Forgive me Burt, but this is misguided on several levels. First of all, the Constitutional thing is a red herring. There are no summary evictions (I don't think) but there are a lot of jurisdictions where the process is relatively streamlined (my guess is that it's at least a month from late rent to dispossession in all of them), and all of them give the tenant due process of law.
If a tenant has any good-faith objection to being evicted the judge of whatever court hears the case absolutely will listen to it, but like PD Shaw said, as a practical matter there never are.
Being able to evict bad tenants is an absolute lifesaver for landlords and as a former California resident I'm surprised you don't have any appreciation for that. Maybe you haven't tried to rent anything for 20 years. Let's just say that situations like Jaybirds tweetlink below are typical. As soon as the landlord lets you in, he's basically at your mercy so he's going to jerk you around as much as possible before that so maybe it will minimize his risk.
Thinking about evictions the way you and Em are is the wrong angle. IMO it's much better to say that housing policy and land use policy in general ought to favor renters much more than it historically has in America. Ideally, landlords and tenants are symbiotic to each other, not necessarily adversaries. The real friction is lack of available units, and lack of land dedicated to siting housing units, and the problem ought to be addressed on those terms.
It's part supply and demand, but not just that. Well beyond that, it's the worst jurisdictions which employ variations on what Em is talking about that makes it more and more a pain to rent anything decent.
Well, yeah. This particular issue aside, the working majority that will probably end up controlling the chamber with 218+ voters will very likely have Reps and Demos both in it. But it's anybody's guess who will be in it and probably more important, when that will emerge.
Like I wrote before, this is most fundamentally unpredictable thing I've seen in a while. Right now, the only thing you can really be sure of is that there aren't 218 votes available for anything.
I wouldn’t assume this is thoughtless conflict or conflict for its own sake. This is the only chance for members to select the most important legislative leader in the country.
Oh but it is. Or more specifically, it is the rejection of the Republican Party (and the Republican conference within the House of Representatives) and its ability to call a play and then run whatever play is called. In short, more than any other this is the vote that defines who is a Republican. The idea that we're negotiating payoffs to "win" this vote distresses me a great deal, whether it "works" or not.
This current standoff is because of Republicans thinking on their own.
I don't want to see Republicans thinking on their own. That's what the conference is for. Everything we've seen in the last day or so was already hashed out in conference, and a decision was made (and not by a close margin).
This is a time for Representatives-elect to show that they want to be part of the team or not. And for now, the answer is pretty clear. For 19 of them, they don't. That has its own problems of course, but I'd rather get started on them than keep on pretending that we have a majority that in reality doesn't exist.
Obviously this looks really bad for the GOP. Apparently some think this will be resolved quickly. Either McCarthy can buy off enough critics to win a vote, or McCarthy can withdraw and Scalise gets majority. This could even be true. But there are still major obstacles to either of those happening.
And worse than that, no matter how it looks, the reality of what it is is much worse.
At the very least, there's a significant minority of Republicans inside Congress and at the activist level who are looking for conflict, conflict in general and conflict within the party in particular. Conflict is unavoidable, in sports, in politics, and in life. But to go out looking for conflict for its own sake is profoundly stupid and nihilistic.
And as things stand in the House of Representatives right now, it's not obvious that there are 218 votes for anything meaningful at all. We could have guessed beforehand that with the results of the election being what they were that we wouldn't necessarily have a reliable working majority to ride out the ups and downs of this Congress. But what's worse, if we're relying on Boebert, Matt Gaetz and the rest of them, we don't even have a nominal majority, which is a genuinely new development and a very bad one at that.
I think we’re a long way from the resolution described in the OP.
This is probably true. That said, I have seen a lot smart people argue that this or that won't happen, or can't happen, and I'm not buying any of it. This the fundamentally most unpredictable thing I've seen come down the pipe in a while. Anybody who thinks they know the resolution of this, or even the next meaningful developments, I suspect is very wrong.
Fwiw, this little episode is causing me to reevaluate some things on some basic levels that I wasn't expecting to reevaluate.
No no. The one who's not getting politics in the western US is you. Colorado is on a 30 year blue trip but the West is bigger than just Colorado. And even in Colorado, the GOP is still competitive statewide. Barely competitive, but still. Certainly no worse than Va, and GOP won the governorship there just a year ago now.
