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US Presidential Election 2020

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Another element in all of this is how Barack's rent-a-mobs from his Organization For Action will play out.

If he can't have the levers of power, is he prepared to blow them up?
Certainly, I believe, he has followers who are so convinced that the end of world is nigh that all means are justified.  And that concerns me.

Organizing For Action - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizing_for_Action

Obama-linked activists have a ‘training manual’ for protesting Trump

By Paul Sperry February 18, 2017 | 10:30am | Updated

Obama-linked activists have a ‘training manual’ for protesting Trump

An Obama-tied activist group training tens of thousands of agitators to protest President Trump’s policies plans to hit Republican lawmakers supporting those policies even harder this week, when they return home for the congressional recess and hold town hall meetings and other functions.

Organizing for Action, a group founded by Obama and featured prominently on his new post-presidency website, is distributing a training manual to anti-Trump activists that advises them to bully GOP lawmakers into backing off support for repealing ObamaCare, curbing immigration from high-risk Islamic nations, and building a border wall.

In a new Facebook post, OFA calls on activists to mobilize against Republicans from now until Feb. 26, when “representatives are going to be in their home districts.”

The protesters disrupted town halls earlier this month, including one held in Utah by House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, who was confronted by hundreds of angry demonstrators claiming to be his constituents.

The manual, published with OFA partner “Indivisible,” advises protesters to go into halls quietly so as not to raise alarms, and “grab seats at the front of the room but do not all sit together.” Rather, spread out in pairs to make it seem like the whole room opposes the Republican host’s positions. “This will help reinforce the impression of broad consensus.” It also urges them to ask “hostile” questions — while keeping “a firm hold on the mic” — and loudly boo the the GOP politician if he isn’t “giving you real answers.”

“Express your concern [to the event’s hosts] they are giving a platform to pro-Trump authoritarianism, racism, and corruption,” it says.

The goal is to make Republicans, even from safe districts, second-guess their support for the Trump agenda, and to prime “the ground for the 2018 midterms when Democrats retake power.”

The goal is to make Republicans, even from safe districts, second-guess their support for the Trump agenda
“Even the safest [Republican] will be deeply alarmed by signs of organized opposition,” the document states, “because these actions create the impression that they’re not connected to their district and not listening to their constituents.”

After the event, protesters are advised to feed video footage to local and national media.

“Unfavorable exchanges caught on video can be devastating” for Republican lawmakers, it says, when “shared through social media and picked up by local and national media.” After protesters gave MSNBC, CNN and the networks footage of their dust-up with Chaffetz, for example, the outlets ran them continuously, forcing Chaffetz to issue statements defending himself.

The manual also advises protesters to flood “Trump-friendly” lawmakers’ Hill offices with angry phone calls and emails demanding the resignation of top White House adviser Steve Bannon.

A script advises callers to complain: “I’m honestly scared that a known racist and anti-Semite will be working just feet from the Oval Office … It is everyone’s business if a man who promoted white supremacy is serving as an adviser to the president.”

The document provides no evidence to support such accusations.

Protesters, who may or may not be affiliated with OFA, are also storming district offices. Last week, GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher blamed a “mob” of anti-Trump activists for knocking unconscious a 71-year-old female staffer at his Southern California office. A video of the incident, showing a small crowd around an opening door, was less conclusive.

Separately, OFA, which is run by ex-Obama officials and staffers, plans to stage 400 rallies across 42 states this year to attack Trump and Republicans over ObamaCare’s repeal.

“This is a fight we can win,” OFA recently told its foot soldiers. “They’re starting to waver.”

On Thursday, Trump insisted he’s moving ahead with plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which has ballooned health-insurance premiums and deductibles. “Obamacare is a disaster, folks,” he said, adding that activists protesting its repeal are hijacking GOP town halls and other events.

“They fill up our rallies with people that you wonder how they get there,” the president said. “But they’re not the Republican people that our representatives are representing.”

As The Post reported, OFA boasts more than 250 offices nationwide and more than 32,000 organizers, with another 25,000 actively under training. Since November, it’s beefed up staff and fundraising, though as a “social welfare” non-profit, it does not have to reveal its donors.

These aren’t typical Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street marchers, but rather professionally trained organizers who go through a six-week training program similar to the training — steeped in Alinsky agitation tactics — Obama received in Chicago when he was a community organizer.

Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky, known by the left as “the father of community organizing,” taught radicals to “rub raw the sores of discontent” and create the conditions for a “revolution.” He dedicated his book, “Rules for Radicals,” to “Lucifer.” Michelle Obama quoted from the book when she helped launch OFA in 2013.

Obama appears to be behind the anti-Trump protests. He praised recent demonstrations against Trump’s travel ban. And last year, after Trump’s upset victory, he personally rallied OFA troops to “protect” his legacy in a conference call. “Now is the time for some organizing,” he said. “So don’t mope” over the election results.

He promised OFA activists he would soon join them in the fray.

“Understand that I’m going to be constrained in what I do with all of you until I am again a private citizen, but that’s not so far off,” he said. “You’re going to see me early next year, and we’re going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff.”

Added the ex-president: “I promise you that next year Michelle and I are going to be right there with you, and the clouds are going to start parting, and we’re going to be busy. I’ve got all kinds of thoughts and ideas about it, but this isn’t the best time to share them.

“Point is, I’m still fired up and ready to go, and I hope that all of you are, as well.”
http://nypost.com/2017/02/18/obama-linked-activists-have-a-training-manual-for-protesting-trump/

This is disconcerting in a democratic society.  It is the way the Bolsheviks (The Majority) found their way to power despite losing the election to the Mensheviks (The Minority). 

Fortunately there seems to be an effective counter in the offing - from the Democrats themselves

Blog: State Dem leaders livid at Obama organizing group OFA

Leaked emails from a Democratic party Listserve account reveal the anger of local and state Democratic leaders at the relaunching of President Obama's activist group, Organizing for Action (OFA). Many Democrats around the country believe the group siphons money and people from state parties, which directly led to the party losing more than 1,000 state legislative seats during the Obama years.

