This is so odd to me. I'm a white male, but I've always felt powerless. Maybe it's because I'm the youngest of my family.

Or maybe it's because, "you pretend it's inevitable , because you really don't care."

What I find demoralizing is that the one thing that can beat us is this kind of demoralization, and somehow we seem fated to play it out over and over.

I don't doubt that people who thought Collins and Flake might listen to them were demoralized to find that they did not. But the county elections office has to listen to every one of us, and it's the one time the powers-that-be actually do have to pay attention. Confusing our control over events when we're in the stands cheering for a side with our control over events when we're on the field with the ball -- I just can't even.

(In this same connection, coverage of the ND law to suppress the Native vote has been maddening. The 8th Circuit dissolved the district court's injunction against the ND statute because it found a lack of standing. The question is whether ND could require that people have an id, or other documents, showing a street address. The district court is right that this would disenfranchise people who live on reservations without street addresses. But then the appeals court pointed out that each of the named plaintiffs -- even the homeless guy -- did have street addresses, so none of them could challenge the provision. They explicitly said that if someone who actually did not have a residence address were to file suit, then that would be different. News coverage: 'ND is screwing people who don't have residence addresses, and the courts have upheld it. If you don't have a residence address, stay home, you're screwed.')

Yeah, I think white people who went to college (and whose parents also did) have a perspective of the federal government now being callous and unresponsive to an unprecedented degree, when it's much less unprecedented in the experience of working-class POC, and therefore they're harder to activate at this moment.

I'm remembering a Thanksgiving guest in LA years ago a little after ACA passage, probably IHMHB, who spoke of how fiercely she had fought to get appropriate care for her cancer, and then expressed concern that it shouldn't be so "easy", some vision of people "taking responsibility" like she did. So, someone who had disadvantages but also had some confidence in her ability to navigate the system in the clutch.

Also an observation someone made re Kavanaugh. "You think it's strange to watch a judge being rude, dismissive, and overbearing in public? Welcome to the world of disadvantaged defendants."

3.3: Or you could just watch The Good Wife.

Or if you prefer non-fiction you could listen to season 3 of the Serial podcast.

See, you already felt powerless because you're well-informed.

3. Are their parents boomers? Boomers lived through Vietnam, and as I recall, the government was pretty unresponsive then, except in a negative way. If their parents were GenX, then I accept the point.

So very anxiety provoking. Hey here are two neat words I picked up along the way and like to use for just a soupcon of pretense: anxiolytic is a thing that takes away anxiety (particularly a drug, I guess) and anxiogenic means provoking anxiety. This week is highly, highly anxiogenic.

Today (ou, peut-etre-, hier) d.t. made noises about ending birthright citizenship, which I fear is good strategy and timing. For all those memes that are like "am I a terrifying liberal thug or a swishy liberal snowflake, make up your mind" I do find it possible to feel simultaneously that d.t. is a witless moron with little more cognitive functioning than an earthworm and pretty much a genius at knowing how to activate the horrifying republican base. So yeah I'm really apprehensive.

But more on topic and less an unspecified yelp of woe, I lost any feeling that protesting did any good around the time of the Iraq war and I've always lived in states that were either so blue I didn't have to say anything or so red it was obviously not worth the keystrokes. The last time I felt like I was making a difference was voting for Obama in 2008 and the truth is I wasn't. I of course voted this time but with the knowledge it wouldn't do anything and that we seem just to be in the middle of a wave of worstness. Why should this election go ok in the same few years as Brexit, Bolsonaro, everything else? Tides don't change that quickly.

I am your morning ray of sunshine.

My only sunshine.

I am fighting my natural optimistic tendencies tooth and nail this election, so I offer up this morsel of sunshine even while emphatically not trying to infer too much: Early voting numbers in Texas are very close to 2012 percents, and have far outstripped 2014 percents (probably doubled) in the first week of early voting.

Already dark here. I think the moon has set, even.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/12-young-people-on-why-they-probably-wont-vote.html

What happened in 2010 is that people who were mad about the 2008 result showed up and actually fucking voted. Same thing happened in 1994, 2006, and 2014. Barriers and suppression are real, yes, but there's no barrier greater than 'it's not going to make a difference so why bother.'

