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Goodguy  1d ago (text post)   Edited 1d ago   8220 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.

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

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