If I were in the mood to be optimistic (and I assure you I am not), you don't have to look very far for signs of optimism in the West. GOP won the governor's race in Nevada, they won new House seats in Montana and I think in California. (edit: or to put it better, I think they won new seats in Montana and Texas, and kept their seats in California where the Demos lost in reapportionment)They flipped seats and increased representation in Oregon and Arizona. They improved margins in California. They got no problems at all in Utah, in contrast to what some libs were thinking.
America lost some big races as well, and beyond a doubt those hurt. But given what happened in other places in the country, we'd love to do this well in the Rust Belt.
Read the whole thing, but it could easily have been written ten years ago, or twenty, or fifty. Americans are decadent, Americans are immoral, America is being invaded by foreigners who are corrupting our national character, etc.
Definitely he's barking up the wrong tree about immigrant voters. Hispanics (and Asians) are our biggest growth areas from this election (and the last one too IIRC). Otherwise yeah, that's me.
The conventional wisdom about Trump and the flaky candidates is right, but still I'm in blame-the-voters mode now and probably will be for a while. We nominated in some races some people who were flaky and unpleasant and inscrutable, but even so if we had a functioning country they were better than they had to be.
Yeah, Trump's gone now, and DeSantis is going to take over and win, we'll get 'em next time, and the cavalry is coming. And that's right, the cavalry _is_ coming. I'm just afraid the settlers are all going to be dead by the time they get there.
Yeah, yeah. GOP wasn't spectacularly great anywhere, but the West is the least of our problems. We didn't get enough to solve our problems in other areas, but based on the election the GOP is on the upswing in every western state except Colorado and maybe New Mexico.
It's the Rust Belt that killed us, PA and Michigan especially, and to some extent Ohio.
You certainly can follow the example of former President Trump if you choose. Certainly lots of Republicans have. But we're a big party. Personally I would instead consider the thoughts of the Republican Civil War officer Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who said,
"We are an army out to set other men free......America should be free ground, all of it, from here to the Pacific Ocean.......In the end, we're fighting for each other," and other thoughts of a similar vein as to the stakes of defeating the Democrats of his day.
youtube.com/watch?v=wUurBiyVhnk
Optimistically, you could say that the stakes now are not _as high_ as they were during Col. Chamberlain's time. But in any event, I'd venture to say they are still high enough.
The big question for this cycle is about the stash of GOP voters who are going to show up on Election Day, without having been represented by the pollsters beforehand. Specifically, where are they and how many are there?
We don't really have a good answer for this. My gut says it's a lot but we don't really even have a good back-of-the-envelope guess. Polling now is the worst its been in my lifetime. I think our usual gut feeling for polls and error doesn't really apply any more. For example, there have been kinda recent polls showing the Ohio Senate race and the Iowa Senate race as being competitive. But I'm not going to be surprised if JD Vance wins by 14 points or Chuck Grassley wins by 25 points, or both. Or not. I just don't think polling narrows the range of plausible outcomes to the extent we're used to.
To figure out the state of the election, I think you have to de-emphasize the horse race polls and look at fundamental data: prior elections, primary turnout, changes in party registration, special elections, and early voting data. And Presidential Job Approval, the one exception to bad polling. And and subjective interpretation of the topical issue mix for the election and who that's likely to favor.
Given the totality of all these things, you have to think the Republicans are going to do very well.
For the House, let's say the GOP gets 245 total after the election. It could be less, but then it could very easily be more as well. The talk about how the Demos will hold the House seems to be ridiculous for me. I don't think that was ever credible. But anything less than 230 for the GOP is very very bad. Among other things, it means that the party leadership has to do a whole bunch of gimmicky crap to manage the chamber, like Pelosi for this last Congress.
I think most or all of the high profile races will go GOP. Masters will win in Arizona, which I wouldn't have predicted a couple of months ago. Mark Kelly has very little presence for being a former astronaut. The negatives for Masters, of which there are many, are all from August or earlier. He hasn't shot himself in the foot during the general election season. And he's attached himself to Kari Lake, who's turned out to be a surprisingly strong candidate.
Laxalt is going to win. I don't think that's been competitive for a while.
