At least 2 previously undecided voters now support Biden so I suppose this headline is technically correct, it’s just completely meaningless and insignificant statistically.
This comment says it better than I could. The debate was a disaster for Biden. Which sucks.
Samples size of a focus group on Univision…
It did quote a poll that Biden is only up 1% among Latino voters tho
Fucking insane that it’s that close. But I guess when Biden literally copies trump illegal border policies, it’s hard to get them scared of trump.
tbf, arent those border policies somewhat popular among some latino voters? Im not defending those policies as they dont align with my own views on the topic, but theres plenty of room for people that managed to get through the immigration system legally to look down of people who havent, or for people born in the country to dislike migration even if their ancestors did it, or for people that want to “pull up the ladder behind them” so to speak. Biden couldnt exactly expect Trump’s border policies to automatically win him that demographic either way.
There’s also the fact that cartels run a lot of border towns. It’s not that border area Latinos are mad at illegal migration so much as they don’t want South Texas to be like Northern Mexico.
Also, it’s a little silly to treat Latinos as a single group. South Florida Cubans are different from everyone, basically. Recent immigrants are different from 2nd or 3rd generation ones. Ted Cruz’s full name is Rafael Edward Cruz and he’s different from people who aren’t bozos.
Ted Cruz’s full name is Rafael Edward Cruz and he’s different from people.
he’s a reptillian in a skin suit. so he’s basically different from humans. altogether.
when Biden literally copies trump illegal border policies
There are three big problems with immigration at the present moment:
- There’s a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons
- We’re rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #1), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it’s fuckin dangerous
- The whole agency in charge of the thing is racist and oppressive
Biden is unable fix the third without an act of God (or, without firing the whole system and then finding 40,000+ people who want to be immigration police who are not racist, so basically an act of God).
Biden is unable to fix the first two problems also, although they do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don’t wait for a year before their case is heard).
And, any time he tries to do anything about it, e.g. reducing the rate of people allowed to come across the border or increasing funding for ICE, everyone on the left as far as I can tell thinks he’s just being cruel on purpose for no reason and gets really mad at him.
So my questions are:
- What illegal border policies do you think Biden is copying?
- What specific thing do you think he should do, instead of trying to increase the number of judges and the funding for ICE, and compromising with the Republicans to try to get it done when they block him on it?
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Oh, I know. I am just stating the message for the rest of the people.
The bad faith folks used to have these epic debates with me back and forth but I think they have mostly stopped doing that and I am heartened to think that maybe they decided that trying to say anything I was saying wasn’t true was an obvious losing battle and they were hurting their cause by even making the attempt.
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No one who saw that debate was inspired by Biden, no one. Ok maybe 1 out of 100, maybe. But 99 of them were not. Gaslighting won’t help, the goose is cooked.
It’s like you didn’t even read the article or what they said and are trying to pretend they said something else. Amazing that you would pull the term “gaslighting” out, it’s almost as if you know what you are doing.
To reiterate he article, they were turned off by Trump’s lies and repeating the same things and avoiding the questions. None says they were inspired by Biden.
Lol did you? It literally cites a single voter and a poll showing Trump trending better among Latinos than previous electoral performances for that demographic. Nothing in this article actually warranted the headline and meta polls show Trump still ahead. Delusion will only hand us another 4 years of Trump
You fighting to sow discord against the only viable alternative is working to get Trump, pointing out that regular people found reason to prefer his responses over Trump and highlighting what they are is useful in helping people highlight the many advantages of Biden.
Yes he’s not as energetic as a lunatic, probably because he’s a sensible human that’s been working hard on his lifelong goal of improving the society he lives in and pushing through sensible and practical reforms that actually help real people and put the nation on track to deal with the many challenges it faces going forward.
Criticizing Biden right now is not “working to get Trump”. Biden could easily step down and get behind an alternative candidate. These things aren’t black and white when we’re still like 4-5 months out from the election.
So nice job of not addressing the fact that you didn’t read the article and nothing I said indicated that I’m trying to sow discord. I will vote for Biden and argue that others should as well
But pretending that the debate helped that cause is worthless. We are losing and pretending we are not doesn’t help. Stop fighting with people pointing out reality and be more vocal on why to vote for Biden.
