Wicked high turnout all over this town. That should put some blue votes on the board for Maggie Hassan.
Thanks. I'll take any good news right now.
She won Dixville Notch! (I posted that in the other thread but it's more appropriate here.)
I saw Mary Peltola out waving signs with bunch of other Dem candidates and volunteers on my way to work.
I still think the most likely outcome is that Dems hold the Senate and lose the House, but it'll be close and we may not know for a while.
Odds of a runoff in GA are pretty high. So "not know for a while" could really mean a while.
Yeah, I think it's pretty likely Georgia goes to a runoff and also fairly likely that control of the Senate depends on it.
But really no one knows anything at this point, to an even greater degree than in past elections.
That's why I'm going to browse used hiking gear instead of reading the news.
Apparently the NYT is putting up the needle again: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/08/us/elections/results-needle-forecast.html
I'm just upset that they are having an election special instead of Jeopardy. There will be so much time to blather once there are results, why do they need to start blathering now?
I actually like the needle. If they're going to do dumb horse-race coverage, it's nice to balance it out with smart horse-race coverage.
But yeah, we all have our traumatic needle memories.
7: Governor's race or Senate?
Also, where is apo? It looks like NC might get a Democratic Senator.
Governor's race or Senate?
Senate. Kemp is pretty heavily favored for the governorship and results so far are consistent with that.
Overall things aren't looking terrible for Dems so far. Still early though.
Since this is the news thread, looks like I now have zero billionaire Facebook friends...
Sorry that was supposed to be presidential and not anonymous.
The market might bring them back.
Zeros were invented in India by people who were very cruel judges in the dating pool.
Polls looking pretty accurate so far?
Looking really good for a midterm with an incumbent president. We'll likely have to wait a while on the senate (NV will take a while, and GA is very likely going to a runoff), house will be R but by a small margin.
NMM SBF's giant Democratically-aligned fortune
It's looking like the NH state house might flip blue.
It's looking like the NH state house might flip blue.
Last Chance Community College, where I teach, won its levy campaign.
Last Chance Community College, where I teach, won its levy campaign.
Last Chance Community College, where I teach, won its levy campaign.
Summer Lee won, which means AIPAC spent several million dollars and changed nothing but pissing me off. And, probably Rep Lee too.
Because I'm not on that *itter site anymore, I've just had MSNBC running as background and that Kornacki guy is doing a pretty good job updating all of the races. Much lower-key than constantly scrolling on a hellsite, but maybe not informing me as much as quickly from as many directions. Also a little too rosy about the Democrats even if they are beating expectations.
26, 27: Yeah, looking pretty good so far for both the polls and the Dems.
I think it's hilarious that Newsom basically didn't even run a campaign. In the voter information booklet the page for his candidate statement is blank. Meanwhile, I don't think I'll ever know the name of his opponent.
Even the House races are going pretty well overall. Holding it is still a stretch, I think, but a real possibility.
Meanwhile, I had to vote twice for the same Senator. Once for finishing the interim term, once for the full term that starts right after.
WaPo is keeping a dispiriting tally of the number of election deniers who've won. It's up to 136. The secretary of state races are looking good so far, though.
Only twelve minutes until the polls close in Alaska!
Whoa, big change at the needle, WI Senate very much in play.
Go Inverted Vermont.
Technically, Vermont is inverted New Hampshire.
Petition to call Grassley the first Millenial Senator because he's been in the Senate since the first Millenials were born.
Ha, Lauren Boebert really might lose. This wouldn't actually be a huge surprise; some analysts who are familiar with the district have been considering it a possibility for a while.
He can be part of the Silent Generation.
So Ossoff and Grassley are gonna swap, basically?
Pro-choice side wins abortion referenda in Michigan and Kentucky(!).
I have a hard time believing Boebert will lose, based on the rule that people who with the potential of being irritatingly in the public eye for decades will remain in the public eye for decades. With the exception of people like Palin who unexpectedly decide to walk away from their offices (though she's back too).
Palin is also probably going to lose this time.
At the end of this I'd like to see the analysis on just how much the Republicans played themselves by falling for their own poll manipulation.
Republicans can still take both houses, in which case they'll declare it the greatest red wave in history, at least until the Rapture (expected by 2030).
It was amazing how the whole media fell for that. It was so obvious what they were doing!
They seized control of the narrative so well that mainstream publications then did real polls that showed good results for Dems but reported them as if they showed the opposite. It was wild.
Oregon has a surprising (to me) amount of more than two candidate races. I assume that's the long term effect of Portland's vegan strip clubs.
Some orgs are calling it for Fetterman.
It was so obvious what they were doing!
It was, but I also had reservations that Democrats were desperately trying to "unskew" the polls as a form of denial, like the Republicans had in 2012. I mean, blaming shitty polls is the first rationalization any side takes when they seems to be losing, and falling back on conspiracy theories is something one does when one is grasping for straws. But this time there was actually a conspiracy!
71: Yeah, no one wanted to call it out for exactly that reason. Which was reasonable! But in retrospect, yeah, wow.
Ok, multiple calls for Fetterman, also a call for Whitmer. So an R Senate is getting less likely. But NY is going terrible for the Dems in the House.
71, 72: I think lack of apparent Dem enthusiasm also played into it. It seems like this midterm might be an exception where lots of people turned out despite not seeming to be excited about it. But I guess I'm just going by vibes. There could have been a lot of energy not being reported on in favor of frothing Republicans and boring centrists.
First Alaska results are in! 35% reporting, Peltola 45%, Palin 28%, Begich 25%. Tshibaka 47%, Murkowski 41%. Lots left to report including almost all of the rural precincts.
LA Times has called it in favor of public school arts funding in California.
It seems like this midterm might be an exception where lots of people turned out despite not seeming to be excited about it
Or maybe we just have bigger turnouts now for structural reasons that are not yet well understood.
Another friend of mine just crushed it in Peterborough. The guy is 19 years old and a State Rep-elect. Keep an eye on him.
My successor as Young Dems president is crushing her state House race. Not a surprise but nice to see. Legislative races overall are a bit of a mixed bag but it's early yet.
Got any other news that might have escaped those of us doomed to live in enlightened but too chilly to be topless Europe?
Yay teo's successor and Spike's friends!
Can't say that I'm sad to see a crypto fortune vanish in a puff of un-smoke.
Dems are doing really really well in state legislative races in a bunch of states. They've already flipped the Michigan Senate and blocked supermajorities in Wisconsin and North Carolina. This is shaping up to be a very good midterm for Dems at all levels.
Also retained a lot of governorships, including in crucial states for 2024 like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
81-82: Thanks! Good news!
I hadn't yet girded my loins to go and look at any site that consolidated results, and had instead been doomscrolling Twitter. (But have you seen the quality of the doom?) And even there I was seeing a decent amount of positive Dem results.
Erik Loomis has written that elections are referenda on the organizing we do in between elections. Holding on in key places and stanching the usual mid-term losses speaks well of what we've done and is a good pointer toward '24. I wish democracy itself weren't on the line, but there ya go.
NYT needle currently points to "Lean Dem" for the Senate and "Probably GOP" for the House. I'll take that as a win. (Still very uncertain though and many races won't be called for a long time.)
For a midterm with a Dem president, that's a win in my books, too.
Is Murkowski likely to lose?
Lots not to love, but MI also ennshrined Roe in its state constitution and broadly expanded/protected voting rights.
Is Murkowski likely to lose?
No, she's virtually certain to win. She'll gain as the rural precincts report and the absentee ballots get counted, then she'll benefit from the ranked choice calculations. The initial results were very good for her given that. Same for Peltola, though she may actually win outright as more rural/absentee votes come in.
87: Whew! I mean, an R, but an independent-ish R. Better than the alternative. And good news about Peltola!
And as if on cue, the Division of Elections just posted a new update. Murkowski is up to 43% to Tshibaka's 44%. Peltola's at 47%. 84% reporting.
And now I'm going to bed because I have to work in the morning.
