I remember one of these liberal patriot articles of late described us as having six parties. Both R and D have a donor party with the seven figure donations (or eight figure). Then there are the activists, staffers, interns, hobbyists, single issue advocates, journos, NGO employees, etc., the ideology backbone of both parties. Lastly there are the voters of both parties and of no party.
Us voters are huge in numbers, but everything must pass through the sieve of the professional activist politician class, and then lastly the idea has to get the ok of the donors who have all the money for campaigns.
Those top two portions of both parties are too rigid, and have a lot more personal wealth than the vast voting class. We can't even pass a budget that is balanced and won't deny people health care. Republicans are fighting their own President over tariffs. Eighty percent of us agree on most things, but we are stuck with recalcitrant operatives at the top of our parties constrained by the whims of well heeled donors.
A party defined by a limited agenda is a way to win elections but no way to govern. Because once you win the election, you have deal with the whole range of everything government does. Your supporters get the full package whether they support it or not, leaving large numbers disappointed. And of course everyone forgets that the enemy gets a vote too. Currently, Trump supporters are suffering from this but let the wheel turn again and it will be Democrats.
This stack seems to yearn for some sort of centrist fusion. I don't think that is feasible as the Establishment factions from both parties who would have to make up such a fusion have failed not only to fix the substantive problems but to convince the disgruntled. The also tend to be partisan for its own sake, having no ideas other than that they should be in charge. So lean into the chaos and try to create a populist fusion from the factions away from the center. The far left and the far right already agree on the diagnosis, though they are loathe to admit it. Getting them to agree on the treatment is more of a challenge and will have to be incremental but some seeds are there.
This is true to an extent, but voter registration shows otherwise. There have been some glitches (in the hundreds, not thousands---UT, CO)---but the PATTERN of voter registration changes has been to Republicans net. Yes, many Ds are re-registering I, but when you get net gains, Rs are coming out ahead in PA, AZ, NH, KY, WY, CA, FL, IA, NC, and OK. More important, this trend has been going on for over a YEAR. That's not a glitch. It takes effort to re-register. This is a total repudiation of Democrats. No, the GOP doesn't have them completely yet, but I keep arguing that the unspoken equation will be this. "There are two parties. One is hapless, often incompetent, and occasionally greedy. But they don't want to kill me. The other party through illegal criminal invasion, woke/transoidism, Jew-hatred and love for Hamas/Palestinian murderers, affinity for the Uke war, total embrace of failed "green," and anti-birth, anti-population, anti-life policies? . . . It wants to kill me and my family." Believe me, the voter shifts are showing that at some level THIS EQUATION is beginning to factor in. Especially among men.
Thanks John. For the uninitiated, let me note that sometimes these reflect "both parties gained," but one gained more than the other. Sometimes it reflects a voter roll purge or "both parties lost" but one lost less than the other. And sometimes one gains that the other loses. With the exception of the UT, CO blips and the one-month PA primary blip, since June of 2024 these changes have all gone in one direction. Away from Ds. That should be very, very concerning. Yes, Is have gained a lot, but that also tells us that the D brand itself is toxic, almost like Rs once were.
The problem is that your reasoning, once you account for the 'non-affiliated' or 'independent' voter registration numbers, makes no sense.
If the voter registration numbers show, as in the cases you are talking about, that A.) more Republicans registered than Democrats, and B.) more independents registered than either Republicans or Democrats, it is wholly incorrect to conclude that C.) there has been a 'net Republican gain'. The only conclusion these numbers support is that there has been a net gain for independents, unless you know how the independent block is going to vote--which neither you, nor I, nor anyone else, does.
Indeed, if we take the independent block to be a block of voters with weak partisan affiliation (as registering as an independent would seem to indicate), then the most likely scenario is that most of the country is up for grabs by either party, depending on how well a particular Democrat or particular Republican appeals to these voters.
The manner of disinformation he propagates can be enlightening in its own right…but only if it is properly recognized for the distortion of reality it is.
Oh, absolutely true. These are the Trump voters who came out in 2024. The question is will they come out for "Rs" in a non-presidential race. TBD. However, it is interesting that Richard Baris has found that NON-REGISTERED voters were Trump +17. In other words, what Scott Pressler is doing in PA is absolutely turning these non-active voters into active voters, and that's really bad news for Democrats. They hit their ceiling long ago. The GOP is just now at a floor and rising.
