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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18870 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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One of the nefarious stratagems the Democratic Party engaged in this election was to intentionally boost and generously fund far-right Republican candidates over their more moderate opponents in the Republican primaries. This potentially risky gambit was intended to allow Democratic candidates to coast to an easy victory by knocking out the moderate Republican option from the general election. This strategy was not just an after-thought, as the Dems put in a ton of resources into the effort. In Maryland for example, the Dems spent $1.2 million on Dan Cox's campaign, more than twice the money the candidate raised at that point. I thought then and still think this is dishonorable and contemptible behavior, but from a pure power play perspective, I concede it was a sound tactical decision. All six Republican candidates (3 governors, 1 senator, 2 house) targeted by this play lost the general election, five of them by double-digit margins.

It's important to emphasize that the Dems didn't force Republicans to do anything. All they did was dangle the candidate's Republican bona fides with "oh no it sure would be terrible if this person that loves Trump and still thinks the election was stolen ends up being the nominee oh no" and voters agreed with them. Given how much of a resounding success this was for the Dems, I anticipate we'll see it again in the future.

If so, can the GOP do anything to immunize itself from this effort? Should it even try to? Also, two can play at this game but is this strategy something the GOP can successfully levy? Dems have no shortage of total crazies (as Libs of TikTok can demonstrate) after all. What would that look like and what are some candidates that come to mind?

All they did was dangle the candidate's Republican bona fides with "oh no it sure would be terrible if this person that loves Trump and still thinks the election was stolen ends up being the nominee oh no" and voters agreed with them.

I think it's worse than that, for some of them. The Cox ad at least had a frame of his Jan6-specific tweet, but it's notable even the Mastriano ad framed it as "audited the election" rather than anything more direct or serious. In other cases, the buys were targeted at the moderate Republican without mentioning the nutjobs.

While a different sort of ratfucking, I'd also add Michigan's primary certification system. The emphasis on more moderate Republicans (and success against the most moderate Republicans) is a really convenient accident, and the partisan nature of the review did not make it look better.

If so, can the GOP do anything to immunize itself from this effort? Should it even try to?

The more general class -- unelectable nutjobs sweeping the primary, sometimes with outside support -- has been a long-term problem, nearly old enough to vote today. So I think so. The question's what solutions are both possible, and not worse than the problem.

  • You can reduce access to the primary system to start with, cutting off nutty outsiders before they even get started. This can be subtle (eg, increasingly steep signature requirements) or less so (require goofy amounts of paperwork while having party volunteers available for favored candidates) to the overt (kneecaps). Outside of the ethical questions for how compatible with democracy this technically is, though, this has the more immediate issue of ossifying the political party, often in pretty bad ways.

  • You can have a big war chest that you dole out specifically to counter something like this. Which is hard, both in the "keeping a war chest" side, and in the "countering something like this" one -- note that the Dan Cox bump came in the last two weeks, not a terribly easy time frame to identify and counter this stuff, especially to the tune of 1 million USD, and especially if you don't know where it might happen.

  • You can have a trusted third party that's able to tell people to "bite the bullet", even if they aren't usually spelling it out. Past primary activity is pretty hard to point toward, but the NRA's continued support of Harry Reid despite his opponents being better on guns is one of the more visible versions (if cross-party) of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, in that they got a huge amount of very quiet victories from him, and then got very publicly stabbed in a way that drastically undermined trust. Of course, even outside of the specific Dem-lead destruction of the NRA, we're running kinda low on trusted third parties, here.

  • You can have a powerful untrusted third party swoop in. Which... has its own benefits and downsides.

Also, two can play at this game but is this strategy something the GOP can successfully levy? Dems have no shortage of total crazies (as Libs of TikTok can demonstrate) after all.

I don't think this is a sword that cuts both ways. A lot of this process works because when Shapiro does this, Reason writes it up, and no one in Pennsylvania cares until after the primary and then both Shapiro and conventional media blast him with both barrels. Shapiro didn't have a meaningful primary challenger, but if we imagine that the nuttiest stereotype and Republicans tried to draw them into the main election by pointing out gun control and criminal justice reform policies, the next day the New York Times and every local news station would have stories about it. That is, the "trusted third party" is baked-in for Democratic candidates in a way that doesn't exist and probably can't exist for Republicans.

At a deeper level, I don't think the Red Tribe or the GOP has a good enough understanding of what the Dem total crazy is, and more (maybe not wrong!) fear that misidentification or bad luck will end up in that crazy becoming the new party dogma. Partly that's because the average GOP strategist is... not good, bluntly. Same for their near-strategists: I'm still not a fan of TracingWoodgrain's trick against LibsOfTikTok, but part of the reason for that is that Libs was already jumping onto Kitty Litter fakes or random unobjectionable stuff at length. But there are also just age, tech awareness, and infrastructural limits.

What would that look like and what are some candidates that come to mind?

I'm really hesitant to give examples out loud, because even if they wouldn't work, they're by definition the sort of weapons you shouldn't be talking about, in the same way that it's really bad that the aftermath of the Shiri's Scissor story had a bunch of people trying to identify the worst Scissors possible by manual search of the space.

I mean, the trusted third parties for Republicans are senior, popular republican politicians with a record of winning elections.

The trouble is that the absolutely dominant example this cycle was Trump, who doesn't have a great record of picking candidates because he is a nutjob with a love of psychophants.

Notably the GOP in states with plausible Trump alternative sources of energy largely avoided this problem- in Texas this was often Rick Perry's endorsement(and sometimes Ted Cruz, a native right-wing activist, or other elected officials), and in Florida it was Ron Desantis. The two dumbest GOP nominees in winnable races were both Trump picks, for example(seriously, Dr Oz and Herschel Walker?).

Herschel Walker also had the rather important John Heisman endorsement aside from his Trump one.

psychophants

Whether this was intentional or not, I love it.

That is, the "trusted third party" is baked-in for Democratic candidates in a way that doesn't exist and probably can't exist for Republicans.

What do you mean by this? That Democrats are seen as the trusted default?

If so why is this the case, wouldn't it depend on your class/upbringing?

I think they meant that they could count on mainstream media to boost the normies and ring alarm bells about plants, in a way that they can't or won't for Republican primaries.

What do you mean by this? That Democrats are seen as the trusted default?

Sorry, mean "third party" in the sense of 'not the candidate or their opponents', rather than in the sense of 'a different political party'. More that CNN/NBC can act to prove something to Democratic primary voters in a way that Fox News (or any other group) does not for Republican primary voters.

This is a relative matter and somewhat prone to limitations of evaluation as an outsider, but I think the extent media efforts against Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard turned into common knowledge for the majority of Democrats, even non-Trump Republican hanger-ons largely didn't get an equivalent, and where Trump was opposed it was often to his benefit.

Just another reason why primaries are a bit of a mess. Strong party elites who can clear the field of detritus straightforwardly improve their party's chance of winning, but what little control the GOP once had over the process has evaporated post 2016.

One of the great ironies of US politics is that the Republican party has always always been far more democratic in its operation than the Democrats, with the GOP having relatively little say it's constituent parties' operations compared to the power that the Democratic National Committee wields over it's state and municipal-level subcommittees.

I'm not sure there was that much difference between them before 2016. The DNC is by no means a kingmaker either, and the experience with Sanders' campaigns has only served to weaken it further. Of course, both parties are astoundingly weak compared to peer countries'.

As someone who's actually gotten to peak behind the curtain I'm going to have to disagree.

Ok, make your argument. Pre 2016, the story was "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line." Or as Will Rogers put it "I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat." Republican presidential candidates from Reagan to Romney were most frequently the second place finisher in the last primary (Reagan, Romney, McCain); out of the rest you have a sitting VP (Bush I), a former VP nominee (Dole), and the son of a former president (Bush II).

Democrats meanwhile, would pick an absolute zinger every now and then. Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton. They nominated Obama on the strength of one good speech from 2004.

2016 was a big flip. Since then we've had two straight "fall in line" Dems, and, well Trump on the Republican side. You can point to some antecedents, notably Eric Cantor getting primaried and Boehner being run out of town. But I have trouble seeing much pre-2016 evidence that the Republicans were more anarchic than the Democrats. Even in Congress, the Republicans more consistently understand the assignment. It's tough to picture the Democrats holding the line like Mitch's senate in 2016 to nab a SCOTUS seat under pressure. Hence the meme that when Republicans have a president and 50 senators they start wars and cut taxes and pass the Patriot act; when Democrats control both houses and the presidency they start talking about needing a bulletproof supermajority to get anything done.

