If you want to know how the president’s prospects for reelection are looking, you’ll get two different answers depending on whether you read the New York Times or Politico. Trip Gabriel in the Times emphasizes that formerly Democratic white working class voters in the Youngstown, Ohio area are sticking with Trump despite his failure to improve their economic situation. Alex Isenstadt of Politico puts the focus on Trump’s reaction to internal polling that shows him behind Joe Biden in key Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
While, technically, both of these narratives can be true, they do appear to conflict with each other. Gabriel gives the impression that Biden is out of touch on trade and won’t be able to win the support of an appreciable number of these voters.
But even though stresses on families and communities are already acute, Mr. Trump appears to have lost little of his blue-collar support here.
It is a sign of how tight a bond he has with voters who were once staunch Democrats, in an allegiance as much cultural as economic. But it also undermines the argument of the Democrats’ leading 2020 candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., that he would be the best nominee to win back Midwest states because of his own appeal to working-class voters.
Isenstadt gives the impression that Biden has already burst into the lead in these key states and the Trump campaign is scrambling to reestablish his advantage.
The moves come at a time of growing anxiety over the geographic linchpin of his 2020 hopes. The Trump campaign recently completed a 17-state polling project that concluded the president trails Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, according to two people briefed on the results.
Ohio may be moving in the Republican column and perhaps it shouldn’t be considered a swing-state anymore. But there isn’t any difference economically or culturally between the Obama/Trump voters of Youngstown and the Obama/Trump voters in neighboring Western Pennsylvania. I doubt there’s a lot of difference between the laid off auto workers in Ohio and the laid off auto workers in Michigan and Wisconsin. Each of these states has its own unique demographics that help determine whether Trump is leading or trailing Biden (or other Democrats) in the polls. Similarly, the road to victory for a Democrat could be slightly different in each state.
Turnout in Detroit was down sharply in 2016, so a better performance there might be sufficient to win Michigan in 2020. Clinton netted essentially the same number of votes out of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as Obama had in 2012, and she did better than he ever did in the suburbs. In Pennsylvania, a Democrat will likely have to recover some support from white working class former Democrats to prevail. It would definitely be risky to assume that the Democratic nominee can improve enough on Clinton’s record-setting performance in the suburbs to compensate for losses elsewhere in the state. If this is true of Pennsylvania, it’s doubly true of Ohio.
Improved urban turnout in Milwaukee and Detroit is almost a given now that there are Democratic governors in those states, but do the Democrats want to bank on that as being sufficient to change the statewide results?
When you read Trip Gabriel’s reporting in the Times, it’s easy to get the impression that Obama/Trump voters are not only unreachable but that they’re not worthy of being reached:
One of those voters is Darrell Franks, a retired tool and die maker, who was once a Democrat but now votes Republican.
“What I want from a president is the rest of the world to look at him and go, ‘Don’t mess with that guy, he will get even,’” Mr. Franks said one morning in the Yankee Kitchen in Vienna Township, Ohio. “I don’t want kinder, gentler. I don’t want some female that wants her agenda.”
Gabriel includes this analysis from Tim O’Hara, the vice president of United Auto Workers Local 1112.
“I don’t think those Trump people are going to flip back, even if it’s Joe Biden, who has a lot of support in this area,” he said. “I think they’re dug in on Trump. Whatever happens, they’re going to go down with the ship with him.”
It seems odd to say that Joe Biden “has a lot of support in the area,” but that no one will actually vote for him. O’Hara also fails to answer the key question of whether Ohio is winnable if every auto worker in Ohio opts to go down with Trump’s ship. Still, we’re left with the impression that Biden’s “strong support” in his community is fool’s gold.
You will come away with a much different take on the state of play if you rely on Isenstadt’s reporting:
People close to the president insist they’re not panicked. They think Biden’s numbers will drop once the honeymoon stage of his campaign wears off…
…Yet there’s nagging concern after a midterm election in which Republicans across the Midwest got clobbered — and as Trump’s trade war is threatening farmers and factory workers who helped put him in office.
