the truth about that and myriad other nasty, destructive campaign tactics that he championed.
Scott, there is a fairly prominent, if not numerically large number of people who call themselves “Never Trumpers”. George Will, George Conway, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin; prominent Republicans who simply can’t stomach Trump. Will left the Republican Party. I don’t know about the others.
The question is how many rank & file Republicans follow them. We’ll know on Tuesday.
I’ve argued many times that Trump is an effect not a cause of the division in the country.
Please welcome your Dad to the Democratic Party for me.
Trump’s 63m were 46% of the votes cast in 2016. We can extrapolate that percentage to the population of 330m. Or we can try to measure Trump support among immigrants, those underage, and those who simply don’t vote. I choose the easy way.
Your second point is equally valid. But with the same problem. How do you measure those who dislike Trump but vote for him anyway?
My point remains that at whatever number between 60m Americans and 150m Americans; you’re a long way from unity or unified.
Thank you for saying this.
It’s not a divide so much as it is a minority party trying to enforce its autocratic impulses on the American people.
a radical minority gets all the attention
Well, our media stars give them the extra Real American points they demand at the top of their lungs.
You nailed it again, Eric. The “polarization” narrative has been total BS for years.
Media feasted on it during Obama years, too. Instead of calling out radical GOP obstruction, they threw up their hands abd said “polarized”!
From an article in last month’s slate about what is supposedly the most controversial issue of all:
“Abortion rights in the U.S. are as popular now as they’ve ever been. Last year, nearly every major poll on abortion rights found support for Roe v. Wade at record highs. A June CBS poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans want to keep Roe v. Wade’s protections in place, while less than one-third want to overturn them. It wasn’t just Democrats: A strong majority of independents and a plurality of Republicans said they wanted to keep Roe v. Wade around, too. As NBC News has tracked views on abortion over the past decade, support for legal abortion has risen among most measurable demographics: Women, men, Democrats, and Republicans have all grown more supportive of abortion rights, a unified trend in opinion rarely seen on such a purportedly controversial topic.“
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/majority-americans-support-abortion-access.html
I am surprised the media hasn’t paid as much attention to the flat-earthers as they have to the small but very loud and whiny minority of Republicans who want to live in the Dark Ages.
Who are these 5% of Democrats? My God. 🙄
Trump should be polling in the 20% range. How is it possible he still has anyone supporting him beyond his cult base? I won’t be breathing easy until Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20th.
But it will be interesting to see what Trump does in the transition after he loses next week. Cohen said he thinks Trump will resign and walk away. Based on things Trump has said at campaign rallies over the last week and his past behavior in the face of failure, I’m starting to see that as a real possibility. So, more chaos to look forward to, but at least he’ll be gone.
The real question is whether or not the media will see it as an opportunity to ramp up the division narrative once Trump’s gone, especially if Democrats have a clear mandate from the voters and Republicans are floundering in the obscure minority in Trump’s wake, even though everyone seems to like Joe Biden and things are calm and actually being accomplished. Will the media be that stupid?
The media's premise is that the only rightful rulers are Republicans. Democrats never have mandates, even if Trump were defeated by 90 points. And when, like 2018 when they enjoyed resounding success, the media always warn the Democrats not to get too full of themselves so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of Republicans and the voters who love them. OTOH, when Republicans squeak by or steal their "victories", they have a mandate.
True. Hideously true.
True. Hideously true.
Most of the news media is now in the category of entertainment. It's necessary (to them) to keep us on the edge of our seat as if we are watching a summertime blockbuster movie. Sadly one must now search for good hard journalism such as your blog. It's out there but only if you look for it. It's not just showing up on the TV anymore. In a fair election Trump loses as no other incumbent ever has. But that's the key word-fair. We are about to find out who we are, a country whose majority leans toward progressive values as the numbers show or a country that is ruled by a minority who goes to court to prevent votes from being counted. And from the military no less! The party that's always kissing the military's ass now wants to discount all of their votes after Election Day.
I know what you are saying to be true. The majority of this country are well intended, thoughtful and caring people who believe we should all have health care and work to heal a strained and damaged planet. Unfortunately the Republican Party and now with the help of Trump has eroded our institutions and cater to just the super wealthy, all others drop dead. We still are suffering from PTSD of the 2016 election. The polls are clearly showing Biden should win but it doesn't stop us from freaking out about what another four years of this shit show will do to us, our country, and our planet.
