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  1. #1841
    Quote Originally Posted by Skydog View Post
    According to exit polls young voters made up 12% of all voters, in line with their usual 11-13% representation. However these under 25 voters skewed more Democratic than usual, even in comparison to their usual left leaning voting patterns. I’m guessing that both abortion and student debt relief explain much of the increased support for DEMS (and/or rejection of GOP) in this age group.

    Speaking of debt cancellation I’m not sure why there has been so little (any?) discussion of this issue. Biden’s implementation of student debt forgiveness late in the election cycle may have well been decisive in some of the important races that were decided by mere tenths of a percent. And even a few extra wins make a big difference in the election narrative that ultimately emerges victorious.

    In todays political environment where Presidential elections are being decided by 10’s of thousands of votes out of over a hundred million cast, even tiny factors can completely change the course of US history. Fascinating and stressful times we live in!
    I believe it is/was an important factor. And the GOP has succeeded in keeping it alive as a factor. They have now gotten it blocked in the courts (not final yet) so not only are Biden and the Dems getting. Credit for it with the younger folks, but the GOP has now taken it away too.
       

  2. #1842
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    Quote Originally Posted by PackMan97 View Post
    Not unique to the GOP. The first rule of politics is to never admit you were wrong.
    Success had many parents, failure is an orphan.
       

  3. #1843
    Quote Originally Posted by acdevil View Post
    I believe it is/was an important factor. And the GOP has succeeded in keeping it alive as a factor. They have now gotten it blocked in the courts (not final yet) so not only are Biden and the Dems getting. Credit for it with the younger folks, but the GOP has now taken it away too.
    The GOP’s strategy on this issue has been a head scratcher IMO. They’ve cast it almost entirely as a class politics issue (They’re making hard-working people pay off the debts of lawyers and doctors, and also baristas!), which I am sure resonates with some of their base - but most people who *have* student loans know that’s not true and can see that the messaging is dishonest.

    The better strategy IMO would have been to paint debt relief as inflationary (which it is) and use it to portray Dems as spending recklessly/ managing the economy incompetently.
       

  4. #1844
    Quote Originally Posted by LasVegas View Post
    Which is the dumbest thing ever. ...
    Is it? Trump has built fame, fortune and power in part due to his refusal to ever admit he is wrong. As off-putting as it is to most of us, about 25% of Americans absolutely love him for it.

    People complain about politicians too much. The real problem lies with voters. As a nation we don’t vote for honest, thoughtful, humble people. Every primary offers a few of these and they get soundly rejected while the bombastic distorters of truth win in a landslide. Then we get mad that the egomaniac crooks we elect are egomaniacal and crooked! Who is truly at fault here?
       

  5. #1845
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    Quote Originally Posted by acdevil View Post
    I believe it is/was an important factor. And the GOP has succeeded in keeping it alive as a factor. They have now gotten it blocked in the courts (not final yet) so not only are Biden and the Dems getting. Credit for it with the younger folks, but the GOP has now taken it away too.
    Not to get too deep in policy but it is actually an issue on which there is a fair amount of divide among Democrats. People like to lump together Dems as a monolithic voting block, and in doing this often assume that all Dems support ideas coming from the far left of the party.

    A lot of Dems were not happy with the debt relief plan. Not enough to make them flip but enough to cautiously speak up. I am an avid NYT reader and often get more value out of the comments than the actual articles. NYT readers skew heavily left, but cover the full range. For articles about debt relief, there was a very vocal, likely majority presence of people who were opposed. Most of them were not opposed to the concept in general but did not like how this one was being done.

    All that being said, I think it was a net positive for the Dems as it pulled more people to them than it pushed away.
       

  6. #1846
    You know, with the GOP looking likely to win the House, but with so many election-deniers and that type having LOST their elections... is there any chance that the GOP decides to move away from the firebreathing promises of filling the next two years with impeachments and investigations and all of this? Might they decide, in reflection, that this is not a winning move moving to 2024?