Thanks, teo!
We'll keep the show going. Well, at least once the East Coast people have had their coffee and feel like talking.
About as best as could have been expected.
Also, fuck Andrew Cuomo
Millionaires tax to make MA a state w/ progressive income tax not yet called.
Fucking Andrew Cuomo and the US Supreme Court bringing you a probable narrow R majority in the house. (His fucked up court appointees and the specific AL and LA gerrymandering BS orders from the Supremes.)
Of course DeSantis/Florida and OH were even more egregiously lawless gerrymanders but the blame for them is more diffuse (of course Supremes overall Rucho ruling is the root--motherfucking choir boy John Roberts laid the groundwork for the utter hacks).
92 and 94: I hate Andrew Cuomo as much as anyone (well, probably not as much as LB) but what in particular did he do that make you hate him now?
But overall in a better frame of mind than last night. After 16+ hours at polls I was in no mood for doomscrolling (and mostly what I knew of was the Florida disaster*). So with barely concealed hostility I rebuffed attempts from friends and family to enmesh me in following results (much lesslistening to fatuous fuckheads like Kornacki for fuck's sake), and my wife and watched escapist TV (AppleTV's For All Mankind--kind of meh, but we are "hooked" and want to see it how it "turns out").
Following the minutiae of returns and trying to predict outcomes use to be fun for me, but am now like this from Paul Krugman: Feeling somewhat pleased with myself: I went to bed early, figuring that doomscrolling would be bad for my health, and woke up to discover that the red wave had been a small ripple.
But it did lead me to go to bed felling pretty doomy.
*I did also know from the precincts where I worked that Mastriano had washed out so we weren't going to be living in the absolute worst chamber of sub-Hell. A lot of ticket-splitting, the more R-leaning of the two precincts where I worked went:
Shapiro -Mastriano (Governor) 57-42
Fetterman-Oz 48-49
Congressional 44-56
His fucked up picks for the NY Supreme Court blew up the NY D gerrymander. Nothing comparable on the other side in FL and Ohio (well, Ohio courts tried but Ohio legislators blew them off), and in LA and AL where lower courts tired to address the gerrymandering the Supremes shadow-docketed the fuck out of them.
Yeah, Republicans are going to Republican but it takes a special kind of asshole to do what Cuomo did to NY state.
A lot of good news down ballot all over the place.
I hate Andrew Cuomo as much as anyone (well, probably not as much as LB)
My work here is done.
but am now like this from Paul Krugman: Feeling somewhat pleased with myself: I went to bed early, figuring that doomscrolling would be bad for my health, and woke up to discover that the red wave had been a small ripple.
Co-signing this.
Our most aggressively progressive city council member was voted out, which I'm disappointed by. I was initially shocked but now upon reflection, it doesn't seem so surprising. He was really adversarial and had no sense of scale, nor charm.
However, the county went Democratic for the first time ever, and this is a really big deal because they're the ones who write the contracts with the private prisons. There may be some way to make headway there.
So, Oz loaned his campaign $22 million (or more). Is he going to have to eat that? I know that if he'd won, he'd be able to get donations to retire the debt. Or if he were someone with a history in the party, he might get help regardless. But neither applies.
One of the funnier tweets I saw by that Mueller, she wrote account was that the red wave turned out to be just a bit of light spotting.
Oh, and we decriminalized marijuana within the city! That's huge but I didn't really think it was ever in doubt.
The DFL now has the governorship, the state house and the state senate and claims that they will "deliver for Minnesotans". I'll believe it when I see it, but on the whole it's a return to 90s-esque Minnesotan belief in choosing good governance rather than frothing loons so good job everyone. Trump did not win our primaries so I had been clinging to some hopes that people here were still somewhat more sensible than the rest of the upper midwest and I guess that turned out to be true.
I had been dreading this day for two years and now it's over and it wasn't so bad! Woo-hoo!
Honestly, the first really good political day since 2012. It was of course great to see Trump lose, but the miserable aura of Trump's presidency clouded that somewhat and I had pretty much zero enthusiasm for Biden, who has born out most of my expectations.
Back from the abyss for the next two years!!!!!
No love for Biden? I've been pleasantly surprised a couple of times. Everything good is something that could have been better -- ending the war in Afghanistan, the student loan forgiveness, the marijuana pardons -- but still surprising that any of it happened at all.
His judicial appointments, support for Ukraine, and some other stuff.
Still should have re-entered the JCPOA ASAP, that was an unforced error.
He's actually achieved meaningful climate legislation, insofar as it looks more likely that the worst possible outcomes for the planet will be avoided. This has genuinely brought me a teeny bit of existential comfort, even though I'm not naive about who will bear the brunt of the midrange outcomes.
Better than either of Obama's midterm performances no matter what, no?
Some heartwarming pictures of Fetterman en famille last night.
Also cosigning 96.2. Like many of us, I have a doomscrolling problem, and I feel as though I've defeated it. I followed the results the way I would a football game when the result interests me but the actual game doesn't seem worth watching.
I went to sleep early and slept well, and the election wasn't the first thing I thought about when I woke up. And like Krugman, I am pleased with myself about this. This feels healthy. I don't think it's quite right to say I've given up, but to some degree I have reconciled myself to the inevitable.
So, there's hope for the country, but none for Ohio.
Biden has kept up a lot of the really egregious Trump-era immigration measures and I think that's a moral injury to the nation. Those needed to be canceled or, where this was impossible for the mere president, vigorously campaigned against. Fascist immigration measures are a reservoir for fascist politics and need to be expunged for the health of the country. Unfortunately, of course, once those fat enforcement contracts are in place you're pretty well stuck but it's still something that is going to bite us.
It's like homelessness - maybe it doesn't feel like a pressing concern if you have a house and/or citizenship, but letting bad policies run is just creating momentum for fascism. It is like....um, to be totally original, it's like a small cancer on the body politic! You may think that it's less urgent than, eg, dealing with the eyeglasses or the cholesterol of the body politic, but actually it's the most pressing matter even though it seems small and symptomless.
There are other reasons that I don't like Biden, but I don't think about them much because I don't expect much from presidents. I did genuinely hope that the immigration situation would at least revert to its pre Trump status because it was such a grotesque and overt Trump initiative.
Are the Republicans ever going to learn to stop nominating so many terrible candidates? 96.last is wild.
Locally:
* The two candidates I personally canvassed for - one city council and one bus district - both seem to be winning.
* The bus district candidate who I thought was sure to win seems to have lost by a substantial margin.
* Mayoral victor is probably the leftmost candidate, though I only ranked him #2 because he seemed low on competence and high on self-promotion/regard. The most capable, sort-of pro-housing candidate came in third, another Warrening. It's a weak-mayor system, so this doesn't change much, but it's good the most prominent moderate candidate, pompous economist who was throwing his money around and advertising more of the same plus law enforcement backlash, is down 6 points.
* Berkeley looks to be retaining its pro-housing majority, a strong NIMBY campaign failing to dislodge the councilmember in the rich district who voted for housing in their backyard.
114: Yeah, that's fair. Immigration politics is something that hits me right in the despair -- there seems to be so little to be done in terms of humane compromise. I want to go back to open borders, or at least to a legal immigration process that allows people to come to the US in numbers comparable to the number of people who want to, but I can't see any realistic political path that gets us there.
Great outcome in the school district just north of Austin. A progressive slate that includes a friend beat back an attempted christofascist takeover.
Biden certainly has fallen short on immigration, but he's had huge accomplishments - most obviously working with the Manchin Senate to get the $1.2 billion infrastructure package, but also the Covid relief, rejoining the Paris agreement and a lot of other small-ball stuff.
Seems to me that the ability of Medicare to negotiate prescription prices is going to be a pretty big deal. And I'm trying to not repeat the important stuff that other folks have mentioned.
Winning the presidency by itself was hugely important. And I think there's a plausible argument to be made that Biden deserves some credit for the modest pro-democracy leanings of the current election.
