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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Notes -
Better comparison is what gasoline prices were January 2025 when Trump took office vs last few months. By macrotrends, it's $3 vs $4, a 33% increase. Younger voters possibly didn't even exist in 2006, they don't care about that.
But that’s just not a lot of money to most workers. Like 5-10 a week. It’s copium to say the election swung on a minuscule expense. Gasoline just isn’t a big budget item like it use to be because of fuel efficiency.
Plus Americans get all that money back since we now produce our own oil. Texas elected a Dem and all the oil money significantly goes to texas.
This feels like copium blaming gas prices
The big swing in Texas was Hispanic voters. I think the takeaway is once you have immigrants you can’t keep out more of them in a Democracy. Your only choice is fascism or figuring out how to run ethnic politics.
We probably need to make a deal with Hispanics to block immigrants from any other country.
You're making the same mistake that Republicans (well, Trump at least) did on the campaign trail where you handwave away voter concerns. "Well, I did some calculations and the increased prices as a result of my policies are only costing the average family $514.64 per year. You should be able to afford that." isn't a good message. Inflation is 100 basis points more than when Biden left office. Biden telling the American public that inflation was transitory and that no government response was necessary was bad politics. Trump telling the American public that cost of living isn't even an issue and, by the way, look at how great this gold-covered ballroom you'll never attend an event at is is even worse politics.
Those were the same Hispanic voters who propelled trump to a 14-point win in Texas in 2024. For years, Democrats assumed that they owned the Hispanic vote (which was always a curious position since they loved George W. Bush) and got owned themselves when they took the vote for granted. Then the Republicans made huge Hispanic gains and immediately pissed them away by assuming the same, even going so far as to redistrict based on this shift. The takeaway here is that Hispanic voters are ultimately like any other voters and will respond to the same things that other voters respond to. And this only considers Texas; it doesn't explain similar leftward shifts in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Mississippi, and other places with much smaller Hispanic populations.
I’m not making a mistake on gasoline prices (and your $500 calculation seems super high). Voters are possibly stupid on things like this - or it’s just pure copium and something else so going on.
And to your second paragraph the point of politics is NOT gainful employment. It’s wielding power. My point is once immigrants are here there is no way to prevent more. They will always side with their non-American tribal outsiders. Hispanics hate Dems because simplistically they are gay. They hate GOP because we wanted to deport their illegals. I’d rather shoot our shot at fixing the country than just have some dude with GOP next to his name sitting in the White House.
To the latter point I guess Im a fascists now. I think as a native my vote should count more than someone who showed up yesterday most likely illegally. I’m not sure what solution we have now. If Trump could figure out how seize power I have no problem backing him.
And my reading of the political scene is technologically the State has more power to protect itself than ever before but the electorate is more fractured than ever before. There is no silent majority to back America anymore. It’s tribe versus tribe now.
Dude, that wasn't a calculation. It was an arbitrary number somewhere in the ballpark of your $5–$10/week estimate. But beyond that I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I thought it was some kind of explanation of why the Republicans lost so badly. If the only explanation you can come up with is that everybody else should have the same opinions as you, even when those opinions run contrary to core constitutional principles, then I don't know what to tell you.
I’m fairly certain when the data comes out it’s going to be the Hispanic vote with the big move. I hope you update your opinion that it wasn’t “gasoline” prices that caused the midterms.
Because gasoline prices should have roughly the same effect on voters regardless of race.
I'm not doubting that the shift in the Hispanic vote had an influence on the election, but you seem uninterested in why the Hispanic vote shifted so much from 2024. And while it was a big shift, preliminary data suggests that Talirico still got a lower share of the vote than Beto did in 2018. These shifts precisely suggest that there isn't some kind of ethnic spoils thing going on, especially since the Hispanic population in Texas hasn't increased that much since 2010, at which time nobody thought the state would ever be in play for Democrats.