  7. #1847
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Ash View Post
    You know, with the GOP looking likely to win the House, but with so many election-deniers and that type having LOST their elections... is there any chance that the GOP decides to move away from the firebreathing promises of filling the next two years with impeachments and investigations and all of this? Might they decide, in reflection, that this is not a winning move moving to 2024?
    Nope.
       

  8. #1848
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Ash View Post
    You know, with the GOP looking likely to win the House, but with so many election-deniers and that type having LOST their elections... is there any chance that the GOP decides to move away from the firebreathing promises of filling the next two years with impeachments and investigations and all of this? Might they decide, in reflection, that this is not a winning move moving to 2024?
    No way.
       

  9. #1849
    Join Date
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    Quote Originally Posted by Skydog View Post
    Is it? Trump has built fame, fortune and power in part due to his refusal to ever admit he is wrong. As off-putting as it is to most of us, about 25% of Americans absolutely love him for it.

    People complain about politicians too much. The real problem lies with voters. As a nation we don’t vote for honest, thoughtful, humble people. Every primary offers a few of these and they get soundly rejected while the bombastic distorters of truth win in a landslide. Then we get mad that the egomaniac crooks we elect are egomaniacal and crooked! Who is truly at fault here?
    About 1/3rd of the American public will agree with any policy or support any elected official. On the day he resigned, Nixon's approval rating was ~30%. Neither Trump's approval rating nor Biden's has ever dropped below 30%. The key is understanding whether that 1/3rd is a floor or a ceiling. For Nixon's approval rating, at the end, it was a ceiling. I'd say the same goes for election denying. It's probably not a ceiling for abortion bans yet, but it's headed that way. Access to abortion as a ballot measure keeps winning, even in deep red states. (Average percentage of anti-abortion votes across the 6 states who had ballot initiatives this year ~39%.)

    In my experience, people willing to admit they are wrong are in the minority - in all walks of life. It's similar to people refusing to admit they've been taken for a sucker. We dig in. It's what humans do. People don't change their minds about their core beliefs/values once they reach a certain age, just like they don't change their brand of toothpaste. That's why I think if Republicans don't start trying to reach Gen Z soon, they are going to face a demographic bubble of stubbornly Democratic voters for quite some time, just like how Democrats can't make any head way with older, white, rural voters now. I could be wrong. I might not be around to see if I'm right but I look at the 2022 midterms as a warning shot to Republicans. And for heavens' sake, how many warning shots do Republicans need? They haven't won the popular vote for President in 18 years and only twice in the last 34! That's not going to change in 2024, even if they do manage to win the Electoral College. And everyday, more people turn 18. For the Republicans with regards to Gen Z, that ~30% is currently a ceiling.

  10. #1850
    Quote Originally Posted by LasVegas View Post
    Which is the dumbest thing ever. Not sure when people became so afraid to admit they were wrong or made a mistake. It’s ok! It’s how your grow. I teach my kids this on a daily basis.
    That’s what sharpies are for!
       

  11. #1851
    Quote Originally Posted by Matches View Post
    The GOP’s strategy on this issue has been a head scratcher IMO. They’ve cast it almost entirely as a class politics issue (They’re making hard-working people pay off the debts of lawyers and doctors, and also baristas!), which I am sure resonates with some of their base - but most people who *have* student loans know that’s not true and can see that the messaging is dishonest.

    The better strategy IMO would have been to paint debt relief as inflationary (which it is) and use it to portray Dems as spending recklessly/ managing the economy incompetently.
    I think the GOP could have also made some hay on the issue as a personal responsibility not to go into six figure debt for a low paying job. A great example would be a Duke Sociology Bachelors that will cost you $300k in student loans and net you a job that pays well under $40k/year. The math on that is just plain bad. Though, I guess it's hard to work into a 15-30s attack ad why that's a bad idea. No offense at Duke, just trying to make it relevant. Many undergrad degrees require getting a Masters and/or PhD for them to make sense.

    source: https://www.collegesimply.com/colleg...sity/salaries/

    It's also worth remembering that politicians spend millions of dollars on focus groups and polling to get their message right. The chances of us coming up with a better strategy that will gain a politician more votes (or deny their opponent more votes) than the strategy they picked are most likely fairly low. They'll go with the options that the polls tell them play the best. Just because our echo chamber here feels differently doesn't mean that scales up into the millions of voters.

