Rov_Scam
8d ago
Just before AI music became a thing, Ted Gioia talked about a Spotify fake artist problem he discovered. Bascially, he noticed that playlists with titles like "Jazz for a Rainy Afternoon" wouldn't include any artists that he recognized (and as a jazz critic he would recognize more than the average bear), and further investigation revealed that the "albums" the songs were from would only have one or two songs. Looking into this even further, he discovered that he couldn't find much information at all about these artists, except addresses in the Stockholm area. The conclusion he came to was that since some music styles—jazz, chillout, orchestral, etc.—are driven more by algorithms than individual artists (by virtue of people telling Alexa "Play relaxing music" or whatever), it was cheaper for Spotify to hire studio musicians to record generic slop so they wouldn't have to pay royalties to real musicians.
In the 90s, I was at a discount store with my dad during Christmas season and he bought a CD titled "Jazz for Christmas Eve" for a dollar or something. It didn't have the name of any purported artist, just song titles. The music was entirely MIDI. A few years later the mother of a family friend was going into the home, and we were helping to clean out her house. I took the records, mostly junk, but there was one that stood out. It was called "The Hits of Nat King Cole" or something similar and had a picture of Mr. Cole on the cover. Towards the bottom, in relatively small print, it said "Performed by Bob Gigliotti" or whoever. The liner notes weren't extensive but mostly talked about Nat King Cole. The only mention of the gentleman who was actually performing on the album was a brief paragraph that said that he was, in fact, a singer, and that he does a good job with the material. When I played the record, I was hit with some guy doing an uncanny Nat King Cole impression.
The point I am trying to make is that cheap, mass-produced slop has existed in the music industry for as long as production costs were cheap enough to justify it. An enterprising music historian could probably do a book-length treatment of the subject, but in the end this has only been a minor footnote in the history of music. And even in the limited instances where it has historically gotten a foothold, tides shifted away from it. Consider Muzak. I hesitate to call it slop because, up until the 1980s, it was produced with a degree of professionalism and creativity that belied its status. But this was more for the pleasure of the people making it than anything else; it was always intended to be nothing more than musical wallpaper for stores, offices, and other public places, with orchestral arrangements of popular hits almost algorithmically selected to ensure the proper pacing. In the 1960s it was ubiquitous, but these days the only national chain I can think of that still plays this kind of music is Hobby Lobby. Retail started shifting to name artists in the 1980s, starting with inoffensive "soft rock" but more recently including practically anything that's been popular since the 1960s.
The AI doomers have tried to make the argument that because this music can be generated so quickly and so inexpensively it's trivial to just completely flood the market, and cash-strapped record companies would love it if they could generate product without having to pay the artists, producers, etc. While this may seem like a compelling argument the music industry could have always done this, but they haven't even attempted it in 100 years of existence. Making music is obviously a skill, and making music that people want to listen to (and pay for) is an even greater skill, but it's not a particularly unique skill. Any city is going to have hundreds of musicians who write their own material, practice in their spare time, play in bars in the weekends, and are good enough that most of the people in attendance enjoy the performance. If the record companies wanted to, they could have always signed as many of these musicians as they could, pay for a recording session, pay the musicians a low flat fee, and completely spam the market for little cost. If they get a hot or two out of the deal, great. If not, they're only out ten grand.
In reality, major labels are highly selective about who they sign, and those they do sign usually get significant financial backing. A local band recording at a local studio can get an album out the door for about 5 grand if they're well-rehearsed. A major label will spend, on average, $250,000 to $300,000 to record the album. The label will also pay for promotion, which can run into the millions if touring is involved. And they would always prefer to spend money on a proven star rather than a nobody. In other words, the model they operate on is the exact opposite of the one where AI takes over.
And it gets even worse. In an alternate universe where record labels operated by signing cheap labor and spamming the market, that at least allows for the possibility of being able to capitalize on the hits. AI doesn't even allow that, since there's no guarantee that you'll get output that's plausibly by the same fake band. Even big stars like The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, and Taylor Swift have had occasional flops; there's no guarantee that because an artist is popular that any individual release will be successful. But at least when you got The Supremes in the studio you were guaranteed a Supremes record. With AI you just have to keep generating and hope that you eventually get a Supremes record, and even that doesn't guarantee you anything.
As much as AI doomers talk about how it's going to take things over, it's not. It's going to replace slop, but slop has always existed. The business model doesn't really allow for the kind of dystopian future they're predicting.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The golden era for everything is always 20 years ago. That's how long it takes society to weed its collective memory of the bad and keep the good. Everything people say about the garbage we have today vs. the awesome stuff we had yesterday was being said yesterday about the stuff we had the day before and so on. That goes for pretty much everything - cars, appliances, movies, etc. Really, it's a mix of good and bad, but given enough time, it all becomes good.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Pinging in @Jiro. I understand you're argument, and while I addressed the potential adversarial motive in selection of the evidence, it was more as an aside, an observation that would give me another reason to be suspicious. But it isn't essential to my argument, because this failure mode seems to happen regardless of whether the observer has an ulterior motive, and is usually the result of a completely logical chain of events.
The cases I was referring to where this happens with police is where they get a Level 2 Description and become on it to the point that they fail to appreciate how broad it is. Take my example from above, where a witness sees a perpetrator running from a crime scene who is an African American teenager, short and very overweight. Let's suppose that a couple hours after the incident a beat cop canvassing the neigborhood come across a young man of that description who is 5'4" and 200 pounds in a pool hall a few blocks from the crime scene. Detectives question him, and while they don't get much in the way of evidence, they don't entirely buy his story. So they spend the next several weeks investigating him, never coming up with anything useful, but also never considering that he might not be the guy. Years later someone writes a book about the case and talks to an old cop who insists that this kid was the killer but they never had enough to prove it.
The police in a case like that didn't go on a wild goose chase because they had some special reason they wanted to pin a crime on that kid, they did it because they came across him early in the investigation and he matched a description given to them by an eyewitness. They didn't consider that the description could apply to hundreds of people, and that they should have been casting a broader net rather than narrowing the scope of the investigation early based on the description alone. It ultimately doesn't matter if Baker has an animus against the police. Even if he was arbitrarily reviewing CCTV footage to try to find a match, if he found some guy walking outside a restaurant who matched to the same degree and started making the argument that it must be that guy based on nothing else, then it's still just as bad.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
As a Democrat, here's what I can tell you, keeping things as neutral as possible:
Going back to March and the last shutdown fight, a lot of Democrats wanted the government shut down over the Big Beautiful Bill, and Schumer caved. I was on Schumer's side at the time. The rhetoric among the pro-shutdown Democrats, who tended to be further left, was that, in the wake of the 2024 elections, their options were limited, and they had to be willing to use the one weapon left in the arsenal to avoid being run over roughshod by Trump. Schumer et al. were more cautious, arguing that shutdowns weren't popular when Republicans did them and Democrats insisting on one could take their situation from bad to worse. Furthermore, this was when DOGE was running wild in the Executive Branch and there was fear that the increased discretion given to Trump due to a shutdown would exacerbate that as well.
