Wow, even in an off-year election, the Democrats can't get a majority of college-educated white men. They really are the party of white college-educated women.
VA is not surprising. It is home to not only to scads of fed workers, but legions of NGO workers, all facing downsizing, missed paychecks or the end of their federal gravy train, in a different manner. All the vendors who provide them goods and services downstream, were also hit hard.
Would guess NJ should be more worrisome for Reps. Sherrill was a very flawed candidate and Reps were still shellacked. Reps did a lousy job explaining Sherrill is really just the sensible shoe version of AOC, if AOC had pocketed $7 million dollars in legal, but offensive insider trading.
Perhaps most disconcerting, there exists virtually no daylight between Spanberger's, Sherrill's and AOC's House voting records. Both Abagail and Mikey will continue to expand government, champion child social engineering, and chase Green fantasies. Both will quietly cheer open borders for any world resident, that is not a violent convicted felon, no valid asylum claim needed. In short, if voters enjoyed Biden's policies, they will love their continuation in NJ and VA.
Mamdani is an entirely different situation. Americans have just self sorted as never before in US history. We shall see if Mamdani's election prompts more.
If Reps learn anything, it should be they cannot allow Dems with Progressive voting records to continue to label themselves "Moderate", without a better Rep response. Reps should also give real thought to drastically increasing the incentive for migrants to self deport, while better explaining welfare and healthcare costs to voters.
Voters knew that Jay Jones wanted to kill children. Voters knew that Mikey Sherrill got rich in Congress, that she wanted to continue green energy policy and open borders, that she cheated, and that she got both her daughters into the Naval Academy. If voters want that, no republican should even bother running.
College educated women in general are wealthier than average. The biggest real problem with the Democrats in NJ is the affect their green policies are having on electricity prices. The economy in NJ is quite strong with lots of houses being built. I guess educated white women's distaste of President Trump is greater than their discomfort over electricity prices.
As I've said elsewhere, while it's true that the party out of power tends to overperform in special and midterm elections, it's also true that we usually don't see this scale of turnout differential. Usually the overperformance takes place just outside the boundaries of polling. By contrast, the polling misses here were *massive*--Atlas Intel (the most accurate pollster of the 2024 election) had Sherill winning by maybe a point or two. Others had her winning by five or six. If she had won by those margins, or even at 7 points above, that would have been in line with historical norms of 'overperformance'--but she looks set to win by over double digits. That is a historically abnormal overperformance.
That underscores one thing that is mentioned but not given heavy stress here (understandably, because TLP's focus is mostly on Democrats), which is that anti-coalitional politics cuts both ways. It doesn't uniquely afflict Democrats, and leave Republicans unaffected. If the future of the Republican party is Trumpism, and Trumpism looks like what we've seen since January, the Republican coalition is not going to broaden beyond its current boundaries, and Democratic turnout is going to remain highly elevated. That is not a recipe for a 'permanent Republican majority' or electoral success, any more than pursuing a strategy that narrows your coalition solely to middle-to-upper class white college-educated voters is. Both are, instead, a recipe for a constant ping-ponging back and forth between the party in power, and a continuing broader rise in voter distaste for both parties, which is what we're seeing. (and I fear something that's going to persist, given that the forces of polarization are more technological and economic outgrowths than 'secular' political phenomena)
All that being said, it's still 'the economy, stupid'. Even with a broad coalition, any party in power that is blamed by the public for a stagflationary economy is unlikely to win elections. Despite the ructions of the sixties, the Democrats still had a fairly broad coalition in the seventies--and the memory of Nixon's improprieties to aid them. Stagflation still crushed Carter. And we all know Trump is unlikely to drop his present stagflationary policies. Democrats should use it as an opportunity.
> "If the future of the Republican party is Trumpism, and Trumpism looks like what we've seen since January, the Republican coalition is not going to broaden beyond its current boundaries, and Democratic turnout is going to remain highly elevated. That is not a recipe for a 'permanent Republican majority' or electoral success"
I think leftists live in an alternate reality where blue states are affordable and well-run. Ezra Klein points out in Abundance that Florida offers better quality social services than New York but at about half the tax burden. He also points out that homelessness is much higher in blue states because housing is so expensive in blue states. And forget Larry's voter registration data, every year hundreds of thousands of people leave blue states for red states. The bluer the state, the faster they leave. If these "grab-bag of goodies", AKA Fabian socialism, actually worked, net migration would be from red to blue.
