Purple is a fine color to use while employing alternative methods of holding people accountable when they control the courts and the senate

A man rubs a lamp and a genie comes out and says, “I will grant you one wish, anything you ask for, whatever you can imagine, your wish is my command.”

The man shouts, “I want a dragon!”

The genie responds, “I’m sorry, but a dragon is just too much, it’s just not possible for that to exist. Can you think of something else?”

The man thinks for a minute and says, “Well, in that case, I guess I wish for the rich and powerful to face significant legal consequences within the existing system for the harm they do to regular people.”

The genie sighs and says, “What color did you want that dragon?”

One easy trick that makes you immune to propaganda - simply respond “not sure” to every question you’re ever asked. It doesn’t really even save you though because they’ll just lump you in with the people who chose the wrong answer. The site repeatedly uses the phrase, “failed to identify as false” to group the “not sures” in with the incorrect responses.

There’s an almost endless way to present poll numbers and survey results to support whatever conclusion you like, you could say that “fewer than half the respondents were able to identify this claim as false,” or you could say, “80% of respondents avoided incorrectly labeling this claim as true,” depending on what narrative you prefer. And that’s assuming that the raw data itself, which comes from an internet survey, is reliable and representative.

In 2020 the democrats were calling the border wall racist and they won, then in 2024 it was “we’re the ones who are actually gonna build the wall, Trump’s all talk.” They literally tried to position themselves to the right of Republicans on the issue in order to win over the mythical centrists, and predictably what happened was that their support among Latinos broke down.

A lot of these people are religious and conservative, but were willing to vote for Democrats as long as there was substantial differences on race/immigration. But even if they were the “lesser evil” on immigration from a pro-immigrant perspective - something which they denied as hard as they could, by the way - if the difference didn’t appear substantial any more, if it was framed in technical arguments about how to do it rather than moral arguments about what to do, then many of them no longer saw it as damning and voted based on other issues where they’re more aligned with Republicans.

This is often what swing voters actually look like, by the way, and why pivoting to the right to capture them is often counterproductive. It turns out pivoting right on an issue where doing so directly harms millions of people so you can appeal to the dozen or so people who like Dick Cheney loses elections. Swing voters are a lot more complex than the idiotic “conventional wisdom” that just has everyone at a different point on a one dimensional left-right scale.

Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.

If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”

Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."

So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.

[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]

Yeah, just like she was in 2019 before the campaign started, which is why she was elected president.

I guess the difference is that those polls were only like a year out from the election while this one’s over three years away. Maybe that means this one will be more meaningful?? Somehow???

This is why Kamala Harris famously won the 2020 nomination and went on to become president, because she was polling in first place before the campaign process started.

Removed by mod

Lmao yes. I’m literally a communist.

I’m frequently accused around these parts of being a secret republican trying to sow chaos and help Trump win because of how much I criticize the democrats. Here’s my comment history searching for the word Biden and for Obama, if you want to see for yourself.

Speaking of self-inserts, remember when she wrote that detective story with long segments that are just people on Twitter accusing the main character of transphobia?

Her brain’s just fully melted at this point.

Elections are far too useful as a form of control for the state to dispense with them. Virtually every country on earth has elections, even if they’re just sham elections for show. If you’re a dictator or aspiring dictator, you’re generally much better off having some pretence of democratic legitimacy than just coming out and announcing yourself as president for life.

Anecdotally, my sister does. I was baffled when she said it and had to try my best to respond politely, because she’s the only other person in my family who isn’t a Republican.

From my perspective, she bombed out of 2020 despite being a media darling cast as the frontrunner, and then was just handed the nomination in 2024 without a real primary and still lost, both of which demonstrate she has terrible political instincts and isn’t popular enough to win. From her perspective, the fact that she dropped out in 2020 before any votes were casts means she was never given a fair chance, and the fact that she was handed the nomination meant she didn’t have enough time to make her case and the unusual circumstances are what caused her to lose, and if she just had another chance she’d nail it.

I’m pretty sure she’s an outlier though and most people are just saying Kamala because of name recognition.

Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.

If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”

Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."

So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.

Not exactly.

On July 1, 2024, the Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview, at least presumptive immunity for official acts within the outer perimeter of their official responsibility, and no immunity for unofficial acts.

So if they rule that something isn’t an official act, or outside of the president’s constitutional powers, they can still find it illegal. It means that the courts can effectively “pardon” the president if they rule that he was acting within the scope of his official responsibility, but it doesn’t mean that they gave their ability to prosecute if they choose to.

Whether the president has the power to “self-pardon,” effectively giving him total immunity to the law, is another angle, but that has not been tested in court.

Of course, Trump could simply choose to ignore the courts the same way Andrew Jackson did and it’s not clear that anything would happen to him, at least while he’s in office and is commander in chief.

If you look at the historical polls about the direction of the country, wrong track always win, it is just a matter of how bad.

Yeah, no shit. That’s the point. What you’re bragging about is “Most people hate us, but they hate us marginally less than they hated the other guy.” It’s pretty pathetic that that’s the point we’re at.

Significant improvement since taking office is a good first step for the Trump administration.

It’s not a “good first step for the Trump administration.” Trump didn’t do shit to actually improve anything, it’s just that he has a significant following who defend anything and everything he does, or are willing to give a different face a chance. Democratic voters are more likely to vote reluctantly while still seeing the country on the wrong track if their guy wins. It means nothing. The minority of people who think like you are simply wrong and the majority who disagree with you are correct.

According to your own stats, the majority of people disagree with that assessment and think things are still getting worse.

But regardless, what people think isn’t necessarily reflective of reality. This is the best argument you can muster, not that Trump is actually improving things in specific, tangible ways, but just, “My guy has managed to convince marginally fewer people to hate him than hated the last guy.” Of course, we’ll see how many people still feel that way by the end of his term when we’ll have likely fallen into a recession thanks to his bullshit.

I mean, I guess you could look at it that way, to an extent. But the larger effect is that it reinforces the threat against every other major news outlet, in a very blunt and overt way.

I don’t expect the AP to suddenly radicalize over it or anything.

What stage of decline is it when Trumpers are bragging about a stat that still shows a majority of the population saying we’re on the wrong track?

How is this legal?

Having a spot in the white house press pool is legally a privilege, not a right. The AP can still operate and write whatever they like, they’re just not invited to exclusive press briefings.

This is a long-standing conflict of interest that incentivizes the press to field softball questions and avoid writing critical stories in hopes of getting priority treatment from the government, but typically it works in a more subtle way.

See, this is why I hate America.