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Has anyone seen Republican Nikki Haley supporters in the wild?
I read a paywalled article the other day in Australian media optimistically hoping for a sudden realignment of fortunes, that Trump might possibly lose the primary.
The article is realistic that Haley's chances are quite low but it favours her nonetheless. I also saw NYT charts that said Haley won the debates. I still doubt that the NYT knows what makes for a good Republican candidate. Their support may be toxic.
Of course, there are polls showing that Haley is coming close to Trump. The funny thing is that nearly all the unrehearsed commentary I've seen about Haley is extremely negative. Even the Boomers commenting below the Australian article seem to favour Trump. Online people have mocked her for the 'I wear heels. They’re not for a fashion statement. They’re for ammunition' comment, which is admittedly pretty bizarre. I never saw any support for her, only people urging Trump not to pick her as VP. Even DeSantis had some traction on twitter, even if it was just his supporters getting shouted down by the overwhelming Trump chorus.
But I'm slightly self-aware, it's no good saying 'well nobody I know voted Nixon' when I'm not even American. Is Haley the new astroturf candidate like Jeb Bush or am I living in an infobubble? Should we all just trust the polls that say she's the primary challenger? Do you see people in real life or online who favour her? If you do, are they actually Republican primary voters as opposed to Democrats? Do any of you support Nikki Haley? Does she have a chance, perhaps if Trump is sent to prison?
Biden didn't have a real base of supporters before he won the primary either. There were even articles about it. Picture a stereotypical Hillary fan. A stereotypical Bernie fan. A stereotypical Biden fan. The last one is impossible, like trying to picture a square circle.
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I would expect my father would lean towards Haley. He's a Republican and interested in politics, but not a fan of Trump.
I was impressed with her first debate performance, but haven't liked some of the subsequent things (and would trust some of the other candidates more to address e.g. civil rights law).
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Nikki Haley is who the establishment GOP and big republican donors have decided to get behind. Murdoch has Fox boosting her.
The poll the Guarding article talks about is just for New Hampshire. Trump is over 50% nationally for the primary and over 70% in a head to head with Haley. I don't see any path to victory for her.
The plan was to convince Ron DeSantis to run by tipping him off about the upcoming Trump charges. Trump, critically damaged by the charges, would go after DeSantis to secure the MAGA vote. A third candidate would clean up as a sane alternative in the race.
Instead the charges made supporters rally to Trump, DeSantis showed some terrible political instincts, and Haley has no hope of winning.
Her campaign is assuming that a Trump conviction would destroy his candidacy, but the reality is that it wouldn't be seen as legitimate by Republican voters. Also it's actually established case law that you can still run for President from prison. Eugene V. Debs did it in 1920.
Good points. I should've mentioned that I was quoting from a Murdoch newspaper above.
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I'm visiting family in New Jersey right now. No Haley support detected.
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That's my instinctive sense of such 'support'. Like Hillary Clinton's campaign backing Trump to be the Republican candidate because they were so confident he was easy to beat, getting places like the NYT coming out with "Haley looks like the one in the lead" makes me think that there is at least some "please pick her because she will be vulnerable when our guys get going" thinking going on, like "we'd love to have her debating Joe Biden and then bring up 'so why won't you condemn slavery, Nikki?'.
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Sure, my mom likes her. Boomer Republican, doesn't miss a 49ers game. Not Waspy rich or Jewish or anything like that. My mom works at Home Depot.
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I am visiting extended family in Iowa so the primary ads are everywhere. Some odd things I've noticed:
Trump and Desantis are running both hard money (x candidate endorsed this ad ads from their campaigns) and dark money issue only ads that attempt to tie an opponent to the issue but all of the pro-Haley ads are the dark money type and most are targeting DeSantis rather than Trump, which seems like they aren't actually serious about winning.
Smells strongly of astroturf to me, but perhaps she's really only running for 2nd in which case she seems likely to be the first of the candidates in 2016 who got the focus and then lost it followed by dropping shortly after.
The only way either of them has a chance is if Trump actually gets removed from the ballot. No amount of attack ads on Trump are going to convince enough voters against him. Thus, attacking Trump is a waste of money, and it makes more sense to preemptively attack DeSantis.
A medical event taking Trump out of contention is also plausible (either death, or something sufficiently obviously incapacitating like a severe stroke). If it happens before Super Tuesday, then the primaries go ahead as normal. If it happens after Super Tuesday, then there are a bunch of now-unpledged Trump delegates on the Convention Floor, making it a party-insider contest. If it happens after the convention then the RNC would pick an alternative nominee - also a party-insider contest. So an establishment candidate who establishes themselves as the clear alternative to Trump has a chance of getting in through the back door.
A few months ago I would have said that the medical route was the least unlikely way a non-Trump candidate could be the nominee. But as time goes by the probability of a medical event drops, and it may be the least unlikely route is now a section 3 disqualification. If there is a section 3 disqualification, I expect Vivek to be the nominee based on "f*** the establishment" sentiment.
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I know one Nikki superfan, who was also a Hillary superfan. Gay dude who loves powerful pantsuit women, and also flipped from left to right after the events of 2020. Probably not a huge part of the electorate.
Me too, might even be the same guy. But I think it shows how aesthetic the whole tournament is. While there are minor policy differences between DeSantis, Trump and Haley (and even Vivek), their respective popularity is primarily aesthetic. DeSantis is arguably more reactionary than Trump, and Haley isn’t as “RINO” as her detractors make her out to be, but it doesn’t matter.
If Trump adopted Haley’s platform tomorrow, and if Haley adopted Trump’s, nothing about their popularity would change. In fact, as far as I can tell Trump hasn’t even announced any policy yet beyond signaling that his primary intention once back in office will be pursuing the people who he believes wronged him in the courts.
RINO is one of those words that doesn't add to the debate in this context. There's a split between two wings of the party, it's not really the case that neither has the right to use the word Republican.
Haley is from the NeoCon wing and fully supports using the military to expand the overseas empire. Invade the world and invite the world, as Steve Sailer puts it.
Trump's policy is hard borders and prosperous trade. Borders Conservatism and Principled Realism are terms thrown around.
The split is between the nationalist and internationalist wings of the GOP. Before the 90s the internationalists got everyone onside with foreign invasion in the name of anti-communism.
The Bushes were solidly in the internationalist camp, and pre Trump they were the only post USSR Republican presidents.
But 20+ years after 9/11 and 30+ after the USSR the nationalist wing wants to scale back foreign interventions.
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If you think there aren't meaningful differences between a Trump platform and a Haley platform, I'm going to infer you really don't follow politics all that closely.
And, I assume, pretty substantial differences between Desantis and Haley.
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I think his point isn't that their platforms are identical, but that voters don't care about their platforms. The platforms have meaningful differences but they are similar enough to not be that decisive, and GOP voters as a mass just aren't reading them.
Nobody is sitting down and reading the official campaign platform documents hosted on a website or somesuch. But suggesting that voters don't see strong differences between Trump and other candidates is nonsense.
