site banner
Goodguy  1d ago (text post)   Edited 1d ago   8139 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.

12
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

That’s why their only hope is to backstab him now. He’s guilty of numerous crimes so this time they can just let Democrats take him out. Trump can’t be president in 2028 if they have any hope of winning. He has to be completely out of the picture and discredited. If he had any integrity he’d resign, but we all know that will never happen.

That was pretty much what McConnell was banking on after J6, and we all saw how that went.

That was 6 years ago. He's 80 and has just been humiliated. Things are different now.

Trump voters aren’t going to abandon him because the rest of the GOP let them jail him. They will stay home and 2028 is a slaughter. Somehow they will need to engage the Fuentes vote and pull Hispanics into the fold.

For that reason Vance is dead. A Hispanic like Rubio will help even though he’s almost pure European or you have to bet on Desantis who might even do well with boomers who see him as a true adult. Either one needs blessed by Trump.

Rubio is DOA and has no chance in the midwest even before the latest neocon adventures. Rubio is how you spell George W Bush in Spanish. The coalition which won in 2024 has no interest in trading the Iran idiocy for a Cuban idiocy to vindicate Rubio's racial vendetta against Cuba.

Picking DEI candidates because you think the right colored Republican will bring racial groups into the fold is something done so many times and failed so many times that it's a meme at this point to make fun of.

Hispanics came out in record numbers for a rich white billionaire in suits from NYC. They want policies and they want action. Maybe we should learn this lesson instead of paying a scummy Republican consultant to find a closeted gay disabled black to run on the ticket... again.

I mean I’m open to a Trump military dictatorship but if I take anything from this election we need Hispanic votes to win in a Democracy and once Trump wasn’t just “strong man Brazil” and actually did deportations we lost the Hispanic vote.

the GOP has been running various races of candidates promising closet amnesty to illegals for decades. In fact, the post-mortem of the 2012 Romney loss was that the GOP wasn't going soft enough on immigration. And then Trump won the 2016 election based on illegal deportations and shutting down the border with the most hispanics vote-share ever

hispanics want illegals to be deported; what they dont want is for their tough guy to get into office and govern for billionaires and foreign countries causing the cost of living to go up

you win the hispanics by playing to economic populism

if MAGA isn't deporting illegals, what's even the point of MAGA?

I mean, to be sure, MAGA is dead and the America First crown is sitting in the gutter waiting to get picked up by someone else

Outside of MAGA, Trump is poison now so they really have nothing to lose by dumping him. They are cooked if he is still around in 2028 so might as well do a Hail Mary. Fuentes people will not vote for anyone associated with MAGA or Israel, and he may have enough power to knock off a half percentage of the vote and cause them to lose.

The Hanania and Fuentes crowd were never going to vote for a Republican of any stripe, and are generally viewed with contempt by the voter base (to the extent that the voter base is aware of them at all). Have you ever seen a more "punchable" face than this one? I don't think I have.

Now while I would never underestimate a Republicans' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, fact remains that as of today Rubio's Gulf-Coast Coalition remains the most powerful faction within the GOP's internal politics and anyone looking to win the nomination will either have to go through them or get approved by them.

if you think Fuentes (or at least Fuentes-like beliefs) doesn't have sway with most GOP staffers or volunteers under the age of 35, you can look forward to another electoral disaster

the Florida Mafia's power is connected, and tarnished, at the hip to the Trump sinking ship

I think Fuentes has a lot of pull with the sort of person who posts here, but I also don't believe that anyone here (with the possible exception of @Shakes and @100ProofTollBooth) is voting for a Republican (much less working for one).

I'm probably the most openly partisan MAGA Republican floating around here but I'd be shocked if I were really the only Republican voter.

fuentes has little pull, but fuentes-like politics is very popular in staffers under 35

voting for a Republican (much less working for one).

well, that's nice but you're wrong

Eh, maybe in some of the state-level machines and edgy college republican clubs who don't have to care about actual electoral politics because they're in D+30 college towns. But DC staffers, the go getters who are going to make up most of the next generation of influential Republicans, are very much not groypers. Those people are mostly the same mix of Squarejaw McPromking and autistic libertarian they've always been.