Fetterman is going to lose, and if any of the high profile Demos win, it will be Rafael Warnock in Georgia. Though I'm sort of schizophrenic here. I have a pretty strong gut feelings about both of these. But otoh, I don't necessarily trust my own judgment because more than the other races, my thoughts here are a substantially a consequence of my own personal opinions as to the candidates involved.
Senate races in Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin will go GOP by at least 5 points each.
If I had to pick any particular upset, it will be Lee Zeldin over Hochul for NY gov. I can't think of any high-profile gov race that's going to go well for the Demos.
One important outcome for Tuesday (maybe the most important) is that establishment Demos are going to push Biden out of the nomination shortly afterward. Right-wing twitter (and maybe even the libs too) has been speculating about this for a week or so. I suspect this has a good chance of working if there's even a few prominent Establishment Demos willing to put their name behind this. But that's only half the job. Somehow, if the Demos can push out Biden _and_ Kamala Harris, i'll be much more bullish about the Demos in 2024. But I don't think that's going to happen, and the presence of Kamala Harris in the race, whether she wins or not, will be a huge negative for the party.
The thing is the feds control over that is limited, and being in deep blue territory it is where my particular vote is least impactful.
Au contraire mon ami.
The feds don't have direct control over the Maryland public schools. But operationally, there is little if anything in the world more valuable or powerful than
Demo constituencies for US House, Senate, or President flipping to GOP.
By contrast, having misgivings about Demo policy but then hugging it out at the end and going back to the Demos is pretty much worthless. And that's especially true here where the Karens at the CDC, AFT and the rest of them will see themselves vindicated where the Demos win races for Congress or governor.
As we’ve discussed, I’m not happy about a lot of things that have gone on with the schools, and while I’m not committed to the Democrats as deeply as some of our other commenters I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with that kind of thing.
I dunno, it doesn't seem to be any big mystery for me. You could and should support the Republicans for federal office so as to disempower the karenocracy which is responsible for shutting down the public schools.
The reality is that the Democrats have paid a price for the kind of interference a significant number of them ran for ivy league radicalism and opportunistic and/or politically inspired criminality in 2020. They’re still struggling to adjust to the fact that their constituency is much more moderate than Extremely Online progressive activists of the type that work in NPOs and staff their campaigns.
Yeah, yeah. The reality is, after everything that's happened over the last 1-3 years, you're still going to be cheerleading for the party of lockdowns and learning loss this midterm, right?
You gotta be kidding me. Let's hope the Demos get complacent. If the Demos were complacent maybe they would have forgotten to close the public schools instead of what they did. "Just slipped my mind I guess."
Btw the Nevada US Senate race isn't competitive for the Demos and hasn't been for 2-3 months.
I mean it’s early for a prediction thread for the midterms but I will take my hat off to you in recognition of the bold prediction. Hat’s off buddy!
We're flying blind a little bit because the polls are so bad, and the Demos have made some progress over the last three months or so. Tbh, the Senate is where there is the most variance/uncertainty. At _least_ 235, probably 240 are locked in for the GOP in the House.
The thing to keep in mind, is that the whatever the polls say, whenever actual people have voted it's been really good for the GOP, with maybe just a couple of exceptions.
twitter.com/WinWithJMC/status/1558999834446684161
Eg, this is the most recent one, and its fairly typical. Thousands and thousands of new GOP primary voters are showing up to the polls, basically in every state that's had primaries (again, one or two exceptions). In this case, it represents a GOP gain of 22 percentage points in two-party share.
I think a lot of conventional wisdom in this cycle is either Demo hopium or substantial misunderstanding of the state of the race.
(It's not all peaches and cream for the GOP btw. If you care I'll write something about the good news for Demos.)
You seem unmoved by what seems like a substantive
volte-face from the party.
Folk Marxism was at least as much a descriptive word as a pejorative one, something that I tried to explain to various people back when, usually to little avail.
In any event, the Trump/Biden money spigot is certainly a worrisome thing, at least for me. Basically, we just have to ride our luck on that one.
Before we can reform the welfare state, we have to rebuild a reservoir of trust between the political class and the grass roots. In more concrete terms, put the genie back in the bottle let out by ACA (and immigration).