Daily Beast:

The nonprofit, which functions as a sort of parallel-Democratic National Committee, was founded to mobilize Democratic voters and supporters in defense of President Obama’s, and the Democratic Party’s, agenda. Instead, the organization has drawn the intense ire, both public and private, of grassroots organizers and state parties that are convinced that OFA inadvertently helped decimate Democrats at the state and local level, while Republicans cemented historic levels of power and Donald J. Trump actually became leader of the free world.
...
— Rick Moran
Read the full article...

http://qwiket.com/context/topic/blog-state-dem-leaders-livid-at-obama-organizing-group-ofa



 
Chris Pook said:
Another element in all of this is how Barack's rent-a-mobs from his Organization For Action will play out.

If he can't have the levers of power, is he prepared to blow them up?
Certainly, I believe, he has followers who are so convinced that the end of world is nigh that all means are justified.  And that concerns me.

Organizing For Action - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizing_for_Action
http://nypost.com/2017/02/18/obama-linked-activists-have-a-training-manual-for-protesting-trump/

This is disconcerting in a democratic society.  It is the way the Bolsheviks (The Majority) found their way to power despite losing the election to the Mensheviks (The Minority). 

Fortunately there seems to be an effective counter in the offing - from the Democrats themselves

http://qwiket.com/context/topic/blog-state-dem-leaders-livid-at-obama-organizing-group-ofa

That concerns me as well. Probably why I have been vehemently anti Obama since about a year after he came in on his first term.

 
The source of the White House leaks may have been uncovered the deputy White House Chief of Staff !! Is she THE leaker or does this include her boss Rience Priebus ? Emails were discovered between Priebus and Walsh on how to get rid of Trump.

http://gotnews.com/breaking-reinces-gal-whitehouse-chief-staff-kmwalsh_gop-source-trump-leaks-nytimes-others/

White House Deputy Chief of Staff and #NeverTrump Republican Katie Walsh has been identified as the source behind a bunch of leaks from the Trump administration to The New York Times and other media outlets, according to multiple sources in the White House, media, donor community, and pro-Trump 501(c)4 political group.
 
tomahawk6 said:
The source of the White House leaks may have been uncovered the deputy White House Chief of Staff !! Is she THE leaker or does this include her boss Rience Priebus ? Emails were discovered between Priebus and Walsh on how to get rid of Trump.

http://gotnews.com/breaking-reinces-gal-whitehouse-chief-staff-kmwalsh_gop-source-trump-leaks-nytimes-others/

White House Deputy Chief of Staff and #NeverTrump Republican Katie Walsh has been identified as the source behind a bunch of leaks from the Trump administration to The New York Times and other media outlets, according to multiple sources in the White House, media, donor community, and pro-Trump 501(c)4 political group.

Wow.  That site makes me want to invest in tinfoil shares.
 
mariomike said:
What he told his fans about Sweden...................

Funnily enough, the Swedish govt has no idea of what he's talking about, and has requested clarification.

For those who aren't up to speed on this, Trump claimed that there had been a terrorist attack in Sweden.

He possibly meant Sehwan, a mere 3270 miles from Stockholm.

In Pakistan.
 
Dimsum said:
Wow.  That site makes me want to invest in tinfoil shares.
Clearly you don't get it, you elitist, legacy media, fact-reliant snob.  It's no different than "reality TV's" connection to....well, reality.    :stars:


Oh, and going back reading earlier posts (because I wasn't following):
Remius said:
I guess we can scratch First Lady Melania off the list as she was not born in the U.S.
Ha!  Except now President Elect Trump actually has enough control to change that rule.
You think Trump would bother changing the citizenship requirement so his duty sheep could run, when he'd be more likely to abolish the Presidential two-term limit law? 

After all, Napoleon was a big fan of the French Revolution overthrowing the monarchy.... right up until he proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon I.  :pop:
 
tomahawk6 said:
The source of the White House leaks may have been uncovered the deputy White House Chief of Staff !! Is she THE leaker or does this include her boss Rience Priebus ? Emails were discovered between Priebus and Walsh on how to get rid of Trump.

http://gotnews.com/breaking-reinces-gal-whitehouse-chief-staff-kmwalsh_gop-source-trump-leaks-nytimes-others/

White House Deputy Chief of Staff and #NeverTrump Republican Katie Walsh has been identified as the source behind a bunch of leaks from the Trump administration to The New York Times and other media outlets, according to multiple sources in the White House, media, donor community, and pro-Trump 501(c)4 political group.

Not exactly an unbiased news source.

You won’t hear this stuff from the lying mainstream media. Keep the GotNews mission alive: donate at GotNews.com/donate or send tips to editor@gotnews.com. If you’d like to join our research team, contact editor@gotnews.com.

Possibly a hatchet job?

Walsh would have significant access as she controls the president’s schedule. There’s also reportedly a trove of e-mails where Katie Walsh and Reince Priebus discuss how to rid themselves of Trump, according to a former #NeverTrump consultant.


 
If you thought 2016 was theatre of the absurd, you ain't seen nothin' yet:

President Oprah? Winfrey doesn't rule out 2020 run

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey did not say she was running for president, but she didn't rule it out either, raising the unlikely prospect of a titanic celebrity-on-celebrity duel with Donald Trump in 2020.
 
She is a Billionaire. She must release her seven year tax returns. :crybaby:
 
YOU get handouts! YOU get handouts! And YOU get handouts!
 
Handouts??? Oprah will give a car to everyone who votes for just like she did on her TV shows.
 
Rifleman62 said:
Handouts??? Oprah will give a car to everyone who votes for just like she did on her TV shows.

Does that trump Obamaphones?

