Pollsters are definitely not herding here . .Ipsos, Pew, Gallup and now Yougov/Economist have him underwater whereas Morning Consult, RMG, Survey USA have him still over 50%.
As I said yesterday, that is much lower approval than Biden enjoyed at this stage of his presidency. Worth noting is the downward change in the various approval polls; Trump is sinking like a rock.
We might say that Trump has a double base of support: the MAGA and the "Illiterati" – the woefully uninformed and disinformed. The latter group makes up a stunningly-large portion of American voters. Large enough that they again handed Trump the presidency.
I don't think he's helping, Dump could have gotten an unnamed hatchet man to do all this but he chose a public Billionaire, i'm guessing for said billionaire's money.
Not exactly unknown or unnamed, but a hatchet man called Peter Thiel is definitely active behind the curtain. (And it’s worth remembering that JD Vance is Peter Thiel’s protégé.)
I would not be surprised if it soon emerges that Musk’s DOGE team is copying massive amounts of federal data and sharing it with Thiel so he can run it through his Palantir analytics software, to guide key personnel decisions.
We’re seeing only the tip of the iceberg of the nature of the ongoing purge of the federal government.
some friends and I were discussing this and our consensus of opinion is mid 30s by Memorial Day and a gop wipeout next year: 20 seats in the House; we are not astute enough to predict the Senate.
Not sure I'd call a 20 seat House gain (which only puts us in the mid-230s) a "GOP wipeout", though it's pretty difficult to see either party breaking through with enough voters to gain enough seats for a political wipeout, and if they did a lot of them would be one-term rentals.
Yeah, with increasingly hardened partisanship from voters, large swings are going to be rarer, even in wave years.
Wiki's page has 69 house seats decided by ten points or less in 2024. Only 23 of those were won by a republican. Only 15 of those 23 were decided by 5 points or less. Of those 23, five were flips of seats we held going into the election. The 20th closest marginal republican held seat was CA-22, which we lost by 6.8 points.
Assuming no major realignments (who knows, at this point) or redestricting changes in our favor, winning an extra 20 seats would require a decent sized wave in our favor. A net gain of 20 seats would put us at 235 — the exact same number we held after 2018.
Some data as an aside:
The bare majority maker seat was PA-07, which we lost by one point. Marginal seats 3-5 are all in PA (7, 10, and 8, in order). Combined with barely losing the senate seat we'd be in a much better position right now if only we did a little bit better in that state.
The distribution of those 23 seats is interesting. Three each in AZ and PA. Two each in IA, CO, and CA. Then one each in NE, MI, VA, WI, NJ, MI, MT, NY, AK, WA, and FL.
Fifty-five percent of voters think Elon Musk has too much power in making decisions affecting the United States, 36 percent think he has about the right amount of power, and 3 percent think he has too little power.
Twenty-one percent of voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, which is an all-time low, while 68 percent of voters disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.
In today’s poll, 40 percent of Democrats approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49 percent disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.
Reading the Reuters article, it seems based on the polling that the tariffs are factoring in although certainly Americans are looking at things from a cost standpoint, not always specifically citing tariffs.
And one more thing about Trump's approval: Gallup, which polls presidential approval over blocks of two weeks, gauged it at 45-51 overall for the first half of February, but only 42-54 on the economy. That -12 on the economy is worse than he ever got from them during his first term.
For a true international downballot contest, if reports from the Vatican are indeed as dire as they sound we may have a Papal Conclave in the next month or so
I hope Francis can overcome this and hold on through 2025. Currently 79% of the Cardinal electors (those under 80 years old) were appointed by him (110 total); it takes 2/3rds to get a new Pope.
Here's where it gets tricky. The Vatican rules cap the number of electors at 120, but currently there are 138. Obviously, some will turn 80 this year and lose their eligibility, but even by 12/31, they'll still have 125 eligible. I don't know how they would handle it if they're over 120 at the time they need to vote.