I don't belong to a political party. This should instruct us on a few things: 1) Either party can win elections based on the issues the party supports. 2) The winner can lose quickly in the next election if it squanders its support. 3) A really bad candidate can trump an issue-based decision. That big shifting group in the middle needs attention.
When I left the Ds, I did not become a R. Once burned, twice shy. But I think I've cast only one vote for the D candidate since 2014. Where I live (WA State), the Ds are controlled by the Puget Sound area, and are thoroughly nuts. Out here, the days of the lunchpail blue-collar Democrat have been gone for more than a decade.
If I may, George Packer pretty outlined this sense of abandonment in his 2013 book: The Unwinding = that the 2 parties are so similar who represents us?! Indeed, Trumpism is not a Republican Party movement. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/george-packer/the-unwinding/. Thoughtful, accessible and well substantiated.
Surely many people are upset with both parties, but the problems have very different life expectancies. Trump is an 80 year old, term limited, historically personally unpopular President. Dems face a plethora of historically unpopular or disappearing issues.
Abortion was always a top Dem priority. After Dobbs, it became a foregone conclusion a Trump win would bring a national abortion ban. It did not matter such a ban was legally and politically impossible. Now the issue has simply disappeared. Neither Reps or Dems mention it. This is important because Dems have historically raised billions on the issue.
How many times in the last 4 months has anyone heard the terms CRT or DEI, except when Trump announced their death? More importantly, how many voters are demanding Dems fight their extinction? Pride month still exists, but with 10% of the energy. The momentum has moved to trans athletes in sports, which puts Dems on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue. Even Climate Warriors are also much more muted. Most have not even bothered to loudly object to the end of many of Biden's Green sinkholes.
6 months ago most Dems still considered the open border a Fox News fallacy, to borrow Ruy's phrasing. Any problem was vastly overhyped and the fault of Reps who refused to codify into law legislation that guaranteed 2-3 million migrants a year, in perpetuity. Eventually the effect of 10 million migrants became impossible to hide. Trump closed the border in weeks and Dems began silently praying the issue would be memory holed like Covid.
The problem is, 10 million migrants are not going away, like unnecessary lockdowns. Regular migrant crime is now punctuated with spectacular crimes like murder and child rape. Then came Boulder. That Jews could be set ablaze in the US in 2025, by an illegal immigrant, for the crime of remembering Hamas hostages, is not an unimaginable one off, but probably a precursor of things to come.
Dems seem to sense screaming "due process" is a loser. 60 days ago Alberta Garcia was a Left folk hero. An entire Dem delegation, traveled to El Salvador by private jet on the taxpayer's dime, to check on the deportee's well being, like he was wrongfully convicted prisoner on Death Row. Today, Garcia should be on a milk carton considering how he disappeared from all Dem vernacular.
And it's about to get much worse. Crime aside, Millions of migrants have enjoyed years of generous food and housing subsidies, along with free medical care and education. Conservative estimates calculate US federal taxpayers spend $150 billion dollars annually on migrant care, which lands the cost in the top 10 list of federal spending. Trump has just ended every federal benefit but education and emergency healthcare. The mass poverty and homelessness that will likely follow over the next few years is going to be like 10 million migrants, hard to hide.
Trump's tariffs, like him, are very unpopular, but unlike 10 million migrants, they can disappear in a day. One bad economic quarter and Trump will declare victory and move on. More importantly, Trump is moving on in 3 1/2 years. Dems unpopular policies and their aftermaths, have no expiration date.
The 1852 election was a disaster for the Whig Party. It was caused, in part, by the rise of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party. After the disastrous 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act opened up opportunities to expand slavery into new territories, Northern Whigs bolted the party to form the Republican Party. The Jacksonian Democratic Party was also weak and split on the future of slavery. Stephen Douglas' solution of letting each new territory decide the issue of slavery led to Lincoln's famous statement about "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand".
Having cast my first presidential vote for JFK, I have been disappointed with what goes on in Washington ever since. The best I can see is Newt Gingrich forcing Clinton to be a pragmatist and they did a few things right. Our 'free' press has been at the business of disrupting thought as long as I've been around and I'm sure before I came into being. So I will continue my marking 'independent' on any poll. Best news I can get is on Substack from some excellent investigative reporters.
The Democrats would be so far out of the running if not for the constant character assassination of Trump and everything Republican. There are just too many unaware voters that get the constant feed from their devices and don't dig any deeper. I have good friends that rely on me to explain what they just heard on the mainstream evening news... fake news.
It's not 'character assassination' to accurately describe someone's character, however.