Anyway, I don't think I had any particular expectation of my personal influence on politics, but elected people going out if their way to be shits to me is new. They treat respect as a zero-sum game and being decent to anyone who isn't doing their exact bidding as a loss.

In Georgia, early voting is triple what it was by now in 2014. Women are voting over men at rates of 54:43, but black voters are estimated at the same proportion as their population, 30%.

Oh my god I need to stop right now. This is exactly what I did before 2016 as well - getting excited over tea leaves. Leave it alone, Heebie.

I'm just startled by the physical toll a week of actual terrorism has taken on me. I'm pretty resilient normally, and I've massively increased daily emotional armor since 2016 because these fuckers don't deserve to get a rise out of me. Anyway, this article seemed like a well-formulated pep talk by someone who seems to take her calling as a white-ladies-whisperer seriously, unlike the blamey version in 2.1. (Only teasing, CC, and I agree completely with 2.3.)

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/12-young-people-on-why-they-probably-wont-vote.html

I know that "stop being an idiot" isn't a helpful response but:

I volunteered for Bernie Sanders. I went to many rallies, I was at the first presidential debate in Las Vegas. But when he folded, then immediately went and defended Hillary, a person who he's been campaigning against for 18 months, that just really killed it for me. I just have no respect for that. It's the same thing on the other side. Look at Ted Cruz, who's spent his last two years being made fun of by Donald Trump, and then we see Trump saying Cruz is the right guy in Texas to go against Beto O'Rourke. It's just so much political theater, and it really just turned me off entirely.

I wasn't planning to vote in 2016. I was with my mom, we were at Albertsons grocery store around the corner from my house, and they were in there voting. My mom voted, and it took her literally ten seconds. She said, "You should do it," and I said, "I don't know, I don't really think I want to." And she was like, "Aaron, it just took a minute." So I said, "Okay, fine." I just voted for Hillary. I felt bad about it for two years.

Tides don't change that quickly.

I am the worlds greatest political pessimist (or I will be if I outlive John Emerson), but actually they do, if they change at all. I wouldn't get your hopes up unduly, but electoral swings can be surprisingly sudden, especially with FPTP.

16: please tell me that's a Russian bot.

There are things that I'm aware of where I'm certain I'm right. But for most things, although I feel strongly, it's very probable that there's some aspect of this that I don't understand. Somebody provides a new avenue of thought, and it changes the way I think about something. I never felt certain enough to vote. But I'm a political-science student, and the talk of voting is really big in my circle of friends. In 2016, I almost did. Of course, I'm not a big fan of Trump, but I didn't know if Trump was going to be a flash in the pan or -- I just didn't know what to do. I didn't want to help something that might end up being wrong.

This person needs to pay more attention to my favorite Rush lyrics.

Kids today are all about Rush.

19: Today's Tom Sawyer, mean mean guy?

20, 21: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_12389.html#1487995

I know I quoted it once here, but I guess Moby quoting it will have to do.

2: I just read an article the other day about tribal responses to the ND decision. Tribal councils are mobilizing like crazy to make sure their members get the documents they need to vote. In places where the county government is responsive to requests for a street address, they are helping people go through that process. In other places, like Sioux County (I think), where requests had to start by calling the sheriff, who wasn't always responsive, the tribe took the attitude: "Screw this. We're a domestic sovereign nation. If the white government is dragging their feet about issuing street addresses, we will do it ourselves." So they've set up an operation at the tribal offices where members can go in, locate their house on a satellite map, and get a street address assigned to it and a freshly-minted tribal photo ID card with that address on it. They were printing so many ID cards that the printers kept overheating. And of course, all these members with new street addresses understand that it's the Republicans who were trying to stop them from voting. This could get interesting.

22: I knooooooooooooow, you standpiper.

I can't deal with the uncertainty, so I switched preemptive despair (which is not my usual style). I'm steeling myself to read on November 6th that exit polls show that Republicans turned out in record numbers to show their support for raping and Jew-murdering.

