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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Notes -
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.
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.
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)?
DeSantis backers and Trump backers have largely been allies up to this point but there are some cracks starting to show. With more conservative Reps rallying to Desantis' flag and wishing that the Trump crowd would just shut up/stop giving the opponents ammunition. All eyes are on AZ atm, if Lake pulls off the upset this will strengthen the Desantis Camp and solidify a "Trumpism independent of Trump".
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No. Seeing your side lose in public is bad. Full stop. People hate a loser.
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.
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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.
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