Fast forward to October and another shutdown is looming. Whatever concerns about DOGE and the like existed in the spring have evaporated since Trump doesn't seem to be paying much heed to any constraints on the office, and the pressure on Democratic leadership to Do Something is at fever pitch. Democrats settle on the strategy of making the ACA subsidies the center of the shutdown. These increased premium subsidies were part of COVID-era relief but are set to expire, and the Democrats want to make them permanent. They've settled on this tack because, back in the spring, Republicans tried to sell making the Trump tax cuts permanent on the grounds that it wasn't a spending increase, just making the status quo permanent. Now the sides are reversed, with Republicans saying that they aren't trying to include any new Republican priorities but are just passing a "clean" spending bill, while Democrats are saying that they too are just preserving the status quo. In the meantime, Democrats are warning voters that if the subsidies aren't renewed, ACA insurance premiums could double.
Republicans have said that they'd be willing to negotiate subsidy extensions, but only after passing a budget. Democrats said this is unacceptable since they'd have no leverage in negotiations after the spending bill was passed. So the whole thing has ground to a stalemate, with everyone waiting to see who will blink first. Part of the reason Democrats were always reluctant to embrace a shutdown is that Federal workers are either furloughed or forced to work without pay, and they don't want to lose that voting bloc. But Republicans shot themselves in the foot on that front by insisting on mass firings and limited job security. The Democrats do not figure that making the shutdown strategy bipartisan will cause any mass exodus of Federal workers to the Republican party. Even after a large public service union condemned the shutdown a couple weeks ago the Democrats didn't blink, finding it very unlikely that they had done enough to lose any endorsements.
Polling has also suggested that voters will blame the shutdown on Republicans based solely on the expectation that the party that controls the executive and both houses of Congress can't credibly blame the other party for their own failure to conduct business. Polling blaming Republicans has held steady throughout the past month. Both of these questions were resolved conclusively last Tuesday with Democrats overperforming expectations in off-year elections, including in Virginia, a state flush with Federal employees. I think part of the reason this may work out better than previous shutdowns is that the Democrats seem narrowly focused on an issue that directly affects millions of people. If the subsidies expire these premiums will increase significantly, and the effects would be fairly evenly spread among Democrats and Republicans. This is different than the 2013 shutdown which was vaguely about lowr spending, or the 2019 shutdown that was about border wall funding, an issue to remote from most people's direct experience.
Aside from polling and election results, two other things may show that things are going in the Democrats' favor, both seeming own-goals from Trump. The first is that he has called for the Senate to end the fillibuster, which would end the shutdown. The Republicans have shown little inclination to do this, since they argued that it was necessary for Democracy when the Democrats wanted to get rid of it, and the consequences of doing so may be worse than whatever negative fallout they get from the shutdown. Unlike Trump, congressional Republicans understand the long game, and want to preserve at least some power if the Democrats take the Oval Office in 2028. The other seeming own-goal from Trump is the current fight about SNAP benefits. Trump moved heaven and earth to get the military paid, but he seems bound and determined to make sure nobody gets food stamps until the shutdown ends. I can understand the initial position, trying to prove that shutdowns have consequences, but once a court ordered that emergency funds be used he had an offramp. Now that he has appealed the ruling (And gotten a stay; after funds for November had been dispersed) it just looks like he's being vindictive against poor people. Especially since he doesn't seem to think military employees should suffer these consequences.
I don't know what the likelihood is of either side caving, but right now it seems like the Democrats have the upper hand. There's nothing in the election results or polling to suggest they've lost any real support, and now that we're entering open enrollment season the premium increases are no longer going to be theoretical. The Democrats have already offered a compromise whereby they would agree to a one-year extension of the subsidies, but the Republicans are still insisting on a "clean bill" with no additional appropriation. For all the heat Schumer gets from the left, I think he's a smarter political operator than people give him credit for. A spring shutdown wouldn't have gone well, and would have looked like another in a long line of defeats. As things stand right now, the Democrats have zero reason to end the shutdown, and their position will only get stronger as time goes on.
For the Republicans' part, it appears that they made a miscalculation by assuming that the party causing the shutdown would be blamed for it, and have now put themselves in the position where they'd be better off negotiating but are refusing to do so because they've already taken the stance that negotiating is akin to caving. Trump isn't helping, in that he's insisting on total victory and actively doing things that seem more designed to piss off Democrats than to improve his negotiating position. If nothing else, however this ends, they're giving Democrats a lot of grist for the mill come election time.
@gattsuru makes some good points about the gait analysis, but I don't think you even need to go that far. I spent 2 1/2 hours at the DMV this afternoon and did some reading about gait analysis. I learned that the way it works is that analysts break gait down into components, and analyze those components into categories based on how prevalent they are in the population. Like a lot of other things, when a gait analyst says there's a certain percentage match, what they're saying is that, based on the attributes they observed, they can eliminate that percentage of the population. With that being said, from here on out I'll assume that the science is bulletproof, because I don't know that that even matters in this context.
I've read a lot of crime books in my life, and one of the things that's always interested me is suspect descriptions and how useful they are. I've read about cases where police failed to solve the crime because they seemed to focus on a description that wasn't very good, and others where they didn't solve the crime and dismissed good descriptions as being too vague. I've also seen authors excoriate police departments for not focusing on suspects who matched relatively vague descriptions. So during my time at the DMV I also thought about a rubric that could be used to categorize suspect descriptions.
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A Level 1 Description would be one that eliminates 90–99% of the population. This may seem high, but anything less than that isn't really even a description. If the suspect is described as a black female, well, only 12–14% of the population is black, and about half of them are female, so that eliminates 93% of the population right there. If the suspect is described as a young, tall, white male, 40–45% of the population is white males, eliminating children and anyone too old to be reasonably described as young and you cut that in half, and cut it in half again to get rid of anyone shorter than average height, and you're down to 10%. These kinds of descriptions are of little to no use in a police investigation and are completely worthless in a trial.
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A Level 2 Description is one that eliminates 99–99.9% of the population. These can be of some use in an investigation but are of little to no use in a trial. Suppose the man running from the scene was described as an African American teenager, short and extremely overweight. Take the 7% who are black men, teenagers being about 20% of them, divide by half again to get people shorter then average, then in half again to get anyone plausibly described as overweight (always use the larger numbers), and we're in that 0.1–1% range. But in most places there are going to be entirely too many short, black, overweight teenage boys for police to identify and question them all.
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A Level 3 Description would eliminate 99.9–99.99% of the population, but still include between one person in a thousand and one in ten thousand. To give a few examples:
- Caucasian male, age 50 to 55, tall, athletic, blue eyes, grey hair, driving an older model pickup.
