This is certainly the message being broadcast into every home on the planet for the last 6 moths. In reality it seems a bit optimistic when we consider the Democrats are coming from a decade-long losing streak (http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jan/25/...), a monumentally embarrassing, record cost $1.2B failed 2016 Presidential campaign (http://nypost.com/2016/12/09/hillary-clintons-losing-campaig...), and following these up by going 0-6 in federal elections (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/21/georgia-special-e...) leaving them with their lowest representation in American government since the 1920's (http://www.npr.org/2016/03/04/469052020/the-democratic-party...).
I think it's pretty safe to say that the American leftist revolution is _not_ right around the corner.
The environment that catalyzed Trump's rise to power has not changed - if anything, it has intensified.
And the polling, which in aggregate, across all demographics, has been continually moving more and more negative each passing month. Even polls like Rasmussen, which have a traditional right-wing bias, have shown a consistent drop in support.
Metrics like the ones you mentioned aren't useful as predictors. Yes, the Democrats spent a lot of money. So did the Republicans. Big money elections are the norm now, and each election has a loser.
Your reference to losing special elections only tells half the story. These are races that should have been as safe as safe can be. That's why they're special elections, because when Presidents make appointments, they only tend to choose people from their party who are in such safe districts that they can easily be replaced. Often-times, the national party doesn't even send monetary support to these special elections, because they're re-won so handily.
Take Ossoff's challenge in Georgia. He lost by 4 points in a district that went for Trump by 19 points. Moreover, the Republicans were required to spend $25 million in order to defend a seat that they had most likely budgeted around $0 for. That's what's called a weathervane. Or a canary in a coal mine.
Even further down this rabbit hole, the 0-6 loss article is from June. Since then, we've had Phil Miller win by 9 points in a district that Trump won by 21 points, which means that's a 30 point swing! We also have Kevin Cavanaugh winning by 23.4 points in a district that Clinton only won by 0.1 points. There's also been sweeps of state legislatures in traditionally VERY deep red states such as Oklahoma.
Every single trend points to a very difficult 2018 for the Republicans, and an especially difficult 2020.
house: https://www.predictit.org/Market/2704/Which-party-will-contr...
senate: https://www.predictit.org/Market/2703/Which-party-will-contr...
Ossoff got 125,517 votes Handel got 134,799 votes.
Compare
Dem - 124,917 Rep - 201,088
As you see there was no swing in Dem's favour.
A special election is a hard sell. Democrats sold it. Republicans didn't.
Mid-term elections are also hard sells. We'll see who can sell it.
Isn't that normal? In Australia these sorts of elections usually swing heavily against the government of the day but are very poor predictions of what will happen at a general election. Is this not the norm in America?
However, a special election within the months after a Presidential election should follow the same results, since there hasn't been the time to build the resentment necessary for a significant change in voting patterns. That, however, has not been the case with the Trump presidency.
We've also seen the trend at state level for the last few years, it seems swings are coming harder and faster.
> The way the swings on the special elections are going, which are all violently swinging away from the Republicans.
The Republicans won all 6 special elections.
> Take Ossoff's challenge in Georgia. He lost by 4 points > the Republicans were required to spend $25 million
He lost. And it was the Democrats who spent $23 Million (the most ever spent) on the election not the Republicans. The republicans spent like $3 Million dollars.
By slim margins in what should have been extremely safe districts.
Then they lost the next 2, one of which by way a 30 point swing.
The swing is not something you can hand-wave away. It's one of the best metrics we have as a predictor for 2018.
> The republicans spent like $3 Million dollars.
Estimates on how much was spent on the election range from $40-$60 million.
$23 million is the amount of fundraising that was done by Ossoff's campaign, independent of the DCCC or traditional DNC PACs, which means none of it came from their "warchest". The DCCC provided an additional $5 million of TV ad spends in Ossoff's favor.
On the Republican side, they spent way more than $3 million. The NRCC spent about $6.7 million on TV ad spends. Paul Ryan's SuperPAC spent about $5 million on airtime and $2 million on additional costs. Two other conservative PACs raised an additional $1 million.
https://www.issueone.org/money-behind-expensive-u-s-house-ra...
The breakdown is very complicated, because money can come in from dozens of different types of sources, and the numbers aren't usually finalized until long after the election ends.
The $23 million figure, however, was mostly crowd-sourced in small donations. So to be very clear, you can say that came from citizens who identify as Democrats and be generally right, but to say it came from Democrats as an organization or a political entity, that is not correct.
Not in the double digits, they don't. And not in special elections shortly into the first year of the Presidency, especially.
But GP only mentioned alt-rights as an example of where might the voters turn their preferences.
Even at Google where James worked, many employees agree with his memo (36%), and the majority, 54% of them think the memo is harmless and was OK to share: https://basicgestalt.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/press-f-for-ja...
After Google fired him, these 54% will inevitably think about what other ideas they think are harmless might cause them to be fired. Not exactly comforting thoughts.
It totally would. Statistically, a sample size of 282 out of a population of 60000 is pretty good.
