2022 Midterm Elections (Abandon hope all ye who enter here) butnahhh. or maybe?

Politics & News
862

it’s Louisiana. the eDem candidates don’t matter there any more than a far-left one. it’s just a matter if this guy can raise sufficient money without schumer’s pac, and generate enough buzz (pun intended) to create a conversation about it.

blue strongholds definitely need to run more progressive candidates, but going into an unwinnable race, and making them closer with really crazy ideas is also a strategy i endorse.

i can’t say the same about close purple districts. i’ve seen too many blown calls in VA, who simply don’t vote for anyone who doesn’t demagogue about christian values all day long. races like that evidently need the ex-mil white shitlib for the majority.

863

The last time a Democrat won a statewide election in Louisiana was…

It might take the parlay of the right candidate, the right wedge issue, and maybe a timely scandal, but I don’t think it’s impossible to win in Louisiana. I don’t know if Chambers is the right candidate, but an eDem is less likely to embrace the variance that would lead to finding a good wedge issue.

864

John Bel Edwards? the current gov of LA?

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865

Yes, that’s my point.

866

Governor races are way different than senate races. Weird parties can win.

LA/KS/KY have D governors. MD/MA/VT have R governors.

I doubt any of them would win a senate race, even if they are popular governors.

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867

Maryland would probably be a tossup immediately in this environment. He seems uninterested tho. He’s way more popular than the D senate guy. Who I’d totally have to look up

rest have no chance

if hogan runs, I’d lean him actually, he’s that popular in maryland all around

868

I don’t think LA is impossible…they seem to never go as hard into the voter suppression that some of the other southern states do, which makes a difference

869

south is slowly getting bluer but man, it’s like 18 points to make up. He has to cut 7 seconds from his commercial though for 30 second spots, you can still say 37 seconds nobody is timing it man.

Gov races as noted sometimes swing the other way, isn’t that long ago IL had a R gov and there’s zero shot at any senate race a R would win here.

870

Chris van Hollen and Ben Cardin are the Democratic senators from Maryland, and as far as I know very typical establishment types. Both white guys, Van Hollen is probably in his 50s, Cardin late 70s early 80s.

I’d be surprised if Hogan beat them. I think the reasons Maryland sometimes goes with a Republican governor (liberal suburban whites who are secretly deep down racist when it comes to state policy regarding Baltimore) do not apply to a US Senate race, when their top issues are probably more standard liberal fare like healthcare, living wages, taxing the wealthy, etc.

I actually think MA or VT would be more likely to go red in a Senate race with their governors, because my understanding is that their governors are a lot more moderate than Hogan is. But I could be wrong about that, I know a lot more about local Maryland politics than MA or VT.

Generally though the comparisons are apples to oranges. It’s very different putting in a red governor with a blue legislature or vice versa than sending the other party to the US Senate. The issues that matter locally are also different, although lately the GOP has had success conflating that.

I think we’re rapidly approaching the point where we have a better chance catching a deeper red state by surprise because they are not going as hard on voter suppression as some of the less deep red states are.

872

For years Delaware politics was all about Mike Castle, Tom Carper, William Roth, and Joe Biden.

Delaware has one House seat.

Carper (D) was in the House 83-93, Governor 93-01, Senator 01-present.

Castle (R) was governor 85-92, House 93-11. He and Carper arranged a swap due to term limits in 1993 to avoid running against each other. Note their parties and they still worked that out together.

Roth (R) was in the House from 67-70, Senate from 71-2001.

Biden (D) was in the Senate from 73-09.

So from 1970 to 2010, out of 160 man-years for House, Senate, and Governor, those four controlled 118 of them or something like that. There was a 16 year stretch where those four held all four major positions.

The only time any of the four ran against each other was when Carper ran against Roth for the Senate seat in 2000. Roth was 79, but Castle refused to primary him. Carper made the race about age, Roth collapsed twice during the campaign, and Carper won 56-44.

Castle would have taken Biden’s seat when he became VP, but he lost the GOP primary to the crazy witch lady and Coons beat her. Castle beat Coons in polling by 20+ points.

Castle was moderate, in favor of campaign finance reform, and would be at the left end of the current GOP. Roth was all about tax cuts, incentivizing saving and investing (yes, that Roth), and cutting spending. Romney-esque.

Carper, Biden, and Coons for that matter are all standard fare corporate Dems.

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873

i think LA can suppress votes just like the rest of them, but New Orleans is a gigantic urban center where it’s harder to pull off. that doesn’t exist in alabama or mississippi. it’s easy to forget that southern states have different population splits.

my point is that we should be moving the party to the left via both safe-blue AND safe-red districts. we won’t bink red seats with any sort of regularity, but those are the races where wacky left ideas like m4a and ubi can shift the conservative brain-rot into defense. we always complain that our messaging sucks. that’s because we always play it safe. so let’s use those un-winnable races for offense.

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874

What’s actually going to happen in this race is the establishment Dem will attack him in the primary for being pro-weed, resulting in the establishment Dem winning the primary and getting curb stomped in the general while the GOP is slowly able to become the party of legalized marijuana (for white people only ldo)

875

win isn’t exactly the right term but stop hte bleeding would help and my god are consultants complete f’ing morons

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876

It really isn’t though. It’s way smaller than you think. Only 383k people with NOLA east abandoned and uptown mostly 1-4 family homes. It’s not some border thing either. It’s 50th in media markets. I think it’s more that there’s a higher percentage of black people in LA than AL, but I don’t know.

877

Mississippi has an even higher percentage of black people, though. If there’s a demographic reason for why LA is different from AL/MS, it’s probably Louisiana having a much higher percentage of Catholics, I would guess.

878

i looked up the populations before posting that. :stuck_out_tongue: greater new orleans is 1.5m. birmingham is like 1.1m. to go bigger for metro areas, you have to go into neighboring states, texas, florida, georgia, and even tennessee (that was a surprise).

879

Sure but this is somewhere that I lived for 4 years. It’s not a big urban center. The Hammond-Metarie-NOLA area you’re using to get to 1.5m is New Orleans, a suburb west of NOLA, a suburb on the other side of the lake and a whole bunch of country bumfucks with a few small towns of that. It’s not urban.

Hammond, Metairie, pretty much all of Jefferson county, and more were run by racist pricks when I was there too.

880

i see, yes there’s room to classify suburban as totally separate. i think most metro areas count suburbs and that’s what really makes them giant. without suburbs the US might be a nation with urban centers being a minority. but with suburbs the numbers are like 75%-25% urban-rural.

eta: that’s overall. MS/LA/AL are also quite different in rural/urban split

881

A good leftist plan for the midterms would be to blast your local rep or senator if they were one of the many who approved a trillion bucks for the Pentagon

I know I’m getting after Teddy Lieu when his time comes

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882

Jefferson Parish went roughly 55/45 for Trump, but the state as a whole was like 59/40, so it’s more swingy than rural Louisiana, at least. And that’s the whole parish, Metairie is only part of it, so they may actually be blue. Louisiana didn’t do precinct level data in 2020 as far as I can tell, and Metairie is not an actual city with local government, so it’s impossible to tell.