Biden’s numbers among young voters have slid during his presidency from the high margins that helped him beat Trump. Several former supporters explain why.
Certainly hearing the same tune over and over again. Seems like it could be a propaganda effort. It is a little hard to believe lots of people are this…obtuse?
I guess it is possible that if someone doesn’t consume any (reliable) news and has zero understanding of politics and how it matters to the everyday peon, then they might not have learned anything during the Trump presidency.
The adults in the room need to do whatever we can to get people to vote and donate time or money to campaigns. Local, state, and US Congress elections matter the most.
Can you explain exactly what people hate so much about Biden?
Like I get he sucked a lot in the past and gave you Clarence Thomas and differential racist treatment of cocaine vs crack cocaine offenders but I don’t get whats currently so terrible about him besides hes old and he has a sketchy history of political disingenuousness
Punted a Bork nomination and had to eat the Thomas one instead. Sucked all round & Bork openly against Civil Rights & Privacy which would have been at odds with Roe.
His handling of Israel’s genocide is a big one. This isn’t just because America, Biden’s handling of this mess has been uniquely horrible, and it’s losing him votes.
To…Trump? I totally get what your saying but does Trump plan to call out Bibi, like I don’t get how eviler is comparatively more appropriate than garden-variety evil/negligent
No Trump is obviously worse. But lesser of two evil stuff doesn’t get turnout. Biden needs to convince people to vote for him, not against Trump, and he’s currently doing the opposite of that.
the economy is still pretty shitty for most Americans. broadcasting how good it is for the few that it’s actually amazing… is not going to win many friends.
Biden is pushing for military support of a genocidal, apartheid state.
his support for abortion is… less actual support and more just him keeping his mouth shut. he’s personally apposed to it. One wonders if we’d have RvW codified in law if a progressive was in office.
afaik, none of the student loan debt that’s gotten forgiven wasn’t already supposed to be forgiven… years, or even decades, ago. he’s done very little to actually lower the cost of tuition and such, or to curtail the blatant financial fraud that kept people locked into crippling debt.
climate change, They’re also basically corporate love notes. the funding for climate change, largely is a lot of tax incentives for companies to do what they were going to do anyhow… while also not directly addressing the issues of climate change… (or, directly counter to it- see re-opening the Willow Project in Alaska. after promising no new oil drilling…)
he’s old, and not nearly as progressive as more than half the people that would be voting DNC. (note I’m very carefully not saying ‘democrats’, because there are a lot of people my age who are progressive independents.we still largely vote blue, but we don’t trust institutions because… why should we?)
The primary election isn’t about who will be president. It’s about who will be a given party’s candidate (to be president.).
which means that right now, Biden is not competing with Trump, and Trump is not competing with Biden, because they’re in diametrically apposed parties. refusing to even consider alternatives to Biden when Biden is extremely and deeply unpopular across large swaths of the DNC base is… pretty myopic… if you’re goal is to defeat Trump in November.
Ah k but I still think its worthwhile to address it, I think I actually upvoted you because I wanted to take a stab at the idea not you ;)
Edit: Ya I definitely upvoted u. I’m weird like that, a comment has to be pretty agregious or me pretty out of sorts to generally downvote something I think is relevant even if its disagreeable
Not voting is still choosing Dem or GOP; it’s just silencing your own preference between the two and putting your faith in your countrymen to make the right decision… many hundreds of thousands of which are fucking morons.
I really, strongly encourage you to show up and pick the least-bad candidate who has a realistic shot at winning.
Not casting a ballot is the stupidest option available. It will only ever send the message that your opinion doesn’t matter and no party will try to win your vote. Showing up to vote, and casting an empty ballot is how you send the message that all the candidates suck. You’ve proven you have the motivation to show up and as such your opinion matters and candidates will try and win your vote.
To the down-voter who didn’t reply: Do you really think that not voting motivates a candidate in the next election to seek out your opinions on the issues to win your vote? Has it worked for you yet?
