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Notes -
Election Grab Bag Post
These are just a few unrelated observations about last night's election that don't really fit anywhere else. One of the first things that struck my attention that hasn't gotten much traction is the PA judicial retention elections. All judges here are elected in partisan races to ten-year terms, after which they have to be "retained" by voters to continue serving for another ten years. They can serve an unlimited number of terms, but must retire at 75. When a judge appears on the ballot for retention, it's technically nonpartisan—there's no R or D next to the name, no opposing candidate, just a Yes or No if they should continue serving. If a justice is not retained, the governor appoints a replacement who serves until the next odd-year election, when a full replacement is selected.
The effect of this is that judges are effectively elected to life terms. A judge not being retained is very rare, and has only happened once at the Supreme Court level since the current state constitution went into effect in 1968. In 2005, both houses of the state legislature voted themselves a pay raise in a midnight session just before the term ended. This was a huge deal at the time and the public was outraged. With no other elections that year, voters took out their anger on Justice Russell Nigro, who narrowly lost retention. Another justice won her retention race by only 8 points, when 40 points is the typical margin.
The PA Supreme Court is composed of 5 Democrats and 2 Republicans. The court has, in recent years, issued a number of controversial left-leaning decisions. Three of the Democrats were up for retention this year, and activist groups attempted a "Vote No" campaign. They started running TV ads a few months ago making themselves sound non-partisan, arguing about how it was time for a change and judges should have term limits and we should force an election. This was thin cover for the fact that these were Republicans looking to change the partisan makeup of the court by, if they were successful, possibly winning a couple of those seats in 2027. The fight took on somewhat of a national character, with Trump calling the justices "radicals" and "activists" and urging "NO NO NO". Democrats were forced to counterattack, with Governor Shapiro appearing in ads highlighting their records and commitment to protecting civil rights.
For all the efforts the GOP took to politicize a normally sleepy race, they successfully managed to whittle a 40 point Yes down to a 23 point Yes. This has to go down as one of the most underappreciated lead balloons in political history. This was an unprecedented gambit that took up most of the oxygen it what is usually an uneventful year; no one has ever run commercials about retention before, no one sunk that much money into it, it was just a given that a judge was going to be retained. Even the Nigro thing was more of a grassroots effort that had more to do with anger at the system than partisan politics. The moral of the story here is that you can't get voters fired up about something they don't want to get fired up about, even if there's nothing else interesting happening, especially if you try to trick them into getting fired up about it.
In other PA news, Pine-Richland, a heavily Republican school district in Allegheny County's northern tier, had its school board flip from an 8–1 Republican majority to a 5–4 Democrat majority. It should be noted that, of the 8 Republicans, 5 were raging Moms for Liberty-style MAGA conservatives, and 3 were normal, moderate Republicans. Four of the MAGA members were elected in 2023 in a campaign funded by outside conservative groups with the intention of revising the school's library policy. Which is basically code for removing woke library books. One of the guys had sued the district a few years earlier over their trans bathroom policy. What ensued was an ever-escalating shit show where it took them a year and a half to approve a new English curriculum, culminating in a 7-hour-long board meeting where they denied students the right to speak (over repeated motions) until nearly midnight, the night before midterms. They were regularly confronted by hostile audiences and refused to explain any of their decisions. After a long fight to wrest control over books from the superintendent, they ended up approving all of the LGBT-themed books that had been challenged anyway. Then they decided to ban a book about a black girl's experience during the Tulsa Race Riot from the English curriculum on the grounds that it wasn't difficult enough for ninth graders, necessitating a long retooling of reading assignments (the book is recommended for ages 12 to 17). Residents eventually got fed up with the negative publicity and the last several meetings turned into forums where residents would rip the board for creating a circus. Now they can turn their energies to things like taxes and re-turfing the football field.
While last night's elections weren't particularly meaningful for those not directly affected, they're useful as prodromes for what to expect in the future. While it's expected that the pendulum would shift back toward the left at some point, I doubt many expected that it would happen this quickly or decisively. some in the comments below have brushed these victories off as liberals winning in liberal states, nothing to see here. But I think that attitude is whistling past the graveyard. During Trump's first term, when I would criticize him to a Republican friend and the friend would ask me what he's done that's so bad, I could come up with any number of criticisms, but none that he, as a conservative would care about. And probably none that a moderate with conservative tendencies would care too much about. Democrats could roast him on plenty of things, but the kinds of things they could roast any Republican about and the electorate broadly wouldn't care about because that's what they expect from a Republican. That and personal scandals and gaffes that can easily be reasoned away by anyone inclined to.
He lost in 2020, and didn't take it well. But by the Democrats fumbled the opportunity to right the ship by Joe Biden fucking up Afghanistan, the border, and any number of other things, all the while governing significantly further to the left than one would have suspected based on his campaign. Add in inflation, and despite things not being too bad overall, it was easy to brush away whatever controversy Trump caused four years earlier and look on the pre-COVID past with rose-colored glasses. Was Trump really so bad? All of the terrible things you said would happen never happened. Biden is a disaster. Give the man another chance.