All of this is important and antifascist, and all of it exceeds my admittedly low expectations.
Biden is even worse on immigration than 114 says. Unbelievable amounts of good policy to address the needs of the 43 million immigrants ALREADY here in the US have gone to die on the hill of Su/san R!ce. I don't understand why but I've given up hope that it will change.
Otherwise, I'm feeling pretty delighted with Pennsylvania this morning. I wasn't sure Fetterman would be able to pull it off -- I thought we might see more ticket-splitting from rich Rs who couldn't stomach Mastriano but thought Oz would be just fine.
The little $10/month I donate to progressive organizing in Central PA is starting to feel like a GREAT investment right now too.
I may have been overly optimistic about the NH House. Right now it appears that, for our 400 Stat Rep seats, we are looking at a 200-200 tie.
For the unlikely Heroes of Our Times, we now have to add Sarah Palin to the list of Dan Quayle and Liz Cheney.
121: Is there a tie-breaking mechanism, or do motions fail on a tie?
120: Yeah. I'm even rather skeptical about the political calculation here. Seems like substantial changes could have been made that would pass largely under the radar.
But CBP is, in its bones, a fundamentally fascist organization. I don't envy a president dealing with them, just as I sympathize with mayors who would like to reform the police.
Did Sarah Palin just stop campaigning out of pique at the earlier result? Or did voters just remember she was always a loser/quitter?
I think motions fail on a tie but they will almost never be able to get all 400 people in the building at the same time so its more a question of who shows up. There will also likely be a steady stream of vacancies as people die, move away, or are thrown out for scandal. Now all of these will effect partisan control of the chamber. Should be interesting!
Nebraska has a slightly larger population and only 49 people in the unicameral.
Republicans just conceded Kherson as well...
121: The New Hampshire state house has 400 reps? So really you are just voting to decide which 4 residents of the state are not in the legislature?
I spent all evening watching election results and I feel fine.
So the Times tracker has it 49-49 in the Senate with 2 remaining tossups, NV and GA. Everyone sharpen your pencils to write letters for another GA runoff, I guess - it could even bring us to a 51-49 majority!
House, 206-219 with 10 tossups. If GOP wins 2/3 of them, that's an 8-seat House majority.
AZ-Sen isn't totally in the bag is it?
* The bus district candidate who I thought was sure to win seems to have lost by a substantial margin.
Right? How could he not win? He's so charming and smart.
128: it's true?? https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1590375354979348481
132: No one's called it but given how much of Pima County is outstanding I'm feeling pretty good about it. Nevada a true knife edge.
Thanks everybody for gently delivering the results and commentary. I'm still avoiding normal news outlets.
Our precinct got a visit from a DOJ civil rights division team! Yay election monitors. They were very friendly.
A weird thing is I think if we win in NV then GA runoff will be an easy Warnock win. No one wants to go out and vote for Walker, and people find losing discouraging. But if we lose in NV then it becomes a vote for control of the Senate and then it'll be very very close.
135.1 yes, Russians announced it themselves. Hope they get hit hard as they withdraw.
Nevada's unusually strong Equal Rights Amendment looks set to pass, I guess forcing parents concerned about the purity of girls' sports and such to flee to Idaho. Margins look like there's a 10-15% cognitive dissonance crowd who voted both for this amendment and also for my mom's ex's Trumpy nephew as senator.
133: I think sadly people may have been put off by the gender and sartorial nonconformity. I thought endorsements would win the day, because it's a low-salience race where most people's vote is based on a single frantic googling of endorsements, but photos also come up in that googling. One person told a friend of mine he looked like a "kook".
137: I don't know. In 2020 (D candidates - R candidates) went from -6.4% in the first round to +2% in the runoff aided by GOP suppressing its own turnout with talk of rigging. I don't know that they'll have that problem to the same extent this time. And this first round, the remaining 2% was to a libertarian candidate; those voters could break right.
The US House of Representatives would have 110 thousand people in it if it had the same proportionality as the NH House. That's a lot of needles!
Some of them would smoke their drugs.
Its one representative per 3500 people and its awesome. Here in New Hampshire, we got democracy out the wazoo.
Honestly, the first really good political day since 2012
And yet, nearly half of Americans who could be bothered to vote came out and voted for candidates who are either fascists themselves or submit to being led by fascists. It still looks alarming to me. I hope and trust that the bulk of those voters supported Reagan and Bush, and haven't noticed that their party has left them, but still.
107: Biden's not the worst but failure to do something Federal on childcare -huge for millennials and a few Gen Z - and elder care support (the looming crisis for Gen X) and which keeps a lit if lower middle class women from working to their potential - really pusses me off. Prescription drug coverage is good. Improved child tax credit's much better.
It still looks alarming to me.
It is.
I hope and trust that the bulk of those voters supported Reagan and Bush, and haven't noticed that their party has left them, but still.
I don't think that's the case so much as they've just stopped being connected to the world that exists.
Did Sarah Palin just stop campaigning out of pique at the earlier result?
Definitely not. She was still running radio ads right up to yesterday. Begich also started running anti-Peltola ads but that was likely too little too lately.
I was out in the Mat-Su Valley this past weekend and there were Palin signs everywhere.
Boy the house is close. The current NYT predictions has R's up in 220 districts and D's in 215. I wonder if that's close enough to avoid a debt default crisis?
151: It'll be interesting to see how the GOP pickups on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley approach crisis-making.
The issue is that the speaker is really powerful, so if the speaker really wants a crisis it's hard to avoid, I think? I don't understand the mechanics of discharge petitions.
IIRC, the US avoided default in 2011 with a huge contribution from Pelosi getting enough votes when it started to become clear the GOP wasn't going to be able to get it done. I'm hazy on the details of what actually passed but it wasn't a total Dem cave in while also not being a win. I think they even might have tried to cave harder on some things and enough Republicans still didn't consider that caving enough so they couldn't win a party line vote. Maybe McCarthy will be a stronger speaker, or maybe the pro-default vote is more solid now if it comes to that.
What I think is a Republican polling firm (Mercury Opinion) just texted to ask how I voted for Senate. Odd because part of the question was not in the past tense ("Not voting").
Oz conceded, but what are they doing?
Isn't McCarthy pro-default? At any rate in 2011 a majority of Republicans voted to raise the debt limit so it wasn't a Hastert rule issue, not at all clear that they can get a majority of Republicans on board this time
Maybe McCarthy will be a stronger speaker
That seems unlikely.
I've been trying to focus on the positive, but I'm feeling really negative again. It looks like the Rs will take the House by a narrow margin and the Senate will come down to the run off in Georgia
Also, every statewide issue and race where I live, Ohio, was decided in favor of Nazis. We lost the state supreme court, which will at a minimum lock in gerrymandering.
Still a good chance D's just win in AZ and NV and the runoff doesn't decide control of the Senate.
Also still a very real chance Dems hold the House. Which is wild.
The runoff means I still get fundraising emails.
The state-level results are the most encouraging, and maybe the most important in the long term. Dem trifecta in Michigan! That's amazing.
164 is right. The state level news in PA and MI is really wonderful, and it's increasingly hopeful that those two states can avoid the death spiral that WI and NC are in.
12:21PM - Text from the Warnock campaign saying it's a runoff, asking for $2800.
12:30PM - I give them $2900 (that's the actual FEC limit this year, I think. Not good that they have that wrong in their messages, I guess they failed to update from 2020).
3:04PM - Another text from the Warnock campaign asking for $2800.
Sigh.
The slow trickle of results today is interfering with my attempts to put off writing something I need a draft of by the end of the week.
166 is actually pretty important for local politics in New York, where Dems underperformed this cycle. The Trump-era trend of Chasidic sects endorsing the GOP has been a key dynamic, and Satmar (which is one of the biggest) bucking that trend and forcefully defending the decision afterward is a sign that that dynamic may be changing.
I'm going to send him some money (not nearly so much), but I'm not opening his emails. Or anyone else's.