- Caucasian female, 20–23 years old, brown hair and eyes, about 5'7", large breasts, extremely good looking, piercing in the nose and tattoo on the lower back.
- Hispanic female, 45 to 50, extremely short, somewhat overweight, perhaps 4'11" and 130 pounds, bushy eyebrows, wears glasses, blue painted fingernails.
These kinds of descriptions are of value to police and may play some role in a trial, but no one could be reasonably convicted of a crime based on them. It's also worth noting here that some of the attributes are changeable, and this needs to factor into the analysis as well.
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A Level 4 Description would eliminate 99.99–99.999% of the population, but still probably include a few people in any decent sized metro:
- Caucasian male, 40–45 years old, between 5'2" and 5'5", thin, long, sandy-colored hair, large glasses, large square face, smokes cigarettes, looks a little like John Denver.
- African-American male in his 20s, average height, muscular build, shaved head, several gold teeth, gold earring in left ear, prominent scar on neck. Very deep voice with trace of a Jamaican accent.
If you match a description of this specificity you should expect the police to come to your door, but it still wouldn't be enough to convict absent other information.
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A Level 5 description would exclude 99.999% of the population or more, aka 1 person in 100,000 or less. This is the point where you stop combining combinations of independent variables that belong to lots of people and zero in on very specific attributes that are themselves fairly unique: A missing finger, a particular tattoo, one green nipple, etc. At this level you're on the defensive; if you match a Level 5 Description, you're going to need an alibi.
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A Level 6 description is a description that applies to only one person: Fingerprints, DNA, being recognized by someone who knows you. A Level 6 Description is an identification.
I bring all this up because there's a certain level of obfuscation going on, both with the science and the use of percentages. Supposing we didn't have any gait analysis but a witness who told the FBI that he observed the person in the video and it was a man who appeared to be of East Indian descent, and Baker claimed that Rajneesh Sarna was the perpetrator on the basis that he's a male of Indian descent living in the DC area, everyone would find it ridiculous. Yet Indians only make up 3% of the population of the DC Metro, and assuming men are about half of those, and we're at a 98.5% "match". Actually higher because a certain percentage of that population is going to be children. All this 94% "match" means is that the police officer they're claiming is in the video has the same gait characteristics as 378,000 other people in the DC area, more if we allow for the possibility that the perpetrator was from elsewhere. Even a 98% match only gets us down to 126,000 other people.
Of course, that wasn't the only attribute mentioned in the article; it says that both the person in the video and Karkhoff are about 5'7". Being very conservative, about 10% of the population can reasonably described as 5'7". It's the point where the bell curves cross, which makes things convenient, and about 9% of men and women will be this height. I don't know how accurate the FBI estimate is supposed to be, but we'll assume it's pretty accurate and just bump the numbers up to 10% to allow for a little wiggle room (an inch on either end would make this closer to 25%). That gets us in to Level 2 description territory, but still includes over 5,000 people. The Blaze engaged in motivated reasoning by linking this to a Capitol police officer and working backwards from there. An honest assessment would have looked at any surveillance video from DC they could get their hands on and analyze the gait and height of as many people as possible. Of course, if that information was fed into their computer and they ended up identifying a 45-year-old cashier from Landover, Maryland as the only possible suspect, they never would have published the story, because it would have been ridiculous. And that there's one person in thousands who happens to have been employed in some law enforcement capacity in the DC area makes things really convenient for them.
If that were the end of it, we could put this nonsense to bed, but there's also the whole business with the Metro card. As per the article:
Former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin realized Friday that he was doing surveillance next door to the woman now suspected of being the Jan. 6 pipe bomber.
“The FBI put us one door away from the pipe bomber within days of January 6, and we were deliberately pulled away for no logical or logically investigative reason,” Seraphin told Blaze News Friday. “And everything about that tells me that they were involved in a cover-up and have been since day one.
“They were f**king in on it,” Seraphin said.
Seraphin proposed doing a “knock and talk” at the door of an Air Force civilian employee whose address was tied to a vehicle that picked up the bomb suspect in Falls Church, Va., on Jan. 5, 2021.
Seraphin’s team spent two days watching the man, but Seraphin’s request to go face-to-face with the person of interest was denied. The team was pulled off the case the same night, he said.
Seraphin said he has given the same details publicly since 2021.
“There’s a personal reaction to it, which is the complete vindication that the things I’ve been saying and my recollection of being briefed on this stuff has been accurate for years and I’ve never changed my tune,” he said.
The FBI tied a DC Metrorail SmarTrip card allegedly used by the pipe-bomb suspect to an Air Force civilian employee but determined that while the man purchased the card, he did not use it. The suspect allegedly used the card to travel from D.C. to a stop in Falls Church after planting the pipe bombs. The Air Force civilian employee had purchased the SmarTrip card a year earlier.
I apologize from the long quote, but I wanted to include it as-written to point out something here that's particularly dishonest. The article refers to "the suspect", and from the context it looks like it's referring to Kerkhoff, and it talks about how the suspect used the card to travel to Virginia after planting the pipe bombs. Not being familiar with this evidence, I presumed the story to be making this point: Kerkhoff was the person seen in the surveillance video released by the FBI. The video was taken the evening of January 5, and while it doesn't show the bombs being planted, it shows the person who likely planted the bombs walking with a backpack in the vicinity of the targeted buildings. This person then went into the nearby Metro station and took it to Falls Church, Virginia, where they were picked up by a friend whose Metro card they used. The FBI surveilled the friend's house but were pulled of for reasons that weren't explained to them, and weren't allowed to talk to the guy, who happened to be a civilian employee for the Air Force.
As many of you know, I'm a fan of reading official reports to get all the details as best as they can be known, as piecing things together from news reports and the like is time consuming and doesn't usually contain all the necessary boring details. In January of this year, a joint report on the pipe bomb investigation was issued by a group of congressmen representing subcommittees with names too long to mention here, chaired by Massie and Loudermilk. This report was incredibly critical of the FBI's response. What we learned about the whole Metro card thing was far different than what was implied in the article.
Surveillance showed a suspicious person (POI2) photographing a dumpster near where the RNC pipe bomb was planted before meeting with 2 other people and disappearing into the nearby Metro station. This video was from the morning of January 5. The FBI was able to link POI2 to the Metro card of a man living in Falls Church (POI3), and had the FBI surveil both. POI2 was a man. The FBI interviewed him and reviewed the pictures on his phone, which corresponded with his story that he had been taking pictures of numerals on doors and the like, including numerals on the RNC dumpster. The FBI was satisfied that the guy had nothing to do with the bombing and they eliminated POI2 and POI3 as suspects on January 19.
