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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Notes -
The Gateway Pundit is reporting that there is a legibly fraudulent pattern of statistical anomalies in this election’s results. They posted the math for anyone to see. The original reporting comes from TruthIsFreedom on X.
Like any good epistemologist, they basically call it predictive: pick a county, apply their formula, and see that the result matches.
Although I’m a minarchist libertarian Republican, I’m probably one of the few remaining advocates for Trump on The Motte, from what I see in these threads. I’m not here to argue that point, FYI. I’m here to ask people not to simply disregard it out of hand because Trump reposted it or because it has LLM speech hallmarks. The allegation is so monstrous that, for the sake of the perceived legitimacy of our democratic republic, the mechanism needs to be explained by literally anything besides malfeasance.
Excerpts posted here from GWP so you don’t have to give them ad revenue if you don’t want:
So, what’s the benign mechanism that explains this?
I think this result is pretty clearly not consistent with fraud.
What happened is that a big chunk of 2024 Trump voters, young men in particular, wanted no new wars and a focus on domestic issues, particularly affordability.
Susie Wiles has been keeping things focussed on the Middle East and corporate interests. R Senate leadership has been focussed on maintaining their power within the party as opposed to delivering on 2024 promises.
A case in point is Texas. Politically it's dominated by the Bush family patronage network. Voters keep rejecting their candidates but leadership is out of touch with reality.
Their plan was to torpedo the Paxton campaign to teach voters a lesson about voting for the wrong primary candidate.
Instead voters taught them a lesson, and now even Abbott lost.
Hypothetical: Would you say the same thing if every Republican who lost had lost by exactly 20,398 votes?
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Man, it must feel great never having to self-reflect.
If the people vote for you, then that is only good and right. However, if the voters from Maine to Mississippi completely reject what you're selling, then it must've been rigged.
And what self-reflection exactly should happen if you can take the vote counts from a previous election for every county in states from Maine to Mississippi, subtract 15%, and accurately predict this year’s vote results?
It seems to me that putting last election’s results into Excel and applying a formula should never predict election results this accurately.
What's more likely, that thousands of different precincts across America, many of them in deep red rural counties, conspired to elect Democrats, or that an LLM-slop article from the Gateway Pundit is bullshit?
But it's clear that Democrats should just treat post-election conspiracy theories as background noise. The right have apparently decided they're incapable of losing elections, even with sky high consumer prices and disastrous foreign wars.
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The US does not run just one election, it runs thousands of them coordinating between the states/counties/cities. Many of those thousands are primarily Republican controlled areas with volunteers/workers who are disproportionately Republican.
Thus we have two possible conclusions if fraud is happening this widespread.
Ordinary Republican volunteers and politicians are all in on the conspiracy and able to prevent whistleblowers somehow.
Republicans are so retarded that they can get the elections stolen in their own counties and governments right under their nose without anyone uncovering a single bit of hard proof.
There must be some explanation for why Republican areas are apparently so easily stolen.
I agree with the other comment on this then, at some point if was happening then maybe you just deserve it.
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If there was fraud, and I don't believe there was, then they deserve to have the election stolen from them. Every election they say there's fraud and it's stolen, yet they do nothing about it. If that is true, then they are so incompetent and weak that they just take it every two years. Nobody who does that deserves to rule.
They tried to have cases heard in 2020, but judges kept throwing them out for procedural reasons before evidence could even be presented.
The national GOP is, honestly, trash for being embarrassed of its voters.
The suits they filed never alleged actual fraud, just procedural violations that they pretended were some kind of cheat code to get election results thrown out. Nothing that was actually alleged had any bearing on the results. Furthermore, even if they had alleged fraud, they would have needed to have the evidence ready to go. It's not like they had six months to conduct discovery. Nothing new has come out in six years.
pointing out an election was done in an illegal manner and counted illegal votes, which you've chosen to describe here as "just procedural violations," is in fact evidence and should, and does, in regular times, result in election results being thrown out and requiring new elections if the effected votes are larger than the difference in an election
Right, instead election contests, like the one filed in Georgia, have a tight schedule to file an election contest and are supposed to get an immediate hearing required by law. Instead, the court just refused to put it on the schedule, it went up to a higher court, the lower court was ordered to put it on the schedule, the lower court didn't do it, and then Jan6 happened and the lower court just decided everything was moot anyway.
woah guys, we're not talking about "actual fraud," just that states conducted an illegal election and counted illegal votes which affected the outcome and then committed crimes in handling of the election, the election records, and votes, including ignoring court orders about intermixing ballots
the legal system just told Trump and other people who cared about the major issues with the 2020 election to screw off and ignored laws and precedents to do it
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If the evidence was that good then it couldn’t be suppressed and it would have gotten out.
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a basic national trend of Trump voters who felt betrayed enough to defect to a Democrat voter while some sat out and not vote and a politicized situation where national politics, e.g., an ongoing extremely unpopular war, swamped state politics
Democrats get near their 2024 voter numbers (mirroring their primary and 2025 turnouts), GOP doesn't get those numbers (again, mirroring the primary turnouts and 2025 races), and the independents who voted (while significantly down) and who leaned heavily Trump in 2024 voted for Democrats instead
this isn't what fraud looks like in the US; you don't get a national trend across a bunch of different systems, different machines, different software, different people, and different places
we do not have a centralized vote counting system
this is NOTHING like the 2020 fraud
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