2018 Midterms

[Bi_3]

Which "red" was she talking about here?

Ugh. Why not re-record this before posting?

Authenticity?

[elliseamos]

Which "red" was she talking about here?

Ugh. Why not re-record this before posting?

Authenticity?

Right. She fumbles talking points off the cuff, just like us!

[Bi_3]

Which "red" was she talking about here?

Ugh. Why not re-record this before posting?

Authenticity?

Right. She fumbles talking points off the cuff, just like us!

True. That kind of unprofessional approach has certainly not been effective recently.

[elliseamos]

Which "red" was she talking about here?

Ugh. Why not re-record this before posting?

Authenticity?

Right. She fumbles talking points off the cuff, just like us!

True. That kind of unprofessional approach has certainly not been effective recently.

So moving forward no one will prepare for anything, say whatever nonsense comes to kind, and when in doubt just blatantly lie?

I think it's pretty clearly not a winning strategy. The election was stolen, BI.

[McParadigm]

Holy farts. This is a group that usually swings conservative (Trump won the demo by a good margin), and which the shrinking Republican Party (smaller, and down around 10% in membership since 2016) counts on to make up the difference in tight elections.

They are exactly why the party initially adopted its “gee whiz politics is so negative” schtick. They are the rare demo that conservative messaging actually reacts to, in the traditional sense. Most groups, conservative messaging is about establishing a narrative first and then guiding the target audience in...which is probably why they now have a president who can convince half their base that tariffs are the best thing ever.

[elliseamos]

Holy farts. This is a group that usually swings conservative (Trump won the demo by a good margin), and which the shrinking Republican Party (smaller, and down around 10% in membership since 2016) counts on to make up the difference in tight elections.

They are exactly why the party initially adopted its “gee whiz politics is so negative” schtick. They are the rare demo that conservative messaging actually reacts to, in the traditional sense. Most groups, conservative messaging is about establishing a narrative first and then guiding the target audience in...which is probably why they now have a president who can convince half their base that tariffs are the best thing ever.

I'll believe it when I see it.

[Bi_3]

“I sat down with a Nobel Prize economist last week — I can’t believe I can say that, it’s really weird — But one of the things that we saw is, if people pay their fair share, if corporations and the ultra wealthy — for example, as Warren Buffett likes to say, if he pays as much as his secretary paid, 15 percent tax rate, if corporations paid — if we reverse the tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent … if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there.”

“Then the last key, which is extremely extremely important is re-prioritization. Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for,” she said. “They’re, like, ‘we don’t want another fighter jet!’ They’re, like, ‘don’t give us another nuclear bomb,’ you know?”

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!



Edit: It's worse when you watch it unfold:

[---]

Edit: It's worse when you watch it unfold:

She is essentially Sarah Palin: a fatuous vessel capable of pandering to an oinking, water-brained constituency unable to separate intellectual wheat from populist chaff, but little else.

[4/5]

Edit: It's worse when you watch it unfold:

She is essentially Sarah Palin: a fatuous vessel capable of pandering to an oinking, water-brained constituency unable to separate intellectual wheat from populist chaff, but little else.

You two clearly just don't want to pay your fair share.

[run2death]

Jesus Christ, that is pretty fucking hard to watch. I would expect more succinct answers from my 10-year-old.

[4/5]

Finally someone calls out Bernie for being a right wing nut job who doesn’t understand young people and socialism:

https://newrepublic.com/article/149378/ ... s-not-left

Open borders plus a generous welfare state... this Democratic Socialism thing is going to be lit.

It’s pretty hard to overstate how much conservatives inadvertently worked to set the stage for this to occur.

I was just reading a paper on people’s perceptions of the word “socialism” over time. By weaponizing the word in response to every single democratic proposal, especially ones that later became incredibly popular like the ACA, they’ve effectively desensitized people to it. Young people have basically no negative response to the word at all, and even middle-age unaffiliated voters consistently misunderstand what it is and have increasingly neutral opinions of it. Socialism is now just seen as a meaningless political attack word.

From a couple pages back, but I think there's a lot of truth in this post and McP's subsequent post. At least it appears that way to me anecdotally.

