2024 Elections Thread

[Ruralguy]

I don't think think they are oblivious, so much as confounded that appeal remains even after the deleterious effects are seen, but of course, there's profound disagreement on what is deleterious.

[Ruralguy]

Is it really the *same* Hampton's donors giving to both sides? I'm skeptical. I've heard this before, but not sure I believe it. Maybe it was true at one time?

Anyway, yes, Musk just pledged almost 200 million to a Trump super-pac.  I have the feeling this and some other Silicon Valley (well, sort ofSV in Musk's case) donations are and will be connected to the Vance pick.

Also, the narrative on Sarah Palin pick was always that McCain didn't want her. He wanted to cross party lines and pick Lieberman, but RNC (not sure if they are elites or not) assured McCain he'd be dumped at the convention if that was announced, so he went with a more conventional pick (inexperienced and not so bright, but conventional).

[apl68]

Part of Trump's message is that he speaks directly to the people, unfiltered and uncensored by the corrupt establishment.

Evidently a lot of his appeal is that he is something of an "unfiltered id" type, in a society conditioned by media to value the expression of that.

Whatever the Trump ticket feels that they get from their new VP pick, it evidently outweighs the use of Rubio to attract more Hispanic votes, as was speculated above.  I'm sure some of them would like to have done that, but no VP can be all things to all people.

[mythbuster]

The Silicon Valley link is a legitimate pull. I have a close relative who works in Silicon Valley VC, and the reality is that those folks don't like Biden and all his discussions of regulations. My relative says it makes for very difficult office politics, since the "needs" of the company are very counter to the employees personal views.  This is likely to pull some big VC donations towards the Trump ticket.

[ciao_yall]

Mrs. Vance is a Hindu immigrant who has a super liberal history.

This might get interesting.

[ciao_yall]

The Silicon Valley link is a legitimate pull. I have a close relative who works in Silicon Valley VC, and the reality is that those folks don't like Biden and all his discussions of regulations. My relative says it makes for very difficult office politics, since the "needs" of the company are very counter to the employees personal views.  This is likely to pull some big VC donations towards the Trump ticket.

Yet Vance has advocated for big tax increases in the past. He was also a Never Trumper, so maybe they will forget that part as well.

[spork]

Mrs. Vance is a Hindu immigrant who has a super liberal history.

This might get interesting.

I'm sure she's willing to sell whatever soul she has left for the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that come with being married to Trump's VP. Cf. Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell.

[mythbuster]

Vance's history prior to about 2018 seems to have been entirely forgotten. As for Silicon Valley and taxes- only the little people pay taxes- per the Trump mantra. What the worry about is regulation of AI. See below for the VC manifesto:
Techno-optimist manifesto

[Langue_doc]

Mrs. Vance is a Hindu immigrant who has a super liberal history.

This might get interesting.

I'm sure she's willing to sell whatever soul she has left for the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that come with being married to Trump's VP. Cf. Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell.

I would ask the moderators to delete the "Hindu immigrant" reference as it comes acorss as biased. Most of us have at least a couple of colleagues who are Hindu immigrants, and also students who can be described as such. I was not aware that Hindu immigrants were on some kind of State Department or University "undesirable" list. Rather, they would be one of the categories in the DEI list.

I'm no fan of the Republicans, but do draw the line at someone being scorned because of their ethnicity and/or religion. The implication in the above discussion is that the Hindu immigrant is willing to sell her soul just because of her ethnicity/religion.

As for Usha Vance's background, here's the link to the BBC article:

Who is Usha Vance, lawyer and wife of Trump's VP pick?

[Langue_doc]

In other news,

Biden Circle Shrinks as Democrats Fear Election Wipeout
President Biden, increasingly isolated during the biggest political crisis of his presidency, is in a historic standoff with his party.

The first few paragraphs:

In the nearly three weeks since President Biden took the debate stage in Atlanta and plunged his re-election campaign into chaos, his closest consultations have been not with his White House chief of staff, his top communications strategist or even the leader of his campaign.

Instead, he is relying on members of his family — a tight-knit clan that includes his son Hunter and the first lady, Jill Biden — along with a tiny group of loyalists to steer him through a self-created crisis and quell a rising rebellion against his candidacy from within his own party.