Come on, am I supposed to believe Nikki Haley shares Trump's ideas about immigration? Tariffs? Social Security? This is casual google territory.
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You can't convince me of this. Not in the ways it matters. If he actually was he would be getting a worse treatment than orangeman, as it is the MSM would rather shill for DeSantis if they felt like they had a chance to sap some of Trump's supporters his way.
DeSantis has staff and a legislature that support him. His staff also know how to pick winning political fights in Florida.
Trump expected that after the 2016 campaign was over the rest of the GOP would get onside and work with him, but that wasn't realistic.
Ideologically DeSantis has been more of a corporate republican of the Paul Ryan variety. But he's seen that's not a winning strategy these days and he's politically ambitious.
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Which MSM outlets are shilling for Ron DeSantis? Do you have specific examples?
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Is that really true? I remember countless “worse than Trump” media pieces about DeSantis. Indeed, MSM and Trump colluded on attacking DeSantis.
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In real life, I don't know anyone who has said anything positive out loud about Haley. Though in real life, people around me barely talk about the primaries. Of the people I know the opinions of, I'd say about 1/2 are in the tank for Trump and the other half went from really liking DeSantis to simply favoring him.
I've personally moved from strong support to DeSantis to planning to vote Vivek. Vivek says outrageous stuff and it didn't work on me until I couldn't avoid any longer contrasting it with Ron's complete spinelessness and clear hopefulness that D shenanigans will give him an unearned victory over Trump, consequences be famned
I think RDS made a political mistake. He should’ve just been himself the entire time. He listened to consultants too much.
But at the end of the day, I look at his record as a governor and the at record can’t be described as spineless.
Edit: I don’t know if you watched the debates but there seems to be an emerging alliance between Vivek and DeSantis. They aren’t that different on policy. A couple of times they agreed. They were occasionally joking with each other during TV timeouts.
To be clear, the spinelessness (perhaps the wrong word) I speak of is strictly that he's too tempted by the upside of Trump losing on lawfare that he dances around outright condemnation of what's happening and won't put any skin into fighting with 'Trump' against this.
Like in a recent interview responding to Vivek pledging to remove himself from Colorados ballot, he made a comment to the effect of ' hey I'm going to compete on every ballot I can, whether or not Trump makes it on. That's the name of the game'
This is effectively admitting to 'playing' the rigged game. Ron appearing on a ballot that Trump doesn't is literally the name of the Democrats' game. It's not the name of the fair primaries game.
I loathe Trump, but Ron's refusal to do more to stand in solidarity against the Democrat bullshit reveals him as a flake, if his Ukraine flip-flop hadn't already.
I would still vote Ron over Trump all day on abortion conviction alone and for every other reason. But I'm now backing Vivek. (Not that it matters anyway.)
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As far as I can tell, the whole Republican primary is about whether something happens in Trump's legal cases, or Trump otherwise does something sufficiently embarrassing, that his support base evaporates or the party drops him from the ticket.
People vary wildly in how likely they think that possibility is, but that's most of the probability space in which anything else happening in the Republican primary matters. All of the debates and campaigning are mostly about who becomes the nominee in that hypothetical world.
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The best argument against the ‘NeverTrumper’ / Lincoln Project GOP anti-Trump types was the first Trump presidency, because Trump didn’t do anything ‘fascist’ (or even populist, really) but did achieve a bunch of generic GOP priorities like tax cuts, being tougher on Iran and stacking SCOTUS because of a couple of lucky breaks.
“Business Republicans”, neoconservatives, hardcore Evangelicals and some Catholics for whom abortion is the #1 priority are the only people Trump unambiguously served during his time in office. Meanwhile, much of “the base”, ie. people who wanted economic populism, mass deportation of illegals and other protectionist and nativist policies, was completely short-changed.
The only people who should feel happy voting for Trump are, in an immense irony, Bill Kristol types because they are more likely than anyone else to get their policy preferences under Trump (who will pursue, as he did in office, aggressive neocon foreign policy while any domestic social conservatism is stymied by congress and the “deep state” / bureaucracy).
In 10 years, people may finally realize that Trump’s greatest success was making neoconservatism palatable again by fronting it with a thin and never-implemented facade of rightist populism.
This is half true/false.
Trump basically didn't give them all of what they want and panders to everyone. This is unacceptable to them and frame it as extreme.
If Trump was not elected, a Clinton administration would be more neocon.
In foreign policy, Trump's behavior was definetly not as beligerent as the neocons would have liked both in the middle east and also on Russia. He also opposed the Iraq war. He still was extremely pro Israel though.
On the culture war sphere, he pushed for muslim ban, tried to get his wall and cut off immigration, had some edgy quotes. it is also what he didn't do. But also pushed the decriminalization bill, tried to pander to Hispanics, etc.
Trump derangement syndrome is not about Trump being uniquely bad or far right but about him being moderate and our elites radicalizing in a purity spiral direction. Part of this is also a tendency to be too judgemental about singular quotes and towards the right and to avoid making comparisons.
Part of being a moderate of course includes edgy far right type quotes about migrants like Trump did. A moderate should be expected to sometimes be edgy in a right wing direction too, and sometimes in a left wing as Trump did with the decriminalization bill towards blacks. Maybe he is too far to the left though in general.
It is a comparative issue. So Trump a) had executive orders against people promoting diversity ideology in the goverment, opposed removal of confederate monuments and claimed that it would be after the founding fathers next. Compare him to someone like Joe Biden, who has been aggressively anti-white and woke and authoritarian to a great degree, and Trump comes as the more inclusive president ironically. Someone who unlike Biden, and the neocons does try to pander to everyone, perhaps less to white voters directly.
We saw that in various countries without Trump like figures, the right implemented it self the cultural far left agenda.
So, Trump isn't the great based figure, but he is a lesser evil and the more moderate option who tries to push back against some of the radicalizing excesses and tries to some extend to satisfy some of the demands of his base too. I guess he might fall more in line with some of the rhetoric of some of the claims of neocons in the 90s but they have proven themselves to be more disingenuous and much more radical.
Clearly for Trump to make an actual lasting change he will have to act more aggressively if he is elected the second time, fire a lot of people and put actual right wingers in charge of the bureaucracy. But there are also limitations of how much one guy can change things, but he can do more. Focusing too much on Trump as a problem misunderstands things. People like the ex republican speaker of the house claim that the republicans should be like the Democrats and reflect American demographics. We saw how similar claims by Cameron ended up in British politics.
The real story is the radicalization of the liberals and people who erroneously affter accepting too much far left ideology claim to still be centrists. And of the people who present themselves as center right. Part of this had to do with normies being influenced by propaganda by more extremist types who promoted one sided distorted picture of the world after we had left wing and neocon march through the institutions. Is someone who started more moderate still such, if they are successfully manipulated in this manner? A world without Trump is a world where either other type of populist leaders oppose them or these kind of people try to remove all opposition and in an authoritarian manner impose a hardcore racist cultural far leftist woke agenda.
