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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18901 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

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The vibe I'm getting is that the red wave isn't happening. The republicans might not even get the senate. I'm watching /r/conservative and they are not happy with Trump, that sub has definitely taken a hard turn towards Desantis so that makes me optimistic that he can win the primary for 2024.

It is an astroturf. Nothing has changed re: Trump v. DeSantis. His "Florida is where woke goes to die" speech was based though.

Yesterday I estimated 70% GOP 51 Senate and 30% 50-50 Dem keep. Looks like even that was an overestimate for GOP performance, even though I had been very skeptical of the wilder 53+ GOP Senate projections. If Dems actually pick up a Senate seat, the GOP will be left only with copium that perhaps the Senate loss will enable DeSantis to prevail over Trump in the 2024 primary and go on to produce a true red wave (especially if the economy will be stuck in a recession at that point).

I wonder if ten years from now the GOP will look back and view Trump's 2016 win was a pyrrhic victory, one that ultimately resulted in a decade+ of Dems in power. So far Trump's SCOTUS appointments still make it seem like a net win for conservatives, but that calculus likely changes if Trump wins 2024 GOP nomination and loses in the general, with at best a 5-4 conservative majority, if not 5-4 liberal one, by 2028.

Desantis has a massive amount of leverage right now to try and get Trump to back down, presumably in exchange for something.

If his tenure as governor is any indication he will make good use of such leverage.

I am curious to see his Trump containment strategy.

He just proved he doesn't need to be tied to Trump to win elections, so hard to see any way Trump can hurt him in the near term.

Well he just saw a bunch of his preferred candidates take an L, whilst Desantis (who runs the state Trump lives in) just blew the doors off his opponents.

I like to think Trump is rational enough to read this portent.

i for one hope to see some Desantis vs Trump debates, i can only imagine them being entertaining.

Maybe I'm easy to please, but DeSantis's victory speech seemed quite good to me (assuming that one is simpatico with his ideology). Considering that the most common critique I had previously seen of DeSantis was that he lacked magnetism and charisma, this seems like a pretty big moment for him.

I wish I'd publicly stated my agreement with @huadpe's bearish outlook.

Trump should be dead. He’s not a winner, he doesn’t bring coattails. His most endorsed candidates are not crushing it.

Versus Desantis turning Miami-Dade red. I have to conclude Desantis is the front runner now. And he’s a real conservative and not one that plays one on tv

If the Walker seat isn’t for control of the senate then I assume he’s dead in a run off.

I hope you're right, but I worry about how much of the GOP primary vote even follows these races closely enough to understand that Trump ruined everything. Seems pretty plausible that >50% of GOP primary voters don't follow that closely and will nod along when Trump publicly blames the rest of the party with some unintelligible claim.

Trump singlehandedly ruined what should have been a GOP controlled Senate in 2020 and it doesn't seem to have cost him anything with them: he led them like lambs to the slaughter in this year's Senate primaries.

nod along when Trump

I don't think the dems should get too cocky quite yet but when you let a capital P Populist be one of the main unifying draws for an entire presidential cycle, its gonna have a lingering effect. The q-anon truthers and Trump loyalists aren't going away.

Lets play with a hypothetical: is it actually good for republicans in 2024 if trump gets hung out to dry by the court battles he's entangled in? Is it possible we see Desantis backers and trump supporters battling in the usual online spaces (or does that already happen, i don't frequent the trenches of serious republican think tanks)?

is it actually good for republicans in 2024 if trump gets hung out to dry by the court battles he's entangled in?

No. Seeing your side lose in public is bad. Full stop. People hate a loser.

Is it possible we see Desantis backers and trump supporters battling in the usual online spaces (or does that already happen, i don't frequent the trenches of serious republican think tanks)?

It's more like ideological evaporative cooling in my experience. You don't see anti-Trumpers arguing with Trumpers, you just see Trumpers take over a previously Republican forum (local parties, gun clubs, etc) and the anti-Trumper grill-class types just kind of edging out of the room. Like if this forum went full fedposting, I wouldn't loudly argue about it, I'd just stop posting. That's what you're seeing at the local Republican level.

