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by RocketMan » Sat Jul 04, 2020 2:54 am
by 8bitagent » Sun Jul 05, 2020 6:40 am
RocketMan » Sat Jul 04, 2020 1:54 am wrote:Talkin' bout "Presidential Election" for the year 2020... How nostalgic and quaint. There will be SOMETHING in November, but it sure as shit won't be a free and fair, liberal democratic Western-style "election" in any traditional, political science sense.
by kelley » Sun Jul 05, 2020 10:40 am
by Grizzly » Mon Jul 06, 2020 4:07 pm
by Elvis » Mon Jul 06, 2020 5:30 pm
by Grizzly » Sat Jul 11, 2020 1:00 am
by JackRiddler » Sat Jul 11, 2020 12:13 pm
by Grizzly » Sat Jul 11, 2020 6:43 pm
Didn't Ventura follow up on his own thoughts about doing it and quash the movement to draft him by announcing he wouldn't and couldn't, because he has to keep his RT job for the health insurance? I mean, that's what he actually said, weeks ago.
by Grizzly » Mon Jul 13, 2020 8:37 pm
Former Vice President Joe Biden was "manipulating intelligence" during the final days of the Obama administration, according to President Trump's ex-spy chief.
Richard Grenell, who declassified documents related to the Russia investigation during his monthslong tenure as acting director of national intelligence, told Newsmax TV that the Obama administration "weaponized intelligence" between the 2016 election and Inauguration Day.
He claimed Biden, who is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, played a leading role in an effort to undermine President-elect Trump.
"We now know that the vice president of the United States, Joe Biden at the time, was in January ... looking for information, manipulating intelligence," Grenell said on Thursday. Grenell served as Trump's acting spy chief from Feb. 20 to May 26, overseeing the 17-member U.S. Intelligence Community. He also was the U.S. ambassador to Germany and remains as the special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations.
During his time overseeing the U.S. Intelligence Community, Grenell declassified a list earlier that showed Obama administration officials, including Biden, who received information in response to "unmasking" requests targeting retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn during the presidential transition period before he became Trump's national security adviser.
Details about Flynn's conversations with a Russian envoy during that time were leaked to the media, leading to a controversy that cut short his stint in the White House and got him caught up in a false statements criminal case. "Now, we also know that some of that manipulation — political manipulation of intelligence was leaked halfheartedly to reporters," Grenell said.
Biden has sought to distance himself from the FBI's investigation into Flynn, even as more declassified notes show he at least mentioned the Logan Act during an Oval Office discussion in January 2017 about that inquiry. Biden said the controversy being stoked by Trump's reelection campaign and its allies ”is all about diversion” and a way to divert attention “from the real concerns of the American people.”
U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is investigating whether there were any crimes during the Russia investigation, is reportedly looking into the leaks about Flynn.
Since leaving ODNI, Grenell has become a vocal critic of officials who leak classified intelligence and the politicization that follows. Last month, he condemned the leaks of "partial information" related to intelligence about a Russian spy unit offered secret bounties to Taliban militants to kill U.S. troops and other coalition forces in Afghanistan.
by mentalgongfu2 » Mon Jul 13, 2020 11:24 pm
Intelligence chairman accuses Obama aides of hundreds of unmasking requests
By John Solomon - 07/27/17 06:00 PM EDT
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is accusing top political aides of President Obama of making hundreds of requests during the 2016 presidential race to unmask the names of Americans in intelligence reports, including Trump transition officials.
Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), in a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, said the requests were made without specific justifications on why the information was needed.
“We have found evidence that current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information,” Nunes wrote in the letter to Coats.
The letter was provided to The Hill from a source in the intelligence community.
In March, Nunes disclosed that he had seen data suggesting Trump campaign and transition officials were having their names unmasked by departing officials in the Obama White House.
National Security Adviser Susan Rice and CIA Director John Brennan have acknowledged making such requests though they insisted the requests were for legitimate work reasons.
Nunes recused himself from his committee’s work on its investigation over Russia’s meddling in the 2016 campaign after a controversy over his charges about Obama-era unmasking.
.... ETC.
by Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 17, 2020 12:23 pm
Q: Let’s start here then: What are the biggest revisions you’ve made to your conception of how electoral politics works since you first took a job on the Obama campaign?
Shor: I think going into politics, I overestimated the importance of the personal ideology of people who worked in campaigns for making decisions — which was part of a broader phenomenon of overestimating the extent to which people were making decisions. In 2012, I would see progressive blogs* publish stories like, “The White House is doing a Climate Week. This must be because they have polling showing that climate is a vulnerability for Republicans.” And once you know the people who are in that office, you realize that actually no; they were just at an awkward office meeting and were like, “Oh man, what are we going to do this week? Well, we could do climate.” There’s very little long-term, strategic planning happening anywhere in the party because no one has an incentive to do it. So, campaigns’ actions, while not random, are more random than I realized.
