When people complain about how this "Joe has to go" furor is a pundit/media led distraction they may not have Sarah's focus groups in mind, but it's all part of the same BS.
I volunteer 5 days a week in one of the swingiest districts in one of the swingiest states and I answer the phones for many hours per week. I get 2 kinds of calls fro…
When people complain about how this "Joe has to go" furor is a pundit/media led distraction they may not have Sarah's focus groups in mind, but it's all part of the same BS.
I volunteer 5 days a week in one of the swingiest districts in one of the swingiest states and I answer the phones for many hours per week. I get 2 kinds of calls from concerned voters and I speak to each one, often at length: From those who think Joe must go, which largely come from people who identify as Democrats and/or Biden supporters but say that they will vote for Trump (or occasionally RFK, JR) instead and whose reasoning is largely based on incorrect information or barely concealed "isms," mostly against immigrants. IOW they were only nominally in Joe's camp to begin with.
The other calls come from Joe supporters, a few of whom base their position on the "realpolitik" judgment that only Joe can beat Trump or that it's too late to make a change but MOST OF WHOM support Joe because they think he is the BEST candidate. All of them refer to his record and his fundamental integrity; sometimes they refer to him as a "good person."
I'll put my randoms up against your scientifically selected panels any day, Sarah.
Thank you for your volunteer work! my parents were active in politics and I grew up with democratic volunteers coming to our house for dinners and parties. I was 13 when I first worked the phones at headquarters. Your post brought me back and reminded me that people like you are the best of America.
Which is exactly what the press is doing by ignoring the Orange Snake and his insanity. In a better, saner world, his rantings, his crimes would be plastered across the country and condemned by Rs, Ds and everyone in between. Now? Nothing to see, folks.
The Press IS reporting on Trump’s craziness - but the public can’t digest it because Biden has created a big target on himself. It’s Biden’s fault not the press.
Blaming "the media" & Bill Kristol for the Democratic Party's failure to have a slate of younger, more vigorous candidates lined up months ago does no good. It may feel great to rant, but Bill told us months ago that Joe probably wasn't the best one to take on Trump again. We all (including me) just ignored him, because he used to be a Republican.
But maybe Bill Kristol had taken the time to look up all 23 sitting Democratic Governors - some so popular that they're in their second terms! And some are governing in "must-win" states, like Mich, Pa & Wisc. Bill probably saw some great potential that the rest of us missed. That's on us & the Democratic Party, not Bill or the media.
I can honestly tell you that I had never heard of Jimmy Carter, the Governor of Georgia, or William Clinton, the young Governor of Arkansas, before either man threw his hat in the ring.
gotta say that as great as he has been as gov in wisconsin - not sure anyone would call Gov Tony Evers charismatic :) so I don't think he would carry the rest of the country in a presidential contest.
It's the media's fault that they don't cover trump's numerous gaffes, mispronunciations, and actual brain farts like they do if it was Biden. It was clear trump was unhinged in 2016, more so now in 2024 but all you hear from the media is crickets. I wish they would put trump under the same microscope that they have Biden under.
It is the media's fault for ignoring all the the times he is fine. Tim Miller counted only twenty bad days in the last 3.5 years. Biden has had at least 15 events since the debate, most unscripted, but he was fine so we hear nary a word.
Biden did not create the target. The emotional over-reaction from Dems created the target. And now look where Dems are coalescing: keep Biden or replace Biden with Harris. Replacing Biden with Harris is functionally equivalent to keeping Biden, because if it should turn out that Biden is unable to complete his second term, Harris steps in anyway. We could have had the same result without the public panic.
No one pays attention to Trump's insanity because he's been insane for the last 10 years, nothing he can do or say now surprises anyone, it's old news. Was anyone shocked or surprised by Trump's debate performance? It's the same old barrage of lies that he's been spewing for a decade.
I fear this absolves voters of having any duty to the US. They are viewedvas consumers who must be persuaded or manipulated by candidates. That's very unhealthy for a democracy.
