Joe Biden's plans for LGBT+

Isn't Biden the clown who said that black people weren't black unless they voted for him?

@LaurieFairyCake

Why are people saying the Democrats are ahead in the polls

Trump is going to win easily unfortunately (I really wish not )

1. Some pollsters are oversampling Democrats and independents and undersampling Republicans. Always check the % of the sampling and also whether "likely voters" were polled as it skews the results. I follow Rasmussen Reports on twitter as they were the most accurate in 2016 mobile.twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll . (Blah Blah "Rasmussen is right wing, biased etc". I want to be informed and don't care about tribes.)
2. Trump has a large amount of secret voters , just like shy Tories here. The pollsters find it difficult to reach these voters and if they do manage to reach them many do not partake due to the fear of being doxxed/cancel culture.
3. The MSM is in the same confirmation biased bubble as they were in 2016. Repeatedly reporting "Orange Man Bad" will not engage voters that need to be won back in the rust belt states.
4. BLM Protests/Riots & Defund the police does not resonate with the majority of the electorate. A lot of people are scared reflected in a huge rise in gun sales. www.forbes.com/sites/aaronsmith/2020/08/03/coronavirus-continues-to-fuel-surge-in-gun-sales/#6de87f5c69e0 .

Voting for Trump because Kamala has pronouns on her twitter bio is a bit like being a religious dissenter under Elizabeth I, and celebrating the fact that you are being burnt at the stake because at least somebody has recognised your religion.

The fact that Trump and Pence are prepared to agree that sex exists does not in anyway imply that they care about women's rights.

I think the turmoil over the past few years puts us all in a very uncertain place.

I do blame liberal democracies for not recognising the need for ordinary voters to be listened to. The idea that the liberal ideal was the one and only has made it so difficult and once cracks appear in a fortress it's easier to try and knock it down.

There is also the spoilt political child syndrome I noticed after Trump, Brexit, Tory win, each time the hard left became more petulant and more entrenched. I'm not saying that didn't happen in other areas, but being of the left, it took me aback. Losing is not what we expected. People like me have put democracy first and accepted the losses however, all sorts of monsters seem to be poking out of the Hydra.

Too many things in one post hey ho

The crucial numbers are not the 15% gap nationally, but the percentage gaps in the swing states. The FT's electoral college model has Biden winning by 28, I think. Florida on its own has 29 votes: the polls by state show more like a 7% lead for the Democrats there. So as usual, it's going to come down to the swing states.

Latest FT poll tracker looks fairly solid for the Democrats:
ig.ft.com/us-election-2020/

But there's a long way to go - 2 and a half months is an eternity in US politics. Server hacks, smear campaigns, something stupid said in a stump speech.

I hope the Democrats win, but I wouldn't be taking anything for granted.

Apologies if I've already posted this:

The Democrats need to be careful how they play this. The slightest whiff of being out-of-touch elitists who think they're better than the people whose votes they're relying on, and they'll lose it, again. Hillary's "basket of deplorables" soundbite was one of the turning points last time round - far more damaging that server leaks, using her own email, etc. IMO. (Yes I know she actually said along the lines of "among the Republican voters heading that way out of genuine economic concerns, there's also a group we might call 'basket of deplorables" - she did qualify it. But she should have been a shrewd enough politician to realise the only bit people were going to hear and remember was the 'basket of deplorables' comment.)

No ones ever won in the modern era with Bidens strategy

Running against an incumbent while running as part of a presidential establishment

Why are people saying the Democrats are ahead in the polls

Trump is going to win easily unfortunately (I really wish not )

The correct approach to this issue is to Lobby and Letter write to the dems HARD. Not to vote for the rapist in chief and his homophobic, anti choice 2nd in command.

This is not at all like any recent UK election.

It would only be comparable if the Conservatives had included 'restrict abortion rights' in their manifesto.

Yes Labour and Lib Dems alienated voters by appearing out of touch, but they also weren't running against Trump/Pence.

Last election the Democrats took a gamble that the votes they would win by playing identity politics would be greater than those they would lose through abandoning various sectors of the true-Blue working classes. They lost badly on this gamble, but seem to have utterly failed to learn from this experience despite having had four years to mull it over.

Also - what about things like fitness testing, which often uses different standards for men and women soldiers?

Presumably that could/should be covered by applying the usual rules re medications rather than having a blanket ban dependent on whether someone says they're trans or not?

Yes, though it may not simply be about medications. I don't know that a flat ban is really necessary, but there are a number f complications that could be relevant in a military context. Where is this person going to be housed when in group setting? Do they expect to be accommodated as the sex they identify as? As was suggested above, how do you manage safety and dignity issues in other cultural settings? What about military roles that are in some way restricted by sex (though these may be disappearing soon in the US?) What about the draft?