Lets play with a hypothetical: is it actually good for republicans in 2024 if trump gets hung out to dry by the court battles he's entangled in?

If somehow the court battles disable Trump so that he loses the primary or doesn't even run? Absolutely! Trump is a terrible politician who repeatedly demonstrates negative coattails. He won a general election once, by a hair, in 2016, against a historically unpopular candidate, following two terms of Democratic control of the White House. He is ineffective even when he is in office, and he is so polarizing that he generates historic energy among the Democrats to oppose him.

DeSantis is the alternative. He's a brilliant politician who knows how to win, who knows how to govern competently, and who knows how to use the levers of government to secure his partisan goals. He walks on water. The only thing he may be unable to do is defeat Trump in the GOP primary.

But I don't think the court battles will disable Trump. Every time the Dems go too far and get too petty in persecuting him, he looks like a martyr and the GOP electorate rallies around him. The Dems are not stupid. They can see this effect play out, and will use it to their advantage. All they have to do is persecute him as loudly and unfairly as possible. I genuinely think this is the reason that Garland started this ridiculous investigation over classified information at Mar-a-lago. They can drag that out for the next two years, constantly keeping him in the headlines as the victim of Democratic overreach to manipulate the 2024 GOP primary and secure him as their opponent.

Even if Trump loses the primary, I don't put it past him to sabotage the GOP in the general election, possibly as a third party candidate.

The GOP is cursed by Trump's existence at this point. The best outcome for conservatives is if Trump dies of a heart attack as soon as possible.

One problem here is that literally every single one of the Republicans who won their primary with Democratic financial support lost the general election, and while 'election denialism' was one prong of that approach, this tactic is neither new or specific to that matter; it's just been drastically upscaled and unusually successful.

Maybe Democratic strategists decide that it's too risky of a weapon otherwise, or it doesn't work without Trump also putting his thumb on the scales, but I'd... be skeptical. I think even if Trump not on the stage in 2024 we still have a combination of Blue-tribe media, Dem official groups, and a wide variety of 'non-political' groups trying to hit the same magic, and I don't think it's reasonable to assume they'll fail.

This is my real concern. It seems possible that Democrats have realized they can use their advantage in political activism and media bias to determine who the Republican candidates are going to be. I'm not sure how you can counter this, short of reforming the primary process.

The primary process has been undergoing a reformation. I've seen caucus states move to primaries and closed primaries moving towards open. So moving but not in the direction away from media involvement. In-party activism can be pretty effective within caucuses though.

How did Trump ruin everything? (Genuine question)

Admittedly I'm not following the midterms super closely but I'd like to consider myself slightly better informed than the average voter.

In this year's primary, he endorsed Masters, Walker and Oz -- three neophyte politicians with manifest weaknesses -- over their more experienced competitors. All three prevailed in the primary, and all three seem to be headed for defeat tonight. All three races should have been eminently winnable.

In 2020, he made delusional claims that the election was stolen from him, and he publicly pressured Pence to basically abuse his power as VP to steal the election for Trump. This occurred before the two senate runoff races in Georgia, both of which should have gone GOP (based on fundamentals and based on the expectation that thermostatic turnout would favor the GOP as being energized to oppose Biden's recent win), but both of which ended up going to the Dems, giving Biden control of the Senate.

Thank you for the explanation!

Yeah it seems like a bust for the GOP. Maybe they'll eke out a win in the Senate but it's a far cry from the +3 GOP pickups that RCP has been predicting.

It's two things:

Thing number one is abortion. Very unusual for a party to win a major nationally salient policy victory while the opposing party controls the Presidency and both houses of Congress. The usual loss by a president's party in their first midterm is thermostatic backlash by voters to that president's policy wins. Here, the GOP winning abortion in SCOTUS upends that logic. Retrospectively the GOP won the biggest policy issue of the past two years, and prospectively it looks a lot more like the GOP holds the whip hand and needs to be checked by centrists. I know the usual pro-life posters on this forum take the line that it's all worth it to save the fetuses, but boy is it demoralizing for a pro-choice conservative like myself.

Thing number two is Trump. If things go as they seem to be going, this is now the second federal election in which he will have singlehandedly handed Senate control to the Dems: last time by contesting the election and putting on his insane January 6 carnival and publicly encouraging Pence to steal it for Trump while two runoffs were pending in Georgia, both of which the GOP should have won but both of which they lost, and this time by intervening on behalf of terrible candidates in Pennsylvania (the multimillionaire Muslim snake oil salesman who lives in a palace in New Jersey -- chosen to run against the guy that central casting delivered as the avatar of the blue collar salt of the earth) and Georgia (the barely literate guy with ten thousand illegitimate children, credible allegations of familial abuse, and a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions -- chosen to run against the unimpeachable family man pastor). And the show isn't over: he's about to announce his run for 2024.

a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions

But isn't that a good thing, from the side of the pro-choice? It means no unwanted children are born to be neglected and abused, it means he is taking financial responsibility for paying for the abortion, and the women are free of unwanted burden of motherhood?

I can see criticising the guy for being a hypocrite if his party is anti- abortion, but I don't get the logic of people (and I don't just mean you, I see this all over) being at the same time loudly pro-choice and complaining about the threat to abortion rights, and then use "he paid for his girlfriend's abortion" as a criticism.

I see the main argument trotted out time and again that restrictions on abortion will mean forcing women to have babies they don't want, which means the unwanted children will be abused, so abortion is a good thing. Unless you can show these women didn't want to have abortions or would not have aborted the pregnancy even if it had been Joe Blow, ordinary guy and not Football Star who was the father, what is the problem here?

"He shouldn't be paying for abortions if he's running for a political party that is anti-abortion?" What are his own views on it - has he said 'abortion is wrong'? Then you can get him for hypocrisy, and for being a sinner.

But by the same token, you cannot be both pro-choice and a conservative, because that's how the battle lines have been drawn up. If you're conservative, you must be anti-abortion, and if you're pro-choice, why are you voting Republican?

But isn't that a good thing, from the side of the pro-choice?

No. It's a scummy look. The median view is that early stage abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Median voters aren't happy when an abortion happens; they view it as a necessary evil in cases where the mother isn't able to care for the baby, there are complications in pregnancy or fetal development, where it would derail the family's future, etc. It isn't meant to be a form of contraceptive that wealthy playboys can use to cover their tracks when they want to rawdog a bunch of women without a vasectomy; that pattern of behavior is somewhere between misogynistic and psychopathic, and no one respects the man who uses it that way.

But isn't that a good thing, from the side of the pro-choice?

No. Although it is impossible to say this in Blue spaces because of wokestupid purity spirals, pro-choice normies want abortion to be safe, legal and rare. Herschel Walker's behaviour made it significantly less rare.

There are also a lot of people, not all of whom are religious conservatives, who think that having unprotected sex outside committed relationships is inherently discreditable, quite apart from whether or not an abortion happens as a result.

Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker said as recently as August that he opposes any exceptions to a ban on abortion, despite stating the opposite during his first and only debate against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock last week.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/19/politics/herschel-walker-abortion-opposition/index.html

Come on dude, first Google result. This wasn't a hard one to research. I even typed in walker abortion position because I was too lazy to figure out how he spells Herschel.

I’m not gonna put money on it til I see some better crosstabs, but if the break from predictions is more on the basis of education than by gender (with the recognition that abortion isn’t as overtly gendered as people expect), I’m gonna point to the student loan relief thing pretty heavily. It was an incredibly obvious and high-value give, timed almost immediately to the election for optimizing turnout, and I think skipping over it is missing a major component

Which is also not great, since it’s dubious as a policy and law matter in ways that something like abortion policy isn’t, and that may have corrosive effects when the next close election finds a President looking for 20k USD giveaways.

