hail2skins

Luce on the state of the race, echoing some of the Cataggio points I posted yesterday:

https://www.ft.com/content/e47d0c41-8ce9-4e62-b875-bdf654a79018

4 minutes ago, Ball Security said:

Getting ahead of ourselves a bit, but I wonder if Trump were to win in 2024 (I don’t think that’ll be the case), would his VP run in 2028. Or would the VP be the fall guy for the Administration’s failures and a different candidate will take the lead?

Yeah, the VP running is normally conventional wisdom....except for Cheney's concerns about his health, and Biden still grieving over Beau's death (he probably very much regrets not running in 2016, as he very likely would've prevailed over Trump then). But in the age of Trump, who knows? If one of his children like Don Jr wanted to be POTUS and DJT supported the run, he'd be the favorite for the nomination for sure, even over Trump's VP.

7 minutes ago, Fergasun said:

We somehow got thru 4 years of Trump (and could do it again). America really doesn't need an effective President.  Except when we do (like COVID).  People really trust Trump in any crises over Biden?  All the rosy crap for him is because we didn't have many criseses... Trump is gonna crumble and fumble Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine and whatever else happens.  He won't have the same handlers to keep from screwing up.  Have fun with that GOP (if it happens). 

I try to have this mindset too, but then I look back and see how nobody thought that 1/6/21 could happen and thus can't really argue with those who fear the worst from a second Trump term.

It is what it is. It seems like Trump's bombastic crap on Truth Social has been downplayed or ignored while he's been a candidate again, but I'm not sure the media will ignore it if he's elected again. I can see his BS once again wearing thin with the public, and the question I have is which sycophant would you get the most satisfaction of being chosen for his VP, only to get his/her ass kicked by someone like Andy Beshear in 2028?  At this point I'd like to see goofy Tim Scott get his clock cleaned.

8 hours ago, 88Comrade2000 said:

There will be no big EC win for either men.  I see a Bush-Gore or Bush-Kerry EC total for whoever wins.  Biden could get 10

million more votes than Trump but there’s still a chance Trump wins the EC.

I think Trump gets around 290. Biden holds one of the three main rust belt states (PA, MI, WI) but nothing else that he flipped from the Hillary-Trump 2016 election.

Biden beat Trump by 7 million in 2020 and I'm thinking 2024 has just a little lower turnout than that one. There's no way Biden increases his popular vote margin. I still think Biden wins the PV (likely by 2016 margins), and Trump, even in EC victory, will yell about how massive fraud caused him to lose the PV.  Its surreal enough that DJT will win again, but I still can't wrap my head around the possibility that he would actually take the popular vote too.

18 minutes ago, The Evil Genius said:

We should probably start marking down all the names here who are saying Trump is winning. Fair warning, I'm going to be insufferable when Trump loses bigly again. 

hail2skins is the first name to mark down. I'm 1-1 so far when it comes to predicting Trump election victories 😃

This is the brutal truth:

As for pundits' hand-wringing that Team Biden should be doing more to make Trump the main character in the race, it feels to me like cope.

It's comforting to believe that, on some level, Americans still don't know who Trump truly is rather than that they're prepared to choose him knowingly and willingly. There area lot of ignoramuses out there, admittedly, but we're less than four years removed from a coup attempt he orchestrated that played out in full public view. To blame Trump's strong polling on a failure of "messaging" by Democrats is to ask why, at this point, voters in a supposedly respectable country need the arguments against him "messaged" in the first place.

The fact that Biden is unpopular is no answer. If the president had opted against running for election and Democrats had nominated Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer instead, say, what do we think the polls would look like right now? Whitmer by 3 maybe? "This isn't, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.' It's ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end,'" one Democratic operative said to Politico about panic on the left over Biden's weakness. But, realistically, there's no nominee the party might have chosen who would have enjoyed an easy victory over Trump.