Did you read the article? Here’s a quote:
The clip shows a group of about a dozen people and one of them being interviewed by a journalist.
So you think this can be applied broadly to undecided voter sentiment in general?
I supported Biden before the debate, I support him now after the debate. But now it’s more of a “Ah fuck, look at this mess I’m going to be voting for, ah fuck what the fuck America aaaaaaah.” Than it was before.
Do you feel like it’s a mess now? I’m not voting for Biden because i think he is a good debater, I’m voting for him because hes done a perfectly fine job as president during some tough times. He’s smart enough to let the systems that have held together for decades continue to function and to take advice from experts.
Trump wants to dismantle the government and fill it with trump loyalists, which adds even more incentive to make sure Biden wins.
I learned absolutely nothing new from the debate. Trump is a habitual liar and Biden is a doddering old man. Out of our two wonderful choices I’ll be voting Democrat but I still wouldn’t trust either of them to drive a car I’m in let alone run the country.
Trump’s lies were more obvious than normal. So there’s that, I guess.
Maybe they just related to someone having trouble keeping up with a yelling idiot liar?
His lies seemed more artful and effortless to me, and he stayed calm and lucid the entire time.
I’ll agree, but he was at the same time more bold, like saying everyone wanted to overturn Roe v Wade. Confident and competent lying can get you far, but if you lie about how the people watching would feel, you undermine all your other lying.
There are few things more maddening than claiming you know how someone feels more than they themselves do. A very credible liar can be undone if they lie that well on a matter the audience personally knows better. Suddenly all the benefit of the doubt purchased by the confidence is erased.
Very capable delusions
The best fictionary
Make all the throwaway jokes you want but a low information voter would probably perceive him the way I described and wouldn’t catch the lies. Trump may be older than in 2016/2020 but he appeared present and even reassuring to uninformed or on-the-fence previous Trump supporter eyes.
Yeah that’s what propaganda does. I could absolutely see that MAGA and uninformed people would fall for this tripe.
BIDEN: I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters.
First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.
The idea that the politicians – that the founders wanted the politicians to be the ones making decisions about a woman’s health is ridiculous. That’s the last – no politician should be making that decision. A doctor should be making those decisions. That’s how it should be run. That’s what you’re going to do.
And if I’m elected, I’m going to restore Roe v. Wade.
TRUMP: So that means he can take the life of the baby in the ninth month and even after birth, because some states, Democrat-run, take it after birth. Again, the governor – former governor of Virginia: put the baby down, then we decide what to do with it.
So he’s in – he’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby.
Nobody wants that to happen. Democrat or Republican, nobody wants it to happen.
I think a big part of the problem is Biden is a good politician, he’s generally honest and forthright which is what everyone claims to want.
But we’re all so lost in marvel movie logic and cinema tropes that people don’t respond to it, they just want a showman - meanwhile politics is boiled down to robot voice tiktoks and reddit posts that barely scratch the headline so again people don’t respond to reality they need a hyper targeted exaggeration coated in catchy idealism and easily retweetable slogans.
Biden says exactly the right things, minis the sort of speech error we all make occasionally, and his record backs up his ability to actually get things done - often in a way that doesn’t draw massive attention but incrementally makes things better.
Trump is a liar and an actual idiot, like genuinely stupid and uninformed - but he says anything that will sound good at the time so it makes it seem to people that aren’t paying attention or follow complex arguments that he’s the one who’ll get things done
You’re not wrong, but the people you describe aren’t the ones this article is about.
Agreed. How about the other guy? Was anybody inspired by him?
I’m really sad that it’s come to this. It’s how I feel when my coworkers vote to go out to a sushi restaurant. I don’t like fish and I’m allergic to shellfish, so I eat my pile of steamed rice and bite my tongue when they want to split the bill equally.
What was I talking about again?
I was thinking the debate rules actually saved Trump from his worst impulses. Biden was allowed to speak at full length and Trump gets to appear like he can participate in a civilized conversation while Biden would sometimes go off the rails while trying to fill his time. A lot of his embarrassments started in a decent place, but pivoted badly in the middle.
