Right to Life

Rosa-Gallica wrote:

Amen!

Blessed be God forever! I prayed very hard for a long time for you to see the Light of Christ in the Orthodox faith, especially since I was just Confirmed myself last year. Have you been received into the Church yet?

Not yet. I am recieving catechism for now and the priest tells me to be patient, so I am...

Thank you for the prayers! I have a small problem as Jehovah's Witnesses shun their members who leave and I am facing loosing contact with all people I knew that are JWs including friends and falimy... So that's a problem... Other than that I believe in the apostolic faith and I can't pretend to be a JW qnymore like I did since last year...

Lagrodia wrote:

and the Son

;)

lol, though our fellow Eastern Catholics pray the Creed that way too.

The Gallant Old Republic wrote:

I find it odd people call Kamala Harris a "female Obama." She really isn't. Every time I watched the debates her personality grated on me more than anyone else's, and that's saying something. Obama is likable even when you don't like him. There's a reason she polled badly in the primaries.

I expect she'll give Obama a run for his money in the kind of media fawning she'll receive, especially if she takes over the big seat.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

Statewide polls are a totally different animal, and often use less effective methodologies, often run by smaller polling firms, and often use smaller sample sizes. At least two of these apply to Rasmussen state polls, which usually partner with local polling firms and use very small sample sizes (~750). I haven't gone through the machinery of Rasmussen polls to know what their methodologies are like.

That's to be expected, but it also does not necessarily help. Less consistent methods and smaller sample sizes means you're more likely to see a lot of variance, you may end up with a disproportionately Trump sample, for example, when you're not bringing in as many people, and if the race was quite close, one would expect to see at least a handful of polls showing Trump winning big, but those haven't come about.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

That would seem to run against your argument though, since how often (Carter, I guess?) does a party win the White House, and then immediately lose it?

Carter, yeah, and I would count H.W. towards it, though obviously his situation is obviously a little weirder. It's either 1-to-1 for second-term-loss vs. third-term-win, or 2-to-1.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

Yes, because people who didn't vote for Hillary are TOTALLY excited about Biden/Kamala...

They don't need to be, they just need to be ticked off about Trump who, though this feels like a fever dream a lifetime ago, has still been impeached. Whether or not you think that was valid (I actually do not) is ultimately irrelevant, the prime factor is how most Americans saw it through the media lens, a lens that rather heavily one-sided, a huge percentage of Americans still believe in Russian collusion even post-Mueller after three years of wall-to-wall coverage. Anti-Trump Americans are much more motivated against him in 2020 then in 2016.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

The difference being same-sex marriage does not impact people's lives the way that roving bands of rioting statue-toppling bandits do. The total mayhem of the 1972 election definitely helped Nixon and his "law and order" platform, and Nixon was not very controversial also.

I don't know if that was a typo to say that Nixon was not very controversial, but it isn't especially wrong. He was polarizing like most any politician, but very much unlike Trump he kept an approval rating consistently over 50% for basically the entirety of his first term-it never even dipped into the high forties until 1971, and was back up above fifty pretty quickly after. Trump would love to see an approval spike into the high forties.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

He's been hiding in a basement for 5 months, to think they know anything about him, when he was mostly ignored and denigrated in his own primary, is laughable.

That's exactly my point. Right now, Biden is primarily "That guy who was #2 to Obama", and Obama is still popular. As long as Biden can be "That old dude that Obama liked" and not "A senile man trying to beat up voters in between not putting sentences together", he'll win. He wants voters not to know anything about him.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

I really don't think such an assessment is based in fact. He's been in hiding and his numbers are already starting to come down. Give it time. He's not ready for prime time, and as the conversation shifts from Trump's handling of the coronavirus to the election, people are going to be giving him a lot more scrutiny. And remember, as I said, it's about turnout, not popularity. As much as you think people will vote against Trump, that didn't happen in 2016 when he was basically painted as the Boogeyman. Now he's just some guy that people think is either a) dumb or b) annoying. That's hardly a reason to go out and vote. The only way that Biden can win is if they mysteriously "find" votes in unmarked vans as they so often do in big cities.

I'm not sure how you can see Trump as somehow being painted less negatively in 2020 than in 2016. In 2016 he got plenty of flak for being controversial, but there was still a fair amount who saw the 'outsider' bit as a possible 'shake things up' chance as you'd expect after two terms of one party, just look at someone like Joe Scarborough playing rather nice with him for much of that year compared to today. In 2020, he's not a blundering businessman, he's (portrayed as) the guy who rigged an election with the help of evil Russia and had to be impeached for doing it again with Ukraine and who will break the entire democratic system of the United States if his corruption is allowed in again.