OT except for impending disaster: We recently read the kid Comet in Moominland -- I was not at all informed of how great that book is. Everyone likes the Moomins and I'm an everyone, but the way it sustains the scale and inconsistencies of a dream, then transcends the point of confusion and dread at which you would have to wake up, is just amazing.

Despair from the jaws of victory, I tell ya.

Of course, I'm not a big fan of Trump, but I didn't know if Trump was going to be a flash in the pan or -- I just didn't know what to do.

Yeah, maybe he'd only be president for 3 months, then get bored and we'd have another election. (rolls eyes until they fall out of head)

That article is the worst thing I've read all day. Those fucking rationalizations make my head spin.

We've all heard that "a liberal is someone who won't take his own side in an argument". Today it's possible to be so liberal, or "woke", that you can't even acknowledge you HAVE a side in an argument.

What do you mean in 27, teo? I'm not even remotely going to click through to that nonvoter article.

Just that liberals always have a tendency to look at even an objectively favorable environment and fixate on any hint of negative possibilities as proof that everything is hopeless and we're doomed.

I get that everyone's still shell-shocked from 2016, but the situation is very different now. All the evidence points to a very likely Dem victory, and the main question is how extensive a victory it'll be. (A lot of people did think this was the case in 2016 too, but that was wishful thinking and they were wrong. It was always closer than a lot of people thought.)

Did anybody else see the reports that Republican operatives were trying to pay women to accuse Mueller of sexual harassment?

It's good to stay nervous. The other side has no morals.

and fixate on any hint of negative possibilities as proof that everything is hopeless and we're doomed.

In our defense, everything is hopeless and we're doomed.

32/33: got it. In my case, I'm not particularly despairing about the midterms, but I am guilty* of craving time for "self-care" and thought Traister's piece did a good job of a) acknowledging that feeling and b) showing a path that would lead out of it as swiftly as humanly possible. The stuff stressing me out is not going to change overnight after the election, and will require a lot of ongoing work and inuring oneself to awfulness. I think she's dead right that this feeling is unfamiliar to a lot of people.

*using the world relatively lightly

35.2: You've just got to remember what Jesus said on the cross - "Always look on the bright side of life."

The bright side of 34 is this.

33 seems nutty to me, the Dem house chances are comparable to Clinton's chances in 2016. Yes we're going to pick up seats either way, but we need to get control of a chamber.

Also, 39 is right.

538's final 2016 forecast gave Clinton a 71% chance of winning. They currently forecast an 86% chance that Dems take the House in 2018. Whether those are different enough to change how you view the situation is a matter of opinion, I suppose.

33: The evidence pointed to Clinton winning, too. Sam Wang gave Clinton a 99% chance of winning. Conventional wisdom would have the Dems winning this time, but it depends on turnout and Trump has shown an ability to motivate voters in a way models miss -- because the models were calibrated before we discovered you can pick up votes by direct appeals to evil.

Anyway, for me the pessimism is defensive. If I'm not prepared for it, Republicans maintaining control of Congress will break me.

Anyway, I agree that the Traister piece is good.

I just now realized I've been thinking that retaking the House was a foregone conclusion. Jesus christ it's hard for me to be pessimistic.

Also I blame Comey more than I blame the 2016 pollsters. Is there a less productive comment to make?

I'd remembered both at "around 80" which I think was true pre-Comey pre-Kavanaugh. But you're right it's a little better now.

45: If you have to ask you've obviously been skipping my comments and I'm a little hurt.

Kanye has switched sides again. That's probably a good sign. Or not.

38: He used his mom's phone number.

This is especially for you, Moby.

48: Yexit

If you could make a last minute campaign donation, but not a huge donation, it would be better to pick a single race rather than donate to one of those "slates" of candidates, wouldn't it? I find it somewhat demoralizing to look at how little each candidate would get from even a $200 donation in something like this, like I'm nowhere near being in a position to even help tip things one way or another via donations at that scale.