It feels like if we avert the worst of the onrushing fascism, there will still be a weird balkanization where within the same region some states have political competition and others are little Hungaries - currently WI, brewing perhaps OH.
148.2 If half the American electorate has become disconnected from reality, that's not alarming. It's the beginning of the end of the world.
Local results remain good. Looks like we gained a couple state Senate seats and held the line in the House. That's probably enough to get Dem-led coalition majorities in at least one house, maybe both. Some of these races are going to come down to the ranked-choice results so we won't know for sure for a couple weeks.
174: Yes, we're just hoping to slow it down.
172: Is Wisconsin further along than Ohio? It looked to me like the Republicans would have a supermajority of the house and senate here as well as all the state offices and controlling the supreme court. All Ohio Dems have left is Sherrod Brown, Connie Schultz and Franklin and Walter.
WI managed to barely hold off complete disaster (held the governor, and more importantly no veto proof majority in congress), if they can win the Supreme Court election next year then maybe they'll even bring back some semblance of democracy. Losing the NC SC is a big deal though, so I think NC has taken the lead as most likely to become Hungary. The big thing is going to be when one of those states puts in an "electoral college" type system for Governor elections, combine that with SC districts and you can just gerrymander in full control by rural areas forever.
177: What makes Ohio different to me from WI and NC, is that in OH is well to the right of either of them. Of course if Republicans always win the Governor's election then they're going to control the state. It's not as anti-democratic if you're actually winning majorities in every election. Whereas in WI and NC (and MI and PA) the goal is to lock in R control forever *even though Democrats get a majority in half the elections*.
Like CA is a one-party state where no R will ever hold office for the foreseeable future, but that's not a failure in Democracy, that's just what the voters want. It'd be better if R's moderated and made the state more competitive, but if they don't want to do that there's not much anyone else can do. It's not the same thing as anti-democracy.
179: Yes, I guess that's right.
I was trying to figure out if Tim Ryan's strategy of running as the Dem-bashing Democrat sort of worked -- he came a whole lot closer than Nan Whalen, the Dem candidate for Governor - but that could be because Ohioans are so used to voting for DeWine, and Vance is a new kind of repulsive.
I wonder if awful people won't leave Pennsylvania and Michigan to take advantage of Ohio's descent?
Nah, they'll either stay put or move to Florida.
182: Maybe to go work at our new Intel plant and enjoy our lax gun laws?
I can believe that a bare majority of Ohioan voters are now genuinely pro-Trump, but then the trifecta can use its (for the sake of argument) legitimate power to change rules to protect themselves from a changing electorate, no?
181: DeWine managed to play the reasonable centrist adult during the pandemic, and Vance is super repulsive.
That reminds me: I will be interested to see any turnout estimates by age range, to see if youth turnout jumped at all.
The exit polls by age range suggest it did, as the below would have meant a more Republican night if the two older groups predominated like they often do:
65+: 55% R, 43% D
45-64: 54% R, 44% D
30-44: 51% D, 47% R
18-29: 63% D, 35% R
But that's exit polls.
185: Sure. We're already using their gerrymandered map, that was rejected over and over by the Ohio Supreme Court. And now they got control of the Ohio Supreme Court.
Where is the best place to go right now to watch conservatives cry and get angry at each other?
I guess it doesn't mean anything to say this now, but:
I was very worried and pointedly ignored the news from 5 pm, when I went to vote, until 8 this morning, when AB woke me up by telling me the 3 contested races we voted in all went the right way. HOWEVER, I actually, objectively, thought an outcome very like what we got was pretty damn likely. I've been certain that Dobbs would be huge, and there were enough polls showing Dem strength that I though a red wave was very unlikely. But I was hurt too much by '04 and '16 to derive any emotional confidence from my intellectual confidence.
Anyway, what a great fucking day. A Black woman head of the PA state assembly! Also, I've now been to a Senator's house.
Here is the prediction I committed to email at some point last week: "I think the dems will do well. Republicans will take the house, but just barely and will not be able to get their shit together for the next two years."
I'd say that prediction is holding up pretty well so far.
Good news for the Senators with Funny Names Caucus, as Crapo and Boozman both win reelection easily. Hickenlooper and Tuberville are continuing members. Sadly, no new members of the Caucus elected.
147 sure looks like blaming Biden for things that are 100% ascribable to Manchima. Biden pushed very hard for child care $$ and child tax credit extension, but ultimately Senators have agency. Those aren't even filibuster issues--there weren't 50 votes for them.
On the immigration thing, I agree that there's been less movement than I want/hoped for. But haven't Trump judges blocked him doing things that are pretty clearly within his purview? I don't know, I don't have a scorecard of actions he could have taken with no possibility of being blocked. But the same mechanisms that prevented Trump from doing things he wanted as quickly as he wanted apply both ways.
191: Yeah, I'm not sure people are appreciating just how little a small R majority will accomplish, even in terms of sabotage. Pelosi does more with a 10 seat majority than Rs can with 30 seats; what the hell will they get done with 5 seats, all of which are in purple counties in New York?
I think Hastert has been the only remotely competent R Leader since the long D dominance of the House ended. Every other one steps on rakes constantly, either terrified of the mouth breathers (eg Boehner) or a true believer incapable of coping with reality rather than the Fox News version.
McCarthy specifically is a weak leader, and Scalise is apparently already campaigning against him. It would be extra delightful if Ds somehow hold on and this backstabbing is in service of a nonexistent job.
It's not like the Republicans will have trouble finding another child abuser to lead them.
147 sure looks like blaming Biden for things that are 100% ascribable to Manchima
Disagree here. Biden was way too eager to get the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill out the door, and failed to use it as effective leverage to get meaningful concessions out of Manchinima. Child care and tax credit extensions may have been possible, but we'll never know, because after Glen Youngkin won in Virginia certain parts of the party felt it was very important to put progressive in their place and jumped at the opportunity to abandon the agreed-upon plan.
Disagree here. Biden was way too eager to get the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill out the door, and failed to use it as effective leverage to get meaningful concessions out of Manchinima.
Wait, what? The implication of that is that Manchin was so interested in seeing the Bipartisan bill pass that he would have been willing to give up concessions (to Biden/progressive caucus) to make sure that it passed. As I recall, Manchin wouldn't have been particularly put out if the bill had failed, but the Dems would have looked like idiots getting Republican votes for the bill in the Senate and then failing to pass it in the house.
197 cont'd Perhaps your argument is that Biden should have held up the bill earlier (rather than waiting until it was passed by the Senate and had gone to the house) but that would have meant a scenario in which the Senate leadership came to Biden and said, "we can get Republican votes for this package" and Biden responded with, "I don't want you to bring it to the floor until you can add XYZ") That doesn't seem likely (given Biden's history as a Senator) and would have made the relationship between the WH and Senate even worse than it was.
It still looks alarming to me.
Yes, we're crossing an expanse of water in the winter and have happened upon a decent sized ice floe so we get to catch our breath for a bit and and not immediately jump/swim to another piece of ice. But we're still well out to sea sitting a bit of frozen water.
Meanwhile the iceberg is getting genuinely mad.
I wonder what Twitter was worth before he bought it, like for real. People are talking about how this or that tweet is costing him billions, which seems true. But I doubt anything he could have done after buying Twitter for $44 billion dollars would have made Twitter worth $44 billion to anyone who wasn't a shit.
Perhaps your argument is that Biden should have held up the bill earlier
My argument is that Biden should have stuck to the plan and passed the bills together. I don't agree with the assessment that Manchin would have balked on supporting the bill he worked so hard to put together, although thats certainly the impression that Manchin was happy to give.
But maybe now the Youngs are finally voting as much as we always hoped? Maybe they'll get a taste for it?
@189 Redstate.com
Lots of rage. Also lots of ads for gold.
Boebert race got down below 100 vote margin, still seems in doubt. Regardless of what happens, someone posted before and after shots from what was supposed to be her victory party last night and you can't take away the joy of seeing the disappointment.