You acknowledge the media's effect but don't seem to see it. Trump in 2020 doesn't have the "Hey, let's give him a shot" appeal that he had in 2016, and the conception of him among doubters and opponents is undeniably more negative. I don't know how you can say that the left only thinks of Trump as "dumb or annoying", they literally think of him as poised to destroy American democracy.

On Biden, as I said earlier, I think it is wishful thinking that he will get much more scrutiny. Some, sure, and the polls will narrow to some extent as they always do, but the media that actively favors him has little interest in exposing his flaws after their belief that they made Hillary lose by actually occasionally reporting on her scandals, and I expect them to keep pushing out coronavirus news as long as they can. There may not even be debates at this point, Biden is not going to get even a significant fraction of the scrutiny that he would in a normal election year.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

He doesn't need to win. Biden just has to underperform.

Biden doesn't just need to underperform, he needs to somehow follow up the highest midterm turnout for his party in modern American history with numbers coming in below the most consistently unpopular President in modern American history. Underperfoming is not going to cut it, he needs to actively self-destruct and blow up his own campaign. That is possible, especially if we actually have debates, but it's not something to break on.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

An eight year record is still a record, especially considering that, if what you say is true and Trump is such an evil boogeyman for anyone, how could he possibly have higher numbers than McCain or Romney. Second, the Democratic coalition is much different than it was even during the Bush era. The Democrats have abandoned rural and working class voters and have fled to the cities, which is a losing strategy. They are more reliant on the minority vote now than they ever have, and Trump is outperforming his contemporaries on this front, largely because of historically low minority unemployment and his strong immigration platform, which is popular with minorities, even latinos despite the media's blatantly racist portrayal of latinos as all pro-mass migration.

McCain and Romney ran against the first black guy ever to be President, Trump against Hillary and cornbread Kaine. It really is silly to ignore the opponent when, again, every single Republican who ever ran against a white person did better with black voters than Trump.

Minority unemployment is the highest it has ever been since the Great Depression. That's a talking point that doesn't fly anymore. Not that it was not a good one, it had some merit to it-but it's gone, and the forefront of the image of Trump among black voters is now his opposition to taking down Confederate statues and the endless media narrative looking to portray him as racist.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

I would put "absolutely" in all caps, but I feel like that wouldn't really get the point across. Not are they one of his biggest enemies, I would argue they are the biggest enemy he has. And why? Because they represent a group of people with even more incentive to see him lose than the Democrats: establishment Republicans. The GOPe desperately wants to reclaim control over its party, whereas Democrats can campaign and grow rich off of the constant anti-Trump coverage. Fox is the one-stop pro-free trade, pro-infinite migration, anti-worker network.

I feel like we've seeing two vastly different versions of Fox, because the network that I see is one that has been deeply Trumpified over the last few years. Seriously, the face of Fox News today is Tucker Carlson, and I don't know what you're imbibing if you think he's the bastion of pro-infinite migration, the guy is getting sponsored pulled from his show because of anti-immigration comments. Follow that up with Laura "Democrats want to replace Americans with migrants" Ingraham and I don't know where you're coming from.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

Not true, because he controls the news cycle in ways that benefit him, as he has for 5 years. When they try to hurt him, they overplay their hands and end up hurting themselves. For instance when he said Baltimore was filled with vermin, and they shamelessly tried to play a race angle on that comment, until they sent a news reporter to Baltimore to report on what people there thought about his comment, and a rat literally ran across the street behind him, proving Trump's point. The media only knows how to step on rakes. The only instance where he has hurt himself is coronavirus because he's indecisive and hasn't figured out what message he wants to focus on: is it a hoax or is he doing the best job ever? If he had just focused on one it would have been more effective, and people are in a panic, so they're going to listen to arguments he's not doing a good job, even though he's doing more than he should.

No-one every sees the correction or the counterpoint, only the initial. If you went around asking people, I'd just about bet money that more had heard about his 'vermin' comments than saw a rat on camera in a follow-up. The media steps on plenty of rakes if you're very politically involved and paying close attention. The overwhelming majority of voters are not.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

The polls do not ask people "do you support the riots?" and they say yes. Coronavirus is a fading story, one which the Democrats will desperately try to keep alive, but in their desperation I think their masks will slip--like when Biden people warned people against taking the vaccine. It will become too obvious too quickly what this whole charade has been about.

A Newsweek poll that literally referenced the burning of the police building in Minneapolis in protest and then asked if they were justified had 54% of people say that they were either fully or partially justified, only 38% said they were not. On both riots and the lockdowns, the numbers in support really grind on me, but they seem to pretty consistently be there.