I like to collect quotes and after the 2016 election I remembered I had one by H.L. Mencken.

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Of course, as I think about other issues of the day...

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -Woody Allen

I guess I am sort of a pessimist so when things actually work out I am pleasantly surprised but mostly I am not disappointed.

52: Yes, and at this point even most individual House races are saturated with cash. If you really want to have an impact state legislative races are your best bet.

2, 23: Here's the story about the North Dakota tribal efforts to get their members addresses. (In the NYT).

41, 44: The way I look at it (assuming 538's numbers are roughly correct) is that in 2016, we had a chance to save vs. Trump by rolling a 3-6 on a d6, and we rolled a 2. Now we have a chance to save for half damage with a 2-6 (and a critical success with a 6 will also give us the Senate for 1/4 damage instead). The odds are better this time, but a 1 will still result in serious damage. Hope for the best (since the odds of at least some success are truly on our side), but mentally prepare for the possibility of the worst as well.
And do what you can to mobilize the vote wherever possible.

Aaaaaaaaaaaugh.

53. I had always assumed that like many Mencken quotes, that one was falsely attributed, but Snopes says "True."

56. I always failed on rolls like that.

||

Serfs, by their productive labour and gifts, supported the ruling lords and nobility; thus both nobility and monks, because they did not need to labour in the world, were ideally more able to live according to the dharma. In addition, because of their favoured economic position, lords were also able to serve as exemplary merit-makers.

That's nice work, if you can get it.

The serfdom, or the merit-making?

The latter.

I think it involves hitting gongs a lot.

Petri on the nonvoting youngs.

Mail makes me nervous. The stamps. The stamps are FOREVER. I can't go back to the post office after the incident.

I'm curious what people think of Kevin Drum today making an argument which sounds plausible, but also doesn't feel right to me, and I don't know that I trust my intuitions.

And that brings me circuitously to my point: broadly speaking, the world is not worse than it used to be. We simply see far more of its dark corners than we used to, and we see them in the most visceral possible way: live, in color, and with caustic commentary. Human nature being what it is, it's hardly surprising that we end up thinking the world is getting worse.

Instead, though, consider a different possibility: the world is roughly the same as it's always been, but we see the bad parts more frequently and more intensely than ever before. What has that produced?

Well, sure, it helped produce Donald Trump. There's a downside to everything. But what it's also produced is far more awareness of all those dark corners of the world. And while that may be depressing as hell, that awareness in turn has produced #MeToo. It's produced #BlackLivesMatter. It's produced a rebellion among the young. It's produced the #Resistance. It's produced more awareness of extreme weather events. It's produced an entire genre of journalism, the health care horror story, that in turn has produced a growing acceptance that we need something better.

I could go on, but the point I want to make is simple: if you want to make things better, you first have to convince people that something bad is happening. Social media does that. Hoo boy, does it do that. But this is a good thing, even if it doesn't always feel that way. Shining a light on the dark corners is the first step toward getting people to give a damn, and for all its faults social media is absolutely stellar at doing that.

He's claiming that the internet and social media is purely a transparency device, and doesn't play a role in stoking and intensifying movements, for better or worse?

I mean, the internet didn't produce the worst side of human nature, for sure. But it accelerates transmission of it a whole hell of a lot. (As well as the best sides of human nature, to be fair.)

165: I somehow got the feeling that Kevin Drum didn't even believe his own argument. Substantively -- sure social media is great at showing the truth about the "dark corners of the world". But it's just as good at spreading lies.

He's claiming that the internet and social media is purely a transparency device, and doesn't play a role in stoking and intensifying movements, for better or worse?

Not exactly. I think he's arguing that, on balance it makes genuine problems more visible. But that is a good way of identifying what doesn't feel right about the argument.

I mean, it's certainly the case that newspapers, radio, and television spread lies as well as news, but we still think of them as having had a positive impact on new distribution.

On another hand, part of what's so annoying is the way that it feels like everything is spin these days. As Tim Burke just wrote

Readers swarm over everything now, stripping any writing down into a series of declarative flags that sort everyone into teams, affinities, objectives. There's no appetite for difficult problems that can't be solved or worked, or for testimonies that give us a window into a lived world. No pleasure in the prose itself, and thus none in the writing of it.

