Democrats take House, GOP tightens grip on Senate

Overwhelmingly white…

and

…skewed towards wealth.

The adjective was only intended to apply to the first subject.

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That’s true enough. My other statements stand, I think. :wink:

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Generally, yeah.

However, you can expect levels of voter suppression to sharply increase between now and 2020, and there isn’t a whole lot that can be done about that within conventional channels.

If Kemp wins, the other GOP states will use Georgia as a model for next time. If he loses, they’ll get even more extreme.

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Yes. Over a third of the people who voted earn $100k or more. Even voter suppression only accounts for a tiny fraction of the no-shows in the lower income brackets.

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Agreed. The people who are getting screwed the most are the least likely to vote. These things are not unrelated. Dems need to think about how to go about voter engagement and education, and I am not necessarily talking about the party machine. Talking about issues in a nonconfrontational and factual way at work, school, social encounter, whatever is probably more effective than tv commercials and newspaper ads.

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Not just talking, doing. Like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Serve the people.

If they wanted to, the Dems could establish a free health clinic in every city in the country.

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Chuck Todd was just talking about turnout and spread. 103 million votes cast, 52% dem, 46% rep, 2% other. He speculates that the spread will rise to 7 points after final counts are in. Not a bad night overall. Gear up for local elections in 2019, and the all out war that will be 2020. No rest for the weary.

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But you would be in power. In power and in a position to do something about election and voting reform. Okay, it’d be via executive order so it would only last until they could overturn it, but it’d be in place for the next election which pushes things in your favour. Do you honestly think they’d have won as many seats if they weren’t disenfranchising voters, or if the voting machines all worked correctly, or even do it properly with paper ballots that can be checked?

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I guess by “drinking the cool aid” I don’t necessary mean believing in Trump himself (which few politicians do), but buying into his racist/nationalist (and lack of concern for norms or rule-of-law) approach. Which, I suppose, the never-Trumpers turned suck-ups have also done, but to a lesser degree. Once they’ve bought into that, it seems to me that it would be hard to extricate themselves from Trump while also continuing that approach. But maybe it isn’t, so much.

I keep thinking about this, and what it means for both Trump and post-Trump politics:

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Well, you also have to remember that those lower income groups are disproportionately made up of minorities so they could still skew Democrat overall even if a majority of “the white working class” voted Trump.

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I don’t have race by income tabs for 2018 yet, but in 2016 the patterns held.

Whiteness was the strongest variable, followed by wealth, followed by education. Poor white people voted for Trump at higher rates than poor PoC, but still at lower rates than wealthy white people.

On average, the Trumpist base is white, wealthy and ignorant.

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The Twain quote about “liars, damned liars, and statistics” comes to mind.

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I don’t know that its even that, not entirely. I mean it is for a fuck load more of them then you’d hope, especially on the nationalism side. And the rest of them certainly do not give two fucks about anyone unlike themselves. I don’t think they are all actively antagonistic to minorities and foreigners. More like passively antagonistic. Like at least some of these people are not interested in fighting for an isolationist White Ethno-state. Even as they don’t think that becoming an isolationist White Ethno-state would be a bad thing. Because either way they’re entrenching their position in an Oligarchy. And hey this isolationist White Ethno-state thing sure is just working so good for that.

And that’s the thing. You’ve got a bunch of people who really truly believe what Trump does. But you’ve also got a bunch of people who don’t neccisarily. But they’re amenable to it. Close enough in their actual beliefs. That Trump looks like a pretty sweet ride to the top. And fuck the consequences.

Its gonna come down to proportion, and how well/long he can hang onto that second set.

IIRC the “white working class” switch to Trump was those few hundred thousand votes in a handful of counties in 3 states that we talk about as being the determining factor in the election.

It wasn’t neccisarily a wholesale shift of the working class. Or even just the white portion of the working class. It was a very small shift among a working class that still mostly voted DNC. In specific regions or cities. And often times among workers in a specific industry. It’s just that some of those specific places it happened, turned out to be absolutely critical for the election. Thanks to that whole electoral college thing.

And on the whole the average Trump voter was far wealthier than both the average Hillary voter. And the general population. They were also older, more likely to be male and white.

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Is there a list somewhere of all the DSA or DSA-endorsed candidates and how well they did? I’m curious as to whether the ones who won in primaries against mainstream candidates did better in the general than the mainstream democratic candidates who won against DSA candidates in the primaries. (I’m sure there are people in both the DNS and the DSA who are doing exactly this kind of postmortem analysis, but I don’t know if either will make the analysis public.)

Which is why the focus on the Trumpist WWC makes me think of this image:

A camel driver, standing next to a dead camel, ferociously berating a single piece of straw.

I don’t have stats for this, but I strongly suspect that most of that shift was not WWC Obama voters shifting to Trump, but was instead working class Obama voters of all races returning to non-voting.

Obama-Trump voters do exist, but I think they were a very minor factor. And, yes, small influences matter in close elections, but not as much as bigger influences.

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I dunno that there’s enough detail around to make that determination. But you’re very close from the numbers I’ve seen. The amount of clear Obama-Trump voters is apparently ridiculously small, they are apparently identifiable as individual voters who voted for Obama then voted for Trump. But again small, very regionally restricted and they were only a factor in some very specific circumstance. They’re a subset of a subset of a subset essentially. With the broader “working class shift” being more of a change in the make up of the voting block, than in individuals’ voting habits.

But the key thing there is that in the same places that these things became a factor. There were MUCH larger shortfalls in turnout for key demographics for Hillary (vs Obama). Especially African Americans and Latinos. And its not exactly a people didn’t like Hillary, or Hillary didn’t excite people issue either. Because she drove huge turn outs in other places. And ended up receiving more individual votes than any candidate ever. Its specific to these certain isolated districts, and particular states where it narrowly flipped.

Apparently the really key spots turn out was being handled by this borderline scam level online demographic and turn out company that was rolled out of the tech end of Obama’s campaign. And they fucked up entirely providing info that lead the Campaign to focus on the wrong states. Stop campaigning in places She really needed to keep an eye on. Or pushing turn out efforts into the wrong districts; where it wasn’t needed at the expense of districts that turned out to badly need those resources.

Taken together with voter suppression and a couple of other key fuck ups. More votes were “lost” to people not voting at all, than to people or groups switching.

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I’m pretty sure it goes race then gender.

If you mean what matters most to hateful bigots, gender is the (slightly) bigger factor IMO.

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I mean in terms of the driving force behind voting divisions - the biggest are between white and non-white, then between gender divisions, and then class. A Trump voter is a white man with a large personal income who is at the end of their career and is undereducated for their position.

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And living in a bubble world that is hard to reach with any contrary view or inconvenient facts.

https://mncriticalthinking.com/2018/11/08/illusions-as-reality-why-some-people-just-cannot-be-reached/

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