Republican policies are a durable platform for electoral success. One that Bill Clinton, the last good president before Trump, supported across the board:
- closed borders, so higher paying jobs and cheaper housing
- law and order. White liberals live in safe upper-middle class neighborhoods, the rest of society lives in the bottom rung of a two-tier sci-fi dystopian society is not appealing.
- Apropos of the above, for legal immigrants, living in a law-abiding society *is* the American dream
- cheap energy from an "all of the above" energy policy versus expensive green energy graft
- business-friendly laws that both build and attract business and promote job creation
Those policies have appeal, no doubt, but the nature of their implementation matters. If they are paired with economically illiterate and highly volatile use of inflationary policy tools, and siege-warfare style politics where you're sending the army into your opponents' cities over the objections of state officials, bypassing Congress and ruling by de facto executive fiat, legally subduing your critics in the press, siccing the DOJ on law firms and former public officials you dislike, deporting people for writing editorials that criticize you (See: Rumeysa Ozturk), and engaging in massive acts of corruption to enrich your family to the tune of billions of dollars while the job market sours and prices stay elevated, among 100 other similarly destructive things...
Well, you're going to undermine that positive policy programme. None of those things are necessary to solve issues of employment, law and order, and affordability--all they do is distract from anything you're doing on that front, and provide a powerful incentive for your opponents to turn out in droves.
Durable coalitions are cooperative affairs; they aren't created by imperial means. It's not enough to subdue opponents--you must win them over. And if Trumpism remains imperial in implementation, as it has been since January, then the Republicans shouldn't count on a lasting governing coalition any more than the Democrats.
Inflation is a real issue, but it's a loser for Democrats, not Republicans. It's worth noting that Larry Summers, a Democrat who was one of Obama's economic advisors, predicted that Biden's polices were inflationary and was laughed out of the room by the left. The left has been free-falling from reality ever since 2008.
Inflation rate by year
---------------------
2020: 1.4%
2021: 7.0%
2022: 6.5%
2023: 3.4%
2024: 2.9%
2025: 3.0%
The rest is just leftist grievances that most voters don't care about. The National Guard has gone into cities for two reasons. First, uninvited, because there have been numerous assassination attempts on ICE agents. The Democrats have reverted to their 1950s form of defying the Federal government and getting a similar response. The second case is at the invitation of governors to stop the crime in cities that leftists are unwilling to stop.
The leftist theory of crime actually predates Rousseau and Marx, and goes back to Thomas Moore's Utopia: "For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them. "
That's wonderful for virtue-signaling white liberals who live in a low-crime neighborhoods. Its terrible for the overwhelming majority of law-abiding minority and working class citizens.
No, the pretext for sending in the National Guard was that Trump 'felt' like there was mass disorder on the ground--i.e., that Chicago and Portland were 'war-zones'--yet no proof of such was provided, and this characterization was rebuffed by the chiefs of police in LA, Portland and Chicago. That is why his deployments are running afoul of the courts--in judgements rendered by people *he* appointed: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71481149/134/state-of-oregon-v-trump/
If the whims of the president are sufficient to send troops into cities over the objections of their elected officials, there is no reason the president couldn't deploy troops anywhere he wanted. The next Democratic president could just declare rural, red America a 'warzone' and occupy it with military battalions.
Are you seriously making the argument that that's *okay*?
re: Inflation, perhaps check back more than just five years--the two-party system existed well before then. You'll see both parties have had periods where they've overseen inflation, and neither is really better about it than the other. Go look at the inflation rates Nixon presided over--they were far worse than anything we've dealt with since 2020. At any rate, Trump campaigned on ending it magically on 'day one' *while* slapping tariffs on everything, with no particular explanation as to how. And, as anyone who was seriously paying attention knew, he's had to break that promise.
If we define inflation as the debasement of a currency, of course, Trump and the MAGA Republicans' record is waaaaay worse than Biden's. The dollar remained relatively strong all throughout Obama and Biden's presidency. It ended the Biden presidency more valuable than it was four years prior. It has plummeted in value since Trump re-took office, and declined in value over the course of his first term as well.
