President Joe Biden has overtaken his Republican challenger Donald Trump in three battleground states, according to polls five months before the presidential election.
In March, the incumbent and the former president won enough primary races to secure, respectively, the Democratic and Republican nominations in the 2024 presidential election.
Polls have so far shown that the results will be tight as the pair are statistically tied in most surveys, or enjoying only marginal leads.
However, speaking to Newsweek Todd Landman, a professor of political science at Nottingham University in the U.K., said it was "still too far out from the election" to read much into swing state polls.
He said: "The race remains highly volatile, and it is still too far out from the election to make any firm conclusion from changing polls across these swing states."
"The Hunter Biden proceedings in Delaware are just underway and there is a very long time to go politically, with many unknown events that will have effects on voter preferences and choices at the national and state level," he said.
The original article contains 538 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"The Hunter Biden proceedings in Delaware are just underway and there is a very long time to go politically, with many unknown events that will have effects on voter preferences and choices at the national and state level," he said.
It's Murc's Law. People think Democrats are responsible for everything that happens in politics. To a lot of people, Republicans are just an obstacle that if Dems fail to hurdle, it's all the Dem's fault. Republicans have been broken for so long, many people have just written their agency out of politics entirely.
What other option do we really have? If there's only one set of adults in the room, it's their job to stop the children. If they just sit while the children start killing each other, then who's responsible?
I'm not saying it's not the Republicans fault. I am saying, though, that Democrats really need to up their game if they want to save the country.
Vote. Put pressure on politicians to do better. But more than anything. Vote.
If the polls say he's 100% going to win. Vote. If you're in a state that goes blue every time for the last 100 years. Vote. If you're in a state that goes red every time for the last 100 years. Vote.
Polls always matter, you just have to understand polls.
This is with third party options and show Biden up 2% which is probably close to margin of error.
It doesn't mean Biden has it in the bag, but it means his chances are improved.
But Biden risks the same dangers Hillary did in 2016.
People don't really want to vote for them, they just don't want trump. So there's a risk if Biden is polling too well (I don't think it will be an issue) people will stay home thinking they don't need to compromise their morals because trump will lose.
It's a dangerous game, and we wouldn't have to play it if we ran a candidate popular with Dem voters.
The margin of error for polls six months out from election, if memory serves, is about 14%.
I think people are phrasing this wrong: it’s not that the polls are worthless, it’s that it does not tell you what’s going to happen on Election Day in any real sense. They’re useful for watching trends and gauging short term changes and impact. They are useful for telling you how things are going. They do not tell you anything remotely useful about how things will be.
Nor are they even remotely reliable to gauge things in the short term.
The methodology of collecting this data can be so heavily bias that the pollers can get whatever result they're looking for, if they're pursuing a narrative. I could write a poll that leads the poll takers to just about any desired conclusion by choosing very targeted questions with bad faith multiple choice options, and by conducting the polls targeting specific demographics. It's a trivial thing to do.
Instead, you have to deep dive into the polling methodology, have a deep understanding of the quality of the poll operators, etc, to have any idea of if the poll was even trustworthy.
I, for one, dismiss polls entirely. There is too much disinformation, too many bad actors, whose entire goal is to "prove" their own biases in favor of their narrative, that the amount of shit buries the truth. So it seems a pointless exercise to sift through the shit to find the nuggets of truth, particularly when good faith polling isn't at all reliable in the first place.
Exactly, also the expert in the article says basically the same thing in more diplomatic language:
However, speaking to Newsweek Todd Landman, a professor of political science at Nottingham University in the U.K., said it was "still too far out from the election" to read much into swing state polls.
He said: "The race remains highly volatile, and it is still too far out from the election to make any firm conclusion from changing polls across these swing states."
Math is math. In order to calculate the margin of error you need to know the sample size. The number of months involved is not a part of the calculation.
Then it’s not margin of error, the predictive accuracy - whatever the term is - is far worse 6mo out from an election (5 now i guess) than the ones that are days or a week or so out. That’s the point. Polls now are useful but not for saying who will win in November. You may as well forget the top line numbers as soon as you see them unless you’re comparing them over time and/or looking at cross tabs for broad demographic trends, which is also limited but useful in some ways.