If you mean vote for him vs. not vote for him, then yes.
If you mean vote for him vs. the Republican nominee, then no, as there are other options. For starters the article seemed to suggest that some may just not vote at all. They also might vote for him but do so reluctantly, e.g. without discussing with their friends strongly promoting the voting for Biden as they did in the last election.
But it’s a long way to the actual election, and campaigning has not started in earnest yet.
“Successful”? Ah, I see, you think they are making their choices strategically, rather than emotionally. Interesting. :-D
I kid, but there actually is strategy involved there - by saying that their votes cannot be “counted on”, they could be attempting to wrangle additional concessions.
Ofc there is a bunch of nonsense going on as well - e.g. blaming Biden for not managing to codify Roe v. Wade, in this Congress!? They would have a better chance of asking to go to the moon - that is expensive but at least possible in theory!:-P I mention Congress ofc bc that is the government body that passes laws - the Presidency enforces, maybe vetoes, but does not make laws, so having a President receptive to and even someone who heavily pushes for a certain thing is not sufficient. Contrary to popular opinion, the Presidency has many limitations, and you do not simply show up to vote and somehow life gets “all better”, as some seem to think. Young people can be quite inexperienced and naive sometimes.
Then again, it was not young people that gave us Trump, and if they choose not to bail this country out again a second time, especially if they vote their conscience as a result of Israel (right or wrong mind you, in fact especially the latter), I will not be blaming the least experienced among us as the scapegoat to all of life’s problems… It should not be the case that it is up to those least prepared to deal with a situation, to be the deciding factor that “saves” us all - and the fact that we continue to ignore this aspect every time the young people show up to do so, shows how perilous the situation truly is. Maybe next time they won’t? If so, then we never deserved saving in the first place… bc that’s not freedom, to continually lie in the shadow of destruction.
blaming Biden for not managing to codify Roe v. Wade, in this Congress!?
yes. he likes to take sole credit for their victories, he can also take some credit for their failings, too. Shoulda kept Manchin on a shorter leash.
Not that I imagine biden tried all that hard on it. I mean, he once voted to overturn it. in 1982… he still says that he’s personally opposed. I just imagine it’s not on his list of things he really gives a damn about, but somebody in his camp managed to convince him he at least needs to shut up about.
That’s probably the gist of it right there in fairness - he could have tried harder. Then again, he knows what’s what, and like (a) the mess he inherited from the previous occupant of the job took an enormous amount of effort to deal with, like basically ALL of the efforts, really, that were to spare (and things like the border crisis, huge spike in homelessness, greedflation, etc. continue onwards even now), and so (b) to have fought the good fight would have come at the cost of enormous political capital that would have prevented other things from happening. Thought experiment: what would Dems be willing to give up, in order to have made a useless (I mean purely in the sense of doomed to failure in the short term, though ultimately such things may need a coordinated effort over many years) attempt to appear to try to codify Roe v. Wade? Would we have been willing to sacrifice funding for Ukraine? Passing a budget for the year at all? College loan remittance? Political capital has limits, so in order to work towards that goal, something else must be sacrificed, that’s just reality.
Also, unpopular opinion alert - or rather, adjacent to one, in the service of a deeper understanding - women are not prevented from having abortions, at least on the federal level. If a state such as Florida or Texas etc. prevents such a thing, then don’t live in those states? There are MANY things going on in those states - book burnings, teacher shortages, also libraries, also doctors/nurses, also basic infrastructure, the list just goes on forever - and Biden is merely one old man, so what is he being asked to do, replace Jesus in those states? There is only so much that he or any one person could do. e.g., when a Supreme Court seat opens up, that’s when he can do a lot to work towards his goal, but I cannot say this loudly enough, even as a President he cannot pass laws. He can be part of a solution but he cannot be the entirety of one. Nor should he be.