Ok, make your argument.

Unlike the Democrats ultimate control of the control purse-stings resides at the state committee level. One of the major reasons you don't often see primary challenges against incumbents on the democrats' side is that the DNC exercises much stricter control over candidate endorsements and will threaten to pull funding and staff from the state before things get that far. The GOP's organization isn't "anarchic" so much as decentralized with state and regional organizations operating largely independently of each other.

Until Trump, Republicans had been consistently voting for the prior runner-up in presidential nominations. IIRC Romney, McCain, Dubya, Dole, HW, Reagan and Nixon were all nominated after being in second-place in the prior primary.

I think you're overstating it or not recalling correctly. I don't think that Dole ran against HW in 88, and certainly not in 92; Dubya did not run in 96; Nixon did not run against Goldwater in 64, but he was a prior VP and was the nominee in 60. Like I said in my comment: Reagan, McCain, and Romney cleanly fit that narrative. The rest have their establishment credentials in various ways. The last R nominee who was a lightning bolt from the blue like Trump is probably Goldwater in 64. Otherwise, every R nominee between 60 and 16 was on at least their second Presidential campaign by the time they got the nominee, with the exception of Dubya who had the exact same name (just missing his Herbert) as a prior Republican president. Another meme is that Republicans didn't win the Whitehouse without Nixon or a George Bush on the ticket between Hoover and Trump.

Comparing it to Dems across that same time JFK, McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Obama, Kerry, were all nominated on their first runs. Gore, Mondale, Humphrey go the other way. I'm not sure how to classify LBJ, for reasons I hope are obvious to anyone participating in this level of analysis. So 2016 and 2020, with the Dems nominating old war horses with multiple campaigns under their belt against a Republican bolt-from-the-blue are rare specimens; where in that time 1960, 1972, 1976, 1988, 1992, 2004, 2008, 2012, all ran the other way.

Dole got second place to Bush in 88, winning 5 states and getting 20% of the primary vote.

Buchannon (2nd place in 96) was completing the destruction of the reform party.

HW was 2nd in 80, Reagan was 2nd in 76. You covered McCain and Romney, 5 out of 6 ain't bad.

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"I know what is behind my curtain, so I know what is not behind your curtain."

Don't know for myself first hand, but have talked to enough people who would know to get a decent idea. In addition to the above my grandad was a state legislator.

On what point? That 2016 was a significant inflection point or that centralised control under the dems were not also weak (but perhaps stronger than today). Your linked post largely agrees on the importance of 2016 (even if painting it as the apotheosis of an ongoing trend) and doesn't address symmetries or lack thereof.

On what point?

First, that this is a recent development (IE from 2016 on). Second, that the DNC is "by no means a kingmaker".

I agree that it didn't come out of the blue on 2016, though I'd consider the view that it is largely a reaction to 2012 to be an agreement that it is actually quite recent.

For all the hay made of The Party Decides that became fodder for Getting It Wrong come 2016, to actually drop the conspiratorial lens on all the DNC leaks paints a picture of an astoundingly ineffectual institution.

I don't think it's a reaction to 2012 though because the relative decentralization of the GOP dates back to at least Coolidge in the 1920s

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After Carter both parties added super delegates, but they're about 15% of the Democratic convention and only 7% of the Republican's. Also, more recently they're more tethered to the state vote.

The Youngkin nomination provides the path forward here. The Partisan primary is a worthless, broken system for choosing the candidates of a political party. It promotes selecting extremist candidates who underperform in general elections and isn't even particularly democratic.

Party conventions with majoritarian nomination requirements are what I want. The whole move away from powerful conventions was a stupid, mid-century feel-good move in the first place and it has been busily sabotaging our ability to govern ourselves ever since.

I think we've already seen some efforts to do this on the right, "I like Bernie, at least he has some balls!" Target candidates like Fetterman and Bernie, AOC if she tries to run for higher office, and label them as spiritually in the right place even if you disagree with their policies.

"I'd rather fight with a socialist with courage who wants to help working class American people but doesn't know how, than deal with slimy corporate-woke lizard people who don't care at all."

What's cool is, you can run that messaging through existing red tribe outlets, and democrats will still fall for it! Fettermans entire career is just chasing the vibe of being appealing to working class white people. Democrats already have this prophecy that if they could only get the white working class back they'd be unbearable!

But that's the lesson from Fetterman, and Trump if you buy that Clinton goaded him into it. You gotta put up a good campaign with a good candidate after.

Shapiro beat Mastriano black and blue because Shapiro was a great candidate (ticket him for white house buzz by 2028). Fetterman still pulled it out because oz.

Democrats already have this prophecy that if they could only get the white working class back they'd be unbearable!

Aye, they would indeed

It's important to emphasize that the Dems didn't force Republicans to do anything. All they did was dangle the candidate's Republican bona fides with "oh no it sure would be terrible if this person that loves Trump and still thinks the election was stolen ends up being the nominee oh no" and voters agreed with them. Given how much of a resounding success this was for the Dems, I anticipate we'll see it again in the future.

I agree that we'll see it again, but strongly disagree that 'all they did' was dangle. Active interference with the internal workings of the opposition party isn't a bad idea in a functioning democracy because it 'forces' the opposition to do anything- it's because the purpose of such an intervention is to prevent the opposition from doing anything by keeping them out of power. The distinction is like claiming an induced convulsion doesn't prevent your muscles from working, and so isn't the same effect as induced paralysis. Steering crowds towards known allergens in a buffet and then deliberately making the alternatives look worse doesn't change a dynamic of food tampering just because someone could have chosen a different item. The actions taken were intended for an effect, and the moral onus of the effect lies with the person who instigated the action with the intent to cause that effect.

The fact that it works is not new. The reasons why it shouldn't be done are not new either. Even 'minimal' active interference in the internal workings of the opposition is a bad idea because it's the precedent/catalyst for more and other forms of active interference, the consistent success of which builds upon itself turns an opposition party into a state-managed (as opposed to state-run) opposition.

This is generally understood in other contexts to be a pretty banal means for authoritarians to degrade and defang democratic opposition parties.

If so, can the GOP do anything to immunize itself from this effort? Should it even try to?

The answer to the first is yes. You can immunize yourself to foreign influences by ruthlessly purging people associated with the influence vectors and, as possible, actively targetting the sources of influence until they can not or will not attempt further influence efforts along those lines. Since it is quite profitable for them to do so, targetting will be need to be highly coercive, and involve some mix of targeted violence, intimidation, and other forms of retaliation against not only the organizers, but their associates and friends and allies, until such people are isolated even within their own alliance networks and unable to execute and no one will want to be seen as emulating them. Such a campaign will need to sustained, actively circumvent efforts of the state dominated by the opposing party to prevent it, and generate popular momentum to continue targetting these people who happen to be fellow citizens of the country.

The answer to the second is that obviously many people, and not just those positively inclined towards the ruling party, would rather the opposition party not do that.

I'm so confused by this comment. What did the democrats do beyond presenting options to the primary voters who then voted for those options? Those voters weren't prevented from voting for whoever they like, they simply liked the nutbags. Hell, Trump is a free actor. He could have endorsed moderates, and chose not to. Who was prevented from doing anything? There's a lot of darkly hinting at sinister actions but not much evidence.

I don't even think Dems needed to lie about their intentions or beliefs. They put up ads like "Cox is too consistently conservative for Maryland", which they really believed (and the recent election suggests they were correct to believe that). There's nothing wrong with advertising your beliefs.

I joked with my wife that Mastriano was the Yes-Chad candidate, or the This-But-Unironically campaign. Most "attack ads" against Mastriano were just him responding to a question like "Should abortion be legal?" with an answer like "No, absolutely not, no exceptions."

Politcio has started off their election day coverage with a tweet that's enraging Republicans....

The 2020 presidential election was rife with allegations of voting machine hacks that were later debunked.

Yet there are real risks that hackers could tunnel into voting equipment and other election infrastructure to try to undermine Tuesday’s vote.

https://twitter.com/politico/status/1589568452699820032

The flip from "election deniers" to "legitimately and patriotically questioning the election" is going to be fun to watch and compare.

It's already happened - with a registered Democrat arrested for trying to interfere with a voting machine.

But it heightened concerns among election officials and security experts that conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election could inspire some voters to meddle with - or even attempt to sabotage - election equipment.