Whoever on your account team wrote this one is funny. They're right. But I love how they wrote that Biden will poll well, when the other guy has been spending weeks saying how bad he's doing.
Consistency my guys. Get your stories straight. Especially if you're going to comment walls of text multiple times every hour every day. Don't make it so obvious.
"Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in love" old people (Republicans) vote, always, because they are retired. Democrats work and need to go out of their way to vote, so you have to convince them.
So there’s a risk if Biden is polling too well (I don’t think it will be an issue) people will stay home thinking they don’t need to compromise their morals because trump will lose.
That's largely how Romney lost to Obama in 2012. Republican turnout sagged in a year when both candidates' approval ratings were underwater. Mitt lost a bunch of midwestern states that a candidate like Bush or Trump could have won, thanks to his vulture capitalist career alienating blue-collar conservatives and his weird knock-off religion alienating evangelicals.
Well said. People also need to take steps to ensure they have not been kicked off of voter rolls (the Republican dirty tricks just never end). I think sites like vote.org can help with that.
I see people saying their vote doesn't matter when they're in a highly partisan district, which is most of them.
News flash: Even the dumbest politicians can look at arithmetic. If they see their margins shrinking, they'll adjust. Or go full retard and double-down. And then get a worse beating.
Typically more important for the average citizen. Federal changes may effect you in years, decades or never. Whereas your local politicians impact your day to day life.
After trading leads several times, Simitian and Low each finished with 30,249 votes in the original tally, which was finalized earlier this month, shortly before the recount began. Liccardo finished with 38,489 votes, well ahead of the other two candidates.
So the two runners-up were competing for who gets to lose in a run-off election?
The attacks reached a fever pitch late last month, when a local prosecutor filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Liccardo’s campaign illegally coordinated with “a newly formed dark money Super PAC to do his CD-16 recount bidding.”
:-/ It's not the votes that count, but who counts the votes.
I see people saying their vote doesn’t matter when they’re in a highly partisan district
I see people saying it when they're in heavily gerrymandered districts and deeply disenfranchised states. Dems have been playing the "Just go out and vote!" game in Florida for a quarter century, and Repubs keep finding new ways to yank the football. Even ballot initiatives don't work, as the Florida gerrymandered legislature just reverses out whatever voting rights or decriminalization laws the public passes.
Throwing your hands up in the air saying "voting doesn't work so I'm not going to do anything" is just allowing them to dictate everything that will happen.
Throwing your hands up in the air saying “voting doesn’t work so I’m not going to do anything”
Studying the history of the electoral system and the patterns of disenfranchisement isn't equivalent to "doing nothing". And in the end, you have to be rational rather than idealistic. When Vladimir Putin is counting the votes, you're not going to vote him out of office.
When Vladimir Putin is counting the votes, you're not going to vote him out of office.
Russians that literally live under Vladimir Putin risk their lives to protest. You have politicians that you admit want to become the next Putin but won't say anything or of fear of pepper spray.
There's an internet meme about France surrendering. French politicians try to increase the retirement age and the population takes to the streets. American politicians try to take away your democracy and American citizens just roll over to expose their belly.
It's not the French that surrender at the slightest bit of difficulty.
Russians that literally live under Vladimir Putin risk their lives to protest.
So do American college kids.
French politicians try to increase the retirement age and the population takes to the streets.
French politicians have been squeezing the pension system since at least 2006, and the street protests have come and gone without discouraging new efforts to dismantle the system.
Bully to them for trying, but without material control over industry, they're all sound and fury.
Don't vote and help their much worse fascist opponents get elected instead, which will affect the general population, not the wealthy elites. That'll teach them!
Harm reduction is a myth, people have been preaching harm reduction for decades and there's been no reduction in harm. Quite the opposite, poverty has increased. Homelessness is at a rate not seen since the Great depression, income inequality is the highest ever recorded. The most percentage of people living paycheck to paycheck is higher than any other level recorded. There has been no reduction in harm.
Wasn't homelessness during the great depression roughly at a percentage rate of 1.5% of the nation (upwards of 2 million people)? Are you sure we have a homeless rate not seen since the great depression? As for all the other stuff...yeah that's pretty bad, especially the income inequality over the decades and decades.
