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Goodguy  1d ago (text post)   Edited 1d ago   8091 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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Part of the problem for Vance and any other Republicans who are performatively distancing themselves from Trump is that a substantial proportion of Republican primary voters still mostly like him and are unlikely to hate him before 2028.

Not only can Trump blame all problems between now and 2028 on a Democratic congressional majority preventing him from doing anything (and he will be persuasive to enough people in doing so) which will ensure he retains at least a core loyal base, but he will also (i) respond extremely poorly to criticism from inside the party and (ii) will be very public in endorsing a preferred candidate or candidates.

This means that even if a Trump-skeptical candidate wins the primary, which would be difficult, they are likely to be heavily bruised by a primary campaign in which he will feature as a looming presence. Trump, who remains a vindictive and capricious person with little loyalty to party, would then also likely criticize them throughout the actual presidential campaign period, reducing turnout in his core boomer base and making an actual victory almost impossible.

In the alternate scenario, if a Trump-endorsed candidate wins the primary, he will require Trump at rallies and in media more broadly to drive turnout among his base to win, which means that he will never be able to criticize him even slightly, and in turn that obviously means that he is unlikely to win swing voters.

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).

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.

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.

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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.

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