In Isenstadt’s telling, it could be the president’s campaign team that is pursuing a false dream in thinking they can repeat their 2016 Electoral College victory by using the same collection of Rust Belt states. At least based on their own internal polling of a matchup with Biden, this looks like an uphill climb, and banking on Biden’s numbers to tank is a hope rather than a strategy.
Ultimately, we cannot know if Biden will be the nominee, nor whether he can win back an appreciable number of Obama/Trump voters, but those aren’t the questions we need to answer right now. First, we need to understand which states are winnable for a Democrat if they don’t make inroads with white working class voters. Then we need to figure out if there’s an Electoral College path to victory in that scenario. If there is not, or if it looks like a very long shot, then finding a challenger for Trump that has “strong support” in these communities will be vitally important.
Right now, a plurality of Democrats think Biden is the safest choice. Their mood may change as the campaign unfolds. They may decide they don’t want the safe choice. They may decide that Biden is not a safe choice after all. What I hope they don’t decide is that they can bank on winning solely through better mobilization of Clinton’s urban/suburban coalition. Regardless of who wins the nomination, they need to do better with white working class voters than Clinton did or we’ll all be biting our nails on election night.
It’s not just me issuing this warning. The election results out of Australia should jolt liberals out of any sense of optimism about the coming election cycle.
Joe Biden got 6,000 people to show up at his campaign kick-off in Philadelphia ON A GORGEOUS SATURDAY. By comparison, Kamala Harris got 16,000. I see that as a Red Flag for Joe.
Not really. Crowd size is a really bad indicator of things. I remember the Texas primary where Obama was drawing these ridiculous crowds, yet Clinton beat Obama in Texas.. Similarly, Beto O’Rourke drew huge crowds that dwarfed the Ted Cruz crowd sizes, yet Cruz won. More telling is the fact that Biden leads Harris by about 35 points in some polls. Not saying Harris can’t win (I prefer Warren), just that crowd sizes tend to not mean a lot.
But you’re comparing 2012 to 2016, and applying it to 2019.
I’d argue that 2016 -> 2018 shows that people are itching for something different than 70 year old white men, but that’s just me.
I’ll of course support Biden if he’s the nominee, but I really, really hope it’s Warren.
We don’t need another Democrat who thinks, THIS TIME, the Republicans will be reasonable. That f’-ing ship sailed 25 years ago.
I think a lot of people want someone completely new. A lot of people want a woman. Someone younger. Someone who they haven’t been reading about for years. But what Democrats want above all is to beat Trump, and they are very risk averse.
And in my belief, choosing risk aversion will make it harder to beat Trump. I’ve seen it fail with Gore and Kerry and HRC. I’ve seen the riskier candidate win with Obama.
Trump doesnt have great numbers but they’re not that bad and incumbents tend to win reelection. You’re not going to beat that with a risk averse candidate imo.
This deal is behind the scenes https://www.citizen.org/documents/PC_Gats_Backgrounder_05-05.pdf that has been being hidden for so long because its really bad, its already led to two huge disasters and two more huge disasters (at least) are likely to come out of it. One is the insane situation with people dying in large numbers because of a pandemic where they cant afford healthcare (they have to end paying for it as soon as people go back to work, because of the way its rules work) Well that is kind of a continuation of the first and biggest disaster I guess, the 25 years of having healthcare that was rugged while at least 50,000 people a year died. the second diaster is the 2008 Global Financial crisis which cost us around 20 trillion in bailouts, it was really a scam,
a fraud on the taxpayers that we could have predicted would happen when insiders knew they could get away with it. What is the fourth disaster? You’ll get an idea from the study by Alan Blinder’s outsourcing/offshoring study that estimated we would lose 26% of our jobs and the Harvard replication study that revised that figure upwards to 41% – And those would be the better jobs. Its cheaper to outsource them. So once it starts its going to ba massive especially in public services and quasi public service professions currently jobs in federal state and local governments. Many will also be subjected to procurement rules that internatonalizes the right to do them. So infrastructure will be as likely or even more likely to create jobs in developing countries than here. like teaching, nursing, coincidentally or not they are often unionized professions. because of how GATS works it becomes irreversible even if they all turn out to be horrible and everything falls apart. Notice also that Blinder left out public services which is the biggest part of the whole scheme, so the 26% and 41% are likely way too low. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1148273
Whats changed is that corporations are being indemnified against risk presented by voters and voting by making it impossible for voting to touch this important economic policy space . I suppose these politicians are men of principle who are determined to keep the promises made by their predecessors NO MATTER HOW BAD they were and how many allegedly overpaid US jobs will be lost, and at whatever cost to the nation, in diversity, stability, skills totally lost millions of peoples investments in educating themselves.
As its cheaper outsourcing.
We also have to help prop up African and Indian strongmen with patronage jobs, or they might decide to start making cheap generic drug versions of our most expensive cancer and AIDS drugs again. Like they used to.
My hunch is that its a bit like gangs, where they have to have committed a crime to be initiated. I hate to say it but the “paths to power” as Bordieu put it are pretty sordid in this country right now. They need to know they arent getting one of those people who put anything else over the making of profit.You’ll notice that was when contributions to Obama surged, when he said he understood of employers laid off employees who had an illness making their health insurance shoot up a million dollars in cost.
This is especially important with healthcare. Because its a crime that they are committing, a serious crime, one they could all be shut away for for the rest of their lives and one that people are literally hunted to the ends of the earth for. We’re not going to stay brainwashed forever. And when we come out of the haze, we’re going to want to punish those responsible in a way that discourages anybody in the future from ever doing it again. All over the world this will happen. they all see it coming. GATS might have kept the world in its fucked uyp state for another 25 years, but people are becoming aware of it and what it does, especially in Europe. Tahts probaly why the UK wanted out of the EU. They want to dump their safety net and become more like US. Brexit is a shameless lie that is likely to strip the UK of its NHS, by the way. Why and how? Read this document, page 11.
Compassion is a slippery slope when jobs are vanishing. Of course its ridiculous to force people with multiple disabilities who likely will never get a job to destroy themselves in stress,
As long as we remain under GATS jurisdiction, all efforts we make to fix healthcare can only make things worse and worse, thats how its designed to work. This is why Biden insisted that if anybody passed a bill for medicare For All, he would veto it. Because it has to remain only partly subsidized, and alongside of commercial healthcare to be effective in excluding the costly sick. If done right, it will basically subsidize the rich peoples, not the poor peoples healthcare! because the poor people know from long hard experience that they cant affgord it. Also they have unaid medical debt which means they cant access any healthcare at all until its paid.
Notice that the temporary payment of hospital bills for COVID-19 ends as soon as the quarantine ends. After that, its COBRA if people are laid off and I suspect nothing if they voluntarily quit their jobs due to fear of getting this fatal disease they culd be totally ruined by the cost of. Its a brillian strategy in one wy and an insanely stupid one in another. But thats what narcissists do, its the way they think. We cant expect any better as long as all of our nominees are narcissists. . That makes it much more convenient to do the outsourcing thing. because they have always tried to frame it as if we just ddnt have the workers which is a bald faced lie. You can see that when you look at documents going all the way back to 1980’s planning what was going to be done with the windfall profits. Example: A/RES/44/232. Trends in the transfer of resources to and from the developing countries and their impact on the economic growth and sustained development of those countries
When Biden says he’ll veto Medicare for All nomatter what Congress does or says, that isnt just a gift to Donald Trump of millions of really desperate voters, many of whom have lost dear friends, sons and daughters to the newly fatal disease, diabetes or cancers, (many of them caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals, a problem that the chemical companies knew existed in advance meaning they are liable for a huge amount of damages, So public healthcare has to be prevented so that there wont be any data incriminating them http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4399291/ ) It is getting worse quickly as these chemical persist in the environment and people age cancers become more frequent the more cells divide and the more glutathione is depleted, its the way that the bodyquences DNA-adduct causing free radicals) and is very costly- in Europe, which has much tighter regulations on EDCs. here, because we have the kind of healthcare we do where countless, huge mumbers of peopel just die, we dont know.