Roughly half the country simply has no real problem with anything Trump has done and will support him over any Democrat, no matter how young and centrist that person might be. The only good thing about Trump winning this fall will be that it forces Americans who have lived in denial until now to confront what their country has become.

https://www.bnd.com/opinion/article288817410.html

2 hours ago, BringMetheHeadofBruceAllen said:

Trump has already won by convincing all of his voters that our judicial system is completely corrupt. He will NOT accept the outcome of the election if he loses and there will be violence...although it's likely that the election vote-counting will be delayed by obstructionist Trumpies.

A Trump victory in November (which I think is probable) is going to result in too many more Republicans and indies who will think 2020 must've been stolen. Just terrible.

Nothing preventing Nicole Russell from voting 3rd party or just voting downballot and leaving the choice for POTUS blank.

1 hour ago, The Evil Genius said:

 

 

Fwiw, the original post says "in today's $s" and this one does not. 

 

As for 2014...the reason was turmoil in Iraq.

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/06/18/aaa-irag-fighting-us-gasoline-prices/10769389/

Overlooked that. Gas prices were at that level pretty much from the latter part of Bush's term (with the exception of late 2008 thru 2010, due to GFC) through 2014 before falling in the last two years of Obama's term.

2 hours ago, TradeTheBeal! said:

Someone jog my memory…what the hell happened to 2014??

 

 

I'm not sure where that person got his info......but this is a chart from last year:

Where we are at due to Trump:

The unfortunate truth is that Republicans, under Trump’s influence, no longer accept that Democrats can legitimately win elections. This isn’t a run of the mill ideological difference between the parties. It’s the ruin of American democracy.

When Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell rejected challenges to Biden’s victory on January 6, he said, “This election actually was not unusually close. Just in recent history, 1976, 2000, and 2004 were all closer than this one. The Electoral College margin is almost identical to what it was in 2016. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

We’re now living in that death spiral.

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/election-denial-marco-rubio-lara-trump-burgum

12 minutes ago, Simmsy said:

She might have life or a chance within the GOP party, but voters don't like a flip flopper and she's already a notorious one. She pulled the biggest, most pathetic flop for a regime that may not even be around in six months. Short sighted, cowardly and stupid, that is was Nikki Haley will be remembered as from now on.

Said voters are likely going to again elect a guy who didn't concede his loss in the 2020 election and led a rally that resulted in a riot at the Capitol the day the election was certified.

So general election voters would not hold the flip-flopping by Haley against her if she is somehow the nominee in 2028. The challenge for her is getting to be the GOP nominee, which is going to be a chore in today's GOP. Her best chance would be by being Trump's VP, but my money right now is on Tim Scott getting picked.

10 minutes ago, Jumbo said:

I modified your post to reflect current state-of-the-art science. 

Follow up to SS's post about election deniers. KDW nails it, especially with the money line: "The American public, as daft and ignorant as they are..."

https://thedispatch.com/article/the-first-debate-question/

44 minutes ago, Spaceman Spiff said:

 

They can suck my ass.  There's a ton of annoying **** out there that the GOP is doing these days, but this might be at the top of the list.  Election deniers/not acceptors/conspiracy theorists are the biggest goddamn ****ing snowflakes of them all.  Nothing is more ****ing stupid than "my guy didn't win so I'm going to be a ****ing crybaby about it."

 

The stupidity is off the charts, and to think that some of these mother****ers are elected officials is just mindboggling to me.   

Because they know that a whole bunch of peeps in this country are idiots. Read this and get even more depressed:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/poll-economy-recession-biden

2 hours ago, BringMetheHeadofBruceAllen said:

I've been saying that for weeks...only my prediction was he'd nominate one of his own kids as VP.

I think that kind of move would be a sure-fire loser for Trump this election. His social media posting indicating his hope that the VP debate be held at a HBCU makes me think he's leaning toward Tim Scott, but who knows with Trump.

2028 is a different story. At 82 I don't think Trump will test the boundaries and try to remain in office. However, if Don Jr has interest in running, I can absolutely see him at least winning the GOP nomination, even over Trump's VP.  But I also feel Trump is going to exhaust people the way he did during his four years in office and the GOP isn't going to have the luxury against running against an old man next go around.

