Yeah, looking at the actual margin, I wonder now if some of the media depiction of “ruby red, hard republican district” is actually defensive. “It’s not like it would have made any difference if we put it out prior to election day anyway.” IF it is found out that they had this story and chose to sit on it until after the vote, some explaining needs to be done. To be clear, I have no info that this is so, but I can’t wait to see if it is.
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I only hope that Beau is right that the damage to the GOP (for being the party of liars) lasts for decades…
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Is he even gay? When people were initially questioning that, I thought it was a joke, but now every part of his life, everything he’s said, seems to not be remotely true. Certainly his claim he’s been living openly as a gay man for a decade and has a husband have turned out to not be true. (Do we even have a name for this supposed husband?)
I saw her on Twitter being very critical of the NY Democrats, in ways that suggested they were extremely fucked-up and dysfunctional, and I wondered what she meant. Now I know what she meant.
The incumbent in his district is a Democrat, so: yes.
Doesn’t seem like it. He has, at one point or another, seem to have lied about literally everything in his life. (His legal name is George Devolder Santos - he dropped the “Devolder” to sound more Latino. Not exactly a lie, but it was also the fact he could least alter.)
I think Trump did that too, to an even larger degree - and more explicitly. All that talk of “take him seriously but not literally.” There was always this acknowledgement that he was fake (his persona, his claims, his stated policies, even his opinions), but the attempt was made to try to confuse people about which parts of him are fake.
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Maybe? New York’s districts were redrawn after the 2020 Census.
It still smacks of victim-blaming. Someone who had their life savings stolen due to a series of mistakes is still not to blame: the thief is.
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This isn’t a new problem. The person AOC defeated was Joe Crowley, and in the late 80’s he worked in Manton’s office (I was there as a high school intern.) Manton was a machine hack who accidentally got elevated to congress when his boss in the Queens machine Donald Manes committed suicide on the Grand Central. Manton was stupid as a rock and used to drive home drunk from events in Woodside out to Long Island… where he actually lived… something being an ex-cop was great for.
Anyway, when Manton decided to retire he did it after the primary season so the Queens Dem committee got to simply select Crowley. Since getting the Dem nomination is basically victory in northern Queens, he had never faced a competitive election until AOC, and it turns out in actual field testing he was a shitty candidate.
We still have a few of these old school machines left - I helped take out the 50 year head of the Schoharie County Dem Committee, and the person who replaced him is actually also the campaign manager for Ryan, our surprise win in NY 19… meanwhile seems like Maloney took advantage of those political levers to boot Mondaire Jones out of the lower Hudson valley district and then he lost the seat anyway.
After all of that you’d think that the message to all of these local committees is that Democrats do better when they act… democratically. But it’s still not going to sink in until regular people show up and pry the professional campaign people’s fingers off of the party machinery. The meetings suck, but when you’ve got one dominant party that’s where the democracy is actually happening, and when you don’t have regular people there you get shitty candidates and lose.
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IIRC he allegedly never lived with his wife and the marriage might have been a fraud to get her into the US, or possibly to get him in because whether he is a US citizen is unclear. I think that this was mentioned in one of the other threads but I can’t find it.
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I think victim blaming would be blaming the electorate. It is literally the job of a party candidate to try to get elected, one of the easiest ways to do this is to look for ways to disqualify your opponent. This is literally the lowest-hanging fruit there could be.
I don’t expect the press to do a full investigation into every congressional nominee, they have a lot of stuff to cover and there are thousand of contests. But the opponent (for the most part) only has one opponent. Do your job. This was an absolute clown show.
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I get what you’re saying, but while the NY Dems did an incompetent job of op research, Santos’ lies are still not their fault - they are the fault of the actual liar.
Emphasizing the former over the latter is a problem and not at all helpful.
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It’s not.
I commented this over on the last post about this guy.
The district contains some of the reddest towns on Long Island, and some of the wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods in the country. But it’s history and politics are a little more split. The district went for Biden by 10 points in 2020.
It is however, pretty much home base for MAGA in the NYC Metro, and multiple prominent Jan 6 folks hail from the area.
Both the district and Nassau County as a whole flip back and forth constantly.
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That would end his term real quick.
No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.
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it’d be awesome if it ended before it started. he’s claimed he’s voting for mccarthy ( granted he can’t be trusted. ) denying that vote and making it that much more difficult for republicans to select a house leader would be fair recompense for them supporting his run
( i wonder what happens if mccarthy wins by a vote, and then santos is determined to never have been qualified for the seat 
)
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I’ve been pondering what would happen if DOJ indicts several of the congresspeople related to Jan 6 on seditious conspiracy - since that can disqualify you from office. If this guy goes down and 4 others get tossed out after sedition charges, they could actually lose the House… which would be absolutely hilarious (until the special elections in states like Georgia return new psychos.)
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nah. don’t see it.
what are we, less than a week from the new congressional session? and Garland’s DOJ is going to move quickly enough - with serious smoking gun evidence - to stop the Rs from taking their seats and their (slim) minority? that would only embolden the magats to ignore subpoenas, indictments and plow forward with gnashing teeth and frothing blood.
lovely thought, but a total fantasy - sorry.
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They are going to try and impeach Garland ASAP.
And throw monkey wrenches into any law and order effort.
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Absolutely and it would do little real good except it would be fun to disband Jym Jordans fishing expedition just as hes getting going.
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They dont have the senate so that can do absolutely nothing. As the GOP showed we dont even have to schedule a trial.
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“When I said that I simply meant that I am a happy person, not that I am sexually attracted to men.”
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Per this NPR story the DCCC actually did do some opposition research and created a dossier but apparently focused on the wrong areas and didn’t bother to check into some basic facts such as his education. The discrepancies that they did find didn’t get much traction at the time.
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I keep looking for any information on his “husband,” but I can’t even find reference to the guy’s name, making me wonder if he actually exists, even just as a boyfriend. There are pictures of Santos with a guy he identifies as a “fiancé” at the time, at some event at Mar-a-Lago, but there are pictures of him with his wife at events, too. George has an amazing capacity to lie about things - his mother dying on 9/11, his employees dying in the Pulse nightclub shooting, owning properties, where he was born - he even claimed to be Black at one point… lying about a husband (beyond just lying that he’s legally married) seems par for the course.
Ironically, if it turns out that he married a woman while in denial about being gay, that might turn out to be the most honest thing about him.
“I didn’t say ‘my husband’ - I actually said ‘my headband.’ I like to exercise and I have a favorite headband, to which I’ve been ‘married’ for many years.”
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