In foreign policy there is a similar problem with the influence of the MIC and certain lobbies that are pro war against Russia, China, or say Iran. There is also an issue of corruption and revolving doors with politics, think tanks, and weapon manufacturers. And also the influence of collection of donors and their lobbies. Nikki Haley exemplifies that corruption in a way that Trump doesn't, while it would be a mistake to pretend that Trump is independent of it. In general, in most ways Trump is bad he is similarly bad to most other politicians and not as bad.
So he seems as neither the problem and unlikely to be the solution, even if people put hopes on him due to sucking less than most.
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... according to the sincere beliefs of Trump supporters, yes.
According to the sincere beliefs of most/many anti-Trumpers, he did.
So I'm not sure how much that helps.
Especially the aftermath of the 2020 election.
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I think particularly on the Jewish Republican side, while Trump had some big supporters in 2016 (at least by the time he eventually won the primaries) like Adelson, much more support happened in 2020 after people realized that certain trumped up establishment fears about Trump were overblown. Larry Ellison spent tens of millions of dollars supporting Rubio and directly opposing Trump in 2016, four years later he was in on calls with the Trump campaign about how they might try to change the election result in November 2020. Sure, he would rather still Rubio or Tim Scott as President, but he’s clearly fine with Trump.
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In contrast to other posters here I don't know anyone that plans to vote for Trump in the primary and this includes plenty of people that voted for him in 2016. People claim to be voting for RDS or Nikki. These are mostly middle class in California, Florida and New England.
I realise that my sample isn't representative (especially since I don't live in America) and that trump almost certainly will win the primary but supporters for both Nikki and RDS clearly exist.
My interactions, mostly in MO and on Twitter/X is that most are still with Trump; those who aren’t are generally for Desantis. Vivek and Halley are not really in the hunt here. I don’t see RDS coming close to beating Trump at all.
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A couple of my friends like Nikki Haley; they are educated center-right types, like the posters below have said. I don't think she stands a chance.
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The idea that Nikki Haley is having a moment, or is coming anywhere close to Trump, is a complete media fiction. This has happened in Republican primaries, over and over again, when a slow news cycle leads to a spurt of interest in a new candidate. Much of this is timed with ad blitzes and campaign consultants putting out puff pieces. Get enough people talking about how people are talking about, and you get Nikki Haley having a moment.
What's the theory here? Indictments caused Trump to noticeably perform better in polls: cause, effect. Vivek Ramaswamy performing well in debates caused him to rise marginally: cause, effect. Nikki Haley is performing better, because, uh, ... ?
Which is my point: sometimes these things don't mean anything, there's just natural variation over time and phantoms in the air.
Nikki Haley has no chance whatsoever, and Trump is leading the primary polls by the greatest margins ever seen in modern politics. A meteor could fall on Mar-a-Lago, and Nikki Haley would still lose.
Haley did very well in the first debate, which was what started her rise.
Vivek's peak was actually before the first debate.
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Some conservative talk radio hosts like her. Based on that one data point I'd say some significant faction of Republicans are non-Trump and wish someone like Haley could be the nominee.
Which ones? I only hear them shitting on her.
Armstrong and Getty like her, but they admit the debates and primary are a waste of time given Trump's enormous lead.
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A supermajority of my Republican family and friends are Trump fans, and the rest all support Desantis. I’ve heard a few speak approvingly of Vivek as a good second choice behind Trump, but I haven’t heard anyone so much as mention Haley. This is in the Midwest, so not really Haley’s stumping grounds, which might go some way to explaining her lack of popularity.
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Do you ever listen to Bill Simmons? The people that support her are like his friend Jacko who is an old school Republican who actually likes what the party stood for before Trump. These people are rich WASPy or Jewish type people in Connecticut that are lawyers and doctors and went to elite private schools. They aren't the kind of people who post here or care about HBD and stuff like taht. They care about balancing the budget, reducing the debt, lowering taxes to stimulate the economy and basic bitch Republican shit like that. That's her base.
But where is the evidence that Haley would do all of that. She basically never faced anything difficult in SC. There is zero reason to believe she’d be able to do really anything in DC. She strikes me as a blank canvas that some people can project their hopes onto; not a real person.
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I expect her to underperform in NH due to the libertarian influence there. The only group I've encountered that seems to like her are conservative jews associated with the Urban East coast, which is no weak demographic but not really enough to carry her.
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Basically, nobody on the Internet supported Joe Biden, but he was the Democratic nominee easily.
I'm not saying Haley is going to do that, but the loud online people are all Trumpian, just like the loud people online in 2020 were all Bernie supporters. It's just Trump also has more support among the rest of the party.
Haley at say, 20% is not a shocking number, and ending up at say, 35-40% in New Hampshire, a very moderate state that Haley is putting a lot of time into wouldn't be surprising at all. So, a few outlier polls currently showing her within 5 or 10 in New Hampshire aren't out of line.
I also think you're likely in your own bubble. The type of people who support Haley, are likely not on media you show, or in areas where you are. Also, NYT polling isn't polling NYT readers, it's usually polling people who watched the debate.
But, as somebody else noticed, the type of person who likely supports Haley at the moment is a combination of college-educated center-right voters, normie suburban voters, and such, that for obvious reasons, don't mention their politcal beliefs on the Internet a lot, because they'll get called RINO's by most of the party, but also are too conservative to ever be Democrat's.
and all it took was fundamental changes to nomination rules specifically to undermine a Bernie Sanders compared to 2016, quite a bit of obvious fraud at the Iowa caucus for Pete to "win," and then rely on machine black politics in SC for a totally legitimate and aboveboard "win" for Biden, followed quickly by behind-the-scenes Obama/Party scheming for all other candidates to drop out and support Biden for Super Tuesday
in hindsight, it's easy for things to seem inevitable and "easy," but that's just not what happened in the 2020 Dem primary
the GOP doesn't have this amount of power which is why they lost against Trump in 2016; they can scheme and ignore voices/votes like they did against a marginal Ron Paul in 2012, but the party fundamentally doesn't have the power to undermine a candidate as popular as Bernie with their voter base let alone Trump who is far more popular among GOP voters than Bernie is with Democrat voters
there is zero chance this happens to Trump
there have already been attempts lead by sniveling GOP schemers to adjust winner-take-all delegate rules to undermine Trump which failed, not that their passing would have meaningfully affected the outcome of the GOP nomination anyway
edit:
the loudest popular online people should be Trumpian given his sheer popularity but it's not all and as far as I can tell, the support for other candidates, Desantis especially, is entirely online
I think it's important to remember that Biden led in the polls for most of the 2020 campaign season, only falling off the lead after performing surprisingly poorly in the early primaries. This is difficult to remember, because the media class was never all-in on a Biden candidacy and was looking to prop up alternatives to take the so-called moderate lane, most notably Klobuchar and Buttigieg. The problem was that neither of those two had a chance of getting broad support among black voters. After South Carolina proved that they would support Biden regardless of how many people wrote his obituary, it was clear to the other moderates that they had no lane left; Biden would win the South by huge margins while they fought against each other and struggled to keep up with Bernie and Warren in the other states. The only path either of them had was through a brokered convention, and that's not a good way to go. So they dropped out and supported the moderate with the best chance.
