I was literally just saying in another thread that I didn’t know much about O’Brien…well now I do! Thanks stranger!

My premise is that, with respect to supporting a party that will support unions, it’d be ludicrous to expect that support from the GOP, because they’ve been consistently anti-union for over 40 years.

one way to escalate your pressure is to scare them into thinking you might endorse the republican ticket

Yeah, and I’m asserting that it’s stupid to even consider endorsing the republican ticket, given how much worse republicans are for unions. Not endorsing the democrats could be likened to going on strike from some company; threatening to endorse the GOP would be like choosing to go work for an even more exploitative company in retaliation.

And nothing says that republicans necessarilycouldn’t offer better support to unions - even if teamsters did endorse Trump, it very well could be because Trump made a material concession to their interest. Nothing says that Teamsters should be interested in anything other than protecting their union’s interests, even if that means getting it from the Republicans, if they are “playing ball”. (The teamsters are a union for a very conservative group of members; it’s not out of the question that Trump might grant some very targeted concessions to that group in order to shore up his base)

Yeah, they could offer better support for unions…they could also offer to lower prescription drug prices and make school lunches free for grade schoolers. They’re not gonna do any of those things, b/c they don’t wanna do any of those things and they haven’t wanted to do any of those things in at least 40 years. I’ll accept cited evidence to the contrary, otherwise we can agree to disagree.

That’s why it’s crazy that the democrats aren’t making an effort to be more pro-union - in most other ways, democrats are the obvious harm-reduction choice. But let’s not pretend as if union protections haven’t been under constant attack and legal challenges during the Biden administration - there is a lot of room for Harris to offer more in the way of union and labor legislation and support.

What specific issue do you take with the Democratic party’s support for unions? Do you refute my earlier link calling a Biden a good pro-union president, and if so can you provide sourced info to explain why?

There are a lot of reasons why everyone ought to vote for democrats over republicans,

Yeah

but pretending as if there are no material reasons a group with specific labor interests might choose to endorse republicans is itself naieve.

This feels like such a “no u” lol. What reasons does a group with specific labor interests have to endorse a party that’s been overly pro-company since Reagan?

Ideally this should motivate the democrats to offer better policy to their constituents, but seems as if democrats would much rather point fingers and accuse those asking for better policy as being covert opposition.

Again, what policies specifically?

AOC shouldn’t be blaming Teamsters for agitating for better labor policy, and doing so absolutely ispunching left, because the thing Teamsters is interested in is a politically-left objective. Not that AOC doesn’t have personal reasons for ignoring those broader goals, but that doesn’t mean what she’s doing isn’t punching left.

Look. I don’t know very much about Sean O’Brien. I’m not gonna accuse him of secretly being anti-union or any crazy bs like that. But if going to the RNC and not endorsing Harris are moves that benefits Republicans (it does), and if Republicans are worse on unions (they are), then whether he means to or not, he’s hurting union workers. From that lens, AOC questioning his leadership isn’t punching left - she’s either punching a guy who’s actually to her right (for reasons outside workers’ rights) or punching a guy who might as well be.

And one more thing: at the end of the day, she’s critical of the guy, not the mission. She’s not saying “workers shouldn’t have more protections”, she’s saying “I question the leadership of this guy whose job it is to get workers more protections”. And quite frankly I agree with that.

Edit: y’know how I said I don’t know much about Sean O’Brien? Well thanks to another lemmyer, now I do!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/31/teamsters-racial-discrimination-lawsuit

So yeah, if there’s an ounce of truth to this, it speaks to the nagging feeling I have that he’s the kind of guy who’s a probably secretly a conservative for…other reasons.

Sure, it could be to pressure the GOP to care about unions, or it could be to pressure democrats to commit to more protections.

If that’s the goal, simply withholding endorsement for the democratic nominee would achieve that goal. Speaking at the RNC, without any serious commitment to unions made by the GOP, goes far beyond that goal, and is again, naive.

A really good way to prove that democrats are more union friendly than republicans would be to commit to more union protections. That’s a simple narrative to fix, if they were interested.

A really really good way to prove democrats are more union friendly would be to have a president in office with an exceptional pro-union record, and to have earned the endorsement of at least 6 other major unions.

Not to a fucking union, there isn’t.

Yes, but the statement you’re replying to was a general statement on leftism. That’s why I follow that up with “Even in this context …”

Literally their only job is collective bargaining, and threatening to withhold support to gain concessions is famouslytheir most useful tool.

That made me chuckle, you have a fair point. But again, withholding support is one thing, and speaking at the RNC with republicans who don’t play ball with workers’ rights is another.

I mean, what’s the play exactly? “Give us even more union protections or I’m gonna help the other guys who definitely don’t give a damn?” What protections specifically? The kinds of protections given to workers by the PRO Act? The thing Republicans try to shoot down over and over again?