But it's ok! Even when it's registered Democrats doing the meddling, it's the fault of the Republicans for their conspiracy theories of Democratic meddling.

Election officials in Colorado use locks and tamper-evident seals on voting equipment, so it becomes apparent if someone has tried to access it. Trigger alerts make machines inoperable if someone tries to tamper with them, which is what happened in Pueblo, according to Ortiz and the Colorado Secretary of State's office.

That is good. This means that people can't hack election infrastructure without detection and we have nothing to worry about. Hopefully no one will make any claims to the contrary.

Republican inspired stochastic election tampering.

That is good. This means that people can't hack election infrastructure without detection and we have nothing to worry about. Hopefully no one will make any claims to the contrary.

Unless the machines are connected to any sort of network, in which case all bets are off.

So, today Trump lashed out at Desantis. He emailed the following to his supporters

https://saveamerica.nucleusemail.com/amplify/v/GffdEHBBmz?hids=NEVWi21K&_nlid=gw8TKPg85p&_nhids=NEVWi21K

NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post (bring back Col!), is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious, an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average—middle of the pack—including COVID, and who has the advantage of SUNSHINE, where people from badly run States up North would go no matter who the Governor was, just like I did!

Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017—he was politically dead, losing in a landslide to a very good Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Putnam, who was loaded up with cash and great poll numbers. Ron had low approval, bad polls, and no money, but he said that if I would Endorse him, he could win. I didn’t know Adam so I said, “Let’s give it a shot, Ron.” When I Endorsed him, it was as though, to use a bad term, a nuclear weapon went off. Years later, they were the exact words that Adam Putnam used in describing Ron’s Endorsement. He said, “I went from having it made, with no competition, to immediately getting absolutely clobbered after your Endorsement.” I then got Ron by the “Star” of the Democrat Party, Andrew Gillum (who was later revealed to be a “Crack Head”), by having two massive Rallies with tens of thousands of people at each one. I also fixed his campaign, which had completely fallen apart. I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…

And now, Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games! The Fake News asks him if he’s going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, “I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future.” Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.

This is just like 2015 and 2016, a Media Assault (Collusion!), when Fox News fought me to the end until I won, and then they couldn’t have been nicer or more supportive. The Wall Street Journal loved Low Energy Jeb Bush, and a succession of other people as they rapidly disappeared from sight, finally falling in line with me after I easily knocked them out, one by one. We’re in exactly the same position now. They will keep coming after us, MAGA, but ultimately, we will win. Put America First and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Not sure how much commentary to add, but feel like it probably belongs here- Trump v Desantis could be a pretty big fight if Desantis engages.

Update: Trump has now targeted Youngkin as well, with the same attack(‘would be nothing without me’) and a claim that his name ‘sounds Chinese’.

The best thing Trump should do now is just die and become an icon. The Republicans got the message that they need a culture warriors, but the recent elections showed that said warriors shouldn't be unhinged. The party made major inroads with black and latino voters and the Dem party is becoming the party of the luxury beliefs. So they have a lot of stuff going right for them. Trump paved the way for a lot of victories, show a winning template, but right now we need someone with a bit less ego and more executive still while still having the Trump flair.

I always assumed, just as a matter of narrative, that everything would catch up to Trump while he was in office then he'd die of a heart attack. His will would be read, and it would call for a giant golden pyramid to be built in Arlington national cemetery. Chaos would ensue. One final troll for the road.

Desantis stood up to a lot of the Covid measures and he actually seems to have a little bit of a platform that's not just 'look at the crazy left!'. I think people are getting sick of the culture war too... Which will hurt trump (gut feeling, so whatever).

If I was Biden, I'd be hoping for a Trump run.

Would be best for the country if he died and honestly that’s the best choice for trump’s ego.

I know I have my biases but this comes across as uniquely and desperately pathetic. I'm aware that "he begged me to help him" is a common Trump play, but it's at least usually levied towards people in a weaker position relative to him. It's weird to deploy this towards someone who had a much better election Tuesday than Trump did. Also, Low Energy Jeb and Little Marco were all scathing and catchy nicknames, but what the hell is DeSanctimonious supposed to mean??

I actually like Desanctimonious. It gestures towards a holier than thou attitude, a petty culture war tyrant who wants to tell you what to do.

I don't actually watch enough Desantis press conferences to know if it will work or not, I've been successfully avoiding TV news.

Too many syllables, and I can't tell who its supposed to resonate with.

Is there a large contingent of Rs that would nod in agreement with the 'sanctimonious' label? Sanctimonious about what, exactly? The things that they already broadly align with him on?

It would be more understandable if Trump was appealing to Democrats with that jab. But it's still nowhere near catchy enough. Disappointed.

That's the secret: Trump is going to switch parties and primary Biden from the left as a Democrat, then run against Desantis as a Democrat. Nobody will see it coming, which is why it will work.

But really, Trump's core constituents are lumpen proles and gutter conservatives. Conservative christians who live their values will hold their nose and vote for him, but they won't like it except to win. That's the target audience of this line.

That's the secret: Trump is going to switch parties and primary Biden from the left as a Democrat, then run against Desantis as a Democrat. Nobody will see it coming, which is why it will work.

Dear god, some perverse part of me wants to see this happen. Trump has flip-flopped his party identification before.

If anything conservative Christians will move more towards Desantis; he was, if anything, moderate.

That's exactly what I was trying to say, that DeSanctimonious is targeted at red tribe lumpen proles against the Ned Flanders evangelicals (who will prefer Desantis to Trump by nature).

Flanders would prefer Cruz or Hawley, honestly- Desantis is pretty moderate on culture war issues, he just prioritizes them. ‘Desanctimonious’ makes him more appealing to Flanders, I don’t know if it has much effect on lumpen proles at all.

It just doesn't seem to stick at all to me. If you were going to choose a group to call "sanctimonious" in our current political climate, it would have to be the woke, and if Desantis is known for anything these days it's for finding new ways to get the woke worked up.

Trump’s core supporters are the red tribe proles who view ‘Christian values’ as aspirational and more than a bit snooty. ‘Desanctimonious’ is a strange choice of words to appeal to construction workers, but casting Desantis as holier than thou is a reasonable if unconventional choice to speak to his core supporters.

Remember, the red tribe generally does not like holy rollers very much, although they fight endlessly over who counts as one. Calling Desantis(a wealthy Catholic who’s almost certain to contrast himself with trump by portraying himself as a social conservative who actually practices Christianity) a holy roller makes sense to appeal to Trump’s not-very-religious base.

It could still backfire, but it’s an at least reasonable choice of attacks.

...didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average—middle of the pack—including COVID, and who has the advantage of SUNSHINE...

Absolutely infuriating. I'm generally willing to cut Trump some slack for being outflanked by public health "experts" at the federal level, but criticizing DeSantis for being way better than Trump on this issue is a bridge too far. Trump's Covid sins are forgivable, but not if he's going to act like he has no responsibility, while pointing the finger at people that overrode his administration's advice.

It’s laughable. Trump could’ve fired the lockdown supporters that enabled everything (eg Fauci, Birx) but did nothing. DeSantis took the arrows from the persons Trump failed to fire. Florida did just fine for an old state.

Also funny how trump claims people moved to Florida for the sunshine. I guess the sunshine changed in the last few years.

I guess the sunshine changed in the last few years.

I suppose California must have lost quite a bit of sunshine in the same years. Weird.

These “statements” are so unhinged I always have to check multiple times if they are actually real. Really hope trump goes away.

This reads to me like one of those Nigerian prince emails. It seems deliberately written to repel anyone with half of brain so the only ones left reading are uniquely gullible. With luck, we'll be rid of this charlatan soon. The Republicans have a star in DeSantis and I think he easily defeats Trump in the primary, and goes on to win the Presidency. The only question is if Trump would run as a spoiler.

He's also swinging at Youngkin:

Young Kin (now that's an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn't it?) in Virginia couldn't have won without me. I Endorsed him, did a very big Trump Rally for him telephonically, got MAGA to Vote for him - or he couldn't have come close to winning. But he knows that, and admits it. Besides, having a hard time with the Dems in Virginia - But he'll get it done!

My estimation is that Trump or his advisors sense that there are a lot of people in the GOP who are primed to blame him for spoiling what should have been a blowout and wants to signal that he's prepared to sabotage the party if they try to get rid of him.

I really don't understand why he added "Sounds Chinese, doesn't it?" It alienates Chinese Americans and Youngkin supporters, and makes him look buffoonish for... no perceived purpose at all?

