Friday Afternoon Trivia

 

• The US was never under anything close to a lockdown at any time during this pandemic.

• Out-of-the-blue sports opinion that no one else cares about (but it's my blog so here it is anyway): there is nothing more useless in sports broadcasts than interviewing coaches/players on the bench or sidelines while the game is going on. Canned questions, canned answers, useless. Whoever thought this was a good idea?

• Anecdotal fact of my life: Most of the military veterans I know are pretty liberal. Most of the conservatives I know aren't veterans.

• Every time I see discussions about David Shor and his ideas I am still left with the uneasy feeling that he is saying that Democrats should stop talking about things they believe in. We aren't going to get cops to stop killing unarmed people without some form of "defund the police". "Reform the police"? We've been doing that most of my life and Tamir Rice is still dead with no accountability; didn't change much. What are their ideas of how to solve the problem. Ignore it? Act more like Republicans? I just don't understand.

• Hint: white voters voted for Trump by larger numbers in 2020 than 2016. What Shor says can be heard as: you need to go softer on this racism stuff or you won't win elections. An alternative reading is that there are two kinds of swing voters (oversimplified for sure): the white surburbanites who swing between Dems and Repubs (i.e., the ones the Dems seem to pursue over anything else); and the younger, more non-white pool of voters who swing between voting for Dems and not voting at all. The former kinda sorta voted for Biden but in some places not for down-ballot Dems. My opinion for a while now is that these voters aren't reliable coalition partners. Maybe we should be finding ways to cultivate those other swing voters.

• A majority of white voters have not voted for a Democratic candidate since 1964. I wonder why? Who are we kidding?