  12. #1852
    Join Date
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    Lynchburg, VA
    Quote Originally Posted by Bostondevil View Post
    You still haven't defined what is a quality candidate.

    Ok, reading your post, here are traits that make one not a quality candidate: barely winning the primary, being too young, not living in the district, no political experience, no serious career, being an athlete. I don't think you mean to say transferring to Yale is a knock, but it could certainly be used in attack ads against a candidate, especially when the district is more rural and/or in the South.

    Not on your list: where a candidate stands on the issues.

    Here's the thing though, no candidate in the Republican primary got more than 32% of the vote, so, by your first argument, none of the candidates in the Republican primary were quality candidates. In this argument that Republicans lost competitive races because of the quality of candidates - where were these candidates? Did they lose primaries or are we talking hypothetical candidates that did not appear on primary ballots? If you are talking actual candidates - who would have done better in your district? Who would have done better in the Pennsylvania Senate race? Who would have done better in Arizona or Nevada? If you are talking hypothetical candidates, I don't know what to say because I don't think those hypothetical quality candidates exist anymore. The few that meet what I think you mean by quality candidates are either incumbents or they are from the Northeast, New England mostly with a few left in NY/NJ/PA/DE too. (I think incumbency is the answer to the Georgia results, btw.) Although perhaps the New England claim falls flat because New England is now entirely blue when it comes to Representatives - I'm thinking of Phil Scott and Chris Sununu.

    To further clarify what I mean, Pat Toomey fits your definition of a quality candidate while nobody who sought to replace him on the Republican primary ballot does.

    My argument is that there is new trend in voting patterns that Republicans have missed or, IMHO, are refusing to see. (Ok, some do see it, they're the ones asking to raise the voting age.) Younger voters, particularly younger female votes, are turning out more than previous generations and a majority of them do not trust Republicans on the issues that they care about most. There are not enough of them to turn deep red states or districts blue, but there are enough of them in competitive states to elect more Democrats than the pundits predicted. Which is what I have been saying for months. I don't think the pollsters adequately captured this group. I didn't look at the early voting as much as Ymo did, but I remained convinced that the jump in new voter registrations after Dobbs was a significant sign that a new, different voting bloc was going to show up in these midterms. They did and they made a difference.

    If you want to counter that candidate quality kept many more moderate Republican voters home which allowed the younger voters to have the impact that they did - my counter to that would be that more moderate candidates weren't going to turn out the more extreme election denying wing of the Republican base. That wing has a name for all of your quality candidates - RINOs.
    Again, no one is saying that abortion (or any other specific policy issue) didn't matter. Dobbs clearly motivated many people to vote and it favored Democrats as an issue. It likely made the difference in races with small margins. But "abortion mattered" and "candidate quality is irrelevant" are two wildly different claims and you have no evidence to support the latter. None of what you wrote above is proof of that claim.

    I feel like we're talking past each other on the definition of candidate quality as several of us have addressed that issue over the last few pages of the thread. To elaborate, there are many factors that determine candidate quality and their position on the issues, including abortion, is obviously part of that equation. This whole discussion started because you asserted that candidate quality was irrelevant to the midterm results and that GOP losses in close states could be explained primarily through the lens of abortion. The point I, and others, have made is that there are factors other than abortion at play and there are counter-examples that complicate, if not outright contradict your argument. Among those examples are Hershel Walker and Brian Kemp, both of whom are equally anti-abortion, but one of whom is clearly a better quality candidate by virtue of a) not having a semi-tractor load of personal baggage, b) an understanding of the issues facing Georgia, and c) the ability to talk about them in an intelligent and coherent manner. If you don't think those factors relevant to the overall quality of the candidate, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. Another example is Mike DeWine and JD Vance. Again, both are anti-abortion but DeWine trounced Vance in relevant performance. What explains that in your model of how voters decide between candidates?

