1% — Kirk has access to internal Trump camp info that’s making him flip his sh!t
4% — Kirk is shrewdly trying to get people who take him seriously to goose turnout
95% — Kirk has absolutely no idea WTF is happening but decided to freak out anyway
Every single OT commenter is in that bubble reserved for people who can name their Congresscritter, both Senators, and all nine Supreme Court justices.
One thing I love about our modern media landscape is I can soothe my own partisan anxieties by seeking out members of Team Red who are freaking out even worse.
Also like I think the lack of a primary was a mixed bag. I think she gained a lot by being able to largely avoid Gaza in particular as an issue.
Immigration I'm less sure about--as much as it would make me personally grind my teeth, I think a primary would have given the party as a whole a politically valuable chance to break from Biden on the issue.
My take is that Harris is a pretty good candidate, but being nominated without any primary campaign, even a perfunctory one, is very unusual.
I think this has had both positive and negative effects, because she was able to get to the general without putting down a lot of the markers she would normally have needed to put down. But she also wasn't really forced to go through the healthy-but-tricky process of defining herself separately from the Biden admin.
NC is kind of a weird case because you have Mark Robinson running for Governor.
I pretty much never say that GOP pols are worse than Trump, but I'm pretty sure that guy is actually worse than Trump. Now usually this is the kind of thing I expect to have little to no impact, but given NC has cycle after cycle of being super-close, "little impact" coupled with Musk's astonishing approach to GOtV could tip things our way.
Texas gets our hopes up in statewide races a lot, and it never really pans out, but a lot of that is because we get excited about candidates who appeal to Blue State Dems and raise a lot of money without really being competitive in the state, and partly because because Cruz is such an oleaginous butthead.
Haven't really paid enough attention [1] to know whether it's the same story with Allred. And of course there's the chance voters will be punishing Cruz for Dobbs and the subsequent cruelty and carnage that the TX GOP has wrought.
I'm not certain--it was a couple decades before I experienced "unsupervised play time" as a high school student--but I am skeptical that screens, in the modern sense of the term, had much to do with it.
Not saying that screens in the modern sense are worse for wellbeing than the ones of the past. The screens I had access to when "unsupervised play time" was a meaningful concept had a disconcerting tendency to display Giligan's Island reruns and man but that show reeked.
When you remember that, in addition to any potential political benefits you gain from terrorizing political adversaries and civil servants who stand in the way of your partisan projects, this also draws a ton of clicks and engagement from people who are more stable than the violent maniacs without actually being stable in an absolute sense.
It really is of a piece with FanDuel and gacha games and social media and "mental health" apps, pulling us into obsessive and easily monetized loops, with any other impact being a happy (or not-so-happy) accident.
1. These kids today are too reckless and irresponsible- Drugs! Sex! Crime! The world isn’t as peaceful as it used to be.
There are a lot of reasons to believe this one is objectively false. Like most if not all stats suggest that all three are down among kids from where they were when I was a kid. There's less crime, less teenage pregnancy, less teenage sex in general, and last I checked less teenage drug use.
These kids today are too soft and coddled. They don’t take risks like we did.
I don't know about how soft the kids are or what their risk tolerances are, but I stand my position that there's a lot of absurd performative protectiveness that revolves around protecting kids from ever-milder "traumas", traumas which have more to do with stuff that upsets their parents than which upsets them.
Like here it's election results and it's only affecting kids whose parents have $65k to blow on a school that is going to be extremely solicitous of its customers' political anxieties, but it's at the end of the day it's a more farcical and less-destructive manifestation of the impulse that leads to mentions of racism being edited out of textbook entries on Rosa Parks in Florida.
I think there are about a billion reasons to be skeptical that legislative success in Red States translates well to being a big vote winner with the broader public.
The press wanted to balance it with Biden's own garbage remarks, but maybe brutally insulting a swing-y low-propensity constituency that probably don't trust you that much to begin with is worse than gaffe-ily insulting a constituency that was, by construction, guaranteed to vote against you in the first place.
Consistently anti-Trump sure, but not necessarily great at peering beyond the elite pundit consensus that so many of them embodied in the pre-Trump era.
Has there ever been strong evidence that they were ever particularly enthused by them?
Like, this seems to be an issue that animates social conservatives and, for whatever reason, appeals to a lot of elite pundits without having a lot of legs at the ballot box.
One thing that's been giving me a bit of hope is the steady drumbeat of stories like this one, about how Elon Musk's plans to disrupt the GOTV industry have been going about as well as you might expect.
Sure, it'll only make a real difference in a very close election, but most signs point to this being a very close election.
Just generally we, as a culture, seem to have gotten vastly more protective of children during my lifetime, in ways that don't necessarily line up with any straightforwardly sensible approach to actually protecting them.
I think this particular bit of coddling is silly, sure, but not extremely so given all the other bits of performative coddling out there.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “2024 Election Day Live Stream, Reaction, Open Thread”
My prior distribution:
1% — Kirk has access to internal Trump camp info that’s making him flip his sh!t
4% — Kirk is shrewdly trying to get people who take him seriously to goose turnout
95% — Kirk has absolutely no idea WTF is happening but decided to freak out anyway
"
Every single OT commenter is in that bubble reserved for people who can name their Congresscritter, both Senators, and all nine Supreme Court justices.
And man is that easy to forget.
"
No.
If they couldn't get Melania to show up nobody would care enough to make getting a body double seem like a remotely worthwhile thing to do.
