Progressives (Liberals)

There is a progressive in the race.

Defending right wing politicians is one reason Democrats are failing and people are becoming independents.

You rarely see Republicans electing "liberals." There's a solid reason for that.

[he] has repeatedly voted against attempts to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), voted to preserve funding for Planned Parenthood in 2017, and voted against the 2017 Republican tax plan. He has complained about the "toxic" lack of bipartisanship in Congress on almost every issue; "liberal activists argue he is too conservative for the Democratic Party, while Republicans argue he is too liberal for West Virginia."

voter unhappiness with the system and the politicians is a primary force in elections these days.

Democracy means that sometimes the bad guys win.

PACE, FLORIDA — Chris wanted to make it clear: He didn’t mean to compare Donald Trump to Jesus. But he did, twice.

Democrats have gone after Trump over and over again because they’re threatened by his power, Chris said — just like the Romans did with Christ. And later, when they couldn't find real reasons to persecute him, well: “They just bear false witness.”

“It’s a Peter and the Wolf thing,” said Chris, a resident of tiny Baker, Florida, who is struggling to find work because of a physical disability. First accusations of racism, then sexual harassment, then homophobia, then more racism, then Russian collusion. Now, Ukraine.

“You cry long enough and loud enough, and at first people are like, ‘Oh no, the wolf is here, the wolf is here,’ but after a while, you realize, it’s a joke. And so now, I don’t even care anymore.”

With the impeachment inquiry into Trump raging on in Washington, I went looking for the place in America that was deepest inside the Fox News bubble. There’s no data about where, exactly, people watch the most Fox News. But data from PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, suggests that the average Republican who watches Fox is white, Southern, and over the age of 30.

I ended up here, in a sun-baked Walmart parking lot in Florida’s first congressional district — a stretch of sparkling beaches and dense pine forests along the far tip of the state’s panhandle. The district is the most conservative in Florida, mostly white and disproportionately older, and most importantly, its representative is Matt Gaetz, who has vaulted his national profile with appearance after appearance on the cable news channel.

The impeachment inquiry has been especially kind to Gaetz’s Fox profile. His latest line: “Trump is innocent and the deep state is guilty.”

In Gaetz’s district, almost no one is worried about what Trump said to the president of Ukraine. Instead, the overwhelming feeling here is that, even in the midst of a historic impeachment inquiry, there is nothing new or different happening in Washington.

I spoke to nearly two dozen voters outside Walmarts scattered across Gaetz’s district. The phrase “quid pro quo” might be new, but the way voters here defend Trump is virtually unchanged from the earliest days of his presidential run, often word-for-word what I have heard at Trump rallies since 2015.

Impeachment is just another scandal stirred up by Democrats — bringing with it exactly the same chance that people here will change their mind about Trump.

Removing Trump from office would almost certainly require a dramatic shift in public opinion to give a mass of Republican senators political cover — a swing not just from independent voters but a large chunk of Republicans, too, who would have to turn against a president to whom they have remained steadily loyal for years.

One clear impediment to that kind of shift: Fox, the outlet that polls show most Republicans trust overwhelmingly over any other news source. Swaying Republicans towards impeachment means swaying people who have mostly watched the inquiry play out on Fox — which has attacked it relentlessly from every angle.

Fox News viewers are remarkably, and unrelentingly, loyal to Trump. Fifty-five percent of Republicans who get their news from Fox said there was nothing Trump could do to lose their approval, a recent study found, compared with just 30% of Republicans who don’t. In a new Suffolk poll, only 9% of people who trust Fox News most said they believed Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president is an impeachable offense, compared to 72% of people who most trust CNN — and 78% of Fox watchers said they agreed with Trump’s assessment that the impeachment proceedings constitute a “political lynching.”...

The seesaw is a result of manipulation by the powers who can propagandize and financially browbeat and bribe, endlessly.

Anybody who thinks Obama or the Clintons have any good answers are as manipulated as Trump's stooges.