    I'm not sure why you offered incumbency as an explanation. A candidate who's already held the office and done a good job (in the mind of that district's/state's voters) has a trust advantage over their opponent. That's an issue of candidate quality and an argument against your position, not for it.

    Even the difference between Kerry Lake and Blake Masters is difficult to explain through your lens. Both were anti-abortion, but Lake actually leaned into abortion in the general election while Masters scrubbed his website and tried to downplay his primary position. Lake outperformed Masters and neither were incumbents. Why?

    The evidence also suggests you are wrong to frame this as a catch-22 where the GOP must choose between ultra-Maga and RINOs. Again, the evidence says otherwise. Youngkin turned out Trump supporters just fine in 2021, as did Kemp and DeWine in 2022.

    A couple of other notes regarding candidate quality. There's no universal standard. The political climate, make-up of the electorate, and strengths and weaknesses of the opponent all matter. So, a CEO with no political experience might have an advantage in one political climate and a disadvantage in another. Running Oz against Fetterman in this political climate is about as dumb as it gets. This is the guy who put out a campaign video complaining about the price of "Crudités." No one was better suited to expose Oz as a carpet-bagging-out-of-touch-elite than Fetterman.

    Also, the fact that determining candidate quality is multifaceted and complicated doesn't mean it doesn't matter. And, just because candidate quality can't overcome a candidate's anti-abortion stance in an election in Boston, doesn't mean candidate quality can't get an anti-abortion candidate across the line in AZ, GA, NV, OH, or PA.

    Quote Originally Posted by Bostondevil View Post
    Ok, my question for you then is - was McCormick of higher or lower quality as a candidate than Oz?
    Marginally higher. He had his own carpet-bagger issue and Fetterman would have tried to framed him as an out-of-touch-hedge-fund-elite, but McCormick certainly had more room to define himself than Oz. He also had more money to defend himself in the Philadelphia suburbs and he likely had more sense than to call a veggie tray a crudités in PA. He had already positioned himself to run as the Pennsylvania Glen Youngkin in the general which is undoubtably better than Oz's strategy, such as it was. Would it have been enough to defeat Fetterman? Maybe.

    Finally, you and dudog84 have questioned why so-called "better" candidates didn't win their primary if they are, in fact, better. Well, because what counts for candidate quality in a primary (GOP or Dem) is different than what counts as quality in the general. And, in most GOP primaries there are a number of things that work in a Trump-endorsed candidate's favor. Few voters are paying close attention and there are frequently several candidates so a Trump endorsement has an outsized effect by locking down a sizable minority of the overall primary vote. The fact that no candidate in a 4 or 5 candidate race won more than 32% of the vote is not an argument for your position.

  13. #1853
    Join Date
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    Quote Originally Posted by PackMan97 View Post
    I think the GOP could have also made some hay on the issue as a personal responsibility not to go into six figure debt for a low paying job. A great example would be a Duke Sociology Bachelors that will cost you $300k in student loans and net you a job that pays well under $40k/year. The math on that is just plain bad. Though, I guess it's hard to work into a 15-30s attack ad why that's a bad idea. No offense at Duke, just trying to make it relevant. Many undergrad degrees require getting a Masters and/or PhD for them to make sense.

    source: https://www.collegesimply.com/colleg...sity/salaries/

    It's also worth remembering that politicians spend millions of dollars on focus groups and polling to get their message right. The chances of us coming up with a better strategy that will gain a politician more votes (or deny their opponent more votes) than the strategy they picked are most likely fairly low. They'll go with the options that the polls tell them play the best. Just because our echo chamber here feels differently doesn't mean that scales up into the millions of voters.
    But that is the GOP's position. They did make that point ad nauseum. And the majority of Gen Z's reaction to such a position? "Ok, Boomer."

