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Mark's avatar

Unfortunately you're right. It's a loser. It requires too much explaining to articulate why USAID should be a priority for people.

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Toiler On the Sea's avatar

I'd like to see polling on this. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think a majority are against the U.S. helping children fight malaria in Africa via foreign aid.

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Avedee Eikew's avatar

Polling would probably say they are against foreign aid but in favor of specific programs. Easier to be against something in the abstract.

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Henrik's avatar

Exactly. Same with stuff like the DOE

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Mike in MD's avatar

True, though as stated it would be better to focus on things like chaos, incompetence, fucking with services people need, and "who elected Elon Musk?"

Jared Golden says that in his red district he's been inundated with communication from people complaining about Musk's unwarranted influence and messing with things, though there's honestly something self-delusional about Trump voters complaining only about Musk and not Trump. Musk didn't just pop out of nowhere after the election.

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Henrik's avatar

This Treasury debacle has certainly opened the door for that

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Toiler On the Sea's avatar

Would a majority of people say they're in favor of abolishing USAID? I have doubts.

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Andrew's avatar

IтАЩm confident they would. Look how many of them voted for Trump.

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Toiler On the Sea's avatar

Issue polling shows voters don't particularly like MAGA positions outside of immigration and anti-woke/culture stuff.

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Andrew's avatar

Exactly.

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j j's avatar

Yeah well Mark, you would say that considering you think everything a Republican does is a genius 12D chess move while seeing Dems as too stupid to plug in a monitor. I don't even know why you continue to be involved when your responses boil down to walls of text that in sum total say "Republicans will win forever while Dems will regret abandoning white male manufacturing workers. Tsk tsk"

Am I being uncharitable to you? Maybe. But you don't have carte blanche to arrogantly proclaim what is and will be based on lucky guesses. Drop the ego

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Mark's avatar

Yeah I would say "uncharitable" would be an adjective that at least partially captures the string of strawmen you've built in an attempt to spook me into submission. Feels like there should be a harvest moon to illuminate as many strawmen as you've constructed.

Do you attribute every correctly called election prediction to be a "lucky guess"? If so, then every single one of us on this board is no better than the average joe on the street. If not, then how do you distinguish my guesses being "lucky" when they're inconvenient but right and others' guesses as especially insightful if the results match your preferences?

Five of the last six election cycles produced results that I consider disappointing from a Democratic perspective. Was it really a "lucky guess" for me to have looked at the trend lines of those preceding cycles and determined that we had a problem going into 2024? Or could it be a signal that Democrats have become really bad at messaging to the contemporary electorate? And that you and many others have become really, really bad at evaluating the trend lines and correctly predicting outcomes?

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Mike in MD's avatar

C'mon man. No need for this. Let's discuss elections, not each other.

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