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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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.
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