Trump won the popular vote because people were nostalgic for Obama's economy that Trump got credit for which is what always happens when a Republican follows a Dem into office.
Its crazy that Dems don't run on policies like these.
Imagine if instead of an 80+ geezer or the most corporate woman in the world, they had someone credibly promising stimulus checks !! They'd win in a landslide.
Obama won huge on promising universal healthcare and then every dem after that decided to promise nothing.
It doesn’t work for Democrats. They were punished hard for that healthcare bill
> According to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower.
Republicans understand the power of appealing to emotion and "othering." They have spent decades training their voters to vote against their own interest because it will hurt people that Republicans say are preventing their great success. Trump said he had "concepts of a plan" on healthcare and voters think he had more of a platform than Harris because his main points were about getting even with the world. Make the world pay what it owes us and get these immigrants out of YOUR country.
Democrats get punished for trying that too blatantly. Republicans and Democrats are playing different games when it comes to campaigning and propaganda.
Democrats want universal healthcare and nobody besides Obama has come close to delivering it. And Obama still failed with a supermajority thanks to the filibuster, and even if that passed it would have sucked compared to what voters wanted or what other countries have.
Democrats want universal healthcare but Republicans will cry socialism which will turn moderates against it. I saw this happen in 08 and again in 16 with Bernie Sanders.
Democrats(the voters) are not a monolith. Like I said, moderate and centrist Democrats are not entirely on board with universal healthcare. The more liberal left wing of Democrats are.
They wanted another stimulus check but didn't want other people to get a stimulus check. They love stimulus checks and the highly effective policies the US used to mitigate an unemployment spike and avoid a recession that did hit other countries but not the US, and then they turn around and blame the government for causing some temporary and modest inflation (modest in a historic context compared to other periods of much higher inflation in recent memory). The median voter is someone who cannot be pleased. And so much of our political decisionmaking is driven to incoherence by trying to please these swing voters who do not understand anything.
For someone like me who isn't very well versed with US politics, could someone explain like I'm a layperson what Obama's universal healthcare is like and what it was meant to do.
Was it anything like the universal free healthcare of Canada, UK, European countries? Or was it still paid healthcare but Obama wanted to integrate all of the healthcare in a universal system? Did it get implemented or is still in the works?
It was a requirement for everybody to get insurance, along with some protections (I forget exactly the mechanism) to prevent insurance companies from excluding people who had preexisting conditions (this is a big deal in the US, private insurance companies don’t want to insure you if they think you’ll be expensive), and a marketplace website thingy that made it easy to sign up for insurance.
There was a concern that if insurance companies can’t consider preexisting conditions, people might just wait until they get sick, and then sign up for insurance. So, there was a fine levied if you don’t get insurance.
There are also some subsidies for people who can’t afford insurance, but anecdotally the definition of “subsidy” and “can’t afford” vary from state to state.
Some states sued to try to get the uninsured fine removed. While the case was going through, the fine was set to $0. Ultimately, the fine was found to be allowed (IIRC), but by the time that happened political leadership had changed a couple times and fines are unpopular anyway, so it wasn’t reimplemented (some states do have their own implementation of the fine, though).
The system was implemented and remains. You can go to a government run portal and buy insurance in the US. Whether or not it is a good deal depends on what your state decided to do around subsidies and all that.
In conclusion, it was a market-driven compromise plan which still exists and is, in fact, highly compromised.
It wasn't anything like any of those. It was based on a right wing think tank plan and the one bonus is that now insurance companies can't reject you for already having a "pre existing condition"
He’s certainly a Republican and he was their presidential candidate against Obama. But, it is also the most conservative plan he could get by the very-Democratic-leaning Massachusetts populace and legislature.
Republicans would win and Democrat voters would stay home. Republicans spend tons of time trying to convince you whatever Dem they are running against is corrupt while their voters ignore the blatant corruption in their own party.
They have better outcomes actually. Higher economic growth, higher population growth, lower state debt, lower unemployment. Of course, exceptions apply but the overall data is pretty clear.
> If you want proof, look at the state with the highest GDP.
And your response is "left-wing" (we don't actually have a left wing in the US) propaganda. Raw GDP is irrelevant for 99.99% of people, because the gains are /very/ unevenly distributed. Reducing cost of living and cost of housing has a much bigger impact on the daily lives of people than increasing GDP, because most people don't benefit from increased GDP, in fact increased GDP is largely tied to increased cost, as it's determined by money flows. GDP is a very flawed metric that doesn't in any way reflect the quality of life of the people who live in the region the metric applies to. Some sort of PPP based metric is more reasonable and is a much more balanced look at life across different US states and is not nearly as rosy a picture for blue states, all of which are some of the most expensive places to live, in part due to political policies.
For a high earning person (say a software engineer), California has a higher effective all-in tax rate on income than most European countries but delivers /far less/. The fact it has such a high GDP is because the headquarters of some of the world's largest companies are there and it's /expensive/ which means there's significant money flows in California. That doesn't prove that California's policies are superior to say Texas. It's an entirely flawed comparison that does nothing to account for actual quality of life.
I think you'd be hard pressed to prove that someone earning a median tech income in California has a better quality of life than someone earning a median tech income in France, and yet California's effective tax rate is higher (combining state, local, and federal).
Ill generally start off by saying that it should be pretty clear that when Republicans are given free reign of all 3 branches of Government, US goes down the shitter. So there isn't even a real argument you could ever make in support of anything Republican, other than saying that you don't mean "those" Republicans. And this argument will hold until the entire party uniformly denounces Trump, Musk and their cronies.
But in the spirit of conversation, you are fully wrong. GDP is an indicator of economic activity. Its not irrelevant. It ties in things like jobs and COL (because you need people to actually be able to live normal lives to contribute to the economies). Likewise, higher taxation rates with high GDP also means that in general a lot of money is moving hands. If you look at population growth of Cali, the only time it dipped was during Covid, specifically because WFH. I.e you are still making California money, but now you don't have to pay taxes. And since then, its on its way up.
This effect also applies in general. You can't claim that Texas economy is growing because Republicans, when the economic powerhouses of the 4 major cities all uniformly vote blue, and start hiring for companies that started in very left leaning areas on the west coast. There is a reason why silicon valley started in Cali and not any other Republican states - Cali left leaning environment attracted more educated people, and the concentration of those people is what allowed tech companies to flourish. If Musk started Tesla in Texas, and asked the state for subsidies and grants, he would have gotten laughed at and Tesla would not be a thing.
The author conveniently ignores this, and Im not even going to mention the horrible statistical analysis of the plots.
Here is a good article comparing economies of Texas and California.
So no its not "leftist" propaganda - its reality. Whether or not you value that more than your ideological alignment, I don't know. Republicans generally don't have the critical thinking skills to parse reality from ideology - if they did they would be Democrats.
> So there isn't even a real argument you could ever make in support of anything Republican
I didn't make any arguments in support of anything Republican. The fact I put "left-wing" in quotes and pointed out that there is no left wing in US politics should have been an indication that I'm not supporting Republicans.
> But in the spirit of conversation, you are fully wrong. GDP is an indicator of economic activity.
Yes, it's what I described, it's economic activity in the frame of movement of money, it says nothing about the quality of life of any individual or how that GDP is distributed, this is why PPP is a much more reasonable metric. I am very much correct in my statements, you are intentionally misunderstanding or you don't understand how PPP vs GDP differ when making comparisons between regions/economies.
> You can't claim that Texas economy is growing because Republicans,
I don't think the Texas economy is growing due to Republicans. The Texas economy is growing because it's cheap to live there at the same quality of life that it's expensive to live in other states, so people move to Texas because they can't afford to live in other states due to the growing wealth disparity in this country, something that GDP conveniently ignores but that PPP doesn't.
> Republicans generally don't have the critical thinking skills to parse reality from ideology - if they did they would be Democrats.