Kinda like how we have to rebuild a store of solidarity among Americans in general, Blue and Red, but not exactly. Either one, the prescription is the same: vote Republican.
I’m getting old, and just can’t muster the energy to be interested in anything outside of the American West. One of Koz or I are horribly wrong about what’s going to happen out here in November.
That's interesting actually, because I was actually hoping you'd check in. The West has a lot of interesting stuff going on this cycle.
For me, at least:
The Arizona Republicans are the fcking worst state party ever.
Nevada (to a lesser extent New Mexico and south/west Texas) is going to be the brightest of bright spots on a good GOP night.
The Colorado Democrats, not just the party apparatus but the pols plus the voters in general, are probably in the best shape for the coming GOP realignment of any state in the country.
The social comity of Kansas is the end state for the upcoming GOP wave.
Let’s just be generous and assume they stay at 50- you think a hypothetical DeSantis Presidency will somehow gently shuffle Trump off to Mar a Lago without him pitching a fit and blowing the right up AND that DeSantis will win a landslide victory where he also rakes in TWENTY Senate seats?
Yeah, we'll get 4, maybe 5 this year and 15 or so in 2024. Look at the map, they're there to be had.
As far as Trump goes, Trump leaving is actually a good scenario for the GOP. That's how the GOP will regain the white professional UMC's they lost under Trump. Trump could go scorched earth or try to play spoiler, but I don't think that's as big a threat as some others think. GOP has seen the consequences of the GA Senate races and they don't want to see that movie again.
No, the bigger problem is nominating someone else, however that happens.
Oh, I get it, so you mean the GOP will redefine its goals, and the goals of the right, to move closer to the left.
To a significant extent, yes. For that, you should give Trump blame or credit, as you choose. Things like Social Security, Medicare, and good public schools are Republican issues now, and sometimes even wedge issues.
I was talking about 60 votes in 2024. That said, 538 is pretty bad and getting worse. Nate Silver is still miles better than Sam Wang, but that's about it.
He relies way too much on public polling where the structural flaws are becoming more and more clear. In fact, get ready for at least a couple 20 point misses this November.
Moving energy production in the direction of low carbon production? Increasing federal funding of infrastructure? Is a hypothetical DeSantis going to tear up the highways and pipes or something? Will he make coal great again?
Renewable energy, especially solar, has made tremendous progress over the last 25 years or so. Likewise, coal has been in decline for about that long.
But, renewables aren't ready to power first world economies yet. When are they are, they probably will. There's nothing Biden has done to meaningfully change that.
What he has done, is discourage oil and gas production. And that doesn't create a clean energy economy any faster. All that does is empower people like Putin and the Iranians, hit domestic consumers in the pocketbook, and force a reversion to coal, as the Germans are currently finding out. Forced into that action by the Green Party nonetheless.
As far as 60 seats goes, that's actually very plausible. In fact, come 2024 70 GOP seats are in play. That will take some luck or movement to the GOP, but not as much as you might think.
As far as the roads and chips go, I can't see why President DeSantis would want to undo those things. They are the sort of thing you'll see when the GOP gets its trifecta.
Well yeah. We're in the middle of taking over, pretty clearly at that. (Maybe if you say some nice things about Ronald Reagan I'll put in a good word for you).
We have been since 2010 when ACA passed, except for the historical idiosyncrasies and quirks associated with two people: Trump and Obama. One of these is no longer relevant, the other is struggling to maintain relevance.
The Waterloo things is interesting, in that ACA is a policy but the Biden legislation for the most part isn't policy, it's just a random grab bag full of money. There's very little there that President DeSantis can't or won't get rid of, probably without too much fanfare either.
The stuff this Congress passed doesn't really stack up as substantively good, or important or even politically beneficial.
Basically the main thing the Left and Biden have accomplished over the past six months or so is that they have stuff to talk about instead of getting beat over the head every day by inflation and Afghanistan.
And a lot of those things were just events that Biden had nothing to do with, like the SCOTUS decision on abortion and Jan 6 hearings.
When I look at what the Dems, under Biden, have accomplished in policy, passed laws and political accomplishments and then look at your critique I can’t help but wonder what more you’d expect them to have accomplished under a Biden who was, by your appraisal, high-energy, informed and mentally average?