When Biden says he will veto Medicare For All, he is saying that as a man of principle, who wants to keep the deals that previous Presidents made, nomatter how bad they were, and nomatter how dishonest. After all, its for a cause. . he also standing up for his principles. And he means it. This is because we swore off things like real public health care a long time ago. also we already agreed to phase out all nonconforming measures and or reduce them in scope. in 1998. Whether its Social Security or medicare, or Medicaid it has to go if its too generous, (any more help than the absolute minimum would undermine corporations) say by extending its scope to anybody but the very smallest number of people and the very shortest time possible. (Thats the (international) law, actually. See the Annex on Financial Services. Its right at the top.
You just watch, the day the limitations on people working end the subsidy for COVID-19 medical bills will end. This shows how both Joe and Donald are pandering to the same people, trying to impress them as to their toughness on the poor. This attracts investment, lots of investment from rich people all around the world, just like the forcible suppression of the democracy movement in China did in 1989. leading to a two decade long boom in foreign investment.
What a shame that “socialist” Bernie, who wanted to put we the people first, dropped out and isnt running third party which could lead to mass demonstrations that could be suppressed. He cheated them out of their victory. (Sarcasm)
If it makes people feel any better, as the whole Medicare for All thing was decided back in the 90s, there could not have been any actual medicare for all without our having to admit that we already traded it off. And that both parties had to be collaborating to hide it, for so long, parceling out the various parts in a scripted performance. Do any of you folks see us doing that after lying about it for so long and so badly? When so many people had died? Do you see we Democrats killing by resolving the goose that lays the golden votes?
So, we’re totally stuck.
Is it 70 year old white men people are tired of or is it old white policies? (Meaning status quo.)
I suspect that Biden’s poll numbers among primary voters are in large part due to the perception of his electability. Of course I will vote for him if he’s the nominee, but contemplating him as the nominee gives me a bad feeling in my gut. Biden was a terrible campaigner in the previous elections in which he tried to run for president. He can be hopelessly indecisive, as we saw in the Anita Hill hearings. Honestly, he’s just mediocre compared to the caliber of the other members of the top tier of candidates. His big advantage is that world leaders seem to respect him and his knowledge of foreign affairs. But I think he will wilt under attacks from the Dotard. He’s a nice guy and I think he’s fundamentally decent, but he doesn’t have the firm moral center, nor the grace and wit, that will enable him to bounce the attacks back to the Dotard, as for example Pete Buttigieg did recently with the Alfred E. Neuman reference.
I admit I’m not a fan of the “we must win back the WWC” argument. But I think the biggest source of that uneasy feeling in my gut is that I don’t think we can win this election by looking backward or pretending that Trump is an aberration and that the Republicans in Congress are fundamentally reasonable. We are living in an era of enormous change in economy and society, and the campaign must be about the future we want to live in. Warren, Harris and Buttigieg can articulate that message. More than that, they embody the message. WWC voters need to be told that the old order, the factories and the steel mills and the coal mines, are not coming back. Rust belt communities need to be provided with the tools, the education and training and other resources to participate meanngfully in a changed economy. Some will accept that and get on board with it, others will not. But we have to honest with people instead of promising to bring back the 1950s.
Its actually desirable to have somebody with a known coercive streak, because somebody who had a history of being a rational individual would be inconsistent with GATS existence and unless they wanted to explain it (HA!!!) nothing they did would make sense-
so inconsistent it did not make any sense what they were doing. That would blow the two parties cover completely. They likely feel trapped, that they cant provide tools because subsidies would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull, any government activity of that kind at all soon, will accelerate the job outsourcing process. (This is why they are not building infrastructure – just letting it fall apart rather than hiring all those foreign workers in such a visible situation) This paper shows how subsidies literally means “jobs they owe us” to some countries.
