Poll of the Day > Dems always seem to screw things up for themselves.

(+) Yeah! (+)

They might have gotten both House and Senate, but they really hurt themselves. One with all the extreme talk and promotion of harassing people in public settings. Childishly promoting people get into mobs and harass those that disagree with them in public areas, restaurants and such. Just shy of promoting actual violence. Giving in to that outrage culture mentality is not a way to win the votes of mentally stable moderates.

Then that Kavanaugh persecution. He was not a person I would have wanted on the Supreme Court, but it was vividly clear it was never a fight that was winnable. Republicans were getting one of their people in there, that was never going to change, Dems should have spent their energies elsewhere, focusing on getting more moderates to vote Democrat but no.. they chose to drag their feet and throw the potential victim under the bus and ruin her life, even though she never wanted it to go public, then they had to go after Kavanaugh with no actual proof just he said/she said and try to ruin his life and career. It really brought out the worst in Dems and reeked of desperation and I feel they lost a good number of moderates and motivated more conservatives to go out and vote.

As a liberal independent it's quite frustrating watching Dems fumble the ball time and time again. With nearly 2 years of the Trump Era, this should have been easy. This should have been so easy.
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But they didnt get the Senate.
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CacciatoPart3 posted...

But they didnt get the Senate.

This. Even if the Dems win the four Senate seats remaining, it will be 51 Repubs, 47 Dems, and 2 Other. We can thank Texas for not hoisting Ted Cruz, despite so many people not liking him.

It's reminding me, actually, of the Eureka content in FFXIV. So many people showing hatred and disgust, but so many giving support because... reasons(?).
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Well that was my point. They didn't get the senate because they screwed themselves over. Things could have been very different. Their dumb actions likely led to increased conservative voters and more moderates leaning towards conservatives instead.
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I'm pretty disgusted with both major political parties, but this election was sort of fun

The Demdum incumbent Senator here had volunteers doing massive amounts of spam phone calls and texts as well as an incessant advertising blitz on TV, managed to annoy enough people to get defeated. At least in this instance, justice was served and arrogance doesn't pay!

It will be interesting to see how the yellow press excuses their predictions of a Dem landslide.
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Personally, I can't wait for the next two years of Trump blaming his inability to do anything on an opposed Congress and ultimately spinning it into support for reelection.


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I love that the current spin is that the republicans had control of the entire government for two years and couldnt get anything done and now that theyve lost that, they won

Take that librals
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Can you say lame duck President.
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dancer62 posted...

I'm pretty disgusted with both major political parties, but this election was sort of fun

The Demdum incumbent Senator here had volunteers doing massive amounts of spam phone calls and texts as well as an incessant advertising blitz on TV, managed to annoy enough people to get defeated. At least in this instance, justice was served and arrogance doesn't pay!

It will be interesting to see how the yellow press excuses their predictions of a Dem landslide.

Something kind of like that happened here. Galeotos ran hundreds of obnoxious ads where people mispronounce his name for shits and giggles, declaring "Finally, a conservative businessman for Wyoming!" and got his ass handed to him in the primary.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Personally, I can't wait for the next two years of Trump blaming his inability to do anything on an opposed Congress and ultimately spinning it into support for reelection.

Didn't Obama do the same thing in his second term (apart from the re-election part)?
First term, had total control of the house and senate, didn't do anything but pass Obamacare (Also put Sotomayor in the supreme court) and then was a lame duck for his entire second term.
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Zangulus posted...

dancer62 posted...

I'm pretty disgusted with both major political parties, but this election was sort of fun

The Demdum incumbent Senator here had volunteers doing massive amounts of spam phone calls and texts as well as an incessant advertising blitz on TV, managed to annoy enough people to get defeated. At least in this instance, justice was served and arrogance doesn't pay!

It will be interesting to see how the yellow press excuses their predictions of a Dem landslide.

Predictions of a Dem landslide? Its going exactly how its been predicted for the last several weeks. R keeps the senate and D takes the house.

This. The popular vote across the nation was basically as expected and Dems made great gains in the house as expected. Very, very optimistic senate predictions had dems tying things at 50/50 but that was always going to be a stretch goal. The way the senate currently sits was how things were expected by most to go.

Also the democrats lead the popular vote by about 9% and in any other country, there would be way more democratic seats as a result. So let's thank republican gerrymandering for allowing them to keep their seats. One look at the North Carolina map makes me sick.
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"Popular Vote" in any kind of national election is completely irrelevant, congress especially. Congress represents communities (Stats for the Senate, Communities for the House), not people of other states. Media only cares about the about popular vote because they know that the blue party is better at it than the red party because of California.
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Judgmenl posted...

"Popular Vote" in any kind of national election is completely irrelevant, congress especially. Congress represents communities (Stats for the Senate, Communities for the House), not people of other states. Media only cares about the about popular vote because they know that the blue party is better at it than the red party because of California.