If people in the US had strong critical thinking skills we wouldn't be stuck with first past the post elections causing us a false dichotomy between two shitty right-wing parties that are both run for the benefit of wealthy elites, but sure, we'd all vote Democrat, whatever floats your boat, given you've displayed a really sore lack of critical thinking in your response.
I'd nitpick the rest of your comment, but since you clearly didn't read and understand what I wrote, it's a wasted effort. You somehow bucketed me into the "Republican" bucket and replied to a strawman instead of acknowledging that GDP doesn't account for wealth disparity, which is why PPP (especially as a per capita metric) is superior for understand QoL differences vs GDP. Last I checked Republicans aren't lamenting the lack of a real left-wing party in the US and talking about the impact of wealth disparity, but go off I guess.
>I didn't make any arguments in support of anything Republican.
The article you linked is written by a prominent Republican blogger. You have to be pretty right wing to think its a good piece.
>GDP is distributed, this is why PPP is a much more reasonable metric.
Your original claim was that Republican run states "have Higher economic growth" among other things, which is just not true, because economic growth by definition implies more money being traded, which is GDP. Now that you realize you are wrong, you start running to derivative metrics like PPP, without doing the due diligence of proving how PPP is actually economic growth.
You also mentioned higher population growth, which is a false narrative (see below), lower state debt, which you have to go in depth to prove how thats actually good, and lower unemployment, which is not only not generally true, but again, you have to prove that unemployment is bad (as opposed to having people between jobs relying on social safety nets due to higher GDP, which creates favorable conditions for economy as history shows)
> The Texas economy is growing because it's cheap to live there at the same quality of life that it's expensive to live in other states, so people move to Texas because they can't afford to live in other states
If you are actually going to respond, please take the time to a) read what I wrote previously, and b) think what you are typing. The population of Cali is currently growing. It can't grow without all sectors down to the lower income service workers also willing to stay in Cali.
The people that move are a) firstly in a financial position to move, which requires funds, and b) moving to optimize salary vs cost of living. But they are also not moving to deep red areas.
>If people in the US had strong critical thinking skills we wouldn't be stuck with first past the post elections causing us a false dichotomy between two shitty right-wing parties that are both run for the benefit of wealthy elites
Funny you mention strong thinking skills, but equivocating what Trump is doing now to anything the Democrats ever did in the past decade is quite funny. Mentally this is pretty much the Republican cope, you can never admit that your side is horrible, you basically have to say "Democrats are just as bad" and point to some obscure things and make up fantastical projections to try to match what Republicans are doing.
>You clearly didn't read and understand what I wrote
You don't understand it either. You first posted an article that has horrible stats, then you use PPP to prove your point because GDP doesn't fit the narrative. I doubt you understand what PPP is. Because if you did, you realize that PPP is a very derivative measure, and its used to compare economies across countries, not states that often have very intertwined economies with lots of market forces (i.e same companies in every state controlling prices nation wide).
>You somehow bucketed me into the "Republican" bucket
You are not fooling anyone anymore. Centrist or libertarian = republican.
> The article you linked is written by a prominent Republican blogger. You have to be pretty right wing to think its a good piece.
My dude, you have me confused with someone else. I didn't link any article in this subthread.
> Your original claim was that Republican run states "have Higher economic growth" among other things
I never made that claim. I made the claim that PPP is a better quality of life metric than GDP when comparing between regions/economies, because of wealth and income inequality. Which it is. In fact, nothing I've said has been disproven by anything you've responded with, you are just trying to bucket me because you have mistaken me for someone else and decided to apply the most uncharitable strawman lens to my entire commentary.
> but equivocating what Trump is doing now to anything the Democrats ever did
It's super rich to spend hours deprogramming my Boomer father from being a Trump supporter to come online and get accused of being a Trump supporter by people too dumb to read what I actually wrote.
> You are not fooling anyone anymore. Centrist or libertarian = republican.
You continue to fail to have any reading comprehension, inappropriately bucketing me as a Republican, which is frankly insulting. Be better. I'm done with you.
Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state.
Red states have had the worst outcomes for generations but they keep going back to republicans. The reasons escape me.
Maybe China will motivate them to get their act together.