Well, that depends on the direction you'd want him to take. He could flaky way-Left, he could be establishmentarian anti-GOP hard Left (what a number of people here want), he could be Right/center-Right (what I want), he could be GOP-friendly moderate center Left (what he tries to do and what he would do if he still had his marbles).
The point being, he is none of these things really, because as the most powerful executive in America, he has very little influence, and for the most part is just catching up to whatever happens in the rest of the world.
As far as legislation goes, there's been the virus relief package, the hard infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act (smh). These are the sort of thing he'd probably be doing if he were much younger, but I don't think they're going to have a whole of substantive impact, and because he's such a passive personality, the GOP is going to get all of the political benefit from the culture wars and intra-Left turmoil.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Biden’s Renter’s Bill of Rights: Is it Time for the Right to Counsel to Evolve?”
Forgive me Burt, but this is misguided on several levels. First of all, the Constitutional thing is a red herring. There are no summary evictions (I don't think) but there are a lot of jurisdictions where the process is relatively streamlined (my guess is that it's at least a month from late rent to dispossession in all of them), and all of them give the tenant due process of law.
If a tenant has any good-faith objection to being evicted the judge of whatever court hears the case absolutely will listen to it, but like PD Shaw said, as a practical matter there never are.
Being able to evict bad tenants is an absolute lifesaver for landlords and as a former California resident I'm surprised you don't have any appreciation for that. Maybe you haven't tried to rent anything for 20 years. Let's just say that situations like Jaybirds tweetlink below are typical. As soon as the landlord lets you in, he's basically at your mercy so he's going to jerk you around as much as possible before that so maybe it will minimize his risk.
Thinking about evictions the way you and Em are is the wrong angle. IMO it's much better to say that housing policy and land use policy in general ought to favor renters much more than it historically has in America. Ideally, landlords and tenants are symbiotic to each other, not necessarily adversaries. The real friction is lack of available units, and lack of land dedicated to siting housing units, and the problem ought to be addressed on those terms.
"
It's part supply and demand, but not just that. Well beyond that, it's the worst jurisdictions which employ variations on what Em is talking about that makes it more and more a pain to rent anything decent.
On “Rise of the Moderates?”
Well, yeah. This particular issue aside, the working majority that will probably end up controlling the chamber with 218+ voters will very likely have Reps and Demos both in it. But it's anybody's guess who will be in it and probably more important, when that will emerge.
Like I wrote before, this is most fundamentally unpredictable thing I've seen in a while. Right now, the only thing you can really be sure of is that there aren't 218 votes available for anything.
"
Oh but it is. Or more specifically, it is the rejection of the Republican Party (and the Republican conference within the House of Representatives) and its ability to call a play and then run whatever play is called. In short, more than any other this is the vote that defines who is a Republican. The idea that we're negotiating payoffs to "win" this vote distresses me a great deal, whether it "works" or not.
I don't want to see Republicans thinking on their own. That's what the conference is for. Everything we've seen in the last day or so was already hashed out in conference, and a decision was made (and not by a close margin).
This is a time for Representatives-elect to show that they want to be part of the team or not. And for now, the answer is pretty clear. For 19 of them, they don't. That has its own problems of course, but I'd rather get started on them than keep on pretending that we have a majority that in reality doesn't exist.
"
Obviously this looks really bad for the GOP. Apparently some think this will be resolved quickly. Either McCarthy can buy off enough critics to win a vote, or McCarthy can withdraw and Scalise gets majority. This could even be true. But there are still major obstacles to either of those happening.
And worse than that, no matter how it looks, the reality of what it is is much worse.
At the very least, there's a significant minority of Republicans inside Congress and at the activist level who are looking for conflict, conflict in general and conflict within the party in particular. Conflict is unavoidable, in sports, in politics, and in life. But to go out looking for conflict for its own sake is profoundly stupid and nihilistic.
And as things stand in the House of Representatives right now, it's not obvious that there are 218 votes for anything meaningful at all. We could have guessed beforehand that with the results of the election being what they were that we wouldn't necessarily have a reliable working majority to ride out the ups and downs of this Congress. But what's worse, if we're relying on Boebert, Matt Gaetz and the rest of them, we don't even have a nominal majority, which is a genuinely new development and a very bad one at that.