Like graduate school.

I do sometimes think of Kotsko noting that Trump still hasn't come close (that we know of, excluding The Button) to killing as many people as GWB did via wars. But I unsubscribed from Drum a couple of months ago when his tendentions on housing and homelessness got severe.

But it accelerates transmission of it a whole hell of a lot. (As well as the best sides of human nature, to be fair.)
Actually it doesn't. Lies spread much faster than truth on social media.

73: If 9/11 happened while Trump was president, I think the death toll would have been much higher.

75: Yes, but we're talking about the state of the world as it is; the howling horror that is Trump's mind is adequately established at this point.

Amusing investigation into a mini-Trump in Michigan, who appears to have been responsible for the messianic Jew being put on stage to talk about Pittsburgh.

I read the Drum thing there before it was brought up here and my emotional reaction was "No!" When I thought about it, all his examples, metoo, BLM, resistance, they're all failures. Is policing notably kinder than before the internet, has the #resistance done anything to stop the roll of republican bad ideas, are sexist douchbags now barred from high office? No, no, and no. Well, I'm no expert on policing, but the "submit or we beat you and arrest you for 'resisting' seems to get an awful lot of airplay." So now we get to be aware earlier of "dark corners" as they expand to soil and blacken us all. Yay internet. [Sorry, not a cheery week for me and I guess it shows.]

[obShame over misplaced end quote]

I say that climate change is so advanced and so much more extreme than our willingnesss to address it that the world is actually substantially worse than it was for Drum's lifetime.

Actually it doesn't. Lies spread much faster than truth on social media.

The best sides of humanity are cat photos and when we all bonded over Left Shark, so you're wrong.

Cat's aren't cute. Cats are sociopathic parasites. You're just proving my point.

OMG you put an apostrophe there. You're the worst part of the internet.

One thing I find depressing is that, from what little I know, coordinated online misbehavior (hacking etc.) seems to have entirely moved right and/or been co-opted by state actors. I really do not think this bodes well. Is this anyone's (observational!!) area of expertise here? Lurkers, even?

82: GODDAMNIT. I blame the internet for being a bad influence.

83: It isn't my expertise. This being the internet I'll go ahead and talk anyway, to say that "hacking" and "co-ordinated online misbehavior" are very different things and need to be disaggregated. AIUI the most powerful hackers are nation states, and the distribution of power tracks that of conventional military power fairly closely. I take that to be no big deal. If you have some fundamental problem with the state possessing means of violence, maybe you disagree.

All I'm really saying is that someone should have stolen all of Trump's tax returns and released them to the public by now. I have been patiently sitting and waiting for almost three years. I have a couple more items on the wishlist, but I'd be happy enough with that one.

You misspelled 'pee tape'.

I think you left your auto-responder on again.

Half-assed last minute Halloween costume idea: Make a letter 'P' in tape on your shirt.

The Burke post in 71 is really good and captures some of my own frustrations about blogging these days.

84, etc.:
The worst thing is that the ubiquity of all the "dark corners" provides validation to people who like the dark corners. You are a Nazi sympathizer? You can find enough others on the net to think "hey, these are my people and this is really a thing!" instead of the pre-web state, where a few asshats sat in their basements and fantasized about leather uniforms and killing the non-Aryan, and sometimes feeling they were wrong to do so, because they knew being a Nazi was bad and everyone said so. Now they get validation. The web can also (and did!) produce hundreds of little tribes that spend their time praising each other and yelling loudly at anyone who isn't in their tribe or disagrees with their beliefs, and those tribes aren't all Nazis but they suck, too.

The sad thing is the same dynamic produces things like #metoo and trans rights and so on.

ps: we are doomed.

The web can also (and did!) produce hundreds of little tribes that spend their time praising each other and yelling loudly at anyone who isn't in their tribe or disagrees with their beliefs, and those tribes aren't all Nazis but they suck, too.