I’ve also fallen toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.
But that’s not what happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all of the actors involved.
...
Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves to do things that are strategically dumb. Nothing that I tell people — or that my team told people — is actually that smart. You know, we’d do all this math, and some of it’s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we’re saying is: “You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.” And we’d use machine learning to operationalize that at scale.
The right strategies for politics aren’t actually unclear. But a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.
When you take the results of the 2012 and 2016 elections, and model changes in Democratic vote share, you see the biggest individual-level predictor for vote switching was education; college-educated people swung toward Democrats and non-college-educated people swung toward Republicans. But, if you ask a battery of “racial resentment” questions — stuff like, “Do you think that there are a lot of white people who are having trouble finding a job because nonwhite people are getting them instead?” or, “Do you think that white people don’t have enough influence in how this country is run?” — and then control for the propensity to answer those questions in a racially resentful way, education ceases to be the relevant variable: Non-college-educated white people with low levels of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us.
You can say, “Oh, you know, the way that political scientists measure racial resentment is a class marker because college-educated people know that they’re not supposed to say politically incorrect things.” But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level, was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like, oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important fact of the world.
I think people take the wrong conclusions from it. The fight I saw on Twitter after the 2016 election was one group of people saying the Obama-to-Trump voters are racist and irredeemable, and that’s why we need to focus on the suburbs. And then you had leftists saying, “Actually these working-class white people were betrayed by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.” And I think the real synthesis of these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.
Q: How should Democrats do that?
Shor: So there’s a big constellation of issues. The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views.
If you decided to create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions, health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find that Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of people.
And the reason is that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues, they don’t have the same consistency across their views. There are like tons of pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones. Some people responded to media coverage of that paper by saying, “Oh, people are just answering these surveys randomly, issues don’t matter.” But that’s not actually what the paper showed. In a separate section, they tested the relevance of issues by presenting voters with hypothetical candidate matchups — here’s a politician running on this position, and another politician running on the opposite — and they found that issue congruence was actually very important for predicting who people voted for.
So this suggests there’s a big mass of voters who agree with us on some issues, and disagree with us on others. And whenever we talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue.
Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down.
So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.
Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.
One way to think about electoral salience and the effects of raising the salience of given issues, is to look at which party voters trust on a given issue, not just what their stated policy preference is. So if you do a poll on universal background checks for guns, you’ll find that they’re super-popular. But then, politicians who run on background checks often lose. In the same way, if you poll comprehensive immigration reform, it’s super-popular, even among Republicans. But then Republicans can run on anti-immigrant platforms and win. So how do you square that circle?
One way is to remember that these polls give us a very limited informational environment. You just throw people a sentence-length idea, which they’ve often never heard of before, and then people react to it. So it tells you how people will respond to a policy at first brush without any partisan context. But ultimately, when people hear from both sides, they’re gonna revert to some kind of partisan baseline. But there’s not a nihilism there; it’s not just that Democratic-leaning voters will adopt the Democratic position or Republican-leaning ones will automatically adopt the Republican one. Persuadable voters trust the parties on different issues.
And there’s a pretty basic pattern — both here and in other countries — in which voters view center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know, center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.
If you look at how this breaks down in the U.S. — Gallup did something on this in 2017, and I’m sure the numbers haven’t changed that much since then — you see that same basic story. But there’s an interesting twist. One thing that Democrats consistently get rated highly on is improving race relations. And this points to the complexities of racial resentment. The way that racially charged issues generally get brought up in the U.S. is in the context of crime, which is a very Republican-loaded issue (in terms of which party the median voter trusts on it). Or it comes up in terms of immigration, which is itself a Republican-loaded issue. So even if voters acknowledge the massive systemic inequities that exist in the U.S., discussion of them normally happens in a context where conservatives can posit a trade-off with safety, or all these other things people trust Republicans on.
What’s powerful about nonviolent protest — and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a disproportionate response from the police — is that it can shift the conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that benefits Democrats and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality, social justice, fairness — these Democratic-loaded concepts — without the trade-off of crime or public safety. So I think it is really consistent with a pretty broad, cross-sectional body of evidence (a piece of which I obviously tweeted at some point) that nonviolent protest is politically advantageous, both in terms of changing public opinion on discrete issues and electing parties sympathetic to the left’s concerns.
As for “the abolish the police” stuff, I think the important thing there is that basically no mainstream elected officials embraced it. Most persuadable voters get their news from the networks’ nightly news broadcasts and CNN. And if you look at how they covered things, the “abolish the police” concept didn’t get nearly as much play as it did on Twitter and elite discourse. And to the extent that it was covered, that coverage featured prominent left politicians loudly denouncing it. And I think that’s a success story for everyone involved. Activists were able to dramatically shift the terms of debate around not just racial justice issues, but police justice in a way that’s basically the Second Great Awokening. But because Democratic politicians kept chasing the median voter, we got to have our cake and eat it too. We got to have public opinion shift in our direction on the issues without paying an electoral price.
