More Americans want a president who sounds like a pleasant normie on holidays than like a raving lunatic.
I will continue believing this unless proven otherwise. And I don’t expect to be.
I nearly missed a trolley last year because I had to switch cars over some nut spouting GQP drivel (and I didn't have my headphones to drown it out). Luckily, I was able to jump into another car just in time. The Former Guy is the equivalent of that blabbermouth.
The last 58 elections, really. It wasn't until the last 2 that one of the major parties nominated a complete lunatic, even the terrible presidents of the past could at least act like the bare minimum human in public.
He was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but the tapes are so full of rants I think that if he could have just typed it out that would be a different story. Same for Goldwater and Reagan, who both made some pretty unhinged public statements in their day.
I certainly don't miss being constantly afraid of the possibility of tfg having somehow tweeted us into an international crisis or even a war every weekend and holiday when he had even more downtime than usual.
I had a panic attack almost every morning when I checked Twitter for the first time that day. I dreaded it. 99 times out of 100, he'd done or said something dreadful and/or dangerous overnight. I just knew at some point he was going to tweet us into a fuckin war.
This, unfortunately, reminds me of my Christmas spent in rural, north Texas in 2016, where the preacher at a tiny (all white) church used his Christmas Day sermon to rant to Jesus about protecting them from, among other things, the biased liberal media.
So, yes, more do. But a lot don’t.
My nonreligious, culturally Christian family would sometimes go to a church on Christmas Eve for the singing. One year we found a Lutheran church and thought "Wisconsin Synod? Those are like the folks on Prairie Home Companion right?"
They were very much not...and listening to a Christmas sermon about how people like us we going straight to Hell was not what we were expecting in a relatively affluent town in Maine.
Just came back from the in-law Christmas where that's one of the groups represented. The rest of the fam makes clear their position by asking me, the raging liberal female pastor of the lefty Lutherans, to pray before the meal. 😁
The food, however, is non-denominational and delicious!
Yeah we didn't know anything about the different groups. It's especially confusing for people like me because I associate "evangelical" with fundamentalist, but the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America is actually the non-crazy one of the three major US Lutherans.
Former ELCA member here - we were brought up with the belief that finding grace in yourself was more important than converting others to your view. (Left during discussion of same-sex marriage, I was pro)
I had a friend who grew up WELS and she couldn’t vote in congregational meetings even as an adult because she was single and didn’t have a man to vote for her 😳
That was this year in IA at my in laws church. He was spending the sermon Going on about how the media caused us to change from AD to CE and now no one remembers it was all about Jesus for the new calendar. I was biting my tongue through it all. He was also mad no one took his 10 word mini-bible.
“Irrelevant” is way overstated.
The Electoral College can be counter-majoritarian institution, yes, and that’s a challenge to overcome. But hardly impossible, as 2020 shows.
For most elections there is no conflict between the EC and the popular vote, but it’s alarming how much one party is relying on winning the EC while losing the popular vote.
Popular legitimacy, while not enforceable, is important.
What elected Dems haven’t quite realized yet is modern republicans don’t care about popular vote. They govern for their donors and corporations and with that they can keep their base angry and misinformed. It’s all about Judges and the EC. Thanks to Mitch mostly. But Biden calls him “a good man”. 🤦♂️
We're at the point where every presidential election is going to come down to the votes of a few thousand people in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Even if Biden was the senile, confused, crooked old man that trump's cult paints him as, I'd take that over a confused, corrupted, anti-intillectial hatemonger any day.
(That being said I haven't been represented by a primary candidate with the voter-ship to win an election in my entire adult life. I just feel forced to vote for whoever is the least vitriolic.)
I have been saying this for 16 years and it still holds up: Americans will vote for whoever would make a better guest at their backyard barbecue, no matter their policies. They want a folksy friendly type. This is commonly known as the “have a beer with” dynamic.
It's not a new phenomenon. The question has been part of political polling since 2000, and the idea probably goes back even further.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_qu....
I think that's largely true. But also I think something that has been happening in that last twenty years is people really want genuineness, where it increasingly seems like marketing has replaced that. Joe's post reads like a lot of Dem output: rehearsed, tested before release
