Peter Hurley

I think this is broadly correct and comes from the social media nationalization of politics / news. R dominance in the South has rested on southern white voters being much more Republican than national avg white voters. Midwest swinginess relied on them being much less Republican than national avg.

Key thing to note here is that this is for spam texts only. But a far higher percentage of raises go to ads. Sherrod Brown's raised $61.6M this cycle and spent 88% of that on TV ads alone.

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

A general reminder that you should realize from a weighting standpoint is that I could take a set of data and easily create a poll result that was tied to +/-8 on either side based on a few very defensible decisions.

as an actively practicing polyamorous person, I need to make this abundantly clear: if you want to explore polyamory, but your partner is hesitant, you are fucking duty bound to say "then we're not doing that" or you will never glimpse the light of heaven

how do you write this?! how do you not realize you are the fucking problem here?! you are the one doing things worse! they are better at this than you!

Or in a bunch of these cases I bet: DMV clerk mistake.

Californians pretend they live in the city and Texans pretend they live in the country, the suburbs where people in both states actually live are largely identical

The fun part is after a midterm beatdown when everyone is fully knives out for each other (with Trump blaming everyone else ofc) instead of trying to play nice. That's a permission structure for the coalition to break in big ways.

At the grave peril of reading too much into early vote this looks very promising. Most notable is that Ds aren't just activating their hyper-voters. Way more heavily skewed to irregular voters than R early turnout.

Never Tailgate.

Dem comms staff: Please check your Meta security. RIGHT NOW. There's some kind of bug, and I was somehow given access back to a page for an elected official for a job I left in 2021. (I created the page originally, so I'm assuming that's how that happened?) But this official has -

Trump does not accept Congress is the legitimately elected and constitutionally empowered legislative body in this country. He is waging a yearslong, escalating campaign of rebellion, violence, and state terrorism against its authority and will stop at nothing short of its total disempowerment.

This is one of the most "I am not fucking around" orders I have seen from a federal court in the Trump era. This level of granular specificity directed at the DoJ is super unusual and reflects how much their bullshit has stopped the Trump admin from being assumed to act in good faith.

Does anyone have a good analysis of the shift needed to flip a trifecta in the Texas legislature? Wild ass possibilities if Ds can do a gerrymander of their own (and if feeling wild add on Maine/Nebraska allocation for electors).

This is a good thread and for some reason it unlocked something that's been brewing in the back of my head for a while.

This is broadly correct. "Bribed/in the pocket of X" stuff is only true for small potatoes things nobody hears about. Susan Collins helping direct $ to a random defense contractor? Totally plausible bribe. But any big public stance on a major issue? They are who they say they are.

“No they really believe it” is a way better heuristic for understanding political actors than “they are on the take” 9 times out of 10. Sometimes beliefs are downstream of materialism and political economy. But these relationships are more complicated than “bribes”

Not Robuchon but my wife and I got to enjoy a six course potato focused meal earlier this year!

I want to believe. I don't know if I can believe, but I want to believe. If I'm going full hopium, it's a midterm where turnout differential is a much bigger factor, and pollsters have been so burned on D oversampling that they're cranking a ton of stuff to favor Rs and... maybe too much?

So this is by far not the biggest deal here but what the actual fuck is point (4) in the cert grant? Whatever question one party wants resolved? Truly special birthday boy bullshit.

"The desire not to be subjected to the (democratic) political power of black people" is basically the core of American reactionary thought, always has been, and what do you know that turns out to make you fascist before long

It's basically the opposite of inclusive design. Intentionally exclusive design ends up hurting more people than you intended to exclude, which is one of several reasons it's bad.

I'll admit it took me an embarrassingly long time to get the joke. Truly top tier trolling.

Realizing the extent to which this is true wildly changed my opinions about how to deal with Trumpism, since they're never going to be satisfied unless they're actively dominating everyone else. You can't give them some concessions and go back to the status quo: they're reactionary revolutionaries.

Samuel Johnson really encapsulated it. “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

I think this relates to more than just disease. There's a conspiratorial mindset where bad things can't simply be randomness or large scale social phenomena. 9/11 trutherism, Qanon, election denialism, etc.

People don’t want to hear diseases just happen. It scares them to death. They need it to be because of malign actors or because they didn’t take the right thing. The fact that it could happen to anyone, anytime, just because is terrifying because you can’t control it. Whether autism/covid it’s fear.

The next administration should declare these counterfeit and demonetized as they were never lawful to mint.

The philosopher AJ Ayer once stopped Mike Tyson from forcing himself on Naomi Campbell at a party in London through clever wordsmithing.

Just gonna toss out there that one of the central facts of US politics--all politics, really--is that the general populace knows very little about who holds power, how gov't works, what policies do & don't exist, the balance of economic forces, or really much of anything outside their lifeworlds.

Downgrade a movie: Project Screen Pass

Choo, and I cannot emphasize this enough, choo.

Celebrating and elevating members of our community who sacrificed their lives to fight for our freedom in a medium that members of our community relate to (goofy state fair ag art) is good. Not cringe! Pretty straightforwardly effective radicalization propaganda.

The Democratic Party has let a consulting industry exploit elderly donors in its name, wreck its reputation and finances in the process, and walk away rich whether the party wins or loses. When a mirror is held up, the instinct is to break the glass rather than look. On why the press looks away:

A Democratic candidate could do a lot worse than Wrecking Ball for their 2028 campaign song.

My whole thing is that *even if* an LLM was giving near perfect legal advice the fact that it is not privileged is so destructive as to make it worse than useless in many cases. Every single question and answer is subject to discovery! One subpoena to Claude and your case is ruined.

this is easily a bigger result than whoever wins WI-GOV, Craig would have been a significantly below average Dem senator and Flanagan will be in the top tier phenomenal news