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Goodguy  14hr ago (text post)   Edited 11hr ago   4577 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 knew that the Dems were the party of women and that the Reps were the party of men but I didn't realize it was quite as stark as last night's exit polls make it look.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-elections/exit-polls

Men voted 49% blue to 49% red, Women voted 58% blue to 40% red, White Men voted 43% blue to 55% red.

As a white man this makes me more concerned for the future of the USA than anything else. If white men continue to feel disenfranchised and start checking out of the increasingly feminized society, which seems like an inevitability over the next six years now, then this strikes me as very concerning for the continued prosperity of the nation. Is this just my in-group biases showing or do I have genuine cause for concern?

It's obviously your in-group biases showing, because a larger gap than white men's 55-43 red is right there in your numbers (women's 58-40 blue) but you presumably felt no concern that women would "continue to feel disenfranchised and start checking out of the increasingly masculinized society" when the red team was ahead.

If being outvoted on your group's preferences amounts to disenfranchisement any time it happens, then representative democracies disenfranchise most groups most of the time. If this actually led to "checking out" every time it happened for even one legislative period, most representative democracies would long have collapsed.

Men voted 49% blue to 49% red, Women voted 58% blue to 40% red, White Men voted 43% blue to 55% red.

You call this stark? Your lede had me thinking it was at least 70-30 either way.

Hold up. White Men voting 55% red concerns you above all else but women (not just white women but all women) voting 58% blue (and we can be sure that the ratio is even more lopsided in the case of white women) does not?

If white men continue to feel disenfranchised and start checking out of the increasingly feminized society, which seems like an inevitability over the next six years now, then this strikes me as very concerning for the continued prosperity of the nation. Is this just my in-group biases showing or do I have genuine cause for concern?

I don't think many white men are going to "check out" who were already doing well. But there's definitely a kind of man who is not competing well in the white collar world who would have been a prosperous laborer in earlier times. I don't think it will effect the prosperity of the nation as a whole though just lead to the continued hollowing out of certain parts along with deaths of despair. Basically more of the same not a dramatic switch, the pattern of de-industrialization to an information economy.

I mean, everyone thinks a pendulum swing to "their" side is the new consensus that will break the cycle. The cultural trajectory towards wokeness has invited some mainstream scrutiny over the years, but it's been largely undisturbed. White men "won" 2024, in a symbolic way, but still didn't deliver much of what was promised in defiance of the culture, and thunderously delivered a war that nobody wanted. Party of the white men failed, that's the price you pay for rejecting the black woman President!

I don't think a gender gap that large is a good thing for democracy, it isn't normal (compared to other democracies or the US historically) and I don't see either party making an effort to shrink it (Dems think what they are doing right now is fine, MAGA Reps think that a massive gender gap is normal).

The only saving grace is that US exit polls are inaccurate (because of the difficulty exit polling postal and early voters) and can be wildly wrong if the demographics of people who actually voted doesn't match historical averages, which I suspect was the case yesterday.

I knew that the Dems were the party of women and that the Reps were the party of men

Generally speaking, D is conservative (which happen to align with women, safety, privilege), R is reformer (which happen to align with men, dignity, merit).

This isn't really that new.

Is this just my in-group biases showing or do I have genuine cause for concern?

The only answers you can get will be from either from people with the same or the opposite bias, so I don't know how helpful any of that will be.

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