Trump wins electoral college by 50 votes plus. R's win Senate and House. It'll be great. Nothing better than a second Trump administration but a second Trump administration with a mandate.
I for one am waiting for Pelosi’s statement, which she has promised for this morning. If she bails, the ship is sinking. I trust her political instincts more than all of ours.
Dems will win the House and have a real shot at keeping the Senate. Voters are not dumping on the Dem party, it's Biden they don't want to vote for. This doesn't mean they will vote for Trump.
Right on, Colleen. Keep these doom and gloomsters focussed on the real battle, control of the legislative, even if they have decided to give up on Joe and the executive by voting for CFT, whether actively by pulling his lever (don't go psychologist on me and ask which one) or passively by not voting at all.
Your adjective saved you from a blistering reply😉, even though the concept of "sane" and someone who would want to vote for CFT is not one I can get my head around, much less a (here it comes) grip on it ... the concept, of course.
It's hard to ignore poor decision-making when your cities are in rumbles and you lost another world war. The MAGAs complain about this economy while still sending money to Trump for tennis shoes and a bible.
This is a bizarre comment. You are simply giving your opinion. No better or worse than anyone else's but just one voice and apparently not based on any data. I am looking down, to actual voters, to the grassroots if you will and reporting on what I am hearing. You can criticize my "methodology" as unscientific but (a) I've already copped to that and (b) I'll go so far as to say that it's more scientifically based than the average comment here or the average op-ed piece about how the sky is falling.
Poppycock. Look at Politico. NY is now in play. Anyone with the hubris to say their analysis is right and all the other experts are wrong but we’ll just have to see doesn’t pass the smell test.
There’s a meteor hurtling towards the Earth this very second. Some
people aren’t looking up and can’t see it. Others see it and don’t think it’s a big deal. But don’t be fooled! Keep looking up! Train your eyes to focus on the goddamn meteor every second of every goddamn day. Don’t you dare look around at what’s going on around you or you might lose sight of where it’s headed next or if it seems to be slowing down or changing course. Or evenworse, you might not catch if it said “good as” or “goodness” during its interview with George Stephanopolous and any astronomer worth his salt can tell you that assessing stuff like that is key to figuring out how much damage it can do!
I should warn you that there will be naysayers who will try to minimize the threat. They’ll say they’ve seen the meteorite and it’s about the size of a basketball and they aren’t really concerned about it. But don’t let them discourage you from sounding the alarm! Just keep bringing people’s attention back to the meteorite and keep yelling about how we’re all doomed! Human nature will eventually kick in and all the people who didn’t initially see the meteorite or think it was that big a deal will eventually hear all the people around them pointing to the sky and shouting and assume they were wrong. Of course thousands of meteors fall to the earth every year and everyone is perfectly fine [1] but if you live in Florida or other places in the South, the astronomy books are banned so there’s no way to access that information. You should be OK.
Once you’ve successfully freaked out most of the country about the threat of the basketball sized meteor, you and your neighbors should all go grab your pitchforks and head to NASA (or Elon Musk’s house) and demand that they stop whatever actual important space thing they’re working on and focus all their their time and energy to concoct some last minute laser to blast it out of the sky.
Of course since all the rocket scientists are now hyper-focused on stopping the stupid basketball sized meteor, no one is paying attention to the aliens from Magatron who want to take over the country and eventually, the entire planet! France, Britain and Iran were able to hold off the aliens for now [2] but *they* didn’t have a meteorite problem on their hands!
So let’s keep our eyes on the skies!
Does it really matter that while everyone’s head is facing upwards 24/7 working to annihilate the meteor, the aliens from Magatron, armed with with an AK-470 in each of their four arms (Magatronians place a high premium on gun ownership ;) have no problem sneaking past the guardrails around the Whitehouse and the Capitol Building and the Supreme Court?
Does it matter that the Magatronions start giggling as they enter these once hallowed buildings, chanting the name of their orange leader and bow before him as he sits on the throne that the Supreme Justices of the MOCKTUS have spent months building for him? Does it matter that there were no journalists around to report on it because they were all too busy debating about to do about the goddamn meteor?