Let's see. The government tells us that poverty is trending down for decades, yet the number of people living paycheck to paycheck has been increasing. The number of renters that cannot afford their rent has been increasing, homelessness is at the largest level ever recorded, but the claim is poverty is decreasing. Have you ever stopped to consider? Maybe they are lying?
Ah so you're doing that disingenuous bullshit where you're saying the TOTAL number of homeless has gone up while intentionally implying you meant the homelessness RATE has gone up.
Guess what? Our POPULATION has gone up over the past hundred years too.
Even just looking at pure numerical data, only last year did the number of homeless edge above the 2012 level, which is the earliest we have good data for. There's no way in hell it's beating out 2009-2011 after free great recession, much less the great depression.
As for poverty, it's currently around HALF of our earliest data from 1925. Trending down steadily.
Capitalism has its problems, but trying to paint a picture of life getting worse over time is absolutely bullshit.
I'm not going to vote for Biden until he stops funding a genocide. You cannot say put pressure on them and vote for them no matter what. They do not give a fuck what you think if you're going to automatically vote for them. That's why the uncommitted votes in the primaries scared them so much.
Oh no, you're only the thousandth person to tell me that. It's so persuasive. Either I vote for the guy funding a genocide or the Boogeyman gets elected1!!111!!1
Yes, that's the reality of the situation, whether you like it or not. If you don't care if that happens, fair enough. But don't try to say that not voting for Biden doesn't help Trump.
I didn't say that. I said that at this point, months into this debacle, it's obviously not persuasive to me. I am not willing to sell the lives of Palestinian children to make my life marginally more comfortable.
You can't get extra dead. Here's the IPC's take on Gaza right now-
The famine threshold for household acute food insecurity has already been far exceeded and, given the latest data showing a steeply increasing trend in cases of acute malnutrition, it is highly likely that the famine threshold for acute malnutrition has also been exceeded. The upward trend in non-trauma mortality is also expected to accelerate, resulting in all famine thresholds likely to be passed imminently.
Helping elect the guy who wants all the Palestinians dead so his son-in-law can have beach front property, while also making everything else worse isn't the moral high ground you seen to think it is.
And no, whatever third option you're talking about isn't going to win.
It's not an either/or question. There isn't some secret vote where Trump gets points for disaffected Democrats. And the other choice is to just not. Or Biden could follow the laws of our country and stop supplying a genocide, and stop fucking with asylum. At this point he's going the wrong way for me to vote for him.
Those children will die regardless of who you vote for or if you don't vote at all. It's a horrific tragedy that is completely out of anyone who isn't in power's control. So instead of worrying about that, worry about what you CAN control - preventing fascists from gaining more power and making things even worse than they already are.
We can control our complicity. Politicians can be brought to heel. Saying we can't do it is just another way of excusing ourselves from worrying about what our leadership is doing.
Vote for the guy that's unfortunately not willing to break with decades worth of support for Israel or the guy who's said he'd send in ground troops wins.
There is actually a third option this time around, not that he's any better with bird flu on the way. But no it's never an either/or proposition. You are in fact allowed to leave that spot on the ballot blank.
So do you plan on doing anything about it, or just going to pout about it and feel good about not voting when those people get bombed harder?
This is just virtue signaling. If you cared about the people you'd want to reduce the harm they're facing, not try to moralize your bad choice on the Internet.
This is a two-way street though. You'd think the democratic establishment would also want to increase their electoral odds in order to reduce harm.
Like, the stakes are so high, and it's so weird to see them betting the horse on Israel. It's frankly irresponsible for Democrats to be playing politics like that at a time like this.
They're not betting the house on Israel. They're hedging. They increased aid to Palestine, they delayed arms shipments, and they've been pursuing a ceasefire deal like their lives depended on it.
Then stop sending weapons. If Israel cannot guarantee aid delivery then they should not receive weapons. Especially considering aid delivery is as simple as driving into Gaza and letting starving people grab food. If they can't keep their settlers from stopping the trucks and they can't effectively distribute aid then they aren't in control and we need a UN peacekeeping mission there right away.
And there is no credible evidence Hamas is stealing aid. Those are just more Israeli claims with no evidence backing them up.
