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I still don't think that the full impact of COVID is being accounted for in polling and voter outcomes. Yes the first wave hit blue areas hard and fast due to population density but with the vaccine and the ever growing amount of time it has been available I have to imagine it is almost exclusively hitting red areas now. COVID has not gone away but vaccinated people aren't dying at nearly the rate of the unvaccinated of which that group is pretty exclusively GOP or at least Maga. When some of these elections were coming down to the thousands of voters 3 years ago what happens when thousands of dedicated GOP voters are now dead?
I did the math a few years ago because I couldn't find anyone else who had published it. This is rough and IANAM (mathmagicman).
Every single day 8,000 boomers and above die, and 12,000 people turn 18 and those numbers are actually accelerating. If you use existing data to estimate conservative/liberal and likely voters within those groups it works out to a delta of 10,000 per day on a national scale. That's 5,000 votes switching every single day. That might not seem like alot. Because it really isn't. Out of 155 million votes cast, 10,000 is .006 percent. But here's the thing. It's cumulative. And it just doesn't stop. It is relentless. it's 300k a month, 3.6 million per year. And that pace is accelerating. Between 2020 and 2024 it's a 15 million vote difference. By 2028 it's 30 million. It used to be that people age into conservatism. But that is not happening with millennials. The demographics are changing, and changing quickly. The most conservative group in the country is dying. While the most liberal group is rising.
We just have to hold on to democracy for a few more years. This will all be behind us. Another 10k today.
I have a feeling you "aged in to conservatism" because that's when you finally had money and humans are generally shit when it comes to "fuck you I got mine" but speaking as a millennial, that's just not happening. My generation's retirement plan is to die at our desks hopefully in a way that creates a lot of work for our bosses. Although on the less cynical side of things, I also tend to think that generally people are becoming more tolerant over time.
For the most part I have aged into liberalism. Older I get and the more shit I have seen.
Before: What do you mean institutional racism is a thing? I am not racist, no one I know is racist. Oh sure there are skinheads, but they are in jail. Since I don't see it, it must not be there.
Now: I just saw my friend who is black get treated like he was a dangerous criminal because of the crime of walking.
Stuff like that for example. I am doing well, I got mine. I want everyone else to get there's as well.
Elder millennial here. Same. Grew up in a conservative, religious house hold, thinking we were some kind of bastion of morality, while the blue team was dead set on blending babies down into a paste for their satanic rituals n' shit. Started actually paying attention to politics in the Clinton presidency, but ofc was hyper-focused on shit that doesn't matter (relative to actual policy, anyway) like his affair, so cue the confirmation bias.
Then Bush happened, but by then I was actually thinking critically, so there was a lot of "wtf, I know he's on our team, but this isn't right". I was still a fucking idiot though, so I landed in the "bOtH siDeS arE teH sAMe!!" trap and championed the Libertarian party for a bit.
Eventually realized the LP, despite having some sincerely decent concepts on paper (shoutout to the non-aggression principle), boiled down to just handing corporations the reigns of the nation; and that the notion of the free market policing itself is a laughable pipe dream (reality check for pretty much any Libertarian proposal: "What would telecoms do with this proposed power?").
And I couldn't support the blue team because... um... well there was the situation with Clinton's blowjob... and, uh... hmmmm... why the fuck have I been vilifying them all this time?! FINALLY took a closer look at the real left's goals, and not just Fox's boogeyman fantasy version, and FINALLY realized I'd been drinking the right's kool-aid from basically birth all the way through the Libertarian phase.
Fast forward another decade-ish and 2016 happened, which really pulled off the last shred of veneer that used to present the GOP as anything other than seething hateful cultists: that was the kick in the ass that made me realize that I've got some catching up to do, and urgently. Haven't missed an election since, big or small: solid blue.
The really important bit here: none of ^that is unique. It took some blundering in the dark to realize that I was... well, blundering in the dark; but I was raised alongside a horde of other kids whose parents "shifted right as they aged" and just didn't question the boogeyman fantasy shit until we got out of the house, and then turned left. Then more left. Then ALL THE WAY LEFT.
And it's not just in blue bubbles, either - I was active duty in the military when we switched from Obama to Trump; the military definitely leans right, but it's not absolute as it's often presented. Even there, a significant portion of the servicemen and women I interacted with were on track wit their own version of my rant here. People in general, but millennial and younger especially, are REALLY sick of this neonazi, christofascist shit on the red team.
It's kind of amazing how much the military still leans right after all the Trump shit.
The draft dodging, the incredible disrespect for the military, the obscene bullshit like the hurricane marker incident, the dictator worship, the subservience to Putin, and of course the coup. I would think military people would be better at recognizing incompetence at least.
A couple redditers put together a list of links to articles highlighting each of Trump's attacks on our own military, from policy to just disrespectful shit like his "I lIkE pEopLe wHo wErn'T cApTUrEd."
Ignoring the shit he did against every other slice of our nation, and JUST focusing on things that hurt the military/vets, there had to be around a hundred links.
I definitely converted a few people with that list.
But yeah, the right's kool-aid is a potent drug - it's easy to just keep chugging without question.
Do you still have the link to that post?
No, the original got deleted. Looks like there have been a few attempts to recreate it though: found one that looks decent, but reddit's being fucky with the comments actually showing up in the thread they were posted - it's a 3 part post and only one shows up, but if you look at the user's comment history you can see them all back to back. This link should bring you to the correct page, ctrl+F "PT 3 -.-" to jump to it. It's reverse chronological, so the the pt 3 is the last, with the 2nd and 1st appearing under it.
