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Goodguy  7hr ago (text post)   Edited 4hr ago   3257 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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I guess all the "voters are stupid for caring about gas prices or a wrecked economy, destroying Iran is for our eternal glory!" talk does not actually win elections for Republicans.

Hopefully Republicans overcome their Israel fetish.

"Gas prices are high, guess I'll vote for trans kids and DEI" turned out to be true.

Kind of. But even Trump's killer ad in 2024 was powerful not because of trans issues in isolation, but because he pretty clearly portrayed that Democrats cared about stupid shit instead of voters' actual concerns. In this election, the greater glory of Israel was the stupid shit that was getting in the way of parents' driving their kids to school (where they might be transed, but that's a step or two into the future, which is too much extrapolation for the average voter).

I agree. Being rightly or wrongly perceived as the side that is more focused on bread and butter issues is huge. Republicans ceded it back to the Democrats through wrong focus and unforced errors at the same time as the Democrats partly realized that they should talk more about the economy and less about woke stuff. Luckily for the Republicans, I'm not sure that the Democrats will be able to resist the sort of smug wokeness and belief in having an "on the right side of history" mandate that got them in trouble in the past.

Democrats will shift back to that mode shortly, if they ever left it. Lucky for them, with no power, voters were happy to ignore them and ascribe the bread and butter failings to the ruling Republicans.

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