"
This is probably true. That said, I have seen a lot smart people argue that this or that won't happen, or can't happen, and I'm not buying any of it. This the fundamentally most unpredictable thing I've seen come down the pipe in a while. Anybody who thinks they know the resolution of this, or even the next meaningful developments, I suspect is very wrong.
Fwiw, this little episode is causing me to reevaluate some things on some basic levels that I wasn't expecting to reevaluate.
On “About Last Night: Beige Trickle Election Results Edition”
No no. The one who's not getting politics in the western US is you. Colorado is on a 30 year blue trip but the West is bigger than just Colorado. And even in Colorado, the GOP is still competitive statewide. Barely competitive, but still. Certainly no worse than Va, and GOP won the governorship there just a year ago now.
If I were in the mood to be optimistic (and I assure you I am not), you don't have to look very far for signs of optimism in the West. GOP won the governor's race in Nevada, they won new House seats in Montana and I think in California. (edit: or to put it better, I think they won new seats in Montana and Texas, and kept their seats in California where the Demos lost in reapportionment)They flipped seats and increased representation in Oregon and Arizona. They improved margins in California. They got no problems at all in Utah, in contrast to what some libs were thinking.
America lost some big races as well, and beyond a doubt those hurt. But given what happened in other places in the country, we'd love to do this well in the Rust Belt.
On “The Republican Civil War Is Upon Us”
Definitely he's barking up the wrong tree about immigrant voters. Hispanics (and Asians) are our biggest growth areas from this election (and the last one too IIRC). Otherwise yeah, that's me.
The conventional wisdom about Trump and the flaky candidates is right, but still I'm in blame-the-voters mode now and probably will be for a while. We nominated in some races some people who were flaky and unpleasant and inscrutable, but even so if we had a functioning country they were better than they had to be.
Yeah, Trump's gone now, and DeSantis is going to take over and win, we'll get 'em next time, and the cavalry is coming. And that's right, the cavalry _is_ coming. I'm just afraid the settlers are all going to be dead by the time they get there.
On “About Last Night: Beige Trickle Election Results Edition”
Yeah, yeah. GOP wasn't spectacularly great anywhere, but the West is the least of our problems. We didn't get enough to solve our problems in other areas, but based on the election the GOP is on the upswing in every western state except Colorado and maybe New Mexico.
It's the Rust Belt that killed us, PA and Michigan especially, and to some extent Ohio.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: 2022 Off-Year Election Edition”
You certainly can follow the example of former President Trump if you choose. Certainly lots of Republicans have. But we're a big party. Personally I would instead consider the thoughts of the Republican Civil War officer Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who said,
"We are an army out to set other men free......America should be free ground, all of it, from here to the Pacific Ocean.......In the end, we're fighting for each other," and other thoughts of a similar vein as to the stakes of defeating the Democrats of his day.
youtube.com/watch?v=wUurBiyVhnk
Optimistically, you could say that the stakes now are not _as high_ as they were during Col. Chamberlain's time. But in any event, I'd venture to say they are still high enough.
"
The big question for this cycle is about the stash of GOP voters who are going to show up on Election Day, without having been represented by the pollsters beforehand. Specifically, where are they and how many are there?
We don't really have a good answer for this. My gut says it's a lot but we don't really even have a good back-of-the-envelope guess. Polling now is the worst its been in my lifetime. I think our usual gut feeling for polls and error doesn't really apply any more. For example, there have been kinda recent polls showing the Ohio Senate race and the Iowa Senate race as being competitive. But I'm not going to be surprised if JD Vance wins by 14 points or Chuck Grassley wins by 25 points, or both. Or not. I just don't think polling narrows the range of plausible outcomes to the extent we're used to.
To figure out the state of the election, I think you have to de-emphasize the horse race polls and look at fundamental data: prior elections, primary turnout, changes in party registration, special elections, and early voting data. And Presidential Job Approval, the one exception to bad polling. And and subjective interpretation of the topical issue mix for the election and who that's likely to favor.
Given the totality of all these things, you have to think the Republicans are going to do very well.