I digress, though. The lesson to be drawn from this is that dominance in polls means nothing once the actual elections start. Biden's lead wasn't as big as Trump's but it was big enough. If DeSantis or Haley or whoever goes into Iowa and wins, or is at least competitive, then it's a whole different ballgame, and 2020 shows that there's a strong possibility of that happening. Buttigieg was only polling around 7% when he won Iowa. And if that happens in 2024 it will throw the whole Trump campaign into a tailspin that they may not be able to recover from. I'm not saying that will happen, but it's a distinct possibility. Maybe there's a Trump constituency similar to black southerners who can buoy him later in the primaries, but again, maybe not. We'll find out soon enough.
Yes, thank you for reminding me Biden had leads in national polling leading up to the first primaries. My memory is his polling tanked after his bad losses in Iowa and New Hampshire to out of the top 3. The media was also fawning over Kamala and pushing Booker, one of which failed because Kamala is so dislikable and she dropped out early and Booker who withdrew before the SC contest but would have likely gotten black support in South Carolina. Both of which dropped out before the SC primary because a deal was struck for Jim Clyburn to deliver the machine black votes to him and he did, saving Joe Biden's campaign. None of this was written-in-stone and it took quite a bit of effort to accomplish. It was neither easy nor inevitable.
Biden +~5-10 in national polling isn't just "not as big as Trump's," it's not even in the same category because Trump is polling near or over 50% in most primaries, including all the first ones. Biden was polling behind multiple other candidates in the early primaries and lost those primaries, coming in 4th? in Iowa. For comparison, Trump is +50 in national polling and well over 50%. That 50% number is a magic one in polling and more or less signals the contest is over. Comparing the 2020 Democrat primary with the 2024 GOP primary is difficult because the 2024 GOP Primary is the least competitive primary in the modern era and it's not close. The fact it exists at all is because many in GOP leadership and the candidates hope Trump will somehow be removed from the contest. All of the manufactured and curated media dialogue and blitz and ads are contingent on this.
The gameplan of the early primaries is to do well enough to convince other campaigns to drop out as donor dollars dry up and media pressure escalates. Trump isn't going to drop out due to primary performance. Trump will never have fundraising issues. He won't be pressured by media derps. He will get through the primary season and will get to the convention. The only path forward for the other GOP candidates is for Trump to be removed; that's the only distinct possibility. If this happens and the GOP does do anything other than run Trump anyway, they will not only lose the general election badly but will likely kill the party.
The reason why Democrats have changed their "primary" system and removed Iowa and NH from the lead primary contests is because they know Biden does poorly in them and is just another example of the Democrats ability and willingness to exercise Party power to shield their preferred candidate. The contrast between Democrats and the GOP is stark.
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The Democratic primaries front-load a few states that tend to lean Bernie, but I knew back in 2020 that as soon as the Southern states voted Bernie would probably get crushed by black mainstream Democrats coming out to support the known item long-term mainstream Democrat and Obama VP. And then Biden would continue to do well in flyover states where, unlike in Bernie-loving college towns, voters want familiar Biden and sure thing electability rather than risking Sanders. Everybody except Bernie and Biden dropping out of course helped Biden, but I doubt that Bernie would have won even without it. He would have seemed like a plausible primary winner for longer than in the real scenario, but I doubt that would have been enough to overcome Biden's numerical advantage.
Biden was polling nationally around 5th place after New Hampshire before South Carolina. It was definitely a do-or-die moment and it wasn't a sure thing. Change a few small details and Biden absolutely could have lost.
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Had Bernie won in Iowa, Nevada, and NH, and lost SC, I think he would have had too much support for Democrat Party scheming to take it from him and he would have won the nomination which is why the party engaged in fraud to get Pete Buttwhatever the "win" in Iowa and more shenanigans to get a split in NH. At the time, Biden was doing horribly. The reason there is so much effort put into the early primaries is because they significantly affect the subsequent race and discussion.
For all this "inevitability" talk here and elsewhere, that is not my memory at the time or the hottakes of anyone at the time. In hindsight, everyone's memory trends toward things being inevitable when that's just not the case a lot of the time.
Would Bernie have gotten the nomination? I don't know, I would guess probably but there is ample room for more Party power. What I'm mostly arguing against is the sort of rewriting of history to remember this period as "easy" and inevitable, which it was not.
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No, Trump is legitimately popular among the base. WTA delegate rules are dumb, though.
But, by "party scheming," you mean Obama called up people and said, "hey, sure seems you all agree with each other, so support Joe since he's our best shot." Like, Twitter joked about moderate voltron when MSNBC did it in polling, then was very mad when it happened. The Iowa & SC is just whining - the number of people shifted by Pete "winning" as opposed to Bernie couldn't fill up a Starbucks, and again, yes, you have to appeal to actual voters in a state to win, and guess what in South Carolina, that's the supposed "uneducated" black voters.
That just shows, and I say this, as a left-wing social democrat, how united the moderate wing was, and how weak and divided the left-wing of the party was, and how much a failure Bernie was, when between 2016 & 2020, he lost support in many working class areas he'd won in 2016 and failed to reach out to black voters in the South, that he needed to win.
Also, by fundamental calendar changes, you mean, making more contests actual democratic primaries instead of weird caucuses, yeah, they did that, and that was a good thing if you think the party nominee should actually have popular support.
The actual problem dead-enders who still think Bernie was screwed over don't get is that a lot of people like Bernie, but they liked Biden too, but they made a choice they thought Biden had a better chance of winning.
The median Bernie voter is the girl from this news story - (https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2020/10/19/boston-woman-dunkies-fenway-voting-video/) - who said she was voting for Joe Biden. She said she would’ve voted for Bernie Sanders but “it’s a team sport," not upset doomer blackpilled folks on Twitter.
I say this all as somebody who voted for Bernie twice, but both times, saw massive flaws in how he and his team were approaching the primary, including his manager saying all they needed to worry about was winning 1/3 of the vote.
No, I mean by party scheming that Barack Obama and other Democrat Party insiders came up to trade admin appointments and racial politics wins in order for all other opponents to collapse and support Biden.
do you think WTA rules help popular candidates like Bernie or Trump which the party doesn't like or harms them? whether you like them or not is irrelevant
whether or not something is a "good thing" is irrelevant as to whether or not the changes harmed a candidate like Bernie or helped him
what I mean is the rule changes harm candidates like Bernie; the changes put control in the hands of the "government-run" primary system controlled by machine politics who count the mail-in "votes" in population centers instead of require motivated voters and ground game to win the day, something Bernie was exceptionally good at
contrary to claiming this requires "actual popular support," it requires pieces of paper to be counted at centralized counting centers; for example, the total accidental mistake which wasn't found until a whistleblower appeared in the 2021 NYC mayoral primary which by pure happenstance gave 135,000 votes to the Party supported candidate Garcia over current Mayor Adams
If most of the party supports a moderate candidate but multiple moderate candidates compete so that a radical candidate wins, is that a better representation of the voters?
