Vancvillan

So what Trump would need is: 1. Biden suffering something as devastating to his numbers as the Comey letter and 2. The same polling error as in 2016. Which was the second option @HanoiVillan gave.

For at least the last twenty years I've uttered the phrase "**** Florida" at some point during every election. They've managed to (administratively) **** up every election in living memory, so I wouldn't count too heavily on them.

SJM says hi.

This is by far the most shocking thing for me in this thread. Absolutely worldy of a signing.

I agree that there are plenty sticks to beat the Obama administration with, but I think you'd be better served by mentioning a couple if you want to compare and contrast.

@HanoiVillan - didn't mean any of that to sound like a critique of you personally or what you said, just that it was great evidence of an insidious problem. The bit I was hoping to focus on was the fact that Trump talks a lot, and what he says usually has an element of truth. Where he's had a surface-level win, 99.9% of people will remember the win in absolute terms, rather than what actually happened days, weeks or months later as a result of that decision. Human beings are generally terrible at taking a long view on anything (we're just not geared to think that way) and we tend to view a lot of actions in a very transactional way that doesn't take into account downstream effects (Mexicans out = more jobs for Americans!). It's really not helped by a 15 minute news cycle and social media where anything can be made more exciting, more sensational - and context or nuance are boring. I honestly don't know what the answer is - at this point I'm just a guy shaking his fists at clouds - but if I could put a button next to every Facebook post, Tweet or news story that Googled "what the post says" + "hoax" I would.

This is classic Trump mythology - he says a thing with an element of truth and it gets remembered as fact. Carrier were going to move approx 2100 jobs to Mexico. Trump and Pence stepped in and "saved" around 800 of those jobs in return for approx $7 million in government subsidies. Carrier also agreed to invest around $15m in the facility - but a lot of that is being invested in automation. Apparently morale at the plant is now at a rock bottom because employees see the writing on the wall - they'll either be replaced by robots or the plant will just shut down in the next few years. Unless the Government subsidize Carrier to keep employing humans, those jobs are going away. It's like the coal mining industry - it employees less than 60,000 people in the US (Walmart employs 1.5 million to put that in perspective) and is an industry that not profitable or heading that way in almost all cases. But Trump "digs coal" and is here to save it apparently - to the tune of $4b per year (approx $67,000 per job) in government subsidies. Propping up an industry with a ton of government money vs using that money to invest in retraining and infrastructure projects is insane (and socialism by proxy!). People want to work - giving them a job that relies on government subsidies (and thus the political winds) is very short term thinking - which unfortunately can be tactically smart given that elections happen every four years.

I can't believe I'm being the Darren Downer, but we should keep in mind it's been one game. It was a good performance on a day when everything clicked for the team as a whole. His speed on the ball and general physicality definitely add something that was missing in our midfield, but I'm not yet concerned about another team swooping in at the end of the season. The next few games might show he still needs time to settle and we should be prepared for that. He's also going to have his off days. I know this probably sounds miserable after our best performance in recent memory, but I also remember Guilbert's debut (see around page 23 in his thread) and plenty thought that him and Jota were the keys to our future success. Barkley is a cut above Guilbert, but he's also a long way from a 60m move to PSG.

There are people on VT who will burn effigies of him if he doesn't score again before the end of October...

Came in to post exactly this,though I'd address LB now. That said, it looks like we are a million miles from where we started last season, so if we have to wait for Jan for another signing or two then so be it (but I don't see the point in waiting - we all know where the gaps are).

