For 2024, The Dems Win No Matter What.

[Texas Contrarian]

Originally Posted by texassapper

Want to explain what the abortion laws are like in Moslem nations? (Non sequitur) Since when did protecting the lives of the innocent become a Christian value?

Who gives a damn what abortion laws are in Muslim countries? Since when did legislating morality become a legitimate function of government?

(Prohibition worked really well, didn't it?)

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by texassapper

Want to explain what the abortion laws are like in Moslem nations? Since when did protecting the lives of the innocent become a Christian value?

This is a loosing issue for Republicans. Just look at the recent Wisconsin supreme court judge election, which the Democrat won by 11 percentage points. Or the referendum in Kansas, a red state, where 59% voted pro Choice.

TC's spot on about DeSantis. This will not play well in a general election.

[jiu jitsu king]

Originally Posted by Salty Again

"I see your TRUE COLOURS shining through - I see yer True Colours
shining through - don't be afraid - to let 'em show!"

Your True Colours ---- look like a rainbow.

... Trump 2024!

#### Salty

MAGAA Trump 2024!

[texassapper]

Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian

Who gives a damn what abortion laws are in Muslim countries? Since when did legislating morality become a legitimate function of government?

(Prohibition worked really well, didn't it?)

You realize that the legitimate function of government is protecting hte lives and property of its citizens right? Then this is precisely the job of the government... protecting the lives of those too weak to protect themselves.

Murder is morally wrong. Why do you have a problem with preventing it?

[Texas Contrarian]

Originally Posted by texassapper

You realize that the legitimate function of government is protecting hte lives and property of its citizens right? Then this is precisely the job of the government... protecting the lives of those too weak to protect themselves.

You realize that fetuses are not citizens, right?

Murder is morally wrong. Why do you have a problem with preventing it?

Of course I do not condone murder, but abortion is NOT murder.

How about a reality check?

Unlike in the pre-Roe era, more than half of abortions today are accomplished with a course of two pills taken together or within a 24-48-hour period. Affluent women, if necessary, will travel out of state or even out of the country to obtain them. Poor women, if they're legally prohibited, will obtain the pills from criminal distributors or gang members.

Alternatively, many lower-income women will seek illegal practitioners of surgical abortions who are likely to botch the procedure and render them incapable of childbearing for life, or even kill them. (Doesn't sound very "pro-life," does it?)

In any event, efforts to restrict or prohibit by legislative fiat a service for which there is overwhelming demand are doomed to fail.

If you're into virtue-signaling or demonstrations of ideological purity and don't care about public opinion and winning elections, fine.

But if you're an ambitious political candidate who aggressively promotes the notion that the state should hold dominion over women's uteruses, you'd better be prepared to get shellacked at the ballot box.

[1blackman1]

Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian

How about a reality check?

Unlike in the pre-Roe era, more than half of abortions today are accomplished with a course of two pills taken together or within a 24-48-hour period. Affluent women, if necessary, will travel out of state or even out of the country to obtain them. Poor women, if they're legally prohibited, will obtain the pills from criminal distributors or gang members.

Alternatively, many lower-income women will seek illegal practitioners of surgical abortions who are likely to botch the procedure and render them incapable of childbearing for life, or even kill them. (Doesn't sound very "pro-life," does it?)

In any event, efforts to restrict or prohibit by legislative fiat a service for which there is overwhelming demand are doomed to fail.

If you're into virtue-signaling or demonstrations of ideological purity and don't care about public opinion and winning elections, fine.

But if you're an ambitious political candidate who aggressively promotes the notion that the state should hold dominion over women's uteruses, you'd better be prepared to get shellacked at the ballot box.

X1000

[Why_Yes_I_Do]

Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian

How about a reality check?...

I do like me some reality checks from time to time. Sadly, the CDC is way too slow on data, but birth rates are a thing.


Basically, they have been declining mostly, but more importantly is for whom. First thing is education levels of new Moms. Bottom line is almost 60% do not have a 4 year college education. It gets a bit chippy when you overlay demographics. I would note, the below is from women, whether you know how to define what one is or not, over age 25 ;-) As such, it misses a lot of a certain demographic or two that tend to have births before then.







Overall the birth rates, especially of the upper 40%, has been on a steady decline for a long time, though, overall we did get a little baby bump post the covid. But what about abortions? Believe it or not, they have been on a steady decline for a long time.