For the House, let's say the GOP gets 245 total after the election. It could be less, but then it could very easily be more as well. The talk about how the Demos will hold the House seems to be ridiculous for me. I don't think that was ever credible. But anything less than 230 for the GOP is very very bad. Among other things, it means that the party leadership has to do a whole bunch of gimmicky crap to manage the chamber, like Pelosi for this last Congress.
I think most or all of the high profile races will go GOP. Masters will win in Arizona, which I wouldn't have predicted a couple of months ago. Mark Kelly has very little presence for being a former astronaut. The negatives for Masters, of which there are many, are all from August or earlier. He hasn't shot himself in the foot during the general election season. And he's attached himself to Kari Lake, who's turned out to be a surprisingly strong candidate.
Laxalt is going to win. I don't think that's been competitive for a while.
Fetterman is going to lose, and if any of the high profile Demos win, it will be Rafael Warnock in Georgia. Though I'm sort of schizophrenic here. I have a pretty strong gut feelings about both of these. But otoh, I don't necessarily trust my own judgment because more than the other races, my thoughts here are a substantially a consequence of my own personal opinions as to the candidates involved.
Senate races in Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin will go GOP by at least 5 points each.
If I had to pick any particular upset, it will be Lee Zeldin over Hochul for NY gov. I can't think of any high-profile gov race that's going to go well for the Demos.
One important outcome for Tuesday (maybe the most important) is that establishment Demos are going to push Biden out of the nomination shortly afterward. Right-wing twitter (and maybe even the libs too) has been speculating about this for a week or so. I suspect this has a good chance of working if there's even a few prominent Establishment Demos willing to put their name behind this. But that's only half the job. Somehow, if the Demos can push out Biden _and_ Kamala Harris, i'll be much more bullish about the Demos in 2024. But I don't think that's going to happen, and the presence of Kamala Harris in the race, whether she wins or not, will be a huge negative for the party.
On “Ten Second News Links and Open Thread for the week of 10/24/22”
Au contraire mon ami.
The feds don't have direct control over the Maryland public schools. But operationally, there is little if anything in the world more valuable or powerful than
Demo constituencies for US House, Senate, or President flipping to GOP.
By contrast, having misgivings about Demo policy but then hugging it out at the end and going back to the Demos is pretty much worthless. And that's especially true here where the Karens at the CDC, AFT and the rest of them will see themselves vindicated where the Demos win races for Congress or governor.
"
I dunno, it doesn't seem to be any big mystery for me. You could and should support the Republicans for federal office so as to disempower the karenocracy which is responsible for shutting down the public schools.
"
Yeah, yeah. The reality is, after everything that's happened over the last 1-3 years, you're still going to be cheerleading for the party of lockdowns and learning loss this midterm, right?
"
You gotta be kidding me. Let's hope the Demos get complacent. If the Demos were complacent maybe they would have forgotten to close the public schools instead of what they did. "Just slipped my mind I guess."
Btw the Nevada US Senate race isn't competitive for the Demos and hasn't been for 2-3 months.
On “The Inherent Weakness of the Joe Biden Presidency”
We're flying blind a little bit because the polls are so bad, and the Demos have made some progress over the last three months or so. Tbh, the Senate is where there is the most variance/uncertainty. At _least_ 235, probably 240 are locked in for the GOP in the House.
The thing to keep in mind, is that the whatever the polls say, whenever actual people have voted it's been really good for the GOP, with maybe just a couple of exceptions.
twitter.com/WinWithJMC/status/1558999834446684161
Eg, this is the most recent one, and its fairly typical. Thousands and thousands of new GOP primary voters are showing up to the polls, basically in every state that's had primaries (again, one or two exceptions). In this case, it represents a GOP gain of 22 percentage points in two-party share.
I think a lot of conventional wisdom in this cycle is either Demo hopium or substantial misunderstanding of the state of the race.
(It's not all peaches and cream for the GOP btw. If you care I'll write something about the good news for Demos.)
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Folk Marxism was at least as much a descriptive word as a pejorative one, something that I tried to explain to various people back when, usually to little avail.
In any event, the Trump/Biden money spigot is certainly a worrisome thing, at least for me. Basically, we just have to ride our luck on that one.