Meanwhile, despite the media and establishment staking a huge position on "no evidence of voter fraud", more and more evidence keeps coming out. Once again, you look at these examples (Illegal Hispanic immigrants registering to vote, thousands of non citizens discovered more or less at random in Virginia and the irregularities uncovered by the Green Party request for a recount in Michigan) and extrapolate across the United States and it is clear that the problem is very huge indeed. You can argue "why" this has not been investigated until now, nor the wrongdoers prosecuted or punished according to existing laws, but the fact it is a large and wide spread problem is not deniable at all:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/1/noncitizens-lurking-on-virginia-voter-rolls/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRsak1HTXpPR1ptTXpGaCIsInQiOiJWc0RVWmwrd2orXC82ZU1SdkdzcG90VGhPdDJGaHo4VVpqM0VVZW16ZVBjTUZVdHg4WFZkMDZtZ3kzcWpCdVFxcmVETnM3RVJLbkZrNWs0QnpaZGVFUmU0dnpqNGN5NGp0bDVGVU8wUDhFaWFCVnl5eFFMOHZraWVHS1pyUUFkOVYifQ%3D%3D

Thousands of illegal immigrants lurking on Virginia’s voter rolls
By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Wednesday, March 1, 2017

When Virginia Delegate Robert Marshall asked the state’s 133 local governments to provide numbers on noncitizens and jury pools, Loudoun County produced some hefty figures.

Between 2009 and 2014, the Washington, D.C., exurb of more than 350,000 residents had disqualified more than 9,000 of them for jury duty because they were not U.S. citizens.

Loudoun County jury pools come from two sources — voter registration lists and Department of Motor Vehicle driver’s license applications. The county’s 9,000 juror disqualifications means that a potentially significant number of noncitizens vote illegally in Virginia. It suggests a basis for President Trump’s assertion of illegal immigrants voting in November’s elections, though not necessarily by the “millions” he has claimed.

After Mr. Marshall, Prince William Republican, had collected the jury pool data in 2014, a new player entered the state last year. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) began canvassing election clerks county by county, city by city, demanding they turn over information on noncitizens purged from voters lists and whether they had voted.

The foundation found itself in a stiff battle with Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s elections chief, who, PILF said, did not want to turn over voter information. In October PILF issued its first report, accusing the state of a “cover up” as “thousands” of noncitizens illegally remain on Virginia’s voting rolls.

Citing data from six counties and two cities, the report found that 1,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in those jurisdictions between 2011 and 2016, and that 200 of them actually voted.

An example: In 2011 Fairfax County discovered 278 registered voters who had told the DMV they were not citizens. Of those, 117 had voted in state and federal elections.

PILF argues that these illegal voters were discovered mostly by accident and not as part of a statewide program to monitor lists and weed out aliens.

“It is, however, likely that based on discoveries to date, thousands of noncitizens remain registered and eligible to vote throughout the Commonwealth,” PILF said.

Liberal Democrats and academics maintain that no illegal immigrants vote in U.S. elections, dismissing two national polls that indicate they do.

However, the Marshall-PILF findings come from counting actual people, not polls. While it is difficult to extrapolate how many noncitizens vote illegally in Virginia, their data provide firm evidence that some do. Polls show they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

Mr. Trump has announced he is establishing a special task force to examine illegal voting and out-of-date rosters. Underscoring the issue’s importance, he has appointed Vice President Mike Pence to head the effort. A top Trump aide asserted last month that millions of noncitizens are on voter rosters illegally.

Virginia has become a political battleground state in each presidential election. It is now also a voter fraud battleground.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group striving to ensure voter list fidelity, says it is continuing its campaign. It is threatening lawsuits against Virginia’s counties and cities unless they comply by turning over what it argues is public information under the National Voter Registration Act.

Logan Churchwell, the foundation’s research director, said the problem with Virginia’s system is that noncitizens can register online and check “yes” for citizenship. They then click “send” or mail in the forms. There is no requirement to prove citizenship.

“You just take them at their word,” Mr. Churchwell said. “As long as your address does not bounce back as not valid, everyone assumes that everyone went through fine. So it’s very much by the honor system.”

Voter rolls and DMV lists

Easy access is one reason the foundation is targeting Virginia, along with other states, some of whose voting districts have more registered voters than voting-age residents, according to the census.

Mr. Churchwell said another troubling finding is that virtually none of those who registered illegally are referred to prosecutors by election officials or are ever prosecuted.

“The law is not being followed,” he said.

The exact meaning of Loudoun’s 9,000 noncitizen jury pool disqualifications is up for debate.

Gary Clemens, clerk of the Loudoun County Circuit Court, said the jury pool mix of voters and license holders is done by the state Supreme Court executive secretary office. He said he does not know the ratio of jurors to DMV records. He said he asked the Supreme Court the same question and received no reply.

Mr. Clemens said he assumes that all noncitizens in the jury pool come from DMV records because voter registration forms ask if the applicant is a citizen.

But Mr. Churchwell said his nonprofit’s investigation has found hundreds of noncitizens who answered “yes” to that question. The group’s report reproduced some of those actual forms.

“The reason we have 1,000 voter registrations who were cleaned up because they were noncitizens is because they lied on that form in the first place,” he said.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation and Mr. Marshall have attacked the problem from different directions.

The state lawmaker went after data on noncitizens and jury duty because a good number of the names presumedly come from voter lists.

The foundation is demanding that counties and cities turn over a different data set. It wants the number of noncitizens cleansed from lists and records on any who voted. Since voter’s lists are constantly changing as new people register, that data indicate that noncitizens are always on the lists.

While they practiced different tactics to acquire noncitizen data, both Mr. Marshall and the foundation ran into the same roadblocks: Local governments, sometimes urged on by the state, often refused to comply.

‘A great deal to hide’

In 2014 Mr. Marshall sent emails to 133 counties and independent cities asking the jury pool question. Only 37 responded. Ten responded with descriptions of how they select juries but provided no noncitizen numbers. Fifteen, including the city of Richmond, said no potential juror was disqualified because of noncitizenship.

Fairfax County reported 167 noncitizen jury disqualifications in 2014, Norfolk 1,223.

Loudoun County’s response was striking, as it provided the highest numbers not just for one year but for six years.

About 12.5 percent of the fast-growing, high-income county’s 373,000 residents are Latino.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation met opposition from local elections officials who it says have been cheered on by Edgardo Cortes, the top state elections official who runs the Virginia Department of Elections, or ELECT.

Mr. Cortes had been a veteran of organizing voter registration drives to sign up Latinos before he was appointed elections commissioner by Mr. McAuliffe.

