sj_zero on Nostr: 0 of 17. The 2008 Election In 2008, something unusual happened: The Republicans got ...
0 of 17. The 2008 Election
In 2008, something unusual happened: The Republicans got absolutely destroyed, and rightfully so.
The Republicans won a lot of support after September 11, 2001, and they used that support to implement a lot of policies and push for a lot of things. They pushed for the USAPATRIOT act and the surveillance state. They brought hawkish neoconservatism to its peak invading two nations with the assumption that they would be greeted as liberators and would magically implement democracy in an unstable region without much democracy. They pushed economic policies which had some short-term growth but ultimately led to the 2008 financial crisis, which was the biggest financial crisis since the great recession, and given how much institutional power the Republicans had at that time, it very much appeared that they owned the recession.
The Democrats ended up winning big after that. They won the presidency. They had a supermajority in the senate for a short time. They had a healthy majority in congress, and as we know they had a majority on the supreme court. Among millennials, surveys at the time suggested that 70% of millennials leaned progressive, and even in businesses, many thought they'd spend more on brands that supported political causes.
This represented a tectonic shift in politics at the time, and the Democrats were at a huge advantage. The Republicans had no choice, they had to start working on new strategies. We saw the tea party strategy come out, snagged from Ron Paul imo, but it was shut down pretty quickly by namecalling ("Teabaggers"), they tried doubling down on neoconservatism, and that was a non-starter. The Democrats had a full 8 years of essentially steamrolling the competition. Since there was essentially no competition out of the Republican field, it looks like that was going to be the case indefinitely.
However, in 2015, something highly unusual happened: a new candidate emerged with new ideas. Donald Trump was described as a bull in a china shop. The Democrats didn't like him, not so much because they thought he could win but because he represented chaos that could mess up their plans, and so after initially supporting him thinking he was the weakest candidate, they went to work putting their full attack machine into action.
Someone once described Donald Trump as a 90s democrat, and I tend to agree with that summary. Mean tweets aside, there are a lot of policy positions where Donald Trump is to the left of Bill Clinton.. Bill Clinton implemented workfare, trying to get people off of federal welfare programs, where Trump didn't really touch those programs. Bill Clinton signed the defense of marriage act which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and other than a couple times where he was blustering, Donald Trump is the first elected president to openly support gay marriage on the day of his inauguration. Many people forget that Elian Gonzalez was taken from his uncle under Bill Clinton and returned to Cuba by force. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to dramatically reduce spending and almost balanced budgeting by his final year.
It turns out that for a lot of Republicans, and a lot of Independents, the MAGA platform had a lot to like. Of course, it was tough to know what was true or not (Trump is a master of innane bluster, and so said a lot of things that were never going to be true such as getting Mexico to pay for his border wall, or paying down the federal debt by the end of his first term)
In an upset victory, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, changing all the assumptions held since 2008.
In 2008, something unusual happened: The Republicans got absolutely destroyed, and rightfully so.
The Republicans won a lot of support after September 11, 2001, and they used that support to implement a lot of policies and push for a lot of things. They pushed for the USAPATRIOT act and the surveillance state. They brought hawkish neoconservatism to its peak invading two nations with the assumption that they would be greeted as liberators and would magically implement democracy in an unstable region without much democracy. They pushed economic policies which had some short-term growth but ultimately led to the 2008 financial crisis, which was the biggest financial crisis since the great recession, and given how much institutional power the Republicans had at that time, it very much appeared that they owned the recession.
The Democrats ended up winning big after that. They won the presidency. They had a supermajority in the senate for a short time. They had a healthy majority in congress, and as we know they had a majority on the supreme court. Among millennials, surveys at the time suggested that 70% of millennials leaned progressive, and even in businesses, many thought they'd spend more on brands that supported political causes.
This represented a tectonic shift in politics at the time, and the Democrats were at a huge advantage. The Republicans had no choice, they had to start working on new strategies. We saw the tea party strategy come out, snagged from Ron Paul imo, but it was shut down pretty quickly by namecalling ("Teabaggers"), they tried doubling down on neoconservatism, and that was a non-starter. The Democrats had a full 8 years of essentially steamrolling the competition. Since there was essentially no competition out of the Republican field, it looks like that was going to be the case indefinitely.
However, in 2015, something highly unusual happened: a new candidate emerged with new ideas. Donald Trump was described as a bull in a china shop. The Democrats didn't like him, not so much because they thought he could win but because he represented chaos that could mess up their plans, and so after initially supporting him thinking he was the weakest candidate, they went to work putting their full attack machine into action.
Someone once described Donald Trump as a 90s democrat, and I tend to agree with that summary. Mean tweets aside, there are a lot of policy positions where Donald Trump is to the left of Bill Clinton.. Bill Clinton implemented workfare, trying to get people off of federal welfare programs, where Trump didn't really touch those programs. Bill Clinton signed the defense of marriage act which defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and other than a couple times where he was blustering, Donald Trump is the first elected president to openly support gay marriage on the day of his inauguration. Many people forget that Elian Gonzalez was taken from his uncle under Bill Clinton and returned to Cuba by force. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to dramatically reduce spending and almost balanced budgeting by his final year.
It turns out that for a lot of Republicans, and a lot of Independents, the MAGA platform had a lot to like. Of course, it was tough to know what was true or not (Trump is a master of innane bluster, and so said a lot of things that were never going to be true such as getting Mexico to pay for his border wall, or paying down the federal debt by the end of his first term)
In an upset victory, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, changing all the assumptions held since 2008.