Trump confidently lied repeatedly without consequences, and so long as someone is unaware that it’s lies, I could imagine them finding Trump’s rhetoric credible that night.
You have a very interesting point about the muted mics actually being in Trump’s favor while simultaneously allowing Biden to ramble like Grandpa Simpson.
No, but Trump blatantly lying about everything, and refusing to admit that he was convicted possibly did turn some “undecided” voters away from him. This election isn’t so much voting for Biden, as it is against Trump. Or for Trump for the idiots that vote for the felon.
The problem is the only people saying this are people who have been saying the same things for the whole time and are desperate for it to ve true so it’s hard to believe them, it’s not coming from my friends that weren’t yelling about Biden every excuse they got.
It’s like thuderfoots recent starliner stream, he predicted it would fail and spent the whole time saying ‘oh shit, here it goes… looks like it’s going to explode…’ even when both bits were returned safely he was calling the spaceX staff morons for celebrating because he was so desperate to be right.
People wanted Biden to fail because then they could push their brand of politics but he’s doing great based on actual metrics, so they try to make him fail using opion and tone setting behavior - the exact way Trump beat Hillary, memed that she was bad until no one went to vote.
What? I wanted Biden to succeed. And he wasn’t doing good in the metrics, his approval ratings were bad, being other dems who are way ahead of him in polls. He was tied with Trump, which is insane given how bad of a candidate Trump is. Most all voters (65% I think) thought he was too old before the debate and wanted another choice.
What will they think now?
yeah but I bet they were suddenly worried
I don’t consider myself a Republican or a Democrat, although unless things change drastically in American politics, I can’t see myself ever voting Republican by the time I’m dead and gone. With that said, I mentioned to someone yesterday that if I didn’t have the experience of living through Trump’s time in office, this debate would make me seriously consider voting for him.
I really don’t believe that this debate is going to sway many undecided voters toward Biden. If you compare their performance at face value, Trump was unusually well-spoken, and Biden seemed like he belonged in a nursing home. Half of what Trump said was complete bullshit, but how many undecided voters are actually reading articles that show how full of it he really is?
What you have is a person who stated lies as fact and did a decent job of being convincing and a person who was generally truthful but seemed like he “wasn’t all there.” Undecided voters who “don’t follow politics” are going to see this and say “You know, I think I understand why people support Trump.” That’s a very scary prospect.
I don’t dislike Biden, but my personal opinion is that the best thing he could do for the country is step aside and let a different Democrat take the nomination. Geriatrics like Trump and Biden need to retire, do whatever they feel like in their golden years, and let someone else take the reins. A competent politician in his 50s or 60s would absolutely destroy Trump, and that’s exactly what we need right now.
What you have is a person who stated lies as fact and did a decent job of being convincing and a person who was generally truthful but seemed like he “wasn’t all there.” Undecided voters who “don’t follow politics” are going to see this and say “You know, I think I understand why people support Trump.” That’s a very scary prospect.
to be fair to Biden, he wasn’t all there. I mean, he had a cold, and if that doesn’t fog things up, the medications would.
But, I feel like somebody on his Campaign programing team should have pointed out that if the win-conditions for a successful debate is literally staying alive (see John Olliver rant,) that there wasn’t really much to be gained by it in the first place. it’s not like we don’t know their positions. we’ve already had 4 years of these guys. (well, 3.5 for biden. close enough for politics.)
If you want democrats to win, you shouldn’t delude yourself with this stupid article that takes the opinion of one undecided voter (asked out of a group of about a dozen people) and pretend this is something that applies to undecided voters at large. This is copium on the level of 2016 and we’d all be better off if we didn’t huff this bullshit. We should be taking steps to improve our chances, not gaslighting ourselves.
I don’t trust Newsweek, you probably shouldn’t either. However, with that being said… if the debate would have gone differently, and let’s just say Joe had a bad sore throat instead of “a cold,” and Joe went up there and said nothing at all, he’d still have my vote in this election. Honestly, I think if Joe would have said nothing, and just let Trump lie, that would have been better than how it went.
He appeared as weak, and a bit incoherent up there. He resorted to name calling on multiple occasions.
Trump lied about 90% of the things he said. Trump sounded better, and didn’t really take the cheap shots at Biden that we expected.