Before we can reform the welfare state, we have to rebuild a reservoir of trust between the political class and the grass roots. In more concrete terms, put the genie back in the bottle let out by ACA (and immigration).
Kinda like how we have to rebuild a store of solidarity among Americans in general, Blue and Red, but not exactly. Either one, the prescription is the same: vote Republican.
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That's interesting actually, because I was actually hoping you'd check in. The West has a lot of interesting stuff going on this cycle.
For me, at least:
The Arizona Republicans are the fcking worst state party ever.
Nevada (to a lesser extent New Mexico and south/west Texas) is going to be the brightest of bright spots on a good GOP night.
The Colorado Democrats, not just the party apparatus but the pols plus the voters in general, are probably in the best shape for the coming GOP realignment of any state in the country.
The social comity of Kansas is the end state for the upcoming GOP wave.
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Yeah, we'll get 4, maybe 5 this year and 15 or so in 2024. Look at the map, they're there to be had.
As far as Trump goes, Trump leaving is actually a good scenario for the GOP. That's how the GOP will regain the white professional UMC's they lost under Trump. Trump could go scorched earth or try to play spoiler, but I don't think that's as big a threat as some others think. GOP has seen the consequences of the GA Senate races and they don't want to see that movie again.
No, the bigger problem is nominating someone else, however that happens.
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To a significant extent, yes. For that, you should give Trump blame or credit, as you choose. Things like Social Security, Medicare, and good public schools are Republican issues now, and sometimes even wedge issues.
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I was talking about 60 votes in 2024. That said, 538 is pretty bad and getting worse. Nate Silver is still miles better than Sam Wang, but that's about it.
He relies way too much on public polling where the structural flaws are becoming more and more clear. In fact, get ready for at least a couple 20 point misses this November.
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Renewable energy, especially solar, has made tremendous progress over the last 25 years or so. Likewise, coal has been in decline for about that long.
But, renewables aren't ready to power first world economies yet. When are they are, they probably will. There's nothing Biden has done to meaningfully change that.
What he has done, is discourage oil and gas production. And that doesn't create a clean energy economy any faster. All that does is empower people like Putin and the Iranians, hit domestic consumers in the pocketbook, and force a reversion to coal, as the Germans are currently finding out. Forced into that action by the Green Party nonetheless.
As far as 60 seats goes, that's actually very plausible. In fact, come 2024 70 GOP seats are in play. That will take some luck or movement to the GOP, but not as much as you might think.
As far as the roads and chips go, I can't see why President DeSantis would want to undo those things. They are the sort of thing you'll see when the GOP gets its trifecta.
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Well yeah. We're in the middle of taking over, pretty clearly at that. (Maybe if you say some nice things about Ronald Reagan I'll put in a good word for you).
We have been since 2010 when ACA passed, except for the historical idiosyncrasies and quirks associated with two people: Trump and Obama. One of these is no longer relevant, the other is struggling to maintain relevance.
The Waterloo things is interesting, in that ACA is a policy but the Biden legislation for the most part isn't policy, it's just a random grab bag full of money. There's very little there that President DeSantis can't or won't get rid of, probably without too much fanfare either.
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We don't need excuses, we're winning. By a lot.
The stuff this Congress passed doesn't really stack up as substantively good, or important or even politically beneficial.
Basically the main thing the Left and Biden have accomplished over the past six months or so is that they have stuff to talk about instead of getting beat over the head every day by inflation and Afghanistan.
And a lot of those things were just events that Biden had nothing to do with, like the SCOTUS decision on abortion and Jan 6 hearings.
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Well, that depends on the direction you'd want him to take. He could flaky way-Left, he could be establishmentarian anti-GOP hard Left (what a number of people here want), he could be Right/center-Right (what I want), he could be GOP-friendly moderate center Left (what he tries to do and what he would do if he still had his marbles).
The point being, he is none of these things really, because as the most powerful executive in America, he has very little influence, and for the most part is just catching up to whatever happens in the rest of the world.
As far as legislation goes, there's been the virus relief package, the hard infrastructure bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act (smh). These are the sort of thing he'd probably be doing if he were much younger, but I don't think they're going to have a whole of substantive impact, and because he's such a passive personality, the GOP is going to get all of the political benefit from the culture wars and intra-Left turmoil.
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