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Goodguy  1d ago (text post)   Edited 1d ago   8260 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 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).

What? I could name a ton of people here that voted Republican. I personally voted straight Republican myself.

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.

They certainly exist, but they're mostly the youngest and least important staffers. I'd put them as slightly less influential than the Ron Paul Reloveution folks back during the Bush/early Obama years. Louder and more prominent than you'd expect, but fundamentally locked out of any real power.

It really depends. I wouldn't be so confident. Most staffers, in general, are pretty powerless, the vast majority spend their time on tasks like the Senator's email and arranging flights and cars. Most of them have to answer calls from constituents which means a lot of time spent talking with what I call "the UFO people". They have to arrange favors for veterans and constituents and write home to help people who have questions about their benefits. Then when they get to actually exercise policy, it's on drafting bills that won't make it out of committee.

There are a few staffers who are very powerful, perhaps more powerful than the average Congressmen. I.e., Susan Collins has been chair of Appropriations, which writes the budget, and she's been around for so long that I bet whoever's served her staff for a long time would have immense and obscure power. But from the outside looking in it's actually hard to make strong pronouncements about which staffers actually have power. It's very opaque.

Also, not all the groypers are necessarily young. Everybody knows who Nick is now and he has some unexpected acolytes. Clearly someone is keeping him well-informed. I don't know enough to say confidently whether those people are powerful or not. Everyone in Washington likes to imagine themselves an insider.

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.

Speaking out against Trump is generally a pretty sure way to get downvoted here unless you have very good reason to do so. I think your bet is probably wrong. 2 to 1 is laughably wrong.

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.

The last one has been a while so it might have finally switched, but in all surveys on the topic that I'm aware of, themotte has been dominated by heterodox lefties/"grey tribe" above and beyond anything else. See Apple Pie's survey for example, he described it as politically realist & left.

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.

I agree that you are one of a very small number of normie Republicans among the regular posters.

Ok, but "Harris and Biden voters here out number Trump voters by a solid 2 to 1" is delusional. I like Charlie, but he has a massive chip on his shoulder about this.

It reminds me about an old SSC post about the politics of his readership. It was mostly Bay Area bugman leftists for the obvious reasons, but among the right-wing minority there were a lot of (self-identified) libertarians, enough neoreactionaries to be worth making them a line item in the report, a significant number of people who wrote screeds about their unique political views in the free-text box, and precisely zero mainstream red tribe conservatives. My impression is that the founding stock of the Motte is that eclectic "grey tribe" libertarian-leaning right-wing minority of the original SSC readership.

@JeSuisCharlie correctly senses that this is not a red tribe forum, and concludes that it must secretly be a leftist one. I suspect he would feel the same way on a European monarchist forum or suchlike.

It reminds me about an old SSC post about the politics of his readership. It was mostly Bay Area bugman leftists for the obvious reasons, but among the right-wing minority there were a lot of (self-identified) libertarians, enough neoreactionaries to be worth making them a line item in the report, a significant number of people who wrote screeds about their unique political views in the free-text box, and precisely zero mainstream red tribe conservatives.

That would be "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup":

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre local sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

Thanks

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.

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