My personal hypothesis is -- bear with me here -- that he is a bitter narcissist with poor impulse control.

Perish the thought!

TBH, if trumps personnel decisions hadn’t been terrible, the GOP would likely have a congressional majority and possibly an additional governor seat. Where the GOP had non-Trump endorsements as the deciding factor in candidate selection(Florida and Texas), they did pretty well, even if, as in Texas, there was a hard abortion ban in place.

DeSantis should ignore Trump and continue to quietly court the Powers That Be within the Red Team to come to his side while Trump takes the heat from the Blue Team for another year.

In a perfect DeSantis scenario, a couple months before the 2024 RNC primaries start, all the remnants of (R) QAnon type guys still in office are brought into a smoky room meeting with their sponsors and told to knock it off because there's an election to win and Trump is quietly blackballed from the party during the primaries like Sanders was in 2020.

Somehow I doubt it will end this cleanly for him.

Trump can’t be quietly blackballed from the primary like Sanders. The GOP doesn’t work that way.

There's no Powers That Be within the Trump coalition except for Trump. The "QAnon" type guys don't have any sponsors except their own contemptible fever dreams. Your post works only as fantasy. The GOP primary voters have to be persuaded that he's a fucking moron who deep-sixed their chances in two federal elections in a row at this point.

but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen…

Uh, what? I do remember when Trump cried wolf about fraud in the Florida 2018 race before all the votes were counted and Gillum had an early lead, it was part of the basis for my correct prediction that he wouldn't accept a loss in 2020. But he's saying he actually sent agents that somehow changed how the votes were counted and is giving himself credit for DeSantis' win because he did so? That sounds like 1) a huge lie that would have been exposed by the media/FBI leaks if it actually happened, and 2) easily read as a confession to electoral fraud to people motivated to accuse him of such.

Is this a 4D chess move to drag DeSantis into January 6 investigations? Does he know he's lying, but actually thinks this is an effective attack on DeSantis that makes himself look good? Or does he think he's telling the truth and sincerely believe DeSantis owes his 2018 victory to Trump sending FBI agents to something something stop ballot theft?

It’s almost certainly one of the latter two- trump is many things, but 5D chess player is not one of them.

Alien vs Predator 3: No Matter Who Wins, We Lose.

Some final thoughts and commentary on this race, focusing mostly on the campaign ads. I had wanted to link the ads I'm seeing as I discuss them, but there does not seem to be any easy repository. Some of the Oz ads, or similar clips, are available on his website and Youtube channel. Fetterman has a much more expansive listing of clips on his Youtube channel, but they don't seem very similar to the ads I'm actually seeing FIVE TIMES EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK. Note that this is all in the Philly market.

Let's start with this Fetterman ad which is not one I've ever seen on TV, though there are some similar themes, and some glaring omissions. The ads I see do hit that note about wanting to "cut taxes for working families", but I have never seen a Fetterman ad say one word about the minimum wage. His ads talk about how Oz has 10 mansions, but Fetterman wants to cut taxes and make sure no community gets left behind and he definitely wants to fight crime and get more stuff made in Pennsylvania.

He still plays this like he's an anti-establishment Republican; you could be forgiven for thinking he was a moderate Tea Partier. Zero references to progressive or left-wing causes, he is nativist, vague on actual policies, but he is definitely One Of Us, not like that Turk.

On a related note, Josh Shapiro has a spot running where is also in favor of cutting taxes, and promises to put parents on the state education board. Taking in the tenor of these campaign pitches, I would be very morose if I were a leftist.

Fetterman does also have another ad running a lot, with a very positive, uplifting tone, where he doesn't say anything negative and ends by "respectfully asking for your vote".

Oz has a parallel one (unfortunately, it evades my Google-fu). In it, Oz expresses gratitude on behalf of himself and his family for "your kindness, and your grace". Just a strong positive note from both of them to end on, only mostly ruined by the shitflinging from the last few months... and their other ads... and all the ads being run by affiliated groups.

Oz has this ad, or one very similar running all the time. Oz stresses that he is like, amazingly super compassionate, and that the real problem is extremism on both sides. His ads position him as a moderate, who just want solutions gosh-darnit by listening and working together and building a reality-warping engine from a condensed singularity of generic moderation.

Both men have allies running harsh attack ads. CRAZY JOHN FETTERMAN WANTS CRIMINALS TO RUN WILD. He also, I hear, MOOCHES OFF HIS PARENTS. It must be nice to actually work for a year, and be so upset about it that you have daddy buy you a political office that is supposed to be extremely part time instead. There is another pair of ads featuring black people ripping into Fetterman for the whole situation where he heard gunfire, grabbed a shotgun, and held up the first black jogger he saw. Obviously a brutally negative ad aimed directly at the black community in Philly.

The other side has ads running against Oz, but almost more at Republicans in general. Republicans want to BAN ALL ABORTION even in cases of RAPE AND INCEST. Look at this 10 YEAR OLD GIRL who could be FORCED TO CARRY HER RAPISTS BABY. Republicans apparently also are going to DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. These ads focus less on attacking Oz directly, and more on the logic that as a Republican vote, he'll enable the other more extreme Republicans, which is an interesting bit of raw tribalism/game theory. They make a bit of hay out of Oz's statement at the debate that abortion should be between "a woman and her doctor and local politicians", but not as much as is made of Fetterman's performance. One ad just runs this clip, almost without commentary. Another has a bunch of Very Concerned People discussing how much Fetterman's debate failure changed their opinions, because he clearly can't do the job. One line effectively pings off a previous Fetterman ad where he bizarrely talks about how grateful he was to get to spent time with his family while recovering, by saying that he looks like he should be resting with his family instead of running for Senate. Oz is also going to RAISE YOUR TAXES (lolwut?), including one little snippet that should win an award for dishonesty, where the name "OZ" is pasted above a newspaper headline style snippet reading "CUT MEDICARE" and "RAISED YOUR TAXES", clearly implying that he has already done so, in spite of his never having held office before.

So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.

Finally, some Kabbalah. I find it delightful that his support for releasing criminals has been an albatross around the neck of a candidate named Fetter-man. Unfortunately, the surname apparently has no linguistic connection to fetters, it's actually an old Germanic nickname/insult for "the fat guy", which again is odd because John looks like he has lost a bunch of weight, all of which went to his hideous neck goiter. "Mehmet Oz", OTOH, apparently just means "praiseworthy courage", which is so bland and boring and inappropriate I can't even make fun of it.

"John Fetterman" has a gematria of 1065, which is the Return of Partnership Income Tax form. "Mehmet Oz" has a gematria of 728, and Luke 7:28 reads "I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” The Khabbalistic implications of this are obvious, but I cannot find anything saying if Oz was a C-section or not. If Fetterman wins, this should be a critical attribute of the next Republican challenger in 2028.

If there is some hidden message in their names that will reveal the winner, it eludes me. But I can say with confidence and joy that 48 hours from now I will be 5+ years away from seeing a single ad for either of these fuckheads again. May God have mercy on us all.

The white hoodie Fetterman wears in the new tv ads makes it look like he died and this is how John Fetterman looks in heaven. The post stroke gentle voice adds to the effect. We are not voting for John Fetterman, we are voting for his ghost. Somewhere, Connor lamb won't stop telling everyone how many push ups he can do.

If Oz wins, he can thank the Fetterman campaign and national democrats for loudly painting him as pro-life when he was pro choice up until 2019.

Vote Erik, at least you can sneer at whoever wins with a clear conscience.

There's no way to paint an Oz win as anything other than an own-goal by Dems. They had a chance to not nominate Fetterman after his stroke, they had a chance to maybe pull him from contention and put forth a better challenger, they absolutely had the choice to not put Fetterman up to a debate, and probably made it worse by making it so late in the election cycle. And they definitely should not have run an ad campaign that gave Oz cover for previous positions that might have killed his appeal to Republicans.

And I'm sure they also had a hand in Oz getting the nom too.

Oz is an effective showman which counts for a lot, but way early on not even his own party was optimistic about his chances.

Live update: in line at polling station. High turnout, I'm in and out most years. Tough to read the crowd, not obviously r or d. Turnout is typically good for D, but in this case it means the early mail votes that came pre debate are less decisive.

I don't think you could have looked very sincerely if you're mostly seeing quotes from 2010.