2/3rds of the current 138 eligible is 92--still enough Francis Cardinals alone to elect a new person. If Francis lives to July 4th, there will be 3 fewer Francis Cardinals and, importantly, 3 fewer Benedict Cardinals. Even better, if he holds on to October 15th, there will be two more Francis Cardinals who hit 80, but also 1 each from the John Paul and Benedict groups. At that time, assuming no other resignations or deaths or a consistory, the Francis group would be at 105, or 82% of the 128 remaining voting members.
More evidence that John Paul was a Reagan-era conservative--the last of his Cardinals to reach 80 will do it in 2032--27 years after JPII died.
The demise of Mr Ratzinger’s influence on the College of Cardinals cannot come soon enough!
PS. Surely you mean Pope John Paul II? The first John Paul (definitely the better John Paul) was pope only for 33 days; I don’t think he had time to appoint many cardinals.
Well, given that any Cardinal that might have been appointed by JPI (there were none, as you note) would be ineligible to vote already, yes, I definitely meant JPII.
The closer the number of eligibles gets to 120, yes, this is likely. I don't know if 18 of them would give up the chance to take part if the conclave is soon.
I'm sure that Trump and his inner circle will find some way to influence a Conclave, if there is one while he's still POTUS, in favor of an overtly pro-Trump pontiff (or at least a traditional Catholic conservative in the mold of someone like Benedict XVI, if a pontiff that isn't going to do Trump's bidding on issues like immigration and wear a MAGA hat regularly can't be found or elected). Pretty much any Pope who gets elected after Francis is going to be, like Francis and everyone before him, rabidly anti-abortion, unfortunately.
Papal conclaves are notoriously difficult to influence because of their extremely secretive nature, as well as the fact that there aren't really any public campaigns (or even official candidates) for Pope. The last five Conclaves took place with JFK, Carter, Carter, GWB, and Obama, respectively, as U.S. President.
The institutional taboo against too publicly coveting the papacy protects against such - there’s the old saying “he who enters as Pope leaves a cardinal” for a reason
With all the international stuff going on, and Musk and Trump trying to undo long-established alliances and the international order, foreign elections are becoming more important than ever. In a few days, Germans go to the polls while Musk is promoting the AfD.
With this in mind, may I propose that David, Jeff & The Downballot team re-launch an occasional "Morning Digest" that focuses on foreign elections in the light of international events? (I seem to recall this as a fairly regular feature at DK Elections.)
I sincerely hope that Vance's late "endorsement" of the AfD causes them to shed some support in the final days here. I'll also be interested to see whether the FDP and Sahra Wagenknecht's party make the 5% cutoff.
The FDP deserves to get shut out of the Bundestag after the stupid stunt they pulled to sabotage the coalition, in the opinion of many Germans. As for Sahra Wagenknecht, she is a real snake. Her posters for "peace" were all over Germany when I was there last summer, but her vision of "peace" is to fuck Ukraine over and replace NATO with a European alliance that includes Russia.
I wonder if there are any Feli fans here. She's a really intelligent woman from Munich who's spent years living in Cincinnati with her now-fiance and speaks great American-accented English. If you'd like to watch her IMO excellent nearly hour-long presentation on the upcoming German elections, the parties and their programs, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsCmfBfyRLE.
I will tell you that I love the domestic program of Die Linke, which is almost utopian, but their foreign policy is a nightmare (see my remarks about offshoot Sahra Wagenknecht's foreign policy above, but she's also an anti-immigrant extremist and just plain nasty demagogue, whereas Die Linke is the most pro-immigrant party with a chance to get [retain, in their case] seats in the Bundestag) that shows they haven't gotten over being a Soviet puppet and now throw their lot in with Russia, and as a result, were I a German citizen, I would support the Greens, who have the next best domestic program while being firm (firmer than the SDP) in their determination to defend democratic Europe.