I don’t simply understand ‘left’ to mean ‘democrat’, I’m aware that there are people left of democrats.

Being “Left” encompasses more than just solidarity with the working class, but even specifically in this context, being the first acting teamster president to speak at the conference of a party that is historically anti-worker is…at best, naive. It could be seen as a way to pressure the GOP to care about unions, but they don’t care about unions, and speaking at their conference as a union president just gives a stronger surface-level impression to voters that they might.

He was the first acting teamster president to ever speak at the RNC, that’s a huge deal regardless of whether he was also expecting to speak at the DNC. Especially given how anti-union the republican party generally is.

Either it was an appeal to conservative teamsters, or he himself is quietly moderate or conservative.

But if your argument is that he went to the RNC as an appeal to teamsters who support Trump (aka not lefties), and that he is also choosing not to endorse either candidate on behalf of those teamsters, then that isn’t an appeal to further-left-than-democrats politics, it’s an appeal to centrism.

My point then being

Now she’s the one always punching left

Doesn’t really make sense in this context

Punching left at the guy who attended the RNC?

Yes, though it’s not a magic bullet.

Here’s a video that compares Plurality/FPTP (our current system), Ranked choice, and approval voting, and is up-front about the limitations of each method.

Here’s a link with a lot more information on different voting methods. STAR voting is the method highlighted here as the best, but Score voting and Approval are also pretty good. IRV/Ranked Choice doesn’t perform quite as well, but is at least still better than FPTP.

A new voting system that’s any better than our current system brings us closer to a political landscape where viable candidates who choose not to drop out early aren’t working against their interests, and voters are less incentivized to vote strategically. And even if IRV is only marginally better than FPTP, its popularity gives exposure to the idea that alternative voting systems are worth looking into.

I appreciate the sleuthing! Was an interesting listen

Interesting, I’ll look more into that, thanks

Ohhh you just mean “there’ve only been 2 times in history where the popular vote disagreed with the electoral vote.”

When you said “only 2 times the popular vote was greater than the electoral vote” it sounded like you were comparing the size of the popular vote to the size of the electoral vote. Which would be silly, b/c the popular vote is always larger than the electoral vote lol

Margin of error on this poll is 4.4%. Don’t even bother clicking this. Vote.

There has only been two presidential elections where the popular vote was greater than the electoral vote.

What exactly do you mean by this? When you say “the electoral vote”, you’re not referring to the number of electors in the electoral college, are you?

Because if you are then that sounds silly lol, I’m probably misunderstanding you

Source for him being a long time registered republican?

As far as I can tell from here, this guy seems all over the place. He voted for Trump in 2016 but later regretted it. He supported Sanders in 2020, but also Gabbard in 2020 and then Vivek Ramaswamy in 2024. He shows strong support for Ukraine, but he supported Covid conspiracies as late as 2023. Multiple felonies, many of which firearm related, some of which related to theft and traffic violations.

It’s not like I can say I know the guy, but I get the sense that he has severe undiagnosed mental illness, which is perhaps more important than his exact political leaning.

“Don’t believe initial reporting about any dramatic event. The rush to be first often overrides the responsibility to try to be correct. As with any event like this, some of this information is likely to change as more information becomes available.”

https://youtu.be/sgpYzFTtJug?feature=shared

In any case, I heard about the attempt shortly after I started scrolling through lemmy last night, so from my pov the information had gotten to me in a timely manner.

That is fair lol.

That said if we’re talking less about how awful he is, and more about how absurd his awfulness is, then nothing screams “divorced from the reality of normal people” quite like this quote from his own daughter:

He ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York.

Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day to day stuff for us.

If even a little of this were true….<insert the words I don’t have to describe my feelings here>

In an alternate reality, not too different from ours, this guy is gonna be the next president.

This seems misleading. 28% is less than Biden’s 39.6% tax proposal for 2025, but still greater than the 20% tax we have now. More importantly, this proposal would just be a request - Congress can make whatever amendments they want.

I could be wrong and would accept evidence to the contrary, but I don’t think Congress was going to pass Biden’s 40% proposal for FY25, anyway, in which case 28% would be a compromise in the right direction.

You should ask this guy why he’s pushing the Green Party nominee, aka the pro-environmental policy nominee, despite indicating in other threads that he doesn’t care if Trump wins, aka the anti-environmental policy nominee.

I asked him that, then he started accusing me of bullying him and blocked me.

If I understand margin of error correctly, then what this means is that the “true” lead that harris had over trump at the time of this poll has a 95% chance of being somewhere between +(5+4.5) and +(5-4.5).

So according to just this poll, there’s a 95% that Harris’ lead in Minnesota is between 9.5% and 0.5%, so somewhere between “what the polling was nearly already saying” and “almost neck and neck”.

And that’s not even taking any of the other polling into consideration…

TL;DR yeah, this poll isn’t very useful.