Nope! What matters is that we’re honest about the meteor! We can’t let our country turn in to some sort of Orwellian dystopian hellscape where people just pretend there’s no meteor just because the government says so. We all *saw* the meteor damn it!!! Don’t try and tell us we didn’t!
And so, just as we’re patting our mutual backs about our unceasing devotion to the truth, ***BOOM*** a loud explosion shatters the stratosphere. The heroes at NASA have finally managed to blast the meteor in to smithereens somewhere above Chicago!!! Everyone cheers! Everyone, that is except the Magatronions. They’re too busy firing all the experts from the government and rounding up humans and sending them to concentration camps.
They come for the people on your block last. As you lay sweating in your small bunk in the camp, a sliver of doubt briefly flits through your mind…Should you maybe have spent more time and energy trying to defeat the aliens instead of getting rid of the scary looking meteor? Nah…you swat the doubt away like an annoying fly. It would have been impossible to fight aliens while everyone was consumed with fear about the meteor. And what if the meteor did end up to be significantly less harmful than the orange alien god king? The scientists all agreed that the meteor would definitely have left behind an unsightly crater - even if it was kind of small. And everyone knows craters suck!
The problem is these Biden supporters are not enough to get Joe over the hump, he needs to win independents and undecideds as well (the other group you describe), and it looks highly unlikely that he will get enough votes from these groups to win the swing states.
Are you saying that the unaligned and undecideds would vote affirmatively for CFT over Joe if Joe stays in? Or that you think they would vote passively by not voting at all? Because those are the only two alternatives if Joe stays in and that group, as a group, decides not to support him in any way.
I think mostly they'll just decide to sit it out and not vote for either, so you could say it hurts both sides, but really it hurts Biden more, because he needs more votes than Trump just to stay even due to the electoral college imbalance.
However you justify if, it amounts to the same thing: A no vote for Joe is a help for CFT because it is a vote against democracy and that is what Project 2025 is all about, even if CFT says he never heard of it.
100% agree. I wish all these "undecideds" felt the same way. If people are still undecided at this point they haven't been paying attention, I find these people exasperating.
You would think they learned their lesson in 2016. In fact they did learn their lesson in time for the 2020 elections which saw historically high turnout and historically low third party votes. Do you think these same voters are going to forget the lesson in Nov 2024?
Back in 2008, black voters did not think that white people would vote for a black man for President. They didn't get on board until he won lily white Iowa.
I think the black electorate is trying to be very pragmatic here, but I do think they're underestimating the extreme dislike for the Bad Orange Criminal.
Can we just say what a terrible Biden campaign it's been so far? No surrogates out there hammering Trump every day, no reaching out the Haley voters, etc. Spent a shit ton of money on TV ads for NOTHING. Truly pathetic. It makes me think they're relying solely on the anti-Trump sentiment without actually making the case.
The way this campaign is currently going, it's going to be a Bataan death march to Nov 5th. It desperately needs a course correction - if Joe Biden can do it, then he needs to do it NOW. If he can't, he needs to step aside and let the party (along with Harris) figure it out.
This is a point that is being consistently missed or slept on. Biden's campaign ads reach me in Jersey, and it's all been Before Times advertising. I think they're trying to convert voters to Biden rather than drive up Trump's negatives.
The election is turning into a referendum on Biden, and that's a game that Trump wins the popular vote at.
First of all, thanks for the volunteer work you're doing. A call here, a call there starts to add up. Again, thank you.
"I'll put my randoms up against your scientifically selected panels any day, Sarah."
Are they scientifically selected? The whole focus group thing is the least useful offering from the the Bulwark, in my opinion. Why is the methodology behind the groups not published anywhere? Who are these people? How are they selected? Randomly? Are the questions administered in a systematic way, and responses recorded in a way that allows drawing valid conclusions? If not, what is the point? I listened to one Focus Group podcast and that was enough for me.
