• originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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    9 months ago

    whats to watch. a bunch of un-empathetic sycophants pretending to have a platform or relevance to an audience already “not votin for a lib”

  • insomniac@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    This is incredibly obvious but it’s stated this way because a more honest headline would be uninteresting. The last time there was a serious Republican primary was 2015.

    So they’re saying debate ratings are lower than the last time there wasn’t an obvious front runner. Yeah, no shit cnbc. Good job.

    • bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      Yeah, the better question is - whose actually watching? Trump is obviously going to be the nominee unless he’s literally forced off the ballot, and if that happens it’s just going to be chaos because I guarentee he’s just going to continue running as a write in candidate

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Watching a bunch of assholes “debate” (read: regurgitate canned talking points on cue) who are only going to lose the primary to a bigger asshole, who is even in the room, is kinda pointless. Especially when said bigger asshole already lost one general election and may well be on track to lose an other one., So, we could either watch losers who are losing to a loser; or, spend our time more productively. Like say, insulting said losers on the internet. Not a hard choice.

      • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        No need to get white into it, racist is sufficient. Trump has plenty of black and Hispanic supporters. I don’t know if they are all racists, but they are definitively assholes.

      • Wooster@startrek.website
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        9 months ago

        Yeah… he lost the general election, but only by a hair, and a LOT of work went into grabbing last minute votes.

        The most dangerous thing you can do is be complacent.

        We need to vote and we need to get others to vote.

      • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Ya, while I was being flippant about it, I do agree that Trump has a very real chance of winning the General Election. I well remember the noise over polling in 2016 and Nate Silver’s epic rant (he was right) about how the data should be looked at.

        I’m curious to see how things shake out in the General Election this time around. And I wonder if Biden’s Campaign will lean into Trump’s criminal actions. In 2016, Trump’s campaign pushed the “lock her up!” narrative over Clinton’s email server. Now that we have clear evidence of Trump mishandling, hiding and attempting to hang onto clearly marked classified information (some of which is clearly SCI or NNPI), will we get choruses of “lock him up!”? At the same time, Trumpets seem to revel in Trump’s crimes and prosecution as almost a badge of honor and/or an underdog fighting “the man”. The irony of Trump pretty much being the definition of “the man” seems lost on his supporters. But hey, no one ever said politics has to make sense.

      • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Demagogues always need to project an image of control, power and invincibility, reality be damned. I’d expect more of the same from them, and it’s why it’s important to keep pointing out their failures. By proving how weak and vulnerable they are, it helps to break the narrative they are trying to build. It’s all about perception, facts are less important than belief. But, facts can be useful in shaping belief.

    • Willy@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      I mean, I didn’t watch it either, but If you are in a state that isn’t purple, maybe you should be registered as a Republican to be part of the primary to pick the best of the worst. My state only has primary by party.

      • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I’m in Virginia, which is pretty purple. That said, we have open primaries, but you are only allowed to vote in one. I have seriously considered voting in the Republican Primary for that reason. Biden is going to win any sort of Democratic Primary; so, not much point voting in the DNC Primary. However, I don’t expect my vote would be impactful at all. Southwest Virginia has Trump’s cock so far down it’s collective throat it stopped being oral and started being anal. Even where I’m at, we have idiots whose yards have been decorated with Trump banners for over 7 years now. If he doesn’t win the GOP Primary in Virginia, I’ll be incredibly surprised.

        If I do go out to vote in the GOP Primary, I’d probably have to pick Haley, just for the fun of seeing Republicans lining up behind a woman for a reason other than groping her. Also, I think it would be hilarious to see leftist pundits twist themselves in knots dealing with the GOP having a relatively younger woman and a minority as their candidate versus the old white guy. But, with her currently polling well behind DeSantis and a very, very distant third to Trump, I suspect that has basically zero chance of happening.

          • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Kinda. Early in the 2016 election cycle, Jeb Bush was sort leading the pack. But, by October 2015 (to compare with the current cycle), Trump was pulling ahead in the GOP Primary and held onto the lead for the rest of the Primary. He was helped, a lot, by the large GOP Primary field and lack of a clear front runner. The political environment in 2016 also favored populism and Trump tapped into that very well.

            Now, this could all get upended by the various criminal charges Trump faces. While the civil charges he is liable for are interesting, that’s not a real impediment to his campaign. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ends up helping him, as he will spin it as a politically motivated attack on him by the left. But, should Trump end up behind bars during the run up to the Primary or General election, that’s going to make campaigning a bit harder. It won’t be impossible, and I’m not entirely confident it would prevent him from winning the Primary or the General Election. Though, I would think that the GOP might find a way to replace him on the General Election ballot, were he behind bars.

      • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        To his credit, he does appear to be the only GOP candidate with clear, actionable policies he is pushing.

        They are batshit insane, but at least he has ideas other than “vote against anything the Dems like.”

    • RaineV1@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      That last part is all that really matters in this case. None of them can make their insanity interesting to watch without the reality TV star around.

  • Kalcifer@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    […] lowest viewership since 2015

    Hasn’t there only been one other debate since then…? That’s rather misleading.

      • mrbubblesort@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        It also represents — by a significant margin — the lowest TV audience for any Republican presidential debate since the start of the 2016 cycle, when Trump first became a candidate.