I didn't know Redstate still was a thing. I assumed Infowars or something took the audience.
but ultimately Senators have agency
I think we should acknowledge that voters have agency, too. You work with the electorate you have.
And don't get me started on the Founding Fucking Fathers ...
I wish we could have done better than Joe, but so far, I think we're very lucky to have Joe.
My argument is that Biden should have stuck to the plan and passed the bills together.
Maybe Manchin was bluffing on this, but there is nothing in his history -- and certainly nothing in his subsequent actions -- that suggest that he was willing to buy into your plan. And who knows what the fuck Sinema was up to.
I actually think that the Republicans are bluffing on the debt ceiling, and Biden's response should be "My offer is nothing."* With Manchin and Sinema, I think Biden took what he could get, and he got a lot.
*And then mint the trillion-dollar coin or cite the Constitution and spend the money anyway if the people who own the Republicans are actually that fucking crazy.
If you want some more popcorn, the worlds third largest crypto exchange is collapsing. Turns out some of the books may have been crooked? Hard to imagine.
Whoa, ran across the phrase "critical race theory" used in its actual non-Fox News meaning for the first time in my life! (Reviewing syllabi for a committee.)
That reminds me of my surprise when a coworker talked about going to her Humanist group and I asked if it was secular. She said yes and I started laughing because I didn't realize it existed outside of Republican propaganda. Then I apologized.
208: yeah, sure. I just think offering more help to younger people would have done more to build the future of the party.
Technically, Biden is pretty much always helping younger people.
Except when he's working with the Senate.
Excellent Senate news in both AZ and NV
https://twitter.com/baseballot/status/1590528120515338242
https://twitter.com/s_golonka/status/1590526982944849921
Nevada news seems to be looking even better now, if the trends hold with latest mail in ballots. Still not going to feel comfortable as long as the R is still in the lead. The Governor race may still be out of reach.
Yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic about both Nevada and Arizona in the Senate. It's been pretty touch and go though.
In the House, Boebert's seat has been a wild ride and plausibly could even be the deciding seat for the majority. Everything is still very uncertain though.
178: How would such a system get past Baker v. Carr and all of the "one person, one votes" law that followed? Or is the idea that the current Supreme Court is so into Calvinball that they'd just go along with bringing back county units?
There's a good chance they're going to rule that states can do away with presidential elections entirely so yes I'll say Calvinball.
218: Yeah, people got out over their skis a bit when someone (a local Coloradan) pointed out that most outstanding ballots were from D-strongholds or D-leaning areas. However, it appears they did not account for those votes apparently mostly being in-person vote, so much more R-leaning than overall %s would predict.
Understanding the partisan lean of mode of voting (and order in which those get counted) is absolutely key now to these kinds of projections. Thus, like in 2020, Arizona is an exercise in holding on to the margin after election night for Ds. And there is a category there of I believe "mail-in dropped off on election day" that gets counted after E-night and skews heavily red. For instance, yesterday there was a drop in Pima County (Arizona's bluest other than a couple of Native American-dominated ones) that was 2-1 R which lead to some howls (and even cries of fraud) from some less knowledgeable folks in my feed. And the knowledge needed is hyper-specific and even then sometimes when the voting/counting rules change the experts are guessing. For instance there was apparently some minor change in Arizona counting procedures this year that had the potential to subtly change the balance of Election night vs. final reporting but I have no idea if it did 9or would even be known yet).
221: I can't help feeling that it would be helpful in all sorts of ways to wait until all the votes for one area have been counted before you announce the results for that area rather than dribbling them out a few at a time. There's almost three months until these people have to start work - they've got the time!
219: I think the most plausible scenario would run something like what was attempted in Michigan in 202), and which I think is a massive hole in the arguments of the Pollyannaissm of some "experts" with their--"they just can't do the opposite of the election count" takes.
So, for Michigan 2020, at first there was deadlock on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers (2 Rs 2Ds--I think it is required to be so by law) where the Rs refused to certify. At some point they did certify. And somewhere in there they had talked with Trump, I forget when in the sequence of events. Then there was drama at the state level when one of the Rs of the State level board (also 2R 2 D) was under pressure to not "certify" but held firm (and was subsequently cashiered by the Rs) while the other R did not certify. Now in Michigan at the time there was a D SoS and D Governor who indicated they would certify anyway, but of course the (then R) Michigan legislature made noises (and notoriously several members went to the WH to meet with Trump).
But imagine that scenario with committed R "deniers" are in the key spots. the big urban county does not get certified due to too many black voters fraud, and the state board does not certify, and then more in sorrow than anger the R legislature is forced to select the electors and the R executive branch certifies and sends to Congress.
The Supremes held on all* of the fatuous 2020 challenges that got to them, but I think post ISL validation (if it happens) there would be a possibility of a 5-4 uphold (and upholding ISL in the first place would be a big signal that they might).
It's guardrails all the way down, and the guardrails are all people.
To serve mankind's elections.
*One PA category they sort of held on (I think post-E-day received ballots). Or at least delayed but it turned out to not be relevant for 2020.
222: Yes, and one thing some of pointed out, everyone (not just the crazies) can't stop saying things like "Trump was ahead in PA on the morning after the Election" and then Biden overtook him. I guess technically true if referring to the election *count*, but in another sense, Trump was way the fuck behind in the days leading up to E-Day and the nearly closed the gap on Election Day itself (going by when votes were cast).
This also leads to a lot of fatuous post-election "analysis" such as in 2016 when there was caterwauling about turnout when many millions of votes were not yet counted.
221 - And it's even harder, because the crazy partisan modalities by voting style (VBM vs in-person vs E-day dropoff) may have been to some extent a pandemic-era artifact; anecdotally, I saw some local reporters who know what they're talking about suggesting that there was more in-person voting from Democrats this year than in 2020.
Further to 221, here in Pennsylvania there are some aspects of the partisan divide in mail-in voting that are underappreciated. In particular the mail-in vote even in the reddest parts of the state are still much more D. For instance, in 2020 Trump won Mail-ins in only 4 very small rural counties, and in those instances only by a small amount. Another illustration is that in 2021 a Pa Judge who was way behind after E-day squeaked out a seemingly-improbable win by dominating mail-in votes. She actually gained more votes in the counting after Election Night from counties outside of Allegheny and Philly (and its big suburban counties) than from those blue strongholds. In part that is because the big counties for the most part have now gotten better at getting the mail-ins all prepped and ready to get scanned as soon as the polls close compared to 2020. For instance, by 6 AM on Wednesday, my precincts mail-in votes were already counted (not so in 2020). In most smaller counties it is still wake up on Wednesday and start dealing with the mail-ins. (Places like Allegheny generally still have more mail-ins to count--ones that arrived on Election day for instance, provisionals etc. --all very D-leaning).
And the extent of the partisan divide in method is pretty massive: The two precincts where I work went Fetterman 52% overall, mail was 82% and E-day was 43%.
Shapiro nearly beat Mastriano in E-day count (and still may. Philly usually still has some e-day votes outstanding for a few days) which is indeed a true whomping.
The PA voting law has some vague language and a lot of holes that lead to variations in procedures and things like whether you can "cure" you're ballot or not, or whether Eday postmark or arrival is needed etc. However, early in 2020 there was seeming bipartisan agreement in the PA state legislature to frim some of that up, and significantly to allow pre-Eday counting of mail-ins (like all big change legislation there were leaks and holes discovered after the fact*). However, once demonize the mail-ins became part of the Fascist takeover agenda in 2020 that all went out the window.
*For instance what happened with Medicare, and most assuredly did not for the most part with the ACA.
My God if you want to see the NYTimes NYTimesing you could not do better than this fucking write-up of Bennet in Colorado (currently up by 11%).
Headline and sub-hed:
Bennet wins a third Senate term in Colorado, in a tougher-than-expected fight.
Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, held off an unexpectedly strong challenge from Joe O'Dea, a Republican making his first run for public office.
First para: Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, was elected to a third full term on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, easily holding off a surprisingly strong challenge from Joe O'Dea, a Republican political newcomer.
