I wanted him to win the nomination in 2016. I’m mixed on him now. He has weasel mouthed the 2020 election by not saying it was stolen, but by saying things about it that were absolute bullshit. He’s disappointing but nearly all politicians are. I’d prefer a sane, pragmatic, successful non-MAGA Republican Governor.@aloha-hoosier what do you think of Rubio?
@squeakyclean I think the more influential question is if Dems will stay woke. They hold all the cards. If they got new centrist blood they’d dominate. Harris. AOC. Newsom. Will keep things competitive otherwise
So called moderates or centrists suck. It's what liberals call themselves when they refuse to admit their ideas suck. It's every terrible idea, but not quite as bad as progressives on it.
I wanted him to win the nomination in 2016. I’m mixed on him now. He has weasel mouthed the 2020 election by not saying it was stolen, but by saying things about it that were absolute bullshit. He’s disappointing but nearly all politicians are. I’d prefer a sane, pragmatic, successful non-MAGA Republican Governor.@aloha-hoosier what do you think of Rubio?
Like DeSantis?
@dbmhoosier foreclosures up a third from a year ago. how bad that is i don't know. many are in fla which might reflect second homes and condos etc.
Why do you think they chose 6 years ago? It's because it was the pandemic. The foreclosures in 2026 Q1 are 27% lower than they were in 2019 Q1 according to Grok. 2026 numbers are 37% lower than 2018 by the way.
@snarlcakes it's not tho. centrist dems aren't for open borders defund cradle to grave benes and all the rest. now. how many centrist dems are left i don't know. but clinton etc (and biden historically) had no desire for soft crime open borders etc.
What's more I don't believe an old guard conservative could have done that.
You're wrong here, and furthermore, based on our previous conversations, I know you know you are wrong. Harris was doomed. The GOP could have run a cantaloupe and won that election. An old guard conservative might have come out of the primary bloodied up and had people worried, but at the end of the day, when people walked into the voting booth in November, they were still going to vote against Harris (and by proxy, Biden). If anything, Trump might have (note I said "might have") made it closer by causing some voters to vote Dem or stay at home just because they hate him so much.
@snarlcakes it's a rain drop in the ocean compared to costs of living. it skews to large corps and the top 10 percent own something like 90 percent of all stocks. an incumbent would be far better off with cheap gas and goods and shit stock market than the opposite
No, an incumbent wouldn't be better off with a shitty stock market. You're arguing it's better to be in recession than a growing economy.
People don't buy groceries and pay their water bills with economic indicators. Growing GDP is great on paper. It's something you can hang your hat on in a discussion among economists. But it isn't real. It's an abstraction. "Do I have enough money in my pocket to fill up my gas tank, buy bread and peanut butter, and still have enough left over for a six pack of High Noon Transfusions to forget about my shitty life for one day?" That's real.
When people say that voters vote with their pocketbooks, they don't mean they vote based on GDP or PPP or, honestly, even high-level unemployment and inflation numbers. It means they vote with "How do I feel I am doing with my needs and my bills right now?"
@goat no sir I do not believe that. I believe old guard conservatives would have lost to Harris. Trump drew even with her on Hispanics and increased with minorities. An old guard would not have done that. Voters don’t relate. Now how these working class and minorities think Trump relates to them other than messaging is wizardry. the party of aloha is dead dead dead.
@goat absolutely. and it's crazy we're having this exact dialogue yet again. deja vu under biden
@goat no sir I do not believe that. I believe old guard conservatives would have lost to Harris. Trump drew even with her on Hispanics and increased with minorities. An old guard would not have done that. Voters don’t relate. Now how these working class and minorities think Trump relates to them other than messaging is wizardry.
Purely anecdotal, but I mentioned this back during the run-up to the election. NPR did a segment where they were interviewing a bunch of minority voters. A lot of them were leaning Trump. Not a single one of them explained why they were voting for Trump. Each and every one explained why Biden was a disappointment or Harris wasn't trustworthy or the Dems in general had moved away from them and lost them as voters. They closest they got to saying something positive about Trump was by talking about how important certain hot button issues like crime were, and those are issues than any Republican can run on, not just a populist.
@goat no sir I do not believe that. I believe old guard conservatives would have lost to Harris.
Also, perhaps I am misremembering, as I am getting old. I just seem to recall you not being nearly this high on Harris' chances at the time. Or perhaps that's simply because Trump was already the nominee, so a hypothetical old guard conservative didn't deserve any brain power to consider.
I will simply point to my track record, which is mostly bad, and very rarely involves getting anything right, but in this case, I was the one liberal consistently beating the drum that Harris had zero chance whatsoever, and all my fellow libs trying to come up with explanations for how she might pull it out were just deluding themselves.
@bar-down I thought Harris was a historically terrible candidate, far and away the worst in history. I am sure I read that on the old board daily (before that the worst vp in history before that the worst VP pick in history).
Add in she didn't have time to really plan out a campaign and I am not sure that that she could have defeated the Libertarian candidate one-on-one.
@goat I wonder if part of that is the Trump touch tho. I don't know. I think MAGA is really positive for the GOP if the goal is to win the presidency. here's my theory with zero data. maga can pick off dems. working joes. labor. unions. cops. those were dem strongholds. those people HATE ROMNEY types. so if you're maga you can pick off dems, have maga voters, and still count on most republicans to vote for your while holding their noses because they aren't voting dem.
conversely this is where i think dems fckd up being all about lbgqtxyz bullshit. pander to workers. laborers. cops. unions. don't pander to gays and trannies and all the rest. you've got them. they're baked in. they will NEVER vote republican. so keep them in the bank and focus on the lunch pale guys.