*sigh*, yeah, I'm dooming. We just had a massive win last week, but I'm already dooming about 2028. And here's why. The reason we won by such an overwhelming margin was because democrats has presidential year level turnout, while republicans had normal midterm year turnout. Polling is shaping up in such a way for 2028 where the race is already projected to be FAR narrower. And we just got a new poll today from Impact Research. Im having trouble finding the original link, so here's a reddit link with a screenshot of the poll.
*sigh*...okay so let's unpack this. First, AOC is the worst of all the candidates polled. AGAIN. The one candidate I'm close to, and they're dead even. And that's a GOOD poll for AOC, as discussed before most polls have her in the negatives.
Harris and Newsom, our frontrunners, aren't much better. D+1 and D+2. In a way this is good for AOC, but also bad for the party in general. The brand is just...fundamentally unpopular. Just because people rejected MAGA last week doesn't mean voters like democrats. Even worse, they don't seem to even like the one democrat who stands out from the rest on policy.
All of these other candidates are the same crap. And sure, they poll higher, but they also have lower name recognition, meaning voters haven't found enough reason to hate them yet. As they get to know them, I'd expect them to end up about the same.
Of the candidates who ARE viable with current primary polling, it's Buttigieg and Ossoff, meaning this is feeling like 2004 again with the likes of Howard Dean, John Edwards, and John kerry, all milquetoast white males. Ossoff scores the best at D+9. WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE LIKE THIS GUY!?
And that's another rant of mine. I keep hearing Ossoff should run for president. Omg isn't he so dreamy? He can give a good speech. he sounds like Obama? SO FRICKING WHAT?! HE'S JUST ANOTHER BORING CENTRIST!
And that's my deep frustration with this cycle in a nutshell. All of these candidates, other than AOC, might as well be Joe Biden to me. They have the same ideology, the same policies, and presumably, the same lack of willingness to deliver for the American people. If I threw them all in my presidential metric, they'd all score...about the same. Sure, Ossoff is more charismatic, in the way Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were charismatic, but that doesn't mean anything to me. Even if they win, they're not gonna get in and make our lives better. They're gonna lose this massive congress we just got. And then we're gonna get MAGA back. When will we learn? The American people want change. But then, it seems like, when you're the person who offers change, it's like "no, not like that!"
Which...brings me to yet another frustration with the American public. Look. I'm an ex conservative. I've been there. I touched the stove in 2010 with the tea party, I learned that fire is hot, and not to touch the stove again. I then completely abandoned conservative ideology and became a full on progressive. I looked at the issues that impact us with the economy, from income inequality, a lack of economic or job security, and hell, in the 2020s, even inflation. And it all goes back to one thing for me: Reaganomics. We have this idea that if we just trust the market, that the best outcomes will be served. But....if we leave the markets to their natural mechanisms, we get...exactly the problems we get. The economy between employers and employees is this. The rich "job creators" dont wanna create jobs, they dont want the wealth to trickle down, they treat you as disposible cogs in their machines, and that's why they wanna automate your jobs away with AI. Because they don't want to pay you. They wanna use you for all you got, and then throw you away. This is how we got the income inequality and economic conditions from 2008 on where it seemed like we never had enough jobs and we always needed to create more.
But then once we get to the other side of the phillips curve, we get inflation. And a lot of inflation in the 2020s is due to the same incentive structure. When looking at the markets between consumers and sellers, the sellers wanna sell the least amount of stuff for the most amount of money, or otherwise produce as much as they can to get as much money as they can. However, with income inequality becoming so extreme, the businesses are straight up looking at the typical American consumer and saying "you don't have any money, so you no longer matter." We see it most plainly with Nvidia and the AI bubble. Computer part producers are giving a massive middle finger at normal PC builders while locking in deals with billionaires for all their AI data center crap that no one wants. But it's also everything else. Housing is like this, it's why housing is so expensive. They arent building more housing for you and me, they're building it for rich ####s with 6+ figure incomes because that's where the money is. That's also why vacations are so expensive. We used to be able to get $60 hotel rooms a decade ago, and they'd be CLEAN. Now you're spending $100+, often $120+ just to avoid something roach infested or without other obvious problems. Restaurants are getting ridiculously expensive. Even fast food is expensive. It's like the wealthy decided past COVID to collectively take the public for all that its worth, and it decided going after fewer people who have more money is more profitable than appealing to the masses.
The result is an economy that works very well for the top 20%, but feels awful for everyone else. We're being pushed down into a slave class where we just work all day to produce for rich people while getting subsistence wages and living in constant fear of losing our jobs, while all that wealth goes to the rich and a handful of people who control society with their massive wealth. And normally the middle class is the buffer, but a lot of that middle class is going down, while others are going up. "K shaped economy", it's basically income inequality.
There are obvious solutions for ALL of these interconnected problems, but you gotta move left. You gotta embrace progressive candidates. I ain't saying you gotta do MY program specifically, i go into an explicitly anti work direction that would probably alienate some of the consumer classes itself (remember the cardinal rule?). But at the same time, the democratic socialist types are basically offering a more traditional jobist/consumerist vision of progressive politics and PEOPLE ARE REJECTING THEM!!! WHY?!
I swear, the median American voter is like a chicken with their heads cut off. They recognize problems, they want solutions, but when solutions, they go "no, not like that" and vote for MAGA or some centrist crapbag who won't do anything instead. And in 2028, it's all, OMG Jon Ossoff, isn't he so dreamy? No, he's not. He's just Joe Biden again. Which is...Barack Obama again. And that seems to be what they're going for, Obama, the charismatic guy who offered performative change, but didnt actually improve the core socioeconomic situation long term.
And it just gets worse from there. Buttigieg, another boring centrist. Newsom and Harris, just, oh god no to both of them. AOC....well, at least she's the more jobist/consumerist vision for progressivism, but then she polls HORRIBLY and probably cant win against FREAKING JD VANCE AND MARCO RUBIO. Like, WTF?!
Anyway, this is why I can't get excited for 2028. We're just gonna get force fed centrist slop, probably only narrowly avoid defeat because for some reason half the country seems to be into the current brand of republican cruelty, religious zealotry, white ethnonationalism, and authoritarianism. SERIOUSLY, YOU REALIZE THAT THESE MINDSETS ARE WHAT GAVE RISE TO THE LITERAL NAZIS, RIGHT?! And then as the country sours on the democrats, because once again, they don't wanna actually DO ANYTHING with their power, they're gonna lose from 2030 on and we're just gonna elect an even more radical republican party here.
Seriously, if you want change, support an actual change candidate. Otherwise wtf are we doing here? Ossoff aint gonna do anything worth a darn unless he's PULLED left by US, the progressives who you guys seem to revile so much. It's frustrating. This whole thing is frustrating. I'm dreading 2028 at this rate because despite whatever wins we got last night, I doubt they'll carry forward. Of course, it's early, and we'll see where things go. But right now, looking at where things are going is painful to me.
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