No one is occupying cities. National Guard members stand on the street protecting federal property and preventing mobs from, assaulting ICE agents and anyone else. Guardsmen have no police powers, their presence is the deterrent. They are allowed to protect themselves and others, and federal property, that is it.
Had the news on folding laundry the other day when a middle aged Black woman was asked about the Guard in Memphis. She was so broken up she could barely speak. For the first time in their entire lives her kids were safely playing outside. No worries about drive-bys, a dope deal gone wrong or a wayward bullet. If only the Guard could stay forever. By the end I was sobbing, and I imagine most others with a modicum of empathy were also.
The lack of concern on the Left is mind boggling. Women like the Mother being interviewed, spend their lives in war zones, on US soil, for the sin of being poor. Parents hold their breath every time a child exits the house, hoping the kid somehow survives until adulthood. Decades of uninterrupted Dem rule and wasted trillions, and her kids get a month of safely playing outside, in the manner the spoiled brats in Georgetown and Palo Alto, spend their lives.
Dems are entirely comfortable with a child's life determined by the birth canal they exit. The feeling of superiority has ended whatever sympathy may have once existed. It is the reason the SV valley wealthy step over the homeless on their way to world class meals, and no longer notice anymore. It is the reason people who have never experienced crime in their lives whine about the National Guard occupying cities, as they allow kids to play safely outdoors for a few days.
> "Had the news on folding laundry the other day when a middle aged Black woman was asked about the Guard in Memphis. She was so broken up she could barely speak. For the first time in their entire lives her kids were safely playing outside. No worries about drive-bys, a dope deal gone wrong or a wayward bullet. If only the Guard could stay forever. By the end I was sobbing, and I imagine most others with a modicum of empathy were also."
I've seen a ton of these on TikTok. Trump has much better political instincts than I do. I would have said to let these neighborhoods suffer until they vote out the Democrats. But the urban residents have been gaslit by Democrats for so long they don't realize that crime is a choice that cities make.
> "The lack of concern on the Left is mind boggling. Women like the Mother being interviewed, spend their lives in war zones, on US soil, for the sin of being poor. Parents hold their breath every time a child exits the house, hoping the kid somehow survives until adulthood."
Yes, they are. The National Guard is performing functions that are meant to be performed by local police--and that is what militarized police states do. They supplant local law enforcement functions with military functions. They remove the very important and necessary firewall that exists between the police department and the army.
How comfortable are you with President Joe Democrat federalizing your state's National Guard and having them supplant your town's local law enforcement? How comfortable do you think your chief of police is with president Joe Democrat's troops constantly present in his jurisdiction, doing what his officer corps is supposed to be doing? Is "But they're here to help!" really all you need to accept all that?
And if crime does indeed get suppressed by this military build-up, what praytell, do you expect to happen to crime when the military withdraws? If crime increases upon withdrawal--as it highly likely to--would that not then require us to invite the military back in again? Do you not see what the end result of that is? Why are you making arguments for the implementation of a militarized police state in the 21st century? Have you looked at how they all turned out in the 20th?
Thank the establishment Republicans still in power in Congress for failing to pass legislation needed to support more of the MAGA agenda, including the requirement that all elections require voter-ID. Instead they bypass those needed actions to protect their wussy political identity and rely on Trump to take all the heat.
The Biden Democrats caused the massive inflation and jacked up the deficit and debt. Trump only in office less than a year is blamed for not fixing the problems... problems caused by decades of Democrat and establishment Republican failures and mistakes.
We have so many truly uniformed, media gaslit voters that this country might very well be doomed.
Meanwhile Democrats elect the most dirty, incompetent and immoral people that will do nothing to fix any of these problems, but will certainly cause more.
An upset would have been big news, lack of an upset less so. Mamdani is interesting because he is quite a bit more extreme than the D party nationally. He reminds me of AOC more than Sanders.
I'd wish for accurate exit polling especially amongst Hispanic voters, but if wishes were horses we all would ride.
Midterms are half a year away, primaries even sooner.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe "the economy" was also the #1 reason given by Trump voters exiting polls in 2024. This suggests that voters are looking anywhere for economic improvement - affordable housing and medical care, living wages - and don't really care if they get this from Brand X or Brand Y. Maybe Democrats and Republicans should both keep this in mind - stay focused on the economic issues that ALL of us care about and dial way back on divisive issues like identity politics, open borders, AND trans-bigotry since none of these help poor people pay their bills.