I like Unfogged.

The others don't have horrible puns.

Also, I spend most of my day with people who are not in my tribe. Also, I hardly ever say anything nice about anyone, here or elsewhere.

65: I keep wondering if I would feel this freaked out if it was 1971? I think 1971 was objectively much more horrible than today, but would it have seemed that way at the time?

OT: Some of the parents taking their kids around are in costume, but despite the warm weather, there's been not one Sexy X.

Wasn't that Emma Frost's alias before she joined the Hellfire Club?

Be the change, Moby!

96: + "other than myself"

83: Dankest shitlord personality (Off-Air)

96: We did not get a single trick-or-treater tonight. I tell you, when I am King of the World, there is going to be a 100% ban on "trunk-or-treat," mall trick-or-treating, Hallowe'en "alternative" events and the like. I wanna see 80% of the 6-to-12 year-old population dragging around pillowcases full of real candy with fucking peanuts in it. In public space! Without much chaperonage!

Yeah okay 83 sounded idiotic, in a way that will ruin my next few rounds of the deadpan-naif act. I just want someone to leak the tax returns. Anyway, it's easy enough to embarrass most obvious targets without stealing their passwords.

I just want someone to leak the tax returns.

Write them on a kidney stone.

Stupid tags.

WILL you not stop following me around talking about urine? What are you, "OPINIONATED INCONTINENT SEA LION"?

That's not all me.

93. The puns make all the difference.

This fivethirtyeight article which asks the question, "if Democrats don't take control of the Senate in 2018, when they're facing a very difficult map, how will they be positioned to take control in 2020?" is making me depressed.

I have an intuitive belief that if Democrats are well positioned in the national popular vote that it should translate to gradual but consistent gains in the Senate and it's always discouraging to be reminded that isn't true.

I have an intuitive belief that if Democrats are well positioned in the national popular vote that it should translate to gradual but consistent gains in the Senate and it's always discouraging to be reminded that isn't true.

One thing this year's cycle is demonstrating well is that the Senate is (deliberately) very very very anti-majoritarian in structure, much more so than the House or the Electoral College.

I don't have time to read the article, but the 2020 map is way better than the 2018 map, and a whole bunch of our coalition votes more reliably in presidential years.

In 2018, we have a bunch of folks who had the Obama tailwind in 2012. In 2014, they're going to have a bunch of folks who squeaked in in 2014, when our folks were staying home because, what, who says you have to vote every time.

That said, our Sen Daines is going to be a very formidable opponent, and even if we had a lot of top tier talent on our bench, most thinking pols are going to be thinking of giving this race a pass. Yes, he's a fundamentalist nutjob, but he's way better at dealing with constituents than the fundamentalist nutjob currently representing us in the House.

If there's anything striking to me about 108, it's the strength of the partisan lean. 18 states lean Republican by 10 points or more, 5 of those by 30 or more; 5 states lean Democratic by 10 points or more. Those are big differences.

I realize that 2018 is a bad year for Democrats in the Senate no matter what, just based on the number of open seats, and I'm not sure how that would influence the partisan leans. The Cook Partisan Voting Index of all states in a presidential election has smaller extremes in both directions but the trend is the same.

I don't have time to read the article, but the 2020 map is way better than the 2018 map, and a whole bunch of our coalition votes more reliably in presidential years.

That was my assumption, and there are a lot more Republicans up for re-election than Democrats. But that doesn't mean there are a lot of good opportunities.

There are republicans running in the following states (bolding states that are less than R+10 and possible pick-ups)

WY, ID, OK, SD, WV, AR, NE, KS, KY, MT, SC, TX, MI, AK, GA, AZ, IO, NC, CO, ID, ME (Susan Collins)

And here are the states in which Democracts are running (possible losses in bold, and counting NM as a safe seat)

AL (Doug Jones), NH, VA, MI, MN, NM, OR, IL, NJ, DE, RI, MA

"IO" should be "IA" for Iowa.

I blame the post office.

