Elections 2021 and 2022

We should only have a recount if there is actual evidence of actual fraud. That’s true whoever won.

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Let’s do it for fun like they do. /s

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I know you’re joking, but we seriously do need to not play the same game that they are playing - all that would do is further destabilize our system and hasten the demise of democracy.

We do need to focus on voter suppression and other issues like that as they are serious issues, but when the Democrats just fail to get out of the vote and put forth candidates who can win, then that’s on the Democratic party.

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I wouldn’t do it for fun, but to get them on the record admitting that widespread fraud doesn’t exist.

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I think their “belief” is that they still hold the “silent majority” in this country, and that the Democrats can ONLY win when they cheat, while if they win, it’s because the majority agrees with them.

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They believe this but you know they also believe that immigrants and minorities (and to some extent young people) are not legitimate voters and that having those people vote or organizing them to vote is intrinsically cheating. They believe that immigrants and minorities wouldn’t vote at all and don’t have any interest in political outcomes without being politically manipulated, paid to vote (with free water while standing in the voting line?) or being promised “free stuff”. The belief in a “silent majority” is racism. They will never believe that fraud didn’t happen because to them minorities voting is fraud.

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“Glenn Youngkin sought a middle ground on Trump affiliation and paid no price for Republicans’ authoritarian turn in recent years.”

This headline should be lighting a fire under the ass of every democrat nationwide. Clearly the “silent majority” ie racist motherfkers with fascist woodies are just A Ok with much of America. This was just a test.

They can do this without trump.

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“ New Jersey does not have an automatic recount law, but the candidates are permitted to request one. The party that wants a recount has to file a suit in State Superior Court in the counties where they want to contest tallies. That has to be done within 17 days of Election Day.”

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Let’s get Beau’s take on the results

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Youngkin’s underage kid not only tried to vote, but came back after he was told he was too young and argued about it - at the wrong precinct.

Ignoramus or troll? Naivete or performance?

“Virginia Gov.-elect Youngkin’s underaged son tried to vote in Tuesday’s election, elections officials said”

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And yet corporate news outlets report the Dem in NJ as barely squeaking by, while the one in VA suffered a “crushing” defeat.

Rebecca Solnit provides some good analysis of this clickbaity bias.

Pretty much anything that happens to the Democrats is a sign that they’re weak and losing and should be worried, according to the storylines into which mainstream media tends to stuff news. Pretty much nothing, including losing, seems to signify that the Republicans are losers. In so habitually and apparently unconsciously fitting a wide array of new and varied facts into familiar old frameworks, the media shape the political landscape at least as much as they report on it.

It’s in the language. The New York Times editorial board thunders that “Democrats deny political reality at their own peril” and then insists that this election in which a moderate lost is a sign that the party needs to get more moderate. Bloomberg News found a way to make a victory sound like defeat: “Phil Murphy clung on to win a second term as New Jersey’s governor, surviving by a narrow margin.” It was about the same margin by which a Republican won the Virginia governorship, but the language around that was apocalyptic (though Virginia usually elects a governor who’s in the other party than the president, and New Jersey – which not long ago gave Republican Chris Christie two terms – re-elected its first Democratic governor in decades on Tuesday).

According to the Washington Post, which seemed to believe that Virginia was a national referendum on the party: “Democrats scramble to deflect voter anger.” The verbiage that followed was stuffed with the emotive language of a pulp novel, though it was presented as news: “An off-year electoral wipeout highlighted the fragile state of the party’s electoral majorities in the House and Senate. But a new round of bitter recriminations threatened to dash Democratic hopes of quickly moving past the stinging defeats.” Fragile, bitter, stinging. Wipeout, dash, defeat. It is true that Terry McAuliffe lost, and also true that he was a corporate centrist who, reportedly, ran a lousy campaign; it’s also true that he is not the Democratic party, and the nation didn’t vote in Virginia’s election.

As for this week’s election, it swept in a lot of progressive mayors of color. The most prominent was Michelle Wu, who won the Boston mayor’s seat as the first woman and first person of color. Elaine O’Neal will become Durham, North Carolina’s, first Black woman mayor, and Abdullah Hammoud will become Dearborn’s first Muslim and Arab American mayor. Aftab Pureval will become Cincinnati’s first Asian American mayor. Pittsburgh elected its first Black mayor, and so did Kansas City, Kansas. Cleveland’s new mayor is also Black. New York City elected its second Black Democratic mayor, and Shahana Hanif became the first Muslim woman elected to the city council (incidentally, New York City and Virginia have about the same population). In Seattle, a moderate defeated a progressive, which you could also phrase as a Black and Asian American man defeated a Latina. A lot of queer and trans people won elections, or in the case of Virginia’s Danica Roem, the first out trans person to win a seat in a state legislature, won reelection.

In Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, who in 2017 was the first of a wave of ultra-progressive district attorneys to take office across the country, swept to a second term with 69% of the vote. “I want to congratulate him. He beat my pants off,” said his Republican rival. In Cleveland, Austin, Denver and Albany, citizens voted in police-reform measures, and while a more radical measure in Minneapolis lost, it got a good share of votes. 2021 wasn’t a great election year for Democrats but it’s not hard to argue that it wasn’t a terrible one, and either way it just wasn’t a big one, with a handful of special elections for congressional seats, some state and local stuff, and only two gubernatorial elections.

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It’s only going to get worse as hedge funds continue their takeover of the newspaper industry.

Our local paper reformed itself as a nonprofit. But who’s on the governing board?

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Yeah. It’s like the U.S. in general learned nothing when corporate media basically got Trump elected by merely serving as a platform for his latest outrageous remark, rather than covering him analytically.

Oh wait, it’s not “like” that. It is that. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

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Makes me want to start spending time on social media - just to recommend people spend a month getting all of their news from different sources. We could put together a top ten list, call it a challenge or media cleanse/detox/diet, offer prizes* to the folks who complete it…
:thinking:
*Ok, if anyone asks for one, we’ll tell them they gained a new perspective on current events.
That’s priceless!

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They discussed the elections on the Friday round up with Jonathan Capeheart and Gary Abernathy…

Capeheart (who is pretty centrist) spent much of the time looking like this…

screams internally fox 6 GIF by WBRC FOX6 News

He does that much less with David Brooks… But this time…

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Felon.

“ B. Any person who intentionally (i) votes more than once in the same election, whether those votes are cast in Virginia or in Virginia and any other state or territory of the United States, (ii) procures, assists, or induces another to vote more than once in the same election, whether those votes are cast in Virginia or in Virginia and any other state or territory of the United States, (iii) votes knowing that he is not qualified to vote where and when the vote is to be given, or (iv) procures, assists, or induces another to vote knowing that such person is not qualified to vote where and when the vote is to be given is guilty of a Class 6 felony.”

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He did not succeed in voting, so no crime was committed. Attempting to illegally vote and failing isn’t like attempting to rob a bank and failing, it’s more like trying locked car doors to see which one’s open so its contents can be burgled but failing.

That’s why I suspect he may have been trolling the left and media into another unactionable outrage, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to vote, wouldn’t commit a crime, and yet get himself and his father attention all over the news using the familiar Trump gameplan: there’s no such thing as bad press. All these articles are a badge of honor to the right.