Seraphin's story about what happened seems a lot less suspicious in this context, and it's pretty clear that he was a minor part of the investigative team who didn't know the whole story behind what was going on. The FBI identified POI3 and put him on a surveillance team. In the meantime they interviewed POI2 and eliminated him as a suspect. POI3's status was contingent on POI2 being involved, and once POI2 had been eliminated there was no reason to interview POI3 or continue to watch his house. As for Kerhoff's allegedly living next to POI3, so what? It's an odd coincidence, but what does it really mean? Someone who is a 1 in 5,000 shot to be the person in the video happens to live next to someone who had nothing to do with the bombing.
This has to be some of the worst "journalism" I've ever seen. They're using "the suspect" to refer to people seen in two different videos, one of whom was already identified by the FBI, interviewed, excluded as a suspect, and not the same sex as the person they're accusing. I don't know if they're intentionally engaging in misdirection or if Baker is simply incompetent, but neither would surprise me.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
The caveat here is that if you're using anything other than a system font (as you should be), the actual hyphen is going to be mapped to U+002D and U+2010 won't be used. In fact, the only two fonts I could find that preserve this distinction were Calibri (used here) and Times New Roman. U+2010 generally shouldn't be used as most word processing programs treat U+002D as the actual hyphen, which means that any time the program needs to recognize a hyphen for formatting purposes it will look for U+002D. And if you're have a justified right edge with hyphenation on, it's going to insert U+002D anyway, so if you're going to be a purist you'd better be prepared to hyphenate manually. Especially since the software will naturally break at the hyphen, which could theoretically result in two consecutive hyphens or a hyphen on either side of the break if you insist on using U+2010. The differentiation is a relic of early Unicode moving away from the old ASCII system, where, with only 127 characters available, you had to double up. But nobody uses fonts that were designed for ASCII anymore, and there's no reason to make a slightly beefier hyphen for use as a subtraction symbol. The distinction has been deprecated by modern technology.
I would also not that the same is more or less true for the actual subtraction symbol, though the proper substitute is not the hyphen-minus but the en dash (U+2013). I'm more of a purist about this one, but like U+2010, it's also available only in a limited number of system fonts. It generally rides a little lower than the en dash, and if they look similar enough and you're that particular you can sub in the subtraction symbol from Times New Roman (Calibri's is too rounded to match most fonts), but in some of the newer fonts that are a little more daring, like Signifier, it's best to just use the en dash.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
It's not so much about lying as it is recognizing the realities of the situation. Most of his pie in the sky ideas are contingent on money being appropriated from the state. That isn't going to happen, and when he comes back from Albany empty-handed he blames the state government and works with what he's got. If he gets something then he touts it as a small victory and puts the money to use. It's not that hard.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Claugus! I never thought I'd see that name on here! When I was doing oil and gas law I spent months working on the Claugus 1 unit and did title reports for several parcels comprising the farm in question. Those were the days.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
You're simultaneously missing my point and making it for me. They aren't presenting the other side because the other side isn't saying anything. They're doing the same thing you're doing where they're hoping people just assume that everything that ICE does is 100% justified, optics be damned. And if they think otherwise then it's just because they're brainwashed by activist propaganda. Both of those things could be completely true, but it doesn't matter.
When that story broke I watched the news report in the kind of bar where people sit and watch the news, with people who aren't exactly liberal, and they were all uneasy about the whole thing. That restaurant has a location about ten minutes away and everyone has eaten there (though I'm personally not a fan), and there's a very real anxiety that they could be enjoying dinner only to have it interrupted by Federal agents barging in because a dish washer doesn't have his papers.
I flesh this out more in another comment, but wave elections happen when a party ignores obvious warning signs and either denies that there's a problem or makes excuses for why things aren't quite going the way they like. Maybe you're right and maybe this isn't really a problem, but there's a long list of other things people don't like about this administration, and if your only response is that it isn't a problem, then don't be surprised if something catastrophic happens.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
Except you're doing the same thing you're accusing them of by assuming that all these people do, in fact, have criminal records and you're just being lied to about it. And the people who think otherwise are hopeless and won't believe you no matter what you tell them. This is the kind of mentality that I was talking about that causes elections to be lost. This conversation started by a comment I made where I listed the deportation policy as an example of a Trump policy that was at least somewhat unpopular and may be among the things that costs the Republicans votes. It was just one of a number of things, and we could be talking about any of them, really. I got comments from people who told me that this was exactly what they wanted him to do. Well, great, but you're not the only one voting. This particular discussion stems from a comment where someone tried to argue, in essence, that there were either no or very few normal, hardworking people who were being deported, and that they were all criminals. I don't think that that's true, but I'm ultimately not trying to litigate whether it's true or not. The important thing is that there is a perception that it's true, and it's not just a perception that's held among woke socialists who want open borders and wouldn't vote Republican if their lives depended on it; it's a perception that's also held among the kind of people who voted for Trump in 2024 but are uneasy with the conspicuous brutality with which ICE is carrying out it's business. I know some of these people. They exist. They decide elections. I beg your pardon if I'm wrong, but you're not one of those people. I doubt you're a few policy tweaks away from voting Democrat in the next election.
I fleshed this out a little in another comment, but the larger point I was trying to make was that wipeout elections tend to happen whenever the party in power ignores and makes excuses for obvious signs of trouble. Trump fans who all love Trump and all need Trump and think that everything Trump does is great and can't believe that anyone doesn't like Trump and that everyone is being unfair to Trump and the big bad media isn't given everyone the whole story, with which they'd understand how great Trump is aren't the people who are going to decide the next election. If that were the case, he would have won in 2020 and wouldn't be president now. Trump did not run away with the last election, even against a candidate as bad as Kamala Harris. When I rattle off a laundry list of things that are unpopular but that the Republican Party doesn't seem too concerned about addressing and the responses I get are that these things simply aren't problems you're making my point for me.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
If that is indeed the case, then the administration needs to do a better job communicating that. By which I mean they need to make that information available to media either via press release or simply giving all the details when they ask. They can't just not comment or simply confirm that they executed a search warrant. Local news these days won't even hire copy editors; it may be a journalistic best practice to verify everything, but in today's media environment they aren't going to have a guy looking up criminal records, especially when these stories go out the same day. That being said, the stories I've seen around here never mention the criminal record or lack thereof, or anything about the victims for that matter. People aren't going to just assume that someone has a criminal record. If that's part of the story, you have to tell them.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
I don't want to doxx OP so I'm not going to post it, but I found a local news report after about five seconds of looking. On the other hand, everyone knows where I live, so I'll have no trouble posting this news report from a couple months ago. It's not mentioned in the video, but the restaurant was open at the time, with customers inside, and the agents also managed to start a small fire in the kitchen after they damaged the gas line of a stove. I don't want to say these stories are exactly common, but when they appear in the relatively unbiased medium of local news every couple months in an area without a high immigrant population at all, what sort of impression are people supposed to get? Why would people think that those detained are criminals or otherwise bad people when ICE just no comments the news?
Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about what kind of people are being deported because it's really beside the point. The important thing is that the perception exists among a lot of people, and calling them morons who live in a bubble isn't going to change that perception. This is the same logic that led to the Democrats underestimating Trump in 2016. "How could anyone possibly vote for that man? We can't lose!" Followed by a bunch of crap about how Hillary's email scandal wasn't a big deal and all the other nonsense that they assumed the electorate downplayed because they were motivated to not care about it. As I say in another comment above, this is how waves happen; you assume you have a broad mandate without doing any research to confirm how popular your policies are, ignore or downplay information that suggests people don't like this shit, talk about whatever "structural advantage" you have through gerrymandering, a Blue Wall, becoming majority minority, or whatever, and then act surprised when you get shellacked. This is exactly how the Democrats went from having a supermajority in 2009 to being in the position that they are now.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
This was more of an idle observation than anything else, but to the extent it's a criticism, it's because they bungled the approach by initially hiding the fact that they were urging Nos for partisan reasons, as if they could trick enough people into voting their way. If they had come out and said that the court was too liberal and would remain liberal for another decade unless they could kick those three out and elect a few conservatives in a couple years, they might have been able to motivate some low-propensity voters to vote in an election they'd otherwise ignore.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
To be clear, I'm not predicting a wipeout, just saying that I'd now put it within the realm of possibility where I wouldn't have earlier. I understand what you're saying, but one of the reasons I see this as a possibility is that each of the wipeouts I've seen in my lifetime—1994, 2006, and 2010—has been preceded by people from the party that got soaked saying that it wasn't going to happen. In 1994 the Republicans had a national strategy of opposing Clinton, and the Democrats insisted that this wouldn't work because people voted for their reps based on local issues and not national ones, certainly not to "send a message" to the administration. In 2010 the Democrats had a supermajority and failed to appreciate the pressure they were putting the Blue Dogs under with the Obamacare negotiations. They had a broad mandate and assumed that the president doing what he campaigned on wouldn't be a liability, and they underestimated the Republicans' ability to regroup after taking a drubbing.
But I want to focus on 2006, because I think it has more parallels with what's going on right now. After the 2004 election everyone thought that the Democrats were dead because they couldn't win any states outside of the Northeast, the West Coast, and parts of the Upper Midwest. Then a series of seemingly minor incidents compounded to make Bush broadly unpopular a year into his second term. With Bush's approval rating in the toilet and polls showing Democrats leading in certain races, Republicans were confident that this wasn't a problem. The districts were gerrymandered to such a degree that there weren't nearly as many competitive seats as 1994. They had a better ground game. They had done all kinds of computerized analysis to show which campaign methods were more effective. They had the greatest number of high propensity voters. It didn't matter; they got shellacked. I see the following items that the Republicans seem to be outright ignoring:
- They keep talking about how horrible a candidate Kamala Harris was. Democrats are largely inclined to agree, but she did pretty well for a horrible candidate. Democrats as a whole lost seats, but both the House and Senate are still close.
- The upshot of the above is that Republicans, and Trump in particular, are governing as though they have a mandate that they don't have, similar to how Biden acted like a guy nominated as a moderate Obama successor would have license to push through a bunch of left-wing policies, even in things like the infrastructure bill where he didn't have to. Trump has managed to go far beyond this, steamrolling previous norms of executive authority.
- New Jersey is being written off as a Democratic win in a Democratic state. But just a few weeks ago, Republicans were looking at close polls as evidence that they had an outside shot of winning, or at the very least that it was on the road to being a swing state. Instead an expected 5 point victory turned into a 13 point victory and Democrats increased their majority in the state house to a level not seen in decades.
- They're writing off Virginia because a lot of Federal workers are pissed that they lost their jobs. Their seems to be no concern that similar grievances may exist in other states.
- They're blaming Jones's victory on his voters being bad people who ignored character concerns. They fail to appreciate that such a bad candidate was nonetheless able to win by double digits.
- They think it's a foregone conclusion that NYC is going to go to hell because of Mandami. They don't consider the possibility that once in office he'll be more pragmatic, which frequently happens when socialists find themselves in executive positions. Sara Innomorato was elected as Allegheny County Executive as a DSA progressive, but her administration so far has revolved around getting the county's fiscal house in order to avoid spending cuts.
- They point to polls showing a low approval rating for the Democratic Party. They fail to appreciate that this isn't necessarily people who like the Republicans. A lot of Democrats are pissed that the party lost the 2024 election. They're also pissed at people like Schumer and Jeffries who come across as spineless cowards. This may change if the party can show that it's better at organizing.
Again, I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but the history of the past 20 years has shown that when parties think they have things wrapped up they get overconfident and start making excuses for minor failures rather than treating them seriously. I've seen no evidence that anyone in the republican party other than MTG seem to be concerned about what could happen if they stick to their "Trump's way or the highway" approach. The stakes are even higher than normal because, for the past decade, the party has been reliant on Trump to a degree that's unprecedented, and it's hard to see where they go next. Finding a successor was going to be hard enough, but it's going to be even harder if they have to reinvent the party.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
When ICE is raiding Home Depot parking lots,.farms, and restaurants, nobody is under the impression that the people they're rounding up are just there to hang out.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
From the people I talk to, it isn't so much women being sympathetic for crying Guatemalans as it is concern about what the objective is. When you sell a policy based on the idea that these people are all parasites and criminals, it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.
I too am skeptical of polls, but you ignore them at your own risk. Especially after elections are sending a clear signal. You don't want to be in a position where you get your doors blown off because you decided that inconvenient information was simply incorrect, based on nothing but gut feeling.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Election Grab Bag Post
These are just a few unrelated observations about last night's election that don't really fit anywhere else. One of the first things that struck my attention that hasn't gotten much traction is the PA judicial retention elections. All judges here are elected in partisan races to ten-year terms, after which they have to be "retained" by voters to continue serving for another ten years. They can serve an unlimited number of terms, but must retire at 75. When a judge appears on the ballot for retention, it's technically nonpartisan—there's no R or D next to the name, no opposing candidate, just a Yes or No if they should continue serving. If a justice is not retained, the governor appoints a replacement who serves until the next odd-year election, when a full replacement is selected.
The effect of this is that judges are effectively elected to life terms. A judge not being retained is very rare, and has only happened once at the Supreme Court level since the current state constitution went into effect in 1968. In 2005, both houses of the state legislature voted themselves a pay raise in a midnight session just before the term ended. This was a huge deal at the time and the public was outraged. With no other elections that year, voters took out their anger on Justice Russell Nigro, who narrowly lost retention. Another justice won her retention race by only 8 points, when 40 points is the typical margin.