As a result of party polarization/tribalism/whatever, it seems like more and more people view everything political as a single binary choice and as a result conflate the differences and relationships between those two positions. This leads to assumptions that are not only oversimplified, but down right inaccurate. I think many of us have, out of convenience developed an inaccurate use of a transitive property for political ideology. For example, if conservative = pro-military and conservative = blue lives matter and conservative = capitalism, then capitalism = pro-military and capitalism = blue lives matter = pro-life, etc. Of course this is totally inaccurate, but I think that a lot of people think this way.

This works the other way as well, of course. If FoxNews says that socialism = everything Obama or any Democrat does, and Democrats = anti-police brutality and pro-choice and tolerance, well then socialism = anti-police brutality and pro-choice and tolerance. And helping the poor, etc.

It's easy to see where young progressives would take the term and and assume positive meaning into it.

[---]

I'm starting to think Trump's election is not merely an exceptional and isolated data point, but instead signals the start of a trend of non-traditional and dubiously qualified candidates gaining favor.

We're in for more Trumps, not less.

[McParadigm]

Corey Stewart is such a disaster. Why would you do this to yourself.

[McParadigm]

[96583UP]

I'm starting to think Trump's election is not merely an exceptional and isolated data point, but instead signals the start of a trend of non-traditional and dubiously qualified candidates gaining favor.

We're in for more Trumps, not less.

yes voting americans are getting more impressed by stupider things

[McParadigm]

Sounds like O’Conner is in for a very narrow loss. The headlines will be “Republicans hold in Ohio,” but they’re winning by a smidge what they used to own completely.

[McParadigm]

[Bi_3]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... edirect=on

Sounds like sanity prevailed on the blue team yesterday

[McParadigm]

[McParadigm]

CNN:

Results from the Washington state primary on Tuesday are another bad sign for Republicans.

We already know that Democrats lead in the House polls, and Republicans have a lot more seats at risk. Republicans therefore are hoping that the polling and the race ratings are overstating their vulnerability. They may be.

The outcome in Washington's primary however, suggest the opposite may be true. The polling and race ratings might be understating the Democrats' advantage. In other words, Democrats may actually be in slightly better shape than we think.

Historically, the primary vote all the Democrats receive relative to all the Republicans is a good indicator of the fall result. As the New York Times' Nate Cohn pointed out in June, the top-two primary results are about as predictive as a poll taken within the final three weeks of the campaign. The catch, though, is that Democrats tend to do slightly better in the general election than in the primary.

With that in mind, look at the results in these three districts: Washington's 3rd, Washington's 5th and Washington's 8th. Not all the votes are in, but if the picture doesn't shift too much, then Republicans could be in big trouble.

Washington 3rd: President Donald Trump won here by 7 points. CNN, the Cook Political Report and Inside Elections currently rate the 3rd, represented by Jaime Herrera Beutler, as either likely or solid Republican. That is, the belief is that she has a very good chance of winning reelection.

The cumulative Democratic percentage of the vote so far is actually outpacing the Republican percentage of the vote by a little less than a point. That suggests this race may actually be a toss-up in the fall, not one where Republicans should be heavily favored.

Washington 5th: Trump took this district by 13 points in 2016. CNN, the Cook Political Report and Inside Elections currently put the 5th, represented by Cathy McMorris Rodgers, as either lean or likely Republican. Put another way, these ratings indicate that she's thought to be a favorite, though not as heavy as one as Beutler.

The results tonight suggest that this race, like the 3rd, may also be a tossup. Republicans are running about three points ahead of the lone Democrat. If you apply the average shift from the primary to fall results (with Democrats doing better in the fall), this race is forecasted to be razor tight.

Washington 8th: Unlike the 3rd and the 5th, Trump lost here by a three-point margin. That's part of the reason why CNN, the Cook Political Report and Inside Elections all believe the 8th District, where Rep. Dave Reichert is retiring, is a toss-up. This is the equivalent of thinking that a race is 50/50 or close to it.

The Democrats, though, are up by 3 percentage points in the primary. Given how Democrats usually improve upon the primary result in the fall, the forecast would be for them to win by around 5 points in November. That's more like a race that is closer to leans Democratic than it is a toss-up.

The results in Washington wouldn't be the first sign that the national polls may be somewhat underestimating Democrats. Democrats have been outperforming the partisan baseline based on the last two presidential elections by greater than 15 points in the average special election. A forecast based solely on the specials has them winning the national House vote by low double digits. Most of the national polling has been suggesting a margin closer to high single digits.