For example, in August, Ron Johnson was saying regarding social security:

“If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost,” Johnson said. “And our problem in this country is that more than 70 percent of our federal budget, of our federal spending, is all mandatory spending. It’s on automatic pilot. It never — you just don’t do proper oversight. You don’t get in there and fix the programs going bankrupt. It’s just on automatic pilot.”

“What we ought to be doing is we ought to turn everything into discretionary spending so it’s all evaluated so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt,” Johnson said. “As long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/ron-johnson-medicare-social-security/

Now I'd say that it's a bit hysterical to call this destroying social security, but making social security discretionary would dramatically change how secure that program is.

Reminds me of the story of the Super-Conducting Super Collider and how the physicists working on it oddly resisted implementing cost-control software. Now, in terms of vibes, I can imagine that the public, or at least the pro-welfare people, would probably also resist cost-control scrutinization of current welfare programs, but on the other hand, could it be any worse than existing means-testing?

Just to be clear, are you calling social security "welfare"?

I know it's not the same as assistance for poverty, but I figured it was a similar idea. I guess I should have said "social expenditures" instead of "welfare."

Maybe Google just wasn't showing me paywalled results, or my phrasing was selecting for outlets like Rawstory.

So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.

(I had seen those headlines and hadn't dug deeper. Here's what I found with a quick web search.)

I think you're talking about New York Times articles like "Republicans, Eyeing Majority, Float Changes to Social Security and Medicare". For concrete proposals, it links indirectly to https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/budget_fy22_final.pdf which includes details such as

  • Increasing the Medicare/Social Security age and enshrining future increases in law by tying them to life expectancy.

  • Privatizing Medicare/Social Security.

These (and a lot of other details I didn't read carefully nor am at all qualified to analyze) are framed as responsible ways to keep those programs running. And, of course, the minority party always proposes things when out of power that they never seriously try to enact when they think they might actually pass. But the House Republicans (well, the RSC which is apparently 156 out of 212 current House Republicans) really did publish a wishlist of what they want in a budget and it included those things.

The linked article "Entitlement, Spending Cap Plans Linked by GOP to Debt-Limit Deal" quotes Republican politicans talking about that plan in interviews for that article published October 11, 2022, and that the plan itself was published in June.

Increasing the retirement age/pension age is something they are also considering here in Ireland (it was supposed to happen last year, but public reaction was so bad they sat on it) so it's one of the tools governments are trying when struggling with the "pensions timebomb". I think privatising Medicare/Social Security would be a bad idea, as these are huge government programmes and there are enough layers of bureaucracy without having to deal with "which private entity took over my pension and have they gone bust or sold it on to someone?" with privatisation.

I actually did find that NYT article, but it's paywalled and thus memory-holed. The plan probably deserves it's own discussion thread, but at a glance, it looks like a ACA style "reform", which makes all the rhetoric fucking hilarious.

There is another pair of ads featuring black people ripping into Fetterman for the whole situation where he heard gunfire, grabbed a shotgun, and held up the first black jogger he saw.

Wait, what??

This situation.

I really wish that Republicans were awesome enough to destroy social security and Medicaid but I know in my heart that they never will.

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.

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.

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".

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.

The degree to which this is "delusional" is one of the key points of disagreement between the Laptop Class and everyone else. The sentiment that "not only do we need to win but we need to beat the margin of the steal" has been bog standard mainstream GOP sentiment since at least 2010 when Obama and Barbara Boxer "joked" about accidentally misplacing ballot boxes from red leaning districts and siccing the IRS on anyone donating to the Tea-Party

Some of the specific claims Trump - in particular the Dominion voting machine conspiracy theory - almost certainly qualify as delusional, and the main reason why they might not is that Trump could have known they were false all along, making them dishonest rather than delusional. IIRC Trump made various claims to have won a landslide, which would also count as delusional - the plausible Trump win scenarios were squeakers.

The "bog standard mainstream GOP" claim that the normal run of petty incompetence that we see in American elections represents co-ordinated fraud by Democrats on a large enough scale to flip multiple states with 5-figure leads (which is what would have been needed to steal the 2020 presidential election) is clearly false and clearly sincerely held by significant numbers of sane people, so whether or not it is "delusional" is a boring argument about the meaning of words.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pro-choice voters aren't the target audience here, because pro-choice voters weren't going to vote for him anyway. The intended audience is pro-life voters, and the intended effect is to get them disgusted enough to stay home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

Minus the Muslim thing, this is a perfect take.

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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.

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.

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

So looks like I can review my prior thoughts on the PA statewide campaigns. Oz and Mastriano represented the two faces of Trump: celebrity crypto-moderate and blood-red culture warrior.

If Both win, then we're probably seeing a Red Wave, and Trump 2024 is a near certainty, because voters are embracing both the Christian Nationalist and Quack Celebrity Pseudo-Moderate strains. If Mastriano teaches Shapiro how to Dougie, but Oz quacks out against Fetterman, then it would seem that Trumpism has left behind the cable-tv popularity contests in favor of raw rightist culture warring, and if an anti-abortion extremist can win in PA then there may be hope for the pro-life movement nationally. If Oz beats up a stroke victim, but Mastriano loses to a Jewish government lawyer, then it would seem to indicate that Trumpian candidates are better off triangulating towards vague moderation than fighting for pure culture war idealism. If both lose, then the lesson would seem to be that only Trump is Trump, and other Republicans would do better not to try to follow him too closely.

Most of the results are in, and it looks like both lost pretty conclusively. I would frame that as a pretty conclusive rejection of Trumpism, lock stock and barrel. It's really tough for me, as a local Republican, to look at this and not think that McCormick would have taken this election walking away if he hadn't run against his own best attributes; and Bill McSwain probably puts up a stronger fight for Governor with policies that are sane instead of policies like Abolish Public Schools with No Plan to Replace Them. There was a Red Wave coming in to shore, but PA republican primary voters chose candidates who couldn't swim. We could have kept Toomey's seat, and chose not to; and at least avoided a gubernatorial candidate that was a massive anchor dragging everyone else down. This will probably cost the Rs a SCOTUS seat, and possibly more. The stink of Oz and Mastriano might waft on through 2024 if they aren't shuffled off stage fast enough.

It's possible to frame this as a relative "win" for the Oz wing of Trumpism, on the theory that Doug got blown the fuck out while Oz lost narrowly; Fetterman should be sending Mastriano flowers and taking him out to dinner for saving Fetterman's ass by encouraging D turnout. But the difference is more likely to be explained by differences in the quality of their opponents. Shapiro was popular, well known, moderate and ran a tight campaign. Fetterman was doing pretty well, right up until he went from looking like Gritty to sounding like Gritty, and he was always a more radical left wing candidate at a time of high inflation. That Oz couldn't beat out a stroke victim with a spending plan that makes Bernie look like Grover Norquist is a pretty conclusive nail in the Trumpian crypto-moderate coffin.

Given that PA is likely to remain a critical swing state in 2024, Republicans should be looking at this result when picking a presidential candidate and honing a strategy. Arguably Trump is already triangulating against the culture war end of the party, labeling his likely opponent "Ron DeSanctimonious." Desantis should note this as well, and aim to moderate on the culture war front in favor of competence and general good governance principles. And the Rs should strongly consider running a true moderate candidate, an R governor from a blue state, like Hogan or Phil Scott; if they feel Desantis already poisoned the well with his goofy-ass Disney fight and such.

goofy-ass Disney fight

I feel like this reflects a failure to grasp the best of what DeSantis represents. Now, the Martha's Vineyard thing was, I think, a mistake, most especially since the immigrants involved didn't even leave from Florida. But Disney came out swinging against DeSantis. It wasn't his "goofy-ass...fight," it was Disney's goofy-ass fight. DeSantis' only real choice there was to remind them that they are a corporation and tell them to get back in their lane. Anything else would have resulted in DeSantis looking like a bootlicker who caves to Woke Corporatism the moment his moneyed masters yank on the chain.

Disney owns (and tyrannically enforces) a lot of beloved IP, so there will always be some people who think "Disney hates DeSantis, so I hate DeSantis." But politically speaking, "there are consequences to getting politically involved" was exactly the right message to send to businesses in this case. As they say--if you're going to take a shot at the king, don't miss. Disney sticking its corporate neck out to object to a bill forbidding schools from exposing young children to sexually explicit pedagogy was a horrible, horrible choice. They missed their shot, and DeSantis had exactly the correct response: punish defectors.

It wasn't his "goofy-ass...fight," it was Disney's goofy-ass fight. DeSantis' only real choice there was to remind them that they are a corporation and tell them to get back in their lane. Anything else would have resulted in DeSantis looking like a bootlicker who caves to Woke Corporatism the moment his moneyed masters yank on the chain.