Why is moderate / radical the only axis in your scheme? Who's to say that all flavors of "moderate" are equal to all voters?
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my comment is to dispute the claim the Biden nomination was "easy" and/or inevitable using my memory of events as well as specifics of what happened during the 2020 nomination to support that dispute
I'm not claiming Bernie should have won the nomination or that it would be "better" or that any of the agenda driven policy choices which changed the way Democrat primaries were done were "good" or "bad," but that they were driven by the disputed and messy 2016 nomination debacle specifically in to undermine a candidate like Bernie. Bernie's 2020 loss wasn't inevitable or "easy," it took quite a bit of scheming and planning and tactics to avoid another 2016 debacle.
In those terms, no, but what does this have to do with the topic at hand? If you're attempting to make a comparison between the above hypothetical to the real world in the 2020 primary with the real 2020 candidates I would dispute both your characterizations and the simplification of candidate preference.
Which candidates were "moderate" and why? Which were "radical" and why? "Radicals" and "moderates" are not interchangeable which is why they typically have differing supporters. Is it true that a person who prefers a "moderate" when asked would prefer any moderate compared to any particular "radical"? No, this can be seen in pretty much any polling cross-tab. If we ask people specific policy positions and then graft that onto candidates, do they prefer the "moderate" or "radical" candidate (labels used with agendas)? It's an easy hypothetical which appears to have a simple answer, but I think when we apply it to real world politics it doesn't accurately predict voter preferences.
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Oh, you're somebody who thinks everybody is rigged. Never mind then.
But, to anybody reading, what he describes is called typical coalition politics. Nobody is honor-bound to continue to run for office if they think by dropping out and getting something in exchange, or because they prefer that candidate over the other, somebody will have a better chance. Like, it's not going to be corrupt when Vivek drops out and supports the guy closest to him - Trump. Like, why did people expect the other candidates to just allow Bernie to win the primary with 35% of the vote and do nothing about it? Plus, much of the moderate voltron didn't get anything or use racial politics - Amy Klobuchar got nothing. She's still Senator of Minnesota, and she was before that. She was the other major part of the moderate voltron, and the reality is, Mayor Pete was a strong enough candidate that he would've gotten a gig in the Bernie administration, just like ironically, everything points to Kamala being Bernie's VP choice.
Again, Biden had things to offer candidates w/ views closer to him. The issue is, Bernie (and his supporters) upset the one person somewhat close to him, not that it would've mattered in the long term, as even during the primary, Biden was actually enough Warren's supporters 2nd choice that Biden would've still won
I think a popular candidate will win regardless of the rules. Trump was that, Bernie wasn't. Unfortunately. But, to a certain extent, it's his own fault. He and his supporters didn't realize much of his support in 2016 was anti-Hillary, not ideological, and when somebody like Biden showed up, those people would move to him, and like I said, he did virtually nothing to try to win over black Southern Democrat's in the four years between 2016 & 2020.
"require motivated voters and ground game to win the day, something Bernie was exceptionally good at"
Yes, I believe in one person, one vote, not some votes being worth more because they care more. Which is why I oppose caucuses, and support primaries with same-day registration. What you wanted was a minority of the party to win the nomination. Sorry, Charlie.
Back in the old days, when often no candidate had a clear mandate going into the convention, and it was there that the deals were hammered out - things were just more interesting back then. Every election cycle, it seems to me, the D and R candidates are decided earlier and earlier, and the national conventions became pointless coronations by 1988.
Now the nominees are set in stone even before the election year and all we get to look forward to is month after month of attack ads and partisan news leaks. I wish I could go to sleep and wake up on the morning of November 5.
GOP race would be interesting if Trump wasn’t running, ideologically and practically. Wouldn’t necessarily go down to convention negotiation, but it could.
Yeah, it's interesting that a lot of people's annoyance with a rematch and politics being dominated by old people will basically be done by 2028 - regardless of your views of any of them, all of the possible 2028 candidates in both parties (except for I guess Trump, if he loses in 2024), are all of normal politician age (40s to 60s), and even Congressional leadership will be younger as Pelosi has been replaced McConnell has been replaced, and there's a decent shot Schumer may retire in 2026, or step back from leadership.
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Totally astroturfed by NeverTrumpers and NeoCons and the GOP donor class who have moved on from the desantis trainwreck. There is currently a media blitz going on trying to push Haley through hook or crook.
bad polls with convenient "oopsies" which tend to through sheer chance coincide with a media blitz for Haley; as an example the linked St Anselm poll, a generally good group other than baddd misses in 2022, included Democrats in the survey when NH has a semi-open primary where the registration deadline passed months ago and these Democrats would thus be ineligible to ever vote for Haley in the NH primary
the barebones ARG release (a group which has been garbage since the 2016 cycle) is even more BS and little more than naked manipulation
these sorts of convenient "oopsies" with an agenda in order to shape public opinion and perception is pretty common during these stages, but the sheer amount of obviously bullshit polls produced in support of the desantis trainwreck or the nimarata randhawa fake is staggering (e.g., don't believe any poll conducted by any group connected to Chris Wilson)
and of course, The Gaurdian didn't mention the UMASS Lowell poll, the only of the recent polls which met basic transparency guidelines by releasing a methodology statement and crosstabs, or the Trafalgar poll both of which had Trump leading by +30 and +27 respectively
tl;dr: it's astroturfed and fake and these media orgs continue to burn whatever credibility they have left
a Democrat winning would be better for the GOP voter than Nikki Haley
for those who don't know, Haley won her governorship in South Carolina on the back of the Tea Party wave by running as a Tea Party candidate and her time as governor would be best described as finding ways to lose and betray her voters
she's always among the first GOP losers tripping over themselves to attack their voters and sell them down the river
the only chance Nimarata Randhawa has in the primary is if Trump withdraws; if Trump withdraws, I think it's a toss-up between her and Desantis with a slight advantage to the dork because Desantis will lose NH and likely SC due to his Iowa strategy and Haley's connection to the SC machine, and Desantis's apparent desperate desire to shred a promising political career by attacking MAGA
if she somehow ends up as the national candidate, she would lose badly even in the environment with a laughably unpopular Biden admin because her neocon corporate schtick will lose in the must-win midwest due to the inability to motivate voters to show up for her; my prediction would be she loses a general a few points worse than Mitt Romney, but not as badly as John McCain
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Most of the ‘trump needs to drink margaritas on the beach’ crowd in my life favors Desantis or ‘I like what Vivek says but I don’t trust him, so maybe trump even though he’s old’. Nikki Haley’s supporters are more a figment of the news media than real.
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Haley's voters, aside from the establishment big money types you see on twitter, are largely the "sorta Republican" Republicans that exist in a decent number in some areas, but lack any passion for politics at all. So you wont see them talking shop, almost ever.
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Her support seems to be anyone but Trump-GOP often corporate types.
Basically the Ken Griffin vote. He seems like he jumps his money around to whoever appears to have a shot of beating Trump in the primary.
I honestly don’t know much about her other than she’s a women, real name isn’t nikki, and is a Republican governor of a southern state.