They are very relevant in the way in which they are told. If you grew up in a red area, surrounded by lifelong conservatives, you actually don't hear those stories (or you hear them in a completely different context). If you want to dispute that then I'm not going to try and convince you. However, if you're willing to accept the fact that the stories people hear are different based on where they live and who they are surrounded by, you can see that they might have an opinion of Trump as a fighter, an astute businessman, someone who wants the best for all Americans but doesn't want jobs shipped overseas. I'm not saying there's an ounce of truth in any of that - you can feel warm and fuzzy inside that you're "right" all you want - but I also don't think that telling those people that they're deplorable is the way to claw back the soul of a nation. As a side - I live in a city with the pedestrian right of way law. I'm over-simplifying, but let's just say if you hit a pedestrian with your car, you are at fault. Now a pedestrian can go out at night when it's raining, dressed in black, put in their earbuds and cross the road without looking. They are "right". However: 1. Would they have still crossed the road if they knew the person driving along the road had a baby in the back that was going through a seizure? 2. Would they rather be right or alive? That's the crux of the problem right now - so many people are absolute that they are unwilling to bend even slightly to the idea that someone might think differently to them and have formed that opinion via what is a legitimate and understandable journey rather than must being a moron. Those same people are also so focussed on being "right" that their end goal can only ever be division.

@villakram question because I'm genuinely interested - and I recognize it's a tough one since there'll be no perfect or maybe even good answer for you. If you had to pick the next president from the field of challengers from both the Dems and Reps in the last four years (so you can have HRC - haha), who would you choose?

Let's put aside the boat people, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the malitias, etc. They're not for turning in this election. Instead look at either conservative independants or right-leaning low information voters. There are two things here: 1. Party vs leader - as an example, for some people of faith the Democrats kill millions of babies per year, so voting for someone they see as unsavoury (but who does a small percentage of the bad things he says he might do) is the least of two bad options. 2. You know he's a compulsive liar, but you get your news from specific places. Hold on the argument of how that's a valid decision for you to do that - we'll get there. For #1 you really have to get into a personal conversation to take that forward if the goal is a Dem vote. For #2 let's play this out... Democrats are unlikely to fact check something bad about Trump if it comes from a trusted source. Trusted source could be NYT, Al Jazeera, CNN, MSNBC, The Intercept - they all fall somewhere on a line of how good their sourcing standards are and how much editorial vs reporting content they run. Let's say some of them aren't perfect and make mistakes, and have run negative stories on Trump that turn out not be true. Someone else gets their stories from different sources - let's ignore Fox / OAN / etc and go with say National Review. Their readers will have seen some negative Trump stories, but more of a focus on negative stories on the Dems (which often do not made it to the lead sections of NYT, etc - and you could make a fair argument it's because they are not as important as other stories running), as well as a highlighting of whenever NYT / AJ / CNN / etc got it wrong. I'd bet you'd be more likely to fact check a bad story about Biden (or another politician you support) if it came from what you perceived as a conservative news source - people who on the Rep's side are the same but in reverse. So what we have are people who mentally check out when they see a story from what they perceive as an "enemy" source about their candidate. The answer isn't simple - but if the end goal is to reach an understanding it has to involve keeping an open mind to listening to people who think differently. I'm not saying the type of people who have stars and stripes facial tattoos and hate brown people - but there are a lot of moderate-ish people who once you talk to them in person and treat them with respect, are willing to listen. I would even go as far to say that they are willing to change their mind over time. I personally think that the wedge of independent / undecided voters are worth a lot of time, energy and patience right now. As I've said before - if they bring their senate votes with them, this could be one of the most consequential elections of the last 40 years, because you can bet your ass that McConnell won't let the Dems get anything done if he's still holding the gavel in 2021.

I'm not suggesting that right-leaning low information independent voters live in a vacuum. I've been in enough environments with a bunch of people who don't care about politics but have heard things from that guy who listens to Rush Limbaugh. So they here bits and pieces and it kind of sticks. It doesn't take much to make it unstick in a lot of cases, but it takes something. I also don't think Biden has ever said that he supports the Green New Deal, a wealth tax or (more obviously) banning cows. My point is that while there is some seed of fact in a claim that he has, right wing media just lie and blow it up (Rush being on of many). If you live in a red zone, you'll hear this second hand whether you want to or not, and the brain worm finds a home. What I'm saying is that there are plenty of people who have heard that kind of nonsense but can be swayed back - and that's a demographic worth fighting for.