My read is that the "50%+ Republican staffer groyper hegemony" is fear porn that conflates MAGA and true groypers. Both Democrats and Establishment Republicans have motivated interest and simple bias to do this. But there are groypers running around on the Hill, I've met plenty. And I've heard that Fuentes gets his news directly from sources in the White House.

More comments

Maybe but I would bet good money that Harris and Biden voters here out number Trump voters by a solid 2 to 1. Ditto Talarico vs. Paxton, and El-Sayed vs. Stevens. While this space has a reputation as being a "right wing" space it's important to remember that it is really only "right wing" within the context of it's founding population of Berkley Area contrarians and edgy-reddit atheists. Pretty much everyone in this forum from @Opt-out to @magicalkittycat would immediately find them selves sorted into the "authoritarian left" quadrant of the political compass if they were dropped into the comments section of someplace like frieghtwaves, ar15.com, or the median IRC channel from the mid 2000s.

I think I’m right-wing. Demographically I’m nearly identical to the current pope except he has a rejection letter I never received.

The only time in my entire life I would have voted for the Democrat would be in Viveks race if I was eligible to vote in Ohio. I cried the day Obama was elected that America had fallen.

I’m not sure how much more right wing I need to be to be right-wing.

The only thing lefty about me is I probably talk to too many non-white people regularly.

I think you are confusing lack of normie Republicans with lack of right wing leaning people. This place has more party line Republicans than it does Democrats. There are essentially no party line Democrats here, it's weird iconoclasts all the way down but I'd be shocked if the vote total doesn't break right.

More comments

Based on what gets upvoted and downvoted, I suspect there are a lot of lurkers and occasional posters who have conventional MAGA political views. I agree that you are one of a very small number of normie Republicans among the regular posters.

"Most of the posters on this forum would be sorted as auth-left in the context of some other more libertarian forum" says more about the culture of that other forum than the culture here - David Brin had a (no longer online as far as I'm aware) meme of this where the Nolan chart had a tiny triangle of "Libertarian" in the lib-right corner with 95% of the chart labelled "Dirty fucking Commie". The actual auth-left (relative to the median voter) have mostly sorted out - unless you think that MAGA counts as an auth-left movement based on Trump's unwillingness to cut unsustainable entitlement spending.

More comments

you mean Rogers? I would bet more people here would have been Stevens voters than ElSayed in the primary

Other than that, you make a good point. I do not fit that description, but I rarely participate here.

I won’t vote if it’s not maga and there are a lot of me.

Thank you for your service.

Have fun with Democrats controlling all 3 branches then.

Democrats are going to be much more cautious about impeaching Trump as it backfired in the past. The only way I see them moving forward with it would be the unlikely scenario where Republicans are driving the train where they demand it, and these demands continue long enough that enough Senators are on the record long enough and adamant enough that by the time they get to vote for removal there's nothing left to lose. The reason I think this is unlikely is that most of the vulnerable Republicans are already out, and, as @2rafa said, there's enough residual support in the party that it's risky going against him. You can already see this in comments by Ron DeSantis and others, who will blame anyone and everyone for the blowout except Trump himself. DeSantis, in particular, was cautious about blaming the loss on the Iran War without pointing out that Trump was in the driver's seat for that. In MAGA-world, Trump can't fail, he can only be failed. So if the ICE stuff turned people off it was because Kristi Noem handled it badly, if the Iran War was a mistake it was Hesgeth and Rubio's mistake, if tariffs were a bad idea then it was Howard Lutnick's idea, etc.

So in this scenario they quietly or overtly threaten him with impeachment (ie supporting an inevitable Dem impeachment vote) and he pardons himself for absolutely everything, then resigns to give them what they want.

He then spends the next two years talking about his betrayal. All the while, the Republicans are still in control of the presidency, his base is completely fractured with many more conspiratorial supporters thinking he was backstabbed by Epstein RINOs or something, and they lose in a landslide in 2028.

Vance cannot win a presidential election, or probably even a primary.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats