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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.

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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.

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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