Okay, a fair point, but… we were talking about abortion:-D. (also, can we stop, or is it a stipulation somewhere in the contract that we must send? perhaps any time they are “attacked” we must automatically send a certain amount? there may be more there than the for-profit news media is willing to tell us, thinking that we are too dumbp to undermastand so they instead just focus on emotional one-liners that generate more clicks…)
Then again, he knows what’s what, and like (a) the mess he inherited from the previous occupant of the job took an enormous amount of effort to deal with, like basically ALL of the efforts, really, that were to spare (and things like the border crisis, huge spike in homelessness, greedflation, etc. continue onwards even now), and so (b) to have fought the good fight would have come at the cost of enormous political capital that would have prevented other things from happening.
Enormous? I don’t think Manchin was all that expensive of lay.
Abortion is the most prominent example of how Biden’s positions diverge from most his base… because most his base have sex. sorry to be so blunt. It’s not healthcare to his mindset because it’s not something he and his partner are likely to need any time soon. and likely the same for… every friend his age. To young twenty-somethings looking to establish themselves and not get burdened with the obscene costs of having a child… it’s far more than “just” healthcare.
There’s other issues that his age puts him on the wrong side of- or could be conceived as such. the housing crisis, for example. in the short term (next decade,) the housing bubble is benefiting retirees resolving it means the prices come down… and houses represent a large (quite possibly the largest) chunk of their net worth. There’s also climate change, which… just isn’t an issue for him. he will not live to see the consequences of failing.
and he is failing. Is he failing less badly than republicans? certainly. But if we don’t get our shit together in the next few years… the world is fucked. no that’s not right. The world is already fucked. we don’t get our shit together, the world is fucked to death. climate change is an existential crisis. Not in the “humanity will cease to exist” existential crisis. But in the “Society will fundamentally reshape itself” sort.
I should have admitted in my previous response that I might be biased, trying to find a shred of hope where none exists. But also I aim not to be either an optimist nor a pessimist, but a realist. I do not claim to actually know what that means here though:-).
That said, what I said earlier still seems true to me: if you live in a state that allows - maybe even enshrines? - abortion as a right, then its being banned in other states affects you none to little (unless you actively visit those states, perhaps even traveling through them on the way to other states?), while if you live in a state that bans abortions, you have MANY problems, of which that is merely one of them (a big one to be sure). So it is one issue - perhaps the biggest of our time - and yet all of that said… what are we going to ACTUALLY DO about it? Congress needs to pass a law to make a decision one way or the other. Or else individual states need to do that. So far, Congress is more divided than it has ever been (during the Civil War, the South did not send their representatives anymore, so bills actually got passed!:-P), and we are looking towards another constitutional crisis happening as soon as the very next election, possibly spilling out into actual bloodshed. I don’t, but listen to the rhetoric on the side most likely to fire the first shot, and tell me that has no chance of happening, sometime in the next ten years? So yeah, I believe Biden when he says that it would be a difficult ask to get such a thing through Congress right now… that’s not about what’s right or what’s wrong, it’s about what’s possible at the current time.
Also look at democracy globally - like UK with Boris Johnson, Brazil with Bolsonaro, uh… right now is not a good time for democracy it seems. I am not speaking out against it, just echoing your thoughts that we are already fucked, in so many more ways than one, since it seems that our particular brand of it (meaning: coupled with low levels of edumacashion), seems to be vulnerable to certain outside parties who may have interests in interfering with our electoral processes? :-(
And in the midst of ALL of that, what the Dems offer is… Biden. Yeah, I know, but it’s not about what’s ideal, it’s about what is possible.
Isnt it like a binary choice? It annoys me that fellow peeps are this stupid if my understanding is correct…
Yes. They are this stupid. Or this is propaganda by big corporations in favor of Republicans.
Certainly hearing the same tune over and over again. Seems like it could be a propaganda effort. It is a little hard to believe lots of people are this…obtuse?
I guess it is possible that if someone doesn’t consume any (reliable) news and has zero understanding of politics and how it matters to the everyday peon, then they might not have learned anything during the Trump presidency.