Mr. Biden has not consulted directly with the pollsters on his 500-person campaign team about the state of the race against Donald J. Trump, but has instead relied on Mike Donilon, a longtime friend, former pollster and Biden-campaign messaging guru, to summarize the numbers, with regular memos and numerous daily phone calls.

The ever-buzzing phone of Steve Ricchetti, a close counselor to Mr. Biden since his vice presidency, is the main conduit between concerned lawmakers and the president.

Mr. Biden speaks frequently to his son Hunter Biden, who calls and texts the president and first lady multiple times a day to see how they are coping with the onslaught of scrutiny surrounding his father's health, mental fitness and final presidential campaign.

More paragraphs:

Though he is taking advice mostly from his closest circle, the president has been trying to prove that he is up for re-election by holding a series of meetings with lawmakers intended to hear concerns about his candidacy. He has held private discussions with Democratic governors and lawmakers, including with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, in Mr. Biden's vacation home in Rehoboth, Del., on Saturday. But multiple participants said the encounters have been carefully choreographed events that failed to alleviate their worries.

On Friday, Mr. Biden abruptly left a call with Hispanic members of the House after one lawmaker, Representative Mike Levin of California, called on him to get out of the race. Three participants familiar with that call said questions were preselected by Mr. Biden's staff. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, called that claim "false."

On Saturday, as Mr. Biden prepared to meet with centrist members of the House, several participants said the Biden campaign tried to solicit questions beforehand, which Mr. Bates also denied.

"They don't want to hear my question, which is, 'Are you cloistered? Have you heard what the polling is, that we no longer have three swing states, we have seven or 10?'" said Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat who has called for Mr. Biden to step aside. "The numbers are trending to more swing states, and worse numbers, and more congressional seats that are now contested. It's going the opposite direction."

During the call, Mr. Biden brushed away Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania when she told him he was trailing in her state by four to five percentage points, according to two people who participated in the call.

During an earlier call on Saturday, with progressive members of the House, Mr. Biden appeared to read from a note passed to him by a staff member: "Stay positive, you are sounding defensive." According to a lawmaker on the call, the president was poking fun at his aides, not accidentally reading the directive. But the lawmaker said it spoke to how stage-managed the calls have seemed.

A second article:

What Polls Tell Us About Biden's Chances

The first couple of paragraphs:

As Republicans head into the second day of their convention in Milwaukee, they are energized. They feel jubilant about their chances of winning in November and furious about the near-assassination of former President Donald Trump — an event many of them view as the natural consequence of what they see as hyperbolic rhetoric about the threat Mr. Trump poses to the country.

Meanwhile, many Democrats are despondent. Serious concerns about President Biden's electoral hopes loomed even before the events of the weekend transpired. Mr. Biden's advanced age and attendant campaign trail challenges remain. And now the iconic images of a bloodied Mr. Trump, fist in the air, seem to have raised Democrats' concerns that they have no good options, only a slow march toward defeat.

Write to your elected representatives! B****ing here doesn't do squat as far as the elections are concerned.

[spork]

Mrs. Vance is a Hindu immigrant who has a super liberal history.

This might get interesting.

I'm sure she's willing to sell whatever soul she has left for the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that come with being married to Trump's VP. Cf. Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell.

I would ask the moderators to delete the "Hindu immigrant" reference as it comes acorss as biased. Most of us have at least a couple of colleagues who are Hindu immigrants, and also students who can be described as such. I was not aware that Hindu immigrants were on some kind of State Department or University "undesirable" list. Rather, they would be one of the categories in the DEI list.

I'm no fan of the Republicans, but do draw the line at someone being scorned because of their ethnicity and/or religion. The implication in the above discussion is that the Hindu immigrant is willing to sell her soul just because of her ethnicity/religion.

As for Usha Vance's background, here's the link to the BBC article:

Who is Usha Vance, lawyer and wife of Trump's VP pick?

Interesting. I did not know that immigrants could be born in the USA. But I was not the person who said she was an immigrant.

Edited to add the most important part, which I forgot: my comment about selling her soul has nothing to do with her ethnicity or religion.

When is someone going to build a wall against Supreme Court clerks from Yale Law School?

[Parasaurolophus]

I think that ciao_yall's point is about how the Vances fit into the current Republican party, given its priorities and their own previous history. It's clearly not a neat fit--but then, it's also not clear that Republicans care about apparent contradictions.