“According to numerous county election officials, Commissioner Cortes had issued guidance to them, instructing them not to respond to our requests for records pertaining to non-citizen voters,” the foundation said in its October 2016 report. “Some election officials kindly provided us the original communications from Cortes.”

Mr. Cortes wrote to local governments that “you may not provide the information regarding reason for cancellation for non-citizen status” because cross-checking is done by comparing voters to their confidential DMV records. DMV asks applicants if they are U.S. citizens.

Mr. Cortes also wrote: “The department will not provide voting history as this is not covered under [National Voter Registration Act]. Only the Department of Elections may provide this information to authorized individuals and entries.”

The foundation’s report said: “This is what a cover-up of alien voting looks like. State election officials are preventing public access not only to records showing the number of non-citizens who have successfully registered to vote, but also records showing how many of them voted prior to being removed from the registration rolls. Federal law says it should be easy, but Virginia has a great deal to hide when it comes to alien registration and voting.”

Mr. Cortes rebutted this allegation in an email to The Washington Times.

“The claims being made by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) are false,” he said. “The Department of Elections provided the data the organization was seeking related to possible non-citizens being registered to vote.”

Mr. Cortes said that when PILF began sending requests for information to local voter registrars, his department offered to create a “customized report” that contained information on potential noncitizens and how registrars dealt with them. The report was quickly turned over on Sept. 30.

“The Department responded in a timely manner to the requests for data related to this issue,” he said.

A process under scrutiny

J. Christian Adams is PILF’s president and general counsel. He worked in the George W. Bush Justice Department and accused the Barack Obama administration of bias in the Civil Rights Division.

“Cortes would have you believe they offered to give us what we asked for,” Mr. Adams said. “They didn’t. Their ‘customized’ report would have hidden the precise number of cancellations for citizenship problems. They also told local election officials to press a bogus legal defense — that federal highway laws didn’t allow disclosure.”

Mr. Cortes also told The Times that his department releases an annual report on how his office and local registrars work together to ensure rosters are accurate. The process involves a series of cross-checks with other states to weed out double registrations and other violations.

“Virginia is a national leader in comparing our voter registration data against other states,” the department’s report says.

On noncitizens, Mr. Cortes’ department compares DMV records for each alien and shares the data with local governments.

Beyond that, the department’s report indicates the process is hindered by high costs and a heavy workload.

“ELECT relies heavily on local electoral boards, general registrars, and their staff to ensure an accurate list,” the report says. “More and more is being asked of our local voter registration offices to accurately and timely process data reviewed and analyzed by ELECT and loaded into the database.”

Virginia law authorizes the elections department to tap into a Department of Homeland Security alien database. But the data do not include illegal immigrants.

“No benefit or potential use is actually possible for voter registration purposes,” the report says.

Anti-voter fraud forces do not see an ally in Mr. McAuliffe. He has vetoed several bills aimed at scrutinizing rosters, including a measure this week. It would have directed registrars to audit voter lists for districts where the number of voters exceeds the U.S. Census tally for voting-age residents.

The bill was backed by Republican state Sen. Mark D. Obershain, who ran for attorney general in 2013 and lost by 165 votes out of just over 2.2 million cast.

In 2015 McAuliffe allies on the three-member state Board of Elections planned to change the voter registration form that would, in effect, make it easier for noncitizens to vote. They wanted to make optional the question, “Are you a citizen of the United States of America?” Fierce opposition nixed the idea.

Mr. Cortes previously worked at the Advancement Project, partially funded by liberal billionaire George Soros. It opposes voter ID laws, including any requirement that a voter applicant provide proof of citizenship.

A study by professors at Old Dominion University found that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, based on polling and other data. The overall number could be as high as 2 million.

A separate poll of Latino U.S. residents in 2013 found that 13 percent of noncitizens said they were registered to vote. Compared to the U.S. Census for that year, it could be mean that 800,000 to 2.2 million were registered voters.

Said the Public Interest Legal Foundation: “Most discoveries of non-citizens on the registration rolls are accidental or chance. What this means is that the number of registered non-citizens thus far identified by this investigation is just the ‘tip of the iceberg.’ The true extent of the problem likely runs in the thousands, if not more. And it is not unique to Virginia.”

After Mr. Trump alleged that millions voted illegally on Nov. 8, Mr. Cortes told Washingtonian: “The claims of voter fraud in Virginia during the November 8 election are unfounded. Virginia’s election was well administered by our 133 professional local registrars, with help from hundreds of election officials and volunteers who worked to guarantee a good experience for eligible Virginia voters. The election was fair and all votes cast by eligible voters were accurately counted.”
 
Yes, these are exactly the sorts of people the Democrats should be standing for office.....



Don’t Sweat the Big Stuff
Politicians who cannot cope with the realities of governing should stop fantasizing about utopia.
by Victor Davis Hanson March 9, 2017 12:00 AM

The recent Academy Awards ceremony turned into a monotony of hate. Many of the stars who mounted the stage ranted on cue about the evils of President Donald Trump. Such cheap rhetoric is easy. But first, accusers should guarantee that their own ceremony is well run. Instead, utter bedlam ruined the event, as no one on the Oscar stage even knew who had won the Best Picture award. Stars issued lots of rants about Trump but were apparently unaware that one of the ceremony’s impromptu invited guests was a recent parolee and registered sex offender.

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg used to offer all sorts of cosmic advice on the evils of smoking and the dangers of fatty foods and sugary soft drinks. Bloomberg also frequently pontificated on abortion and global warming, earning him a progressive audience that transcended the boroughs of New York. But in the near-record December 2010 blizzard, Bloomberg proved utterly incompetent in the elemental tasks for which he was elected: ensuring that New Yorkers were not trapped in their homes by snowdrifts in their streets that went unplowed for days.