If Trump goes to jail he’s not losing the primary. I would likely shift my vote to Trump in that case.
She might be the only Republican I’d vote for Trump over her. I’m not even sure why but something about her rubs me the wrong way.
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In contrast, the prediction markets say she's at only 13 percent, vs. Trump's 78 percent.
This is extra pathetic because there's only an 85% chance Trump will even be on the ballot.
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It might be dated but Haley seems to have a cliff problem. Second choice of most Trump voters a couple of weeks back was RDS by a large margin.
I’ve met people who have positive things to say about her. With that said, I think she has largely not had any criticism thrown her way (it is starting — only question is (1) will it be effective and (2) will it be effective immediately).
With all of that said, she is supported by people I hate and therefore I will not vote for her.
The reason Ron Desantis is still a much bigger threat is almost 80% of Desantis voters have Trump as 2nd choice. Knocking him out hurts Haley. OTOH almost all Haley voters dont have Trump as #2.
As a RDS voter, I’m pretty much RDS or bust (covid heavily influenced my political choice coupled with RDS’ general competence such as in Ian).
I have a decent preference for Trump over Haley mainly because while I think both would suck Haley reminds me too much of Bush. So maybe I fall in that camp?
As a "COVID Voter" (for lack of a better term), what is it about Desantis that makes you like him so much? Yes, I understand that at a superficial level he waged the most opposition to restrictive COVID policies among politicians who had actual influence over those policies (i.e. not Trump, who was powerless at the state and local level), but I didn't really see any fundamental differences between him and anyone else. Insofar as I can tell, there are two categories of COVID skeptic:
The kind of person who believes restrictions such as stay at home orders and broad business closures are antithetical to basic principles of liberty and shouldn't be on the table in a democratic society, and
The kind of person who thinks that the response was overblown in proportion to the threat, i.e. that there may be some circumstances where restrictive interventions are justified, but COVID wasn't one of them.
In my admittedly limited experience, the kind of person who is still bitter enough about COVID restrictions in 2023 is the kind of person who fits more into camp #1 and believes that the restrictions are evidence of our tolerance for creeping authoritarianism. To that end, I don't see what Desantis has to offer. He had no problem issuing stay-at-home orders and business closures early in the pandemic, and he didn't change his tune until six months in. By that point, existing restrictions in Florida were more of a mild annoyance than anything else, and loosening restrictions was the norm in most places, even those with Democratic governors.
The point I'm trying to get at here is that his anti-restrictionist sentiment always came across to me more as political posturing than as an expression of underlying principal. If that were the case, he'd never have implemented any restrictions in the first place and would have stood firm when there was pressure from practically everywhere in the country. But he didn't. He was certainly smart enough to realize that the existing restrictions were more theater than anything else, and that there was widespread recognition that they were such and there was corresponding pressure to get rid of them, and he responded to that pressure because he also recognized that it was unlikely to lead to the disaster some were predicting. But that's not principle, it's politics. It doesn't make him any different than governors of more restrictionist states who were walking back the restrictions more slowly because they knew they needed political cover in the event cases spiked.
By comparison, I live in Pennsylvania, and Tom Wolf took a lot of heat for the restrictions he implemented in March of 2020. But the more rural areas of the state were fully open by the middle of May, and the more urban areas were open by early June (except Philadelphia, but Philadelphia is kind of its own thing so we don't talk about it). After that, the only serious restriction was a bar and restaurant (and, oddly, courthouse) closure from early December to early January, which was implemented when cases were out of control and things were expected to get worse around the holidays. But once that expired things were pretty much over. Other restrictions lasted into spring of 2021, most of them dumb, most of them more annoying than restrictive, none of them seriously enforced. Like capacity limits. Restaurant owners bitched about these to no end, but if you went out you weren't waiting for a table. People who were concerned about the virus weren't going out, period; the capacity restrictions did nothing to allay their fears, but they also did nothing to restrict actual business.
Yes, a lot of this stuff was dumb to the nth degree and largely unnecessary, and I assure you that a lot of people on the left who were otherwise concerned about COVID thought that at the time. But that seems more like an argument that would work on someone who falls into camp #2, i.e. the problem with the COVID restrictions was that they were dumb and unnecessary. This is where Desantis seems to fall, but it seems odd to me for this to be the main reason to vote for the guy. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of dumb and unnecessary laws on the books in Florida right now that Desantis isn't exactly making a priority out of addressing, so I don't know that his stance on COVID speaks to some greater strength regarding dumb laws. And it's not like COVID-style pandemics are expected to come around every few years where he can put his opposition to specific dumb laws in action. All it really shows is that he took a particular stance on an issue that was relevant for about six months, and not that relevant in most places. It doesn't say anything about his stance on fundamental issues of freedom, because we know he had no problem implementing the restrictions when he thought they were necessary. Sorry, this went on longer than I expected it to, I'm just confused by how someone can think Desantis's stance on COVID is relevant in 2024 and not be concerned that for fully half the time his stance on COVID actually was relevant it wasn't any different from anyone else's.
Count me as C, I believe that selection pressure from more potentially fatal disease are good for the surviving population's health. I would have liked to mandate COVID spreading parties once the disease crossed the border. 2 weeks to speed the burn.
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I’m a type B of the ‘the Covid reaction was so utterly retarded that keeping restrictions past may is simply evil in keeping with my malice and stupidity are the same thing post earlier’, and it seems understandable that there might have been political restrictions on governors opening up, but governors who didn’t push right up to the edge of what they could do were simply wrong.
Yes, there is a counter factual scenario where Covid restrictions were justified. We had enough information in march or maybe even February to know that it was just that- a counterfactual, and that information was confirmed by the end of April. The science advisors who advised longer lockdowns and restrictions should all be shot out of hand, because they were lying when they claimed this was the Black Death 2.0.
Look, by all accounts emperor moctezuma really believed the world would end if he didn’t rip out enough human hearts in sacrifice to the sun god. He was blatantly wrong, and so I have no qualms calling him evil. The lockdowners were either lying or delusional in a way that really mattered, and I have no qualms calling them evil because they smashed the world rather than admit they might be wrong.
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Just to add to this, see https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29928/w29928.pdf
Florida had almost 100% in person schooling during the pandemic. Compare the only states that did better were Wyoming (super rural) and Arkansas (which basically had the same percentage as Florida). No other states were close. PA in contrast was at 50%.
In addition, Florida desire slow down in tourism still did better than many on economic matters.
This shows contra your claims that Florida was much more open and much sooner than say PA.
The person most responsible for that difference was RDS (the large city democrat mayors in Florida fought him).
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I don’t think liberty is absolute. It is possible that a pandemic could in theory justify things like stay at home orders.
Florida may not have gone “open” right away but they shifted policy two months in once they realized covid was not one that justified the extreme restrictions — 2 months was extremely quick and showed (1) an understanding of the virus and (2) a presumption more in favor of freedom instead of safety. Florida basically adopted the GBD specifically focusing on targeted protection noting the differential death rate. There is a reason he was labeled Deathsantis. Also, if you go back and listen to RDS during this time you’ll realize he actually had a deep understanding of the facts. He wasn’t just making a political decision.
