Democratic (Party) Direction

why?

Either Sanders or Warren would be making a much better case for their election, on top of the "anyone but Trump" campaign that Trump is aggressively running on Biden's behalf. The combination should balance out individual voter antipathy towards either.

Responses to that Bernie video are fucking depressing, telling myself those are mostly bots

Impressive to see so many people in the replies who still don’t comprehend the existence of the Electoral College.

why?

I think she doesn't have the "I'm an extremely normal old white guy who will run things competently and who will allow you to go back to not thinking about politics" thing that is very strong for Biden with suburban voters (and maybe older voters, too, though I think with that population it's just as much Trump's no-longer-concealable contempt for the idea that their lives are worth anything.) And she doesn't have Sanders's ability to super-activate young voters and "both parties are bad" voters (which includes left voters but also a much bigger group of "political correctness is bad and corporations are too powerful and there should be term limits" type voters, who broke big for Trump in 2016.) What does Warren have? She has what Clinton had, basically. Maybe a little more thanks to suburban Trump fatigue. I guess she'd maybe be ahead. But not by much. Who are the people who really see her as the answer? Middle-aged white people with advanced degrees, and there just aren't that many of us.

who still don’t comprehend the existence of the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is definitely the controlling factor in who wins the job, and winning the job is the whole point. However, entering the job as the recipient of a popular vote landslide gives you more leverage than narrowly squeaking in just because you won Wyoming, Alaska, the Dakotas and Utah. Politicians notice such things and play their hands according to the prevailing winds.

That's an enormous amount of bullshit. Dubya and Trump lost the popular vote and yet here we are. Obama had the largest popular vote margin since the '80s and yet here we are.

In any case, failure to give Biden the proper mandate (lol) would not be the same as the performative "if you don't vote for Biden, you're voting for Trump."

I agree, the idea that a popular mandate has an actual bearing on governance and law making is mostly a fantasy.

don't remember the GOP granting Obama or Bill Clinton any leverage

Republicans always claim mandate even if the numbers say ‘squeaker’. Democrats never claim mandate even in landslide conditions.

Real mandates come with coat tails. Obama was not the beneficiary of a landslide election, even with the financial crisis fast gaining speed in October, 2008. A real landslide brings both chambers of Congress with it and enough new faces who are beholden to you that you can push through your agenda. Clinton was a minority president in 1992, with Ross Perot splitting the vote.

Reagan chose to pretend he had a mandate in 1980, but he did most of his damage (like Trump) through executive action or by playing the media skillfully to win public support for horrible policies, like deregulation and union busting. His real power was his speaking ability.

Biden seems destined to have no coat tails. Trump may be able to generate a 'negative coat tail' effect, but that is a long shot. I'd be ecstatic with simply retaking the Senate by 51-49, with Harris as the tie-breaker in reserve.

So, outside of swing states, it doesn't actually matter if you vote for Biden (or Democrat X) because landslides don't actually grant the leverage you referred to earlier, having one-party control of Congress in alignment does. (Obama '08 had Congress IIRC.)

Thus "not voting for Biden" is not actually "a vote for Trump" as the people who pretend the EC doesn't exist every four years claim.

Thus "not voting for Biden" is not actually "a vote for Trump"

The people you are dismissing as wrong are not entirely wrong, but mathematically speaking, the value of one vote not cast against you is not "one vote", but a ratio, based on the number of votes cast and the number of potential voters. The larger the number of non-votes, the less value each non-vote has to the outcome.

an exchange between aimless and milo z. how riveting

as we used to say, another party heard from

I agree, the idea that a popular mandate has an actual bearing on governance and law making is mostly a fantasy.

Republicans always claim mandate even if the numbers say ‘squeaker’. Democrats never claim mandate even in landslide conditions.

This US political commentator taught me about Reagan's mandate

(a few years before a new right-wing PM in Australia claimed that winning the lower house by two votes out of 149, and not gaining the Senate for another nine years, gave him a mandate)

two votes seats

Per Aimless’s logic, if everyone in, say Wisconsin, was going to just not fill out the presidential box on the ballot when they could vote for Biden, they can feel less guilt in a second Trump term because everyone else did it.

Not my stance, but an interesting undertaking

My logic, if I took the time to perfect it, would be an equation that expressed the exact degree to which any vote or non-vote contributed to an election's outcome, based on a complex of variables, including the total of potential votes, the outcome, the total of votes for each of the top two vote-getters, and the total of non-votes for either of the top two, where any votes cast for candidates other than the top two would be wrapped into the total of non-votes.

It has nothing to do with guilt. People are allowed to vote or not vote according to their idea of the best choice. But it is mathematically obvious that voluntarily not voting when you could vote does have a consequence to election outcomes, and the exact consequences of a non-vote could be measured in any election. It's just not the blissful simplicity of "refusing to vote for Biden is a vote for Trump".

I think you could calculate the consequences of a non-vote on an election that has already happened. I don't know about trying to come up with that number (?) beforehand.

You can see the probability any one vote determines the outcome of the election here. It’s a remote possibility everywhere but it’s really remote in some places, generally states that are very blue/red or very large or both: https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president (half way down the page, sort by “chance of voter deciding election”). The number isn’t useful in an absolute sense but it does give a feeling of scale for what’s a stake when someone in like DC chooses not to vote vs someone in New Hampshire or PA or whatever.

The heat map from Slate was good:

https://compote.slate.com/images/513f1aaa-c7d5-41ab-bf81-439efeb625c5.jpg

I mean, basically it's just another way of pointing out that swing sates are important.