For at least a generation the GOP has been learning how to exploit the bothsiderist narrative that is so deeply embedded in our political media ecosystem. That narrative persists for intransigent structural reasons not just journalistic laziness (though obv. that's a factor), which is why it has been remarkable, and encouraging, to watch the fizzling-dud failure of the Hunter Biden "scandal." Must be SO frustrating for them, b/c on the surface they've done everything according to the tried-and-true formula. "Email" dumps are great for it b/c in a couple-ten thousand you can always find something to build your innuendo on, "more remains to be exposed," "questions have been raised," "if only the candidate would address the questions it would go away" (i.e., it will persist because all answers raise more "questions" etc etc. We've seen it over and over again. Only there's one key failure point: they need the so-called MSM to pick it up, and that pressures offiicial bodies to have a look, and then you've got a self-sustaining feedback-loop "scandal" that generates tons of smoke that obscures the fact that there's no actual, y'know, fire. That's what the impeachment phone call was about: they needed there to be someone, not them, to say there was an investigation. There didn't need to BE one. But they got caught in the act, which caused the whole thing to misfire. The key is that it has to catch on outside of the fever swamp or the whole thing just fizzles. And it seems like, mirabile dictu, the wider media culture are for once NOT PLAYING. Partly b/c the whole thing just has the stink of hoax all over it (the wildly improbably provenance, lack of meta-data, involvement of known-shady players starting with Giuliani). But none of that would have really been a real obstacle before. I think what's really made the difference is Trump. Four years of Trump have broken the media taboo of calling a lie a lie, to the extent that new reflexes, new muscles--feeble and atrophied to begin with, but stronger every day due to being exercised due to Trump--are actually being flexed. You can see the astonishment on their faces. "How can it not be working? It ALWAYS works!!!" For once, it sucks to be them.
But it must be true. Visitors from the DC political media brothel (the chief chucktodd of them all, madam) found economically anxious voters who went for the republican in 2016 and weren't in the least bit racist.
Right before the last debate MSNBC interviewed a young black woman who didn’t vote for Trump last time but can’t decide if she wants to vote for Biden. She was angry that Democrats have done nothing about her high mortgage rates. The interviewer, Chris Jansing, never pointed out that Biden had talked explicitly about that problem as well as redlining in the recent town hall. (HIllary also had plans to get rid of discrimination in housing.) The fact that NBC gave a platform to someone so uninformed and unrepresentative is inexcusable. The fact that Jansing let that false impression stand was irresponsible. When are political journalists going to realize their first responsibility is to do everything they can to make sure voters have the information they need to make an informed decision? Focusing on such fringe voters as if they are important or allowing misinformation to go unchallenged is irresponsible in the extreme.
Never. Political journalists' responsibility to their brands and book deals. I wonder if like NYT, the angry woman was connected with the Republican Criminal Cabal or one of its affiliates.
I doubt we can, but it would be great if we had a press that wasn't dependent on making money. I don't know of a solution that would keep the press free and fair in this age. But, as long as they need to keep the matchup close in order to drive ratings and advertising rates, we're going to be in this situation. Nobody's tuning in to watch the Chiefs play the Jaguars. But, if you can sell that the "game" is going to be a close one, they can make more money.
That's why I'll often look for other (related) pieces - either from outside the US, or from less raggy local ones - to read for less bias. The Guardian is a very good "paper" and they self-fund, basically, so are as objective a news outlet as I've seen in a while.
There are 3 things going on with the press.
1) They love the horse race neck-and-neck narrative because it draws eyeballs and lets them furrow brows in concern while playing ominous music and graphics. The internet era has made them drama queens.
2) Decades of messaging from the right has made them skeptical/hostile to anything left of center - and the Overton Window ‘Center’ has been shoved rightward for years. It’s shifting back but the press hasn’t adjusted yet.
3) The press picks up and amplifies right wing talking points as a conditioned reflex so they won’t have the dreaded ‘liberal bias’ and can pretend to be ‘fair and balanced’. That plus the sheer volume of noise coming from the right is hard for them to discount.
I wish I had your optimism... Wisconsin is so heavily gerrymandered it's unlikely we'll escape the yoke of a Republican legislature in my lifetime.
ugh, Wisc. It’s so sad to watch....
I live in Madison so I'm insulated from much of the wingnut lunacy in the Iron Ring suburbs around Milwaukee and the Fox River Valley, but the 2010 gerrymandering has completely unbalanced the state's democratic systems.