Infact, fuggit, I hate directing traffic to reddit, and I've got the pages open now. Gimme a min and I'll just get the list + links over as a post here.
Edit - Here ya go:
https://lemmy.world/post/8041636
Ah, the good old tango of
"Yeah, sure, we could do That Thing with the proposed powers, but we'd NEVER EVER do That Thing, we're not evil after all. We just ABSOLUTELY NEED the capability to do That Thing right now. K, thanks.
Whoops, we did That Thing."
I completely agree. With both points. Add to it the rapidly fading religious influence.
I remember Gen X saying much the same thing about their retirement plans, too, though.
Regarding the steadfast belief that "conservatism is dying": no it isn't. Christian schools, home schools, Christian colleges, and even regular schools, communities and colleges are pumping out kids that have the beliefs of their parents. I live in a rural area, and work (hypocritically) for a Christian based organization. I'm surrounded by young minds that are perfectly comfortable with the ideals of the religious right, and vote.
Society has been saying it for years... We said it when I was back in college. "Bubba in the white house is going to be the best! We'll undo all the hell Reagan and Bush did!" then Newt Gingrich (sounds like a disease...) made his "Promise to America(tm)" and everything got fucked.
I will say that the trend, year over year, for xtians has been they have been going down at roughly 1% per year, every year, for many years now. I think it is things like this that explain why the cons are getting increasingly radicalized in their positions and in their tactics. They have been denigrating the notion of democratic norms (the well-actually "this is not a democratic country" stuff that they love to pull, for instance). Their more wonky members starting laying the groundwork way, way back, according to McLean's Democracy In Chains.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/
I mean, the fact that about 1 in 3 is unaffiliated is quite staggering. I can remember a time where even admitting this was seen as rather "edgy", now it's going to earn a shrug.
This is why they want religious schools, school vouchers, private schools, etc. It's segregation light. This way they stay in their echo chamber.
But the data shows religiousness is going down. The ones that remain are becoming more radical.
This is also why they want Fox, to appeal to more than the religious.
People have been saying that conservatism is aging out since at least the 90's. Instead we see resurgences throughout the years.
Some people have been saying that the current resurgence is more of a death throe. I truly hope so, but I'm worried.
It used to be that being conservative did not require you being batshit insane.
Yes batshit insane conservatives existed, but so did reasonable people supporting reasonable sounding policies by conservative politicians who behaved in a respectable manner.
While I believe it's still possible for reasonable people to be Conservative, it's not possible for reasonable people to support Republicans with their mouth pieces like Magorie "Jewish Space Lasers" Green being treated like someone with opinions worth listening to.
Damn dude, I needed to read this today. That’s amazing!
You need to keep in mind that 2023 COVID is a different beast than 2020 COVID. The currently most common strains tend to be less hard on the body as the virus has started to adapt to human hosts.
I still wouldn't recommend people to go unvaccinated but it's not quite as suicidally irresponsible as it used to be. Still irresponsible, though.
Yeah, but the elderly GOP base is getting it for the 2nd or 3rd time without having been vaccinated. It's just as hard on them if not harder.
That said I don't think it's moving the needle as much as MAGA politics are.
What bizarro world do you live in? It's no longer a novel virus. Most boomers have been exposed or infected by COVID, also a great number (majority) of them got vaccinated. So by now there are miniscule number of boomers without natural or vaccine immunity. The vaccines boosters do little here in terms of death, because very few boomers are currently dying from COVID.
Hospitalization rate of over 65 was
Death rate is a fraction of that.
Shhhh if we don't talk about it they'll never figure it out
We’ve been talking about this since COVID hit. They’re too fucking stupid to accept the truth.
I remember how the cons were cynically thinking it was going to hit the "urban" people harder and the worst among them were cheering that on. Whooooops.
They’re always thinking that the world is more dumb than they are and hilariously never coming to the realization that it’s because they're so dumb that they think that.
Everyone I know who was vaxxed and boosted told me it felt between a cold and the flu. Which granted not fun, but considering the alternative much better.
And it's a hell of a lot better than long Covid, especially before we knew more about what the duck long Covid was going to look like.
You can still get long COVID even after being vaccinated (at least that's what I've read) but it's much less likely
It also was and still is most fatal for older people, who generally lean more towards the Republican side.
I think there are also a couple more factors. In a time when early detection and treatment gets the best outcomes, the right-wingers are more likely to believe that it isn't serious, so they're less likely to test and less likely to try to get paxlovid (or be outside the 5-day grace period).
And even if they know they're sick early and want to get paxlovid, people who live in rural areas have less access to healthcare in general - and some of their doctors may not believe in paxlovid. Which really sucks for those people.
All that said, the are definitely health care discrepancies for minorities, and those disproportionately affect Democrats (mostly).
Um polling is on the current population. Unless there's a long, long pause between the poll and the vote it really won't matter much.
Polling is on the current population of people who are willing to answer polls. If the poll is done by blind calling people what are the odds you would even answer the phone?
And people are less willing to give out data to an unknown entity than ever before.
Previously you'd answer surveys because you wanted to be represented. Now you don't answer surveys because you know it may just be used to target advertisements or messaging for your opponents.
They also generally call lan lines. Who has a lan line these days?
Land lines.