2018 Midterms: Gerrymandering to Victory b/w Blue Wave, Red Pill

[Jaybar]

Just walked out of the Loop in Chicago and the lines for early voting are wrapping city blocks. I'm voting in the early AM tomorrow. A bit upset since it's supposed to thunderstorm all morning...at least my polling place is only a couple minute walk away.

[6souls]

Latest ad for the guy running against Amy Klobuchar;

[Yuri-G]

well that's just gross lol

[Andalusian girls]

these attack ads are uniformly gross and the Republican Party deserves to be annihilated at the polls tomorrow for what they've allowed themselves to descend to. hopefully a shattering, sobering defeat will end this entrancement with white nationalism and help enable the conservative wing to eventually regain control from the populists in 2020 and beyond.

[Quicklet]

Spoiler alert: even if they lose tomorrow, Republicans aren't going to abandon Trump.

[Andalusian girls]

spoiler alert if you think 'help enable the conservative wing to eventually regain control from the populists' means only that you have a child's understanding of politics

[archibaldcrane]

these attack ads are uniformly gross and the Republican Party deserves to be annihilated at the polls tomorrow for what they've allowed themselves to descend to. hopefully a shattering, sobering defeat will end this entrancement with white nationalism and help enable the conservative wing to eventually regain control from the populists in 2020 and beyond.

This is just the beginning of a 25 year process of a majority-minority America.

You're in California, you saw all the nonsense that occurred from say, 1998-2008.

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[Quicklet]

spoiler alert if you think 'help enable the conservative wing to eventually regain control from the populists' means only that you have a child's understanding of politics

The conservative wing (if such a distinct thing even still exists) has no chance of "regaining control" of a party that's lost all its sanity by pumping brain poison into half the country for several decades. What you need is a tectonic shift in this country for that to even start to be a possibility. That's just not happening tomorrow or anytime Trump still remains in office. They're stuck on this wild ride until it all goes up in flames.

[Byrthnoth]

Idk what p(votes for Trump|Republican) = 0.90 with pretty normal turnout means, but it doesn't mean that there is a huge wing of the Republican party that is conservative but not racist.

[Quicklet]

Well, good thing we have a massive poll tomorrow to find out if your hypothesis is true.

[Andalusian girls]

This is just the beginning of a 25 year process of a majority-minority America.

You're in California, you saw all the nonsense that occurred from say, 1998-2008.

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I'd say we're well past the beginning given the alacrity with which the white proportion of the citizenry has declined in recent decades but I understand the point. I believe there to be two paths before the Republican Party and the Republic, one would be to continue in the Trumpian vein, catering to an ever more insulated and bunkery shrinking white majority, the other to embrace a broader tent conservatism that can and has appealed to other ethnicities.

politicians do nothing without gain in mind so naturally morality will not affect this kind of recalibration, but defeat well could. the electoral catastrophes following the Bush administration largely discredited both compassionate conservatism and big war neoconservative regime change, and hopefully tomorrow will be the first in a similar series of defeats that will awaken the party to the purblind appeal of catering to uneducated whites in a nation that is increasingly educated and brown.

white nationalists will of course remain but the question is one of relegating them to the role of isolated garrisons in a fallen kingdom ala Dixiecrats or of having them assume control of one half of the nation's political machinery.

[Fiye]

Tea Party politics have been pretty successful for the republican party I dunno why they'd be incentivized to change anything at this point.

[Quicklet]

Tea Party politics have been pretty successful for the republican party I dunno why they'd be incentivized to change anything at this point.

Yeah, especially because even if they lose the House, as long as they retain the Senate they can spend the next 2 years stacking the courts and locking in voter suppression for 2020.

And, as soon as they go back to being the minority party, they can just yell about deficits and break government until they get back into the majority, just like they did from 2010-2016.