Which is why the first thing the Democrats have got to do when they take over Congress and the White House in January is enact legislation to make gerrymandering illegal, across the board in all 50 states, and upgrade and reinstate The Voting Rights Acts to apply universally across all 50 states (52 once D.C. and Puerto Rico are included) federal voting rights and procedures. This should have been done the moment Obama took office in 2008, but is even more important now.
Our legislators on the local and national level seem to have bought into the divided-country narrative effectively hamstringing all sorts of forward-thinking laws.
Our GOP legislators, you mean, who don’t want to allow any power that doesn’t belong to them.
I put them into two camps: Zealots and cowards. Both sides are lost for different reasons.
Oh, good—more “both sides” drawing equivalences that aren’t there. Just what we need.
Sorry you don't agree. Better luck next time.
Better luck? You’re hilarious. Bye now.
The timber of a resonator guitar soothes. Nice "extra" today.
The astounding thing to me is how many opportunities he has ignored, blown off, or actively failed to capitalize on to actually BE a unifying, hugely popular figure. The sporadic gestures in that direction during his original campaign scared the sh** out of me because if he'd lived up to it--if he'd actually done the "infrastructure" thing, if he'd actually come up with an improved ACA--would have locked him in as the authoritarian Great Leader he liked pretending to be. Obv. the biggest blown opportunity was the one that's taking him down: C19 itself. If he'd just done the basic stuff right, same as ANY normal president of either party--let the CDC do its thing, NOT dissolve the agency set up to deal with this exact situation, treat the initial hot-zone states fairly and not as an opportunity for extortion, above all just make the right noises and gestures that communicate we're all, blue red and otherwise, in this together, he'd be riding an unstoppable electoral wave of his own. And the only thing that prevented him from doing that was, well, HIM. Time after time all the fears and hungers that drive him ran counter to him achieving the Great Leader status he fantasizes himself to be. His fantasies have always "trumped" reality, but ultimately reality wins. Heraclitus nailed it: character is destiny.
Is it really that the press in general is just that lazy? Like a music writer lifting text from a band bio? It is astonishing. We thank you for calling attention to it.
thanks I appreciate...I fear the next few weeks/months will be rocky
Thanks Eric. Looks like some push back today in the comment section.
The divide that concerns me is "loyalty vs. merit." Whether it is the white male type, or religious type, or some other, this divide leads to incompetency at the highest levels. There is much to complaint about Justice Kennedy, for example, but the idea that he can't provide accurate and rational legal reasoning is deeply troubling.
Mr. Boehlert,
I suggest you should not be surprised that Trump has not narrowed the divide in America. He simply hasn’t tried to do so. I can think of only a handful of efforts to reach out beyond his base. (Counting numerous “infrastructure weeks” as one)
Need I catalogue the numerous efforts Trump has made to incite his base?
Next, I assert the US is indeed divided. That does not imply that it is evenly divided. The assumption of even division undercuts your argument.
If we assume Trump voters are 45% of the populace, and the population is 330 million, that’s still 148.5 million potentially irreconcilable Americans. 35% is still 115 million.
That’s a lot of people who seem to reject the very foundations of the country. Trump’s arguing “Biden will listen to Scientists” as if it’s a rational argument.
No, America is deeply divided and I’d like to see someone address the issue of reconciliation.
His ENTIRE point is that we’re NOT as divided as the media says we are, and in fact that Trump has succeeded in uniting the country against him. How exactly did you miss all of that?
Easy. The country is not United against Trump. There are significant numbers of Trump supporters.
How blind do you have to be to miss that Trump easily can get 60,000,000 votes?
Who's blind? The man has never had an approval rating that went above 50%. That means the majority of the country can't stand him. Look how many people voted two years ago, and the results.
He can still get millions of votes, sure--but too many people also DO NOT vote. 60m is not anywhere near half the country. That's about one-fifth of 330 million. If those non-voters had bothered to check a box four years ago, we wouldn't be here--which is why the Dems keep pushing voter registration and the GOP keeps trying to stop it (and voting in general). How blind do you have to be not to see THAT?
I don’t know if you’re being willfully blind or really can’t see.
While Trump’s approval rating has never been above 50%; it’s never significantly BEEN BELOW 40%.
60 million is a larger percentage of the 125m who voted in 2016. Compare equivalents. 40% of 330m is a big number.
Each number Mr. Boehlert cites e. g. 62% carries with it the reverse negative e.g. 38% don’t agree.
Where do you get off claiming “unity” when 40% don’t agree?
