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Notes -
I'm assuming the discussion over red state efforts to crack down on voter fraud are sufficiently far downthread to justify another top level comment:
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2022/10/19/435531/texas-agencies-plan-to-monitor-harris-county-elections-raises-concerns-among-observers/
TLDR is that Texas government agencies are sending their own teams of pollwatchers, inspectors, and legal advisors to Harris county(Houston metro area) to monitor the conduct of the election. This is only the latest round in an ongoing saga of escalating tensions between the Harris county and state governments, the previous episode of which- a controversy over property taxes and policing- is fascinating in its own right.
My priors, like with other red state election security measures, is that it will spend some amount of money to accomplish precisely nothing, but it will give Beto O'Rourke and Rochelle Garza ammunition to claim voter suppression/vote rigging if they underperform in Harris county(which is likely; Harris county is probably the lightest shade of blue of Texas's blue counties and also has an unpopular dem county judge running for reelection). It should go without saying that the commission being sent to oversee things is... not exactly non-partisan, the line between the Texas GOP and Texas governor being much thinner in the case of the secretary of state(a political appointment in a one party state) and Ken Paxton's office, but the Texas government has historically not taken large risks they weren't 100% sure they could get away with and even if Abbott and Paxton were able to flip votes, they almost certainly wouldn't be able to do so without it being widely known, and in any case they both have a single digit chance of losing which gives them almost no upside to pulling stunts like that.
As someone who believes democratic elections are indeed fixed structurally, watching Republicans flail around trying to catch literal voter fraud is very frustrating. In the adjacent thread on the New Right the point was made that one has to put up with watching the Stupid Version of your ideology be the one that actually gets to see the light of day, and I certainly get that sense here.
Elections in Texas are rigged because:
The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades
The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent
Lawmakers just change the rules whenever they feel their hegemony slipping (e.g. Covid mail voting), "We had a vote to rewrite the ballot rules at 3 in the morning the day before the election with no public consultation, that means it's legit :^)"
It doesn't matter whether the Reps or Dems win anyway because the politicians of both parties come from the same class stratum and are pursuing UniParty agreed goals anyway
And even if they weren't, the example of Trump proves that even if an outsider were to win, they'd just get stymied by the Deep State
It's all fake and gay kayfabe, stop buying into the horse and pony show
...but they are probably NOT rigged due to ballot stuffing. I feel like a guy who muttered in frustration "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?" and then I have to watch Reginald FitzUrse literally kill Thomas á Beckett. It was FIGURATIVE you guys.
And by importing, you mean advocating fewer restrictions. Isn't it just possible that people support immigration because they think it's good for a range of economic or moral reasons, not for some nefarious reasons regarding the partisanship of immigrants. I do, at least.
This is just silly. Not only does media coverage mostly just respond to demand - at the end of the day even MSNBC just want viewers, that's what they exist for - cable news is not the entirety of media in America. Local news and most print media (with a few notable exceptions), especially tabloids, don't 'blare of left-propaganda' at all.
Sure, that's why famously liberal Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia, Indiana, Arkansas, Alaska and Missouri also expanded mail voting during Covid.
Probably not the place for this discussion but consider that 'uniparty agreed goals' may exist because of genuine overlap in the preferences of both sections of the electorate, not some conspiracy.
Again, probably for another time, but I'd just ask on what specific issues wholly within the President's power Trump was stymied on.
"A person" can do that kind of supporting, perhaps. But when 75% of people named José vote Democrat, then no, I absolutely do not believe that the opportunity to import a reliable electoral bloc is absent from the minds of the Democrat politicians advocating for low immigration restrictions.
I suppose I can't fault you for countering my Just So assertion with your own Just So assertion, but let's not pretend that yours is any better supported than mine. "MSNBC exists to serve viewer's demand" is one possibility. "MSNBC exists to spread it's owners propaganda to the masses" is another, and I feel like it's a better fit to the evidence of it's content.
One could just as easily turn this round the other way and say that Republicans don't want immigration because they lean Democratic significantly. Seems pointless to get caught up in this hyper-partisan reading of policy, why not just debate the actual merits?
'Media companies exist to make money' seems like a fairly simple assumption to make in the absence of evidence suggesting otherwise; and I'm not a partisan about this, I would say the same about Fox or Newsmax or whatever.
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