https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil... shows me that, while a lot of people strongly disapprove of Trump, he retains a very strong base of over 40% of likely voters. And his overall approval rating is pretty typical for a US President at this point in their term.
He won last election on a fragile coalition which doesn’t exist anymore today. So, if elections are held today, he’d not only lose but will also get buried deep down.
From that article, I can tell that there are farmers, and farmer groups, who are pissed off for good reason. But Trump carried rural counties by 93%. Given how well his general polls have held up, I am highly dubious that most farmers in most rural counties have turned against him.
Given the way that all media (across the spectrum) have been slipping, I will not take any story based on anecdote as indicative of anything other than the biases of the one selecting the anecdotes. Give me a poll. And the polling shows that his base is strong.
Note for the future. We reveal our own biases when we reject what is said by those who do not share them.
For the record, here are my biases. I hate Trump. I think that he's a threat to democracy, and I wish that red America would wake up and reject him. But I'm painfully aware that the world doesn't work like I would wish. And so I'll look for what I judge to be most accurate. And not for what I want.
You claim that the actual number of rural counties carried by Trump is much lower than the 93% that I said. But my 93% comes from your article. Do you have a reference that disagrees with your own article? If not, then you are insisting on facts that are not in evidence.
You also reject my bringing up that figure as being stuck in the past. But I didn't just stick in the past. I brought in current polls. Polls of his base, which truly do dominate rural counties, show that his support is holding strong. Certainly his support is holding strong among the rural people that I know through my family.
But let's be more specific. According to https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-rural-... last month, Trump's rating has slumped in rural counties from an overall approval of +22% down to +14%. Which means that some minds changed, but a random person from a rural county has probably not turned on Trump. Which is the opposite of your original claim.
Next up, the article brings up various groups that dislike this decision or that which Trump has made. But it is extremely common for us to dislike some decision that a political leader makes while continuing to support them overall. Registering specific unhappiness does *NOT* mean a change in popular support. It just means that there is specific unhappiness.
In fact the single decision that Trump made which caused the most specific unhappiness in his base is the choice to not release the Jeffry Epstein files. From https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/most-americans-want-th..., about 2/3 of Republicans want them released. But despite most of Trump's base disliking that decision, polling says that they are part of his base.
And no, I'm not looking for selective validation. I'm simply reading the news in a critical fashion. Per https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left/cnn-bias/, CNN has a left-wing bias, and is only "mostly factual". What that means in practice is that they put a spin on stories that will appeal to left-wing audiences. Left-wing audiences want to believe that Trump's base is turning against him. That's the spin in the article.
But the article offered no fact which would lead me to believe that. And if you want to find out whether people have turned against Trump, the most reliable way to do so is to ask them. "Did you vote for Trump? Would you support Trump now?" Which is *EXACTLY* what a poll does.
My preference for polls is not a preference for the version I want to hear. It is a preference for the best kind of data asking the question that I want answered.
He has the lowest first 100 days polls amongst presidents, beaten only by himself on his first term. On his current & second term, he is losing on what should should be strong issues historically for the gop such as the economy and immigration. His core base is indeed difficult to move but independents are not.
Now that was 100 days, but we are 278 days into his second term now. The polls went down further and polls on issues he should have addressed are not going up.
For a better view of what's normal and compared with presidency of the past:
The first 6 months are usually a honey moon period. The full effect of Trump's policies are still to be felt, and with the current political / economic / legal / etc.. context, the approval ratings won't go up.
But indeed, his core is difficult to move. My opinion on what follows, but I think they attached too much of their identity to the guy and their coping mechanism will be studied for decades to come in political, psychology and history classes.
You shouldn't be citing articles about the first 100 days, when you're given a reference with much more current results.
There are many different pollsters, each of which has slightly different numbers. Here are Nate Silver's average of the polls giving approval for historical presidents at this point in their office who were then polling below 50%. (Obama, at 51.8% just missed the cutoff.)