Like I said in another thread, Trump is performing massive acts of corruption out in the
open. It's not TDS to point them out.
I hear a lot of "fake news!" from MAGA-world when it comes to these 'improprieties', but I have yet to hear *one* single explanation as to how, say, a sitting president using promises of private dinners with him to court investors in his memecoin, and making billions of dollars for himself and his family through the affair, is not a blatant act of graft and corruption.
" ... when asked which party comes closer to their own view on a variety of issues, 'neither party' is chosen by 24 to 36 percent of adults." -- John Halpin
Well, now, that "24 to 36 percent of adults" corresponds aporoximately to the percentage of adults still pledging allegiance to the Democratic Party; that is, the dwindling Democratic Party base supporters. Not a group, however dissatisfied with Democrats, likely to proclaim allegiance to Republicans.
It may turn out that unless the economy turns around, and soon, that Republicans will suffer a setback. The midterm results should prove the measure that matters.
In the meantime, what Democrats are fond of calling "false equivalence" may prove the biggest obstacle to their clawing out of a popularity hole of their own incompetent making.
If the Democratic Party is alive enough to fog a mirror it will survive and win the midterms, it's hard to imagine a scenario otherwise. What happens prior to 2028 and how both parties enter into that contest will be defining.
The party out of power traditionally does gain seats on the midterms. Given the Democrats internal divisions, their record of late and their performative politics that has been more theatric than substantive, we'll see if their lone "success" is an exception to the tradition. Also a measure of the woes they may face in 2028.
That is probably right, but imagine what happened in Boulder, increased by a factor of 10 or 100.
If Trump's tariffs have been put to bed for 12-18 months before the election and oil has spent 2 years at $60 a barrel. it may be more of a horserace , then most assume.
It is sort of like the New York Jets and New England Patriots rivalry.
Both teams suck, their fans know their teams suck, but their fans would rather crawl through broken glass than wear the other team's jersey.
I remember one of these liberal patriot articles of late described us as having six parties. Both R and D have a donor party with the seven figure donations (or eight figure). Then there are the activists, staffers, interns, hobbyists, single issue advocates, journos, NGO employees, etc., the ideology backbone of both parties. Lastly there are the voters of both parties and of no party.
Us voters are huge in numbers, but everything must pass through the sieve of the professional activist politician class, and then lastly the idea has to get the ok of the donors who have all the money for campaigns.
Those top two portions of both parties are too rigid, and have a lot more personal wealth than the vast voting class. We can't even pass a budget that is balanced and won't deny people health care. Republicans are fighting their own President over tariffs. Eighty percent of us agree on most things, but we are stuck with recalcitrant operatives at the top of our parties constrained by the whims of well heeled donors.
A party defined by a limited agenda is a way to win elections but no way to govern. Because once you win the election, you have deal with the whole range of everything government does. Your supporters get the full package whether they support it or not, leaving large numbers disappointed. And of course everyone forgets that the enemy gets a vote too. Currently, Trump supporters are suffering from this but let the wheel turn again and it will be Democrats.
This stack seems to yearn for some sort of centrist fusion. I don't think that is feasible as the Establishment factions from both parties who would have to make up such a fusion have failed not only to fix the substantive problems but to convince the disgruntled. The also tend to be partisan for its own sake, having no ideas other than that they should be in charge. So lean into the chaos and try to create a populist fusion from the factions away from the center. The far left and the far right already agree on the diagnosis, though they are loathe to admit it. Getting them to agree on the treatment is more of a challenge and will have to be incremental but some seeds are there.
This is true to an extent, but voter registration shows otherwise. There have been some glitches (in the hundreds, not thousands---UT, CO)---but the PATTERN of voter registration changes has been to Republicans net. Yes, many Ds are re-registering I, but when you get net gains, Rs are coming out ahead in PA, AZ, NH, KY, WY, CA, FL, IA, NC, and OK. More important, this trend has been going on for over a YEAR. That's not a glitch. It takes effort to re-register. This is a total repudiation of Democrats. No, the GOP doesn't have them completely yet, but I keep arguing that the unspoken equation will be this. "There are two parties. One is hapless, often incompetent, and occasionally greedy. But they don't want to kill me. The other party through illegal criminal invasion, woke/transoidism, Jew-hatred and love for Hamas/Palestinian murderers, affinity for the Uke war, total embrace of failed "green," and anti-birth, anti-population, anti-life policies? . . . It wants to kill me and my family." Believe me, the voter shifts are showing that at some level THIS EQUATION is beginning to factor in. Especially among men.