Georgia (the barely literate guy with ten thousand illegitimate children, credible allegations of familial abuse, and a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions

Man, I can tell you don't have much insight into the actual Georgia electorate to realize why Herschel Walker has quite possibly the most positive name recognition of any native Georgian in history.

If you think that's how anyone would define their perception of the guy who brought UGA football a national championship and won the Heisman, I don't know what to tell you.

Brian Kemp, noted Trump enemy, is running away with the governorship tonight, while Herschel is fighting tooth and nail at the finish line. So the possibilities are that Stacey Abrams is the photo negative of Walker in terms of popularity, Warnock's two-year tenure gives him an incumbency advantage equal to the magnitude of Walker's titanic stature, or voters look for different qualities in Senators than they do in football running backs. My bet is on the third, particularly when Herschel's laundry is aired out in a competitive campaign (and surely one should expect a brain-damaged running back to have dirty laundry).

Stacey Abrams is the photo negative of Walker in terms of popularity

Without casting aspersion on any of your other points, this is very possible. Between the minor corruption scandal over her shoveling money at her campaign manager to fight a doomed election denier lawsuit and her frequent gaffes, she does not cut a particularly dashing public figure. Insofar as she is an effective Democratic operative, it seems to be within deep blue bubbles and within activist and organizing circles.

Not sure that Jan 6 impacted the Jan 5 runoffs too much, although I like the rest of your analysis.

You're right, thanks for the correction. The 2020 Georgia runoff was the day before the January 6 shitshow, but well after Trump claimed the election was stolen and lobbied Pence to steal it for him.

Right, there had already been a considerable amount of circus.

Depends on how you classify a wave, but looks like Oz and Masters will both lose. Walker is in a dog fight and may end up losing. That’s three very winnable races where Trumps guys are struggling mightily.

I really thought that Oz would win easily after seeing Fetterman's verbal impairment. Not sure what to make of his imminent win.

The obvious interpretation is that Pennsylvanians will pick a brain-damaged stroke victim over a rich Muslim carpetbagging snake-oil salesman who lives in New Jersey.

I think the more obvious interpretation is that people vote for the party first, especially for non-presidential races.

Yeah, very few people like parachute candidates who show up out of nowhere to try and get a seat. That was a bad call.

Unless it's a safe seat guaranteed for you by the party apparatus so that you can ascend the cursus honorum in your plan for running for the Presidency and your name is Hillary, of course.

Minus the Muslim thing, this is a perfect take.

Yeah probably right. I guess I just couldn't help myself adding it to the litany, being just four years after Trump tried to work a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims coming into the country "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

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Honestly I'd have done the same if I were a Pennsylvania Democrat. Senators aren't like governors or presidents, where you need someone competent, charismatic and strategic. A brilliant Senator can get valuable committee chairs, sponsor smart legislation, build legislative coalitions, etc., and that's ideal, but 90% of the value of a Senate seat is just mechanically voting how the party leader tells them to vote. Brain-damaged barely-coherent stroke victims are fine. Same with congressmen and SCOTUS justices. Anyone who votes for a living has a pretty easy job.

The reason you want to nominate good politicians for Senate seats is so that they can win elections. But having them run in against rich Muslim carpetbaggers who live in a completely different state apparently also works, if the other party is dumb enough to nominate them.

Either no one saw it or VBM has basically re created machine politics. I’m guessing the latter.

Which is massive contrast to the absolutely crushing performance Desantis just put forth with Rubio.

To DeSantis's credit, he did just get his state through a godawful hurricane with what appears to be quite competent and rapid organization and work. That would buff anyone's poll numbers. Masters, Oz, and Walker didn't get that chance (not that I think any of them, other than mmmmmaaaaaayyyyyybeeeee Masters could have done remotely as well in DeSantis's shoes)

He also appeared on stage with Biden, and praised Biden's response and got praised in return. That's the kind of thing squishy moderates like to see as well. He probably didn't need them, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

I have to think being the national face of reopening for business after covid didn't hurt his numbers either.

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