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[The_Explorer]

I don't have hard numbers off-hand either, but from materials I've seen the uninformed voter block is not huge but larger than one might think. These are people are are too busy working multiple jobs / not starving / whatever to spend much time paying attention to the news at all. They get a steady drip of news-like blurbs from their facebook feed or other social media, but are not really informed.

That said, there's also a very sizable group of people who don't vote, and there may be quite a bit of overlap between those two groups.

Well I can see why people don't vote. Its why I think the voting stuff needs a remake, but a lot of politicians don't want to completely remake the system. If I was a republican in a full blue state, or a democrat in a full red state, there'd be no point voting. I have a few friends who are republicans and they say their vote doesn't matter because we don't live in a swing state and it always goes blue anyway. And its kinda true, there is no point in them voting because their vote doesn't matter or count at all. And two of my democrat friends don't vote either because they say the democrats already won here so they don't need to go out. My family is the same way that live in this state, mostly democrats and a couple republicans. And, the only ones who vote in my family, are the democrats because thats the only ones who vote kinda counts here even if its a done deal. But if this was a red state, it would be the opposite.

Seems like the system doesn't work, because peoples votes don't matter, unless its a swing state. And individual votes don't really matter either, because its already a done deal. I'm always enthusiastic about voting, but if it felt like my vote didn't matter and I was a republican or lived in a red state, I probably wouldn't vote at all. Makes the system seem kinda broken.

[Dostoevsky]

Yeah, that's also true. Nonvoters include both the uninformed as well as the 'too informed', so to speak.

There are a few states (only two, maybe?) that apportion their electoral college votes by proportion instead of winner-take-all. In my opinion would be one of many good reforms to the electoral college system.

[sluissa]

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-debate-poll/

538 did a before/after snapshot poll. Seems like the debate didn't really have much of an effect at all as was expected by a lot of people.

Interestingly, it seemed to have shaken the confidence of a few people on both sides who were absolutely sure they knew who was going to win.

[JoshuaFH]

Should I be out on the street with a big cardboard sign advising people to vote Biden? I feel like I have to do something, atleast more than the bare minimum of going out and voting and then hoping for the best.

[Madman198237]

So I didn't see anyone mention this yet, and I've been spreading the wonderful hilarity everywhere I go, so have the the best line to come of the debate, from Mark Hamill himself:

"The debate was the worst thing I've ever seen, and I was in the Star Wars Holiday Special."


Just in case anyone still thought that this presidential race was going to be dignified or have any redeeming value whatsoever.

[Superdorf]

"The debate was the worst thing I've ever seen, and I was in the Star Wars Holiday Special."

Ah man, that had me cackling something awful

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

This really sunk in for me when I looked at the exit polls from this year's primary, which I had never done before.  It was pretty consistent that, with Bernie supporters as the sole exception, the majority of voters weren't deciding who to vote for or support until a few days before they voted, or even the day of the vote.  By my interpretation meaning they are not paying attention long-term, don't know much about the candidates, and are just putting some brief effort into making a shallow judgment just before voting, or even just going and checking a box based on name recognition alone.  It took me to a new level of jaded. 

I think the uninformed voter is actually a significant bloc.  Not that they don't have political opinions and leanings.  But they're not based on information.  They're based on feeling their way through things.  And voting behaviors are based on which candidate appeals to and/or manipulates their feelings about things, based on their prior exposures to vague bits and pieces of notions and ideas and how those intersect with their personal anxieties and identity.

Propaganda is a thing that works, after all, and it's rooted in how the majority engages with politics.  Or rather... doesn't.

Edit:

This isn't to do exclusively or even mainly with conservative voters, either.  Just look at the countless examples out there of Democrats admitting their support for a candidate in the primary was based on that candidate's gender or things like appearing "professorial".

Simple.  There was basically zero difference in terms of their overall policies, so the voters leaned for who they thought would beat Trump.

And then they selected the guy from the administration Trump was a direct, hand grenade response to, particularly in the forms of establishment, agreements like the Transpacific Partnership that ended up sending more jobs out than keeping them and causing a collapse of more rural economies, illegal immigrants in the US being over 10 million for the entirety of Obama's term in spite of multiple amnesty programs he put into place that would have lowered the numbers (ones done by executive order rather than congress, which feeds back into establishment via concerns of overreach), and intervention in the middle east.  Mix a bit of American nationalism* (follow the asterisk) and there you get his base.

And if you look over his presidency, when did he take hits to his rating?  Year 1, when he was working with the establishment he was voted to be a hand grenade to.  When there was a threat to go into Syria and more direct interference in the middle east with our troops.  The economic slowdown of Covid-19.  First two took until the start of when Covid hit to recover (spike was due to the weekly addresses), and the third was always going to be temporary because it was a virus-derived thing done from little info and currently it is not him holding the country still in lockdown, but the opposition party where they have control, so he's already back to pre-Covid numbers.