Tshile mentioned personal responsibility and I think the most maddening thing about Trump supporters is their inability to lay fault at Trump's feet for losing in 2020. It was either the media, the uniparty, or the election being stolen......but nothing about Trump's own behavior that was the cause of him losing.

But on the other side of the coin, there are many people (including several in this thread) who don't think that Trump can possibly win in 2024 solely because Biden beat him in 2020. Things have changed, as (aside from Biden's age and the dislike of Harris) the covid stimmy-induced inflation (Biden's additional stimmy didn't help) has been the main thing which have soured folks on the current administration. But a 2024 Trump victory will have even more GOPers and independents taking the wrong lesson and instead will think "it must've been stolen in 2020." Which only further undermines confidence in our elections.

9 hours ago, UK Skins said:

Raise Hail is just excruciatingly awful anyway

It's gonna take a while to get the stupid out of the non-football related parts of this operation.

Is the Commanders website a good enough source to confirm that there are three preseason games?

https://www.commanders.com/schedule/

5 hours ago, Ball Security said:

Dow cracked 40k today.

Wouldve been 100k already if Trump was still president 

1 hour ago, samy316 said:

One big takeaway that I noticed that I didn’t see mentioned yet is the fact that our only two primetime games this year will be both on the road (@CIN and @PHI).  The league is telling us what kind of HFA we have at (formerly) Fed-EX Field.  I don’t see us hosting any more primetime games again, even if we do have a decent season, because the stadium is terrible and the optics of it being occupied mostly by away fans is not ideal to the Commanders or their brand.

While there are a few teams like Philly, Dallas, and Pitt whose fans probably make it close to 50-50, people see the rest of the games where the visitors side of the lower bowl has a lot of opposing fans and think the whole stadium is taken over. I don't think that is the case and you generally have more Commanders fans than the opposition by a large margin.

The narrative of the team losing HFA exploded after the 2008 Steelers MNF game and then they started removing seats in 2010. Since then we've played as many primitive games at home as we did away. In 2018 we played two away primetime games and none at home. We were coming off an 8-7-1 seaon. Granted, we did lose Cousins (but replaced him with Alex) that off-season.

I think you're reading too much into us not having any home primetime games. I'm sure Commanders Field will host several more primetime games in its life.

The problem is that that life is too long. No idea when a new place gonna be built at this point.

Trump talking about a 3rd debate in early Oct on Fox News

35 minutes ago, China said:

I see that they will be debating without an audience.  Nobody for Trump to try and play to.  

Good. Granted, I don't think the audiences tend to be as big of a deal during the one on one POTUS debates, but having them at the primary debates is so annoying.

I read the report about the statement from Carter's grandson last night.

I don't think the WH will say anything until Carter actually passes.

44 minutes ago, SkinsGuy said:

According to that eagles schedule, Washington plays them week 11 on a Thursday night. 

 

I hate Thursday games.

People complain about the quality of the Thursday games, and now the league is going to have a Wednesday Christmas doubleheader involving teams that figure to be thick in the playoff race. SMH.

Granted, we can make exceptions to kick off the season on Thursday and Thanksgiving, but really would like the league to just go back to Sundays and Mondays.

59 minutes ago, lavar1156 said:

JP Finlay said on radio today that a lot of construction is going in at Commanders Park. I wonder what renovations they're making.

This is what was announced in Feb:

https://www.commanders.com/news/washington-commanders-announce-significant-upgrades-to-stadium-bringing-targeted-investments-to-more-than-75-million-under-new-ownership

At some point there was also mention of a big scoreboard on top of the stadium to replace the existing ones, but not sure what the timeline is on those

For sure I'll check Wednesday night when it comes out, but for the first time in a LONG time I'm not on pins and needles waiting on the schedule. That's what 30 years of this team beating you down will do.

As usual, what is expected on ES are the usual takes of "we have the hardest schedule in league history" and "we got screwed bad because of x or y" 

Was at Live Aid at JFK Stadium in Philly in 1985 and can say that Trump must've had 500K in Wildwood yesterday