Third para: With 82 percent of the votes reported, Mr. Bennet had 54.8 percent to Mr. O'Dea's 42.6 percent, The A.P. said, a significant spread that exceeded some pre-election polls.
The 538 average ended at 8.4%, so sure some slight poll overperformance (but that average included a late Trafalgar* result of +2). The 538 polling averages were between 7 and 11 the whole time (and actually showed little of the late R "surge". (The hacks at RCP had it at 5.7%).
And let's go to the historical record maybe it was a tight race compared to earlier campaigns. Oh, turns out Bennet won by 2% in his first election, and 6% in 2016.
So yeah, what a tough race. This article is truly beyond parody.
I also like this framing further down:
In their two Senate debates, Mr. O'Dea called Mr. Bennet ineffective and partisan, prompting Mr. Bennet to accuse his opponent of lies.
*Trafalgar does some non-transparent mojo I think mainly to correct for potential R-leaning non-response bias. Worked well in 2016 and somewhat 2020 so they became darlings. Also those poll "corrections" worked much better in the industrial Midwest than the West even in 2016.
I'm fascinated by the DeSantis hype in the wake of the election. I get the NY Post's motives and the motives of the rightwing establishment in general. Their goal is Trumpism without Trump. Likewise Douthat and Frum, who would prefer a more genteel form of fascism. They're just talking their own book.
And credulous, unsophisticated political reporting is the NYT's thing. And anyway, DeSantis really did have a good day at the polls.
But Rubio had the same kind of good day.
I'm a bit surprised, though, that Chait, generally a shrewd observer of politics, whatever else you think of him, has bought into this.
Unless Trump is incapacitated, DeSantis isn't even going to run (I predict). All of DeSantis's mojo comes from voters' belief that he is a Trump acolyte. Without that, he's Ted Cruz.
I don't do prediction markets, but DeSantis is incredibly pricey at 41 cents a contract for the Republican nomination at Predictit. If Trump (37 cents) doesn't run, then Look to Don Jr. or Tucker Carlson (both at 1c).
"Trafalgar" seems a bad name for a polling company since the side with fewer people actually won Trafalgar.
219: I don't understand what the problem is here. Each district has the same size, each person's vote counts the same for voting for their "electoral college" representative, and then the electoral college votes for governor with each vote counting the same. How could that possibly be a constitutional problem?
Think about president, or even senate before direct election of senators. There's just no problem here. (And historically no problem at all, until we had both severe density polarization *and* granular data and computers that allow more effective gerrymandering.)
Hell you could just let the house choose the governor, no possible problem with that. It's what most countries do! Are they going to say Westminster doesn't have a "republican form of government"? But I think that's less likely because it could cause more backlash than an electoral college, people want to vote for governor but don't care how their votes count so long as their preferred candidate wins.
Doesn't Trump still have to run to avoid indictment? Even without that, there's no way the guy could stand to be talked about by DeSantis, Cruz, Graham for God's sake, as a has been they're all glad to have moved on from. If he doesn't run, he has to stage a multiday version of The Bachelor.
Emerson was always correct that the NYT's shitty political coverage reflects the owners' preferences, but I still wonder just how much of a readership there is for Dems in Disarray, as a constant.
It's pretty clear that we've lost the new congressional seat, to a guy who was too corrupt to be in the Trump cabinet. This especially stings because at the same time the MAGA challenge to one of our Supreme Court justices was beaten back, and also the 'born alive' ballot measure was defeated. Here in the county, we fell short by only getting 63% of the vote for the D candidate, while 65-66 isn't impossible.
"Trafalgar" seems a bad name for a polling company since the side with fewer people actually won Trafalgar.
That also happened in the 2016 presidential election.
233.1 He certainly thinks so. But two years out? No way he's going to avoid an indictment.
Nile Group: "The Republicans will be completely destroyed".
Denmark Strait Public Opinion Inc.: "Expect an early result".
Jutland Surveys, Ltd: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody likely voter models today".
231-32: This you can just gerrymander in full control by rural areas forever from 178 indicates the problem.
227: It goes very nicely with the Times' poll (which they commissioned! Their polling analyst, Nate Cohn, chose the districts and hired the pollsters!) of four "classic swing districts". The Democrat was winning in 4/4 and the article duly went on to note that the polling reflected grim tidings for Republicans. I truly believe that this isn't even Emersonian "the Cossacks work for the czar" stuff, but rather that the reporters just listen to GOP consulting bragging and Democratic consultants flipping out and write their stories based on that. (Maybe with a dollop of "things look bad for Democrats here in New York, so how could it be different in a state no one cares about like Michigan?")
They even have a song about that in Ohio.
A random columnist's mea culpa in WaPo. I'm surprised people still use presidential approval ratings as any guidepost for congressional predictions as he notes he did - for both Biden and Trump, everyone on the other side these days responds "disapprove", and then the rating gets driven lower by people on the same side dissatisfied with them (lefty Dems, anti-Trump Republicans, etc.) who will still vote with them congressionally. So "historically low approval" means nothing.
You made me click on a Henry Olson story.
He seems averagely shallow but is he considered especially heinous?
Never mind. I was thinking of Hugh Hewitt.
I would do anything for loveschadenfreude, but I wouldn't do that.
238: Goddammit, I couldn't even type it, it was so boneheaded. Winning 4/4 swing seats was grim tidings for Democrats. Cohn's explanation on Twitter was, "Uh, those seats were poorly chosen to have predictive value." Clearly even he the polls guy at the paper was believing vibes rather than the actual numbers in front of him.
246: They were palpably embarrassed at showing good numbers for Sharice Davids in Kansas, who went on to win by almost exactly the same margin as in the poll. Cohn is very good at what he does despite the cultural weirdness of NYT political coverage.
247: I see a lot of that narrative, but I'm confused about exactly which tweet or article it's referring to. The main thread looks pretty measured. "Obviously, four districts can't say a ton about the battle for the House. But on balance, the polls are better for Democrats than I would have guessed given our national polling (yes, the methodology is identical), esp in KS-03 -- which feels like a possible outlier" but also says "Though oddly enough, our KS-3 poll from 9/18 also ranks as one of the most surprising polls we ever published and... it did turn out ok."
https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1585789761654231040
I came out of reading that thread at the time thinking maybe that poll was a statistical outlier but also maybe KS-03 is a weird race, and it's hard to be sure from one poll. But the reaction now seems to be reacting to something more one-sided than that thread.
Update on the NH house.... currently there are 6 races where the winning margin is 8 votes or less, so final outcome might be a while.
248: That thread is what I was referring to. It's relatively measured as these things go; Cohn is a smart guy and good at this. But the main thrust is still about how these good poll results for Dems are still consistent with predicting a GOP House.
233.2 "Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to. " - Hannen Swaffer.
I suggest this applies equally to United States, and indeed to every country where the media aren't controlled by the state. Emerson was late to the party, but it's an important point.
My district just elected the first trans person to the state House!
248: The original article from the New York Times that accompanied the polls--which, again, were specifically selected by the New York Times to be swing districts, and which the Times' own, now-proven-correct polls showed Democrats sweeping--contained the following as its second paragraph: "A new series of House polls by The New York Times and Siena College across four archetypal swing districts offers fresh evidence that Republicans are poised to retake Congress this fall as the party dominated among voters who care most about the economy."
And then in the Twitter thread, Cohn goes on to say, "Why? One reason: our understanding of the state of the race in these districts v nationwide. Other than KS-3, these results are all very much in line with expectations from private polling -- and that polling shows the GOP on track to take the House... A world where Biden+6-8 races like NM02 and NV01 are pure tossups is not a tossup for national control. It's just not"
Look, if you chose "four archetypal swing districts" (not my words!), and polling showing a Democratic sweep confirmed your priors that the GOP is about to romp, that doesn't match up with the reader's understanding of swing districts and you did a bad job judging things. And Cohn's punditry is entirely wrong, as here we are two days after Election Day, and it's a tossup for national control.