If I'm wrong about this (and I've been wrong before) and the focus group methodology is described somewhere, please paste a link for me.
It's not posted than I am aware of but Sarah has talked about it in pods
They hire a professional group to find the people with the attributes they want to focus on...
It isn't random and it isn't like a poll
Sarah says: we want Trump to Biden voters, and the group screens for those and any other requirements, but nothing else...it is very tailored and specific...
As Sarah doesn't do the actual polling and they aren't asking any questions like a poll, there are no cross tabs
Maybe I'm being too pedantic, but it seems a lot like walking into a random bar and striking up conversations with your fellow drinkers. It certainly could be entertaining -- even provide a few laughs in the Jay Walking sense -- but the basis for political analysis? Not without a description of the approach and methodology and why we should believe in the accuracy of the conclusions. Otherwise it just seems like more noise. Sarah seems to take it all so seriously though. If it's serious, tell us why we should agree.
The whole approach and methodology is they want to ask questions to specific people to see what they think, so she can target them in her RVAT ads to convince them not to vote for Trump, and to get an idea what they think about several things,,,her conclusions are considered accurate because of her reputation at being good at this, why she writes for The Atlantic, WA PO, NYT's etc...and appears on cable news shows...she was a political operative before Trump too
When people complain about how this "Joe has to go" furor is a pundit/media led distraction they may not have Sarah's focus groups in mind, but it's all part of the same BS.
I volunteer 5 days a week in one of the swingiest districts in one of the swingiest states and I answer the phones for many hours per week. I get 2 kinds of calls from concerned voters and I speak to each one, often at length: From those who think Joe must go, which largely come from people who identify as Democrats and/or Biden supporters but say that they will vote for Trump (or occasionally RFK, JR) instead and whose reasoning is largely based on incorrect information or barely concealed "isms," mostly against immigrants. IOW they were only nominally in Joe's camp to begin with.
The other calls come from Joe supporters, a few of whom base their position on the "realpolitik" judgment that only Joe can beat Trump or that it's too late to make a change but MOST OF WHOM support Joe because they think he is the BEST candidate. All of them refer to his record and his fundamental integrity; sometimes they refer to him as a "good person."
I'll put my randoms up against your scientifically selected panels any day, Sarah.
Thank you for your volunteer work! my parents were active in politics and I grew up with democratic volunteers coming to our house for dinners and parties. I was 13 when I first worked the phones at headquarters. Your post brought me back and reminded me that people like you are the best of America.
Yeah, don’t pay attention to that meteor headed straight for US democracy… don’t look up.
Which is exactly what the press is doing by ignoring the Orange Snake and his insanity. In a better, saner world, his rantings, his crimes would be plastered across the country and condemned by Rs, Ds and everyone in between. Now? Nothing to see, folks.
The Press IS reporting on Trump’s craziness - but the public can’t digest it because Biden has created a big target on himself. It’s Biden’s fault not the press.
The media is a large part of the problem in American politics.
Blaming "the media" & Bill Kristol for the Democratic Party's failure to have a slate of younger, more vigorous candidates lined up months ago does no good. It may feel great to rant, but Bill told us months ago that Joe probably wasn't the best one to take on Trump again. We all (including me) just ignored him, because he used to be a Republican.
But maybe Bill Kristol had taken the time to look up all 23 sitting Democratic Governors - some so popular that they're in their second terms! And some are governing in "must-win" states, like Mich, Pa & Wisc. Bill probably saw some great potential that the rest of us missed. That's on us & the Democratic Party, not Bill or the media.
I can honestly tell you that I had never heard of Jimmy Carter, the Governor of Georgia, or William Clinton, the young Governor of Arkansas, before either man threw his hat in the ring.
Kristol is still a Republican and his wanting two people on a Dem ticket that meet his criteria isn't going to happen.
Let him clean up his own party.
gotta say that as great as he has been as gov in wisconsin - not sure anyone would call Gov Tony Evers charismatic :) so I don't think he would carry the rest of the country in a presidential contest.
Exactly. They were trump enablers in 2016 as well.