DeSantis within six months prohibited local restrictions and had kids back in school. That was very different compared to most of the country.
Re PA, I can’t speak to every day life. We were looking at buying a house in eastern PA / NJ early 2021. Due to covid restrictions we weren’t allowed to physical view houses in PA since we weren’t PA residents. Philly schools didn’t return to in person learning until Aug 2021 and then were required to mask. That is a full one school year later and with stupid masks compared to Florida. So no, it was not basically the same. It was much worse. I think you live in the Pittsburgh area. They didn’t unveil plans to go back to in person learning until June 2021.
There is a weird revisionist history where people pretend all states were pretty much the same. No. Florida was much more open and much sooner compared to most states. I was in Florida multiple times during the pandemic. It was entirely different compared to the northeast. There is a reason there was a mass exodus to Florida. Where I am in NJ didn’t get “normal” until 2022. That is at best basically 1.5 years after Florida. Look I was deep into covid policy at the time. You can’t make me misremember what happened. I know you are on the left and the left was terrible on covid so the left is trying to retcon all of this (see Gavin Newsome). Won’t work on me. I lived and live in NJ. I visited Florida a lot (almost moved there despite buying recently in NJ). It was radically different.
Trump wielded a lot of power since a lot of nonsense derived from the CDC. Trump could’ve fired Collins. He could have fired Fauci. He could’ve not side lined Atlas (if you read Atlas’s book, you’ll see that Trump seemed to agree with Atlas but lacked the courage to implement his messaging in full).
Finally crisis reveals character. I don’t need to know about how a leader does when the sun shines. I need to know how he does in crisis. DeSantis wasn’t brash but at the same time was willing to take a very different tact compared to the narrative based on a clear understanding of the facts and a freedom oriented perspective. He passed the test with flying colors when many others failed (if you want happy to pull up detailed stats on it).
Trump didn't sideline Atlas, Trump brought in Atlas to attempt to moderate of the ridiculous loons in Birx, Fauci, and Collins; Atlas tried, he ran into the the decades-long constructed bureaucratic wall that was Fauci, Inc., in NIAID and associated agencies not to mention their ability and willingness to leak and scheme to media mouthpieces to lie and manipulate against him and any moderation of their approach (something Birx details in her own book), and realized he couldn't make a dent and he left to do other things.
while we're pointing out some context to avoid rewriting history, let's remember Donald Trump was being impeached in early 2020 and was being threatened with removal by Mitch McConnel if he "fired" or removed Fauci, a man who was almost universally revered in DC at the time who quickly became a cult-like figure in the media
so, Trump's strategy was to undermine or work-around fauci, collins, and birx because he couldn't do more due to opposition by his own party let alone the entirety of corporate media and his other political opposition
desantis wouldn't have fired fauci, collins, or birx; we know he wouldn't because he appointed Florida's own "Fauci" in Scott Rivkees and refused to fire him, despite his ridiculous guidance throughout 2020 which closely mirrored Fauci and didn't end until his contract expired in 2021
and even if fuaci, collins, and birx, were removed and scott atlas was the CDC spokesperson, the media wouldn't have magically got behind his guidance because he's the expert, they would viciously attacked and ridiculed him and ignored his guidance while having fauci, birx, and collins on tv nightly to give their sermons to fawning media personalities
no one was good on Covid, but Trump and Desantis were better than most with Trump being equal or better than Desantis on pretty much every single covid topic during 2020
Trump criticized Fauci before Desantis while Desantis was fawning over him in presser after presser. Desantis only broke with Fauci after Trump called for states to reopen and Desantis was one of the first governors (not the first) who locked their states down (multiple other governors never did) to issue a plan to reopen. Desantis didn't harshly criticize Fauci, something Trump was doing in March 2020, until 2021.
I liked Desantis despite reservations about my memory of him being a forgettable neocon/neolib dork Congressmen from Florida who idolized George H.W. Bush not to mention his military record of providing legal guidance for torturers at Gauntanamo. I grew to really like him throughout the Covid hysteria because post summer 2020, he was willing to be front in center and perform well in front of media about the various hysterics constantly being pushed. I was pretty disappointed when he decided to engage in this kamikaze campaign against Trump, but his doing so and the laughable train wreck which has been his campaign and campaign tactics have soured any positive appreciation I had for the guy. Despite some alleged vaunted "competency," he has outdone even Scott Walker in how to shred a promising political career in short-order. It's a shame. Was it always going to happen given his neocon/neolib dork tendencies being surrounded by bushie consultants? Perhaps, but in any case it shows very poorly on Desantis and his competency and decision-making.
I wish Desantis did the things him and his supporters have attempted to retcon into history, but he didn't.
There is a reason he was foremost in the summer of 2020. It is because Trump abandoned the perch.
Yes, you can point out rural states like South Dakota but I lived during covid. Florida was open early and faced heavy criticism for it. Georgia opened around a similar time (and hell I’d go to bay for Kemp as well) but Kemp didn’t go as hard in the paint to prevent local government from enacting certain policy (and you may recall Trump tried really hard to prevent Kemp from doing what he did).
Hell, I provided the receipts from Mulligran. Florida had schools open in person pretty much more than every other states (it is basically tied with Arkansas and Wyoming with a pretty big gap until Utah).
Also this whole “neoliberal” smear. Any guy that says “Coolidge” when favorite president isn’t your bog standard neo lib. Add to it his attacks on ESG and feud with Disney. He isn’t another GWB or Romney.
Finally, judging someone for a bad campaign is a poor way for how somehow would run the federal government. Instead I would say the way he handled covid in Florida (which despite your retcon was excellent) or the way he handled the hurricanes (which again were excellent). The guy is a great executive who is not a natural politician. I’d prefer the former to the latter.
He wasn't foremost in summer of 2020. Trump was always foremost throughout all of 2020. He wasn't even the foremost governor. Kemp was because he opened weeks ahead of Desantis, just not fully. Desantis only came out with reopening once Trump called for all states to reopen. Trump didn't "try really hard" to stop Kemp, he made some statements in response to questions from the media. That is nonsense. Trump criticized Kemp because Kemp was in front of Trump and Desantis. Desantis came to be the forefront governor because he engaged with the media and I was grateful for that.
I can point to more states than South Dakota. There were multiple governors who didn't lockdown at all (Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and more). There were over five governors who never issued stay-at-home orders. There were multiple other governors who opened quicker and with fewer restrictions (Texas, Georgia, and others). There were governors who cracked down on localities attempting lockdowns quicker than Desantis, who put out an order in like October and didn't enforce it with Floridians still getting tickets and summonses afterwards.
Desantis was not good on Covid. He was better than most, but that's not saying much, and he wasn't the best. He wasn't better than Trump on any issue during 2020. And he was worse than at least five+ other governors.
In addition, my anecdotal experience in both Florida and Texas in ~May-June was Texas was more open with fewer mask weirdos irrelevant of whatever was on the books or in press conferences.