The Bloomberg syndrome is a characteristic of contemporary government officials. When they are unwilling or unable to address pre-modern problems in their jurisdictions — crime, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate transportation — they compensate by posing as philosopher kings who cheaply lecture on existential challenges over which they have no control. In this regard, think of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s recent promises to nullify federal immigration law — even as he did little to mitigate the epidemic of murders in his own city. Former president Barack Obama nearly doubled the national debt, never achieved 3 percent economic growth in any of his eight years in office, and left the health-care system in crisis. But he did manage to lecture Americans about the evils of the Crusades, and he promises to lower the seas and cool the planet. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, likewise ran up record debt during his tenure, culminating in a $25 billion deficit his last year in office. Schwarzenegger liked to hector state residents on global warming and green energy, and brag about his commitment to wind and solar power.

Meanwhile, one of the state’s chief roadways, California State Route 99, earned the moniker “Highway of Death” for its potholes, bumper-to-bumper traffic, narrow lanes, and archaic on- and off-ramps. During California’s early-February storms, the state’s decrepit road system all but collapsed. A main access to Yosemite National Park was shut down by mudslides. Big Sur was inaccessible. Highway 17, which connects Monterey Bay to Silicon Valley, was a daily disaster. Schwarzenegger’s successor, Jerry Brown, warned of climate change and permanent drought and did not authorize the construction of a single reservoir. Now, California is experiencing near-record rain and snowfall. Had the state simply completed its half-century-old water master plan, dozens of new reservoirs would now be storing the runoff, ensuring that the state could be drought-proof for years. Instead, more than 20 million acre-feet of precious water have already been released to the sea. There is nowhere to put it, given that California has not built a major reservoir in nearly 40 years. The crumbling spillways of the landmark Oroville Dam, the tallest dam in the United States, threaten to erode it. Warnings of needed maintenance went unheeded for years, despite the fact that some 20 million more Californians live in the state (often in floodplains) than when the dam was built.

Meanwhile, the state legislature has enacted new laws regarding plastic bags and transgendered restrooms. We have become an arrogant generation that virtue-signals that we can change the universe when in reality we cannot even run an awards ceremony, plow snow, fix potholes, build a road or dam, or stop inner-city youths from murdering one another. Governors who cannot build a reservoir have little business fantasizing about 200-mph super trains.

Do our smug politicians promise utopia because they cannot cope with reality? Do lectures compensate for inaction? Do we fault past generations of Americans — who drank too many Cokes and smoked too many cigarettes — because we are ashamed that we lack their vision, confidence, and ability to build another Oroville Dam or a six-lane freeway, or to stop criminals from turning urban weekends into the Wild West? Governors who cannot build a reservoir have little business fantasizing about 200-mph super trains. And dense celebrities who cannot open the right envelope should not be sought for cosmic political wisdom.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445596/
 
Why despite the foaming at the mouth rhetoric, Big Business in the US funds the "Progressives" and not the Conservative movement/Republicans/Alt-Right. This is more about the vertical class divisions and the "Revolt of the Elites rather than political ideology as most of us understand it:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445705/corporate-leaders-progressive-activists

Why Corporate Leaders Became Progressive Activists
by Kevin D. Williamson March 13, 2017
4:00 AM

U.S. corporate activism tilts overwhelmingly to the left. The Organization Man, whom we first met in 1956, is still very much with us. And his eccentric career since that time partly answers a question that mystifies many contemporary conservatives: Given that progressives profess to hate corporations, why are our corporate leaders so progressive? It is easy to understand their taking a self-interested stand against the Trump administration over things such as the H-1B program and visa waivers, which interfere with their access to workers and customers, respectively. But 130 corporate leaders — including the CEOs of American Airlines and Bank of America — getting together to come down on North Carolina over public-bathroom rules that annoy transgender activists? Together with business leaders who have no presence in North Carolina and nothing to do with the state or its politics?

Is it only cravenness — or something more?

In the progressive lexicon, the word “corporation” is practically a synonym for “evil.” Corporations, in the progressive view, are so stoned on greed and ripped on ruthlessness that they present an existential threat to democracy as we know it. When the Left flies into a mad rage about . . . whatever, the black-bloc terrorists don’t burn down the tax office or the police station: They smash the windows of a Starbucks, never mind CEO Howard Schultz’s impeccably lefty credentials.

Weird thing, though: With the exception of a few big shiny targets such as Koch Industries (the nation’s second-largest privately held concern, behind Cargill) and Walmart (the nation’s largest private employer), the Left’s corporate enemies list is dominated by relatively modest concerns: Chick-fil-A, which, in spite of its recent growth spurt, is only a fraction of the size of McDonald’s or YUM Brands; Hobby Lobby, which is not even numbered among the hundred largest private U.S. companies; Waffle House, a regional purveyor of mediocre grits and a benefactor of Georgia Republicans. Carl’s Jr. was founded by a daily communicant and Knight of Malta, a man who had some not-very-progressive opinions about gay rights. But even in its new role as part of a larger corporate enterprise (the former CEO of which, Andrew Puzder, had been nominated for secretary of labor), the poor man’s answer to In-N-Out is not exactly in a position to inflict ultramontane Catholicism on the world at large, though the idea of a California Classic Double Inquisition with Cheese is not without charm.––

Far from being agents of reaction, our corporate giants have for decades been giving progressives a great deal to celebrate. Disney, despite its popular reputation for hidebound wholesomeness, has long been a leader on gay rights, much to the dismay of a certain stripe of conservative. Walmart, one of the Left’s great corporate villains, has barred Confederate-flag merchandise from its stores in a sop to progressive critics, and its much-publicized sustainability agenda is more than sentiment: Among other things, it has invested $100 million in economic-mobility programs and doubled the fuel efficiency of its vehicle fleet over ten years. Individual members of the Walton clan engage in philanthropy of a distinctly progressive bentIn fact, just going down the list of largest U.S. companies (by market capitalization) and considering each firm’s public political activism does a great deal to demolish the myth of the conservative corporate agenda. Top ten: 1) Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, is an up-and-down-the-line progressive who has been a vociferous critic of religious-liberty laws in Indiana and elsewhere that many like-minded people consider a back door to anti-gay discrimination. 2) When protesters descended on SFO to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration, one of the well-heeled gentlemen leading them was Google founder Sergey Brin, and Google employees were the second-largest corporate donor bloc to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. 3) Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a generous funder of programs dedicated to what is euphemistically known as “family planning.” 4) Berkshire Hathaway’s principal, Warren Buffett, is a close associate of Barack Obama’s and an energetic advocate of redistributive tax increases on high-income taxpayers. 5) Amazon’s Jeff Bezos put up $2.5 million of his own money for a Washington State gay-marriage initiative. 6) Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has pushed for liberal immigration-reform measures, while Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz pledged $20 million to support Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats in 2016. 7) Exxon, as an oil company, may be something of a hate totem among progressives, but it has spent big — billions big — on renewables and global social programs. 8) Johnson & Johnson’s health-care policy shop is run by Liz Fowler, one of the architects of Obamacare and a former special assistant to President Obama. 9) The two largest recipients of JPMorgan cash in 2016 were Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and the bank’s billionaire chairman, Jamie Dimon, is a high-profile supporter of Democratic politicians including Barack Obama and reportedly rejected an offer from President Trump to serve as Treasury secretary. 10) Wells Fargo employees followed JPMorgan’s example and donated $7.36 to Mrs. Clinton for every $1 they gave to Trump, and the recently troubled bank has sponsored events for the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, and other gay-rights groups, as well as donated to local Planned Parenthood franchises.

