pjwestin

Oh my God, please sit down, you walking Dunning-Kruger. Clearly the quotes were over your head, so I'm going to explain it using smaller words.

So, you're looking at very small quote from a single graph that says, "Note Validated voters are citizens who said they voted in a post-election survey and were found to have voted in commercial voter files." You think that means that this survey is conducted exclusively by people who just voted, but it's not. It's just explaining to you how they verified that people, who were already randomly selected for the survey, actually voted.

How these people were actually selected was described in my first quote, but since it went over your head, I'll rephrase it for you; the respondents were randomly selected through a random sampling of phone numbers, both landline and cell. 50% of those people asked if they'd like to be included in the survey said yes, which was about 10,000 people. This took place between July 8th and July 18th of 2021.

I know it said, "self-administered," at one point, and that was very confusing for you, but that isn't describing how people were selected for the survey, it's describing how they took the survey. They self-administered it online, but it was still sent out by Pew to randomly pre-selected candidates, not anyone who wanted to take it. Do you get it now?

So, just to be 100% clear, so you don't get confused anymore, between July 8th and July 18th of 2021, Pew Research Center selected about 10,000 randomly selected Americans for a survey. They then self-administered that survey through a website shared with them by the Pew Research Center. They were asked about their votes in the last election, and while that information was self-reported, it was also independently verified with voter databases to ensure it was true. There are literally 2 Appendices of information attached to this survey that explain all of this.

So, A) no, this is not a selection problem, you just don't understand the selection process, and B) if it seems like everyone else is a, "fucking moron," well, I've actually got a theory on why that is.

Name one moment in history where abstaining from the bare mimimim to avoid catastrophic consequences results in a net gain.

Name a point where I said abstaining from voting was good. My point wasn't that protest voting was good. It was that you could make the exact opposite point (with a lot fewer words) using your exact logic. Which means it's not a good point.

I ask this because you’re trying to make this party thing where I’d title paring [you mean "try paying," maybe?] attention and reading for context- you’ll see clearly that It’s an ACTION thing.

Again, fine, let's make it an action thing. If the protest voters were so necessary to Harris' election, why didn't she take any actions to win them over? That was incredibly irresponsible of her.

Are you beginning to see how all your arguments can be flipped just as easily to place the blame on the candidate instead of the voters? Do you think maybe that's because, even though you've convinced yourself that what your saying is cold, hard logic, your actually just screaming your opinions at people?

For the record, I voted for Harris out of harm reduction, and I wish she'd won. However, I believe that it is a candidates job to win an election, not the voters job to get them elected. If there was a significant contingent of voters withholding their vote, I think that candidate must have been doing a shitty job.

Interesting that you went to progressives so quickly though. Especially since I never even mentioned the word.

That says a LOT.

Yeah, it says I saw more than 2 minutes of political coverage in 2024, so I knew that Harris wasn't getting criticism for being too progressive. Grow up.

I mean, I tend to believe that they're actually just a truly incompetent, cowardly bunch that are too afraid to fight and too stupid to realize that a party can't simultaneously serve a working-class base and billionaire donors. That being said, I've been much more open to the controlled opposition theory since Schumer caved on the budget for no conceivable reason.

Not that I should even have to debate this, since my my source is the Pew Research Center and yours is, "most people I know," but that's a blatant misrepresentation of the methodology. The survey uses data from a group of randomly selected panelists, not self-reported post-election surveys.

The American Trends Panel (ATP), created by Pew Research Center, is a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. Panelists participate via self-administered web surveys. ..The ATP was created in 2014, with the first cohort of panelists invited to join the panel at the end of a large, national, landline and cellphone random-digit-dial survey that was conducted in both English and Spanish. Two additional recruitments were conducted using the same method in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Across these three surveys, a total of 19,718 adults were invited to join the ATP, of whom 9,942 (50%) agreed to participate.

The only reference to self-reporting I found was people self-reporting whether or not they voted, and even then, that was independently verified. I'm pretty sure you clicked the first link you saw, scrolled down until you found this paragraph, and didn't read it very carefully:

Voter turnout and vote choice in the 2020 election is based on two different sources. First, self-reports of candidate choice were collected immediately after the general election in November 2020 (ATP W78). Secondly, ATP panelists were matched to commercial voter file databases to verify that they had indeed voted in the election. For more details, see “Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory.”

Also, if Bernie's failure to win the Democratic primary proves progressives don't vote, then it stands to reason that Clinton and Harris' defeat proves that moderates don't vote either, right? I mean, it seems stupid to me to make broad, sweeping generalizations about voter behavior over something that has as many variables as an election, but if that's what you want to do, then you must concede that Harris and Clinton prove that moderates don't vote.

Literally the opposite is true. People on the far-left and far-right are much more likely to vote than people in the middle.

Yup, it was not lost on me that this was essentially Eco's 8th feature of fascism. Not that the Democrats are fascists; they don't match most of the other features, especially 6 (I don't think it'd ever occurred to them to appeal to anyone's frustrations), but it seems liberals have at least borrowed this rhetorical attack to punch left.

This is just a long-winded, inverted version of the aphorism about liberals' paradoxical view of progressives; they're a small, niche group, and the Democrats shouldn't try to appease them because they'll just alienate mainstream voters by courting this insignificant block of voters. However, progressives are somehow also a large, powerful cabal that can be blamed for every major Democratic loss.

That's definitely part of it. I would say the trucks that are literally becoming unglued (while the CEO is figuratively) are causing equal, if not greater, damage.

This woman also said, “You violated the law, you are not entitled to due process," because she apparently doesn't know what due process is.

I think that's true for some of them, mostly the Wall Street folks who have enough diversified wealth to buy a lot of stock during the crash and wait it out. But I think the start-up folks, who's companies have often never been profitable, and rely entirely on investors over-inflating their value to survive, are freaking the fuck out right now. And I think Trump is just legitimately dumb, doesn't understand that a trade deficit doesn't mean America is losing money, and genuinely doesn't understand tariffs.

Yeah, for sure, fascist regimes have a pretty short shelf-life in general because of cronyism and incompetence. I'm just saying there's nothing inherent to fascism that should be tanking the economy right now in the way, say, a communist revolution would by causing capital flight. If he wasn't pushing the worst, most unnecessary trade war in history, Trump could have a strong economy right now.

I find it deeply funny that fascism is completely compatible with capitalism (it's arguably its end-state), but they're still tanking the economy because Trump doesn't understand tariffs.