And I guess if you want to get technical: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/gelmankatzbafumi.pdf

Beforehand all the necessary variables are unknown values. My main point is that both individual votes and individual non-votes do individually influence election outcomes to a measurable amount, even if the exact amount is not predictable ahead and can only be calculated accurately afterward.

i mean, some elections have been decided by 10 votes or less, but has any election been decided by a single vote?

proof: your vote doesn't matter in any election

I mean, it assumes you talk to no one else and your voice in your social circle is worthless. I understand the stance of not voting, voting for a third party, whatever. But I will never live long enough to perfect my logic on this and I simply live in a so-called swing state and drummed the importance of voting into my family and peers enough that they were asking me this week whether I had voted yet, because they had.

I voted for Aimless obvs

A vote for Aimless is the same as voting for Trump*.

*according to certain unnamed persons who converse with milo z.

"is a vote for Trump"
About 850,000 results (0.67 seconds)

i voted for tom pagnozzi

If one hates Trump enough to not vote for him, voting for Biden is like not voting for Trump twice.

she better not

Dianne Feinstein is raising money for a run in 2024, when she'll be 91 years old, and actual human beings have given her $40,000 in campaign contributions towards this goal. Political giving is the weirdest world I know pic.twitter.com/WKH3TJfh16

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) October 15, 2020

She's got a ways to go to beat Strom Thurmond's record

sure, but she really connects with young people in California

absolute psychopaths


good Dollop ep on Dianne Feinstein

As I understand it, a famous name draws money and when you don't run that money gets used for other Dem candidates so it makes total sense for Feinstein to be fundraising under her name whether she's running or (hopefully) not

Democrats' two likeliest paths forward, as I see it:

1. Win in November, decline to expand the court, enact a bunch of laws, lose the Senate in 2022, watch helplessly as the Supreme Court strikes down all their new laws in 2023.

2. Expand the court and save democracy.

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 15, 2020

otm

is the senate map particularly bad for Dems in 2022? or should we just assume the customary irritation for the party occupying the WH?

North Carolina has an open seat coming up in 2022, hopefully we can find a Dem to run who isn’t gunning to be the dixieland version of Anthony Weiner

more like dick-see land am I right

xp Customary irritation plus slow recovery?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_Senate_elections#Potentially_competitive_races.

of the states voting in 2022, democrats hold these with < 55% of the vote (i.e. < 10ish% majority):

nevada
new hampshire
colorado
illinois

republicans hold these with <55% of the vote

alaska
florida
indiana
missouri
north carolina (burr retiring so no incumbent advantage)
pennsylvania (toomey retiring so no incumbent advantage)
wisconsin

and then whoever wins arizona (probably democrat) and georgia in january (probably republican)

so it's not as good a set of states as this year, but it's pretty good.

my collection is complete pic.twitter.com/9qonvM2AEk

— beguiling bug (@runolgarun) October 31, 2020

We should remind ourselves of a hugely important development: if the Dems win the WH and Senate, Dems control the census, thus redistricting. The implications are uh enormous.

also, this will not happen at all, but it might lead to a rare opportunity to try to reform/replace the entire system of state-driven, partisan-driven districting (whoever wins the election in a year that ends with a 0 gets to screw half the people in their state for the ensuing decade). just for the sake of a wildly hypothetical scenario, let's imagine the replacement for districting is some sort of computer-driven, non-partisan allocator.

first, obviously, reform will never happen while republicans are in power. they gerrymander the living fuck out of every state they can, and then brag about it as they toast and lick each other's open sores behind closed doors. they benefit from the current system, they will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it in place.

secondly, if we accept that democrats will have to work alone, most republicans and their supporters will assume the worst of their intentions (again, because they assume that democrats act as republicans do, which is not a bad assumption). the only way to get around that is to set the implementation date for reform in the future, at a date when neither party can be confident of being in or out of power. if they want to keep the districting on the 10s (2030, 2040, etc...) then then can set 2030 as the year it goes into effect - the mid-term of whoever is elected in 2028 (god help us all).

if there's a chance of this happening, it has to happen in the first years of 2020, during this biden term.

(and they won't, and we'll be talking about how fucked we are by gerrymandering again in 2029)

Great idea, Karl, but whatever system you put in place, it can be tossed out and replaced by whoever sits in power in a year ending in zero.

The Roberts court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a while back, and has deliberately avoided placing limits on gerrymandering when it had the chance to do so. The chance of any new federal law intervening in gerrymandering making it past this version of the court are nil.

again, because they assume that democrats act as republicans do, which is not a bad assumption

Or just look at reality, where (some, not all) Virginia Democrats are backing off their support for redistricting reform now that they're in charge

https://wamu.org/story/20/10/09/democrats-virginia-reject-redistricting-reform/

The good news about this sad development is that it strengthens bipartisan support for ending gerrymandering when Republicans grasp it can and will be done to them, too.

xp i agree, it's bleak. :(

eephus, you're right that democrats do it too. which is another reason the chances of passing anything, anywhere, are so low: the people who could hypothetically change things are also the people who have managed to benefit from the current system, no matter how inequitable it is for everyone else.

but i think that, like many things with republicans and democrats, yes, "both sides do it", but one side (republicans) takes it to leeeeeeeeethal and absurd extremes, orders of magnitude worse than democrats, and then lies whenever confronted about it, rarely being pushed too hard on it. take the filibuster, for example. i listened to mcconnell go on at length (just before the vote on ACB) about the history of treachery in the senate, and how it was the democrats abuse of the filibuster in the bush era that led everything to the current moment. and how "he was there", so "he knows what happened".

so it is with gerrymandering, at least in my lifetime. both sides abuse it. but one abuses the holy living fuck out of it

Eephus

Or just look at reality, where (some, not all) Virginia Democrats are backing off their support for redistricting reform now that they're in charge

It's complicated. The VA dem position is not that there doesn't need to be reform. It's that THIS proposed reform is toothless and wrong-headed.

Not all reforms are created equal..