Oh right, it's the media's fault for Joe Biden's inability to complete sentences unless he's on the teleprompter.
It's the media's fault that they don't cover trump's numerous gaffes, mispronunciations, and actual brain farts like they do if it was Biden. It was clear trump was unhinged in 2016, more so now in 2024 but all you hear from the media is crickets. I wish they would put trump under the same microscope that they have Biden under.
It is the media's fault for ignoring all the the times he is fine. Tim Miller counted only twenty bad days in the last 3.5 years. Biden has had at least 15 events since the debate, most unscripted, but he was fine so we hear nary a word.
Biden did not create the target. The emotional over-reaction from Dems created the target. And now look where Dems are coalescing: keep Biden or replace Biden with Harris. Replacing Biden with Harris is functionally equivalent to keeping Biden, because if it should turn out that Biden is unable to complete his second term, Harris steps in anyway. We could have had the same result without the public panic.
No one pays attention to Trump's insanity because he's been insane for the last 10 years, nothing he can do or say now surprises anyone, it's old news. Was anyone shocked or surprised by Trump's debate performance? It's the same old barrage of lies that he's been spewing for a decade.
"No one pays attention to Trump's insanity because he's been insane for the last 10 years, nothing he can do or say now surprises anyone"
Agreed. It's the old "man bites dog" problem.
The media has its faults. But if we don't have a candidate that can prosecute the case against Donald Trump, we have no chance.
It's Trump for pete's sake. Biden should be able to beat him from his basement again. What's wrong with the voters?
I fear this absolves voters of having any duty to the US. They are viewedvas consumers who must be persuaded or manipulated by candidates. That's very unhealthy for a democracy.
Trump wins electoral college by 50 votes plus. R's win Senate and House. It'll be great. Nothing better than a second Trump administration but a second Trump administration with a mandate.
But at least Joe Biden will be sure to tell us he gave it his all while American democracy burns.
Sigh....
I for one am waiting for Pelosi’s statement, which she has promised for this morning. If she bails, the ship is sinking. I trust her political instincts more than all of ours.
She went against him though not very stridently...odd as her progressive members are pro Biden
She left space for him to bow out is how I see it. It’s a diverse caucus. She suggested waiting until after the NATO meeting, which makes sense to me.
Dems will win the House and have a real shot at keeping the Senate. Voters are not dumping on the Dem party, it's Biden they don't want to vote for. This doesn't mean they will vote for Trump.
Right on, Colleen. Keep these doom and gloomsters focussed on the real battle, control of the legislative, even if they have decided to give up on Joe and the executive by voting for CFT, whether actively by pulling his lever (don't go psychologist on me and ask which one) or passively by not voting at all.
What sane voter would want to touch the Trump lever much less vote for him.
Your adjective saved you from a blistering reply😉, even though the concept of "sane" and someone who would want to vote for CFT is not one I can get my head around, much less a (here it comes) grip on it ... the concept, of course.
I'll have to engage in some mental masturbation in order to form an adequate reply.
Germany had to suffer through world war II before they wised up to Hitler
It's hard to ignore poor decision-making when your cities are in rumbles and you lost another world war. The MAGAs complain about this economy while still sending money to Trump for tennis shoes and a bible.
Yep, clearly what MAGA tells pollsters about how they feel about the economy is not true.
and a Project 2025
The mandate never to stand for another election because there will be no others?
That is most certainly not knowable.
This is a bizarre comment. You are simply giving your opinion. No better or worse than anyone else's but just one voice and apparently not based on any data. I am looking down, to actual voters, to the grassroots if you will and reporting on what I am hearing. You can criticize my "methodology" as unscientific but (a) I've already copped to that and (b) I'll go so far as to say that it's more scientifically based than the average comment here or the average op-ed piece about how the sky is falling.
Poppycock. Look at Politico. NY is now in play. Anyone with the hubris to say their analysis is right and all the other experts are wrong but we’ll just have to see doesn’t pass the smell test.