That the coronavirus shilling did not collapse with the millions of unmasked marchers in the streets shows that it is plenty durable to keep surviving at least through the election.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

Votes where people vote against someone else don't work (see 2016). You have to vote for someone and it's not going to happen for Biden. Only a truly spectacular catastrophe could keep Trump from winning. All the models based on primary turnout and enthusiasm which have been correct in every modern election predict he will win, one model by an even wider electoral model. You may not be rooting against him, but you are too pessimistic. You have to look at voting as a dispassionate science; although you may think my confidence comes from bias, the reality is that I'm at least 10x more worried than you are because I haven't given up hope, and I'm more invested. I always look at things critically because I don't want to be bamboozled. Despite my initial reservations, however, everything that has happened over the past few weeks has almost completely reversed my own fears. My confidence is based in logic and not emotion. I'm not saying he's going to sweep, it's definitely going to be a hard-fought contest, but I do think that all objective indicia point towards his victory. I don't go by media hype, I don't go by polls, I also don't rely on the so-called "silent majority", even though I think it exists. There are certain factors which have reliably and consistently predicted the electoral college winner, and that's where the real vote is. If we had a popular vote, it would be a completely different ball game.

2016 is proof that voting against someone else does work, mate. Trump won that election not from support from the people who liked him, only 32% of people said he was "qualified to be President" compared to 46% for Hillary, but because voters who disliked both him and Hillary broke overwhelming for him, he won 66% to 15% among voters who said that neither candidate was qualified. In 2020, that's reversed, and voters who dislike both Trump and Biden are heavily backing Biden. Trump absolutely needed those people to win the election in 2016, and now he does not have them.

I would be interesting to see some of the confident models that you're referencing.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

Well, you didn't hear those lines from me. I knew the House was on the line, but I also knew that the polls were wrong (which they were). There was no "blue tsunami" and the Democrats' majority is not that large. Apart from the 110th Congress (2007-2009), you have to go back to the 50s to find a majority as small as what the Democrats have now. The Republicans had their largest majority since the 40s. To try and paint the midterms as some sort of landslide victory, when it was really the result of an unprecedented number of anti-Trump retirements handicapping the House race, is ludicrous.

Bringing up that the Republicans had their largest majority since the 40s undermines your claim that 2018 was not a banner year for Democrats. Their majority is small because the previous GOP majority was a big one-in terms of the actual number of seats lost, 2018 was the single worst year for the GOP since 1974.

La France Bonapartiste wrote:

And while you may ding Trump for not being very popular, he's also far from the least popular president: both Bushes, Carter, Nixon, Johnson, and Truman all had lower approval ratings than he did at one time or another. Trump's spread is very tight and stable, which is a lot more important a measure of a president's resiliency than how high he can get, and his worst day is no than Reagan was at his nadir. Trump's spread is the tightest since Kennedy, and his "underwater" margin is better than the Bushes, Carter, Nixon, and Truman.

I very much disagree with that line of argument, that a tighter spread of approval ratings is somehow better. In a one-on-one election, your ceiling is far more important than your floor. In modern-day America, you're not ever going to see any candidate's vote share fall below the low forties, even if their party nominated a corpse, because there is an immense number of voters on both sides in America that are fundamentally unwilling to vote for the other side no matter who they put up. Trump having a stable approval rating in the low forties does almost nothing for him, he was never going to fall below that number even if he or any other Republican President "shot someone on 5th avenue." Bush's approval fell into the twenties-but if he had run again, he would have broken forty regardless, it's how polarization works.

What the ceiling indicates, higher spikes in approval, is the willingness of people who may not be consistent fans to vote for you, which is particularly important for an incumbent. An approval that fluctuates between, say, 25% and 55% is giving you the indication that up to fifty-five percent of people are at least willing to consider giving you a shot, while the twenty-five is just going to leave you with a grumpier low-forties. The guy with the consistent 40% approval has the same average as the one with the swings, but they don't have the potential for growth, and that potential is at the heart of incumbency advantage. Incumbency advantage is "Eh, I don't know if I like that guy or not, but I'll stick with him."

That's what lets someone like Obama, who had 43% approval at this time in 2012, to win re-election, because well over half of Americans could say that they had approved of him at at least one point, and "sure, let's give him another chance." Trump does not get that, does not have that crucial block of people who at some time or other supported him and might do so again, because he's been so tied to a solid but little-growing number that's well below a majority. With the economy shot, a wholly negative media cycle, and Biden escaping scrutiny, incumbency advantage is the last real hope Trump has got, and Trump's lack of a spread in approval means he does not even get that.

Lagrodia wrote:

and the Son

;)

HERESY!

xD

Slavic Lechia wrote:

Eastern Catholic also means those under Patriarchs... The Full name is Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church and Eastern Catholic is also used to describe us.

Just so we don't talk at cross purposes, I generally use "Eastern Catholic" to describe those Eastern Churches in communion with Rome. While I fully respect that "Catholic" is in the name of the Orthodox Church, most people would simply use the term "Eastern Orthodox" in common conversation, as I do.