If this test was authentic, we would be 95% sure that the true percentage of the population who think that the memo is harmless is between 47% and 60%.
Otherwise you could run a poll "Who thinks [minority] should leave the USA?", get a high "yes" response, say "THE POPULACE AGREE!" but then discover only racists/whatever have replied because Breitbart/4chan dogpiled the poll - which would make it 100% invalid, no?
However, the design matches the defaults of google forms, exact colors and their sequence, too: http://imgur.com/WPC0ogZ
Also the header says "gd-jpeg v1.0", it’s a cross platform open source C library with bindings for all modern programming languages including Go and Python: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD_Graphics_Library
Even if that’s a fake, it’s a good one.
I could whip upa similar graph without breaking a sweat that says whatever I'd like, and it would have all the same hallmarks of this one. I could even do it in PHP using ImageMagick (if I felt masochistic) and fake the file header to say it was created using GD. Or build it in photoshop, and pull it into a binary editor.
So I think unless there's someone who can point to greater evidence that this is an internal graph, there's just no reason to believe it is.
So I think unless there's someone who can point to the actual internal graph, there's just no reason to believe this is fake.
The distribution this poll shows is not so outlandish as to be unbelievable, and importantly it does not lend itself to overwhelmingly support one side over the other. Why would anyone spend time and effort to fake it?
It's a heated argument on the internet. There'd be plenty of incentive to fake a graph in order to bolster one's opinion.
I am not bullish on Trump long term, but not because some extremists also support him, but because of his own randomness and inability to get things done in Washington.
The traditional conservative movement is dying out. Quite literally, it has a demographic problem that it is not sure how to resolve. In it's place, you have the alt-right, which does tend to be more youthful, but which acts as an umbrella for a wide variety of extremist viewpoints, everything from extreme libertarianism to conspiracy theorists to white nationalism to single-issue anti-islamic advocates and a whole host of others. And within that milieu, a large proportion of people are not singularly committed to those hard-right ideologies as much as they define themselves solely in their rejection of liberalism, the left, or social justice. The result is a whole host of confusion. The alt-right is constantly infighting about cultural issues such as traditional masculinity or gay rights, to the difference between opposition to illegal immigration (a viewpoint which can claim to be more centrist) or opposing immigration altogether, including legal (which is held by the nationalist wing of the movement).
As the voting base disappears, these groups will have to figure out how to grow their movement, make political demands, maintain a presence without burning out, etc. Just like all movements do. But that's exactly where those intense internal divisions come in and wreak havoc.
The alt-right is not constantly infighting.
The left are more likely to devolve into infighting.
This google guy was moderate left wing and the hard line social justice response from Google and the media will alienate a lot more of the intellectual left.
Hispanics and African Americans often lean socially conservative.
Gay men are a lot more fiscally conservative than you might think.
None of those groups identify with single white woman.
Etc etc.
His first interviews were with alt-right Youtube channels.
I agree with your points about lots of minority groups being socially (and/or fiscally) conservative. It's lucky for the left that the white social conservatives have been driving them away consistently for decades.
I'd argue he is still left of center.
He is just interviewing with the groups who will give him a fair go.
So yeah he's definitely in that general area.
they won't change their position. If anything, their position will be radicalized. For example, from classical liberal to alt-right.
This is been a common sort of mantra since Trump won the presidency. Whenever we have a controversial event like this, people make a statement that any actions by those on the left will only further radicalize people in the other direction. I don't think it's true, but most of all, I don't think that other direction really leads anywhere useful. For the reasons I outlined previously.
Superficially at most. When you go to some of the most popular alt-right facebook pages, and you see caricatures of Jews and whole racial groups consistently disparaged and stereotyped, and when you see just how many people posting in them have cross-interests with white supremacist and misogynist movements, you realize that "welcoming" is a very, very narrow term.
Sounds like an amazing sit-com. Stay tuned, folks!
But what happens when the 4chan poster with the anime pillow who denies the holocaust just to get a rise out of the libcucks crosses paths with an actual hardline anti-semite who is interested in building an even-more-final solution?
To use a colloquialism, what happens when the rubber meets the road? Do the fascists tolerate what they would consider to be total degeneracy for the sake of finally building a mass movement? Does the online troll recognize that what was an ironic joke for him is a hard reality for others, and move to push their real-life activism away from those types of groups?
This is what I mean by internal contradictions, the kind that can kill a mass movement before it even starts.
So while there is a common refrain of "this is why Trump won, and the movement of contrarians, devils advocates, trolls, anti-pc crusaders, people who tweet about white genocide, stormfront regulars and conspiracy theorists is only going to grow if you being offensive towards them", the reality is much, much more complicated.
Trust in Trump has plummeted, even amongst his core. The vote is very quickly slipping out of the grasp of the Right, and was always a race against time demographically to begin with. And if you're in a position where you can't win through democratic means, you have to use other means (boycotts, protests, organizing, etc). And the alt-right is utterly lamed by it's own hand before that race has even started.