I did. I saw a tired old man and a used car salesman. More importantly though, is I don’t think almost everyone gives two shits about debates or polls. They know these two guys, know them well. What they offer is clear.

Additionally, I don’t think a President has to be spry. They just need to be good at delegation, that is by far the most important skill. If you think about monarchy, the king did not need to run everything. Simply assign the tasks to people who did know all the details. Generals run the army. Finance ministers run economy. Diplomats run diplomacy. Etc.

No, there’s a lot of us that don’t want to surrender the incumbent advantage for the very common backlash-against-the-last-party phenomenon we’ve seen many times in the past decades.

We’re just not as loud as everyone else, and our position makes terrible clickbait.

It’s also related to sex being a “special” or “sacred” act. If it was just something that could be potentially dangerous by resulting in STDs or unwanted pregnancy, like say, driving your car can be potentially dangerous by resulting in accidents and death, then no stigma would exist. But people give it this special character beyond any other human activities, and put it on a pedestal essentially.

Without that pedestal, a delivery driver delivering to someone they don’t like, for the money, is just … their job. Sex being a job is just … a job a person can have. Why make it special?

People basically want to put the pussy on a pedestal, and you don’t really need to be doing that. It doesn’t actually make any sense, it’s just tradition for some folks. Who then want other people to follow their tradition too.

Someone must always make decisions, a world where no decisions are made would devolve into a Mad Max type thing, where the fact that we are members of the animal kingdom would become very readily apparent. We used to decide these things with trial by combat, where the most skilled warrior (or who chose the most skilled as their champion) was right because God apparently said so, by making him so good at fighting. Still a person making a decision. Not far off from a world where you decide if someone was a witch by trying to build a bridge out of them.

The modern trick is dividing up the decision-making power so much that nobody can assemble it all into their personal toolkit and fully embrace corruption with no consequences.

Very well summarized, I think this hits the majority of the most relevant points.

I wanted to disagree with this, but I actually think you make a rather compelling argument.

Well, I am not that guy for the record. But if you read the article it said he automatically rejects any candidate that advocates for gun control. So, that means Biden is flat out for him, along with pretty much the whole dem party.

The amusing part to me personally was that such a person would normally just vote gop. But that specific guy cannot, for fairly obvious reasons.

If you look at the Trump candidacy and things like qanon, it’d be hard to argue that the internet isn’t making inroads. My generation let this go on for long enough, it’s not about the lulz anymore. Lots of people are getting hurt, and it can still get worse.

I occasionally go through my old comments to see how things got received, see if I could improve my wording, things like that. General communications skill polishing. It’s not consuming as much as critically reviewing, but whatever.

Since I’m adding engagement on lemmy, and I do put some effort in to be amusing or informative or whatever (usually anyway), yes I do feel like I am helping. If I was on reddit or something, not so much.

A hardcore second amendment voter will usually resist any and all measures that restrict firearm possession, often on the basis of slippery slope arguments. Since the basis is rooted in a classic logical fallacy, they can be very difficult to persuade.

You’re right though, Biden has been fairly moderate on gun control. So was Obama though, and you remember how they reacted to him?

Profound believer in the second amendment and profound supporter of racial justice. Yikes, I really feel for the guy, that’s a tough one.

I’d say both the parties are pretty capitalist. The repubs were interested in finding their challenger, they didn’t know who it would be yet. The dems, all the way down to the majority of voters, were interested in supporting their incumbent, not interested in a chaotic primary fight.

I think that’s still largely the case.

So, that’s pretty much the same order as always, not seeing how that helps anyone.

And you can look up who runs if you want. You do not need to see debates to figure it out, someone announces after they file their paperwork, then its up to them to convince people to support them. You’re pretending like the DNC needs to do all this work to serve us up a platter of great options, but ignoring that it’s the candidates that determine how they get received. Don’t forget, most Americans still hate the idea of communism, too, even if they don’t actually know what it is.

This conspiracy theory nonsense is getting tiresome. The real world isn’t that simple.

Okay then, next was SC and Nevada. How far do we have to go before we see these changes? And who was the contender that was hurt by the changes?

That’s funny, I remember Iowa and NH going first like they do every year.

Polling, usually. Otherwise primary results. Most states did have their primary, btw, only a handful cancelled. Each state has their own way of doing it.

Can you name a candidate that was doing well at any point? Better than low single-digits? Dean was the only one I heard much about.

edit: You do remember the write-in uncommitted thing, right? Those were primaries.

Not a lot of options. Gretchen Whitmer perhaps, she can also appeal to moderate independents.

Bernie decides if Bernie runs. He has already said he won’t though, he’d have to change his mind. He’s also getting up there in years unfortunately.

This is true, it is very possible.

One thing not enough people are discussing is the incumbent advantage though. We’d lose that edge, and be subject to the standard backlash-against-the-last-party phenomenon.

We’d need a candidate strong enough to compensate for that lost advantage. And there’s the big problem, dems have had very few strong leaders since Obama retired. Bernie was our strongest, and he’s not even officially a dem.

I’m leery of polls these days. One thing I like about the Bulwark is they do a lot of focus groups, where you can hear from voters at a more detailed level, in their own words.

It’s still not a great method, since its such a small sample size. But I think it’s better than polls of poll-taking Americans.