As go abortions, so goes the Abortion Industrial Complex.





Speaking of politics...








Sources used:
Pew Research Center
Wikipedia


But the icky question remains: Are the right ones, making the smartest choice?

[texassapper]

Originally Posted by Why_Yes_I_Do

But the icky question remains: Are the right ones, making the smartest choice?

The ones that care about THEIR society and THEIR DNA are.

And yes contrarian abortion is murder. By the very definition... other wise it would need medical/chemical intervention to commit it.

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by texassapper

The ones that care about THEIR society and THEIR DNA are.

And yes contrarian abortion is murder. By the very definition... other wise it would need medical/chemical intervention to commit it.

At 8 weeks an embryo is half an inch long. There's not much difference between a frog embryo and a human embryo. At 12 weeks the fetus is 2 inches long.

The Bible and other sacred writings don't really address abortion.

In the early stages of pregnancy, why is an abortion morally more abhorrent, say, than killing a cow?

I'm not a vegan btw.

[Texas Contrarian]

Originally Posted by Tiny

At 8 weeks an embryo is half an inch long. There's not much difference between a frog embryo and a human embryo. At 12 weeks the fetus is 2 inches long.

The Bible and other sacred writings don't really address abortion.

In the early stages of pregnancy, why is an abortion morally more abhorrent, say, than killing a cow?

I'm not a vegan btw.

You cold-blooded killer!

OK, I might as well fess up, although this admission might reveal a tad of hypocrisy. Last week I shot a fallow doe on my Llano County property, but I do have a good excuse. (Surplus population within a high-fenced ranch. Besides, fallow backstrap is delicious!)

Originally Posted by texassapper

And yes contrarian abortion is murder. The sheer fatuousness of that statement renders it unworthy of a response. By the very definition... other wise it would need medical/chemical intervention to commit it. Huh?? That doesn't make sense on any level. It's a confused word salad; a grammatical and syntactical train wreck.

Aside from those two minor details, you're doing quite excellently in this and all the other debates in this forum!

Germane observation (question, actually) about whether a hardcore position on the abortion issue effectively torpedoes Republicans' chances in the 2024 presidential election as well as their prospects of holding the House:

Did DeSantis render himself virtually unelectable when he signed the legislation prohibiting abortions after 6 weeks post-conception in Florida?

For that matter, now that it's looking more and more likely that Trump will be the nominee, does this hard-line position reduce his chances (someone long in any event) to near zero?

[Why_Yes_I_Do]

Originally Posted by Tiny

....In the early stages of pregnancy, why is an abortion morally more abhorrent, say, than killing a cow?

I'm not a vegan btw.

Seeing you can't tell the difference between a cow and a baby, I suspect it gets kinda murky for you on what is a women too. Either way, I hope you're not saying you eat <banned mention>, 'cause this ain't no confessional here.

[Why_Yes_I_Do]

Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian

...Did DeSantis render himself virtually unelectable when he signed the legislation prohibiting abortions after 6 weeks post-conception in Florida...

I think it happened when he barely eeked out a victory over Freak'n Andrew Gillum, who is recently in the news again:
Former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum indicted on wire fraud charges

On the upside, he was fully clothed and standing up in court and actually able to remember his own name, unlike that other night after loosing the Governor's race:
Former Fla. Political Star and Escort Give Dueling Accounts of Scandal That Sidelined His Career

[Texas Contrarian]

Lately, many Democrats have been salivating over the prospect of running against Trump in 2024, apparently feeling that independent voter disgust with the former president's antics render him virtually unelectable, making even a decrepit old dotard like Biden virtually a shoo-in.

But is that true? It seems that the Democratic Party has become hell-bent on demonstrating that it will take a back seat to no one when it comes to apparent eagerness to offend relatively centrist voters with moderate views.

Comes now Ruy Teixeira, a left-wing sociologist with whom I would agree on very little, but who I believe well articulates the case that Democrats would do well to avoid sanguinity.

Here's Teixeira's blog post from April 27th:

Five Reasons Why Biden Might Lose in 2024
Even If His Opponent Is Donald Trump
Ruy Teixeira
Apr 27

Biden, to no one’s surprise, just declared for re-election. The general consensus in Democratic circles appears to be that since he is likely to face Trump in a re-match and Trump is toxic among large sections of the electorate, Biden will pull out the win. I personally think it’s too early to assume that Trump will for sure be the nominee and that a non-Trump nominee would be significantly harder to beat.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume it is Trump. Here are five reasons why Biden might still lose.