***Don’t Look Around*** or Why Craters Suck!
There’s a meteor hurtling towards the Earth this very second. Some
people aren’t looking up and can’t see it. Others see it and don’t think it’s a big deal. But don’t be fooled! Keep looking up! Train your eyes to focus on the goddamn meteor every second of every goddamn day. Don’t you dare look around at what’s going on around you or you might lose sight of where it’s headed next or if it seems to be slowing down or changing course. Or evenworse, you might not catch if it said “good as” or “goodness” during its interview with George Stephanopolous and any astronomer worth his salt can tell you that assessing stuff like that is key to figuring out how much damage it can do!
I should warn you that there will be naysayers who will try to minimize the threat. They’ll say they’ve seen the meteorite and it’s about the size of a basketball and they aren’t really concerned about it. But don’t let them discourage you from sounding the alarm! Just keep bringing people’s attention back to the meteorite and keep yelling about how we’re all doomed! Human nature will eventually kick in and all the people who didn’t initially see the meteorite or think it was that big a deal will eventually hear all the people around them pointing to the sky and shouting and assume they were wrong. Of course thousands of meteors fall to the earth every year and everyone is perfectly fine [1] but if you live in Florida or other places in the South, the astronomy books are banned so there’s no way to access that information. You should be OK.
Once you’ve successfully freaked out most of the country about the threat of the basketball sized meteor, you and your neighbors should all go grab your pitchforks and head to NASA (or Elon Musk’s house) and demand that they stop whatever actual important space thing they’re working on and focus all their their time and energy to concoct some last minute laser to blast it out of the sky.
Of course since all the rocket scientists are now hyper-focused on stopping the stupid basketball sized meteor, no one is paying attention to the aliens from Magatron who want to take over the country and eventually, the entire planet! France, Britain and Iran were able to hold off the aliens for now [2] but *they* didn’t have a meteorite problem on their hands!
So let’s keep our eyes on the skies!
Does it really matter that while everyone’s head is facing upwards 24/7 working to annihilate the meteor, the aliens from Magatron, armed with with an AK-470 in each of their four arms (Magatronians place a high premium on gun ownership ;) have no problem sneaking past the guardrails around the Whitehouse and the Capitol Building and the Supreme Court?
Does it matter that the Magatronions start giggling as they enter these once hallowed buildings, chanting the name of their orange leader and bow before him as he sits on the throne that the Supreme Justices of the MOCKTUS have spent months building for him? Does it matter that there were no journalists around to report on it because they were all too busy debating about to do about the goddamn meteor?
Nope! What matters is that we’re honest about the meteor! We can’t let our country turn in to some sort of Orwellian dystopian hellscape where people just pretend there’s no meteor just because the government says so. We all *saw* the meteor damn it!!! Don’t try and tell us we didn’t!
And so, just as we’re patting our mutual backs about our unceasing devotion to the truth, ***BOOM*** a loud explosion shatters the stratosphere. The heroes at NASA have finally managed to blast the meteor in to smithereens somewhere above Chicago!!! Everyone cheers! Everyone, that is except the Magatronions. They’re too busy firing all the experts from the government and rounding up humans and sending them to concentration camps.
They come for the people on your block last. As you lay sweating in your small bunk in the camp, a sliver of doubt briefly flits through your mind…Should you maybe have spent more time and energy trying to defeat the aliens instead of getting rid of the scary looking meteor? Nah…you swat the doubt away like an annoying fly. It would have been impossible to fight aliens while everyone was consumed with fear about the meteor. And what if the meteor did end up to be significantly less harmful than the orange alien god king? The scientists all agreed that the meteor would definitely have left behind an unsightly crater - even if it was kind of small. And everyone knows craters suck!
[1] https://www.iberdrola.com/innovation/meteorites-earth#:~:text=Most%20meteorites%20reach%20the%20Earth's,fall%20to%20Earth%20every%20year.
[2] https://apnews.com/article/uk-france-iran-elections-left-far-right-8b219c4475484d366c8c64601fc55fc4
The problem is these Biden supporters are not enough to get Joe over the hump, he needs to win independents and undecideds as well (the other group you describe), and it looks highly unlikely that he will get enough votes from these groups to win the swing states.