Correct, but some races have lower average incomes than others and thus feel the pinch more. Some voters aren't ideologically inflexible and are open to voting for candidates of different parties. You seem to believe we can group people into demographic buckets and make assumptions about how they'll vote. Democrats did this back in the 2000s with their "Demographics is Destiny" argument, and you see how well that went. Republicans thought they'd have a permanent presidential majority with the electoral vote expected to shift to Texas from California, but now it looks like they'll have to actually win Texas and not take it for granted. Things change, people change, and you can't just assume that they'll stay the same. If your goal is to ensure a conservative majority by keeping out immigrants, it doesn't work like that. If Democrats think that allowing more immigration will allow them a permanent majority, it doesn't work like that. If things ever start to head in that direction there will just be a realignment. There are certain economically depressed white areas around Pittsburgh that 25 years ago you'd be nuts to think would ever consider voting Republican, but now they're prime Trump country. It's the nature of the beast.
I’ve thought with the population shifts that Texas would be in play for a while. Texas going Dem isn’t a surprise to me though the timing is early.
You kind of can dump people into demographic groups. GOP wins basically everywhere on the white vote. The four grandparent US citizen vote GOP dominates.
Regardless if politics are just gasoline prices then neither side will ever have more than 2 years in power. You went from GOP winning the popular vote in decades to a complete wipeout 2 years later. Like what bigger things are we actually governing on.
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Half of American households dont have $200 in savings, which means an extra $10 a week on a must spend expense forces them to give up $10 that otherwise would have been spent on something they wanted. And given the lack of savings cutting $10 from the another want is probably a pretty sizable cut.
What benefit does the average American see from the Iran war that's worth giving up maybe 20% of their fun budget?
The modal poster here is very, very different from a sizable share of voters.
That's one I'd like to see a bit more detail on, in terms of how it's calculated. There was a while where I didn't have "$200 in savings", having only about $25 in my "savings account", but I instead had about $5k in my checking account (at a similar interest rate but more convenient, same credit union), and a bunch more in a Cash Management Account stored in a MMF. Would I have counted as "not having $200 in savings"?
The full reports dont seem to be there but this describes a bit of background:
https://solofunds.com/blog/the-2025-cash-poor-report-the-true-cost-of-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-solo-funds
Relevant to your question:
Not according to that definition.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the report is entirely survey-based, correct? Not only that, they then need to extrapolate their fee estimates from this survey claims, adding another potential level of error, though that's irrelevant for this particular discussion, I guess.
So it entirely hinges on how well-selected the set was (usually the answer is no), how trustworthy you think the people filling it out are, and however they interpreted the question.
Sure, but the survey results align with BEA's likely better survey data (the income is validated against tax returns). Which finds that about half of households have a negative personal savings rate.
https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2024/pdf/ec240050.pdf
None of this seems shocking to me, I've learned a little about friend's and acquantance's finances over the years. Does everyone here only know people who are prodigious savers?
The survey also states that the "cash-poor" have a significantly lower rate of disability/chronic health issues than the general population (40% vs 75%), and is at odds with data that "the median American has $8,000 in transaction accounts (savings, checking, money market)".
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Possibly. I come from germany, which already has a different savings culture, and in particular even from one of the poorer parts, but it's very rural and almost nobody I know was actually struggling with anything. All my school friends, and I'm still in contact with many of them, are doing very well independent of earning a lot - they just make do with whatever they get.
If anything, I sometimes get the impression that some of the better earning (urban) friends struggle more, because they then spend it away so fast on holidays, vacations, insanely expensive hobbies, and other stuff. If I were cheeky, I might say that the richer you are, the more you can afford to live paycheck to paycheck.
On the BEA report, it not only also has some insane stats, like expenditure being double of the income (!,wtf) for the whole bottom 10%, they explicitly say they suspect some unreported income to finance that much consumption, which would be my guess as well. So again, press X to doubt.
To be clear about my position, I think that not only the rate of paycheck-to-paycheck is probably seriously overstated, I also think that the kind of person living like that is very likely to have a lot of unnecessary expenses they can cut if need be. But the US is a different world, so maybe I'm typical minding too much.
That's one of those metrics that gets thrown around, but is awfully defined. How does it reflect, say, automatic retirement plan contributions? If someone is putting (say) 15% of their salary into a 401k every month, but have basically nothing extra left over in their bank account at the end of each month (because they have a defined budget, and spend on luxuries and vacations everything beyond bills, needs, and retirement savings), is that "paycheck to paycheck"?
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It's a visible and ever-changing one, though, in a way that groceries (weekly list might change) or even a daily coffee (which tends to be pretty smooth) isnt. Every day, you drive past the price of gas, and notice when it changes. So it's an obvious sign of "prices are going up" in a way maybe everything else isn't.
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