And if those numbers are only partly due to Covid and more largely due to the BLM rioting that are kinda only continuing due to the local mayors and governors not taking the assistance he has offered, with DAs releasing the ones that had charges pending, Trump's approval might well rise higher what with inertia being a bit greater.  Especially as it spreads to the suburbs where families typipcally live at the same time he's appointing a family-oriented person to be a Supreme Court judge.

-:-

*What most people think of in terms of Nationalism is not nationalism, but Jingoism.  I am not doing so here.  The definition of Nationalism is:

Nationalism is an idea and movement that promotes the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power (popular sovereignty). It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on shared social characteristics of culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics (or the government), religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solidarity.

In this context: the Cultural form of a focus on self-reliance and the core tenets of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  And partly contains such things as the tradition of a Northern European-derived work ethic and two-parent household**.  There's certainly some that take it to have an ethnic component, but fair few of the elected got primaried while guys like Richard Spencer have flipped to supporting Biden as Trump's been taking people away from him by giving people a non-ethnic cultural identity to latch onto.

**Right wing being labelled as anti-LGBT+ is kinda wrong, as there's actually decent acceptance of the LGB part, but stand against the T+.  And even here there tends to be the asterisk of most of it being about education with prepubescant kids (which extends to the LGB) as they have the perspective of 'all this is sexual and kids have no business being exposed to that'.  Though T+ also tends to get hit harder on that front of 'this is huge and they haven't even hit puberty', 'massive changes to body that we really don't have good data on the long term effects of', and 'everything is too broad and would allow for some creep/rapist to falsely claim to do creepy shit to the opposite sex.'

-:-

As a side note, Bernie's 2016 platform was born of largely the same pressures, and could likely have won from splitting the hand grenade vote that went solidly Trump in the actual given the opposition was Hillary.  However, over the past four years, starting with his endorsement of Hillary and we found out a lot of stuff being rigged so he wouldn't win, he started to get a bit more subverted by the establishment, and so lost his hand grenade to the establishment status.  Something that with more fuckery killed his 2020 bid.

And as a further side note, the effective collapsing state the Democrats kinda got themselves into thanks to Bernie charging everyone up but then leaving no clear leader after, likely would have been where the Republicans would have gone if Bernie managed to get the nomination then White House from Trump having charged up his side.

[A Thing]

First two took until the start of when Covid hit to recover (spike was due to the weekly addresses), and the third was always going to be temporary because it was a virus-derived thing done from little info and currently it is not him holding the country still in lockdown, but the opposition party where they have control, so he's already back to pre-Covid numbers.

This just isn't true. I live in a Republican state and we're still in a degree of quarantine. We're not in lockdown because of 'an opposition party' but because there's a pandemic.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

First two took until the start of when Covid hit to recover (spike was due to the weekly addresses), and the third was always going to be temporary because it was a virus-derived thing done from little info and currently it is not him holding the country still in lockdown, but the opposition party where they have control, so he's already back to pre-Covid numbers.

This just isn't true. I live in a Republican state and we're still in a degree of quarantine. We're not in lockdown because of 'an opposition party' but because there's a pandemic.

Yeah, I should have been a bit more specific.  Should have specified in terms of overall coverage the appearance leans towards the Democrats being the ones that are holding things down more due to them holding more of the big states and thereby where most of the coverage tends to go with the news.  And if you dive into the comparison of how things went in 2016, 13 of the 20 states that went Democrat that election still have the lockdown going, and only 11 of 30 of those that went Republican are still lockeddown.

[PTTG??]

Hot take on the debate: The winner was hard to determine, but the loser was definitely the American people.

[Dostoevsky]

Simple.  There was basically zero difference in terms of their overall policies, so the voters leaned for who they thought would beat Trump.

And then they selected the guy from the administration Trump was a direct, hand grenade response to, particularly in the forms of establishment, agreements like the Transpacific Partnership that ended up sending more jobs out than keeping them and causing a collapse of more rural economies, illegal immigrants in the US being over 10 million for the entirety of Obama's term in spite of multiple amnesty programs he put into place that would have lowered the numbers (ones done by executive order rather than congress, which feeds back into establishment via concerns of overreach), and intervention in the middle east.  Mix a bit of American nationalism* (follow the asterisk) and there you get his base.

And if you look over his presidency, when did he take hits to his rating?  Year 1, when he was working with the establishment he was voted to be a hand grenade to.  When there was a threat to go into Syria and more direct interference in the middle east with our troops.  The economic slowdown of Covid-19.  First two took until the start of when Covid hit to recover (spike was due to the weekly addresses), and the third was always going to be temporary because it was a virus-derived thing done from little info and currently it is not him holding the country still in lockdown, but the opposition party where they have control, so he's already back to pre-Covid numbers.

