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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The Trump admin and the GOP may have managed to turn a once in a couple generation opportunity to fix major structural problems in the United States into the worst political loss since at least the 1974 election a month after Nixon's resignation over the Watergate Coup, but have you considered the worst scumbags around, Republican political consultants like Susie Wiles, Chris Lacivita, and James Blair, got generational wealth sucking MAGA dry?
Wiles, LaCivita, and Blair just spent >$1,000,000,000, the most expensive midterm in US history, in the worst loss in 50 years. They could have scaled up 10xvotes or some other GOTV operation over the last 2 years with that enormous warchest, but that wouldn't have gotten them generational wealth, and so they ran worthless dumb ads while claiming DJT doing a rally in a few states was going to get the job done and blacklisted and attacked anyone attempting to speak the truth or tell Trump the truth.
Let's hear it for these champions. In a just world, these people and the rest of the Florida Mafia would at least be blacklisted from controlling anything more than county dog catcher (not to mention sued into oblivion and investigated for where the money went and what it was spent on), but we can look forward to them joining the Rubio 2028 campaign because that's how GOP politics works.
It's hard to exaggerate just how much of a disaster if not malicious destruction the GOP leadership/consultant class has caused in this cycle, but here's hoping this will cause accountability instead of what is more likely which is to find some scapegoat to blame everything on. The burned MAGA to the ground and got rich in the process. They betrayed their voters and supporters but at least many of them have gotten fabulously wealthy.
And don't forget the paid-for pollsters manipulating access to lie in internals and to the President. I need to make a pollster review and post-mortem effort post about this, but not right now.
Sorry for the rants, I burned bridges and access and money over the last year+ trying to stop this from happening and as you can see I failed miserably. It's simultaneously cathartic but also this loss will just make everything worse.
Not sure exactly how it compares, but the Democratic Party is definitely overrun with useless political consultants gathering all of the money for themselves, spending a lot (most?) of it on messages for donations which are essentially elder scams. Any blue wave was despite that waste, not because the Democratic Party is great at spending money to get votes.
Does political spending really correlate that well with outcomes? Beyond that, can we show causality in the right direction? Presumably popular, charismatic candidates are good at both raising money and getting votes even before they spend anything, and even generate much more organic, unpaid promotion.
I think it correlates in certain situations where exposure is an advantage. If you're running in a crowded primary, having money earlier means you can start running ads and getting name recognition before your competition finds out if they even have donors. This is what happened in the 2014 PA Democratic gubernatorial primary; Tom Wolfe was independently wealthy and was able to get his name out there enough that his polling lead was large enough for him to start challenging the incumbent weeks before the primary was even over, despite being a political newcomer. This year, Stacy Garrity couldn't compete with Shapiro financially and didn't start running ads until very late in the campaign. The result was that for a while after Labor Day something like 30% of the electorate couldn't name the Republican candidate if you put a gun to their head.
With shit like President, I don't think it matters one iota in the general. With Senate it can matter, since an underdog can make an impact they wouldn't be able to make on a shoestring budget. But there are diminishing returns. Once a campaign is well enough funded that they've already done all their ad buys (it's a lot cheaper if you buy early) and they don't have to be too careful about what hotels they stay in, it's not going to do much. Spending a ton of money on late TV buys doesn't have the same impact on voters who have been seeing your ads for months. I almost think it's counterproductive, as there are certain candidates I'd never vote for based on ads alone. That guy from MS put together a good one, but most of them are just black and white shots if the opposition with dire voiceovers saying that they support tax cuts that ship jobs overseas. These are unwatchable but are at least predictable; more often than not, going outside the box makes them completely impossible, like the Stacy Garrity ad with AI Josh Shapiro talking about what a bad candidate he is.
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