Biden really is an extraordinarily weak candidate. His approval rating his been in the low 40’s seemingly forever. Right now it stands at a little under 43 percent in the 538 rolling average. Generally, presidents get pretty close to their approval rating in voting support. The last three incumbent presidents (W. Bush, Obama, Trump) got only 1-2 points higher support than their approval rating at the time of the election. This pattern would make Biden dead in the water if his low ‘40s approval rating continues to election day.

Of course, his approval rating might improve by election day; this does happen but in the 2000’s the pattern for incumbents has either been decline or a modest gain from this point in the election cycle. The best performer was Obama, whose approval rating went up a little over 4 points. Even if Biden gets that level of improvement and then a slight bump above his approval rating on election day, he’s still in very dangerous territory. A president who was barely elected with 51 percent of the popular vote would have hard time weathering a decline to 48-49 percent of the vote.

It's also worth noting that NBC polling shows Biden losing by 6 points to a generic (unnamed) Republican party candidate. This is a contrast to Obama who at a similar point in the cycle was leading a generic Republican by 3 points. But it is very similar to Trump’s situation in 2019 when he was also losing to a generic opponent by 7 points—and went on to lose to a real opponent in 2020.

And did I mention he’s a little bit on the old side?

Trump may be a stronger opponent than Democrats expect. There’s no question that Trump has a lot of baggage, including his incessant dwelling on the “stolen” 2020 election, that should weaken him as an opponent. But consider some uncomfortable facts. Trump is a point ahead of Biden in the RealClearPolitics rolling average or just a point behind in a polling average reported by Nate Cohn. Yes, it is early but these results are not nothing. We are talking about a candidate who is very, very well-known to the voting public, warts and all. But that is not translating into a big advantage for Biden, quite the contrary.

Certainly, Trump has a low favorability rating—but then again so does Biden. And in some polls, Trump’s favorability rating is slightly higher. Intriguingly, in the latest Wall Street Journal poll, Trump’s retrospective approval rating (48 percent) is actually higher than Biden’s current approval rating (42 percent), indicating surprising residual strength for a third Trump candidacy.

Biden and the Democrats have not moved to the center on cultural issues. Biden and the Democrats seem to be operating under the questionable assumption that they don’t need to draw any line whatsoever against the cultural extremists in their own party. This calculation overlooks the fact that voters think Democrats and Republicans are equally too tolerant of extremist groups in their ranks.

That means the Biden campaign will need to contend throughout election season with a burgeoning backlash against lax enforcement on crime and illegal immigration; ideological curricula in schools; the undermining of academic achievement standards; the introduction of mandatory, politically approved vocabulary; proliferating “diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucracies; and the unvetted mainstreaming of “gender-affirming care.” Republicans are now widely preferred by voters to Democrats on immigration and crime; they have reduced the traditional Democratic advantage on education, and are set to take advantage of a conservative turn among the public on transgender issues.

There is a middle ground in all these areas, but Democrats are clearly resisting it. Witness the fierce intraparty reaction to Biden’s modest attempts to move to the center on crime by supporting an override of the new D.C. law that reduced penalties for carjacking and to his suggestion that he might resume detention of migrant families who enter the United States illegally (this blowback on a slightly tougher immigration policy comes when Title 42 is set to end on May 11, leading almost certainly to a big surge at the southern border).

On current evidence, it is hard to see a decisive move to the center aborning. Therefore, Democrats’ vulnerabilities on these issues will likely persist through the 2024 election.

Abortion may not be the silver bullet many Democrats assume it will be in 2024. There is a serious tendency for Democrats to overinterpret the results from 2022 and 2023 and map that overinterpretation onto a high turnout presidential election when many issues will be in play. It may well be a factor in Biden’s favor but the idea that it will override all other issues and deliver certain victory is wishful thinking. Even in 2022, many Democrats underperformed abortion referenda and general pro-choice sentiments, frequently by wide margins, indicating the limits of the issue.

It’s well to remember that American voters, by and large, are moderate on the abortion issue and do not support abortion on demand throughout pregnancy. Newly-released Marist/NPR data (consistent with much other survey data) show two-thirds of voters supporting limiting on-demand abortion to the first three months of pregnancy. Among working-class voters, these sentiments go up to 72 percent.