Oh, the IPC ringing literally every alarm bell there is about the man made famine in Gaza is bullshit?
Every single NGO telling the world they can't get Aid trucks in because of Israel's actions is bullshit?
Biden can stop sending aid right now, and he can put immense pressure on Netanyahu to stop this. The fact that he won't disqualifies him for office in any functioning democracy.
How would he do it faster? The last time he tried to get the military to commit crimes they straight up told him no and reminded the entire force their oaths are to the Constitution, not Trump. He can certainly deploy them, but he cannot force them to participate in crimes once there. The very first Corp level Civil Affairs officer that touches the ground will ensure Aid is processed into Gaza as fast as possible, no matter what the Israelis or Trump think about it.
So Trump would need an entirely new force which doesn't happen overnight, and oh yeah we've got to somehow get Biden to reverse course on this and lose while doing the right thing in a race against a convicted felon. Because as it stands Trump won't need to do anything. This isn't something on the timeline of years. That's what happens when the world manages to get aid into the affected region and we play whack a mole with starving people. (And there's still a ton of people dying.) In the scenario where aid is effectively stopped we don't have that effect and the death rate is going to be far higher.
I think we're down low enough that no one is at risk of being suckered in by your brain rot, so I'm just gonna quit with the charade that you're a reasonable person making arguments in good faith.
On top of this, you have the bigger picture. What will happen if Trump wins?
It will get harder to go to college, as Trump works to gut Pell Grants and cap Stafford Loans.
If you have gone to college, it will get harder as Trump will increase the monthly amount you have to pay and not reward you for going into lower-paying public service jobs.
Gay marriage will be put on the chopping block.
Laws stopping discrimination against Gays and Minorities will be repealed and/or not enforced.
This is just the most benign parts of Project 2025. It gets worse from there.
So, on top of more people dying, we'll suffer here at home because of idiots like Maggoty here.
Sure, but I don't even want to get into all that. They'll just pivot back to the stupid "genocide Joe" bullshit. I want to pin em down on that, because even THAT makes no goddamn sense.
Pretty much. I'm open about the fact that I would vote for him if he reversed course. Nope, still just shouting at me and calling me a trump supporter.
Oh look, another original take. You're only the (checks notes) hundredth comment attempting to gaslight me into thinking I'm a trump supporter because I'm not blindly loyal to Biden. Not even the Democrats, Just Biden. And you guys accuse Trump supporters of being a cult.
Hilariously that would give them more access to aid than Israel is giving them. Trump wouldn't be able to stop the US military from distributing aid as part of its normal operations mode. As usual he has no clue how the military works.
Mathematically, either Biden or Trump will win, with 100% certainty.
As lamentable as it is for Palestinians, you drawing the line in the sand over foreign policy in Palestine & Israel will not help Palestinians. I would even go as far to say that Biden's policy on Israel is marginally better than what Trump's would be. The GOP is actively hostile against Palestine. At least with Biden we are getting (gentle) push-back on Israel.
So, if it's a given that either Biden or Trump will win, you have one of four options, depending on your political leaning:
Liberal and vote for Biden. Helps Biden.
Conservative and vote for Trump. Helps Trump.
Liberal and don't vote for Biden. Helps Trump.
Conservative and don't vote for Trump. Helps Biden.
I don't see any other option, but if someone has one - one that helps Palestine - I'd be interested to hear option 5.
The democratic party realizes it's losing voters instead of gaining them and reverses course. And yes that requires being willing to carry out the threat of not voting for Biden in November.
Electoral boycotts aren't new. And our entire political philosophy is based around voters holding elected leaders responsible. Saying we have to vote for someone completely removes that accountability.
I base my facts on research and my college education in politics.
The mean number of US presidential felonies is .75.
Trump is truly an extraordinary president, since he's single handedly raised that number from zero to where it is today, and he's not even done yet.
Truly providing an excellent education in why statistical means are sometimes very misleading.
This is a big deal. I'm extremely excited to get a look into these data. This would be an INCREDIBLE thing considering that Biden has been lagging Trump in the polls for over 450 days.
And whoever tells you polls don't matter has their head up their ass. Polls do matter, a lot, especially this far out. People aren't a monolith. People do change their minds and perspectives.