Even the hated Koch brothers are pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro-amnesty. You may see the occasional Tom Monaghan or Phil Anschutz, but, on balance, U.S. corporate activism is overwhelmingly progressive. Why? For one thing, conservatives are cheap dates. You do not have to convince the readers of National Review or Republicans in Valparaiso that American business is in general a force for good in the world. But if you are, e.g., Exxon, you might feel the need to convince certain people, young and idealistic and maybe a little stupid in spite of their expensive educations, that you are not so bad after all, and that you are spending mucho shmundo “turning algae into biofuel,” in the words of one Exxon advertisement, and combating malaria and doing other nice things. All of that is true, and Exxon makes sure people know it.

The professional activists may sneer and scoff, but they are not the audience. Even if it were only or mainly a matter of publicity (and it isn’t — Shell, among other oil majors, is putting real money into renewables and alternative energy), big companies such as Exxon and Apple would still have a very strong incentive to engage in progressive activism rather than conservative activism.

For one thing, there is a kind of moral asymmetry at work: Conservatives may roll their eyes a little bit at promises to build windmills so efficient that we’ll cease needing coal and oil, but progressives (at least a fair portion of them) believe that using fossil fuels may very well end human civilization. The nation’s F-150 drivers are not going to organize a march on Chevron’s headquarters if it puts a billion bucks into biofuels, but the nation’s Subaru drivers might very well do so if it doesn’t.

The same asymmetry characterizes the so-called social issues. The Left will see to it that Brendan Eich is driven out of his position at Mozilla for donating to an organization opposed to gay marriage, but the Right will not see to it that Tim Cook is driven out of his position for supporting gay marriage. For the Right, the question of gay marriage is an important moral and political disagreement, but for the Left the exclusion of homosexual couples from the legal institution of marriage was something akin to Jim Crow, and support for it isn’t erroneous, it is wicked. Even those on the right who proclaim that they regard the question of homosexual relationships as a national moral emergency do not behave as though they really believe it: Remember that boycott of Disney theme parks launched with great fanfare by the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, and the Southern Baptist Convention back in 1996? Nothing happened, because conservative parents are not telling their toddlers that they cannot go to Disney World because the people who run the park are too nice to that funny blonde lady who has the talk show and dances in the aisles with her audience.

The issues that conservatives tend to see as life-and-death issues are actual life-and-death issues, abortion prominent among them. But even among right-leaning corporate types, pro-life social conservatism is a distinctly minority inclination. And that is significant, because a great deal of corporate activism is CEO-driven rather than shareholder-driven or directly rooted in the business interests of the firm. Like Wall Street bankers, who may not like their tax bills or Dodd-Frank but who tend in the main to be socially liberal Democrats, the CEOs of major U.S. corporations are, among other things, members of a discrete class. The graduates of ten colleges accounted for nearly half of the Fortune 500 CEOs in 2012; one in seven of them went to one school: Harvard. A handful of metros in California, Texas, and New York account for a third of Fortune 1000 headquarters — and there are 17 Fortune 1000 companies in one zip code in Houston. Unsurprisingly, people with similar backgrounds, similar experiences, and similar occupations tend to see the world in a similar way. “A new breed of chief executive is emerging — the CEO activist,” wrote Leslie Gaines-Ross, of Weber Shandwick, a global PR giant that advises Microsoft and had the unenviable task of working with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on the ACA rollout. “A handful of CEOs are standing up and standing out on some of the most polarizing issues of the day, from climate change and gun control, to race relations and same-sex marriage.” Hence chief executives’ joining en masse the great choir of hysteria on the question of toilet law in the Tar Heel State.

Whereas the ancient corporate practice was to decline to take a public position on anything not related to their businesses, contemporary CEOs feel obliged to act as public intellectuals as well as business managers. Many of them are genuine intellectuals: Gates, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein. And, like Hollywood celebrities, almost all of them are effectively above money.

Some of them are rock-star entrepreneurs. But most of them are variations on the Organization Man, veterans of MBA programs, management consultancies, financial firms, The supplanting of spontaneous order with political discipline is the essence of progressivism, then and now. and 10,000 corporate-strategy meetings. If you have not read it, spare a moment for William H. Whyte’s Cold War classic. In the 1950s, Whyte, a writer for Fortune, interviewed dozens of important CEOs and found that they mostly rejected the ethos of rugged individualism in favor of a more collectivist view of the world. The capitalists were not much interested in defending the culture of capitalism. What he found was that the psychological and operational mechanics of large corporations were much like those of other large organizations, including government agencies, and that American CEOs believed, as they had believed since at least the time of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his 19th-century cult of “scientific management,” that expertise deployed through bureaucracy could impose rationality on such unruly social entities as free markets, culture, family, and sexuality. The supplanting of spontaneous order with political discipline is the essence of progressivism, then and now.