Clearly one of the things going on is that a lot of unreleased polling seemed to indicate a terrible night for Democrats and a bunch of journalists used that (and whatever lines GOP operatives and even panicky Democrats were feeding them; and possibly whatever stinky vibes were happening in New York, where Democrats really did have a bad night even if the "Hochul is going to lose!" stories were nonsense produced with an assist by Trafalgar) instead of the public polling to write their stories, but Cohn was clearly shading towards "ignore the polls, trust my gut" and the article (not written by Cohn) was worse. It goes with the story everyone's been dunking on about how Michael Bennett (a politician I'm not that fond of!) won a tighter-than-expected race against surprise GOP wunderkind Joe O'Dea, and you have to read to the last paragraph to discover that Bennett rinsed O'Dea by 13 points.
And Cohn was the good Nate this cycle, pointing out that Trafalgar's inclusion in the 538 averages was skewing people's sense about how likely Democrats were to hold the Senate.
I think I was persuaded by discussion somewhere, possibly here, that 538 does a good job on the polling math from 2016-2020 despite whatever disagreements I have with opinions of the people running the site or doing NYT horse race coverage and punditry. But also I'm not that interested in polling so I didn't really look this year beyond trusting the arguments that this year would be genuinely hard to call.
This is a very boring comment to say that I never read almost anything a poll-pundit named Nate says about anything but I'm glad the math still looks ok.
And Cohn's punditry is entirely wrong, as here we are two days after Election Day, and it's a tossup for national control.
Also the Dems won NM02 and could still win NV01.
Nate Silver is now boasting about how 538's Polls-Only ("Lite") model did very well at predicting the result after spending all cycle downplaying that model and playing up the Deluxe version that majorly overestimated Republican chances.
It's wild that even data guys like the Nates who made their reputations by undermining vibes-based punditry are now just wallowing in vibes even as they continue to do the data work.
Nate Silver is now boasting about how 538's Polls-Only ("Lite") model did very well at predicting the result after spending all cycle downplaying that model and playing up the Deluxe version that majorly overestimated Republican chances.
It's true that the Deluxe version was presented as the superior option (specifically because it hedged slightly for polling uncertainty), but wouldn't you still say that either model was a more accurate starting place than the general vibes journalism?
My anxiety was such that I tried to avoid learning what the polls said and got my impression of the races entirely from the subject line of fundraising emails that I was deleting.
263: Absolutely. I have no problem with the data journalism project itself. It's just striking how much even its architects have been letting the vibes shape their own takes this cycle.
It's not even problematic to doubt the polls in this sort of weird situation, and looking more at fundamentals is a totally reasonable approach to take given the circumstances. (However, as Nate Silver used to point out all the time, actual quantitative fundamentals-based models have terrible track records.)
Since I still read TPM (subscribe, even) but not any other politics website anymore, I got all my poll summaries from there and felt confident in "who even knows?" as my expectation for this election. Part of why I felt ok watching election night coverage rather than avoiding it.
I just decided that I wouldn't feel relieved by good poll news and would be unnerved by bad poll news, so I stayed away.
I'm thinking of joining Tumblr and using that as my news source.
Tumblr is now offering its own blue checkmark and advertising it on Twitter.
I'm holding off until they bring back actual porn.
My cousin keeps putting up artistic photos on Facebook, so of which are of topless women. I guess he's immune to Facebook jail or maybe Facebook's moderators really like tasteful nudity from the 1920s.
Two weeks in and Musk is already floating bankruptcy. I'm sure his creditors are thrilled.
The real treasure is the libs you've owned along the way.
Vote Forward has now released its Georgia runoff letter campaign. If you want to balance out the doomscrolling with some action, adopt 20 addresses!
200: Meanwhile the iceberg is getting genuinely mad.
Meant to ask, were you riffing on something with this? I seem to recall recently seeing something of the form "something something XYZ, and XYZ is mad at us" where XYZ is not a thing to which one would normally attribute emotions and was a scary thing to have mad at us.
I may be completely imagining it as happens to me in my dotage. Or alternatively, it might be something I absolutely should be aware of that I've forgotten. As also happens to me these days.
I'm just going to sent money. Having been on the receiving end of letters, I have my doubts on its effectiveness.
262: Yeah, I was going to disagree a bit on your initial Nate Cohn assessment. He seems to be decent with the numbers, but the allure of punditry appears to be too strong. The other Nate from the other Nate seems to have gone even further down that path.
For Nate Cohn, the thing I found most disagreeable from him was his almost angry dismissals of Barton Gellman's articles (from between Eday 2002 and Jan6 and after as well as recently) pointing out the threats to our electoral mechanisms. Various things that Gellman postulated as potential disruptors (Trump-friendly Supreme Court ruling or calling out the troops) and Cohn used those to trash him despite Gellman getting the overall concern absolutely correct. And he had a contemptuous tweet about Gellman's article this year on the threat of the PA/Wisconsin/Arizona/Michigan crazies getting in position to run elections. (I think he may have deleted that fairly quickly.)
I myself am contemptuous of anyone who his contemptuous of the possibility of scenario like that in 223 actually working.
280, 281: Ah yes. And the thing was literally an ice thing floating in the water so quite apt.
Yeah, I was going to disagree a bit on your initial Nate Cohn assessment. He seems to be decent with the numbers, but the allure of punditry appears to be too strong. The other Nate from the other Nate seems to have gone even further down that path.
I don't think we're really disagreeing. Maybe in magnitude but not in kind.
I posted the same link as in 280 a few days ago because I couldn't stop laughing about it. Still can't. In more official media, I think the twitter meltdown may have ushered in a golden age of journalistic asides.
The Verge reached out to Musk for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department.
The social media company was running a negative cash flow of several billion dollars, Mr. Musk added, without specifying if that was an annual figure.
And that's just today.
286 - And it's sucking all the schadenfreude out of the room over crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried Jimmy Stewarting (on Twitter!) his apology that he doesn't have $6 billion of his clients' money any more because it's all in the houses and business of the good people of Bedford Falls hands of the hedge fund run by Sam Bankman-Fried, and that hedge fund lost it in a perfectly innocent and definitely legal manner.
Do the clients really want $6 billion dollars at the cost of destroying their relationship with their friends?
I looked it up. Turns out they want the money.
Speaking of money, when do employees start quitting Twitter just because they are afraid they won't get paid?
Encouraging drops from Arizona and Nevada. Kelly getting close to being called (I think would be except for some of the uncertainty in how counts are dropping, and there is a batch of in=person that had some problems not counted.
Hobbs/Lake (Governor) may be in play; but Hobbs running several points behind Kelly. In all completed counties (mostly small) Kelly was several points ahead of Biden in 2020.
In Nevada, Masto clawing back ground at an acceptable rate; down less than 10K. Concern is some rural mail-ins still left. Not sure how extreme voting mode partisanship is in Nevada compared to PA (I'm guessing not as extreme).
I remember seeing an oral history a few years ago of someone who'd been at a company that more or less came to an end in the late 80s or early 90s.* The company hadn't made its financial situation public and this guy got laid off with severance and a farewell party, as if times were normal. The people at the party who consoled him on losing his job lost their jobs not long after, on much worse financial terms, without ceremony.
*It came out of bankruptcy for a bit after its big collapse but eventually closed up.
I guess there's some thought among the twitter semi-randos (journalists and people in business/econ who don't seem to be impersonators) that bankruptcy might be the best for Musk if he can get through it because that might make it easier to restructure it into something else, like a social system that includes payments(?). I guess something something WeChat something?
Maybe one idea for the twitter purchase, that might have been very wrong, was that it would cost less to take twitter with its existing user base and turn that into something something social payments crypto banking investment democratization peasants revolt against the bluecheck lords and colonize mars something rather than building something new from scratch.
hello, nice site, please don't spam filter my last comment (even though one sentence looks a lot like spam)
$44 billion is a lot of money to fuck around like that.