The adults in the room need to do whatever we can to get people to vote and donate time or money to campaigns. Local, state, and US Congress elections matter the most.
Civics classes have been cut for decades. Even when I was a kid they never explained that you had to vote for someone you didn’t like.
South Park already dealt with this aha. Douchebag or Turd Sandwich—decide lol
It’s more like a root canal vs a bullet to the head. Both are gonna hurt, but only one is good for you in the long run
Can you explain exactly what people hate so much about Biden?
Like I get he sucked a lot in the past and gave you Clarence Thomas and differential racist treatment of cocaine vs crack cocaine offenders but I don’t get whats currently so terrible about him besides hes old and he has a sketchy history of political disingenuousness
Punted a Bork nomination and had to eat the Thomas one instead. Sucked all round & Bork openly against Civil Rights & Privacy which would have been at odds with Roe.
His handling of Israel’s genocide is a big one. This isn’t just because America, Biden’s handling of this mess has been uniquely horrible, and it’s losing him votes.
To…Trump? I totally get what your saying but does Trump plan to call out Bibi, like I don’t get how eviler is comparatively more appropriate than garden-variety evil/negligent
No Trump is obviously worse. But lesser of two evil stuff doesn’t get turnout. Biden needs to convince people to vote for him, not against Trump, and he’s currently doing the opposite of that.
Which is objectively terrifying. Very dangerous approach, CottonHow do you feel about the idea of Trump winning? That’s acceptable to you?
Or Futurama:
Jack Johnson vs. John Jackson:
https://youtu.be/Ll3iyvbsRDM
I love name+language games like that!
Chad Chadinson!
The primary election isn’t about who will be president. It’s about who will be a given party’s candidate (to be president.).
which means that right now, Biden is not competing with Trump, and Trump is not competing with Biden, because they’re in diametrically apposed parties. refusing to even consider alternatives to Biden when Biden is extremely and deeply unpopular across large swaths of the DNC base is… pretty myopic… if you’re goal is to defeat Trump in November.
Not being a dick but did you mean
opposed or literallyapposed?I don’t get what
appositionis, its a weird word+conceptNot voting is an option :(
(Edit to add: To be clear, I put a frowny face because it’s an option some people take, but I wasn’t endorsing it. And I’m not American…)
Seriously, fuck that. Pick a damn lane, you don’t not vote when Hitler/his modern day political equivalents are in the picture…
What’s Nikki Haley’s deal besides she’s a she?
Then we should all vote for the guy that allowing genocide like Hitler did, right?!? Because genocide is the lesser evil, right?
I think you shouldn’t do what actual Hitler’s protègé wants and
not voteBiden was never getting my vote anyway. Red fascist, blue fascist, its all fascism. And there is NO acceptable level of evil.
Does it bother you that you’re kind of doing what Republicans “want you to do” and disenfranchise yourself reflexively?
Definitely interestedin your perspectives but I would also like to get your commentary on the notion :)
I’m not disenfranchised, the oligarchy has done this
I mean…
So you’re bucking what Repubs want?
To be clear: I put a frowny face because it’s an option some people take, but I wasn’t endorsing it.
Ah k but I still think its worthwhile to address it, I think I actually upvoted you because I wanted to take a stab at the idea not you ;)
Edit: Ya I definitely upvoted u. I’m weird like that, a comment has to be pretty agregious or me pretty out of sorts to generally downvote something I think is relevant even if its disagreeable
Fair enough
Not voting is still choosing Dem or GOP; it’s just silencing your own preference between the two and putting your faith in your countrymen to make the right decision… many hundreds of thousands of which are fucking morons.
I really, strongly encourage you to show up and pick the least-bad candidate who has a realistic shot at winning.
To be clear: I put a frowny face because it’s an option some people take, but I wasn’t endorsing it.