Also, I'm not sure why I wrote "ID" between "CO" and "ME." If you're actually curious, the chart in the linked article is easier to read, but I was trying to summarize, and it's basically accurate.

538's partisan lean metric is heavily weighted (50%) by 2016 presidential results, so it may be distorted a bit by dynamics specific to that year.

109: It's obvious when someone wins the Electoral College with a minority of votes. I'm curious if anyone has tallied up the vote totals from the 2012-2016 Senate elections (plus special elections) to show the degree to which Republicans have lost the popular vote there. I'm looking around, but I haven't had any luck finding anything.

The closest I'm getting is that in 2016 Democrats received 45.2 million to Republicans' 39.3 million. If you don't count Loretta Sanchez's votes in CA (top-two election where both were Democrats), it goes down to 42.2 million for Dems.

I totally remember seeing 117 for the House, at least. Not sure what year it was.

The Republicans got more votes for the House than the Dems in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2016

Oh, duh, Wikipedia posts totals for each year. Their numbers differ from USA Today's, but whatever. Including the Alabama special election, I get 123.0 million votes for Democrats vs 104.8 million for Republicans. Wow.

For comparison, in 2016 the Republicans actually won the popular vote for the House, and Clinton only had about 3 million more votes than Trump. The Senate is much worse.

keep in mind there is some fudge factor vs a fully democratic system where everyone's vote counted equally because the districts with democrats 'packed' frequently don't even have republicans running so the vote total is depressed (for both parties)

I've said that I think Daines has a good shot at re-election, but it's hard to call a state that elected a Dem governor in 2016 and is about to either re-elect a Dem senator or not by a very slim margin, +17R.

Is this on topic because of free speech issues? Or just because it's great vandalism.

|| I don't remember whether I mentioned at the time that a crew from NHK interviewed me a few weeks ago about the midterm. Apparently, they've shown it twice already. The clip isn't on the website . . .
Toughest part of the thing was being asked why I don't support Trump. My answer wasn't word salad I don't think, but I definitely didn't get everything said. |>

NHK?

No thanks. I just ate.

keep in mind there is some fudge factor vs a fully democratic system where everyone's vote counted equally because the districts with democrats 'packed' frequently don't even have republicans running so the vote total is depressed (for both parties)

This is important. I think both parties had a similar number of uncontested races in 2016 though. Dem ones mostly in NY, Mass and California, Repub ones mostly in the South (3 out of 4 Arkansas races didn't have a Democrat candidate, according to that Wikipedia page). I'm very surprised that there were more Repub votes for the House, actually. Most of the uncontested seats in either direction were in non-swing states, so you can't blame depressed turnout in either direction. I guess I just have to blame Robby Mook.

You can now blame federal judges for some of it, at least in North Dakota.

If you like blaming federal judges for stuff you're going to love the next 30 years.

126 That wasn't a typo.

124: This long Chronicle of Higher Ed piece (linked from your link) suggests that Nebraska Republicans are on a hair trigger about liberal professors. It sounds awful.

Free speech was supposed to be one of the few remaining ideas in American politics that could bring everyone together. But free speech doesn't resolve political conflicts; it creates them. In Nebraska, everyone had their say. But the more they talked about what had happened on the university plaza that August afternoon, the more reasons they found to distrust one another.

Pessimization! That sign was made much funnier by the reaction, though.

Yes. Plus Fartenberry's district, while including Lincoln, is still mostly rural Nebraska.

Anyway, it's all a dominance play. If they can make you watch every word while they back/copy Trump's openly expressed racism, they win. Which is why I'm always saying Fartenberry from now on.

132-134: At the risk of being a downer, this is why we're screwed. We can't play their game of ridicule and physical intimidation, and we can't not play it. Punching Nazis is absolutely called for, but where Trump stands at a podium and calls on supporters to beat people up -- and solidifies his support thereby -- we* will tut-tut about a mouthy liberal professor confronting some asshole kid.

*For certain values of "we."

I think that is changing. Also, farts are funny.