The PA Supreme Court is composed of 5 Democrats and 2 Republicans. The court has, in recent years, issued a number of controversial left-leaning decisions. Three of the Democrats were up for retention this year, and activist groups attempted a "Vote No" campaign. They started running TV ads a few months ago making themselves sound non-partisan, arguing about how it was time for a change and judges should have term limits and we should force an election. This was thin cover for the fact that these were Republicans looking to change the partisan makeup of the court by, if they were successful, possibly winning a couple of those seats in 2027. The fight took on somewhat of a national character, with Trump calling the justices "radicals" and "activists" and urging "NO NO NO". Democrats were forced to counterattack, with Governor Shapiro appearing in ads highlighting their records and commitment to protecting civil rights.
For all the efforts the GOP took to politicize a normally sleepy race, they successfully managed to whittle a 40 point Yes down to a 23 point Yes. This has to go down as one of the most underappreciated lead balloons in political history. This was an unprecedented gambit that took up most of the oxygen it what is usually an uneventful year; no one has ever run commercials about retention before, no one sunk that much money into it, it was just a given that a judge was going to be retained. Even the Nigro thing was more of a grassroots effort that had more to do with anger at the system than partisan politics. The moral of the story here is that you can't get voters fired up about something they don't want to get fired up about, even if there's nothing else interesting happening, especially if you try to trick them into getting fired up about it.
In other PA news, Pine-Richland, a heavily Republican school district in Allegheny County's northern tier, had its school board flip from an 8–1 Republican majority to a 5–4 Democrat majority. It should be noted that, of the 8 Republicans, 5 were raging Moms for Liberty-style MAGA conservatives, and 3 were normal, moderate Republicans. Four of the MAGA members were elected in 2023 in a campaign funded by outside conservative groups with the intention of revising the school's library policy. Which is basically code for removing woke library books. One of the guys had sued the district a few years earlier over their trans bathroom policy. What ensued was an ever-escalating shit show where it took them a year and a half to approve a new English curriculum, culminating in a 7-hour-long board meeting where they denied students the right to speak (over repeated motions) until nearly midnight, the night before midterms. They were regularly confronted by hostile audiences and refused to explain any of their decisions. After a long fight to wrest control over books from the superintendent, they ended up approving all of the LGBT-themed books that had been challenged anyway. Then they decided to ban a book about a black girl's experience during the Tulsa Race Riot from the English curriculum on the grounds that it wasn't difficult enough for ninth graders, necessitating a long retooling of reading assignments (the book is recommended for ages 12 to 17). Residents eventually got fed up with the negative publicity and the last several meetings turned into forums where residents would rip the board for creating a circus. Now they can turn their energies to things like taxes and re-turfing the football field.
While last night's elections weren't particularly meaningful for those not directly affected, they're useful as prodromes for what to expect in the future. While it's expected that the pendulum would shift back toward the left at some point, I doubt many expected that it would happen this quickly or decisively. some in the comments below have brushed these victories off as liberals winning in liberal states, nothing to see here. But I think that attitude is whistling past the graveyard. During Trump's first term, when I would criticize him to a Republican friend and the friend would ask me what he's done that's so bad, I could come up with any number of criticisms, but none that he, as a conservative would care about. And probably none that a moderate with conservative tendencies would care too much about. Democrats could roast him on plenty of things, but the kinds of things they could roast any Republican about and the electorate broadly wouldn't care about because that's what they expect from a Republican. That and personal scandals and gaffes that can easily be reasoned away by anyone inclined to.
He lost in 2020, and didn't take it well. But by the Democrats fumbled the opportunity to right the ship by Joe Biden fucking up Afghanistan, the border, and any number of other things, all the while governing significantly further to the left than one would have suspected based on his campaign. Add in inflation, and despite things not being too bad overall, it was easy to brush away whatever controversy Trump caused four years earlier and look on the pre-COVID past with rose-colored glasses. Was Trump really so bad? All of the terrible things you said would happen never happened. Biden is a disaster. Give the man another chance.
If the Trump of 2025 were similar to the Trump of 2017, things wouldn't have changed. But his time he is doing things that are genuinely unpopular and hard for his base to defend. Tariffs. Aggressive immigration enforcement. Troop deployments to US cities. The George Santos pardon. Mass firings. The Epstein Files. Withholding grant money. Ending healthcare subsidies. This isn't merely bungling like we saw under Biden, but conscious policymaking that could stop at any time. He's making a similar mistake as Biden in treating a narrow victory like a mandate, except he can't even pass a budget let alone achieve any real legislative accomplishments, even with an undivided legislature. At least Biden had the infrastructure bill. He's using the Steve Bannon Flood the Zone with Shit strategy, forgetting that voters don't like being served shit.
Republicans will have to defend every one of those policies next year. Some may be defensible to some people, but Trump's actual policies are broadly unpopular, and there's no unifying ideology to bind them. Maybe there's enough hardcore MAGA sentiment out there that the Republicans can ride through 2026 with minimal damage, but I don't know if I'd be willing to bet on it. Trump certainly isn't, hence the redistricting push. The trouble is that if these policies turn out to be losers it's hard for Republican incumbents to distance themselves from them, even if they want to. I don't see the GOP turning away from Trump en masse, and individual politicians have supplicated to the point that they can't credibly repudiate him. MTG can fight against these things and make nice with the ladies on The View, but she has enough MAGA cachet that it won't hurt her much. Trump himself could, of course, back away from his policies, but that would be an admission of defeat, and Trump will never admit defeat. He might chicken out on the implementation, but what would be involved is a complete repudiation, and that's not going to happen, especially when nothing can affect him personally.
A lot can happen within the next year, so I don't want to make any predictions, but I wouldn't rule out a midterm wipeout. We've heard this before, and it hasn't come to fruition, but all I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if it happened, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened and took the GOP completely by surprise. By wipeout, I don't mean that the Democrats merely win both houses or win all of the "contested" seats, but that they also pick up a few surprise House seats in presumably safe districts that nobody polls, and a few Senate races become spicier than one would expect. Beyond that I don't want to say anything else, because I don't know what will happen, but the amount of personal fealty Trump demands would make things very difficult for Republicans if the electorate turns against him. What will JD Vance do if it become apparent that his chances of winning the nomination in 2028 are akin to those of Dick Cheney in 2008? Are there any John McCain types in the GOP who have national profile but haven't kissed Trump's ring? I don't know the answers to these questions, but htings will sure be interesting.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Thanks, I don't know what I did there because if Trump had indeed won Virginia that sentence wouldn't have made sense. Corrected.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Neither would have any power over immigration law or enforcement.
You should have told that to Miyares before the election because that's what he campaigned on. He doesn't have an Issues section of his website, but he does have an Accomplishments section, which he divides into four sections. One is law enforcement and one is immigration. Another one is the opiate epidemic, which is fine, but that's par for the course among people running for AG regardless of party. The other is protecting children, by which he mostly means the Loudon County school incident but also includes a few other non-culture war things. Even with the normal AG stuff he could only offer half a loaf because there was nothing about fraud and corporate malfeasance, which, I don't know his record and Jones attacked him for being too friendly to big business, so maybe there were people he didn't want to piss off.