A US judge said he will take some time to consider a request by prosecutors under orders from a Donald Trump political appointee to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, saying he wants to make a reasoned decision on a 'somewhat unusual situation'
Does anyone know if President Biden ended up keeping in certain tariffs or did he lower/eliminate them?
I may have heard at some point during Biden's presidency that he didn't change anything regarding tariffs but I don't know for sure.
I ask because with the 2026 midterms coming in more than a year, it would be good for Democrats to run on potentially lowering or eliminating tariffs. This may address at least partially the problem with cost of goods.
Biden was mostly pretty good on policy, but he was worse on trade than any previous Dem president. He made no attempt to expand it or lift any of Trump's tariffs, when he probably should have made a big show of scrapping at least some of them to reduce inflation.
I suppose there's the made-in-america argument to explain this.
However, noting that Trump's tariffs in his first term where in place before the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems ridiculous that if inflation was a factor that Biden didn't do anything.
When the next Democratic POTUS comes in (hopefully in 2028), the tariffs should immediately be addressed within days of taking office.
In the meantime, I don't see why Democrats shouldn't run on this issue heading to the midterms if it's about lowering costs for Americans. Biden did help the manufacturing industry and the union workers a lot with the infrastructure bills though.
I agree that Biden left too many Trump tariffs in place, though he may have done so to support the unions and Dems in industrial states and areas that tend toward a more protectionist stance, viewing tariffs as helpful in keeping jobs at home.
Trade doesn't usually fall on neat partisan lines today, though it often did in the past. There was a time when Republicans were mostly for high tariffs and Democrats for freer trade, up to and including the 1930s when a GOP trifecta under Hoover passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff which was basically the protectionists' economic Waterloo, and FDR campaigned on negotiating reciprocal tariff agreements which lowered duties on many products and with many countries.
We may not be able to adopt a free (or freer) trade stance as party dogma given the differences in views between candidates in different regions, and we should at least allow Democrats in more pro-tariff areas to vote or campaign as they see best for their constituencies. But we could overall benefit from running on freer trade by telling voters that Trump's tariffs are making things too expensive. Polling suggests voters may well agree.
Quite honestly, I see the bigger issue being outsourcing, which should be regulated.
Democrats dropped the ball on this a long time ago since the Bush Jr was in office back in the 2000s. It’s like they have let this issue get worse and even more so with automation and tech.
Trade is fine as long as corporations don’t have any loopholes by which to avoid paying a living wage to workers and turn to cheap labor instead.
What you consider worse, I would consider better. He didn’t pursue any of the “protection for capital, free market for labor,” “trade agreements” that the Clintons and Obama did. That devastated the party on the sub-presidential level, and devastated the “industrial heartland.”
Zelenskyy Agrees to Hold Immediate Election and Run for President of United States
KIEV (The Borowitz Report)—Bowing to Donald J. Trump’s demand, on Wednesday Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would call an immediate election with the condition that it be held in the United States and he be permitted to run for president.
“For almost 250 years, the USA has been a beacon of democracy and freedom,” he said. “It should have a president who respects those ideas, and I will gladly relocate from Ukraine to do the job.”
He was optimistic about his chances of defeating Trump, adding, “I have heard his approval rating is 4 percent, and most of that comes from Elon Musk’s children.”
Has there been a lot of discussion of the possibility that New York Governor Hochul might fire Mayor Adams? If she does, I might vote for her in the primaries.
It's really essential, because he's been blackmailed by the Trump Administration, due to his corruption. Removing him from office would show a spine Hochul has yet to show.
Maybe this is because I don’t live in NY but does a NY Governor have the authority to fire the NYC Mayor and any mayor in a city/town in the state? Is this a state law that is in place?
have to start someplace; of course we are a long way from that; shit he has been office 1 fucking month and even some of his own people are starting to react. what do you expect after a month, johnson to initiate impeachment proceedings?
It would have been nice for fucking McConnell and the other cowardly Republican senators to have saved the country and human race from this when he had the chance.
they are afraid big daddy would send them to their room without dinner but, like I said, maybe Bacon's criticism of trump just might be the start of something, who knows!