[Andalusian girls]

Idk what p(votes for Trump|Republican) = 0.90 with pretty normal turnout means, but it doesn't mean that there is a huge wing of the Republican party that is conservative but not racist.

this is specious and doubly so for attempting to use mathematics to establish the veneer of intellectual respectability.

Trump did not win the majority of votes in the Republican primary, and that despite a woefully weak field ranging from please clap to the most disliked man in the most disliked branch of government. that is to say when given a choice among Republicans the majority of Republicans said not Trump. support consolidated around him for the same reasons it always does, tribalism, in-group out-group thinking, and stomaching distaste for practical gains. evangelicals come on board for SCOTUS, businessmen for tax cuts, etc etc. it's very similar to how all of you would have voted for either Hillary or Bernie despite their rather different approaches to governance, yet that would not make the social democrats among you neoliberals nor the neoliberals social democrats.

a final note is simply pointing to the fact that both Dubya and Donaldo recieved overwhelming support from the party once it became a matter of them v the Democrats despite varying quite drastically in both temperament and policy. if you think voters support whom they support because of principled ideologies you have experienced a very different species than I.

[Andalusian girls]

Tea Party politics have been pretty successful for the republican party I dunno why they'd be incentivized to change anything at this point.

that is precisely my salience dear Fiye, only failure will incentivize change and I think they are going to fail spectacularly tomorrow despite having literally drawn the maps to ensure their victory.

[Byrthnoth]

Sounds like rationalization. If you want to talk primary, Trump won 45% of the Republican primary popular vote and 70% of the delegates in ~4 person field. His competition was Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio. Cruz and Kasich are just nods to times when Republicans could be racist/regressive in quieter ways. Voting for them isn't a repudiation of Trump, it's a commentary on tone. Marco represents the best kind of "possibly not racist but likes conservative policies and doesn't repudiate racism" that we can possibly expect from a Republican in the 21st century and got 11.3% of the Primary vote. Those are probably your non-Trump general voters.

2016 showed that many Republicans dislike even conscientiously objecting and allowing Democrats to be elected more than overt racism, illogical policy, and incompetence. The number of people discouraged from the polls by Trump's horrible . . . everything . . . were apparently less than those encouraged to the polls by his racism.

[Andalusian girls]

yes the two Cubans the Bush who married a Mexican woman and speaks to their children in perfect Spanish the black guy and the Ohio square who was one of the few never Trumpers to mean it are all also heralds of a more toneful white nationalism

[Andalusian girls]

2016 showed that many Republicans dislike even conscientiously objecting and allowing Democrats to be elected more than overt racism, illogical policy, and incompetence.

thank you for repeating my point though.

[Fiye]

https://twitter.com/JimCarrey/status...27359718924289

Spicy

[Gredival]

Tea Party politics have been pretty successful for the republican party I dunno why they'd be incentivized to change anything at this point.

The prediction was that the increasingly browning of the population would make it untenable for the Republicans to maintain course and that they would be forced to have a reckoning and move to the center, re-calibrating the spectrum for left vs. right. The evidence was the inability to beat Obama.

The problem was that while the demographic shifts are still happening, they aren't happening fast enough when you consider the geographic and gerrymandered redundancies protecting the GOP.

They need to get blown out consistently to have their reckoning moment where they abandon the evangelicals and the alt right handbasket. But that requires disenfranchised poor people and/or minorities to actually vote. They might do it now because Donald is such a shit show, but when it's just McConnell fucking them over and the Dem party is unable to deliver "noticeable" gains to them (again because of structures of the Legislature) then they stop coming out to vote.

Generally we've seen that it really is true that you need to give your base (the perception of) something to vote FOR not merely against -- Trump might be the singular exception to that where "We're not him" is so strikingly and apparently true that even the simpletons can't screw it up.

That's why Republicans' superior tribalism is such a giant advantage even in the face of dwindling numerical equity. If progressives just held their nose for HRC as well as establishment Republicans did for Trump, we wouldn't be in this situation.