Also, while I am thinking about it, also as soon as they reopen states then as they are no longer preventing people from working the subsidies must end.
then people MAY (or will) again have to pay their own hospital bills from coronavirus. (I guess we’ll see but I dont see any way they could get around it with their rigid ideology. You see, the other countries arent pushing this ideology like we are, we’re literally wedded to it)
) And they- the bills, will be huge. Maybe that will be the crisis they claim “forces” the outsourcing of a lot of jobs, or maybe something else, but you can bet its coming, they would never let a crisis like this go to waste, literally, all roads all changes must lead to this agenda, one way or another. My guess is Trump, if he wins will have the WTO and India be the bad guys, “forcing” us to do it. because profit is job #1 – If Biden wins he will just let the WTO rule on it and then all blame will go to them. But I dnt see Biden or the Dem leadership wanting to be in this position, so I dont think he will win. Actually, no, thinking about it they will not want the WTO to be visibly connected to all this in any way because then people would figure it out, even without any cooperation from media, blogs.
Its quite probable they can only subsidize health care as long as businesses remain shut and people cannot make money, as it has to be minimally trade restrictive, limited to only the smallest number of people and for the shortest amount of time, otherwise they will be breaking the rule they want all the other countries to follow to the letter, so frankly, they would never do that. see.
( http://policyspace.xyz/external/towards-developing-subsidy-disciplines-under-the-gats ) and see the connection between subsidies and jobs that developing countries feel they are entitled to – if a country made extensive commitments like we did in health care, that means we’re committed to foreign countries basically becoming the dominant players in those areas, with their workers, we have to conform ALL our laws to make that easy..
Note that they quote extensively from the WTO Secretariat’s Note (T/C/W/50 ) from 1998 .
There you can see the connection clear as day. If something is committed in GATS (and right now dozens of services that employed or employ millions of Americans are committed, huge ones like hospital services and health insurance, banking services (or payday lenders and digital loans which could be insanely profitable imagine micropayments triggered by use of once public now privatized streets and water fountains, ventilation systems etc. and of course the staple jobs teaching, nursing, engineering services construction, public works. Other countries are entitled to their fair share of the jobs, if they are a lot cheaper – could it really be possible that they basically could end up entitled to all of them? I dont think we would get that far. But maybe. ) Here is a very good paper about a WTO legal decision that suddenly greatly expanded the scope of the WTOs authority over a countries domestic regulation. (basically the body of laws and policies of a nation state like the US, at the federal, state and local levels) You see it doesnt really matter so much who is in power once a country signs an FTA. (as long as they dont leave it. This is why they work so hard to make so much to seem all about politicians like Trump, when in fact its not. They devote a lot of energy, waste a lot of energy hiding the deception. Leaving the agreements becomes increasingly impossible makes it so difficult and expensive to leave that becomes less and less likely)
Read this, this shows how radically the potential scope was expanded with the Antigua decision. (The “US-gambling” case over online gambling)
Pauwelyn, Joost, Rien Ne Va Plus? Distinguishing Domestic Regulation from Market Access in GATT and Gats (April 1, 2005). Duke Law School Legal Studies Paper No. 85. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=638303 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.638303
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Hannah Arendt describes the process of setting up duplication of governments and government offices in detail in her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” centered around Page 413, top. You can find PDF copies of it on the web if you look around.
Its basically a diagnostic sign of totalitarianism.
Its absolutely essential that Americans not give anybody any excuse at all to say we agreed with these trade deals. Because all the major corporations will take that and run with it and turn it into our signing away the country willingly. Don’t forget its forever. We’re not talking about anything people here are familiar with in that respect. Watch this
https://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/20/a_plan_only_banksters_will_love
What is a ratchet or standstill? Its a one way fish trap like legal structure.. Whatis an extrinsic fraud, its something totally unlike what it claims to be, its evil twin..
There is a good description of standstill in this Democracy Now segment, you have to wait until the end, this is what we are dealing with. (Keep in mind that health insurance is also a financial service and all this applies to it, the effecdtive standstill date is way back in the 90s so that means the entire ACA – guaranteed issue, limits on rescission (post claim underwriting) limits on how much prices can be raised for the old and the sick, all the gains since the 1990s all the changes that limit profits to be tossed out the window as soon as it is challenged)
This is because politicians all around the world want to shedresponsibility, shed the mmoral hazard of being connected to whats going to happen.
