The Tyrannical Minority

[Guest]

Again a misread. The nation can't focus on everything going on with Trump you say? The Republicans would be making political hay out of this if the roles were reversed you say? Let's make sure we recite everything possible to make sure everyone knows how bad the other side is compared to our side over and over and over and over and over and over and...

Thanks for helping illustrate why the current strategy is the winning one and not the one you advocate for. Again, I'm not saying you are wrong about the facts. You just seem to have a hard time with normal people behaving like normal people instead of callous analytical machines with a libertarian lean. Hmmm. Anywho.

[_EAllusion]

Apropos of nothing, this was one of my favorite polls recently. When reading it, keep in mind that Democrats are doing very well in head to head polling against Trump at the moment:

% of registered voters who think ___ would beat / lose vs Donald Trump in 2020:

Biden: 39% beat / 44% lose (-4)
Warren: 36 / 46 (-10)
Sanders: 32 / 51 (-18)
Harris: 23 / 55 (-31)
Buttigieg: 21 / 54 (-33)
Booker: 19 / 56 (-37)
O'Rourke: 18 / 57 (-38)
Klobuchar: 15 / 59 (-43)

https://Twitter.com/gelliottmorris/stat ... 0290743305

Democrats' loser complex producing abject cowardice in the face of Republican aggression is one of the defining features of modern politics.

[_EAllusion]

Again a misread. The nation can't focus on everything going on with Trump you say? The Republicans would be making political hay out of this if the roles were reversed you say? Let's make sure we recite everything possible to make sure everyone knows how bad the other side is compared to our side over and over and over and over and over and over and...

Thanks for helping illustrate why the current strategy is the winning one and not the one you advocate for. Again, I'm not saying you are wrong about the facts. You just seem to have a hard time with normal people behaving like normal people instead of callous analytical machines with a libertarian lean. Hmmm. Anywho.

Republicans would be right to investigate a Democratic president in that instance. They wouldn't hesitate to do so because they aren't massive political cowards with a broken understanding of voter behavior. Putting up a relentless cloud of impropriety around the President, in addition to being factually accurate, is actually bad for the President and his party.

[_honorentheos]

Your favorite poll is a Zogby internet poll that confirms one of your already held views if read as being due to Democrat self-loathing rather than issues with Democrat voters not supporting a second or third candidate of choice at the moment?

Ok.

[_honorentheos]

Again a misread. The nation can't focus on everything going on with Trump you say? The Republicans would be making political hay out of this if the roles were reversed you say? Let's make sure we recite everything possible to make sure everyone knows how bad the other side is compared to our side over and over and over and over and over and over and...

Thanks for helping illustrate why the current strategy is the winning one and not the one you advocate for. Again, I'm not saying you are wrong about the facts. You just seem to have a hard time with normal people behaving like normal people instead of callous analytical machines with a libertarian lean. Hmmm. Anywho.

Republicans would be right to investigate a Democratic president in that instance. They wouldn't hesitate to do so because they aren't massive political cowards with a broken understanding of voter behavior. Putting up a relentless cloud of impropriety around the President, in addition to being factually accurate, is actually bad for the President and his party.

[_EAllusion]

Your favorite poll is a Zogby internet poll that confirms one of your already held views if read as being due to Democrat self-loathing rather than issues with Democrat voters not supporting a second or third candidate of choice at the moment?

Ok.

"Zoby Internet poll?"

Is that supposed to be a derisive description meant to imply it is not a scientific poll? Like it's a click-poll? That's a serious misunderstanding of how online only scientific polls work, but this is a Economist/Yougov poll with a very large sample size.

It's my favorite recent poll because it is a humorous, and extreme illustration, of the true stereotype of Republicans believing they'll snatch victory from the jaws of defeat while Democrats believe they'll snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It's mainstream for Republicans believe that polls are unfairly skewed against them until the bitter end, at which point they may speculate they only lost because of fraud. It is much, much less difficult to convince Democrats of their inevitable defeat if they so much as breath wrong. This attitudinal difference can help explain some differences in how politicians in both parties behave.
It's not me who doesn't grasp human behavior here.

