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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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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.

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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