"
:keeps hitting F5 like a lab rat with the cocaine button:
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: The Night Before the 2024 Presidential Election”
One thing I love about our modern media landscape is I can soothe my own partisan anxieties by seeking out members of Team Red who are freaking out even worse.
Am being sarcastic? No idea!
"
I am trying hard to resist placing any weight on the emotional reactions of one of the dumbest people in American politics...
...but I can't say I'm not tempted.
"
Exactly what it says on the tin.
"
Am I wrong that this is a bad sign given the Trump camp’s low-propensity voter strategy?
"
For some reason the Google News algorithm has decided that I'm extremely interested in whether Joe Rogan endorsed Donald Trump.
"
Yeah B- sounds very close to where I'd put her.
Also like I think the lack of a primary was a mixed bag. I think she gained a lot by being able to largely avoid Gaza in particular as an issue.
Immigration I'm less sure about--as much as it would make me personally grind my teeth, I think a primary would have given the party as a whole a politically valuable chance to break from Biden on the issue.
"
My take is that Harris is a pretty good candidate, but being nominated without any primary campaign, even a perfunctory one, is very unusual.
I think this has had both positive and negative effects, because she was able to get to the general without putting down a lot of the markers she would normally have needed to put down. But she also wasn't really forced to go through the healthy-but-tricky process of defining herself separately from the Biden admin.
"
NC is kind of a weird case because you have Mark Robinson running for Governor.
I pretty much never say that GOP pols are worse than Trump, but I'm pretty sure that guy is actually worse than Trump. Now usually this is the kind of thing I expect to have little to no impact, but given NC has cycle after cycle of being super-close, "little impact" coupled with Musk's astonishing approach to GOtV could tip things our way.
"
I think Tester is toast, sad to say.
Texas gets our hopes up in statewide races a lot, and it never really pans out, but a lot of that is because we get excited about candidates who appeal to Blue State Dems and raise a lot of money without really being competitive in the state, and partly because because Cruz is such an oleaginous butthead.
Haven't really paid enough attention [1] to know whether it's the same story with Allred. And of course there's the chance voters will be punishing Cruz for Dobbs and the subsequent cruelty and carnage that the TX GOP has wrought.
[1] Partly to avoid getting my hopes up.
"
Basically where I am. Maybe swap PA and NC.
On “Final Thoughts Before November Fifth”
I'm not certain--it was a couple decades before I experienced "unsupervised play time" as a high school student--but I am skeptical that screens, in the modern sense of the term, had much to do with it.
Not saying that screens in the modern sense are worse for wellbeing than the ones of the past. The screens I had access to when "unsupervised play time" was a meaningful concept had a disconcerting tendency to display Giligan's Island reruns and man but that show reeked.
On “Open Mic for the week of 11/4/2024”
When you remember that, in addition to any potential political benefits you gain from terrorizing political adversaries and civil servants who stand in the way of your partisan projects, this also draws a ton of clicks and engagement from people who are more stable than the violent maniacs without actually being stable in an absolute sense.
It really is of a piece with FanDuel and gacha games and social media and "mental health" apps, pulling us into obsessive and easily monetized loops, with any other impact being a happy (or not-so-happy) accident.
On “Final Thoughts Before November Fifth”
For real, if kids really are softer today this nonsense has nothing to do with it because this nonsense isn't protecting kids from sh!t.
"
There are a lot of reasons to believe this one is objectively false. Like most if not all stats suggest that all three are down among kids from where they were when I was a kid. There's less crime, less teenage pregnancy, less teenage sex in general, and last I checked less teenage drug use.
I don't know about how soft the kids are or what their risk tolerances are, but I stand my position that there's a lot of absurd performative protectiveness that revolves around protecting kids from ever-milder "traumas", traumas which have more to do with stuff that upsets their parents than which upsets them.
Like here it's election results and it's only affecting kids whose parents have $65k to blow on a school that is going to be extremely solicitous of its customers' political anxieties, but it's at the end of the day it's a more farcical and less-destructive manifestation of the impulse that leads to mentions of racism being edited out of textbook entries on Rosa Parks in Florida.
"
I think there are about a billion reasons to be skeptical that legislative success in Red States translates well to being a big vote winner with the broader public.
Don't you?
"
The press wanted to balance it with Biden's own garbage remarks, but maybe brutally insulting a swing-y low-propensity constituency that probably don't trust you that much to begin with is worse than gaffe-ily insulting a constituency that was, by construction, guaranteed to vote against you in the first place.
"
Consistently anti-Trump sure, but not necessarily great at peering beyond the elite pundit consensus that so many of them embodied in the pre-Trump era.
"
Has there ever been strong evidence that they were ever particularly enthused by them?
Like, this seems to be an issue that animates social conservatives and, for whatever reason, appeals to a lot of elite pundits without having a lot of legs at the ballot box.
"
It's wild how much Kristol sounds like an LGM front-pager.
This is not criticism, of course. If anything, it does a lot to prove his point.
"
One thing that's been giving me a bit of hope is the steady drumbeat of stories like this one, about how Elon Musk's plans to disrupt the GOTV industry have been going about as well as you might expect.
Sure, it'll only make a real difference in a very close election, but most signs point to this being a very close election.
"
Just generally we, as a culture, seem to have gotten vastly more protective of children during my lifetime, in ways that don't necessarily line up with any straightforwardly sensible approach to actually protecting them.
I think this particular bit of coddling is silly, sure, but not extremely so given all the other bits of performative coddling out there.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.