I kind of wonder if Trump wimping out in favor of DeSantis would be worse. The bulk of the professional Republican Party has taken his object lesson on how to go up several levels of impunity, and DeSantis and Youngkin illustrate that if you can do the same things as Trump without literally being him, the media will give you a lot more benefit of the doubt.
No big surprises in the Alaska results so far, at least in the statewide races; some of the legislative races have had unexpected twists. We won't know the results of the special election for two weeks since they won't do the ranked-choice calculations until all the absentee ballots are in.
I'm pretty sure the current thinking is that Fox was distancing itself from Trump but has now, as it's become clear that the party is still a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump, Inc., abandoned that retreat and embraced him again. I don't watch Fox, but it does seem like the 1/6 hearings and especially the FBI raid have consolidated Trump's control of the party, which some people--David Frum, for example--think is terrible and I, giving in to my baser (sorry) instincts, find delightful.
The anti-Cheney campaign must have been huge. They called my house asking for money twice at least. Presumably more often because we usually don't answer the phone. It's been a long time since I've gotten a human calling me on behalf of a Republican.
Republican campaigns are terrible at targeting. I actually don't have a good sense of why; they have plenty of money and in theory should be able to build the sorts of highly granular national databases that Democrats use, but they just haven't. It's similar to how it took them forever to come up with a fundraising platform comparable to ActBlue. Republican campaign consultants as a class seem to be really behind the times in weird ways.
Genuine question: how does that square with Cambridge Analytica and that whole story about how the Republicans have leapfrogged to super sophisticated models. (The answer might be: that was all myth. I really don't know, which is why I'm asking.)
I just read some clickbait story on how Laura Ingraham suggested that the Republicans are ready for a change from the constant battle and got raked over on TruthSocial and I could read two more of those every day from now 'til November '24 without ever getting tired of them. Dear god I hope the Trump-base and the Q-base and whatever else there is of the Republican base fight like wolverines until the end.
ActBlue is kind of convenient, but you think they could find a way to send me fewer than ten emails a day.
Just recently I was so bored I opened one of those fundraising emails and apparently they were raising money on the notion that the Dems would impeach Kavanaugh, and I tried (and failed) to imagine the poor sap that gave money thinking that there was actually some chance of this happening.
I don't read the emails and I will never donate on a link off one. I just go to the campaign page.
Yes the Cambridge Analytica supersophistication is myth.
Yeah, I didn't follow the story very closely but my understanding is that it did turn out to be basically a myth, hyped up by credulous media coverage. The media loves a "revolutionizing politics with tech and Big Data!" story and pretty much every cycle some campaign or other takes advantage of that to puff themselves up. Cambridge Analytica was the same tendency with a "dark side" twist.
The Dem tools are okay, but they're not that sophisticated and the data is riddled with errors. The Dem consultant class has plenty of its own issues.
If you do a volunteer shift, you get texts and emails to sign you up for the next volunteer shift even if you've already signed up for the next shift an hour ago with the volunteer coordinator.
Republican campaign consultants as a class seem to be really behind the times in weird ways.
Isn't the answer simply that the Republican Party is 50% pure grift at this point? I never bought the "Trump never wanted to win" thing, but it was clearly the case that he and pretty much every other 2016 R candidate was just in it to raise his profile for future griftportunities. And it's been more or less like this since the rise of direct mail in the '70s, so the number of consultants who are unambiguously trying to win by the most effective means possible, rather than compile lists of real suckers while, if convenient, winning, is down to a minority.
In fact, I think this is even more the case now that every College Republican runs for high profile office as young as possible, such that even the ones who are sincerely in thrall to the party don't spend any time learning at the knees of old, wise heads. On a related note, the candidates are only in it to own the libs on TV, not to win office, let alone do anything while in office. The entire edifice is profoundly disconnected from trying to win elections by raising funds smartly, spending them to add voters, develop winning messages, etc. And of course our fucked up Constitution allows them to remain competitive despite all this.
12: To be sure. Even if you're not grifting the electorate, you can still be grifting the party by focusing more on your own career than on winning elections. You need to win a certain amount, of course, to get the good gigs, but losing the right way is hardly career-ending.
Anyway, not to count chickens, but all signs are positive for November, and I wonder if/when that will start locking into coverage. It's still fairly new news (I looked at some tracking polls, and the earliest clear movement is only about a month ago) and subject to change, but A. abortion isn't going away and is clearly favoring Dems, B. gas prices are dropping steadily, which is the only economic news that probably matters in the timeframe remaining, C. whatever happens with Mar A Lago, it's clearly not going to help R turnout.