[And other stuff]

I have, er, objections to numerous parts of this, but in the interest of time I mainly just wanted to note that it'd be hard for the Trans-Pacific Partnership to send out millions of jobs during the Obama administration because it was never ratified and never went into force. I'm not a fan of the agreement either (in part for its lacking environmental provisions), but the only thing it 'did' was make the US less relevant in Asia when everybody but the US agreed to an amended 'OK forget them' version after we bowed out. (Granted, that's not necessarily a bad thing for the world.)

There are a few other trade agreements from his tenure, but they were smaller in scope (though not necessarily tiny) and Bush-era negotiations that he fiddled with as opposed to being Obama originals (though that's more of a technical quibble than anything else).

[Madman198237]

Hot take on the debate: The winner was hard to determine, but the loser was definitely the American people.

I feel like a hot take has to be actually, y'know, at least mildly controversial.

So I disqualify this statement from hot-take-ness and demand you find a better hot take

[wierd]

The TPP was mostly about "But our intellectual property empires!!  Without artificial scarcity, we wont make epic assloads of even MOAR money through the abuse of our industry leader statuses, in direct contravention of the principles that are behind such things as antitrust laws! You DO want us to make epic assloads MOAR money, DON'T YOU?!", and less about "Ensuring quality" and "Ensuring safety."


If instead, there had been agreements for oversight with teeth, rather than "NO, YOU CANT MAKE LOCALLY! YOU HAVE TO IMPORT AT HIGH PRICES! WHHAAAA!", for such things as pharmeceutical drugs-- You know like "If you manufacture a local version of this preparation, it must be in accordance with these regulations-- [insert list of regulations requiring routine checks by designated inspection persons representing the original designer of the compound, and the health/safety comissions of ratifying countries, et al]" instead of "No, you cant do that, call the waaaambulance, you are trying to run over my profit margin!",  I would have been more favorable to it.

When it comes to life saving medications, putting all the eggs in one (very profitable) basket is how you end up with shortages and people dying during an economic or some other kind of catastrophe upsetting supply lines at the bottom.  The TPP was first and foremost about preventing international competition to the big boys.  Forgive me for not being "THRILLED!" by that.

As for the whole Biden vs Sanders thing-- The majority of the democratic base were afraid of sander's extreme views. Some may even have been influenced by the absurd "RED MENACE!! DREAD COMMUNISM! WOOO! HORRORS!" mantra that was getting slung about. The people that handed Biden the nomination were mostly women, with dependent children.  People who are biologically conditioned to seek a stable status quo, in order to have a stable and consisted environment in which to raise their children. (Even if that status quo is having the house on fire, while they sit at the table saying "This is fine.") The people who supported Sanders tended to be young, unmarried, and in dire need of the "Radical" reforms espoused by Sanders.

It was a conflict of interests and interest groups in the US's electorate.  Biden was favored by the establishment democrats and their big business supporters, and he was favored by the "mothers with children" demographic.  really, that's all there is there.

[feelotraveller]

Hot take on the debate election: The winner was hard to determine, but the loser was definitely the American people.

FTFY

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I have, er, objections to numerous parts of this, but in the interest of time I mainly just wanted to note that it'd be hard for the Trans-Pacific Partnership to send out millions of jobs during the Obama administration because it was never ratified and never went into force. I'm not a fan of the agreement either (in part for its lacking environmental provisions), but the only thing it 'did' was make the US less relevant in Asia when everybody but the US agreed to an amended 'OK forget them' version after we bowed out. (Granted, that's not necessarily a bad thing for the world.)

There are a few other trade agreements from his tenure, but they were smaller in scope (though not necessarily tiny) and Bush-era negotiations that he fiddled with as opposed to being Obama originals (though that's more of a technical quibble than anything else).

Worded badly again (pretty much why I never get involved.  Have things clear in my mind, but tend to skip a line or two, and bundle things a bit much.  Bit more margin of error when its not political shit).  I used it as quick reference due to being the one that was the big one looming at the time that gave an overall looming threat that would accelerate the already ongoing losses.

As for the whole Biden vs Sanders thing-- The majority of the democratic base were afraid of sander's extreme views. Some may even have been influenced by the absurd "RED MENACE!! DREAD COMMUNISM! WOOO! HORRORS!" mantra that was getting slung about. The people that handed Biden the nomination were mostly women, with dependent children.  People who are biologically conditioned to seek a stable status quo, in order to have a stable and consisted environment in which to raise their children. (Even if that status quo is having the house on fire, while they sit at the table saying "This is fine.") The people who supported Sanders tended to be young, unmarried, and in dire need of the "Radical" reforms espoused by Sanders.

It was a conflict of interests and interest groups in the US's electorate.  Biden was favored by the establishment democrats and their big business supporters, and he was favored by the "mothers with children" demographic.  really, that's all there is there.

I dunno.  Always seemed more like a rep thing to me when you saw stuff like this across the board from the candidates.