(also I’m not American if that wasn’t clear from my username)
Not casting a ballot is the stupidest option available. It will only ever send the message that your opinion doesn’t matter and no party will try to win your vote. Showing up to vote, and casting an empty ballot is how you send the message that all the candidates suck. You’ve proven you have the motivation to show up and as such your opinion matters and candidates will try and win your vote.
To the down-voter who didn’t reply: Do you really think that not voting motivates a candidate in the next election to seek out your opinions on the issues to win your vote? Has it worked for you yet?
To be clear: I put a frowny face because it’s an option some people take, but I wasn’t endorsing it.
That’s how I interpreted your comment. 👍
If you mean vote for him vs. not vote for him, then yes.
If you mean vote for him vs. the Republican nominee, then no, as there are other options. For starters the article seemed to suggest that some may just not vote at all. They also might vote for him but do so reluctantly, e.g. without discussing with their friends strongly promoting the voting for Biden as they did in the last election.
But it’s a long way to the actual election, and campaigning has not started in earnest yet.
How could that ever be successful? I like the Billions paraphrase
—Billions
“Successful”? Ah, I see, you think they are making their choices strategically, rather than emotionally. Interesting. :-D
I kid, but there actually is strategy involved there - by saying that their votes cannot be “counted on”, they could be attempting to wrangle additional concessions.
Ofc there is a bunch of nonsense going on as well - e.g. blaming Biden for not managing to codify Roe v. Wade, in this Congress!? They would have a better chance of asking to go to the moon - that is expensive but at least possible in theory!:-P I mention Congress ofc bc that is the government body that passes laws - the Presidency enforces, maybe vetoes, but does not make laws, so having a President receptive to and even someone who heavily pushes for a certain thing is not sufficient. Contrary to popular opinion, the Presidency has many limitations, and you do not simply show up to vote and somehow life gets “all better”, as some seem to think. Young people can be quite inexperienced and naive sometimes.
Then again, it was not young people that gave us Trump, and if they choose not to bail this country out again a second time, especially if they vote their conscience as a result of Israel (right or wrong mind you, in fact especially the latter), I will not be blaming the least experienced among us as the scapegoat to all of life’s problems… It should not be the case that it is up to those least prepared to deal with a situation, to be the deciding factor that “saves” us all - and the fact that we continue to ignore this aspect every time the young people show up to do so, shows how perilous the situation truly is. Maybe next time they won’t? If so, then we never deserved saving in the first place… bc that’s not freedom, to continually lie in the shadow of destruction.
yes. he likes to take sole credit for their victories, he can also take some credit for their failings, too. Shoulda kept Manchin on a shorter leash.
Not that I imagine biden tried all that hard on it. I mean, he once voted to overturn it. in 1982… he still says that he’s personally opposed. I just imagine it’s not on his list of things he really gives a damn about, but somebody in his camp managed to convince him he at least needs to shut up about.
That’s probably the gist of it right there in fairness - he could have tried harder. Then again, he knows what’s what, and like (a) the mess he inherited from the previous occupant of the job took an enormous amount of effort to deal with, like basically ALL of the efforts, really, that were to spare (and things like the border crisis, huge spike in homelessness, greedflation, etc. continue onwards even now), and so (b) to have fought the good fight would have come at the cost of enormous political capital that would have prevented other things from happening. Thought experiment: what would Dems be willing to give up, in order to have made a useless (I mean purely in the sense of doomed to failure in the short term, though ultimately such things may need a coordinated effort over many years) attempt to appear to try to codify Roe v. Wade? Would we have been willing to sacrifice funding for Ukraine? Passing a budget for the year at all? College loan remittance? Political capital has limits, so in order to work towards that goal, something else must be sacrificed, that’s just reality.