Where and when did you learn arithmetic? A majority is anything over half, or 50%. None of the numbers you present--as others have also observed--crosses that line. 60 million is a larger percentage OF WHAT of the 125m who voted? It's still LESS THAN HALF. 40% approval is LESS THAN HALF of the country. 38% not agreeing is still WAY LESS THAN HALF. *40% of 330m IS STILL LESS THAN HALF.*
It really shouldn't be so hard to understand that "less than half" = "not a majority. 62% is, in fact, well over half.
60% in agreement is a majority, an implies far more unity than even a 50-50 split would. It's not that I'm blind, it's that you don't understand basic mathematics.
It should go without saying, but in your case, probably doesn't, so just so we're clear: Nowhere is Mr Boehlert implying that we're 100% in agreement. He's simply saying that a majority of the country is, in fact, united in the cause of removing this cancer from office. It seems you missed that point, too, in your determination to prove that water is dry and black is white.
Where did you learn English?
“Unified”: made one. Same root as Unique: only one.
America is not “unified” where 40% don’t agree. America retains its significant divisions.
You’re being willful. Good day.
I think the bigger problem is that the people who are anti-Trump lack the institutional power right now to get what we want, need, and deserve.
True. I’m also concerned by the existence of an irreconcilable, authoritarian, 40% just waiting to seize power if our vigilance ever flags.
By your own numbers below, trump voters aren't 45% of the populace. You said we have a population of 330 million and that he could get 60 million votes. That's less than 25% of the populace.
I think there are two things wrong here
1) you can't conflate the populace with the voters. Those are two different numbers as age, disenfranchisement and apathy will always keep those two numbers apart.
2) You shouldn't confuse trump's popularity with republican voters. I know this is anecdotal and anecdotes aren't facts, but I look at someone like my aunt. She's a great person - charitable, kind, caring, takes care of her adult son who has special needs, goes to church. If I listed off all of the things trump has done, she'd hate the man. But, when you put an (R) next to his name, she'll pull the lever for him. She votes Republican. That's it. That's the reason she'll vote for him. Now, I haven't asked her this time, because I love her and don't want to fight, but she voted for him in 2016. So, there will always be a certain segment of the population that will vote for their candidate simply because they have the correct letter after their name.
Today my daughter told me some older women in her neighborhood were saying that they are going to vote Republican —just not for Trump. What they are missing is that Trump is mainstream for the extremism and insanity that party has adopted since the 90s. He is just more open about it.
My dad (the brother to my aforementioned aunt), was also a Republican for 50 years. In 2008, at 72, he voted for his first Democrat. He has voted for Obama twice, Hillary and now Biden. He told me that his party has left him.
trump is the natural evolution (devolution?) of the party from Newt and Limbaugh through Cheney and Coulter and now trump, McConnell, Gaetz and Graham.
My parents who would be 110 now were also lifelong Republicans who were appalled by what Newt and the media were doing to the Clintons. But even before Newt men like Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort we’re spreading their sickness in mainstream Republican politics. The sainted GHW Bush hired Atwater and Ailes to run his campaign against Dukakis. Roger Stone and Manafort were also involved. Bush knew exactly what these men were but, as I recently read, the patrician, “classy” Bush family are fine with doing whatever it takes to win.( I guess we shouldn’t be surprised since he was raised by a father and grandfather who helped fund the Nazi war machine long after it had become clear just how evil Hitler was.)
Bush personally approved the racist Willie Horton ad after he was told he would lose if he didn’t play that race card. The Very Principled Poppy approved it then lied to the voters claiming he had had nothing to do with it. When he was dying of brain cancer Lee Atwater told the truth about that and myriad other nasty, destructive campaign tactics that he championed.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/jeb-bush-willie-horton-118061
Scott, there is a fairly prominent, if not numerically large number of people who call themselves “Never Trumpers”. George Will, George Conway, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin; prominent Republicans who simply can’t stomach Trump. Will left the Republican Party. I don’t know about the others.
The question is how many rank & file Republicans follow them. We’ll know on Tuesday.
I’ve argued many times that Trump is an effect not a cause of the division in the country.
Please welcome your Dad to the Democratic Party for me.
Scott. Your point 1.
Trump’s 63m were 46% of the votes cast in 2016. We can extrapolate that percentage to the population of 330m. Or we can try to measure Trump support among immigrants, those underage, and those who simply don’t vote. I choose the easy way.
Your second point is equally valid. But with the same problem. How do you measure those who dislike Trump but vote for him anyway?
My point remains that at whatever number between 60m Americans and 150m Americans; you’re a long way from unity or unified.