As for the Trump stuff, it was even worse than @KennethAlmquist points out. The centerpiece of Jones's campaign was that Miyares sat idly by when Trump was running roughshod over the state and didn't bother joining in lawsuits that other AGs were filing. In particular, he didn't join in the one that argued that Federal employees were wrongfully terminated, the result of which was the employees got reinstated in other states but not in Virginia. I don't have to tell you that there are more Federal employees in Virginia than in most other places. Miyares had no response to this, and when confronted drifted into his normal mode of attacking Jone's liberal legislative record and lack of experience as a prosecutor, which is fine when you're winning but doesn't cut it when you're behind. Jones was able to successfully paint Miyares as more loyal to Trump than to Virginians, and it was a fatal blow.
'If only the average voter knew' runs headfirst into what we're imagining that the average voter would do if they did know. And some of them did. Optimistically, maybe one-in-ten? Forget anyone running out into the street and screaming into the sky like a Charlton Heston outtake, forget any member of the Abundance Caucus speaking against the man without being pushed about him first. You'd expect to see someone horrified.
I'd say that most of them knew because Miyares wouldn't shut up about it, to the point that he'd use it as a crutch and bring it up when confronted with a question he couldn't respond to. Miyares, however, had the misfortune of representing a party that has spent the better part of the past decade defending statements from Trump that would have previously been undefendable all the while bemoaning cancel culture and the alleged erosion of free speech. To be fair, at first the Republican establishment did condemn him and try to end his career, but once he secured the nomination these condemnations gradually turned to excuses, and then justifications, and finally admissions that they really didn't give a shit. Republicans are well past the point where they can credibly say that this is the point where they draw the line. Do you seriously think that if similar texts from Trump came to light a month before last year's election that the GOP establishment would be tripping over themselves to endorse Harris? Do you think his voters abandon him en masse? Do you think Trump even apologizes? I think you know the answer to this one.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
By that logic, now, 9 in 10 Republicans have no problem with grabbing women by the pussy and the rate of sexual assault among Republicans should be higher. Sure, there are a handful of loud examples, but nothing systemic. the only conclusion, then is a MASSIVE FRAUD machine that got Trump elected twice.
Apart from what @hydroacetylene said, I'll try to give you a more complete answer. You have to go back to 2020 and the Virginia GOP's decision to have a convention instead of a primary. Virginia had been a Republican stronghold for years, but in little more than a decade had become reliably liberal. A lot of conservatives like to blame Federal employees in Northern Virginia for this shift, but that's a bit of a cop out; NoVa had been reliably Republican well into the 2000s, and the shift was occurring in other places, like suburban parts of Richmond and Hampton Roads. Biden won Virginia Beach in 2020, the first Democrat to do so since the days of the Solid South. This sudden shift left the state GOP scrambling and rudderless. While Republicans found ways to win in liberal strongholds like Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and California, no Republican had won statewide office in Virginia in ten years. Rather than look to these other states as examples of how to win in hostile territory, the state GOP appealed to rural voters in the western part of the state more closely aligned with West Virginia and Kentucky than the Tidewater. But running up the score from a 60% win to a 75% win doesn't do much if the county has 5,000 voters, and it was clear to some in the party that this was a formula for continued irrelevance.
In February 2020, state delegate Amanda Chase announced that she would be seeking the gubernatorial nomination. Ms. Chase dubbed herself "Trump in Heels" and represented the far-right fringe of the party. She had been disciplined by the state GOP in the past and had taken every opportunity to publicize her maverick image. As 2020 wore on, and COVID restrictions came into place, she was representing her district from a plexiglass box she was forced to sit in due to her refusal to wear a mask during sessions. She had previously open carried in the state house. As 2020 drew to a close and Trump lost the election (and by double digits in Virginia), she became a vocal proponent of the MASSIVE FRAUD narrative, part of the fringe who genuinely thought there was a chance of Trump being sworn in for a second term in January. She was completely unelectable. She also had a decent shot at being the Republican nominee for governor.
The party establishment was alarmed, and devised a plan to prevent her nomination at all costs. Per state law, they had the privilege of holding a convention rather than a primary. In a primary, Chase could win the nomination with 30% of the votes, with three serious candidates and several minor ones splitting the remaining 70%. But in a convention, the nominee would need a majority, elected by screened delegates. the establishment's push for a convention led to all-out war within the party. MAGA hardliners had by this point made sizeable inroads into party leadership, and sought to thwart what they saw as a rigged nomination process. The convention went forward, but rules and logistical challenges turned it into a mess.
The idea was that delegates would be seated in an "unassembled convention" whereby they would submit ballots at 37 locations throughout the state. Ranked choice voting would be used, and delegate votes would be weighted based on Republican turnout in the previous election. Most importantly, since Virginia does not include party affiliation with voter registration, delegates would be screened by the local party before they would be seated, ostensibly to weed out Democrats, but realistically to ensure that only committed party men would go through the process. As the May convention approached, the party bragged that over 53,000 delegates had qualified, but only 30,000 showed up, a far cry from the over 300,000 who participated in the last primary. The byzantine process had critics describe the whole thing as a mess that only made the GOP look worse, but it achieved its objective: Chase finished third, and that November, Virginia elected its first Republican governor since 2009.
A seemingly minor side-effect of this whole debacle was that Winsome Sears was nominated as Lieutenant Governor. Sears had served a single term as state delegate 20 years prior, but was otherwise a small business owner from Winchester and occasional minor candidate. How she won the nomination appears to be a mystery, since I can find nothing about how this happened. I suspect, though, that it's largely a combination of the unusual nature of the nominating process and sheer luck. I can't find much in the way of traditional campaigning, no one seems to have paid much attention to the LT side, she only got 32% of the vote on the first ballot (compared to 22% for second), and that just may have been the way the cookie crumbled. If anyone has any information that explains this, I'd love to hear it, but whatever happened, I think it's safe to say that she didn't win the nomination through running a traditional campaign.
So she essentially lucks into the LT role after Youngkin wins. And he's able to do so by shying away from MAGA rhetoric and focusing his campaign on a few key issues that were big at the time. In the process, he cements himself as one of the rising stars within the party and a possible presidential nominee. He maintains a decent approval rating in a state hostile to his party, even after Trump Harris carried it in 2024. He can't run for reelection, but it's clear to the party that the best way to stay in power is to extend his governorship the best way you can. And the obvious person to do that is the lieutenant governor. By this point the party is in agreement about the best path forward, so they have a primary, except there's only one name on the ballot.