    Duke doesn't have students graduating with $300k of debt. Average student loan debt for a Duke grad? $24,219. That's a car payment. So, don't buy a car for a few years after graduation. Bonus - you're somewhat insulated from higher gas prices. Live close to work or somewhere with adequate public transportation - student debt problem solved! (My personal Gen Z expert bikes to work.) And for Duke's sociology majors? First of all, there were only 45 in the Class of 2020 (last one where I could find data) and they graduated with an average debt of $13,395.

    It's not the degree that's the problem for people with huge amounts of student debt - it's the profession. Two professions that always turn up near the top of lists of the "Who is carrying the most student loan debt?" variety are teachers and nurses. We have nationwide shortages in both. Gen Z has gotten the message, they aren't going into those professions at the same levels as previous generations.

  14. #1854
    Quote Originally Posted by Bostondevil View Post
    But that is the GOP's position. They did make that point ad nauseum. And the majority of Gen Z's reaction to such a position? "Ok, Boomer."

    Duke doesn't have students graduating with $300k of debt. Average student loan debt for a Duke grad? $24,219. That's a car payment. So, don't buy a car for a few years after graduation. Bonus - you're somewhat insulated from higher gas prices. Live close to work or somewhere with adequate public transportation - student debt problem solved! (My personal Gen Z expert bikes to work.) And for Duke's sociology majors? First of all, there were only 45 in the Class of 2020 (last one where I could find data) and they graduated with an average debt of $13,395.

    It's not the degree that's the problem for people with huge amounts of student debt - it's the profession. Two professions that always turn up near the top of lists of the "Who is carrying the most student loan debt?" variety are teachers and nurses. We have nationwide shortages in both. Gen Z has gotten the message, they aren't going into those professions at the same levels as previous generations.
    Good to hear about Duke student debt. Some of the stories you hear about are mind boggling. I also imagine the 2020 graduates aren't terminal at a bachelors.

    Definitely worth mentioning where there are shortages and debt. That's a solid point. My niece just started teaching this year (her parents did the prepaid tuition when she was born, so thankfully no debt) but even then, she was ready to quit after about 2 months.

  15. #1855
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    Quote Originally Posted by PackMan97 View Post
    Good to hear about Duke student debt. Some of the stories you hear about are mind boggling. I also imagine the 2020 graduates aren't terminal at a bachelors.

    Definitely worth mentioning where there are shortages and debt. That's a solid point. My niece just started teaching this year (her parents did the prepaid tuition when she was born, so thankfully no debt) but even then, she was ready to quit after about 2 months.
    Yeah, as someone who accrued a decent amount of student loan debt, the VAST majority of it came AFTER I graduated from Duke. Like, over 80% of it.

  16. #1856
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    Vermont
    Quote Originally Posted by Skydog View Post
    No way.
    I agree with you guys...heard on the news at lunch about how eager the GOP is to move ahead (if they get their expected narrow House win) with hearings on impeaching Joe, investigating his son and the Afghanistan withdrawal. (Have they finally dropped Benghazi?)...Will anyone in the party try to dissuade them from this? Hard to see it as a winning strategy...all about pleasing The Base I guess

  17. #1857
    Quote Originally Posted by budwom View Post
    I agree with you guys...heard on the news at lunch about how eager the GOP is to move ahead (if they get their expected narrow House win) with hearings on impeaching Joe, investigating his son and the Afghanistan withdrawal. (Have they finally dropped Benghazi?)...Will anyone in the party try to dissuade them from this? Hard to see it as a winning strategy...all about pleasing The Base I guess
    I was talking with my wife about this over the weekend. The truth is both of us wanting a functional and sane GOP to counterbalance the Democrats. However, given a lot of the extremes in the GOP these days, neither of us actually want to get down and dirty and get active in the local GOP that would give us a chance, maybe, of moderating and influencing their direction. So they become more and more of an echo chamber convinced of their own correctness and my wife and I become more and more disenchanted with the politicians we have to choose from.