There is a working-class sized hole in Biden’s re-elect strategy. That brings us to perhaps the biggest problem Biden may have matching up with Trump. Biden’s opening video and the general message from his nascent campaign is very heavy on democracy issues, abortion rights, and denouncing “MAGA extremists”. It is fair to say that this message will play best among the college-educated voters the campaign is clearly targeting.

The problem here is that working-class voters are much more numerous than their college-educated counterparts. A reasonable guess is that as a group they will be half again as large as college voters in 2024. That means that slippage in the working-class vote can have on outsize effect on the outcome.

In 2020, Trump carried the overall working class vote by 4 points. In 2022, Republicans carried the nationwide House vote by 13 points. If Trump replicated that 2022 margin in 2024, he would be very hard to beat. Absent a countervailing Democratic improvement in the college vote—which the Democrats already carried by 18 points in 2020—Trump would likely carry Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, and even Pennsylvania and Michigan. A counter trend among the smaller college-educated group could still cancel these effects out but to completely do so it would have to be larger than the working-class shift, spiking Biden’s advantage among the college-educated to over 30 points. Possible, but a very heavy lift.

Since Trump is regularly showing double digit advantages among working-class voters in trial heats and has a proven track record in attracting working-class support, the challenge for Biden’s campaign seems clear. They must at all costs prevent the kind of working-class slippage that could put Trump once again in the Oval Office.

Hillary Clinton did not take this threat seriously and she paid the price. The Biden campaign should consider whether their strategy could be making the same mistake.

[the_real_Barleycorn]

Originally Posted by Texas Contrarian

Really?

Pretty sure I "get it" just as well as anyone here.

As befitting my last name, I often have a contrarian take on a whole range of issues, not just on finance and markets.

Here's my take:

Like Jackie, I think Trump has very little chance of winning the 2024 election if nominated. In fact, it may be a difficult landscape for any Republican candidate, although I think someone less incoherent and less noxious might have a pretty fair shot, especially if the economy is looking shaky in Q3 2024.

However, if Trump fails to win the nomination and doesn't suddenly develop a severe health problem, he'll probably try to torpedo the Republican nominee's candidacy, just like he threw away the two Republican Senate seats in Georgia a couple of years ago. And, since he doesn't care about much other than his own self-aggrandizement, many observers think he may even run as a third-party candidate, thus guaranteeing a Democratic victory.

Recall also that Republican-appointed justices initiated a political kamikaze mission last year when deciding Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Then, as though that wasn't damaging enough, a rabidly anti-abortion federal judge recently saw fit to yank the FDA approval for mifepristone, originally granted 23 years ago.

These may have been base-pleasing acts, but Republicans will pay a severe price at the polls for years to come. Tens of millions of angry women will be energized as never before.

If you're inclined to start snarking at me and calling me "pro-Biden" or a "libtard," I suggest that you save your keystrokes. I am a center-right independent with conservative/libertarian views on almost all topical issues.

Despite the extreme dishonesty, dysfunction, and irresponsibility of today's Democratic Party, it still holds the higher cards politically, owing to the opposition's self-immolation.

We need a leader who can, at the very least, stand athwart the headlong rush to an authoritarian, frighteningly dysfunctional, and extremely expensive brand of "social democracy" and effectively yell "STOP!!"

But that takes real leadership. Good luck finding it over the horizon in today's wrecked political landscape!

Exactly which leader do the democrats have who can do that?

[the_real_Barleycorn]

Some things the democrats did but probably won't work this time;

As usual, the democrats called Trump a racist. There is no evidence of this. There is a lot of evidence that Biden is a racist to some degree.

They called Trump antisemitic. Once again, there is ample evidence to the contrary and more evidence that Biden is truly antisemitic.

They said Trump was going to cause a war. He didn't but Biden did.

They said Trump was beholden to Russia and China. One of the biggest hoaxes of political history. Any we have some pretty damning things that suggest that the entire Biden clan is up their eyeballs in illegal influence peddling.

Remember when they said that Trump was going to ruin the economy in 2016? What happened? Things took a hit with covid but they didn't really go downhill until after the Biden effect.

All the attacks over the years have made Trump an underdog. We all love underdogs and we love kicking in the teeth of liars.