It is hardly a new idea. The old robber barons were far from being free-enterprise men: J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, like many businessmen of their generation, believed strongly in state-directed collusion among firms (they’d have said “coordination”) to avoid “destructive competition.” You can draw a straight intellectual line from their thinking to Barack Obama’s views about state-directed “investments” in alternative energy or medical research.

It is not difficult to see the temptations of that approach from the point of view of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett: The decisions they have made for themselves have turned out well, so why not empower them, or men like them, to make decisions for other people, too? They may even be naïve or arrogant enough to believe that their elevated stations in life have liberated them from self-interest.

Populists of the Trump variety and the Sanders variety (who are not in fact as different as they seem) are not wrong to see these corporate cosmopolitans as members of a separate, distinct, and thriving class with economic and social interests of its own. Those interests overlap only incidentally and occasionally with those of movement conservatives — and overlap even less as the new nationalist-populist strain in the Republican party comes to dominate the debate on questions such as trade and immigration. Under attack from both the right and the left, free enterprise and free trade increasingly are ideas without a party. As William H. Whyte discovered back in 1956, the capitalists are not prepared to offer an intellectual defense of capitalism or of classical liberalism. They believe in something else: the managers’ dream of command and control.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445705/corporate-leaders-progressive-activists
 
A bit of wishful thinking. While Trumpian populism may be the wave of the future in the US and perhaps in a spreading wave around the world (think BREXIT, AfD, Front National, the "Five Star" movment in Italy.....) there are different models outside of populism or Progressivism. F.A. Hayek is perhaps the most influential person no one has ever heard about (the Reagan Revolution and Thatcherism were largely based on his ideas), but in todays world, I suspect that the louder voices and better organized groups, coupled with more effective PSYOPS messaging techniques will ultimately win the day.

https://www.cato.org/blog/25-years-later-it-still-hayek-century

25 Years Later, Is It Still the Hayek Century?
By David Boaz 
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F. A. Hayek died 25 years ago today. His secretary called Cato Institute president Edward H. Crane, who confirmed the sad news to the New York Times.

Hayek’s life spanned the 20th century, from 1899 to 1992. In his youth he thought he saw liberalism dying in nationalism and war. Thanks partly to his own efforts, in his old age he was heartened by the revival of free-market liberalism. John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker that “on the biggest issue of all, the vitality of capitalism, he was vindicated to such an extent that it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century.”

Back in 2010 the New York Times said that the Tea Party “has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas. It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers [such as] Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” (1944).” I responded at the time,


So that’s, you know, “long-dormant ideas” like those of F. A. Hayek, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, who met with President Reagan at the White House, whose book The Constitution of Liberty was declared by Margaret Thatcher “This is what we believe,” who was described by Milton Friedman as “the most important social thinker of the 20th century” and by White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers as the author of “the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today,” who is the hero of The Commanding Heights, the book and PBS series by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, and whose book The Road to Serfdom has never gone out of print and has sold 100,000 copies this year.

On the occasion of Hayek’s 100th birthday, Tom G. Palmer summed up some of his intellectual contributions:


Hayek may have made his greatest contribution to the fight against socialism and totalitarianism with his best-selling 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. In it, Hayek warned that state control of the economy was incompatible with personal and political freedom and that statism set in motion a process whereby “the worst get on top.”

But not only did Hayek show that socialism is incompatible with liberty, he showed that it is incompatible with rationality, with prosperity, with civilization itself. In the absence of private property, there is no market. In the absence of a market, there are no prices. And in the absence of prices, there is no means of determining the best way to solve problems of social coordination, no way to know which of two courses of action is the least costly, no way of acting rationally. Hayek elaborated the insights of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, whose 1922 book Socialism offered a brilliant refutation of the dreams of socialist planners. In his later work, Hayek showed how prices established in free markets work to bring about social coordination. His essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in the American Economic Review in 1945 and reprinted hundreds of times since, is essential to understanding how markets work.

But Hayek was more than an economist. As I’ve written before, he also published impressive works on political theory and psychology. He’s like Marx, only right. Tom Palmer noted:

Building on his insights into how order emerges “spontaneously” from free markets, Hayek turned his attention after the war to the moral and political foundations of free societies. The Austrian-born British subject dedicated his instant classic The Constitution of Liberty “To the unknown civilization that is growing in America.” Hayek had great hopes for America, precisely because he appreciated the profound role played in American popular culture by a commitment to liberty and limited government. While most intellectuals praised state control and planning, Hayek understood that a free society has to be open to the unanticipated, the unplanned, the unknown. As he noted in The Constitution of Liberty, “Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.” The freedom that matters is not the “freedom” of the rulers or of the majority to regulate and control social development, but the freedom of the individual person to live his own life as he chooses. The freedom of the individual to break old molds, to create new things, and to test new paths is the mark of a progressive society: “If we proceed on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will practice are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom.”

Reagan and Thatcher may have admired Hayek, but he always insisted that he was a liberal, not a conservative. He titled the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” He pointed out that the conservative “has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. It is the recognition of such principles that permits the coexistence of different sets of values that makes it possible to build a peaceful society with a minimum of force. The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike.” He wanted to be part of “the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution.” And I recall an interview in a French magazine in the 1980s, which I can’t find online, in which he was asked if he was part of the “new right,” and he quipped, “Je suis agnostique et divorcé.”

Hayek lived long enough to see the rise and fall of fascism, national socialism, and Soviet communism. In the years since Hayek’s death economic freedom around the world has been increasing, and liberal values such as human rights, the rule of law, equal freedom under law, and free access to information have spread to new areas. But today liberalism is under challenge from such disparate yet symbiotic ideologies as resurgent leftism, right-wing authoritarian populism, and radical political Islamism. I am optimistic because I think that once people get a taste of freedom and prosperity, they want to keep it. The challenge for Hayekian liberals is to help people understand that freedom and prosperity depend on liberal values, the values explored and defended in his many books and articles.
 
