mdgoonah41 bit like Game of Thrones isn't it? The white walkers and winter is coming, folks are here fighting over Iron Throne and pushing stupid agendas

flobaba pretty much, yeah

Qwiss it’s not just £25m. It’s the fact that academy players don’t have existing amortisation to net out, so that £25m goes straight to the bottom line this year if we sell him, which is big for FFP etc.

Trump and Vance suddenly look like the low energy campaign. The 'weird' attack line really works.

Claudius i literally read this like 4 times trying to understand how it fit in here before realizing that you likely posted it in the wrong thread. lmao

Haha me too

Don't know much about Walz, but he reminds me of any one of my kajillion aunts and uncles in Melbourne. They're pretty variable quality wise, but at least they're vaguely real people.

They're all the same, politicians - liars and panderers. Media giving Kamala and her merry band a free ride/pass so far, but 3 months is a long time in politics. Just a few weeks ago Trump was inevitable. Martyr, Victim and Strongman Savior. Now he's chatting about people's wives and struggling to regain attention.

Let's see how this new energy ticket holds up after the honeymoon period passes.

Trump must laugh all the way to the bank when people keep saying he's no worse than anyone else no matter what he does.

mdgoonah41 yup. They just need a few good rallies. Some door to door in Pennsylvania and it’s done.
Meanwhile Trump is saying his VP nominee doesn’t add value - but we do know he does the opposite with a 45/55 approval rating

mdgoonah41 the good news for dems is that the election is in less than 100 days, so they dont need to keep this momentum for a year like a ticket normally does. if they can avoid shooting themselves in the dick and just stay focused, they can win

Has Kamala or Trump done any interviews yet or been pressed on policy? That is when opinions of candidates will change.

JazzG as far as I understand these are the two most divergent policy slates in US history.

But as @Gazza M says people don’t care about policy in a positive sense. There are negatives (like picking Shapiro would’ve alienated some voters on the left), but American politics has moved from policy to personality in 21st century

Gazza M When it is this close I think it might make some difference because surely banging on about their main points will keep their base happy but the swing voters might need more convincing.

JazzG i think a lot is made about "swing voters" but these people are not really undecided ideologically, its whether or not they are going to actually vote. a lot of people "in the center" are apathetic, and its a matter of will they actually go and vote or not. its 2024, i think most people have their minds made up regarding abortion, immigration, and the social safety net.

I see she's taken her defeat well....

mdgoonah41 From the outside it feels like you have two candidates that nobody is all that enthusiastic about. So you would think some of the voters might leave it late to decide, especially in the swing states which are going to decide the election.

Like flobba says 3 months is a long time in an election campaign, a few weeks ago after Trump got shot it looked like the Democrats were ready to throw the towel in but Kamala has hit the ground running and made it a contest.

AIPAC poured funds into her opponent , nothing new in American politics. It's always the pro Israel mob that gets funded and ultimately put into positions of power which then allows the likes of Netanyahu and company to lie steal and murder with impunity.

GooneriC 100% right, she has every right to be angry. the most depressing thing right now about democratic politics is how willing they are to be swayed and outright gaslighted by the right.

i read an article yesterday about how some right wing strategists were feeding opposition research on shapiro to the media and more left wing liberals to try and tarnish him and create opposition to him, because republicans were afraid of him on the ticket. whether that is true or not, i dont know. and shapiro obviously has his issues and potential liabilies, as noted in this thread.

but the bigger issue is that the democratic party has allowed itself to be influenced and swayed by republicans over the last 8 years. republicans closer to the political center were rightly disgusted by trump and felt the party no longer was welcoming to them, so they wanted to coopt the democratic party and turn it into their idealized version of the republican party. thats not how any of this is supposed to work. you dont show up to someone's house for a dinner party and start changing the music and then go into the kitchen and tell the hosts they are cooking everything wrong. if you do that, the host would be justified in ejecting you from the party.

never trumpers either need to create their own viable third party (will never happen) or they need to figure out whether their views more closely align with democrats or republicans and then vote that way. they dont get to change the democratic platform or completely water down views on repro rights, immigration and the environment. if these never trumpers had it their way, dems would have nominated liz cheany and mitt romney for the ticket. that isnt a world i want to live in.

JazzG hard disagree here. the dem base is definitely more excited about harris. i think most people agree she isn't the dream candidate. but dems also cant fall into the trap of letting perfect be the enemy of good. shes a better candidate than biden, shes more progressive than biden. shes still a cop, and she'll never win over certain people, but shes far from some disaster candidate. if she'd fucked up the VP selection, i think the momentum train could have derailed, but she picked the guy that has drawn plaudits from AOC and progressive groups, all the way to joe fucking manchin and republicans like larry hogan. this is as united as the dem party has been since probably 2008, to be honest.