Q: We’ve been talking a lot about the education split among white voters. But the polling results you just referenced from South Africa suggest that education-based splits on cosmopolitanism manifest across racial and ethnic lines. Are Democrats losing ground with nonwhite, non-college-educated voters?
Shor: Yeah. Black voters trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters. We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about this fact.
I don’t think there are obvious answers as to why this is happening. But non-college-educated white voters and non-college-educated nonwhite voters have a lot in common with each other culturally. So as the salience of cultural issues with strong education-based splits increases — whether it’s gender politics or authoritarianism or immigration — it would make sense that we’d see some convergence between non-college-educated voters across racial lines.
American politics used to be very idiosyncratic, because we have this historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and all of these things that don’t have clear foreign analogues. But the world is slowly changing — not changing in ways that make racism go away or not matter — but in ways that erode some of the underpinnings of race-based voting. So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons, occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church. So I think you can tell this story about how the America-centric aspects of our politics are starting to decay, and we’re converging on the dynamics that you see in Europe, where nonwhite voters are more left wing than white voters, but where they vote for the left by like 65 to 35 percent, rather than the 90-10 split you see with African-Americans.
To be clear, if that happens, it would take a long time. But if I had to guess, I’d say young African-Americans might trend 4 or 5 percent against us in relative terms. But they’re a small percent of the Black electorate. These are slow-moving trends.
by Elvis » Fri Jul 24, 2020 6:29 pm
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/ke ... r-BB179BBI
Key Trump campaign donor steps back from supporting president’s 2020 election bid
Danielle Zoellner
4 hrs ago
One of Donald Trump‘s top presidential donors from 2016 has taken a step back from supporting his latest election bid.
Robert Mercer, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, donated $15.5m with his wife, Diana, to a number of organisations that supported Mr Trump and his campaign efforts in 2016. The couple also put up another $1m for the inaugural committee.
Not only did Mr Mercer and his family provide needed donations for the campaign, but they also brought Cambridge Analytica, a data company funded by the billionaire, into the fold.
His daughter, Rebekah Mercer, was on the board for the data-gathering company, and the information that was gathered from the company assisted the Trump campaign in its creation of social media ads that would influence voters.
Mr Mercer also helped staff the now-president for the White House by providing three key employees for Mr Trump: Citizens United President David Bossie as deputy campaign manager, pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager, and Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon as his campaign CEO.
“The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution,” Mr Bannon said in 2017, according to The New Yorker.
Now Mr Trump is running against former Vice President Joe Biden for the 2020 presidential race, and has found himself trailing in the polls nationwide as well as a number of key states.
In 2016, the president was also trailing the then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. But he had deep financial backing, which was led by Mr Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.
Five people in the same sphere as the Mercer family have told Business Insider it was unlikely the billionaire would re-emerge prior to November with funding for the president.
A Republican Party official close to the Trump campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity to Business Insider, said the campaign was not expecting to receive financial or any other support from the Mercer family.
“The Mercer cavalry,” the official said, “isn’t coming over the hill.”
Another associate of Rebekah Mercer told the publication: “They’re 100, 100, 100 per cent out.”
News of the Mercer family removing itself from the Trump campaign efforts first started in 2018 after public scrutiny heightened over their role in the 2016 campaign, CNBC reported.
Mr Merer and his wife contributed just $400,000 to pro-Trump super PAC, the Great America PAC. Nothing was contributed to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee that splits money between the president’s campaign, the Republican National Committee, and 11 state Republican committees.
Then a lone contribution came on 14 February with Mr Mercer donating $355,200 to Trump Victory. But Mr Trump’s committee only saw $5,600 of that sum as its the legal maximum for a primary and general election combined.
Rebekah Mercer, on the other hand, has not donated anything to Mr Trump’s bid for a second term.
The lack of these key backers doesn’t mean the president doesn’t have cash on hand to get him through the next three months of the election run. His campaign reported he had $113m to spend on 30 June.
In comparison, the Biden campaign revealed it had $109m on hand when entering the month of July, as the Democratic nominee has boosted his fundraising efforts in recent months to compete against Mr Trump.
If the Mercer family were to decide to back the Trump campaign late into his election efforts, it was expressed now was the time if they wanted their funding to have any positive impact on the campaign. But so far, it has appeared these contributions are unlikely.
by Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 24, 2020 7:31 pm
by Elvis » Sat Jul 25, 2020 3:38 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jul 25, 2020 5:38 pm
Elvis » Sat Jul 25, 2020 2:38 am wrote:There are other articles like that one—all a ruse?
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