Once again, we have a narrative cut from whole cloth here. Biden's administration is a laundry list of under 40 priorities: student loan forgiveness, climate, unionization, infrastructure, abortion. Only place he's really gone up against them is Gaza, because it's the only place he has to.
I will remind everyone that Ben Collins, Brain Mind, thought that there was going to be a red wave in 2022 and stated the fact that there wasn't didn't change his priors at all.
Like, Biden's campaign isn't sneering at college students. He hasn't even gone to the level of "basket of deplorables". But people keep telling each other that Biden personally told them that he wants all young people to die and will make homework mandatory up to age 40, so it becomes the truth.
Ehhh, he bought a satirical news org that hasn't been relevant in about a decade and started throwing a hissy fit when people pointed out they've kind of sucked for a while. The social media beat may have done more than just boil his brain.
and as always, ppl like Ben have to learn extremely heavily on horserace polling and horserace polling alone to make these points bc if they looked at either actual election results or issues polling it would show that the argument they are making are just completely off the mark
And horserace polling gets worse and worse either year. People keep saying "But Janus, Janus, it's all within the error bars!" like I can't see the error bars creeping out percentage point by percentage point over time.
That's just objectively false, though. I will compare the national RCP to the popular vote because it's the fastest apples vs apples going back
2020: RCP D +7.2, actual D +4.5
2016: RCP D + 3.3 actual D +1.1
2012: D +0.7, D +3.9
2008: D: + 7.6, D+7.3
2004: R+ 1.4, R +2.4
The three point error is consistent. You see the same thing with the congressional elections and state level results and a more careful analysis.
What's changed is "every single election is this 50/50 evenly split nailbiter" where the error is important.
I don't think polling is everything, and the three point error is a big deal in a close environment, but there is a signal to the horserace polling, and it should absolutely be part of the whole picture, and the biden people **should** be alarmed at the horserace polling.
I'm not saying they're *totally* useless- just mostly useless, and most importantly anyone obsessing over polls is just torturing themselves for no reason. Especially when they're polls that have stats like "10% gen. pop for RFK" and "20% of our LVs have never voted before".
Back when the NYC Amazon warehouse voted to go union I saw a prominent leftist Twitter account crowing that the victory somehow proved they didn’t need Biden and it didn’t matter who was in the White House
This is a thing I don't get from the outside looking in: the US government did a _lot_ of what people said "why isn't this done", and that it promised to do, which is a victory for everyone who pushed for it & defeat for people who said it was unrealistic. And yet that's often ignored??
That's not the same as going "I sure like this stance he's doing because I got my loans forgiven", you can consider a policy immoral & demand it end even though another benefits you (and hell, it'd be grotty if you went "I got mine"). But that's different to "nothing has happened".
Combination of 1) Biden getting middling coverage since Afghanistan withdrawal, 2) Biden initiatives not all hitting at once in a way that's easy to cover, and 3) everyone having PTSD about 2020 and forgetting it happened.
and then when it's pointed out that a lot of these things indeed happened, the pivot is "well I never heard about it, which means his messaging is so incompetent that he isn't worth voting for"
I've never understood this made up image of Biden being this massive asshole. I've never seen Biden being anything but patient with leftists and liberals who oppose him. Oppose Biden's policies if you must, but don't paint him as another Trump. I don't recall him sneering at anyone but the media.
Collins is suggesting that rather than working to convince young people to support his policies, Biden sneers at them for not supporting them in the first place.
Gaza also barely registers as a priority in 18-29 compared to a wide variety of other topics. People insisting it's the primary issue for Biden live in a bubble.
Maybe I’m reading too far into this (or not far enough) but even if you sidestep to the economy I’d guess Biden’s likely underwater with younger voters too. Aren’t young people kind of the most likely to be just working on getting their footing in the economy & be relatively, well, poor? 🤔
young people are also the most likely to be hit by terrible rents... and, perhaps, to not realize how much worse the economy was after the last big economic shock
Good point. I try to lay out how recoveries typically go & the real day to day impacts that had on my family but its typically met with crickets. I’m still young (29) but our lives were scaled down, 45 yr olds were in entry level jobs, & real incomes at the bottom fell & then lagged for years longer