Don Bacon’s problems with Trump and potentially getting primaried out of office is like whatever. Nothing new with the GOP.
However, Democrats winning NE-02 is more of what our concern should be. Considering how much the Congressional District has gone back and forth with inconsistent margins of victory for Bacon, primarying him out of office by a more extreme challenge could help Team Blue.
Related to Trump's approval rating that was discussed in yesterday's thread: Ipsos's numbers lout today have it at 44/51.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-rating-slips-americans-worry-about-economy-2025-02-19/
Pollsters are definitely not herding here . .Ipsos, Pew, Gallup and now Yougov/Economist have him underwater whereas Morning Consult, RMG, Survey USA have him still over 50%.
Taking the average, Trump is lower than Biden was at this time in 2021, but higher than he was in February 2017.
Thnx for the context
As I said yesterday, that is much lower approval than Biden enjoyed at this stage of his presidency. Worth noting is the downward change in the various approval polls; Trump is sinking like a rock.
We might say that Trump has a double base of support: the MAGA and the "Illiterati" – the woefully uninformed and disinformed. The latter group makes up a stunningly-large portion of American voters. Large enough that they again handed Trump the presidency.
According to YouGov, Elon Musk is underwater at 42/52. Without Musk to absorb public discontent, Trump's ratings would probably be even worse.
Musk makes for a useful meat shield
I don't think he's helping, Dump could have gotten an unnamed hatchet man to do all this but he chose a public Billionaire, i'm guessing for said billionaire's money.
Not exactly unknown or unnamed, but a hatchet man called Peter Thiel is definitely active behind the curtain. (And it’s worth remembering that JD Vance is Peter Thiel’s protégé.)
I would not be surprised if it soon emerges that Musk’s DOGE team is copying massive amounts of federal data and sharing it with Thiel so he can run it through his Palantir analytics software, to guide key personnel decisions.
We’re seeing only the tip of the iceberg of the nature of the ongoing purge of the federal government.
some friends and I were discussing this and our consensus of opinion is mid 30s by Memorial Day and a gop wipeout next year: 20 seats in the House; we are not astute enough to predict the Senate.
We’re only a month in; I shudder to think what insanity will unfold over the next three
Not sure I'd call a 20 seat House gain (which only puts us in the mid-230s) a "GOP wipeout", though it's pretty difficult to see either party breaking through with enough voters to gain enough seats for a political wipeout, and if they did a lot of them would be one-term rentals.
Yeah, with increasingly hardened partisanship from voters, large swings are going to be rarer, even in wave years.
Wiki's page has 69 house seats decided by ten points or less in 2024. Only 23 of those were won by a republican. Only 15 of those 23 were decided by 5 points or less. Of those 23, five were flips of seats we held going into the election. The 20th closest marginal republican held seat was CA-22, which we lost by 6.8 points.
Assuming no major realignments (who knows, at this point) or redestricting changes in our favor, winning an extra 20 seats would require a decent sized wave in our favor. A net gain of 20 seats would put us at 235 — the exact same number we held after 2018.
Some data as an aside:
The bare majority maker seat was PA-07, which we lost by one point. Marginal seats 3-5 are all in PA (7, 10, and 8, in order). Combined with barely losing the senate seat we'd be in a much better position right now if only we did a little bit better in that state.
The distribution of those 23 seats is interesting. Three each in AZ and PA. Two each in IA, CO, and CA. Then one each in NE, MI, VA, WI, NJ, MI, MT, NY, AK, WA, and FL.
given the nature of the (2020) gerrymandered House a gain of approx 20 seats would put
Dems around the same # of seats they had after 2018 rout. I'll take it!!
Yep in this day and age a 20 seat swing is akin to a "wave" . . Folks forget in 2018 how many "reach" seats the GOP had acquired the prior two cycles.
