Elections 2023 and 2024 (Part 1)

He is my goto example of the major advantage of lifetime appointment. Him and David Souter. There are some big disadvantages too, of course.

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Now taking bets on how long until Nikki jumps on board the MAGA train for trump…

Season 3 GIF by BET Plus

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yeah, my post definitely was meant tongue in cheek. not coincidentally, it was also the only place bloomberg won in 2020 ( after spending something like 600 million. )

one wonders if maybe america samoa dems know that it gets the territory in the news, if only for a second. i’d certainty rather see an article about the territory and the issues they care about, than the wealthy buyers of votes

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:face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

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Mrs. Decorum strikes again.

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In the very least it means that the 2024 California Senate race is now going to be yet another tired slugfest between basic competency and MAGA extremism instead of a nuanced and thoughtful debate between two progressives with different ideas for governance.

And so the Overton window continues its drift ever rightward.

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Leftovers from… (what’s today, Wednesday? Ah, got it!) 2016

IMG_20240306_131055

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It doesn’t look that close, to be able to blame Garvey’s 2x lead over Porter on one ad, no matter how cynical. Maybe look at the other 24 candidates that split half the D vote into a giant long tail.

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Garvey was polling well below Porter before Schiff started boosting Garvey though those ads. They were playing on the TV all the time over here, and Garvey wasn’t airing any TV spots on his own. Could he have eked out a second place finish without Schiff’s help? Possibly, but he didn’t have to and now we’ll never know if he would have.

I don’t fault any of the Democratic candidates for trying to make a case for why they ought to get the seat; that’s what the runoff process is for. Boosting a Republican because you think they’ll be easier to beat than another Democrat is just a dick move though.

Of course it also didn’t help that some cryptobro assholes spent at least $10M on attack ads against Porter. (Cryptocurrency is another topic on which Schiff is on the wrong side of history.)

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There were also 9 other GOP candidates running for the seat. Thanks to Schiff’s ads only one of them gained any significant prominence, so the vote was much less split among the GOP than among the Democrats.

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Nope, they were tied.

Why doesn’t the party herd those cats better!?!

Regardless, as dickish as Schiff’s move was, I find it difficult to put all the weight of these results on him. Porter didn’t earn enough votes, and Dems didn’t show up as well as they should have compared to R voters given the broad gap. A 57% to 42% party showing isn’t enough to reliably push two Dem candidates to the general.

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It was the goal Schiff actively worked toward, and there’s a very good chance Garvey wouldn’t be in second place if he hadn’t done it. Schiff isn’t the only person who could have changed the outcome but I see no reason to cut him any slack on this. I will still vote for him because he’s a better choice than Garvey, but that doesn’t mean I have to forgive him for working against his own party’s interests.

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She was ahead of Garvey by 3% in November.

Maybe he would have gained in popularity on his own without Schiff’s help, but he wasn’t even running any of his own TV spots.

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Here is an interview about the local initiative that just came together this week…

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At the time Schiff started running the ads, they were tied according to the articles posted on this very thread.

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Even if they were tied, Schiff’s clear intent was to help Garvey get ahead of Porter so I don’t see how “Garvey might have made it to the general election even without Schiff’s help” is much of a defense. :person_shrugging:

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It’s not meant as a defense of Schiff. He did a very cynical and potentially counter-productive thing. I’m saying that it’s a stretch to put all the weight of Garvey going through to the general ahead of Porter on that underhanded action. Assuming Porter was never going to get any R votes, it’s mathmatically impossible for her to have beat Garvey’s 32% when Dems only represented 57% of the vote. More Dems would have had to have voted to have put two through to the general. Two million Dems in a state with over 10M registered democrats is weak sauce.

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But Garvey wasn’t the only Republican on the ballot, he was just the only one who rose to prominence (and he sure didn’t do that on the strength of his own TV ads because he didn’t have any). So there’s no reason to assume he would have got 32% of the vote without Schiff’s help. If the Republican vote hadn’t coalesced around a single figure then Porter might have easily come in second behind Schiff.

Clearly Schiff thought the ads he bought to boost Garvey were making a difference or he wouldn’t have spent so much money on them.

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