There was nothing about that debate that would have swayed “undecided voters” (who’s that by the way) to vote FOR Biden as a result of the debate. The number of lies coming from Trump may have persuaded some people to vote against him however.
This is literally a new article about an X post where they’re interviewing some Latinos… Objectively, the cope is insane. Joe is fucked
Yeah this is reporting on the feedback from a focus group of like 20 people conducted by some Latino TV station… Not sure how representative that is of the wider electorate…
Polls are all trash, but this focus group we believe.
This one affirms our convictions so it must be true
This message brought to you by the Ministry of Truth.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
And to add something with more substance than straight eye rolling sarcasm, amazing that the non-english speakers loved his performance.
Lets get one of those translators on the ballot.
But I was told that all Biden’s answers were completely incoherent? You’re telling me that the media is making a big deal out of a few moments in the debate?! That’s never happened before!
No man it was legitimately bad. Biden did horrible. I’m terrified that we’re gonna see a significant slip in the polls after that disaster.
Undecided Latino voters specifically according to the article. I don’t think that should be too surprising based on the lies Trump was spewing about illegal immigration.
Ok let’s see how the polls move. If they move in the right direction, Biden stays on. If they move in the direction everyone knows they’ll move in, he steps down. Deal?
There will be no negotiations. You will accept what the DNC… your betters… puts forward to you. You will bow and kiss the oldest moldiest feet in human existence.
Now stand up and clap. And you will smile. Bigger now… I see you’re not smiling big enough after placing your vote. Sorry, it’s too late for you… you are now antisemetic and you are 110% responsible for the Republicans installing a authoritarian government.
Don’t forget to chant "Joe Biden is the most labor friendly president in history " 20 times every time when you wake up.
Democratic party would crush it if only they replaced Biden with a younger candidate. I’m telling you, even republicans might switch over and vote democrat if this happens.
Lol, have you seen a Republican recently?
Yes, have you?? I actually happen to live amongst them, which may sound exotic to some Lemmings.
“I hate Trump, but Joe is a walking corpse” is not an uncommon sentiment.
Are they aware that even an almost-corpse could follow their advisors and therefore end up having an effective presidency? As long as Biden doesn’t start doing random senile shit (and be realistic, he’s far from that)
To a lot of these voters it’s not about having a logical cabinet nor even policy. It’s the individual as a character representing our nation, and to them Trump is better spoken than Biden even if what most of he says has little basis in reality.
This is why Obama had such a good time with swing voters, it’s not really about the policies from what I see. I’m shocked no party since 2008 has tried running a younger candidate. I’d love to see someone younger debate Trump. Like Pete Buttigieg for example. Like ya he’s still a career politician, but I suspect he’d do much better at making the insane stuff Trump says sound insane.
If they haven’t changed their minds yet, then they aren’t going to. It’s time to try someone different.
Besides, you’re not even needing Republican votes. You just need undecided votes and to energize democratic voters who hate both candidates with age being a big factor.
The presidency needs to be reframed. It’s not some position of ultimate power. Presidents have far less control than the general public thinks, or the media would have you believe.
To get anything lasting done you need all three branches working together and with this court, and congress…
I actually happen to live amongst them
I do too, which is why I know that you are wrong.
If Biden decided to step down, his delegates are pledged to support Kamala Harris. So it’s either him or her.
Still certain Democrats would crush it without Biden?
If Biden decided to step down, his delegates are pledged to support Kamala Harris.
I’ve tried to verify that this is the case and can’t find evidence anywhere. Can you point me to a source? I was under the impression that they’d be expected to turn to her, but that they’re not required to.
Edit: After lengthy back and forth, it finally became clear that this is simply an opinion. User has absolutely no proof.
They aren’t required. But Biden/Harris delegates aren’t chosen randomly, they are Democrats who have demonstrated loyalty towards Biden and Harris and have personally pledged to support them.
But they’re not “Biden/Harris delegates”. They’re Biden delegates, as he was the only name on the ballot. Are you just saying they’ll go with her out of deference?
