Vampire Beats Werewolf

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12 Responses

  1. Philip H says:

    You have 2 years to figure out what the Republican party stands for and what issues you want to run on. Think harder. Do better. Get back to me when you decide.

    The problem the GOP has is that its own polling shows its policies to not be widely popular. Thus its easier to adopt no new platform and run on culture war issues – which don’t generally require policy preferences.

    But good luck!Report

  2. Michael Cain says:

    You have 2 years to figure out what the Republican party stands for and what issues you want to run on. Think harder. Do better. Get back to me when you decide.

    Nope. They’ve got to decide this month. In January the Republicans will control the US House and many state legislative chambers. They’ll choose what to support. Hector Hunter Biden? Refuse to raise the debt ceiling and crash the stock market? Ban abortion in 20 states? Do nothing? In the run up to the 2024 elections, the party doesn’t get to say, “Ignore what we’ve done for 18 months, here’s what we’ve decided to run on.” They’ll have a record to defend.Report

  3. DavidTC says:

    As for Georgia Democrats: don’t get too cocky. You didn’t win this election. Republicans threw away this election. Yes, Warnock ran a great campaign. But you lost every other statewide office last month. You lost the state legislature. You lost a majority of the US House races. This state is not blue. Despite what the NY Times and Washington Post are saying today, it’s not even purple. It’s still a red state.

    …you do remember that Biden won the state in 2020, right? But..maybe you think Trump is also past the line what Georgia voters will support also?

    Except…wait. In the 2020 election, Warnock also beat Kelly Loeffler, who was not a great candidate, but wasn’t a horrible one like Walker.

    And Perdue lost too. Perdue was an even better candidate, pretty well respected and the incumbent. There really wasn’t anything that stuck to Perdue, unlike the problems that Loeffler had with the whole ‘incredibly rich carpetbagger’ look she had going on. But he lost too.

    Perdue and Loeffer and Trump lost in 2020 because there are, in actual fact, more Democratic voters in Georgia than Republican ones, and they actually voted that election.

    This isn’t very hard to notice to notice and do the math on.

    Republicans, for now, win midterms due to low turnout…except when Republicans screw up very badly and nominate people who clearly shouldn’t be anywhere near elected office, in which case Republicans can lose there also.

    That makes Georgia a purple state, however much you might dislike it.Report

    • Merrie Soltis in reply to DavidTC says:

      Loeffler and Hice got more votes in the jungle primary and Perdue got more votes in the general than Ossoff. But Republicans lost both runoffs when Trump convinced his supporters not to turn out for the runoff. Walker got fewer votes than Warnock in the general and even fewer in the runoff. Kemp got 200,000 more votes than Walker in November. A lot of voters split their votes and a lot of Republicans (like me) just refused to vote for EITHER candidate. That means more people voted for every single Republican candidate than every single Democratic candidate on the statewide ballot – except for the Senate race.
      And turnout was NOT low this year. It was historically high for a midterm election.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Merrie Soltis says:

        But Republicans lost both runoffs when Trump convinced his supporters not to turn out for the runoff.

        And your excuse for _Trump_ not winning to start with is…?

        And turnout was NOT low this year. It was historically high for a midterm election.

        ‘For a midterm election’ is doing a lot of work there.

        You understand the premise is that Democrats do well the better turnout is? And _this_ midterm, which had good turnout for a midterm but still low compared to presidential elections, had in turn the Democrats doing better in one race but still poorly in other race?

        I have postulated two facts:

        1) Democrats beat Republicans in a good turnout, do poorly when there is not.

        2) Midterms generally have worse turnout.

        And thus, Republicans generally win midterms. This election, there was exceptional turnout for a midterm, thus causing Democrats to win a single race.

        That means more people voted for every single Republican candidate than every single Democratic candidate on the statewide ballot – except for the Senate race.

        Yes, in a midterm.Report

    • Merrie Soltis in reply to DavidTC says:

      I was also one of those voters who went for Evan McMullin in 2016 and Biden in 2020. There aren’t a lot of us, but we’re enough to swing an election. That doesn’t make us Democrats. We would prefer to vote for Republicans. Just not crazy ones.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Merrie Soltis says:

        So your theory is that there is some hypothetical mass of Republican voters that won’t vote for Trump or anything he supports, and _also_ there’s the hypothetical mass of Republican voters who will do anything Trump says, including not vote in the 2020 runoff.