It's irrelevant only in that the popular vote doesn't decide anything on a midterm year. It's relevant because, like I said, it shows that a large majority of the people aren't being represented due to the unfair gerrymandering of states like North Carolina.

North Carolina has 13 seats in the US House. Democrats only lost the popular vote in North Carolina by 2% or 60,000 votes (and one of those districts was a republican running unopposed). So you'd think that North Carolina should be fairly evenly split in the US House. Wrong, It's 10 republicans and three democrats and the districts have been gerrymandered in such a way to allow a party look more popular than it really is.



You're not going to convince anyone that those district lines actually represent "communities" like you believe they should. Heck, these lines are being forcefully redrawn because they were deemed unconstitutional. People aren't being represented equally and it's painfully obvious.
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I absolutely agree. I am a supporter of fixing the house:
https://thirty-thousand.org/

Whether or not people see it feasible to have a house that is that large, we should be properly represented.

But yes as for your example New York is a far better example because of NYC being so dominate in that state.
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The Democrats abandoned their anti war platform when Obama dropped more bombs than any other president in history, and then instead of supporting the anti war nominee in the primaries, they forced the warmonger Hillary Clinton through despite an evident lack of enthusiasm for her. Obama also extended the Patriot Act, failed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan or Iraq, and failed to close Guantanamo. And when I say 'failed', I really mean never really bothered to try when he had eight years to do so.

So then Hillary, the same Hillary who supported the wall street bailouts and voted for the war in Iraq in the first place, is thrust upon us. And then she selects Tim Kaine as her running mate. The same Tim Kaine who represented student loan companies and prevented student loan reform from passing.

So, if you vote blue, and end up with a warmongering corporatist neocon anyway, why even bother voting for either major party?
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Sequiro posted...

Well that was my point. They didn't get the senate because they screwed themselves over.

No, they didn't get the senate because they were never going to get the senate and we knew that as far back as 2016. The map was legendarily unfriendly to them - maybe as bad a map as any party has ever faced. They had to defend three times as many seats as the Republicans (26 seats held by Democrats were up for election vs. just nine for the Repubs) and a lot of those seats they were defending were in states won by Trump, sometimes by huge margins.

To win the senate, the Dems would have had to hold onto every single seat they already had, and take Arizona and Nevada. Or, if you acknowledge that North Dakota was always a lost cause, you'd need to add in a win in at least one seat in Texas, Mississippi, Wyoming, or Tennessee. Even at the absolute nadir of their popularity leading up to the midterms, nether of those situations was feasible. The reputable pollsters never wavered in saying that the senate was likely to stay Republican. About the best you could say is that, for a while, it looked like the Democrats had some momentum and had a good chance to keep things close, but they were not polling strong enough in key races they absolutely had to win if they wanted to take the senate.

The upswing is that the senate map in the next two elections looks much friendlier to Democrats (they are defending half as many seats as the Republicans in each), so their odds of retaking the senate will look much better in 2020 and particularly 2022.
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BADoglick posted...

So, if you vote blue, and end up with a warmongering corporatist neocon anyway, why even bother voting for either major party?

Because one cares about children and families of non-white background and the others are white supremacists / racists silly .
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Judgmenl posted...

BADoglick posted...

So, if you vote blue, and end up with a warmongering corporatist neocon anyway, why even bother voting for either major party?

Because one cares about children and families of non-white background and the others are white supremacists / racists silly .

So empty platitudes, identity politics, and 'we aren't the other guys'. What a strong platform.
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BADoglick posted...

So empty platitudes, identity politics, and 'we aren't the other guys'. What a strong platform.

Yea and just imagine, this party holds roughly 50% of the power in this country right now.
And they want more.
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Judgmenl posted...

BADoglick posted...

So empty platitudes, identity politics, and 'we aren't the other guys'. What a strong platform.

Yea and just imagine, this party holds roughly 50% of the power in this country right now.
And they want more.

If the best reason to vote for you is because you are subjectively less awful than the other choice, than it's no wonder you can't convince third party voters and non voters to embrace your platform.

The left can either choose to listen to the criticism and try to earn more votes, or they can double down on identity politics and scaremongering. They keep choosing the latter, and it's clearly not working.
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BADoglick posted...

They keep choosing the latter, and it's clearly not working.

How is it not working? They won the house, which was about the ceiling for how well they could reasonably have expected to do in this election.

They were never serious contenders for the senate because the map was incredibly bad for them. Short of a clean sweep on defence and stealing a seat or two in ruby-red territory, it was literally impossible for them to take the senate.

Moreover, if you think it was the Democrats running on identity politics and scaremongering, you might want to have a listen to some of the statements the Republicans were putting out prior to the election.
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Democrats win the House.

Republicans - take that libruls!
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Judgmenl posted...

Didn't Obama do the same thing in his second term (apart from the re-election part)?

Hasn't literally every president in history done the same?
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Nah both Bush Jr and Bush Sr were trash from day 1 and chanced the erl.
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