I think it's definitely worth watching, but the off-year electorate is completely different from the general electorate, and during realignments, voters in much more in play than before and after.
TLP should have noted the Latino vote and the huge polling miss in NJ by Atlas. Clearly, the level of enthusiasm was missed and remember Ciatarelli ran heavily on Trump endorsement. A lot more of Trump’s low information Latino voters than predicted must have come out to vote, for Sherrill. They’ll likely come out again (normalize) in 2026 and will not support the lunatic Vance in 2028.
I wouldn't read too much into an off-year election. It seems implausible that Hispanic realignment progressed through the first four years of Trump's presidency, but then reversed itself in the fifty year.
What might be worth reading into is that the Dems can't even get 50% of college-educated white males in a high-turnout off-year election. That percentage is only going to drop in the general. You can't win elections on college-educated white women.
The facts that the Democratic party has no popular message and does promote unpopular social issues, has not prevented their sweep of these off-year elections. Personally, I don't think this has much to do with Donald Trump. We shall see.
Both Sherrill and Spanberger won by wider margins than I expected. But given the ongoing class gap, I would have been happier if they had each aligned more closely with labor in a couple of ways.
The NJ AFL-CIO and most of its unions (blue and white collar alike) backed Sherrill, but the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 825, one of the most influential unions in the state, backed Ciattarelli. They cited his strong support for natural gas, which they contrasted with Sherrill's support for solar. While Sherrill is not against gas (and she supports more nuclear as well as more solar), the identification of Democrats with all things green is still something the party needs to confront.
Spanberger got significant labor support (including, encouragingly, the Virginia Police Benevolent Association), but the VA AFL-CIO did not endorse her because she did not support full repeal of the state's right to work law. While her stance of wanting to change the law is better than Earle-Sears wanting to keep the law as is, it's discouraging that Spanberger couldn't take that one extra step. Unions don't always make their best argument on this issue (calling non-union workers "freeloaders" is needlessly rude), but right to work is a bad law for workers.
The state legislature of New York responded to New York City's financial debacle in 1975 by imposing financial controls on the city government. Mamdani will need the consent of Gov. Hochul and the legislature to implement measures such as new corporate and personal city income taxes. Democracy requires that the voters get what they voted for. Yet, if Mamdani runs the city deep into unaffordable debt, it is almost guaranteed that he will ask the state for a bailout and confidently expects to get it.
I've been puzzling for a long time on leanings in my cohort of college educated voters and white women voters in particular. I would like to see more analysis on these trends. It feels like a most unhealthy form of magical thinking, a total disconnect from reality, an abandonment of historical patterns, for good reasons, to vote in a more conservative direction, especially on fiscal matters. It feels dangerous, irresponsible, and like a form of Morning Show extreme and irrelevant vanity.
"It’s not all that surprising that a president who campaigned on tackling inflation but has done little to tame it"
While inflation is a little higher than what is desired, it has been brought down to a level where its not causing shocking pain. 3% is very much closer to 2%-2.5% than is 9%. The 9% number was caused by the massive amount of printed money the Fed injected into the economy. They injected that money to payoff everyone the Democrats promised money in exchange for thwarting President Trump in the 2020 election. President Trump put an immediate stop to the printing of too much money. I would say that he was largely successful in his fight against inflation.
Curious how dems voted because of the government shut down when it was the dems who caused this to begin with. What am I missing? Personally, the more educated the more republican people should vote. Sorry...not dissing on dems (entirely), but standing for SOMETHING is better than falling for anything, which is what they are doing. No guardrails on anything! JMan2819, I'm a PhD educated female and you couldn't pay me to vote democratic. I guess I'm an outlier.
Wow, even in an off-year election, the Democrats can't get a majority of college-educated white men. They really are the party of white college-educated women.
So Democrats voted for Democrats?
VA is not surprising. It is home to not only to scads of fed workers, but legions of NGO workers, all facing downsizing, missed paychecks or the end of their federal gravy train, in a different manner. All the vendors who provide them goods and services downstream, were also hit hard.
Would guess NJ should be more worrisome for Reps. Sherrill was a very flawed candidate and Reps were still shellacked. