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 -
With Biden having low approval ratings, rampant inflation and a historical tendency to punish the incumbent in the midterms, the failure of the GOP to win back the senate is pretty stunning to me. It suggests that the GOP message just isn't popular and perhaps Trumpism, for a lack of a better word, is the only viable option as mainstream Reaganism (favored by party elites) is rejected by voters.
I really am struggling to make sense of this election. Every poll had the country deeply on the wrong track. Every poll by a large margin had economics as the number 1 issue with republicans crushing in that category. There wasn’t really anything for the Dems here.
Yet they seem to be doing very well relatively speaking.
I honestly think VBM has broken the system.
I think what's going on is that the villainization of Republicans is so pervasive across schools, government, and media both institutional and social, you have a large class of people who are not politically engaged and whose impressions are formed only by the cultural miasma of "Republicans are villains". The DNC has figured out how to get these people to vote anyways.
I'm pessimistic that there's any real counter to this. Because it is a strategy that relies on politically disengaged and low-information voters, it's basically immune to actual issues or platforms. It's about in-group and out-group, good guys and bad guys, high-status and low-status. The institutional and cultural capture has been a decades-long process and the storyline so firmly entrenched, it's probably no more reversible than Luke Skywalker being the good guy and Darth Vader being the bad guy.
Maybe. I guess you combine that with VBM?
It just seems odd — the country is in a terrible spot. Who votes for the incumbent?
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It's my observation that German media uncritically accept and promote the framing of democrats as good and republicans as bad, and this has been ongoing at least since the Clinton presidency.
It's the same in Finland. This is sometimes mentioned as a negative by Finnish right-wingers (of course a ypical Finnish center-rightist would reflexively support Democrats, too.)
Then again, why not? The Finnish media is certainly extremely negative on Putin - has been for his entire career, but particularly now. This is extremely uncontroversial, and the reasons are obvious; Putin's policies cause dangers to Finland, and there's no particular demand for neutrality in those situations.
GOP's policies don't cause a direct danger to Finland, but it's still a case where there are two parties, one of which at least states openly its internationalist principles and generally supports a cordial relationship with Europe, the other frequently speaking about Europe and the European systems, or at least a great subset of them, in hostile tones, and particularly during Trump's era committed to an "our country comes first, the rest take the hindmost" line. That's their right, of course, but in such a situation one might also expect that these two parties are indeed handled differently in the European medias, with less propensity for neutrality.
Of course the problem is that it becomes harder to understand the GOP perspective, but at least the Finnish media has a regular "Trump whisperer" for this purpose, a guy who wrote several (fairly good!) Finnish-language studies about the US religious right and ended up sympathizing the movement himself. The same guy made a completely misjudged "red wave" prediction for these elections, though, so we'll see how long his expertise continues to be used.
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