The upshot of all of this is that, in 2025, Sears found herself as the major party nominee for governor of a larger state, her only record of having won a competitive election on her own being state delegate race in 2002. She hadn't even run in a competitive race since 2004. She lucked into the LT nomination because of an unusual situation, got elected LT in the general by virtue of being ticketed with Youngkin, and won the nomination in 2025 without a primary opponent. The state party failed to realize that this was a recipe for disaster.
Several things ultimately did her in, and contributed to her image as an unserious candidate. The first was a series of glitches and booboos. The kind that a seasoned candidate wouldn't have made. The kind that a seasoned candidate may have made, but not so many. The kind that a seasoned candidate who made as many as she did could have recovered from by responding better. Things like putting watermarked stock photos on your campaign website, and likening DEI to slavery. I wouldn't say these alone sunk her campaign, but they didn't giver her an image as a good campaign manager running a well-oiled machine.
The second was that her inexperience was underscored by her inability to raise money. This is where I'd lay the most blame on the state party, because they should have considered this and had a plan to counter the problem. It was unrealistic to expect her to suddenly raise large sums of money when she hadn't had to before, and they needed to either get on the horn for her or teach her how to dial for dollars or whatever it took. It was clear this was going to be a problem the minute her candidacy was announced, and a party that cleared the path for her nomination should have been rolling in dough to give for the general. There is absolutely no excuse for this.
The biggest problem, though, was that she had very little in the way of policy, and what she did have was an object lesson in what not to do. The only two policy positions she seemed to care about were anti-abortion and anti-LGBT. She could mouth conservative buzzwords like school choice and what have you, but there was no real substance to her campaign. the Issues part of her website was buried at the bottom of the Meet Winsome section, and outlined five positions: lower taxes and government spending, be tough on crime (and illegals), school choice, right to work, no trans in sports. Nine total paragraphs. In 2017, the Republican nominee had pages and pages of policy positions down to minutia like how much money should be allocated to increase enrollment at the University of Virginia at Wise. Apart from the paucity of substance, these are not winning positions in this kind of race. Youngkin may have been elected, but it's still a blue state. Generic conservative talking points are not going to win the election, because the conservative isn't the default candidate. Youngkin understood this. She didn't, and the party didn't. The ultimate illustration of how inept she was at this came towards the end of the campaign, when she hammered the airwaves with commercials reminiscent of the "they/them" ads that critics found especially damaging to Harris. Apart from the blunder of fighting the last war, it wasn't even her last war. Trump was trying to win marginal votes in swing states; there was no expectation that those ads would get enough votes for an unexpected victory.
She completely misunderstood the election she was running in and either forgot or didn't realize that to win in Virginia, you have to attract the kind of voter who wouldn't normally be inclined to vote for you. And as these failures became evident, so did the final failure, the complete lack of a ground game. She didn't tour the state. She didn't respond to media requests. She didn't respond to voters. She disappeared the last month of the campaign. Whether it was from lack of money, lack of experience, or a sense that the enterprise was a lost cause, dropping off the face of the earth during crunch time isn't the mark of a serious candidate. At least take your best shot. You're a major party nominee for the governorship of an important state. When you launched your campaign, it looked winnable. Act like it still is, don't just throw in the towel. I don't think that this hurt her too much since she would have lost anyway, but it took the party from looking like geniuses who managed the improbable to inept jackasses who mishandled an important candidate in a winnable election. They moved heaven and earth to come back from the dead four years earlier, but, depending on how they handle things going forward, the view of Youngkin's win may go from a rejuvenation to a last gasp.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
California can reliably elect Democrats, but when it comes to specific issues, the ballot initiatives don't always go the way one thinks they would. Looking at recent years: Funding greenhouse gas initiatives by raising taxes on incomes over $2 million? Failed. Raising the minimum wage? Failed. Expanding the ability of local governments to impose rent control? Failed. Two initiatives to legalize certain forms of gambling failed. The measures voters actually approved in that time period were ones for increased funding for arts and music education, two involving healthcare, and one that increased sentences for certain drug and theft crimes. I don't know how much the party apparatus was involved in pushing or pushing against some of these, but there's no clear pattern here, and the left-coded ones that were approved were of the more boring variety. This probably received more attention than any of the others, but the margin by which it passed sends a pretty clear signal.
It doesn't if you consider the fact that very few people are going to the polls because of an AG race. Down ballot candidates ride the momentum of the headlining act, so to speak. If a lot of Republicans weren't sufficiently motivated to turn out for Earle-Sears, they weren't going to turn out against Jones.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
I watched a video and I just don't see this catching on. The thing took 5 minutes to load a few items into a dishwasher, and that was with 100% remote operation. You can talk about minefields all you want, but the bigger minefield is that 100% teleoperation is expensive. I'm sure the robot itself costs no small sum, and beyond that a portion of the $20,000 purchase price has to go towards paying someone to do housework more inefficiently than they could in person. And the "housework" they do seems to be limited to light tidying up; you aren't going to get one of these things to clean the bathroom, or dust and vacuum. In other words, it doesn't do anything that you'd actually pay someone to do. It's useless! And the operator needs special training to do things that need no special training, and presumably having an operator actually available is key to the whole thing since you don't want a robot that's an expensive paperweight because there's no one there to remotely operate it. So, unlike an actual maid, you have to pay someone to be on call constantly in case someone wants you to move a book from one table to another. For $20,000 I can hire a cleaning service who will undoubtedly do a better job.
That's not really much of a shocker, though. We've had similar democratization with the streaming services for 15 years now, and while I'm sure somebody has had a hit by virtue of nothing other than having uploaded their music to Spotify, if you look at the Billboard charts it's almost exclusively artists signed to major labels. Even the artists you're referring to were only able to use Spotify to get enough traction to get signed with major labels. "Rich Men North of Richmond" is the only song I can think of off the top of my head that became a hit despite having absolutely no label promotion, and it's a good example to use because Oliver Anthony refused to sign with a label. Despite touring with name acts he hasn't had any real success since, and despite venting about his ex-wife on Rogan, the song he wrote about their divorce stalled in the lower reaches of the Country chart and didn't crack the Hot 100 at all. Zach Bryan is probably the epitome of the phenomenon you mention, as he was self-released until 2022, but none of his music actually charted until after he had signed with Warner the previous year. There isn't any evidence of a sustainable path to success for a self-released artist that doesn't involve eventually being picked up by a label.
And this is for artists who have at least some ability to self-promote, whether through social media, local radio, licensing to TV/movies/advertisements, or simply playing shows wherever you can. If the strategy is simply to upload as much material to streaming services as possible and hope something catches on, there's no way to engage in even this kind of low-level promotion, since it doesn't make sense to invest anything beyond the minimum that's required to get the song uploaded. It may happen occasionally, but there's no reason to believe that simply increasing the volume will turn it into a viable business model, or allow it to play a significant role in the industry.
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