I always pay attention to Larry's registration findings!
Thanks John. For the uninitiated, let me note that sometimes these reflect "both parties gained," but one gained more than the other. Sometimes it reflects a voter roll purge or "both parties lost" but one lost less than the other. And sometimes one gains that the other loses. With the exception of the UT, CO blips and the one-month PA primary blip, since June of 2024 these changes have all gone in one direction. Away from Ds. That should be very, very concerning. Yes, Is have gained a lot, but that also tells us that the D brand itself is toxic, almost like Rs once were.
The problem is that your reasoning, once you account for the 'non-affiliated' or 'independent' voter registration numbers, makes no sense.
If the voter registration numbers show, as in the cases you are talking about, that A.) more Republicans registered than Democrats, and B.) more independents registered than either Republicans or Democrats, it is wholly incorrect to conclude that C.) there has been a 'net Republican gain'. The only conclusion these numbers support is that there has been a net gain for independents, unless you know how the independent block is going to vote--which neither you, nor I, nor anyone else, does.
Indeed, if we take the independent block to be a block of voters with weak partisan affiliation (as registering as an independent would seem to indicate), then the most likely scenario is that most of the country is up for grabs by either party, depending on how well a particular Democrat or particular Republican appeals to these voters.
I would do so with due skepticism, approximately 95% of what he says is provably false, especially about the economy. (if you need evidence, you can check my post history—his latest is here: https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/does-the-working-class-vote-against/comment/122214561?r=2pnvf&utm_medium=ios)
The manner of disinformation he propagates can be enlightening in its own right…but only if it is properly recognized for the distortion of reality it is.
To be clear, we do our own research and analysis when using VR data ;-)
I figured as much, I'm merely dispensing PSA's ;-)
A recent article showed that the Rs gain in "seldom vote" people greatly exceeds the Ds.
Oh, absolutely true. These are the Trump voters who came out in 2024. The question is will they come out for "Rs" in a non-presidential race. TBD. However, it is interesting that Richard Baris has found that NON-REGISTERED voters were Trump +17. In other words, what Scott Pressler is doing in PA is absolutely turning these non-active voters into active voters, and that's really bad news for Democrats. They hit their ceiling long ago. The GOP is just now at a floor and rising.
Do you have a link to Baris's Trump +17 finding?
No, that was way back during the election. There may be something on his "People's Pundit Daily" website, but we're talking Sept/Oct of last year.
Bring back Ross Perot circa 1992. "Let's look under the hood."
I don't belong to a political party. This should instruct us on a few things: 1) Either party can win elections based on the issues the party supports. 2) The winner can lose quickly in the next election if it squanders its support. 3) A really bad candidate can trump an issue-based decision. That big shifting group in the middle needs attention.
When I left the Ds, I did not become a R. Once burned, twice shy. But I think I've cast only one vote for the D candidate since 2014. Where I live (WA State), the Ds are controlled by the Puget Sound area, and are thoroughly nuts. Out here, the days of the lunchpail blue-collar Democrat have been gone for more than a decade.
If I may, George Packer pretty outlined this sense of abandonment in his 2013 book: The Unwinding = that the 2 parties are so similar who represents us?! Indeed, Trumpism is not a Republican Party movement. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/george-packer/the-unwinding/. Thoughtful, accessible and well substantiated.
Surely many people are upset with both parties, but the problems have very different life expectancies. Trump is an 80 year old, term limited, historically personally unpopular President. Dems face a plethora of historically unpopular or disappearing issues.
Abortion was always a top Dem priority. After Dobbs, it became a foregone conclusion a Trump win would bring a national abortion ban. It did not matter such a ban was legally and politically impossible. Now the issue has simply disappeared. Neither Reps or Dems mention it. This is important because Dems have historically raised billions on the issue.
How many times in the last 4 months has anyone heard the terms CRT or DEI, except when Trump announced their death? More importantly, how many voters are demanding Dems fight their extinction? Pride month still exists, but with 10% of the energy. The momentum has moved to trans athletes in sports, which puts Dems on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue. Even Climate Warriors are also much more muted. Most have not even bothered to loudly object to the end of many of Biden's Green sinkholes.
6 months ago most Dems still considered the open border a Fox News fallacy, to borrow Ruy's phrasing. Any problem was vastly overhyped and the fault of Reps who refused to codify into law legislation that guaranteed 2-3 million migrants a year, in perpetuity. Eventually the effect of 10 million migrants became impossible to hide. Trump closed the border in weeks and Dems began silently praying the issue would be memory holed like Covid.