Fair point. I think they would absolutely go with Harris. Partly out of deference, partly because she would remain in control of the Biden/Harris $100 million warchest and ground operations org, partly because her name can’t be taken off the general ballot in multiple states, and partly because Democrats need to campaign on women’s rights and it would look awful to pass over a Black woman.
I also think that Newsom/Whitmer/Beshear/Pritzker et al are not interested in replacing Biden. They will inherit chaos, are very likely to lose in the general, and that will be the end of their presidential aspirations.
partly because her name can’t be taken off the general ballot in multiple states
Again, where is your proof of this? Ballots haven’t been finalized anywhere in the country, as Biden isn’t even officially the nominee yet. You keep saying these things as if they’re set in stone, but from what I can tell they’re not. Do you have proof that ballots have been printed before the convention, or that states have closed the registration window for running mates before closing the registration window for candidates?
Note: I agree with the rest of what you said, for the most part.
As you suggest it’s a regulatory problem. There was a recent kerfuffle involving the Ohio ballot, which was solved by putting Biden/Harris on the ballot before they are officially nominated. So any changes made at the Democratic convention will come too late to change the Ohio ballot.
There was a similar issue in Alabama, but it looks like they just moved their deadline after the convention.
Will someone please come out and say what the problem with Kamala Harris is? I see people hinting about it all the time, but I have no idea what it’s all about.
Her record as DA is problematic for a lot of people. She was labeling herself as a progressive, but then behaved as a conservative. Fought to keep a lot of people in prison for minor offenses, fought to keep the death penalty, etc. While doing that, she had a book out about criminal justice reform… and went against her own advice. Pretty much a lap-dog for conservative criminal justice policy. Overall, blatantly hypocritical to anyone that was paying attention.
Thanks for explaining.
I have a problem with many of her past decisions but, the same goes for Biden. Both are still a significantly better choice than Trump.
Is she pro genocide? My only problem with Biden is his age and Israel policy, and I have no idea what hers are.
Unfortunately, anyone who has any real chance of being president isn’t going to do anything meaningful to stop what is happening in Gaza.
It’s because she’s a woman. They’re scared.
It’s certainly true that women who rise to the top of national politics get relentlessly, negatively caricatured (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi). With Kamala Harris it’s different because a lot of the murmuring comes from Democrats and they never say why.
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/28/joe-biden-replace-us-elections-2024
All undecided voters in a U.S. swing states focus group hosted by pollster Frank Luntz said President Biden should be replaced as the Democratic nominee after watching his first presidential debate against former President Trump.
Newsweek is tabloid-adjacent.
Biden is underperforming his 2020 run by pretty much every metric. It’s time to try something different while we still have time.
Lol. There is no time. Replacing an incumbent at the last minute is a death sentence for a political campaign. It would be the most foolish option. Even if Biden came out and said he’s stepping back and letting Kamala Harris take the spot, you’d be fighting an uphill battle for people who haven’t been paying attention to her work as VP, which the uninformed thinks does nothing.
That’s not even taking into account all the sexist and racist shitheads who have been doing all the fear mongering and hand-wringing about the prospect of Harris becoming president by simply being VP. We have a bunch of really shitty people in this country…
That is complete and utter bullshit and smarter minds than me are already advising it, including one of the biggest analysts in the industry, Nate Silver. Here, let me walk you through it:
I’ve thought this through for quite some time and I think you’re missing the opportunity for Democrats to seize the narrative.
- “We listened to voters who were unsatisfied with either candidate, a large majority who said age is a real concern for them.”
- “Joe Biden stepped down for the American People to let a younger generation lead.”
- FREE VIRAL MEDIA TIME for months on end about the fresh face of the Democratic party.
- A complete lack of developed right-wing talking-points to disseminate.
It doesn’t have to – nor should it be – Harris. I can think of half a dozen other candidates with semi-national profiles who could easily surge in polling with such viral media attention following a Biden resignation.
All we know is what doesn’t work, and what doesn’t work was shown last night. It has been showing in poll after poll after poll despite people burying their heads in the sand: a President with approval ratings in the 30s, and a Presidential candidate who is FAR behind in every data-point compared to where he was in 2020. Need I remind you that Biden took this debate out of pure desperation to begin with, and now he’s now 2 full steps further back than where he needs to be as my link on battle-ground undecided voters proves.