[Antiphon1]

The Vances fit into the current Republican Party as bridges to Silicon Valley money and Peter Theil, etc....  It's the money and narcisitic, bare knuckle, venal, ambitious arrogance.  Elon Musk's announcement on Sunday gave the game away.  Frankly, the 18th century robber barrons were more palatable because that crowd at least felt more or less real obligation to support some educational and social agendas.  These guys want to monetize all government functions and drown the remainder of our public institutions in their own solid gold bathtubs.

[ciao_yall]

Mrs. Vance is a Hindu immigrant who has a super liberal history.

This might get interesting.

I'm sure she's willing to sell whatever soul she has left for the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that come with being married to Trump's VP. Cf. Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell.

I would ask the moderators to delete the "Hindu immigrant" reference as it comes acorss as biased. Most of us have at least a couple of colleagues who are Hindu immigrants, and also students who can be described as such. I was not aware that Hindu immigrants were on some kind of State Department or University "undesirable" list. Rather, they would be one of the categories in the DEI list.

I'm no fan of the Republicans, but do draw the line at someone being scorned because of their ethnicity and/or religion. The implication in the above discussion is that the Hindu immigrant is willing to sell her soul just because of her ethnicity/religion.

As for Usha Vance's background, here's the link to the BBC article:

Who is Usha Vance, lawyer and wife of Trump's VP pick?

Interesting. I did not know that immigrants could be born in the USA. But I was not the person who said she was an immigrant.

Edited to add the most important part, which I forgot: my comment about selling her soul has nothing to do with her ethnicity or religion.

When is someone going to build a wall against Supreme Court clerks from Yale Law School?

My point was that a bunch of Christian Nationalists were going to wonder what to do with a non-Christian, Hyphenated-American.

[Langue_doc]

Mrs. Vance is a Hindu immigrant who has a super liberal history.

This might get interesting.

I'm sure she's willing to sell whatever soul she has left for the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that come with being married to Trump's VP. Cf. Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell.

I would ask the moderators to delete the "Hindu immigrant" reference as it comes acorss as biased. Most of us have at least a couple of colleagues who are Hindu immigrants, and also students who can be described as such. I was not aware that Hindu immigrants were on some kind of State Department or University "undesirable" list. Rather, they would be one of the categories in the DEI list.

I'm no fan of the Republicans, but do draw the line at someone being scorned because of their ethnicity and/or religion. The implication in the above discussion is that the Hindu immigrant is willing to sell her soul just because of her ethnicity/religion.

As for Usha Vance's background, here's the link to the BBC article:

Who is Usha Vance, lawyer and wife of Trump's VP pick?

Interesting. I did not know that immigrants could be born in the USA. But I was not the person who said she was an immigrant.

Edited to add the most important part, which I forgot: my comment about selling her soul has nothing to do with her ethnicity or religion.

When is someone going to build a wall against Supreme Court clerks from Yale Law School?

My point was that a bunch of Christian Nationalists were going to wonder what to do with a non-Christian, Hyphenated-American.

It's the Democrats and academics who hyphenate Americans based on all kinds of categories, including religion, skin-color, ethnicity, and so on, much to the dismay of those hyphenated. Our students, especially those whose parents immigrated from South American countries find the term LatinX to be highly offensive for a variety of reasons. Likewise, our students who come from Asia, find the term Asian-American to be equally offensive.

As for Usha Vance, according to the BBC article, she was born in San Diego, and hence an American citizen. The Republicans, while no saints in the area of bias, are already familiar with candidates who are not white--Nikki Haley in the 2016 and 2024 primaries (I don't recall if she was a candidate in 2020), and also the gentleman whose name I don't recall, who was one of the four candidates in the recent Republican primary elections.

Referring to someone we disagree with as "Religion-American" instead of disagreeing with their policies would be an example of an Ad Hominem fallacy that our freshman comp students are taught to avoid.

The Republicans are on a roll--see the NYT article:

In Milwaukee, a G.O.P. Transformation From Dysfunctional to Unified
On Tuesday, Republicans effectively took a victory lap in the middle of the presidential race, expressing a sense of invincibility at their convention.

The photo shows people of all colors holding up placards supporting DJT. It appears that the Republicans, unlike the Democrats are well-organized and united behind their candidates.