Are you saying that the unaligned and undecideds would vote affirmatively for CFT over Joe if Joe stays in? Or that you think they would vote passively by not voting at all? Because those are the only two alternatives if Joe stays in and that group, as a group, decides not to support him in any way.
I think mostly they'll just decide to sit it out and not vote for either, so you could say it hurts both sides, but really it hurts Biden more, because he needs more votes than Trump just to stay even due to the electoral college imbalance.
However you justify if, it amounts to the same thing: A no vote for Joe is a help for CFT because it is a vote against democracy and that is what Project 2025 is all about, even if CFT says he never heard of it.
100% agree. I wish all these "undecideds" felt the same way. If people are still undecided at this point they haven't been paying attention, I find these people exasperating.
You would think they learned their lesson in 2016. In fact they did learn their lesson in time for the 2020 elections which saw historically high turnout and historically low third party votes. Do you think these same voters are going to forget the lesson in Nov 2024?
Back in 2008, black voters did not think that white people would vote for a black man for President. They didn't get on board until he won lily white Iowa.
I think the black electorate is trying to be very pragmatic here, but I do think they're underestimating the extreme dislike for the Bad Orange Criminal.
Can we just say what a terrible Biden campaign it's been so far? No surrogates out there hammering Trump every day, no reaching out the Haley voters, etc. Spent a shit ton of money on TV ads for NOTHING. Truly pathetic. It makes me think they're relying solely on the anti-Trump sentiment without actually making the case.
The way this campaign is currently going, it's going to be a Bataan death march to Nov 5th. It desperately needs a course correction - if Joe Biden can do it, then he needs to do it NOW. If he can't, he needs to step aside and let the party (along with Harris) figure it out.
This is a point that is being consistently missed or slept on. Biden's campaign ads reach me in Jersey, and it's all been Before Times advertising. I think they're trying to convert voters to Biden rather than drive up Trump's negatives.
The election is turning into a referendum on Biden, and that's a game that Trump wins the popular vote at.
Yep, expertise is a myth and data is nonsense, that'll work out
First of all, thanks for the volunteer work you're doing. A call here, a call there starts to add up. Again, thank you.
"I'll put my randoms up against your scientifically selected panels any day, Sarah."
Are they scientifically selected? The whole focus group thing is the least useful offering from the the Bulwark, in my opinion. Why is the methodology behind the groups not published anywhere? Who are these people? How are they selected? Randomly? Are the questions administered in a systematic way, and responses recorded in a way that allows drawing valid conclusions? If not, what is the point? I listened to one Focus Group podcast and that was enough for me.
If I'm wrong about this (and I've been wrong before) and the focus group methodology is described somewhere, please paste a link for me.
It's not posted than I am aware of but Sarah has talked about it in pods
They hire a professional group to find the people with the attributes they want to focus on...
It isn't random and it isn't like a poll
Sarah says: we want Trump to Biden voters, and the group screens for those and any other requirements, but nothing else...it is very tailored and specific...
As Sarah doesn't do the actual polling and they aren't asking any questions like a poll, there are no cross tabs
Maybe I'm being too pedantic, but it seems a lot like walking into a random bar and striking up conversations with your fellow drinkers. It certainly could be entertaining -- even provide a few laughs in the Jay Walking sense -- but the basis for political analysis? Not without a description of the approach and methodology and why we should believe in the accuracy of the conclusions. Otherwise it just seems like more noise. Sarah seems to take it all so seriously though. If it's serious, tell us why we should agree.
The whole approach and methodology is they want to ask questions to specific people to see what they think, so she can target them in her RVAT ads to convince them not to vote for Trump, and to get an idea what they think about several things,,,her conclusions are considered accurate because of her reputation at being good at this, why she writes for The Atlantic, WA PO, NYT's etc...and appears on cable news shows...she was a political operative before Trump too
Thanks.