Apparent viability matters. Even a 2-5% hit in polling to Trump can take him from the range of viable to non-viable.
And yes, polling is flawed. In 2016 and 2020, the polling massively underestimated support for Trump. We need to keep this in mind when we look at these numbers,.
Keeping in mind that the trajectory of Bidens polling was into the carpet, pretty much since the inauguration.
If Biden can shift this towards an upward trend, he's suddenly back in the game. Thats a sea change. Thats huge.
Polls matter a lot when they start moving. There are plenty of people who pay no attention at all to news or politics. and those people are slowly finding out that Trump is now a convicted felon and may soon be wearing an orange jumpsuit.
No matter how the "Law and Order" GQP attacks the American Criminal Justice System, western societies have centuries of experience dealing with convicted felons. It is a stain that won't wash out.
Agreed. I'm holding back to do any real analysis of this for about 10 more days.
People love to say polls suck, they don't mean anything, its total none-sense, etc. Interestingly its always when their candidate is losing.
Now that these polls are shifting, my guess is the dorks who can't tell up from down start shifting their stories, and soon after that, they'll be pretending it was always their view.
Polls are important, especially in terms of this far out, and especially in-terms of the 'appearance' of electability. These are the weeks and months where momentum builds. A sudden breakout, or sudden drop in polling numbers is extremely consequential.
This actually is an improvement for Biden who had been losing several of these.
If Trump takes either PA or MI, it's game over. He only needs one of them to win.
After that, Trump needs any 2 of the remaining 4 states to win and Biden needs 3/4.
If Biden takes Wisconsin and Minnesota, and Trump takes Arizona, that means it will all come down to New Mexico and we have ZERO useful polling out of New Mexico, absolutely none.
I'm excited for RFK to take a couple states and Congress votes in Trump. That's not going to be a shit show at all. And I know that's what's going to happen because we're in the timeline where things just keep getting worse. I think we split from the prime timeline sometime around Reagan.
It really doesn’t matter how many square miles turn red, it’s the people who do the voting.
Inside of states for popular elections this is true. However, that giant area of red is over-represented at just about every level of government, from the electoral college to Congress to state legislatures.
The US is mostly empty space, sparsely inhabited by republicans. Democrats are often gathered in major population centers and seem less visible in this form of representation, due to their geographic concentration, but that’s a misrepresentation.
This graphic better illustrates this, representing the 2020 presidential election (from NYT)
Rural populations lean red. Not exactly sure why that is. I guess contributing factors are that rural people tend to be more religious, bigoted, "independent" of public infrastructure and community, and pro-gun. I think Republicans also give more lip service to rural economic conditions, and visit rural parts more often. Democrats seem to largely ignore rural America, and even sometimes express contempt for them.
Confirmation bias on full display. Downvote all polls and discredit them if they show trump beating Biden. The other way around and they are credible polls and up voted.
This is why we see no difference between BlueMAGA and MAGA
There are no both sides. It's one side One is openly racist and bigoted. The other is covertly racist and bigoted. But your blinders prevent you from seeing your own party is racist and bigoted
But the first two choices help the wealthy and the donor class while fucking over everyone else. We'll swap out blue fascist for red fascist and get the same results
I wouldn’t exactly claim 2% polling gains as a big victory, tbh.
Its preferable to the 5-pt lag he was suffering a month ago. But nothing to brag about. Hillary squandered a 10-pt lead in the month before the general election, as the media turned into a "Buttery Males" feeding frenzy.
Every bit of news around (which old fuck is in the lead) is complete horseshit. Real polls can no longer be done. There's an insane self selection bias and beyond that there's an inherent participation bias.
Couldn't we just vote by phone now? It's just a suggestion anyway... I mean, our vote is just a suggestion, not actually a vote. I vote Biden because the guy is not crazy. But could we also get started on looking for a person younger than 30 to be president? Maybe a woman?
That's a rule that should stay. They are literally no qualified candidates under 35. There are barely any qualified candidates over 35! There needs to be an upper limit though. At 70 IRAs force you to take withdrawals; it should be the same for the president.
As someone with decades of experience in the tech industry we should stay as far away from electronic voting as possible. I know the sort of people who work on government systems and do not trust them or their code.