45.8% Bill Clinton
43.7% Trump (current term)
43.6% Joe Biden
39.1% Gerald Ford
38.0% Trump (first term)
So really, despite how mad so many people are, his popularity is not that low by historical standards.
> You shouldn't be citing articles about the first 100 days
I think we can. This tells his popularity is not as strong as what the claim is. We are in a presence of a significant vocal minority. I will grant that his core base is hard to move, including the farmers who are going bankrupt and harmed by his own policies, and many will rationalize it. As Twain's quote go: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled". Especially when voters are voting based on identity.
Equally, he could do a lot worse than his current numbers and they are not that catastrophic, granted. Comparing to Clinton who did bad in his early 1st term isn't great (for a myriad of scandals that are quite pale compared to recent times), or Biden inheriting a bad economy with a pandemic, while Trump inherited a boosting economy in his first term, and a recovering one for his second. Hence his numbers should be so much better.
Some key metrics to focus is the independants support/approval that he lost in majority, and certain pro maga communities such as the latinos who's families are directly affected. Farmers, who knows how much will swing and wake up after losing it all, but some did already. A trend might start with the economic dominoes slowly dropping.
Overall, I don't think he has normal polling numbers given the context. But we are not in normal times.
In their defense, they're in a bit of a precarious financial situation. Most of their money comes from Google, who happens to also be their largest competitor.
Maybe they shouldn't pay their CEO a sizable fraction of the entire company's income and also stop wasting money on AI bullshit and gimmicks like Pocket or whatever their latest obsession is.
Maybe they'd be in a better position if they focused their resources on building their core product? I know that's a wildly radical concept these days...
The amount of money comes from the number of people willing to use and tolerate their defaults. Surely, burning all the good will they've built up can't possibly improve that, can it?
But you understand that cars are made to transport people, and hamburgers are much smaller than people, hence it would be a tiny bit wasteful to drive hamburgers in "people cars", right?
But then a single car can carry multiple hamburgers to multiple people! Maybe that is still a better situation than multiple people driving multiple cars to each get a single hamburger :-)
So we need a car that drives around and makes hamburgers on-demand, drives to your home while it's being prepared, and delivers it hot and fresh to your door with a smaller bot.
To be clear, we do not need this, and I am being sarcastic. However, if a VC wants to fund me to do this, I'll try my best in the hours between my use of the startup's office sim-rig and the office wood workshop.
It depends on what you consider the goal to be. If the goal is bring a hamburger and person to the same location. It doesn't really matter which is in the car.
A car wouldn't become more productive if you were to strap a person to the roof. If you instead happen to move that person inside the car for the trip, what exactly changes?
If only someone invented some sort of 25lb vehicle that one can use their own human power to travel upon. Maybe something with a chain and gearing? No, that would be fantasy, back to my 5000lb steel block I go.
The point of comparison here would be a human delivery driver, who (as I understand) can be carrying multiple deliveries at a time. I think with Waymo's service, it's one delivery at a time, which results in more cars on the road for the same demand? (Or are there potentially several orders in the trunk when you go to get yours out?)
> Delivery, however, has increased the number of times people buy a meal made by somebody else.
No, I'd say it's work expectations that have increased the number.
I took a several-month career gap and didn't order delivery even once. Delivered food tastes bad and as long as I have time I either make food (most of the time) or dine-in. But when "everything is on fire" and deadlines are tonight, delivery it is.
You mean the emissions from the EV doing the delivery? Or the emissions from the hydro or solar or wind (or even natural gas) used to generate the electricity that was stored in the battery?
The absurd waste of energy in moving a 4000lb object to deliver a 1lb object. You can attribute that to whatever source you want. It's still wasted energy.
Wasted energy isn't exactly emissions. The claim was really specific, so I wanted to figure out what they meant by it. Of course, on the east coast they use a lot more coal, so there is a point to made I guess.
I think it is dumb to use Waymo cars, but E-bikes would work really well here. I'm sure whoever breaks through this market will come with some sort of light vehicle solution. Waymo seems to be doing this as a side project to use their vehicles when ride share demand is low.
