Summary
A new Economist/YouGov poll shows Americans favor many government programs over Elon Musk and his DOGE, which is working to slash federal spending.
The CFPB (50% approval), EPA (61%), and USAID (46%) were all viewed more positively than DOGE (42%).
Even the IRS’s free tax-filing program received strong support (63%). Musk himself had a 42% favorable and 52% unfavorable rating.
The findings show that government programs remain widely valued by the public.
Even these numbers are fucking infuriating. The IRS creates a way to file your taxes for free instead of paying a company for the privilege - 61% approve. What the fuck is wrong with people who would disapprove of that?
a lot of people are simply contrarians who make responses (or even vote) out of spite, not logic.
I personally believe that oppositional defiant disorder is so prevalent it’s basically a personality type for half the US population.
What I recall from my studies is that ODD is generally considered a children’s behavior disorder that can mature into Antisocial Personality Disorder. So you definitely aren’t wrong, a party that has policies against social benefit is a party geared towards antisocials.
if only anyone had been warning against this!
morons.
There’s just no way we could have predicted they would do the things they said they were going to do
/s
He tells it like it is except when he doesn’t or it isn’t, sometimes all at once. Depends on what I need to believe.
But Trump said he never even heard of Project 2025🙄
That’s why he had to seek out the authors and appoint them to key government positions… so he’d be properly informed!
But… but… Genocide Joe! And those eggs were so expensive!
That’s still the most maddening part of the election to me. It’s not a question of Biden arming Israel or his nonexistent red line. It was the constant railing against voting for genocide Joe given the alternative. FPTP with the Electoral College always ends up as the lesser of two evils.
As shitty as this may be, most presidents in my lifetime have been complicit in war crimes. The difference being that the masses are finally being fed the information through social media without having to seek it out on their own.
Yup. We can’t vote for the best possible outcome until our voting system lets us. Now we might never get the chance in my lifetime. The goal needed to be to vote in the best possible outcome candidate (the lesser of two evils in a binary choice election) and keep advocating for election reform. But instead we’re here, with the eviler of two evils in a binary choice election, and the possibility we’ll never get to vote again.
Depends on how old you are. In Germany it took only twelve years. Plus four years until the next election. So, if you survive, you have a good chance.
Germany was a relatively weak country, recently ravaged by war only 20 years earlier. We are not. Which I’m not counting as a good thing these days
With Trump alienating all of your international trade partners and showing the world that the United States cannot be relied upon as a military ally while at the same time gutting your government through indiscriminate firings you’ll be a relatively weak country soon enough.
Don’t worry. Donnie’s going to speed run it.
While I do agree that voting for the lesser evil is the correct thing to do for harm reduction and advocated for people to do so during the campaign (as I did and advocated others to as well), ultimately this points to a much larger issue with our supposedly representative institutions. Unfortunately, the reality is the vast majority of people do not vote on the basis of harm reduction or lesser evil. Most people are too busy working paycheck to paycheck and tuned out of politics. Unless they are offered concessions, they have no interest in politics. That said there any plenty of popular policies that would gain their interest, policies that would improve their material conditions. Good policy, good communication, and good politics are all needed to follow through and deliver those concessions to the American people.
Foreign policy on facilitating genocide, the economic hardships that every working American is experiencing, and immigration were all and still are critical issues for voters. Which is exactly why in order to win an election, a campaign needs to offer concessions to voters to earn as many votes as possible. Something the Democratic Party’s Campaign decisively chose not to do, and in fact did the opposite.