As for your contrary explanation, it doesn't offer an actual contrary explanation. If Democrats think that only the specific person they support can beat Trump, that still reflects a deep pessimism in the face of what appears to be decent conditions. It'd be weird given the broad favorability Democratic candidates have among Democrats even as not a first choice, but still quite pessimistic. I wouldn't describe this as "self-loathing" so much as a fear and expectation of losing that guides poor political choices. The common theory I see for why this is is that boomer Democrats have the experience of getting crushed by Republicans burned into their psyche, but I haven't seen enough exploration of the phenomena to know if that's strongly supported.

[_honorentheos]

That Twitter link isn't to the source. The poll is a Zogby internet poll. They are notorious for being self-selective as a person has to sign up to be selected to participate. As you noted, most polls show almost every Democrat beating Trump in general national polls.

It's not a secret that about a quarter of Bernie voters won't vote for any other Democrat candidate. Your own Twitter source has a few nice polls showing that while Warren has pretty good second place strength the fact is most Democrat voters are currently not counting their candidate of choice out and acknowledging another candidate would be ok instead.. The poll is easily understandable through math and the numbers of voters who won't concede their candidate of choice has a chance against Trump while theirs is the one voters should pick. It's math. And that poll reflects the Republicans have one candidate while the Democrats are fighting it out.

Seriously.

[_EAllusion]

That Twitter link isn't to the source. The poll is a Zogby internet poll. They are notorious for being self-selective as a person has to sign up to be selected to participate.

The Twitter link contains the source if you scroll up. I queued up the link to the specific data I wanted to cite. It is from G. Elliot Morris, who writes on political forecasting for the Economist.

The poll is here:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/c ... plines.pdf

[_EAllusion]

It's not a secret that about a quarter of Bernie voters won't vote for any other Democrat candidate. Your own Twitter source has a few nice polls showing that while Warren has pretty good second place strength the fact is most Democrat voters are currently not counting their candidate of choice out and acknowledging another candidate would be ok instead.. The poll is easily understandable through math and the numbers of voters who won't concede their candidate of choice has a chance against Trump while theirs is the one voters should pick. It's math. And that poll reflects the Republicans have one candidate while the Democrats are fighting it out.

Seriously.

It's possible to believe, "I like Joe Biden, but I believe that Kamala Harris is also likely to beat Trump." That's a conceptually possible thing to think that seems to be a plausible position to hold. Thinking that "only my guy can stand up to the Trump juggernaut (that has been a terrible candidate since forever)" reflects pessimism. This theory also doesn't match up well with stated support of those candidates vs. their perceived electability numbers. The stronger explanation simply that people underestimate support of the candidates they like. When I've seen polling of Republicans on questions like this, they tend to have the opposite problem.

Think about Ajax running around imagining that America supports his positions on immigration because Trump was elected even though his positions on immigration poll as wildly unpopular. He's not a lone-wolf there. He's fairly representative.

[_honorentheos]

That Twitter link isn't to the source. The poll is a Zogby internet poll. They are notorious for being self-selective as a person has to sign up to be selected to participate.

The Twitter link contains the source if you scroll up. I queued up the link to the specific data I wanted to cite. It is from G. Elliot Morris, who writes on political forecasting for the Economist.

The poll is here:

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/c ... plines.pdf

The numbers in your link don't match. Realclear and 538 only include the October 1-3 Zogby poll as matching your data or but mg very close to it. So, something is fishy there. Regardless, the overlap is one gets results you find amusing in online self-selective polls that show slight Democrat support but general riffs between Democrat voters when it comes to asking if a candidate that lacks more than more than 25% lacks current support among enough D voters in the poll to show they could beat Trump. It's not rocket science, EA. Democrats aren't yet at the place where they are evaluating the second and tier candidates against Trump at the same time they are arguing their preferred candidate is the only one who can beat Trump.