The problem is, 10 million migrants are not going away, like unnecessary lockdowns. Regular migrant crime is now punctuated with spectacular crimes like murder and child rape. Then came Boulder. That Jews could be set ablaze in the US in 2025, by an illegal immigrant, for the crime of remembering Hamas hostages, is not an unimaginable one off, but probably a precursor of things to come.
Dems seem to sense screaming "due process" is a loser. 60 days ago Alberta Garcia was a Left folk hero. An entire Dem delegation, traveled to El Salvador by private jet on the taxpayer's dime, to check on the deportee's well being, like he was wrongfully convicted prisoner on Death Row. Today, Garcia should be on a milk carton considering how he disappeared from all Dem vernacular.
And it's about to get much worse. Crime aside, Millions of migrants have enjoyed years of generous food and housing subsidies, along with free medical care and education. Conservative estimates calculate US federal taxpayers spend $150 billion dollars annually on migrant care, which lands the cost in the top 10 list of federal spending. Trump has just ended every federal benefit but education and emergency healthcare. The mass poverty and homelessness that will likely follow over the next few years is going to be like 10 million migrants, hard to hide.
Trump's tariffs, like him, are very unpopular, but unlike 10 million migrants, they can disappear in a day. One bad economic quarter and Trump will declare victory and move on. More importantly, Trump is moving on in 3 1/2 years. Dems unpopular policies and their aftermaths, have no expiration date.
The 1852 election was a disaster for the Whig Party. It was caused, in part, by the rise of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party. After the disastrous 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act opened up opportunities to expand slavery into new territories, Northern Whigs bolted the party to form the Republican Party. The Jacksonian Democratic Party was also weak and split on the future of slavery. Stephen Douglas' solution of letting each new territory decide the issue of slavery led to Lincoln's famous statement about "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand".
Having cast my first presidential vote for JFK, I have been disappointed with what goes on in Washington ever since. The best I can see is Newt Gingrich forcing Clinton to be a pragmatist and they did a few things right. Our 'free' press has been at the business of disrupting thought as long as I've been around and I'm sure before I came into being. So I will continue my marking 'independent' on any poll. Best news I can get is on Substack from some excellent investigative reporters.
The Democrats would be so far out of the running if not for the constant character assassination of Trump and everything Republican. There are just too many unaware voters that get the constant feed from their devices and don't dig any deeper. I have good friends that rely on me to explain what they just heard on the mainstream evening news... fake news.
It's not 'character assassination' to accurately describe someone's character, however.
Like I said in another thread, Trump is performing massive acts of corruption out in the
open. It's not TDS to point them out.
I hear a lot of "fake news!" from MAGA-world when it comes to these 'improprieties', but I have yet to hear *one* single explanation as to how, say, a sitting president using promises of private dinners with him to court investors in his memecoin, and making billions of dollars for himself and his family through the affair, is not a blatant act of graft and corruption.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/22/nx-s1-5406209/trump-meme-coin-dinner-crypto
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-family-net-worth-crypto-investments/
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/trump-organization-break-ground-golf-club-vietnam-amid-trade-talks-2025-05-21/
" ... when asked which party comes closer to their own view on a variety of issues, 'neither party' is chosen by 24 to 36 percent of adults." -- John Halpin
Well, now, that "24 to 36 percent of adults" corresponds aporoximately to the percentage of adults still pledging allegiance to the Democratic Party; that is, the dwindling Democratic Party base supporters. Not a group, however dissatisfied with Democrats, likely to proclaim allegiance to Republicans.
It may turn out that unless the economy turns around, and soon, that Republicans will suffer a setback. The midterm results should prove the measure that matters.
In the meantime, what Democrats are fond of calling "false equivalence" may prove the biggest obstacle to their clawing out of a popularity hole of their own incompetent making.
If the Democratic Party is alive enough to fog a mirror it will survive and win the midterms, it's hard to imagine a scenario otherwise. What happens prior to 2028 and how both parties enter into that contest will be defining.
The party out of power traditionally does gain seats on the midterms. Given the Democrats internal divisions, their record of late and their performative politics that has been more theatric than substantive, we'll see if their lone "success" is an exception to the tradition. Also a measure of the woes they may face in 2028.
That is probably right, but imagine what happened in Boulder, increased by a factor of 10 or 100.
If Trump's tariffs have been put to bed for 12-18 months before the election and oil has spent 2 years at $60 a barrel. it may be more of a horserace , then most assume.