FWIW, Quinnipiac puts it at 45/49. In January it was 46/43.
https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/us/us02192025_urxu99.pdf
Fifty-five percent of voters think Elon Musk has too much power in making decisions affecting the United States, 36 percent think he has about the right amount of power, and 3 percent think he has too little power.
Twenty-one percent of voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, which is an all-time low, while 68 percent of voters disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.
In today’s poll, 40 percent of Democrats approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49 percent disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion.
It would be interesting to see what percent think the Democrats control Congress and what they think the Congressional Democrats should do.
Reading the Reuters article, it seems based on the polling that the tariffs are factoring in although certainly Americans are looking at things from a cost standpoint, not always specifically citing tariffs.
And one more thing about Trump's approval: Gallup, which polls presidential approval over blocks of two weeks, gauged it at 45-51 overall for the first half of February, but only 42-54 on the economy. That -12 on the economy is worse than he ever got from them during his first term.
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGkLWwl6XMAA0s5C.png
For a true international downballot contest, if reports from the Vatican are indeed as dire as they sound we may have a Papal Conclave in the next month or so
Perhaps that could inspire a movie. We could call it "Conclave" – put Ralph Fiennes in the starring role and even throw in John Lithgow.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20215234/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1
Also worth a watch is "The Two Popes" starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8404614/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_in_0_q_two%2520popes
Conclave was very good, both on shot composition and acting, even if the ending left me a little baffled
I hope Francis can overcome this and hold on through 2025. Currently 79% of the Cardinal electors (those under 80 years old) were appointed by him (110 total); it takes 2/3rds to get a new Pope.
Here's where it gets tricky. The Vatican rules cap the number of electors at 120, but currently there are 138. Obviously, some will turn 80 this year and lose their eligibility, but even by 12/31, they'll still have 125 eligible. I don't know how they would handle it if they're over 120 at the time they need to vote.
2/3rds of the current 138 eligible is 92--still enough Francis Cardinals alone to elect a new person. If Francis lives to July 4th, there will be 3 fewer Francis Cardinals and, importantly, 3 fewer Benedict Cardinals. Even better, if he holds on to October 15th, there will be two more Francis Cardinals who hit 80, but also 1 each from the John Paul and Benedict groups. At that time, assuming no other resignations or deaths or a consistory, the Francis group would be at 105, or 82% of the 128 remaining voting members.
More evidence that John Paul was a Reagan-era conservative--the last of his Cardinals to reach 80 will do it in 2032--27 years after JPII died.
The demise of Mr Ratzinger’s influence on the College of Cardinals cannot come soon enough!
PS. Surely you mean Pope John Paul II? The first John Paul (definitely the better John Paul) was pope only for 33 days; I don’t think he had time to appoint many cardinals.
Well, given that any Cardinal that might have been appointed by JPI (there were none, as you note) would be ineligible to vote already, yes, I definitely meant JPII.
JP I was the William Henry Harrison of the papacy.
Except JP II was no John Tyler. Except in eyes of the far right.
Also some cardinals will not be able to travel to Rome for a potential conclave.
The closer the number of eligibles gets to 120, yes, this is likely. I don't know if 18 of them would give up the chance to take part if the conclave is soon.
I'm sure that Trump and his inner circle will find some way to influence a Conclave, if there is one while he's still POTUS, in favor of an overtly pro-Trump pontiff (or at least a traditional Catholic conservative in the mold of someone like Benedict XVI, if a pontiff that isn't going to do Trump's bidding on issues like immigration and wear a MAGA hat regularly can't be found or elected). Pretty much any Pope who gets elected after Francis is going to be, like Francis and everyone before him, rabidly anti-abortion, unfortunately.
Papal conclaves are notoriously difficult to influence because of their extremely secretive nature, as well as the fact that there aren't really any public campaigns (or even official candidates) for Pope. The last five Conclaves took place with JFK, Carter, Carter, GWB, and Obama, respectively, as U.S. President.
