‘A dying empire led by bad people’: Poll finds young voters despairing over US politics | Semafor
‘A dying empire led by bad people’: Poll finds young voters despairing over US politics | Semafor
A new survey may help explain Joe Biden’s recent struggles with the under-30 set.
49% agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51% agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64% backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65% agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power”
Nearly all of these statements are, I think, undeniable if you’re paying attention. I’m surprised the percentages are so low.
“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys.”
(Emphasis mine)
And that is exactly the point where the misinterpretation train leaves the station. The excitement generated by Bernie Sanders / Beto O’Rourke / etc seems to suggest otherwise.
If you wanted to check whether young voters feel that the right answer to that bleakness you asked them about is to give up on politics and let whatever happens happen, rather than to get involved and fix it, you could have asked them that directly. My observation is that they are voting and getting involved in protest movements a lot more so than other younger generations in the recent past, but it kinda sounds like you don’t want that to be true, so you asked them something different and then decided that they said something different than they did.
The excitement generated by Bernie Sanders / Beto O’Rourke / etc seems to suggest otherwise.
The fact that Bernie lost the nomination twice and Beto is persona non grata in Texas politics suggests that they're right that there's no good people in government. Hell, I was excited about Fetterman and look how he turned out.
Agreed with you on Sanders - he is an incredibly rare occurrence in politics. He is someone who was :
- Not ever rich so he understands from a very real perspective the economic stratification that many of those in higher government offices ignore or are oblivious to.
- Didn't seek politics as a means to enrich himself (unlike Sinema for example)
- Right in almost every instance of history when he's gone against the grain - whether in the with Civil Rights, or the 90s with Iraq and NAFTA, or the 2000s with Occupy Wall Street, bailouts, etc.
The closest other analogs I can think of are a few members of the "squad..." but even a good number of them come from some sort of modest means... although - again - that garbage pile Sinema shows us that's no guarantee when it comes to class solidarity... :(
Beto on the other hand - who I actually met in person once and shook hands with - although he is a thousand times better than Cruz or Abbott - is basically backed by his very well-to-do in-laws and more of the "New Democrats" coalition - aka Obama / Buttigieg / thinly-veiled neoliberal "look how cool I am but don't check my voting record too closely" group of pretend-progressives backed by a lot of capital trying to appeal to the folks who like the politics of Sanders, AOC, Warren, etc.
Although Beto's better than some of the others in my opinion, his voting record shows he'd be another Obama policy-wise so no public healthcare probably, no ending massive private-kick-back driven "Military Industrial Complex" contracts, probably not great on foreign policy, and I wouldn't expect him to crack down on billionaire tax evasionists.
I was a young person excited for Bernie in 2016. That was almost 10 years ago. I am no longer the younger generations.
A lot of people were excited for Bernie and the Dems (and media) coordinated to kneecap him rather than chance the vote.
I agree with the title, but Semafor is not a real news source.
The easiest way to understand Signals is to go look at one yourself — it’s fundamentally a collection of links to stories from around the web about a topic, curated and summarized by a Semafor reporter. The twist is that Semafor built an AI-powered search tool called MISO (for “multilingual insight search optimizer”) to help those reporters find a broad range of stories in various languages to make that curation process more efficient. The company describes the tool as “a custom bot built on OpenAI’s platform and using Microsoft’s Bing search engine.”
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/5/24062229/semafor-signals-miso-ai-microsoft
Their "reporters" are just checking what an AI spews out.
And there's a lot more shady stuff this could be heading.
They've said they want to eventually tailor articles presented, headlines, and even article content to users.
The potential propaganda impact of something like this can not be ignored. People bitch about social media algorithms changing people's opinions, but this is disguised as a real new organization and wants to change the information shown on its site on a user by user basis to more effectively get people to the result the owners of the website works.
Uber used to provide a cheap effective service, so did Walmart. Once they get market share, the shit show begins.
Senafor is still in the process of capturing market share, dont help them accomplish that step so they can move into the shady shit
The easiest way to understand Signals is to go look at one yourself — it’s fundamentally a collection of links to stories from around the web about a topic, curated and summarized by a Semafor reporter. The twist is that Semafor built an AI-powered search tool called MISO (for “multilingual insight search optimizer”) to help those reporters find a broad range of stories in various languages to make that curation process more efficient. The company describes the tool as “a custom bot built on OpenAI’s platform and using Microsoft’s Bing search engine
Wow that's really fucking lazy of them. Not suprising though.
They've said they want to eventually tailor articles presented, headlines, and even article content to users.
Nothing like keeping people in their echo chambers and safe spaces.
But overall, that's incredibly grimey of them.
My take is that if you can't beat AI, and you're not, you might as well embrace it. You are obviously not going vote it out of existence. What you are describing is something Google's Meteor platform does every single minute of every single day for Google News.