Point being, if the storyline turns clearly positive*, I feel like at some point that flips the odds on the House, where individual candidate quality matters little, but national vibe matters much.
And then we just need a convenient gas explosion at SCOTUS or whatever and the day is saved.
*and we know goddamn well the national press doesn't want that, but I'm not sure they can villainize Biden in a midterm the way they did to Gore & HRC in actual POTUS campaigns
14.1: Sure, but even if you're just grifting, it's good to target the right people.
Actually, following on 16.2/16.*: In '10 and '12, when Rs were losing clearly winnable Senate seats due to nominating utter clowns, the press actually did decide to play up that angle. If ostensibly purple PA is cruising to 60-40 wins for US Sen & PA Gov because the Rs are complete clowns/lunatics, while multi-child Herschel Walker blows a race in which he was strongly favored, I could see that narrative taking hold, which would probably directly help in House races where (obviously) Dems will be facing many lunatics who have relatively little media profile to make clear their lunacy.
I don't know the best way to tar them all with the same brush, but it would be super-useful to have the sort of shorthand Rs used for years with "chardonnay-sipping" and the like. "Trump-fellating" seems like it should work, but doesn't.
Isn't the answer simply that the Republican Party is 50% pure grift at this point?
Yeah, that's clearly a big part of it, and I think a related dynamic is an increasing divergence of interests between candidates and their consultants as the candidates get crazier and the consultants more cynical. It still doesn't fully explain why they're so bad at pretty basic stuff, though. A lot of it is probably just laziness and path dependency, I guess.
At lower levels one factor is that a lot of GOP districts are so insular and/or gerrymandered that Republican candidates can easily win while doing literally nothing to campaign, and that leads to staffers getting lazy and letting skills atrophy, or never developing them in the first race. More competitive races would weed out a lot of this stuff.
We see this a lot in Alaska, actually, where Republicans do very well in state and federal races where they have an R by their name on the ballot, but they struggle a lot in nonpartisan local races because they don't have the skills to campaign without that crutch.
Oz's wife is from a family of Swedenborgians. Not just closet private Swedenborgians either, the organized kind. The house he owns in PA used to be one of their, well church is the wrong word, but for tax purposes that's what it was. I knew there were some in upstate New York near Ithaca, but apparently they're not alone.
I haven't really heard anything bad about Swedenborgians, other than how the one dumped Taylor Swift.
Though, according to Wikipedia, that might be Buddha's fault.
Johnny Appleseed was a Swedenborgian missionary.
You can't get more American than apple pie and crudités.
As it will happen, of course, that for a long time to come there will be unmarried men in our Church who are not able to marry, and married men who have been received among us, but who have unchristian wives, rejecting the New Doctrine, and who thus must live in a disharmonious marriage, it follows that when such men are driven so strongly by the inborn amor sexus that they cannot contain themselves, it is inevitable, for the sake of order, that they be permitted, the former to take a mistress and the latter a concubine. But no one is permitted to live thus in our Church who does not report it to the Bishop or the Marriage-Priest. These are to examine, according to Swedenborg's rules, De Fornicatione et de Concubinato, if his case is truly such as he presents it. After this he is to receive their written permission, in which the conditions are to be carefully stated, and he may live with his mistress or concubine. If this be observed, he may still be received among us as a dear member and brother, and his life will be no reproach to him. But if he does not report it he must be punished, and this in the degree that his life is disorderly; for no kinds of adulteries or anti-conjugial life can be tolerated in the New Jerusalem if the Church is to continue and the Lord to find an habitation among us.
If you register your adultery, haven't you just invented civil marriage?
Except for the complete lack of concern for what a woman might be thinking.
There's a gorgeous Swedenborgian church in Saint Paul I would have loved to get married in, but the rental fee was too steep.
Vaguely on-topic, this story about Biden's family origins is pretty interesting: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/the-untold-history-of-the-biden-family
I had been following Biden's career for a while because of that state that I live in, and I was actually stunned when he decided to run for the presidency this last time because I thought it was so likely to be disastrous for Hunter's sobriety (this was before the laptop & Burisma stuff, back when Hunter was doing crack and leaving his wife for his late brother's widow). That left me with the ethical question of whether someone should let possible/likely harm to an adult child dissuade them from major career decisions. As the daughter of a recovering alcoholic and a severely mentally ill parent that I've cut off, I don't have a great answer to this. One of the many reasons that I've decided to never run for office, though, is the likelihood that painful family stuff would be made public. I wouldn't want that to happen while me parents were still alive.
That left me with the ethical question of whether someone should let possible/likely harm to an adult child dissuade them from major career decisions.
As an imprudent blogger, I feel this.