I’ve listened to Jon Stewart, Katie Couric, 2 different NYT podcasts, post-PBS analysis, Pod Save America (former Obama/VP Biden staffers), Washington Week roundtable – and they are all echoing the same fucking thing:
It is time to try something different.
Given the timing that nearly all the primaries are done, his replacement would necessarily be someone no one even has the chance to vote on. This is a tremendous risk.
However, if he announced someone like “announcing my new chief of staff: Obama”…
That would be interesting and I’m frankly open to it.
I don’t think people not voting is a big deal because frankly we didn’t have a legitimate primary season this cycle anyway. More importantly, if Biden himself voluntarily stepped down and endorsed someone else, then that at least channels those votes through Biden.
I’m laughing my ass off that you even try to source Nate Silver. Member when he was right those two times a long ass time ago? 🙄
You checked his accuracy rate, friend? It’s not good. He makes prediction models, buddy. Well, then after they aren’t very good, he writes a ton about how they were actually great and everyone misunderstood what the data REALLY was saying.
I’m laughing you don’t seem to understand how statistics and probability work. But please, DO tell how he was wrong – I’m going to enjoy this.
But hey, excellent attempt to cop-out of the myriad of other points in my comment, buddy. Can only respond to maybe 10% of a comment but want to try to take down a leading statistician? Okie-dokie!
If Biden is the head of the ticket he’s going to lose. Full stop.
Absolutely. And given his rate of decline, how fucked are we if he suffers a medical emergency one month out?
Man its already a death sentance. They can’t hurt it any more than than that debate did.
As literally every single outlet has already pointed out, plenty of other candidates have had the same issue, and come right back from it. Y’all need to chill out.
You cannott undo dementia or Alzheimers the mans brain is going. With how few press conferences and speeches he has done without a teleprompter its fairly clear that this is NOT new.
He needs to grow a pair and gracefully step down, or he is just handing this to Trump on a silver platter.
In this thread:
Everyone not on the Right doing what they do best:
Argue incessantly with one another.
And ya’ll wonder why the Left struggles so often.
This is unfortunately true. We have the same shit in Germany. The Nazis are uniting while the left fight each other because one doesn’t support lgbtq+ enough, the other group forgot to gender correctly, other hardliners won’t go to pro-democracy protests because CDU voters are amongst them. It’s pathetic. We need a strong and united front against the far right. Not this hissy bullshit.
That phrase “Don’t let perfect get in the way of good” is our stumbling block. We want our candidate to support everything we support and no less. Friggin’ Trump is a rapist, a traitor, a racist, etc., but if he says he wants let’s say Christianity to be the national religion, the Christians are like “Hey he supports us, we’ll vote for him,” and completely ignore everything else. Single issue, boom, they’re in. The left needs to value unity over their individual issues right now.
If you want to see a great example of this is in a comment section, watch the comments on Boing Boing for a bit. The site used to be one of the top 100 sites, IIRC, and maybe still is, and the comments used to be rather fun and interesting. In recent years, it’s been take over by a very far-left fringe with a very particular interest in just checking off boxes and playing “oppression olympics”. It’s a textbook case of this. I got on there a few years ago and made a few comments in defense of sanity and unity among the left.
Some of the best posts making great points got taken down in quick order, even though I was entirely civil the entire time. Those arguing against me - if not the mods themselves - were absolutely violating the supposed rules - had theirs all left up, even if it was using things like ad hominem or just using dumb and overused giphy memes as a supposed “response”. Even anyone that tried to cut a middle ground between me and this echo chamber had their posts nuked, too.
Anyone on the fence witnessing such a thing is not going to vote for leftists, I can tell you that much. If they don’t vote for donnie (or his next version), they’ll just sit out on elections.
Keep the masses divided and all that jazz
Not arguing among each other is what helped turn the party of Lincoln to what it is today.
I think its a social defense mechanism, I met an old bastard who saw it in full swing after Catalonia when he was a teen. When a bunch of unions where he lived purged out authoritarian elements especially if they sympathized with the Soviets. Basically use debate to figure out who is stupid, lying, or compromised so that you can deal with them. Such things are helped along by it being a semi-constant force.