Indeed, while the opening scenarios were not directly equivalent, by standing his ground and "punching-back" Desantis passed the test that Cruz failed back in 2016.

Now, the Martha's Vineyard thing was, I think, a mistake, most especially since the immigrants involved didn't even leave from Florida.

If the Democrats would have responded in a sane fashion, simply housed the migrants for a while, and kept largely quiet about it rather than openly screaming about it being a humanitarian crisis (50 people, I remind you) then yeah. But that's not what happened.

It's just possible that Desantis has a better grasp of the tactical situation on the ground than you think.

https://www.yahoo.com/video/floridas-hispanic-voters-back-desantis-120000204.html

My problem is that it still hasn't been demonstrated to me that the action abolishing Disney's local control benefits the taxpayers of Florida, rather than harming both Disney and Florida. Lose-lose governance by deterrence does not appeal to me. Sanctity of contract is also highly important to me, but I'm not sure that carries broadly beyond business-Rs. I'm open to evidence that it's good, but I haven't seen it.

But Disney came out swinging against DeSantis. It wasn't his "goofy-ass...fight," it was Disney's goofy-ass fight. DeSantis' only real choice there was to remind them that they are a corporation and tell them to get back in their lane. Anything else would have resulted in DeSantis looking like a bootlicker who caves to Woke Corporatism the moment his moneyed masters yank on the chain.

I think you're ignoring the "ignore it" option. DeSantis could have just said "You stick to cartoons, I'll run the state" and decried Disney's intrusion into politics, without wading into the muck with them. If you're wealthy, you probably own shares in many "woke corporations" and you don't want to get punished for what management does.

My problem is that it still hasn't been demonstrated to me that the action abolishing Disney's local control benefits the taxpayers of Florida, rather than harming both Disney and Florida.

It benefits the people of Florida by ensuring that the people calling the shots are the politically accountable people, rather than (Californian!) corporations. There may or may not be a pricetag in dollars that will ultimately fall to Florida (I wouldn't even be surprised to see DeSantis backpedal on this under the right circumstances) but the political benefit seems obvious and arguably priceless. (For a much bigger example of this, see Brexit. The economic cost has been substantial, probably, but Brexit did accomplish exactly what it was supposed to: it liberated the UK from being a vassal state of Brussels.)

Lose-lose governance by deterrence does not appeal to me.

Same--but win-lose governance where leftists demand every W and conservatives are expected to eat every L appeals to me far, far less.

DeSantis could have just said "You stick to cartoons, I'll run the state" and decried Disney's intrusion into politics, without wading into the muck with them.

Right--then he's all talk, no action. Pass.

If you're wealthy, you probably own shares in many "woke corporations" and you don't want to get punished for what management does.

Then you should appreciate Ron DeSantis reminding management to stay in their lane, so as to avoid pointless confrontations with government actors. Woke Corporatism is a plague on politics, but it's not going to go away until it negatively impacts enough people's bottom line, so I think it is good to impose costs on corporations that seek to extract private profits by polluting the political commons. Of course, I say that as someone who misses the anti-corporatism of the late conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist. Presumably more pro-corporate conservatives will have a different view.

being a vassal state of Brussels.)

Inflammatory claim that needs some evidence surely? If you want to say it's supporters made that claim, then that is fine. But let's not assume facts not in evidence without at least substantiating your claim. The UK government was far from a vassal in my opinion. And I worked there!

Guess I'm just not sufficiently plugged in to European politics to understand why this would be "inflammatory." In this context, "vassal" just means--

a person or country in a subordinate position to another

As a part of the EU, the UK was legally subordinate to decisions made in Brussels (the administrative center of the EU), so I was just describing the literal state of the law pre-Brexit. When you say "The UK government was far from a vassal" are you asserting something like, "the UK did get to participate in the decision-making process, and therefore was not a vassal" maybe? If so, I don't really buy that; the UK was not EU occupied territory (modulo, perhaps, some worries over immigration) and the UK was not an EU colony (see previous qualifier), but I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the people of the UK ultimately chafed at being in a legally subordinate position to Brussels.

But perhaps I have simply failed to understand something about your objection.

the UK did get to participate in the decision-making process, and therefore was not a vassal"

Correct. Otherwise every voter is a vassal of the government no? Which I don't think is something most people would accept (Libertarians as always excluded.). In any case the vassal framing was used by one particular side, so if you want to claim it is unconditionally correct, in an aside it probably requires more explanation.

Just like groomer, or Nazi, vassal has a set of emotional connotations which is why it is used by one side as an attack. It is a good political attack don't get me wrong. I certainly endorsed its use in that context (I may be a Remainer but I was being paid by (some of) the Tories at the time) but it isn't neutral, let alone indisputably accurate.

Otherwise every voter is a vassal of the government no?

Indeed--every voter is a vassal of the government.

Which I don't think is something most people would accept (Libertarians as always excluded.)

I don't want to say this without couching it very carefully, because it's pretty antagonistic standing on its own in ways I don't want to convey, but my initial reaction to this parenthetical was "well a hearty 'fuck you' to you, too"--followed by some indication that I say it with a smile. I'm not offended, genuinely. But if you think in terms of "libertarians as always excluded" then it's no wonder at all that you failed to take my meaning in the first place. If you think in terms of "libertarians as always excluded," then you have a very slim chance of genuinely understanding anything I write, ever. The community even has a rule about this, come to think of it...

In any case the vassal framing was used by one particular side

I didn't know this, but it doesn't surprise me. Except that in this case I would say that the side that refused to use this framing was the side engaging in disingenuous rhetoric. It's literally true, and not in a weird edge-case way; every member state of the EU is a vassal of the central organization. Watching the EU force economic medicine on Greece is exceedingly strong evidence that this is so. Saying "but the Greeks participate in the decision-making process" is classic rhetorical bullshit. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner. Doubtless many vassal states in empires across the ages got to "participate in the decision-making process" before they were ultimately given marching orders disregarding their contribution to the conversation.

it isn't neutral, let alone indisputably accurate

It may not be neutral, and I accept your contextual explanation in that regard. But it does seem indisputably accurate, once you stop excluding libertarians (as, I would contend, you should). So I feel comfortable continuing to call groomers "groomers," Nazis "Nazis," and vassals "vassals," until such time as I have clearer words for the concomitant groups, behaviors, and/or phenomena.

I don't want to say this without couching it very carefully, because it's pretty antagonistic standing on its own in ways I don't want to convey, but my initial reaction to this parenthetical was "well a hearty 'fuck you' to you, too"--followed by some indication that I say it with a smile. I'm not offended, genuinely. But if you think in terms of "libertarians as always excluded" then it's no wonder at all that you failed to take my meaning in the first place. If you think in terms of "libertarians as always excluded," then you have a very slim chance of genuinely understanding anything I write, ever. The community even has a rule about this, come to think of it...

Ahh perhaps I was not clear in my meaning here! Mea Culpa if so! I have a hearty level of respect for Libertarians. Most of the truly principled people and even politicians(!) I know are Libertarian or sway that way. But there are in my experience just not that many of you. If most people were Libertarian then I think your point would stand and maybe the world would be better for it. But that world is not as far as I can tell, this one. I exclude Libertarians not because you are wrong or because you don't count but because it is I think a given that a Libertarian would hold that opinion for basically any modern Western polity, so including them in the rebuttal is unnecessary. I really am very sorry if I did not communicate that well.

Having said that, I accept that Libertarians (often? always? mostly?) see themselves as unwilling vassals of our current governments and if that is your view then that makes sense. However there is one difference between you and the UK. The UK government opted itself to join the EU, whereas none of us have a choice as to which polity we are born into and thus bound by. The UK was not a vassal of the EU it was a willing member which traded some responsibilities for some benefits.

If you want to make the Libertarian point that the British people are vassals of their own government and THEREFORE were also vassals of the EU, because the UK government did not have the right to make that trade for them, then that makes sense from a Libertarian perspective. But it is a different thing than the UK as an entity itself being a vassal of the EU and not something that most non-Libertarians are going to agree with. Most people tend to agree that their elected government can take them into and out of various treaties as far as I can tell.

I am not being disingenuous when I say that I certainly did not view the UK as being a vassal of the EU. If for no other reason, that in my view, we were one of the wolves in this scenario, not one of the sheep. (For clarity the wolves would have been France, Germany, the UK and in name but little else, Italy). If you wanted to argue that Greece was a vassal state I think you might be close to being accurate even in my world view.