135: I cringed reading about the grad student's objectionable behavior, though -- it seemed so purely immature, and she was in her 40s! Conversely, the idea that the "No Ban/No Wall" signs were "anti-Trump" per se, rather than expressing opposition to particular policies, seemed like an acknowledgement of the cult of personality on the part of the GOP representatives.

I would, in theory, like to sit down with some of these conservative activist students and ask them what makes "conservative" feel like an identity rather than a set of political positions. Do they feel forced into the identitarian defense by rhetoric on both sides? Do they feel that conservative "beliefs" are like Christian "beliefs," or inextricable from them? Is it (not that they would confess to this) a deep need to belong to a group like all those other group members get to do?

I tried to write a post just now with a launching off point of "Rightwingers live in a world where they genuinely believe that the migrant caravan contains terrorists and necessitates a deployment of 15,000 troups" and riffing off the delusional world in which they inhabit, but it was too depressing to compose.

138: Didn't Bat Ye'or already write that?

I keep thinking of the Hungarians or whoever it was slaughtering and enslaving the Peasants' Crusade.

Cornhuskers aren't peasants.

The peasants in question were pre-Colombian, so.

they had no corn to husk.

You can husk barley. It's just very awkward.

137: See, lk is part of the problem, talking about trying to understand conservatives. It as though punching isn't even an option among decent people.

I had an extraordinarily low opinion of conservatives 10 years ago, but not low enough!

I've said that I think Daines has a good shot at re-election, but it's hard to call a state that elected a Dem governor in 2016 and is about to either re-elect a Dem senator or not by a very slim margin, +17R.

I'm curious what you think of Yglesias's post today looking at the reverse case -- Republican governors in "blue" states (both on its own merits and to what extent it applies, mutatis mutandis to Democratic politicians in MT).

If voters in solidly blue states like Massachusetts and Maryland were genuinely eager to shift to an equilibrium with higher taxes and significantly more generous social services, they could get that fairly easily. Jealous, in particular, has the most serious and well-considered version of a Medicare-for-all plan that I've seen. But it seems pretty clear that the voters mostly don't want that.

They don't like Trump (he got 34% in Maryland and 33% in Massachusetts), and they send tons of Democrats to Congress to fight Trump, and they keep their legislatures in Democratic Party hands, and they clearly don't want Republicans to actually enact a governing agenda, but they're perfectly happy to just see basic competent management of state government with no big policy changes.

See, I think party id, and policy positions, are important to a strong majority of voters, but that elections are decided by the minority that is voting on things like charisma. Which, like everything else, comes to most voters through a media filter.

I don't know about Mass, but Maryland has its gubernatorial elections in the off-presidential years, when poor and minority turnout is typically lower. Is this an accident? It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't.

To be clear, I'm not hoping to understand young conservatives for the sake of the greater good. It's just a selfish desire.

Well, okay then. I guess I can get behind that. And it is trickier punching the young ones. You really want to go after the old, arthritic ones that aren't so likely to punch back.

Keith Rothus is running commercials that say, basically, "I'm not a Nazi" without ever mentioning that the head of his party is. I'm both a little offended at the omission and a little hopeful that he feels compelled to pay the TV to say he's not a Nazi.

150: And Trump said in a tweet that Rothfus was the best at mourning* so he's like double-plus not a Nazi.

*One assumes other than Trump himself, of course.

135: One of the problems with approving punching Nazis is that it often implies that the mob gets to judge who qualifies as a Nazi. The last time this was an issue in the US, back in the early 40s, a number of the people getting punched (and threatened with worse) as alleged Nazi sympathizers were Jehovah's Witnesses who were simply refusing to salute or pledge to the American flag, on the grounds that it expressed an allegiance owed only to God. (I found out a few weeks ago that the famous "fighting words" case establishing an exception to free speech was based on the somewhat intemperate remarks addressed by a Jehovah's Witness to the sheriff who had declined to rescue him from the mob that was beating him up and threatening him with lynching.) Seems like a fraught history that one should be very cautious about encouraging repeating.

152: We live in a fallen world. Neo-Nazis are a much bigger threat to the Republic than mob violence aimed at Jehovah's Witnesses.