Yeah, he wasn't my top choice by any means but strategically it's hard to argue with for any number of reasons. That said, picking him was the first step - getting those blue collar workers outside of Scranton to understand that he's not all wealth taxes, green new deal and banning cows is the real challenge. I just don't think that telling people who aren't yet committed to voting for him that you don't have strong enough language to describe how shitty they are is both bad politically, and is also myopic if the end goal is any kind of unity.

It's not that black and white. Let me play out an example: A gas drilling worker who has a family with two kids who rely on their salary to pay the mortgage, bills, etc. They live in an historically red area so a lot of their day-to-day interactions are with people who have voted Republican for years / decades. As far as they know, a vote for Biden is a vote for the end of fracking, and thus the end of their job. Are you honestly saying you can't see why someone who spends very little time reading about politics (and zero time on Twitter), and who's livelihood hangs in the balance might just stay at home instead of voting for Biden? That's a very noble standard you set, but I think you're being incredibly unrealistic. If I were part of the DNC, those would be exactly the kind of voters that I'd be trying to reach as they could be swayed, and they could end up being (as white working class people once were) a part of the Democratic party for years to come.

I think that's an over-simplification. There are a decent number of people who haven't yet made the decision on whether to vote for Biden or not to vote at all. They are not a monolith - but are typically centre-right or right leaning and dislike the leader but traditionally identify / see themselves as Republicans / Conservatives. They come from small pockets such as oil and gas workers who have heard that Biden will ban fracking, people who due to religion or personal ethics disagree strongly with late-term abortion, people who think Biden is "just another career politician" - the list goes on and there are a lot of these pockets. A lot of the uncertainty is based on not knowing Biden rather than not knowing Trump. These aren't the kind of people you see at Trump / Pence boat parades with flags flying out of every available hole, they are less politically engaged (in terms of consumption of politics news - they are likely just starting to tune in now) so will decide later and make decisions based on things that are very personal to them. They are likely ex-Trump voters who the Dems could sway from just staying home, and if they bring their senate votes with them could make this a victory of three fronts. I think anyone who is interested in the Dems taking back all three branches does the cause no favours by writing off anyone who isn't a nailed on Biden voter as "stupid pieces of shit".

I don't think that Trump saying that he might act like a dictator and then having a convicted felon saying martial law should be declared is going to motivate anyone to stay at home. There's a lot of this kind of commentary on Twitter, but Twitter isn't (even remotely) representative of the thoughts on the minds of a lot of the voters who are going to matter in this one. Yes, Trump shouted louder and interrupted more. Sure, he really riled up his base with nods to QAnon, OAN and the Proud Boys. But that's not a win for him. If he stayed on the topic of the economy (and being the one to rebuild) he could probably gain a couple of points since it's the lowest-hanging fruit, but he doesn't have the discipline. He's like the high school pitcher who turns up at job interviews ready to toss a ball. Sure, he might have good instincts for very specific things, but they are completely the wrong tools for what he needs right now. And for what it's worth, I don't think Biden is a great candidate - I just think that Trump and Hillary are / were historically bad, so Biden being average is enough right now.

Trump looked like a child, not a bully - and a lot of adults were at home watching.

He's at an almost historical low in the polls for an incumbent, and I'm not just talking popular vote. "Winning" for Trump tonight meant appealing to more than his base and bringing back some of the small percentage of undecided / non-registered voters who currently lean heavily towards Biden. The kind of people who held their nose because the other choice was Hillary, or who voted for him last time because he wasn't a politician and he promised to shake up the establishment. He has neither of those two crutches to lean on this time. I'm not saying Trump can't win, but the signs do not look good for him at all, and that debate did nothing to improve his standing where he needs a bump in support.

I'm familiar with all those words except the last one.

I think the (sad for us) reality is that he's been found out at this level. He's an excellent Championship winger, but doesn't have the attributes to step up to the prem. I say that with a heavy heart since I think most Villa fans thought he'd make the step up, but while he's a useful enough squad player, he shouldn't be near the starting 11 on a regular basis.

I'll just leave this here.

Yeah, it'll be shit having a player who just scores lots of tap-ins...

It's not great but goal aside it's been all Villa. To say Burton are on top is more than stretching the truth.