Sorry again for not being clear about my views on Libertarians and how it pertained here.

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Indeed--every voter is a vassal of the government.

Kind of, yes. And from a libertarian-ish perspective, I think that’s a very good pro-remain argument. Brexit just changes where the asshole that decides your life sits, london or brussels. Is the cheese standardization he will inevitably impose on you, going to be in metric or imperial ? Those are the kind of monumental policy changes that hang in the balance here, justifying all this circus. Who gives a shit? Brexit, and all separatist movements, are a giant waste of time and political energy. Convincing common people to find honor and pride in being ruled by the near idiot instead of the far idiot.

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So I feel comfortable continuing to call groomers "groomers," Nazis "Nazis," and vassals "vassals,"

Just because I missed this earlier. The people you call groomers would not call themselves that, the people the left call Nazis would generally not call themselves that etc.

If I definitively called Trump a Nazi in passing I would expect to be moderated HERE, because Trump does not regard himself as a Nazi. I could if I laid out supporting evidence and argument for why Trump is a Nazi perhaps. Your vassals comment didn't lay out why you believe that was a relevant term, you just dropped it in as if it were a given.

Consider:

The social cost has been substantial, probably, but 2020 did accomplish exactly what it was supposed to: it liberated the USA from being a Nazi state under Donald Trump.)

I am smuggling in controversial arguments there without support 1) That the USA needed to be liberated and 2) That Donald Trump is a Nazi. There are people who actually hold that opinion, but I don't think they should be able to say that in that way here, without getting some pushback.

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What sort of evidence would you accept?

Forcing local cheesemongers only selling their cheese locally to use metric weights and sending trading standards after the non-compliant or is that only cheese vassalage?

Well we got input into what the rules were through a legal process, which the UK government freely entered into (and was able to leave), so if the UK was an EU vassal then every voter is a vassal of their own government at which point it's usage is so broad as to be worthless.

Indeed arguably internal political subdivisions like counties and states are more akin to vassals than the UK-EU relationship ever was, but people don't typically say that Staffordshire is the vassal of the UK government because it doesn't make a lot of sense in a modern context. It's a political and rhetorical stratagem. A good one admittedly.

You notice how no other big corporations in Florida have decided to make any sort of major fuss about Florida's legislative actions, yes?

Do you follow the logic of "punch the biggest guy in the prisonyard so the rest of them leave you alone?"

Because Disney is one of, if not the biggest of several big dudes in the yard, and cowing them probably saved Desantis much hassle and political capital down the line.

You notice how no other big corporations in Florida have decided to make any sort of major fuss about Florida's legislative actions, yes?

No, no I don't. Many did more than Disney, most did about the same. The only difference was that DeSantis didn't have a big, shiny, public spectacle of a stick to bash Starbucks or Lululemon with; it just wouldn't have the same impact to deny a new Starbucks zoning approval or confiscate a Lululemon parking lot or whatever.

That you think that Disney was the only corporation that opposed it publicly is the result of the media spotlight, primarily created by DeSantis' actions against RCID.

Name a single instance of a corporation in in Florida publicly opposing a Desantis measure after the passage of the bill to dissolve the RCID.

This is silly since you ostensibly know that your posted story is from March, and the bill was signed on April 22nd.

https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/florida-gov-ron-desantis-signs-bill-to-eliminate-reedy-creek-improvement-district

Has there been any Florida Corporations speaking out against Desantis since April 2022?

Did Desantis pass another parental rights in education bill after April? If so I apologize, I wasn't aware of it.

Where is the “breaking of a contract” angle?

Guessing something about changing self governance but Disney is a political entity in this case and insubordination by a political appointee is grounds for firing.

I want to note that I'm against things like RCID before they happen, I've opposed them locally and will continue to. But breaking the deal after it happens is another thing entirely. A bargain was made, if the government won't stand behind it then investment can't be done on solid ground.

The basics of these kind of deals are that a corporation lobbies the state for special treatment, which will enable the corporation to invest serious money in the community in a profitable way. Disney held up their end of the bargain, modern Orlando exists because of Disney world. Disney brings in billions in tourist dollars every year, habituates the entire East coast to vacationing in Florida, it's the crown jewel of Florida's tourist industry. And it's immovable, Disney cannot remove its investment at this stage.

I can't really parse the "Disney is a political appointee" thing. Is your theory that one loses the right to speak after accepting economic benefits from the government, else those deals may be revoked? That would vastly impact property developers across the country. And also make RCID type deals even more dystopian, with governments blatantly handing out favors to those who will back them and revoking them if they don't stick by the government line. That is not a box we want to open.

The problem is that if you argue that governments are NOT allowed to rescind these special districts, even through proper legislative action, for virtually any reason whatsoever, you're forced to accept that these corporations have some legal entitlement to said districts.

Which is also to cede the state's authority over political entities created by said state.

Which is just silly.

Not really, any more than signing a contract ever limits your rights. Saying that a sovereign state can't sign a contract limiting its own sovereignty gets too into "Could an omnipotent God create weed so dank he could not smoke it?" territory for me; but suffice it to say that whatever the proper procedure for unwinding an RCID type special district is, it isn't by legislative fiat motivated by momentary political spats.

There's a general principle that a legislature cannot bind a future legislature. Otherwise, any time a party got control of a legislature, it would pass as many laws as possible that limit the scope of action of future legislatures. As such, voiding a contract made by a previous legislature would require compensation as per the Takings Clause, but is a wholly permissible use of legislative power.

As such, voiding a contract made by a previous legislature would require compensation as per the Takings Clause, but is a wholly permissible use of legislative power.

Is that happening here and I missed it? I'm not as familiar with the current state of play as I should be given how much shit I'm talking in this thread. Genuinely, I'm not saying that the RCID can never be revoked, or even that it oughtn't to be, merely that my understanding is that it is not a "win" for Florida at the end of the day, it is likely to end up costing Florida money to no obvious benefit.

The powers in question are based in the Florida Constitution.

If the Constitution doesn't limit the Government from dissolving the districts, what contract, specifically, would do so?

but suffice it to say that whatever the proper procedure for unwinding an RCID type special district is, it isn't by legislative fiat motivated by momentary political spats.

Who, specifically, is authorized to set that procedure, do you think?

I'll do half the work for you. Here's the actual body of law involved:

https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2015/Chapter189

No they are literally a government entity in Florida. And as such have been insubordinate. While I agree that deals should be kept - Disney seems to be the party that broke the deal by meddling in Florida politics not related to their business. At which point their just insubordinate.

This is as if Desantis fired a political appointee who worked against him. A football coach firing his Offensive Coordinator for not doing his job.

I'm not opposed to things like RCIDs as a general principle and support some actual ones; government can create significant benefits by setting them up. But if you think they are on net bad, isn't it good when a government creates substantial uncertainty for future ones and makes them much less enticing? There will now be fewer of them than there otherwise would have been.

But if you think they are on net bad, isn't it good when a government creates substantial uncertainty for future ones and makes them much less enticing?

Loyalty and paying one's debts are higher on my list of virtues than the principle that the government should not interfere in private markets. I'd place it higher than almost all other virtues. One stands by a deal, even a bad deal, even one in which one was tricked. Jacob served Laban, even though he was tricked into marrying the wrong daughter to double his time; Yudhishthira and the rest of the Pandavas stay in exile for 12 years despite the dice game being crooked. From Plutarch, quoting others:

And truly Antigonus, it would seem, was not solitary in saying, he loved betrayers, but hated those who had betrayed; nor Caesar, who told Rhymitalces the Thracian, that he loved the treason, but hated the traitor; but it is the general feeling of all who have occasion for wicked men's service, as people have for the poison of venomous beasts; they are glad of them while they are of use, and abhor their baseness when it is over. And so then did Tatius behave towards Tarpeia, for he commanded the Sabines, in regard to their contract, not to refuse her the least part of what they wore on their left arms; and he himself first took his bracelet of his arm, and threw that, together with his buckler, at her; and all the rest following, she, being borne down and quite buried with the multitude of gold and their shields, died under the weight and pressure of them;

The fact that I dislike RCID type deals doesn't excuse a government failing to stand by its predecessors statements. A government that doesn't stand by its deals makes business impossible, you can be most of the way through a huge project only to be told your approvals are revoked. The worst recent example being how the Keystone XL pipeline was jerked around for years by multiple administrations.