It is very dangerous, for a male to have a firearm, and because he 'identifies as a woman' be put in charge of supervising a group of women in a country far far away. This is just not a workable policy imho. Think of the cultural sensitivities.

Of course big Pharma benefit from this but women serving in the military certainly do not, if they are expected to share sleeping facilities with Tom who now identifies as Tanya.

Ideally, I'd like to abolish party political candidates all together and have elections that elected an "independent" constituency representative based on prior community representative work that then, through a constituency referendum, sat in the chamber according to the results. So you don't elect the Labour candidate or Tory candidate, you elect a candidate and then tell him where to sit.

Past evidence says this isn't a great idea. Look at the Police & Crime Commissioners, you get one or two good and lots of bad. As an electorate, we tend to be lazy and not look at what we're voting for.

With the current system, at least a bit of vetting goes on before we are presented with our candidate and we know what to expect from them because of manifestos etc.

Local connections good and would like to get rid of career politicians.

Interesting re Trump. This was 2016 when he was already very much running for Prez..

www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/04/trump-transgender-bathrooms-222257

"Leave it the way it is," he said, referring to companies that have canceled plans to move or expand businesses in the state as a result of the law, which bans transgender individuals from using a bathroom that does not match their gender at birth.

"There have been very few complaints the way it is... They use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate," Trump said. "There has been so little trouble.. ". Matt Lauer then asked whether Trump has any transgender people working for his company. "I really don't know. I probably do. I really don't know," Trump said, answering that he would allow, say, transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner to use whatever bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower.

He added, "You know, there's a big move to create new bathrooms. Problem with that is for transgender, that would be—first of all, I think that would be discriminatory in a certain way. That would be unbelievably expensive for businesses in the country. Leave it the way it is."

I don't recall there being much fuss made at the time about it. He and Biden, not for the first time and certainly not the last i suspect, seem to feel the same way about it. They have to maybe say they think differently on the issue in public but that's where Google comes in handy.

Refused on medical grounds. He now has to wait (forget whether it's 3 or 5 years) and be able to demonstrate that he's been symptom free for this period.

Because the last thing you want is someone on a warship, 100s of miles off the coast, possibly while the ship's at action stations, needing medical attention.

Whilst there are lots of good thing in here (the reversing of the ban on trans people in the military, for example), there is also this:

This isn't even as straightforward as it seems. Having medicalised people in the military is a problem - generally they avoid having people who require regular medication or who have very specialist healthcare needs. If you send people out to a military base in the wilds of a foreign country, or they are off on a ship for six months, it's not like they have access to that care or can always be sure their medications will be available.

Do you think it’s associated with the democrats getting funding with strings attached from tech billionaires?

I think one of the main problems in Britain is that a lot of political representatives, be they MPs or local councillors, don't have any ongoing exposure to the daily reality of their constituency or ward. They didn't grow up there or go to school there. They don't actually live there or, if they do, they haven't lived there long. They don't know the people very well.

So all they have is their surgeries and their postbag. Now there seems to be a perspective that the issues that are raised in their surgeries are "outlier issues", or specific to one particular case -- and that everyone else is perfectly fine.

Activists have figured this out and are using it to their advantage. So an MP or councillor might receive a hundred negative emails about, say, renovating a piece of parkland and then presumes the community is against it, when, in truth, everyone else wants the project to go ahead -- they just haven't contacted the MP or councillor to tell them so.

I think this is what leads to the odd priorities we are seeing. Coupled with Twitter silos, many MPs and councillors are now chasing policies that the vast majority of people find either bizarre or alarming, and they are not tackling issues that the majority of people in an area really find concerning.

It is one reason why I have real problems with parachuting candidates into constituencies or the idea of abolishing the local connection qualifier.

Ideally, I'd like to abolish party political candidates all together and have elections that elected an "independent" constituency representative based on prior community representative work that then, through a constituency referendum, sat in the chamber according to the results. So you don't elect the Labour candidate or Tory candidate, you elect a candidate and then tell him where to sit.

All Tory returns would mean a candidate joined the Conservative group. All Labour returns would mean a candidate joined the Labour group. 50/50 would mean a candidate joined a central group. And I'd quite like to get rid of whips, but that would mean the flow of legislation would slow down exponentially, but that might not be a bad thing considering the amount of bad and unexamined law that is being passed.

If things don't change, and fast, I can see the US fracturing and certain states ceding from the union. In the UK, if the LibDems and Labour continue down this road, I can see the necessity for a new political party.

Otherwise, you gonna end up with massive political, social and cultural discontent.

a week is a long time in politics - November is 8 weeks away