Huge graphics available at the link, this is quite stunning when you see just how small and dispersed the "Blue" strongholds really are. As well, if the demographic trends of outmigration continue, the "Blue" strongholds will actually continue to shrink. And this is without even looking at their tone deaf messaging to Americans (although the dismissal of the concerns of Americans and the economic fallout of Democrat economic policy certainly doesn't help):

http://ijr.com/2017/04/841803-stunningly-detailed-2016-election-map-just-released-democrats-scared-scared/?utm_campaign=ods&utm_content=Politics&utm_medium=Owned&utm_source=Facebook&utm_term=ijamerica

The Most Stunningly Detailed 2016 Election Map Was Just Released—Democrats Should Be Scared, Very Scared
By Benny Johnson

The Trump administration is off to a rocky start, as every week seems to bring new turmoil and drama. However, it is important to remember how shockingly unlikely this presidency was in the first place.

Since Trump went from nearly zero chance of becoming Leader of the Free World to launching missiles at our enemies, one is left to ask: what trends led to this fate for Democrats?

This is a modal window.

Ryne Rohla at Decision Desk HQ set out to model American voting patterns, not just on a national or state level, but by burrowing down to the most localized, nuanced metric available: local precincts. Because of the incredible locality and difficulty of attaining such data, few have ever attempted to map the voting populace in this way. Rohla persisted. He explains in his piece entitled, “Creating a National Precinct Map”:


Election results show so much more than simply who won and lost a constitutionally-legitimized popularity contest. Election results lay bare the souls of its voters, translating millions of individual hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations, and biases into tangible, observable quantities. No census or survey can truly capture that singular moment of personal truth which occurs in the ballot box. We can identify your race, your income, a list of a thousand other measurable values which statistically imply the outcome of this moment, but as deterministic as we might try to make it seem, it always comes down to a final act of free will. These individual acts sum to make manifest the inner milieu of a people at a particular moment in time, a secular sacrament ordaining to our political priesthood.

In other words, Rohla knows that voting trends reflect the true spirit of a people, at least for a window in time. This data is important and measuring it accurately is essential. However, even in our digital-first society, nailing down the accurate voting habits of a rural district is difficult.

Precinct data, despite providing the clearest available picture of how areas vote, can be quite difficult to both come by and to visualize. There isn’t a singular, unified source of precinct-level data nationally nor even at the statewide level in many cases. Precinct boundaries frequently shift over time, especially during the decennial redistricting process following each Census.

After spending most of my spare time in 2015 working on a global religion map, the 2016 Presidential Primaries rolled around, and I decided to go for it: I would do everything in my power to create a national precinct map. I didn’t have a team of researchers. I didn’t have aides. I didn’t have much extra money. I didn’t have connections. But for some reason, I thought I could do it anyway.

Hundreds of emails and phone calls and months of work later, here’s what I came up with:
Want to see what that looks like year over year?

(graphics at link)

The huge change in the maps can be underwrote from an economic perspective, as well. As IJR recently reported:


According to economic expert Stephen Moore, writing in the Washington Times, the reasons Americans are fleeing these states are all driven by economics — namely, that they share the progressive values of “high taxes rates; high welfare benefits; heavy regulation; environmental extremism; high minimum wages.”

Here is an amazing statistic. Of the 10 blue states that Hillary Clinton won by the largest percentage margins — California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Illinois, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut — every single one of them lost domestic migration (excluding immigration) over the last 10 years (2004-14). Nearly 2.75 million more Americans left California and New York than entered these states.

Also, the Democratic Party has lost seats from coast to coast on every level. According to Fox News, the last eight years have proved disastrous for the Democratic Party, handing them over 1,000 losses nationally:


The Democratic Party suffered huge losses at every level during Obama’s West Wing tenure. The grand total: a net loss of 1,042 state and federal Democratic posts, including congressional and state legislative seats, governorships and the presidency.

The latter was perhaps the most profound example of Obama's popularity failing to translate to support for his allies. Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of state under Obama, brought the first family out for numerous campaign appearances. In September, Obama declared that his “legacy’s on the ballot.”

Less than two months later, Americans voted for Donald Trump.

From every angle, the Democratic Party looks like they're in an uphill climb, even all the way down to the local precinct level.
 
By Benny Johnson

This Benny Johnson?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/07/27/the-ravages-of-buzzfeeds-benny-johnson/?utm_term=.9341637f260d
 
Thucydides said:
Huge graphics available at the link, this is quite stunning when you see just how small and dispersed the "Blue" strongholds really are. As well, if the demographic trends of outmigration continue, the "Blue" strongholds will actually continue to shrink. And this is without even looking at their tone deaf messaging to Americans (although the dismissal of the concerns of Americans and the economic fallout of Democrat economic policy certainly doesn't help):

Who gets to vote in an election? People, or land? I'm pretty sure it's people, not land. All that infographic tells me is that wide open, sparsely populated, rural areas vote republican, and densely populated cities vote Democratic.

America, politically, is its people, not it's mountains, lakes, and prairies. It wouldn't matter if everyone in the whole country moved to New York, and made the United States look 100% red and have one tiny island of blue in the corner. If 99.99% of the population live in that tiny island and all vote Blue, then by all rights they get to decide the law (minority rights respected, of course).
 
.... however the USA does have its idea of precincts and districts, which can be 'adjusted" by the elected between elections!

I was surprised at the amount of "blue" in Texas given the amount of adjustment that has occurred in that state. That cannot be explained by just the rural and urban delta, nor Hispanic vs all the rest. 

 
 
Lumber said:
Who gets to vote in an election? People, or land? I'm pretty sure it's people, not land. All that infographic tells me is that wide open, sparsely populated, rural areas vote republican, and densely populated cities vote Democratic.

America, politically, is its people, not it's mountains, lakes, and prairies. It wouldn't matter if everyone in the whole country moved to New York, and made the United States look 100% red and have one tiny island of blue in the corner. If 99.99% of the population live in that tiny island and all vote Blue, then by all rights they get to decide the law (minority rights respected, of course).

I agree. You can take the same snapshot for Canada for the 2015 election and come to the conclusion that the Liberals would have, at best, had the same power as the NDP and conservatives.

the fact is that the majority of people live in large urban centres which vote overwhelmingly liberal/democrat and those urban centres are continuing to grow. If I were a conservative/republican I'd be less worried about the shades of a map and more worried about how the message can be made to appeal to the ever growing urban population.

 

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