The fact that I dislike RCID type deals doesn't excuse a government failing to stand by its predecessors statements. A government that doesn't stand by its deals makes business impossible, you can be most of the way through a huge project only to be told your approvals are revoked.

"This pipeline, created under these conditions, is environmentally safe" is a factual determination. It is or it isn't. Of course, governments routinely fudge this and make "factual" decisions that are really political. But just because the government does that, I wouldn't give the government the same slack that I'd give them on decisions that are supposed to be political in the first place.

So I see no contradiction in saying that it's okay to take back deals like Disney's (if process is followed), yet it's not okay to take back a pipeline approval. The pipeline approval wasn't political, it's a factual thing that doesn't change. If you made it political anyway, well, tough luck, you weren't supposed to, so you don't get the benefit of being political.

A special economic district is created under equally factual determinations: that bending these laws will produce more benefit (in investment and jobs and economic development) than it will cost in bent laws. Its no different from a zoning approval, or an environmental approval, just bigger and moreso. It's no more political than the Keystone XL decision.

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I’m not sure I classify as wealthy but I’m not bad off. It pains me that there is a P-A problem when it comes to politics and big corporations. I think we might start seeing anti-ESG funds to try to control the P-A problem. Those funds will be successful if my thesis (ie the woke stuff is bad for the bottom line) is correct.

I do wonder if Delaware should revisit ultra vires rules. At a certain point, taking a position on K-3 education is so outside Disney’s core business it is absurd. Of course, anyone will make the argument “good PR helps bottom line” but I don’t think people truly believe that in egregious areas — especially where the PR is likely harmful.

My read on the matter is that voters usually don’t punish culture war partisan republicans when they can deliver genuine good governance, economic growth, and sane policies that cover the gaps in their ideas. Desantis is more or less in that category; he’s unlikely to try to abolish public schools without planning to replace them.

I would prefer a clown-world Democrat over a moderate Republican. Fetterman is a radicalizing force for Republicans. The notion of mental retard in the Senate is offensive to anyone with a sense of Republican virtue.

The worst possible outcome is a moderate Republican in the White House. Nothing can be achieved through such weakness.

Can you substantiate that claim about Fetterman's mental health? I think it's more likely that his mental capacity will be fine by next January and it's just his speech and hearing that look bad.

Worse than nothing, they become the source of terrible compromise laws like the Immigration Act of 1990 (expansion of H1-B visas which reduce domestic wages), No Child Left Behind (federalization of education), Medicare Part D (gigantic entitlement program), and the Patriot Act. I'd rather have clownworld and wait for the inevitable default than more of that.

So what happens if Fetterman wins, goes off to Congress, then a couple of weeks/months down the line, oh dear his health issues mean he has to quit.

Is there another election then to fill his seat or can the party nominate someone for it?

If there is another election, do you think your moderate Republican is still winnable, or will it be everyone turning out to vote in a Democrat for Fetterman's replacement since that was clearly The Will of The People originally?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/03/how-do-states-fill-vacancies-in-the-u-s-senate-it-depends-on-the-state/

In PA the governor appoints the replacement until a special election. So Shapiro. Then it would depend if Shapiro picks a moderate or picks like, Fetterman's wife or something.

As an opening salvo of the presidential primaries of 2024, the midterms were a great night for Desantis and a pretty bad night for Trump. Dems had high hopes for Florida a few months ago, as it's ostensibly a purple state. Desantis made headlines for his Martha's Vineyard + Disney stuff and it was plausible that swing voters may have punished Republicans for this. In the end, though, Florida was a bloodbath for Democrats. Rubio and Desantis both won by double digits, and many democratic congressional districts were wiped out with recent redistricting changes.

Trump, on the other hand, has egg on his face. He helped clear the lane for weak senate candidates like Oz and Walker, and they underperformed similar races (e.g. governors) through split ticket voting. It's impossible to redo the election to see what it would have been like if Trump didn't back candidates, but it's not implausible that Trump's meddling cost Republicans control of the Senate chamber. It also probably shrunk McCarthy's house majority a bit, making it more unwieldy and difficult to restrain Biden.

As of the time of writing, Desantis currently has a 26.5% chance to be the next president on Election Betting Odds, while Trump has a 19.3% chance. It was even more stark early today when it was 30%+ vs 15%, and while I think this is very unrealistically lopsided in Desantis' favor, the recent movements have captured the sense that Trump fatigue is setting in not only for moderate swing voters, but for a broader swathe of Republicans as well. I personally think Trump still has a 66%+ chance of winning the Republican nomination if he seeks it in 2024, but it's looking increasingly likely that it won't be a simple coronation: he'll have to work for it through a potentially crowded field. If Desantis proves to be an actual threat, things could get really ugly really quickly. All major presidential candidates have a hardcore following of blindly loyal fanboys that will stick with them through basically anything, but through browsing places like 4chan and interacting with some Republicans in my circle of family and friends, it seems that Trump's version of this is quite large. Desantis won't just be seen as an enemy, but as a traitor, and many Trump loyalists will not look kindly on a man who hurt their king.

I'm terrible at making political forecasts, but the phrase that keeps coming to mind with Trump and normie voters is "ur scaring the hoes"

Indeed. My fairly well to do Red friends from PN were horrified at the prospect of having to vote for another TV charlatan despite being ambivalent to Trump. "We just want someone normal" is the big sentiment for them (former reluctant Trump guys big on DeSantis).

It'll be interesting to see how crowded a field it is.

In addition to Trump and DeSantis, Predictit is only giving odd for Haley, Youngkin, Pence, Pompeo, Romney, and Rubio. None of them are over 5 cents. With the possible exception of Youngkin who I don't know that much about, all of them seem like fairly Establishment GOP candidates.

My perception is that if the Establishment doesn't want Trump, all those candidates will play ball to cut deals for the promise to go away strategically, similar to how the Democratic field cleared for Biden.

I think what gives DeSantis a real shot is that he can realistically run to the right of Trump on how Covid was handled.

I think what gives DeSantis a real shot is that he can realistically run to the right of Trump on how Covid was handled.

Does anyone care, other than a few weirdos like me? It sure seems like most people are willing to chalk up even the worst excesses to something along the lines of, "well, we just didn't know".

Among the GOP primary electorate, yes, I think a lot of people care.

(My older Fox News watching relatives, who I perceive to be well represented both in Trump's base and in the GOP primary electorate, care a lot).

A large fraction of that electorate wants the government to be small, and mostly leave them alone.

Covid response was the largest government intrusion into the average person's life in nearly everyone's lifetime (maybe since WWII?).

In large part, that happened on Trump's watch, while Trump's didn't directly cause much of it, he didn't do much to prevent it. (Its not obvious that he had the authority as President to prevent much of what happened, but those nuances tend to get lost in the branding of these things [and can probably quickly be summed up as 'he had the authority to fire Fauci, and didn't']).

One way to think of the GOP is break it out into 3 group - Bush style establishment, Trump loyalists, and anti-libs.

Bush style establish has a very limited voting block (ballpark, maybe somewhere between 5-25% of the GOP), but is over-represented in the various positions that have levers of power.

If the field clears for DeSantis, that might very well be helpful for him, I'm skeptical it will be decisive.

Trump loyalist will vote for Trump based on personality - it's not a winnable demo for anyone who's not Trump.

Anti-libs have largely supported Trump, but not because of who Trump is, but who he's against. They're happy/grateful that Trump got to nominate 3 SC justices, they're distrustful of GOP politicians who seem to get more liberal once they get to Washington. But it's what Trump stands for, not who he is personally.

Personally, they were embarrassed by Trump's twitter antics, they were embarrassed by "grab them by the pussy", they don't love that he's on his third wife, but they looked around, and voted for what they perceived as the lesser evil.

That's a winnable demo for someone who might be perceived as a better standard-bearer for the anti-lib perspective.

DeSantis's anti-Covid record gives him real credibility with that demo.

The exact breakdown on what percentage make up the Trump loyalists and what percentage makes up the anti-libs I think is somewhat of a mystery. And I think will ultimately determine who winds up the nominee.

Abbott’s also almost certainly got feelers out for the presidency; although he could be derailed very easily by local political factors, he’s also one of the GOP’s most prolific fundraisers and is a bit too far to the right to be firmly establishment.

Oz actually did alot better than the R governor candidate, so the split-ticket voting was in his favor. Mastriano was the disaster candidate in Pennsylvania, and possibly dragged Oz down with him.


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