Problem is I'm not sure he's capable of finding out.
293: I haven't seen that but I have seen speculation that he's smashing everything so quickly and completely that he may drive it directly into Chapter 11 bankruptcy where someone buys it for pennies without majorly restructuring the business. No idea how realistic that is.
Another good line I saw was that he's going to announce "full self-owning" functionality for all tweets.
WTF is going on with trump and DeSantis?
Colbert on the Red Wave:
"It was a salmon drizzle, a rosy wash . . . It's like what happens when you accidentally wash your Klan robes with your MAGA hat."
299: Nothing terribly interesting. DeSantis is positioning himself as Trump's political heir. Trump resents this because he has no intention of ever departing.
More Colbert"
"Mastriano honored confederate tradition by losing in Pennsylvania."
292: yeah when a company is circling the drain it's better to be one of the early ones let go. Better severance, beating the rush.
The unfunny bigoted asshole one.
It is completely wild to contemplate that you used to be able to build an entire career on a shtick so lame that it wouldn't capture TikTok for even a moment's breadth. There really used to be so very little funny content.
The 80s had boredom in a way kids today can't understand.
Nevada Senate race now basically even after the latest update.
Yeah, the Senate is done, we won a majority. Maybe even made it one bigger. Will make a big difference with judges. We'll need every seat we can get though, the map in 2024 is an absolute bloodbath.
I linked Chait's argument in 228, and he develops that argument further here. He acknowledges the inclination of people like me to mock him for his views.
Chait is careful and judicious and doesn't predict a DeSantis nomination -- just as I don't predict a Trump nomination. Chait responds to my argument thusly:
This ignores a crucial difference. In both 2016, and the aftermath of the insurrection, there was no unified Republican alternative.
Are you fucking kidding me? Even DeSantis doesn't present himself as an alternative to Trump. He presents himself as Trump's potential successor.
I think Chait is sometimes importantly misguided, but this is just stupid:
After the insurrection, a brief window opened to move on, but the party lacked any obvious figure to rally around. (DeSantis had yet to make the key moves consolidating his support on the right.)
DeSantis still hasn't come out against the insurrection in any meaningful way, and he never will.
As best as I can reckon, Chait's entire point is that DeSantis is a Republican candidate that the National Review and other fascist Trump skeptics can enthusiastically support. That's plausible, but who gives a fuck about the National Review? Murdoch matters much more, and Murdoch as already shown he will fall in line when the time comes.
DeSantis is screwed the moment he comes out against Trump, and Trump can come out against DeSantis any time he wants. How can smart people possibly think otherwise?
Chait, quoting Cernovich:
"The MAGA slop that's going out is that the Trump-endorsed McConnell, McCarthy, and Graham are somehow at fault for why Trump-backed candidates underperformed. It's never Trump's fault," and added, "DeSantis needs to declare today."
You know who doesn't agree with this? DeSantis, who will not declare unless Trump becomes completely non-viable as a candidate. (Which could happen!) Even then, I'd take the field against DeSantis.
I think if DeSantis really went for it, maybe he could topple Trump. But he's shown no inclination to really go after him. He has to say "Trump got his ass kicked and I won in a landslide, time to go with the winner." That doesn't require being anti-insurrection, just confronting Trump. But as they say, "if you aim at the devil, make sure you don't miss."
DeSantis looks like he wants to remake Florida on the model of Russia and remake liberal parts of the US on the model of what Russia's been trying to do in Ukraine. I know it comes down to the Electoral College math, but I'm still having trouble seeing how he can get a majority of votes in a national election given that Trump never did either. But I don't know Florida at all, so maybe a big win there is a sign of broader appeal than a big win in other red states would be.
Except for wanting to seize the authoritarian-curious moment, I don't see why DeSantis, who doesn't seem to be that old, doesn't try to just wait out Trump.
I have no idea what is going to happen and am avoiding Florida as best I can. I just know that the PA results make it unlikely that the Trump campaign can cheat enough here to win.
314: I don't share your belief that DeSantis could plausibly topple Trump as things stand right now, but he hasn't gone after Trump because he doesn't yet believe this is his best opportunity. I think he's clearly right.
Media figures like Chait or Jonah Golberg or whoever desperately want to believe that Republicans are looking for someone less obviously vile than Trump. That's just not true. For 50 years or more, Republican voters have labored to bring forth Donald Trump. And even now, everyone with any goddam sense at all understands that Trump's successor must be at least as horrifyingly awful as Trump. Mitt Romney is an awful human being, but the Romney tendency is no longer viable in the Republican Party nationally because it is insufficiently grotesque.
For the Republican electorate, Trump is actually a bit of a squish. He's vaccinated. I don't think he's killed a single Jew. We can still hope that the American electorate will never accept death camps, but the Republican Party is still searching for the bottom. It is still trying to figure out how repugnant the party is prepared to be, and still hasn't settled on a definitive answer.
316: Well of course. You and DeSantis are on the same page on this.
They're not looking for someone less vile, but the might be looking for someone who is less of a loser.
Someone with tighter pants and a firmer set of jowls.
320: To Trump's supporters -- that is to say, to the rank-and-file of the Republican Party -- Trump is in no sense a loser. He won in 2016 -- not just the electoral college; not just the popular vote, but he actually had more people show up to his inauguration than Obama did, and he has pictures to prove it. You can see NPR here reporting both sides of the crowd-size debate.
DeSantis can't touch Trump. In some theoretical world, Desantis might be a loser. He might get fewer votes than an opponent and might, for that reason, get turned out of office. Not only has this never happened to Trump, it can't happen to Trump.
When DeSantis wins, he only wins because of Trump. Trump says this, and even DeSantis doesn't deny it.
At this late date, it's amazing to me that people still don't get Trump. DeSantis certainly gets Trump, and that's why he doesn't challenge him.
We're stuck with him until he dies or gets his penis stuck in a glue trap at another Wendy's.
There's a charming innocence among people who imagine that Republican voters might prefer DeSantis to Trump. I believe journalists like the the WaPo reporter here are simply too decent to grasp the world as it exists.
This reporter, for example, informs us that even Jesse Watters of Fox News is conflicted about Trump:
"I love Trump. I want him to run. I think he's a great candidate. I loved him as president," Fox News host Jesse Watters said Wednesday evening. But he added: "He brings out such insanity on the left. They will walk over hot coals to vote against Donald Trump."
Allow me to translate: Watters says he thinks Trump is AWESOME. But, he adds, reasonable people should stop for a moment and consider the possibility that Trump is SUPER DUPER INCREDIBLY AWESOME AND ABSOLUTELY KICKS ASS.
Charley @233 invokes Emerson, who blames Trump-adjacent management for the behavior of reporters like this. That's not entirely wrong, but those managers and owners are themselves desperate to not confront what is happening. They are confounded by evil when they confront it (and yes, sometimes they are active co-conpirators).
Emerson himself is likewise an innocent. He will tell you that some significant portion of these Trump enthusiasts are, at heart, merely misled Bernie Sanders supporters.
Thomas Frank, like Emerson, asks What's The Matter with Kansas, and likewise comes up with the wrong answer. What's the matter with Kansas? The truth is, they're a bunch of fucking assholes.
Several orgs have been calling Nevada for CCM, which means Dems officially hold the Senate regardless of what happens with the Georgia runoff.
And the House is still in play. It would be amazing if we held the trifecta even after all that.
Still very hard to see all of the remaining in-doubt House races* breaking for Democrats, even in California. But it's probably all mail-ins being counted now.
*California has many un-called House races, but only a few of them seem to be in doubt. I keep hoping Michelle Steel will lose but her lead seems just a bit too large. Meanwhile, Katie Porter is not out of the woods yet but does seem to have been increasing her lead as counting continues.
The Times thing is helpful for keeping an eye on the House. At this point the Dems need to keep the lead everywhere they're leading, and overtake in four more districts once mail-ins are counted. Some of those seem more mathematically possible than others, I guess it really comes down to the consistency of mail-in skew?