The institutional taboo against too publicly coveting the papacy protects against such - there’s the old saying “he who enters as Pope leaves a cardinal” for a reason
Since the papacy has a global constituency, wouldn't this be an upballot contest?
Well, ever since the Reformation, Lutherans and many other Protestants have insisted on seeing the Vatican and the Papacy as "downballot".
A MODEST PROPOSAL
With all the international stuff going on, and Musk and Trump trying to undo long-established alliances and the international order, foreign elections are becoming more important than ever. In a few days, Germans go to the polls while Musk is promoting the AfD.
With this in mind, may I propose that David, Jeff & The Downballot team re-launch an occasional "Morning Digest" that focuses on foreign elections in the light of international events? (I seem to recall this as a fairly regular feature at DK Elections.)
I sincerely hope that Vance's late "endorsement" of the AfD causes them to shed some support in the final days here. I'll also be interested to see whether the FDP and Sahra Wagenknecht's party make the 5% cutoff.
The FDP deserves to get shut out of the Bundestag after the stupid stunt they pulled to sabotage the coalition, in the opinion of many Germans. As for Sahra Wagenknecht, she is a real snake. Her posters for "peace" were all over Germany when I was there last summer, but her vision of "peace" is to fuck Ukraine over and replace NATO with a European alliance that includes Russia.
I wonder if there are any Feli fans here. She's a really intelligent woman from Munich who's spent years living in Cincinnati with her now-fiance and speaks great American-accented English. If you'd like to watch her IMO excellent nearly hour-long presentation on the upcoming German elections, the parties and their programs, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsCmfBfyRLE.
I will tell you that I love the domestic program of Die Linke, which is almost utopian, but their foreign policy is a nightmare (see my remarks about offshoot Sahra Wagenknecht's foreign policy above, but she's also an anti-immigrant extremist and just plain nasty demagogue, whereas Die Linke is the most pro-immigrant party with a chance to get [retain, in their case] seats in the Bundestag) that shows they haven't gotten over being a Soviet puppet and now throw their lot in with Russia, and as a result, were I a German citizen, I would support the Greens, who have the next best domestic program while being firm (firmer than the SDP) in their determination to defend democratic Europe.
A US judge said he will take some time to consider a request by prosecutors under orders from a Donald Trump political appointee to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, saying he wants to make a reasoned decision on a 'somewhat unusual situation'
reut.rs/3DaMztA
Tariffs From Trump back in 2017-2021 to Today
Does anyone know if President Biden ended up keeping in certain tariffs or did he lower/eliminate them?
I may have heard at some point during Biden's presidency that he didn't change anything regarding tariffs but I don't know for sure.
I ask because with the 2026 midterms coming in more than a year, it would be good for Democrats to run on potentially lowering or eliminating tariffs. This may address at least partially the problem with cost of goods.
Granted the 2017-19 round of tariffs were much more targeted and narrow, but Biden didn’t repeal many if any of them
Biden was mostly pretty good on policy, but he was worse on trade than any previous Dem president. He made no attempt to expand it or lift any of Trump's tariffs, when he probably should have made a big show of scrapping at least some of them to reduce inflation.
I suppose there's the made-in-america argument to explain this.
However, noting that Trump's tariffs in his first term where in place before the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems ridiculous that if inflation was a factor that Biden didn't do anything.
When the next Democratic POTUS comes in (hopefully in 2028), the tariffs should immediately be addressed within days of taking office.
In the meantime, I don't see why Democrats shouldn't run on this issue heading to the midterms if it's about lowering costs for Americans. Biden did help the manufacturing industry and the union workers a lot with the infrastructure bills though.
I agree that Biden left too many Trump tariffs in place, though he may have done so to support the unions and Dems in industrial states and areas that tend toward a more protectionist stance, viewing tariffs as helpful in keeping jobs at home.
Trade doesn't usually fall on neat partisan lines today, though it often did in the past. There was a time when Republicans were mostly for high tariffs and Democrats for freer trade, up to and including the 1930s when a GOP trifecta under Hoover passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff which was basically the protectionists' economic Waterloo, and FDR campaigned on negotiating reciprocal tariff agreements which lowered duties on many products and with many countries.
