It’s both. Successfully electing a bunch more conservative democrats now isn’t going to improve anybody’s life anymore than it has done for the last 40 years. That’s a big part of how we got here.
If your goal is just for team D to have more power, sure yeah you’re right. But unless that’s in service of policy goals you’re totally missing the point.
And sure, you can pressure congressmen to do what you want. But it’s way way way more efficient to put ones who also want what you want in place.
Joe Manchin is legit one of the best senators in the party.
Trump just won the state by 39 points.
Forget about a Democrat, we should thank our lucky stars that we don’t have a QAnon senator from there.
If we could have Joe Manchin and Jon Tester clones throughout Appalachia and Big Sky land, we would be so much better off.
Oh I agree. I think many of the candidates are trash that needs taking out. I think there are two phases to every election cycle… there is the primaries where we fight like hell to put good people on the ticket… and then the general where we try to maximize the amount of accessible political power we have.
I am much more bothered by centrists in blue states than I am by centrists in red states. If you’re from a swing district I’ll forgive a lot if you can figure out how to win consistently. If you’re from WV you can be Joe Manchin and I’ll be in your fan club.
And Kansas, I believe. The first three you named are the best choices, though. Collins is the most sane, and probably the easiest seat to hold going forward.
Yeah. OTOH, one thing we should have learned from Trump in 2016 is that policy is nearly irrelevant when it comes to campaigning. When he did articulate anything related to policy it was all over the map. This years election reinforces that – the Republicans didn’t even bother with a party platform.
As much of an odious failson Trump is, he understands some things the political establishment doesn’t yet.
You know we agree that there’s no requirement to get someone to buy socialized medicine when we can sell medical freedom.
It wouldn’t be surprising if a Senator from West Virginia wanted to burn witches, but they should probably be a socialist.
That candidate crushes in whitesville kentucky. Crushes.
Political parties suck. If every electorate elected who they really wanted instead of a compromise because they have to fit into one of the two parties, we’d have all those popular programs like M4A and none of the witch burning.
I don’t think I said anything about her being “a her.” I was just alluding to the fact that you seem to have some kind of vendetta against her that you bring into many different threads. It’s a weird obsession.
In my experience with non-partisan municipal and judicial races, the non-partisan nature leads to even worse representation. Someone self-applying the label of R or D does a lot of heavy lifting for your average (terribly informed) voter about what the person likely stands for. Without it, it’s way easier for these people to just bullshit their way through the election cycle and then take the mask off when they win.
I’m just telling you how people perceive you. If you insist on stressing alternate “facts” like “Warren is a Republican”, people aren’t going to treat you very seriously and you don’t have much ground for complaining that you are being unfairly treated.
I don’t know about other threads, but in this thread, Mimosa merely described your posting as “creepy” without specifying that there was anything gender-related. I suggested that some people see a pattern. Then you brought in the idea that “mimosa and the 4 likers” want to score points by defending a female.
Do you have any interest in changing minds or at least trying to get people to understand you better or are you just looking to pick fights because it makes you feel better?
If we had more than two parties, that just means that the compromises get made after the election, not before.
Political parties naturally exist because people have a tendency to form groups. Society is not just a set of discrete transactions between atomistic individuals.
It’s 100% the last one.
One of my favorite ways to attack libertarians is when they talk about how competition will save everyone from everything. I point out that there is no evidence that, if left to their own devices, businesses don’t have huge incentives to just merge into ever larger businesses with ever larger market control until they can engage in monopolistic and monopsonistic behavior. In fact the whole goal of the game of capitalism is to get as close to a monopoly as one can. One wants total market share so that it becomes actually impossible for anyone to compete with your firm… and at that point you can extract rents that are actually more abusive than those collected by governments.
What happens if they are like a 20 year old white dude from a middle class family is that they tell you that’s not true and they have to look it up. Then they do. Then you win. No matter what example they bring back they know they had to dig deep to find it and you can just avalanche them with dozens of counter examples. You can be an asshole and ask them to randomly select an industry and then look at the history of the business and the same patterns 100% guaranteed repeat. Because that’s how the world actually fucking works.
Once you’ve cracked what I call a load bearing concept open like that there’s a window where that person becomes a lot more open minded. In that window you can offer them new concepts to include in how they think about reality. If those concepts are as sound as the fact that in a vacuum for profit companies trend toward monopoly rather than toward 0 profit absolute competition, they aren’t going anywhere ever. If those concepts confirm other parts of their world view as being stable they will take them even if they aren’t that sound.
The only counter argument to this I’ve found that even sounds convincing is Peter Thiels, and it is from a long while ago and everything he predicted about new rivals to the tech monopolies he’s defending in that book hasn’t come to pass. In fact the opposite came to pass. That’s the way you crush that line, but the Xerox/Kodak/Blockbuster ‘the market disrupts monopolies eventually’ line was trickier before FB bought out all of the social media competition.
Like when some Ayn Rand-worshippng CEO ran JC Penney into the ground by pitting the various business units against each other in competition. Turns out when parts of a business actively ratfuck each other - the business suffers!
FFS, you constantly accuse people of “not wanting M4A” or “not wanting people to have healthcare.” Maybe pump the brakes a bit on that before complaining about others strawmanning you.
I’ve noted here before there’s a sizable number of people who like divided gov’t. Polling saying Biden by a lot certainly impacted votes, how many in reality I don’t know but not absolute zero.
2018 manchin/tester win
2020 the prog is down 43.5, Bullock got smoked too and he was relatively popular there.
manchin/tester aren’t going to hang on in 2024 and probably neither is brown in OH. I don’t know how to combat that–if GOP strength holds in those states, they have more to turnout than dems do there.