        That seems reasonable.

        And both these groups of people should be counted as Republican voters (Despite both of them being defined as ‘people who deliberately don’t vote Republican at certain times’), and because they are both ‘Republican voters’, this means outnumber Democratic voters in Georgia enough to make Georgia a red state, despite these hypothetical Republican voters not actually voting in any sort of unified manner to actually _elect_ Republicans. And in fact not being able to do so, because they both choose to not vote for literal opposite positions…one votes anti-Trump and the other votes pro-Trump.

        This feels fairly absurd to me.

        Georgia has repeatedly, constantly, elected Democrats to a national election for an entire election cycle at this point. A Presidential election and _three_ Senate elections. You can’t just keep saying ‘Republican make bad choices’ to justify that…if Republican make bad choices, and this causes Georgia to vote for Democrats, than Georgia is, in actual fact, voting for Democrats! That makes it purple.

        You can’t hypothesize some sort of better Republican party and assert Georgians would vote for that, and thus the state is _hypothetically_ a red state.Report

        • DavidTC in reply to DavidTC says:

          I swear, this feels like someone saying ‘I know Fred has gotten in a lot of car accidents recently, but he is actually a good driver, objectively speaking…those car accidents were just because he was really drunk. So you shouldn’t call him a bad driver, it’s just he has a habit of driving drunk’.

          But…that does indeed make him a bad driver! In fact, he’s a worse driver than someone who just gets unlucky!

          In some alternate universe where the Republican party did not drunkenly pick people who horrified suburban Republican voters in Georgia, Georgia would probably not be a purple state just yet…that should have been about a decade away according to demographics, IIRC. But we are in this universe, where Trumpian antics have, indeed, caused this to happen early.

          This isn’t some weird fluke. It really seems unlikely it will stop, there’s no actual way that Georgia or the Republican party can make it stop…their primary voters are complete wackjobs, end of story.

          Honestly, it’s unclear even that stopping at this point would undo things in Georgia…these victories had Democratic voters turn out in massive amounts and the party has been revitalized by this.Report

          • DavidTC in reply to Merrie Soltis says:

            … if Republican voters will not vote for Republicans at a national level, they are no longer national Republican voters.

            And thus Georgia is a purple state.

            You keep trying to argue some other hypothetical Republican party that might have more voters for it in this state. But that party doesn’t exist.

            At the national level, in a choice between Republicans and Democrats, as the parties literally exist in the actual world that we really live in, Georgia has more Democratic voters than Republican… Or, at least, roughly the same amount, which is the argument for calling it a _purple_ state.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to DavidTC says:

              You keep trying to come up with justifications as to why that doesn’t really count, but ‘purple state’ is an observation of reality, not some hypothetical ideal universe in which people vote based on…I don’t even know what you think they’re based on.

              If you want to argue that the reason Georgians are picking Democrats at a national level is that Republicans have become entangled with Trump, I do not disagree with that in any amount, but it does mean it is true that Georgians are voting for Democrats at the national level!

              And have done it enough times that it is reasonable to call the state a purple state at this point… At least when speaking on the national level, locally it is still very red.Report

  4. Chip Daniels says:

    We haven’t changed. The party we used to support has changed. That party doesn’t even bother to put together a platform anymore. “Whatever Trump says this week” and “Hunter Biden’s laptop” aren’t policy goals. You have 2 years to figure out what the Republican party stands for and what issues you want to run on.

    Sigh.
    I want to be sympathetic here, but look let’s face facts.
    The party of DeSantis, Abbott, Youngkin, of Boebert, Taylor Greene and Gohmert HAS figured out what it stands for.
    And it is NOT “limited government, freedom, fiscal responsibility, national defense”.

    Sorry, it just isn’t, not at any level on anyone’s part. No one of any stature anywhere in the party gives a rip about any of these things.

    B-but here’s a platform statement from Congressman So&So mentioning all those things!

    No, sorry those thing aren’t important enough for the Congressman to fight for.

    Genital inspections for students, drag show bans, book bans, unfunded tax cuts, and foolish and destructive tariffs all get a vast majority of votes from “reasonable, moderate” Republicans.

    At this point, after 6 years of a horror show of freaks and weirdos, it’s a bit much to hear yet another chorus of “Well I’m Giving Them One More Chance And I Really Mean It This Time!”Report