Also, unpopular opinion alert - or rather, adjacent to one, in the service of a deeper understanding - women are not prevented from having abortions, at least on the federal level. If a state such as Florida or Texas etc. prevents such a thing, then don’t live in those states? There are MANY things going on in those states - book burnings, teacher shortages, also libraries, also doctors/nurses, also basic infrastructure, the list just goes on forever - and Biden is merely one old man, so what is he being asked to do, replace Jesus in those states? There is only so much that he or any one person could do. e.g., when a Supreme Court seat opens up, that’s when he can do a lot to work towards his goal, but I cannot say this loudly enough, even as a President he cannot pass laws. He can be part of a solution but he cannot be the entirety of one. Nor should he be.
He could stop sending weapons to Israel. That would be a nice start.
Okay, a fair point, but… we were talking about abortion:-D. (also, can we stop, or is it a stipulation somewhere in the contract that we must send? perhaps any time they are “attacked” we must automatically send a certain amount? there may be more there than the for-profit news media is willing to tell us, thinking that we are too dumbp to undermastand so they instead just focus on emotional one-liners that generate more clicks…)
They bypassed congressional oversight to sell Israel tank shells.
https://www.dsca.mil/press-media/major-arms-sales/israel-m830a1-120mm-tank-cartridges
My bad, I got lost in the comment chain
Enormous? I don’t think Manchin was all that expensive of lay.
Abortion is the most prominent example of how Biden’s positions diverge from most his base… because most his base have sex. sorry to be so blunt. It’s not healthcare to his mindset because it’s not something he and his partner are likely to need any time soon. and likely the same for… every friend his age. To young twenty-somethings looking to establish themselves and not get burdened with the obscene costs of having a child… it’s far more than “just” healthcare.
There’s other issues that his age puts him on the wrong side of- or could be conceived as such. the housing crisis, for example. in the short term (next decade,) the housing bubble is benefiting retirees resolving it means the prices come down… and houses represent a large (quite possibly the largest) chunk of their net worth. There’s also climate change, which… just isn’t an issue for him. he will not live to see the consequences of failing.
and he is failing. Is he failing less badly than republicans? certainly. But if we don’t get our shit together in the next few years… the world is fucked. no that’s not right. The world is already fucked. we don’t get our shit together, the world is fucked to death. climate change is an existential crisis. Not in the “humanity will cease to exist” existential crisis. But in the “Society will fundamentally reshape itself” sort.
I should have admitted in my previous response that I might be biased, trying to find a shred of hope where none exists. But also I aim not to be either an optimist nor a pessimist, but a realist. I do not claim to actually know what that means here though:-).
That said, what I said earlier still seems true to me: if you live in a state that allows - maybe even enshrines? - abortion as a right, then its being banned in other states affects you none to little (unless you actively visit those states, perhaps even traveling through them on the way to other states?), while if you live in a state that bans abortions, you have MANY problems, of which that is merely one of them (a big one to be sure). So it is one issue - perhaps the biggest of our time - and yet all of that said… what are we going to ACTUALLY DO about it? Congress needs to pass a law to make a decision one way or the other. Or else individual states need to do that. So far, Congress is more divided than it has ever been (during the Civil War, the South did not send their representatives anymore, so bills actually got passed!:-P), and we are looking towards another constitutional crisis happening as soon as the very next election, possibly spilling out into actual bloodshed. I don’t, but listen to the rhetoric on the side most likely to fire the first shot, and tell me that has no chance of happening, sometime in the next ten years? So yeah, I believe Biden when he says that it would be a difficult ask to get such a thing through Congress right now… that’s not about what’s right or what’s wrong, it’s about what’s possible at the current time.
Also look at democracy globally - like UK with Boris Johnson, Brazil with Bolsonaro, uh… right now is not a good time for democracy it seems. I am not speaking out against it, just echoing your thoughts that we are already fucked, in so many more ways than one, since it seems that our particular brand of it (meaning: coupled with low levels of edumacashion), seems to be vulnerable to certain outside parties who may have interests in interfering with our electoral processes? :-(
And in the midst of ALL of that, what the Dems offer is… Biden. Yeah, I know, but it’s not about what’s ideal, it’s about what is possible.