Your memory of Desantis during COVID or his PR campaign to retcon his record, much like many of his other PR stunts, are rewriting history about what he actually did during Covid. Early Desantis was mister tough guy sending staties to arrest teenagers on beaches he closed. Let's stop lying about it or mischaracterizing the landscape of the Covid hysteria in 2020.
then you should look at Desantis's record and statements when he was a Congressmen before he rebranded himself to run for Governor let alone he has repeated multiple times his politician idol is George H.W. Bush
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As to PA, I don't know what you're real estate agent told you but I can assure you there were no restrictions on looking at houses, excepting during the initial phase when everything was shut down, but certainly not by 2021. There may have been people who didn't want to risk showing houses to people from out of state and made up laws to avoid an argument, but PA never jumped on the train where they restricted anyone from out of state. In May 2020 they put out guidelines for the real estate industry in accordance with their reopening plan, but it didn't say anything about out of state travel. It also only applied to counties in the red and yellow reopening phases, and every county was in the green phase by the end of June, and they ditched the color system after that.
I also mentioned it in my initial post but it doesn't hurt to repeat it here: Philly doesn't count. This is often more of a joke at their expense but during the pandemic they were literally on a separate system that meant statewide guidelines didn't apply to them. I don't know the exact distinction or reasoning behind this, but enough things are different about Philly that I don't bother asking questions.
As for the school thing, the school system here is different than in the South (and a lot of other places). School districts here are independent government authorities that don't always follow municipal boundaries. School boards aren't subject to the same level of centralization as they are in places like Florida. School districts here were free to set up their own COVID guidelines, and most of them were back in-person at the beginning of the school year. Some delayed a few weeks, but were otherwise in-person. The exception was the City of Pittsburgh itself, which was ostensibly in-person but seemed to regularly be reverting to online after the latest scare, but the governor had nothing to do with that, and DeSantis couldn't have done anything about it if he wanted to because the PA governor doesn't have the power to tell local governments what to do. The exception to that was the 2021 mask mandate you were referring to, but there's more to the story than that. It was initially supposed to be the district's prerogative to make the decision, but as the summer wore on, school boards and superintendents were dealing with angry parents on both sides of the issue. Wolfe couldn't tell the schools that they couldn't implement a mask mandate, but he could require them under the emergency health powers. So he required it, but the purpose of it was to deflect the criticism towards himself so the schools could get on with their business.
I got a similar impression, but I think it was less due to the laws that were in place than it was the general attitude of the people. Yeah, the further south you drove the fewer masks you saw and the more people were in bars and restaurants. But there were never any real restrictions anyone took seriously. There were some stupid rules involving bars but nothing that would really stop you from drinking there (and some of the harshest lockdown critics in my social circle actually long for those days because they inadvertently made things more social). Aside from people occasionally talking about the virus, things were pretty normal for most people by the time vaccines were widely available in the spring of 2021. I'm not saying some places weren't more restrictive, I'm just saying that having traveled to PA, OH, WV, VA, MD, and NC at the time I didn't notice too much of a difference.
It wouldn't have mattered. Trump handpicked these people as experts for his task force early in the pandemic, and it had become apparent that he found what they said politically inconvenient. They never had any real power, just a microphone and the credibility of being the nationally known authorities. By the time Atlas came on the scene it was already clear to everyone that he was hired because he said what the president wanted to hear. If he fires Fauci it doesn't stop Fauci from going on TV every 5 minutes saying the things he would have said anyway, and from still being treated as an expert by anyone who was still doing so at that point. The media would have treated Atlas as a hack and probably had Fauci on after every press conference to tell you how much of what he said you should actually believe. It's one thing to disagree with the policy implications of the information your experts provide. It's quite another to say you want to rely on expertise but then replace your guys with yes-men when they don't tell you what you want to hear. Trump already had a problem with this in his cabinet, but at least it was behind-closed-doors stuff that came out later in tell-all books. This would have been public, and in the midst of an election season no less. He made the right decision in keeping Fauci, however grudgingly, and distancing himself from Atlas.
Aside from those points, though, thanks for clarifying. If I have anything to add, I think that Desantis's gambit was less a stroke of personal genius than more of a risk/reward decision that worked out in his favor. If you really believe he did a significantly better job than other governors, one has to ask why other governors didn't follow in his footsteps? I doubt he had access to information the others didn't. He was able to tap into a growing anti-restriction sentiment by becoming the face of it, and by actually using his power to not only remove restrictions, but keep localities from enforcing them. But I think he overplayed his hand and got away with it. Most governors quietly let restrictions expire and kept up the messaging about personal responsibility because they knew that in the event of a catastrophe they wanted those powers in their back pocket. Even if they thought such a catastrophe was unlikely, they weren't willing to bet the farm on it. Desantis made that gamble, and while it may have paid off, I don't know what it shows about the man other than that he's willing to take unnecessary risks if he thinks it will earn him political points. What would have happened if COVID started spreading through Florida's retirement communities and nursing homes like wildfire after September 2020, to the point where the statistics were unequivocal? Would he have had the courage to go back on his policy? Would he claim the numbers were wrong (Even if they were pretty conclusive)? Would he say that the deaths were an acceptable cost for removing the restrictions? Luckily he was never in this position.
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So instead of trying to build a coalition of like-minded scientific advisors in the administration, it sounds like Atlas just threw up his hands and refused to play ball. One might even say that Atlas shrugged 🤷♂️
It seemed he started out trying to do so, but it became obvious others weren’t interested.
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Almost everyone is obviously type B. If Covid had 30% mortality rate among young and healthy people then the constituency opposing lockdowns would be limited to ancaps and the most extreme accelerationists.
Even most type A in your taxonomy would become type B if the mortality was high enough.
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I’m a type 1 who was a bit late to figure things out. But the thing is that once he got it, he got it, and he was loud and proud of being the voice of that movement. I’ve no problems with recommendations, but what flipped me was just how cruel these things were and how much they harmed the middle and working class to assuage the fears of pampered PMCs who got to work from home (something they wanted anyway and are now demanding as a condition of employment) at the expense of the rest of the economy which was torched by SAH orders. If you had any sort of retail, restaurant, or construction business, you were outright fucked. The big chains were fine because of online delivery, but no small businesses could survive, especially once their customers began shopping online.
Desantis likely saved a lot of those small shops in Florida.
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The actual reality is that 95% of "COVID voters" that existed in any large numbers were type B, and that's one of many reasons DeSantis died on liftoff - people don't want to think about COVID. That's why the Loudon County School Board went back Democratic and Moms for Liberty types have been largely failures outside already bright red areas. If the Virginia Governor race had been in March of 2022 instead of Novemeber of 2021, Youngkin probably loses, and he's basically the only real right-leaning victory that ran on COVID stuff, when it came to school closures and the like. The temporary allyship they had with center-left to center-right parents upset over school closures ended when the schools basically all reopened by fall of 2021, and life was back to normal for the vast majority of people, outside of the 5% of always maskers and 5% of people who think being forced to make sacrifices for other people you disagree with is the same as a concentration camp.
It is crazy to me that these people didn’t realize “stress reveals character.”
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