We may not be able to adopt a free (or freer) trade stance as party dogma given the differences in views between candidates in different regions, and we should at least allow Democrats in more pro-tariff areas to vote or campaign as they see best for their constituencies. But we could overall benefit from running on freer trade by telling voters that Trump's tariffs are making things too expensive. Polling suggests voters may well agree.
Quite honestly, I see the bigger issue being outsourcing, which should be regulated.
Democrats dropped the ball on this a long time ago since the Bush Jr was in office back in the 2000s. It’s like they have let this issue get worse and even more so with automation and tech.
Trade is fine as long as corporations don’t have any loopholes by which to avoid paying a living wage to workers and turn to cheap labor instead.
Environmental issues are also relevant. I don't support or oppose tariffs in general. They are sometimes a useful tool, sometimes not.
Limited use of tariffs is fine in a selective sense.
These days though, with Americans feeling the pitch in costs, it makes more sense to end certain ones to give them relief.
What you consider worse, I would consider better. He didn’t pursue any of the “protection for capital, free market for labor,” “trade agreements” that the Clintons and Obama did. That devastated the party on the sub-presidential level, and devastated the “industrial heartland.”
Zelenskyy Agrees to Hold Immediate Election and Run for President of United States
KIEV (The Borowitz Report)—Bowing to Donald J. Trump’s demand, on Wednesday Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would call an immediate election with the condition that it be held in the United States and he be permitted to run for president.
“For almost 250 years, the USA has been a beacon of democracy and freedom,” he said. “It should have a president who respects those ideas, and I will gladly relocate from Ukraine to do the job.”
He was optimistic about his chances of defeating Trump, adding, “I have heard his approval rating is 4 percent, and most of that comes from Elon Musk’s children.”
https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/zelenskyy-agrees-to-hold-immediate
Has there been a lot of discussion of the possibility that New York Governor Hochul might fire Mayor Adams? If she does, I might vote for her in the primaries.
It was brought up the other day but not too much discussion on it. I'd gain a lot of respect for her if she did it.
It's really essential, because he's been blackmailed by the Trump Administration, due to his corruption. Removing him from office would show a spine Hochul has yet to show.
Maybe this is because I don’t live in NY but does a NY Governor have the authority to fire the NYC Mayor and any mayor in a city/town in the state? Is this a state law that is in place?
Yes, but it's never been done.
I would sense that the issue could potentially be politicized if a GOP Governor were in office and a Democrat were NYC Mayor.
But again, I don’t live in NY and am not familiar with how things are in the state as you are.
Maybe Congressman Don Bacon, R-NE, turning on trump is the beginning of something we haven't seen since Watergate?
How so?
the president's party no longer supporting him
We are a long, looooong way from that
have to start someplace; of course we are a long way from that; shit he has been office 1 fucking month and even some of his own people are starting to react. what do you expect after a month, johnson to initiate impeachment proceedings?
It would have been nice for fucking McConnell and the other cowardly Republican senators to have saved the country and human race from this when he had the chance.
they are afraid big daddy would send them to their room without dinner but, like I said, maybe Bacon's criticism of trump just might be the start of something, who knows!
Turning on him in what way, though? Is he calling for his removal from office?
Kinda has too, he's numero uno on the potential 2026 unemployment list if he doesn't create separation.
You say that, but don't put it past Republicans to primary out anyone who crosses their Dear Leader.
Don Bacon’s problems with Trump and potentially getting primaried out of office is like whatever. Nothing new with the GOP.
However, Democrats winning NE-02 is more of what our concern should be. Considering how much the Congressional District has gone back and forth with inconsistent margins of victory for Bacon, primarying him out of office by a more extreme challenge could help Team Blue.
Undoubtedly. I'm just saying, he takes a risk either way.
For sure.