If the Trump of 2025 were similar to the Trump of 2017, things wouldn't have changed. But his time he is doing things that are genuinely unpopular and hard for his base to defend. Tariffs. Aggressive immigration enforcement. Troop deployments to US cities. The George Santos pardon. Mass firings. The Epstein Files. Withholding grant money. Ending healthcare subsidies. This isn't merely bungling like we saw under Biden, but conscious policymaking that could stop at any time. He's making a similar mistake as Biden in treating a narrow victory like a mandate, except he can't even pass a budget let alone achieve any real legislative accomplishments, even with an undivided legislature. At least Biden had the infrastructure bill. He's using the Steve Bannon Flood the Zone with Shit strategy, forgetting that voters don't like being served shit.
Republicans will have to defend every one of those policies next year. Some may be defensible to some people, but Trump's actual policies are broadly unpopular, and there's no unifying ideology to bind them. Maybe there's enough hardcore MAGA sentiment out there that the Republicans can ride through 2026 with minimal damage, but I don't know if I'd be willing to bet on it. Trump certainly isn't, hence the redistricting push. The trouble is that if these policies turn out to be losers it's hard for Republican incumbents to distance themselves from them, even if they want to. I don't see the GOP turning away from Trump en masse, and individual politicians have supplicated to the point that they can't credibly repudiate him. MTG can fight against these things and make nice with the ladies on The View, but she has enough MAGA cachet that it won't hurt her much. Trump himself could, of course, back away from his policies, but that would be an admission of defeat, and Trump will never admit defeat. He might chicken out on the implementation, but what would be involved is a complete repudiation, and that's not going to happen, especially when nothing can affect him personally.
A lot can happen within the next year, so I don't want to make any predictions, but I wouldn't rule out a midterm wipeout. We've heard this before, and it hasn't come to fruition, but all I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if it happened, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened and took the GOP completely by surprise. By wipeout, I don't mean that the Democrats merely win both houses or win all of the "contested" seats, but that they also pick up a few surprise House seats in presumably safe districts that nobody polls, and a few Senate races become spicier than one would expect. Beyond that I don't want to say anything else, because I don't know what will happen, but the amount of personal fealty Trump demands would make things very difficult for Republicans if the electorate turns against him. What will JD Vance do if it become apparent that his chances of winning the nomination in 2028 are akin to those of Dick Cheney in 2008? Are there any John McCain types in the GOP who have national profile but haven't kissed Trump's ring? I don't know the answers to these questions, but htings will sure be interesting.
I'm skeptical about most of that list, but I don't really trust any polling at this point in a cycle. Most of the polling from before suggested that a straight majority of Americans wanted every illegal gone (and a supersupermajority for illegal + criminal history), but yes you can probably show some women pictures of a crying Guatemalan and they'll report not liking that. I'm not sure there's any takeaway beyond "Dems still have a hell of a propaganda machine".
From the people I talk to, it isn't so much women being sympathetic for crying Guatemalans as it is concern about what the objective is. When you sell a policy based on the idea that these people are all parasites and criminals, it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.
I too am skeptical of polls, but you ignore them at your own risk. Especially after elections are sending a clear signal. You don't want to be in a position where you get your doors blown off because you decided that inconvenient information was simply incorrect, based on nothing but gut feeling.
No one is seeing this. Functionally no one has ever seen anyone get rounded up by ICE at all. If you think that's a reasonable description of reality, then you're in a propaganda bubble. What they're seeing is context-free clips on Facebook and TikTok elaborated with straight up lies, posted by activist Karens who assault and harass federal law enforcement with near impunity due to their overwhelming privilege. OTOH, DHS and ICE don't ever shut up about the prior criminal convictions of the people they're deporting, but that doesn't go viral by abusing weaponized empathy.
Maybe some conservative billionaire needs to start shelling out a grand for every woman who posts a crying fictional sob story video about how she was raped by an illegal immigrant.
Not wrong, but I'm also super skeptical of this "Better stop doing that stuff you were just elected by promising to do because we've suddenly gotten better at narrative control!" line.
Like, yeah Sherril just won, but she did so while disavowing everything she'd ever said as a progressive, dumping a fortune into painting Citarelli as a tax-and-spend liberal and swearing to fight against her own Democrat economic policies.
Maybe ignore that at your own risk?
Have you considered that you, too, are affected by a propaganda bubble?
Just a couple days ago there was an ICE raid at a car wash right down the street from where I live. They didn’t have a warrant to enter the building so they simply arrested all the employees who happened to be outside at the time (which is to say, the ones who were drying and vacuuming cars). Many of those arrested said they had legal work permits in their lockers inside, but they were not allowed to retrieve them. In fact the owner insists that ALL of the employees had proper work permits and has been pretty furious to the local media. (For what it’s worth I find this believable, because the car wash is a relatively bougie one for the area, the kind where people bring their nice new BMW— I don’t even always use it, even though it’s good, because it’s more expensive than the others nearby— and so I honestly don’t think the owners are short-changing the workers, which is the primary motivation for hiring illegals.)
