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Goodguy  12hr ago (text post)   Edited 9hr ago   4144 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/35886/voting-intentions-us-midterm-elections/

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-war-midterms/

Exit polls show that 62% of voters believe that taking miltary action against Iran was the wrong decision, according to NBC News. […] Among those that voted for Democratic House candidates, 95% said it was the wrong decision, compared to 22% of those that voted for a Republican […] was named as an issue "crucial" to their vote by 45% of Democratic voters and 21% of Republican voters. Forty percent of voters overall called it "major factor."

I don't get what's going on with Responsible Statecraft's

"Nothing to see here," the American Conservative's Curt Mills snarked, pointing to a graph showing voting preference averages literally flipping from Republicans to Democrats since the war was launched in February.

If I look at the tweet linked thence, it appears to show a graph where voting preference averages flipped in March 2025, and there is barely any detectable signal of anything in Feb 2026. Am I blind, or are these people all failing at reading graphs? (...perhaps they are so discombobulated that they only read the "Jan" on the left and the "Aug" on the right and assume the graph must run from Jan to Aug of this year?)

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