Instead of trying to secure hundreds of thousands to millions of constituents by supporting a permanent ceasefire and weapons embargo, a policy vastly supported by the Democrats own voter base (in addition to the majority of also independent and Republican voters), they instead alienated those voters by more than just ignoring their valid concerns. They instead chose to arrest thousands of student protestors, gave billions of dollars to a genocide at the tax payers expense consistently for 15 months, actively suppressed the voices and representation of the main victims of the genocide, and campaigned with Liz Cheney (who was actively involved with the Bush-Cheney foreign policy in the middle east and enthusiastically pro ethnic cleansing of Palestinians). They chose to do all that instead of represent the view of the majority of their constituents and abide by domestic/international law. And that was just one of the major issues, along with going right-wing on immigration, and continuing neoliberalism economic policies, that tanked the approval of the Democratic Party.
Polls on policy
Democrats’ Working-Class Failures, Analysis Finds, Are ‘Why Trump Beat Harris’
2024 Post-Election Report: A retrospective and longitudinal data analysis on why Trump beat Harris
How Trump and Harris Voters See America’s Role in the World
Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college
Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, but not the unpopular ones
Here Are 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind
Finding common ground: 109 national policy proposals with bipartisan support
Progressive Policies Are Popular Policies
Tim Walz’s Progressive Policies Popular With Republicans in Swing States
Under the policy spoiler you can find a whole bunch of policies that are overwhelmingly popular with every American and would improve people’s livelyhood (Such as codifying abortion rights, universal healthcare, good public housing, renter’s rights/protections, cracking down on price gouging, trust busting, public infrastructure projects). It would be the best way to fracture the Republican base of support, but it would require going after the bottom line of corporations. What was more important for the Democratic Party during the election? Doing everything possible to gain votes to win against the fascist Donald Trump, or prioritizing monied interests at the expense of public support and the election?
2024: Us: They’re going to do Project 2025! Them: What? Us: Project 2025! Them: What’s that? Us: Here! thump Them: tl:dr lol. Us: sigh. makes simple charts Them: Oh, he’d never do that! Him: I don’t know what you’re talking about! Them: See! You people are always taking things out of context and over-reacting! Us: Is it worth the risk? Them: Fucking libtard doomscrollers, tryin’ to let everyone have things for free. votes [R]
2025: Them: Oh. … Oh! … Wait, no!
the number of republican voters i encountered after the election who weren’t worried about project 2025 because they were going to vote against it in 2025…
That - that interpretation never even occurred to me …
The average republican voter (and American voter, regardless of party preference, really) doesn’t actually understand how our government works. They think they vote November 2-8th, and the new government takes office as soon as the television declares a winner. And this includes people who participated in the January 6th insurrection. Some people who were there did not understand that what was really going on was an attempt to disrupt the certification of the electoral college ballots. They thought they were preventing a hostile government takeover (ironic). This is how powerful propaganda can be. It can inflame people who only kind of know what’s going on into thinking they’re experts. It tricks the sleeping into thinking they are away
42% still ok with Elon taking his axe to any organisation set up to help people in order to make the billionaires richer.
It’s hard not to take the attitude that Americans deserve everything they get.
Probably a good number of people who aren’t directly affected by the cuts… Yet. Something us Americans seem to lack a lot of is sympathy/empathy. Unless it strikes close to home, a lot of people are pretty callous to the plight of others.
The US exports “I’m alright, Jack.” By the fucking container ship. But of course the average American lacks empathy, Fox has been feeding the population toxic shit for decades, while his ilk buy off politicians.
That’s what set the stage for the right wing coup you’re living through.
The demon responsible has his crooked fingers in the politics of the UK and Australia, to name just a couple of other places going to shit off the back of his pipeline of awful shite.
Rupert Murdoch should be shot into the fucking sun, alongside the orange shitgibbon and his pet nazi techbro.
Listen to the How Conservatism Won podcast by Behind the bastards. It goes back further, but this is all a part of a grand plan. Melon is just taking advantage of the situation, also for his own personal gain of course.
This is good. This is an opportunity to talk to people about the destructive effects of Trump’s agenda, and help them to really understand that he’s not looking out for their interests. The more people get upset about what Trump is doing, the more chance there is to potentially stop it.
Friends, they needed your approval to get into power. Now they give a shit if you like it or not.