    • RaineV1@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      Probably looking at all republican debates since 2015. In short, the lowest its been since Trump.

  • Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    9 months ago

    Why would you want to watch? They’re all a bunch of losers and one worse than the next. They’re the current failures that rose to the top.

    None have compelling arguments or solutions and are only there to shitsling each other. Even monkeys at the zoo are smarter.

        • Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          9 months ago

          It showed that America, if it is going to keep its greatness, is in desperate need of new politicians or a new generation of politicians. All these people on the debate stage have no clue how hard it is out there right now or what people stree going through. Desperate people need help, solutions, and answers. These debaters/ Republicans aren’t it.

    • jmd_akbar@aussie.zone
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      9 months ago

      To the most of the world, they are “mentally ill psychopaths”, but to their rabid supporters, they can do no wrong. They will still watch them, cheer them on, and support them and vote for them…

      • kaitco@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        That’s the thing, though. They don’t actually have rabid supporters. Trump does, and they want his supporters to support them.

        That’s why no one is interested in watching their debates. The people who actually care about debates aren’t interested in their nonsense, and the ones whose vote they are courting are just waiting for Trump to give them the Go signal.

        • alternative_factor@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          Yup I’ve looked at conservative spaces online and it’s all still Trump Trump Trump! I was honestly pretty surprised that they don’t want to try anyone else considering how much everyone else hates Trump but that’s just how out of touch they are I guess.

          • Ech@lemm.ee
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            9 months ago

            I was honestly pretty surprised that they don’t want to try anyone else considering how much everyone else hates Trump

            In their eyes, that’s one of his best features. The Republican party’s singular common goal these days is to be as contrarian as possible, and the angrier everyone else is with them, the better they figure they’re doing.

    • skeezix@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      What, you don’t think that 70 million racist conservative rubes would vote for a brown man with the name Ramaswamy?

      • betwixthewires@lemmy.basedcount.com
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        9 months ago

        You think half the voting population is racist? The fact that he’s on that stage, or Nikki Hailey was elected governor, or the last governor of Louisiana, or the FCC head under Trump exist should tell you how wrong you are. Your team does not own all the brown people.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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          9 months ago

          Republicans aren’t all racist. But they have shown that racism isn’t a deal breaker.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Your team does not own all the brown people.

          Telling choice of words there. Could have gone with “represents” went with “own”.

        • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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          9 months ago

          I don’t think you deserve the down votes. However, the actions of many Republican reps correspond to direct negative impacts on non-white voters. Is that racism? Eh maybe not, Democrats are the favored party in those groups so attacking your opposition means attacking those groups, and it’s politics after all… but let’s explore.

          The best recent example of that I can think of is the recent “election reform” measures. These measures have never been proven to be justified once in a courtroom. They typically target heavily urban metro areas and people living an urban life. They do this two ways primarily, first they reduce opportunity for voting by doing things like restricting the number of ballot drop boxes, reducing early voting days, and eliminating mail in voting (which results in congestion that takes folks much longer to get through the polls). The second thing they do is they add restrictions that are much easier to fill in suburban or rural life vs urban life, things like drivers licenses aren’t as common in these areas (because they don’t need to drive).

          You can say none of that is racist, but it disproportionately affects non-white voters by targeting a class dominated by non-white voters: poor urbanites.

          It’s the same idea behind things like the “Muslim ban”, the text doesn’t say “Muslim” but the effect is “Muslim” (in this particular case Trump said the quiet part out loud because he had before hand said he wanted a Muslim ban).

          It would be one thing if there was actual data suggesting that people coming from these “Muslim countries” were well above the normal risk or if there really was voter fraud that held up in court. As it stands today though, that isn’t the case.

          It’s a kind of “underhanded” racism that maintains some plausible deniability that invites a fair number of genuine racist into the party that yearn for the old days where white guys ran everything and non-whites were second class citizens that were “separate but equal.” This is why the American Nazi party saw “real potential” with Trump.

          The fact that y’all didn’t shut these nonsensical policies down is why a large portion of Democrats (and people internationally) see the Republican party and its voters as acting with a racial bias/racist.

          • betwixthewires@lemmy.basedcount.com
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            9 months ago

            That’s not true either, almost every racist I run into on the internet talks mad shit about republicans for supporting Israel. Most of them wouldn’t vote for either party. I saw multiple news articles about klansmen in 2016 supporting Hillary Clinton on the grounds that she was anti desegregation when she worked on the Goldwater campaign in the 60s.

            I’ve met numerous liberals and leftists that were racist in private. Hell, Che Guevara was an outspoken racist. I don’t think racism is partisan, there are just people like that out there.

  • OpenPassageways@lemmy.zip
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    9 months ago

    Couldn’t watch it without a cable subscription or signing up for a streaming service. That’s probably at least part of it.

  • dynamojoe@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Nobody wants to watch a bunch of losers kiss the ass of an elephant who isn’t even in the room (honorable mention to C. Christie who clearly does not kiss Trump’s ass)

    • meco03211@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Chris Christie. Maybe the least smelly turd in the group. He still smells like shit and now the question is whether he’s only trying to separate himself from the others while still planning to deliver the exact same steaming mess any of them would. Is he hedging his bet that trump is falling to the charges?

      • squiblet@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        At this point, they all are counting on the chance that he won’t be able to run for one reason or another.