Fri Nov 6, 2020 10:19 PM
Fri Nov 6, 2020 12:20 AM
The Dead to Me star, who did not support the president, said some family members had been 10000% brainwashed by his anti-Democrat scare tactics.
Fri Nov 6, 2020 10:49 AM
This is why progressives need to move out of the safe spaces and get use to being around other people who don’t share their views. Move to the swing states and suburbs!
It would help a lot if big tech companies would move to those states which would bring jobs there making it easier for younger people to follow.
Another thing, like Arizona, Alabama is courting a changing voting population by bringing in more jobs. Expect Alabama to slowly turn blue, but not within the next 8 years.
From @[100001888413631:2048:Leslie Rochell]:
“Due to the abundance of thinly populated, rural, overwhelming white states in the South and West, the Senate currently has a 6-point bias in favor of the Republican Party; which is to say, given the existing major party coalitions, Democrats are unlikely to win the “tipping point” state in the Senate (i.e. the one need to secure a bare majority) unless the party is winning nationally by 6 percent or more. Of course, this is an illustrative abstraction: In real life, all 100 Senate seats aren’t on the ballot in a single election cycle, and Democrats have longtime incumbents like Joe Manchin and John Tester, who’ve managed to hold their own in increasingly Republican states.
But urban-rural polarization is steadily intensifying in the United States, while ticket splitting – the practice of voting for one party at the presidential level and another down-ballot – is becoming less common (though it’s possible the data from this election will reveal an uptick). Taken together, this has made it harder for Democrats to retain seats in Republican territory (even in the wave election year of 2018, Heidi Heitkamp and Claire McCaskill got evicted from the Senate), or to mint new Manchins and Testers (Montana governor Steve Bullock lost by nearly double-digits in his Senate race last night).
This state of affairs makes it exceedingly difficult for the Democratic Party to win control of the Senate, while remaining faithful to the aspirations of its predominantly urban base. In the view of Democratic data scientist David Shor, 2020 was the party’s last, best chance to win a Senate majority for the foreseeable future: Red-state incumbents Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, and Sherrod Brown held onto their seats in 2018 – with the help of a historically Democratic national environment – but are unlikely to be so lucky when they are on the ballot again in 2024. Thus, the party’s best hope was to eke out a majority in 2020, while it still had votes in unlikely places – and then, to use that majority to award statehood to Democratic leaning territories like D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, thereby mitigating the coalition’s structural disadvantage.
On Tuesday, Democrats likely missed their shot. To win a Senate majority (after Doug Jones’s inevitable loss to a non-child molester Republican in Alabama), Democrats needed to flip four Republican seats without losing any more of their own. Their most plausible path for hitting that mark was to win races in Maine, Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina. But Susan Collins won handily in Maine, and Thom Tillis appears to have bested Cal Cunningham in the Tar Heel State. That leaves Democrats two seats short of a bare majority.
The party still retains an outside shot at capturing those two seats: It looks like both of Georgia’s Senate races are headed for January run-off elections between the top two finishers, with Republican Kelly Loefller facing off against Democratic pastor Raphael Warnock, and Republican David Perdue taking on former Barack Obama impersonator Jon Ossoff. The odds of Democrats sweeping these races aren’t great. Generally speaking, in special elections held right after presidential ones, the party that’s just lost the White House tends to enjoy a turnout advantage, as winners get complacent while losers thirst for vengeance. Further, if Ossoff forces Perdue into a run-off, he will do so only barely: Perdue needed 50 percent plus a single vote to win reelection Tuesday; he appears likely to finish with something in the neighborhood of 49.9 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, anyone with remotely progressive political commitments should contribute anything they can to winning these two races.
If Democrats fail to pull off an improbable triumph in the Peach State, then the Biden presidency will be doomed to failure before it starts. With Mitch McConnell in control of the Senate, Biden will not be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice, or appoint liberals to major cabinet positions, or sign his name to a major piece of progressive legislation; and that may very well mean that the U.S. government will not pass any significant climate legislation, or expansion of public health insurance, or immigration reform, or gun safety law this decade.
With Biden in the White House, there is a good chance that Republicans will grow their majority in 2022, as the GOP will enjoy the turnout advantage that almost always accrues to the president’s opposition in midterms. Two years later, Democrats are more likely than not to lose their aforementioned red-state incumbents. Extrapolate from current demographic trends, and Democrats don’t take the Senate again until 2028 or later.”
Democrats probably just won the presidency but lost the chance to govern at the federal level for a long time to come.
Fri Nov 6, 2020 05:51 PM
In the fictional world of the Batman comics and movies, I always thought the idea of a large group of followers of The Joker was just too implausible. Why would so many unite to follow a clown to commit crimes and hurt the community and city? That disconnect kind of ruined the story for me.
Now I sort of get it. It doesn’t seem so far fetched anymore. People aren’t just rational human beings. People can be drawn into cults and worshipping “strong man” autocrats and bullies. The fears and resentment of the masses can be harnessed to make them do terrible things they normally wouldn’t do and follow a truly despicable person. Others will just unite against a perceived common enemy even if they don’t really like their leader.
Fri Nov 6, 2020 10:04 PM
The former top USPS official said the Trump administration has been “politicizing” the Postal Service.
Fri Nov 6, 2020 10:19 PM
Across Pennsylvania, activists were prepared to confront a right-wing disinformation effort aimed at delegitimizing the 2020 election results.
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