This is very literally “rounding up hardworking people trying to make a buck”! They were actively working when they were arrested! Trying to convince people this stuff isn’t happening (and it’s good that it is) is
ridiculousan extremely ineffective messaging strategy.I am not completely unsympathetic toward ICE, I don’t want to see it abolished and I certainly acknowledge the reality of the problems we have with illegal immigration. Most people being deported very much deserve it, and I have limits on my sympathy even for the sympathetic cases. But the impunity being given to ICE is genuinely very bad, and raids like the one I’ve described (which very much ARE happening) are pretty much indefensible. If nothing else, people need to have the opportunity to show their papers if they’re being accused of not having papers! If the response to that is “well we can’t let them go get them because they might run, and we can’t escort them to their locker because we have no warrant to enter this building”, too bad, you should’ve thought of that before you started.
I honestly don't believe you. If this were true, I would expect it to lead the national news. Every leftwing journalist in the country would be talking about it. We've had nine months of these stories being falsified or collapsing under scrutiny, to the point where I'm genuinely baffled at how on point ICE seems to be. Maybe we should just put Tom Homan in charge of the entire government.
But the grand total number of arrested and deported people so far is something in the ballpark of 500k. Many of those will not have been in super visible locations, so round that down further. The overwhelming majority of Americans (99%+) have never seen anyone getting loaded into an ICE van. The number of people who have watched with their real eyes as a "hardworker just trying to make a buck" gets picked up for deportation is probably something like 0.01% of Americans as a highball estimate.
If I seem to offer them impunity it's because I've been having this conversation for 9 months, and as best I can tell their error rate is between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude better than any other branch of the government.
I don't want to doxx OP so I'm not going to post it, but I found a local news report after about five seconds of looking. On the other hand, everyone knows where I live, so I'll have no trouble posting this news report from a couple months ago. It's not mentioned in the video, but the restaurant was open at the time, with customers inside, and the agents also managed to start a small fire in the kitchen after they damaged the gas line of a stove. I don't want to say these stories are exactly common, but when they appear in the relatively unbiased medium of local news every couple months in an area without a high immigrant population at all, what sort of impression are people supposed to get? Why would people think that those detained are criminals or otherwise bad people when ICE just no comments the news?
Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about what kind of people are being deported because it's really beside the point. The important thing is that the perception exists among a lot of people, and calling them morons who live in a bubble isn't going to change that perception. This is the same logic that led to the Democrats underestimating Trump in 2016. "How could anyone possibly vote for that man? We can't lose!" Followed by a bunch of crap about how Hillary's email scandal wasn't a big deal and all the other nonsense that they assumed the electorate downplayed because they were motivated to not care about it. As I say in another comment above, this is how waves happen; you assume you have a broad mandate without doing any research to confirm how popular your policies are, ignore or downplay information that suggests people don't like this shit, talk about whatever "structural advantage" you have through gerrymandering, a Blue Wall, becoming majority minority, or whatever, and then act surprised when you get shellacked. This is exactly how the Democrats went from having a supermajority in 2009 to being in the position that they are now.
Bro, did you watch your own video? It's literally a press release from an anti-ICE activist group presented as a news clip. Every single person interviewed is from the same anti-ICE rally without a single countering take.
Meanwhile the reporters do note that the agents had a warrant and arrested so many illegals that both locations shut down temporarily. That is nothing like the "legal immigrants dragged away while begging for the chance to go get their papers" crap I was replying to.
And this perception has little to do with reality. So please stop actively making it worse. "A lot of people believe these wild exagerrations and lies I'm actively peddling, so you'd better start acting as if the lies are true". How about I keep pointing out that they're wild exagerrations and you stop making it worse?
You're simultaneously missing my point and making it for me. They aren't presenting the other side because the other side isn't saying anything. They're doing the same thing you're doing where they're hoping people just assume that everything that ICE does is 100% justified, optics be damned. And if they think otherwise then it's just because they're brainwashed by activist propaganda. Both of those things could be completely true, but it doesn't matter.
When that story broke I watched the news report in the kind of bar where people sit and watch the news, with people who aren't exactly liberal, and they were all uneasy about the whole thing. That restaurant has a location about ten minutes away and everyone has eaten there (though I'm personally not a fan), and there's a very real anxiety that they could be enjoying dinner only to have it interrupted by Federal agents barging in because a dish washer doesn't have his papers.
I flesh this out more in another comment, but wave elections happen when a party ignores obvious warning signs and either denies that there's a problem or makes excuses for why things aren't quite going the way they like. Maybe you're right and maybe this isn't really a problem, but there's a long list of other things people don't like about this administration, and if your only response is that it isn't a problem, then don't be surprised if something catastrophic happens.
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