What really bugs me is that both sides are just attacking the other rather than talking about why they are the right choice. US elections are always about smear campaigns
It’s not what I’m used to in the Netherlands. There are personal attacks sometimes, but mostly by guys who don’t have the best reputation in the first place.
This is most of my memory of Canadian elections too. I wish even mentioning other parties wasn’t allowed in campagin material, like how in some parts of government politicians can only refer to each other by title and not by name.
You can’t say “Party X just wants your money”, try “Our party will help you keep your money”, or even “Unlike some parties today, we will put your taxes to good use”.
It’s a lot harder to make a compelling attack without a concrete focus. “Some parties are corrupt” is so trivially true that’s it embarassing, but “Party X is corrupt” is a rallying cry.
It won’t prevent lies by any means, but since specific claims can only be nade about your own party it gives an advantage to talking about your own party instead of every ad being incredibly negative claims one step off of a flame war. Hopefully that leads to building a strong case and then defending that case during debates, but at least the ads will have less direct negativity.
It would be more positive, but potentially less accurate. A party that does a lot of very specific and bad stuff but has some vaguely good policies to point towards would beat a neutral party, even if they shouldn’t.
Maybe if you only see the political ads of a single party. It would still be better because you would know of even a single stance of one party.
Last election, I can’t remember a single actual stance taken by any party based on political ads. They were all attack ads. Without discussion you couldn’t separate the resonable accusations from the trash anyway.
Basing your politocal opinions purely on ads is a terrible stance anyway, and the party best at fearmongering will win there. There aren’t any restrictions on ads that can fix people forming opinions only on ads anyway, we’d need to encourage public political debates and discourse instead.
I remember the first election I was old enough to vote in (the 2004 election) paying close attention to all the political ads I saw and, at least for that election, only the Republican ads were focused on “other guy bad, so vote me.” The opposing side’s ads were entirely focused on their own platform and never even mentioned the other side.
There was a time, a few decades ago, when there was a real demand to get away from the negativity of most campaigns. Everyone says they wanted it, polls clearly showed it, etc.
But then there was another study which analyzed the effectiveness of campaigns (i.e. if they won) vs how negative they went.
Negativity was clearly proven to be the winning tactic.
Trump has also never won the general election for POTUS against a man but is undefeated against women so far, so let’s hope that changes. For America, and the rest of the world, he better not win.
I remember one night me and a friend passed a handle of gin back and forth and drank the whole thing right from the bottle. What the hell happened? That was only like 15 years ago.
You ever heard of Bacardi 151? It was an alcohol that was 151 proof. 75% alcohol by volume.
My friend used to buy this $80 bottle. It was huge. Bought it every week. We’d do shots from 7pm, until ???. We’d wake up the next day, bottle empty, no clue what happened past 10pm, but we’d always find evidence we were up until at least 6am.
They don’t even MAKE that stuff anymore because they said it was too dangerous.
Now I drink like 6-8 beers and I’m thinking its getting late.
Someone said to me that even if the majority would now vote for a third party, they wouldn’t get anything done because the Senate Ave Congress are still all dems and reps.
I don’t know enough about how US elections work though
I like Kamala. You have a real shot at taking Trump out with her. The stakes could not be higher. Maybe for the world. He is a truly dangerous person.
I wonder if I can get the next statement out without venom coming back at me, but I’ll say it anyway:
I think you guys should try hard to steer the rhetoric away from anything polarizing (race or gender), and do everything you can to create inclusion (from anyone). I’m seeing a lot of things like that, and I don’t think it plays out into more support. And there’s nothing more important now than maximizing support.
I feel similarly, but my whole life Democrats keep thinking “maybe if I compromise with the right wing and move right, I’ll get more votes” and saying aw dang better luck next time when the right wing’s dwindling base votes red down the whole ticket, while party insiders actively sideline Democrats who win big on left wing messaging. So when I hear Harris striking a tone of inclusion and unity, I’m glad because I feel it’s laudable, but I’m also not thrilled because I’ve heard this song before.
Charlene Alexander Mitchell (June 8, 1930 – December 14, 2022) was an American international socialist, feminist, labor and civil rights activist. In 1968, she became the first Black woman candidate for President of the United States.[1][2]
I get the feeling in OPs post, but for those unfamiliar, there are more people on the ballot other than the 2 main picks. This even varies by state, as they can have different criteria for defining who makes it to the ballot.
So perhaps a black woman has at some point ran for president (as in, made it to the ballot at least)?
Hell, at least one, Shirley Chisholm, campaigned to be on the Democrat ballot in 1977. That counts as running for president, even if they don’t win the primary right?
Not really, since in most (all?) U.S. presidential elections to date there has not been a black woman on the ballot. I think there’s an important semantic difference between losing and not winning. The equal but opposite statement to the OP would be that a black woman has never won the election, which is true.
Read the wiki article. If a black woman has never been on the ballot then every possible statement you make beginning with “for all black women who have ever been on the ballot…” is true.
Don’t correct that. He’s wrong. It’s way more than 46, most multi-term presidents defeated several different contenders.
Edit: I got 63 white men and 1 white woman, not counting pre 12th amendment elections, not counting minor candidates who didn’t win any states electors. There’s a lot more if you include minor candidates, but then one of them would be Cynthia McKinney who is a black woman.
what are you talking about? racist? I think they’re saying that since ~2% of the population identifies as trans and more are probably eggs, we likely had one trans president before, but they weren’t out to the public, or perhaps even themselves.
I read it as him making a reference to black people being legally considered to be 3/5ths of a man back when the united states was founded. So if you go by those definitions, Obama wouldn’t have added up to “1”.