I think we can count on health insurance becoming at least two or three times as expensive next year, for the same level of coverage. This way it will become peoples own responsibility, they chose to go wothout and they paid the price. This deflects attention from the fact, largely true for more than 25 years biw that for a vast majority of Americans there is no successful way through the maze that will ever last more than a very short period of time, Because GATS wont allow it. This is a serious crime,a crime against humanity. Because they already knew it was impossible. And its going to get worse. How much worse? A lot worse, and everybody with a brain knows it. This is why Bernie could not possibly win. Because he was proposing something that everybody knew was off the table – for good. Its right there in black and white. We are literally the last to know. We have to get the worst deal of all to show we’re serious. We coould not ask other countries to make these sacrifices of their poor people if we werent willing to sacrifice our own poor people. Oh the terribleness of it. They would say this laughing. Because its a joke to them. Like Trumps comment about us having the best yachts. I hope people realize the Trumps and Clintons are old and very close friends. Their daughters are literally best friends.
Meanwhile a huge number of people have died during all this deception. because its been going on for decades. In totally bad faith. Its a genocide. of the poor and now, middle class, there is no other way to put it. And there is absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel. They made sure of that.
Does anybody realize how expensive a decent PPO is now if you are self employed. Its more than most Americans make. So most people arent even going to begin to afford it after they lose jobs. And now because of the coronavirus, coverage is going to be much less. Governments have a responsibility to do things that work and not murd…
their
But thats is what is planned, to outsource and offshore a huge number of jobs, thats what the deal they made says they will do. Make no mistake about it this is exclusively a deal of by and for the ultra rich against the rest of the planet. To steal it. To lock in their ill gotten gains and keep the cash rolling in.
People are not going to know what hit them because they have been sweet talked out of their votes. Imagine training your reptheirlacement over a nine month period, thats a long time to be thinking about how you are ever going to survive, what will happen to your family. There should be a law against politicians lying that became more and more severe the more they lied.
the media should not be allowed to suppress news this important. How important, well, its the number one existential threat to public higher education, according to the European University Association.
It and TRIPS are probably the largest non-coronavirus threat to global public health.
Frankly, NOBODY can be Democratic or progressive when the rules only allow you to walk backwards. Look up “progressive theirliberalization” They use these phrases because they want to make people into right wingers by having a fase flag attack on them be identified with fake progressives.
The WTO claims and prtends to be helping the poor, like the rich people in Africa, We idiot Americans always, wrongfully assume that every person we meet from a poor country is invariably poor, but surprise, almost all of the people from places like Africa or India who ever come to the US are in fact wealthy. This is an endless source of amuseement to them and they miss no opportunity to portray themselves as middle class. But its a shameless lie, you can tell from how well dressed they are. They are taking away jobs fromAmericans many of whom worked their way up from hadscrabble backgrounds, and many of them literally got their college degrees without having spent practically any time in a classroom. They paid for it! Bribery is extremely common. They admit it.
Basically, neoliberalism is a cult that wants to tear the world of people deciding our own futures (which it denigrates as “majoritarianism” down with its pack of lies, and its false illusion of meritocracy (nothing is a bigger lie than this) and replace it with a ideology based on money being the new voice and power. Money buys everything, even human lives. Even politicians. Everything, without exception. In order to hide this terrible thing, the politicians are all without exception trying to deceive people into a state of false security, with the goal of nullifying whats left of those rights by sneaking big changes in under the radar. This will lead to mass public disillusionment and anger as people realize they have no way out, similar to what happened in Weimar Republic. Its a scheme to extract all the value ot of the country and its people and leave it a debt ridden shell. The people will have to pay a heavy price for their lack of dilligence, just as we did with GATS which was the root cause of the 2008 crisis, (They dny it but the proof is easy to find) These organizations are basically pretending to be legitimate by multilateralizing autocratic rule. See the Club Model papers, here is one..
Between Centralization and Fragmentation:
The Club Model of Multilateral Cooperation
and Problems of Democratic Legitimacy
Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr. (2001) But although this is good It fails on the core issue, I have not seen even a single paper that is honest about the fact that would be obvious to every American. they would be laughed out of town and they know it. Thats why they dont tell us what they are doing.