    There is only one way to fix the problem, and that requires a lot of effort from a lot of people at the local level and I don't think there are enough people willing to do that work. This goes for both sides, not just the GOP, though I see fewer left leaning folks distressed about the current condition of the Democratic party.

  18. #1858
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bostondevil View Post
    But that is the GOP's position. They did make that point ad nauseum. And the majority of Gen Z's reaction to such a position? "Ok, Boomer."

    Duke doesn't have students graduating with $300k of debt. Average student loan debt for a Duke grad? $24,219. That's a car payment. So, don't buy a car for a few years after graduation. Bonus - you're somewhat insulated from higher gas prices. Live close to work or somewhere with adequate public transportation - student debt problem solved! (My personal Gen Z expert bikes to work.) And for Duke's sociology majors? First of all, there were only 45 in the Class of 2020 (last one where I could find data) and they graduated with an average debt of $13,395.

    It's not the degree that's the problem for people with huge amounts of student debt - it's the profession. Two professions that always turn up near the top of lists of the "Who is carrying the most student loan debt?" variety are teachers and nurses. We have nationwide shortages in both. Gen Z has gotten the message, they aren't going into those professions at the same levels as previous generations.
    Not to go too far on a tangent but the teacher shortage and nurse shortage are resolving themselves differently. I’m not sure but I’m guessing that teacher salaries are not changing much. A small part of my professional life is looking at hospital finances and all I am hearing about are nursing shortages and nursing salaries. Nurses have been shifting to contract labor - this morning I was looking at the financials of a decent sized hospital system in a pretty big metro area whose contract RN labor rates have doubled since 2020. This is happening a lot of places.

    Many would argue this is a well deserved raise though hospitals now have to figure out how to pay it while maintaining care levels.
       

  19. #1859
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    Quote Originally Posted by CrazyNotCrazie View Post
    Not to go too far on a tangent but the teacher shortage and nurse shortage are resolving themselves differently. I’m not sure but I’m guessing that teacher salaries are not changing much. A small part of my professional life is looking at hospital finances and all I am hearing about are nursing shortages and nursing salaries. Nurses have been shifting to contract labor - this morning I was looking at the financials of a decent sized hospital system in a pretty big metro area whose contract RN labor rates have doubled since 2020. This is happening a lot of places.

    Many would argue this is a well deserved raise though hospitals now have to figure out how to pay it while maintaining care levels.
    Indeed, we have had a major festouche at our major hospital, primarily because nurses are overworked AND find themselves making literally half the money of travelling nurses. They have fixed this, don't know the details, but they are paying the locals quite a bit more which obviates the need for the travelling nurses. So I'd say this labor situation you are seeing isn't so much of a "well deserved raise" but rather mostly a function of having to hire exorbitantly priced contract/travelling nurses.
    I'm thinking (maybe incorrectly) that the local nurses aren't seeing overly large raises...

  20. #1860
    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Ash View Post
    You know, with the GOP looking likely to win the House, but with so many election-deniers and that type having LOST their elections... is there any chance that the GOP decides to move away from the firebreathing promises of filling the next two years with impeachments and investigations and all of this? Might they decide, in reflection, that this is not a winning move moving to 2024?
    I doubt the committed anti-Biden and Big Lie pushing Reps will want to give an inch, but if there is a very narrow majority, they may not be able to get their way.

    Just like the Dems agenda ended up being decided by folks in the middle, Sinema and Manchin being the two most notable examples, the scope of a GOP house agenda may be decided by the moderates.

    If you are a GOP rep in a swing district, do you really want to face the electorate again in two years with a vote to impeach President Biden on your record? Or a refusal to raise the debt ceiling? Or a strict national ban on abortion?

    The radical right agenda may play well to the base in ruby red districts, but elsewhere voters are sending a clear message that they want serious government that is working to address real, everyday problems.
    So if the GOP ends up with a razor thin margin, just a few folks in swing districts voting with their own careers in mind may prevent the most radical measures from making it to the floor.
       

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