It's less than 200 million votes, being counted and recounted in parallel by people all over the country. The problem of scale isn't big enough to justify the security risks. I'm willing to wait a week to make sure the count is accurate and true with paper ballots.
Why the fuck is Trump even able to run? He's literally a fucking criminal, and was impeached. I dont understand how our political system or even judicial systems work at this point.
In Germany, if you're in jail you can't be elected into office. You can however always cast your vote even from jail (except for rare and extreme political crimes such as terrorism, starting a war and such)
Those people never realized their stance is just as idiotic as "I cross the street without looking both ways because if they run me over, they'll have to pay"... or "I have the seat belt on, I can crash at top speed and nothing will happen to me"
There are no hard requirements for being president beyond those listed in the Constitution:
Be a natural born US citizen
Be at least 35 years old
Have resided in the US for 14 or more years.
That's it. The framers of the Constitution presumably felt being a convicted felon would be enough for an electorate (or the electoral college, at least) to simply not vote for that person.
And what happens when medical science increases life expectancy? U would have to amend the constitution to pass this. Think of how nightmarish it is to do this. Now think of amending this AGAIN when life expectancy increases every year.
Does not lie about well known facts from scientist, like Covid-19.
Who decides what "well known facts" are? A particular non-political committee? The supreme court was supposed to be this committee. It clearly became political quickly...
And what happens when medical science increases life expectancy?
Make the upper age limit be average life expectancy minus X years. This has the added bonus of motivating politicians to actually try to increase average life expectancy.
Who decides what "well known facts" are?
The scientific community, and certainly not the Supreme Court. Not sure how you came to that conclusion.
The scientific community, and certainly not the Supreme Court.
Because there are different "scientific communities" - some of them rogue and stupid. I'm not the poster you were responding to, but I would assume that the arbiter of your hypothetical of which scientific communities would be valid would go to the Supreme Court.
No. The scientific community polices* itself with peer review. The rogue and stupid communities are peer reviewed out of existence. You can submit all the falsified "research" you want, but if your published results can't be replicated, you will be labeled a quack and your "findings" will go ignored by the rest of the scientific community.
No government-affiliated judicial body is involved in verifying science, because judges are experts in law, not science.
instead of this I would like to see independent physical and mental acuity tests performed and released publicly. no need to bring age into it if they are fit. and if they aren't fit they shouldn't be able to run even if they're young.
Sure but I also want that the person to be able to last the whole 4 years period without running into any of those health issues with time. Might be hard to get the health measurements right and get people to accept it. Easier for people to just understand the person did not meet the age criteria.
also this prevents a rogue prosecutor and judge from convicting a presidential candidate and blocking them from running. this way it is up to the people, whether the conviction is legitimate or not.
to be clear i am not saying trump’s conviction is illegitimate, just speaking generally. i could definitely see a world where trump pushes for this with a Democrat candidate (remember all the “lock her up” stuff?). i hope the legal system is robust enough to appeal a rogue situation but at some point it may not be.
He IS a felon. But while he went through the impeachment process several times, he was never convicted. And there is no rule or law that says a felon can't be president.
While voting for Trump, or even entertaining his views, is a red flag warning. Like it or not, he is legally entitled to run. Perhaps the rules and laws should be changed. But to do that would require either a unified congress or a super majority of a party willing to do so. And I suspect, that as it currently stands, neither side wants to limit themselves from gaining the power and status of national or state office brings to them for any reason.
it could also be an amendment to the constitution if enough states agree but that’s probably even less likely.
and i’m not sure it should be. i could definitely see a world where trump pushes for conviction of a Democrat candidate (remember all the “lock her up” stuff?). i hope the legal system is robust enough to appeal a rogue court situation but at some point it may not be. And elections are time sensitive, would the appeal even finish before the election?
flawed as it may be this could be the best solution to guard against authoritarianism.
Oh, I whole heartily agree. There is a lot tit for tat in politics. And rules are meant to be bent and twisted to one's own end. It could end up being a slippery slope as easily as not.
The serious argument about felons being allowed to vote is that voting is a civic duty, and you want felons to re-integrate into society. If they have tons of restrictions following them around for the rest of their lives, they're always going to be a little bit outside. Feeling like they're stuck outside of society makes recidivism rates higher, so restoring the right to vote is an important step in rehabilitation.
It would take a lot of people having felony convictions to be able to seriously sway an election, but given the racially polarized way that the criminal justice system is often applied, I think that's probably happened.
That being said, convicted "criminals" should still be able to run for any public office in my opinion. A tyrant CAN capture the judiciary and imprison their political opponents. This is in fact what happened in the Indian elections right now. This is in fact what happened in the US elections in the early 1900s, where a socialist candidate ran for President from prison. What was his crime? Striking when the State had deemed it illegal to do so.
No, a correlation between being black and being arrested for weed. In my city, they made the legal status of the drug indeterminate and gave cops DISCRETION on whether to arrest or cite someone for having pot. Not a felony now in any event, misdemeanor or civil citation or nothing but how do you think this discretion will be used?
You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Oh sweet summer child, everyone smokes weed. Cannabis prohibition was about giving police the power to arrest anyone they want to - and they used that power to arrest Black people.
And if you don't smoke weed? Well what about this little baggy we "found in your pocket"?
Not that I care about either of you guys or your argument, but I gotta point out that it's a phrase intended to be insulting and condescending. You're just letting the other guy know they got to you by writing this.
Based, but I never denied that. I gave them the benefit of the doubt because I've unironically seen people saying stuff like this without realizing that it has a negative connotation.
I guess the fact that you were more willing to believe that Black people have a natural inclination towards drug use than to understand that cops are bad leads me to the conclusion that you aren't a great person with smart ideas, and didn't see the necessity in being super nice about it when responding to you.
I could have laid into you for the racist-leaning narrative, but instead I insinuated that you were naïve, so truthfully I did give you the benefit of a doubt in regard to the racially insensitive question you asked.
I asked specifically because I knew there had to be a better explanation.
You asked a racist question because you thought there was a non-racist answer? I kinda understand what you mean here, but those are some horrible optics that still involve you asking a racist question.
Fuck me for wanting to learn from other people in a conversational manner and not researching like I was preparing for a debate
No, just don't ask questions with racist implications, such as suggesting that Black people are intrinsically more likely to use drugs.
Fuck you!
Calm down. If you have a problem with being called out for saying racist things, join Truth Social.
"You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
I never understood the logic behind that. What's the reason for it?
Are we afraid that all of the criminals will form a Crime Party and campaign to legalize burglary and murder? 😈
Or do we think the type of person who would commit a violent crime is going to be incentivized to not commit a crime because of losing their right to vote, in a country where half the people don't vote anyway?
Before I mug this old lady, I really should consider that this upcoming election has huge ramifications and I really don't want to risk losing my right to vote. I don't mind jail, community service, or monetary fines; it's voting that might prevent me from commiting this offense. 🤓
No, I think it's more likely that some people don't want other people who are disproportionately convicted of crimes (you know, those people) to have a voice.
Happened in Brazil too in 2016. Corrupt prosecutor (now congressman) worked with corrupt judge (who later became justice minister and is currently a senator) to imprison Lula. He couldn't run for the presidency and Bolsonaro got it. Later, the Supreme Court found that the case was based on lies and there were coordination between the prosecutor and the judge and they reinstated Lula's freedom and political rights.
But now, the tables have turned, and after Bolsonaro's actions in the failed coup on 2022, the Supreme Court took away Bolsonaro's political rights and he can't be a candidates for any office until 2030.
I'd like it if anyone convicted of fraud / criminal deceit / murder could never be president, but as our nation's common sense appears to have withered and died, the intent would eventually be twisted to suit some nefarious purpose.
Because nobody is actually stopping him. Republican state level leaders all love him. Dems are too terrified to threaten him with more than a wrist slap. The police are in his corner. Big Business is bankrolling him. The Media keeps accidentally falling face first onto his dick. And 1:3 Americans still insist he's better than The Other Guy.
So he's still listed on all the ballots. He's still the GOP's nominee. And if he wins the lion's share of electoral college votes (by hook or by crook) he's going to be the President in January.
Thought leaders have been raising this issue for years. Among those calling for barring criminals from running for office: some guy named Donald Trump.
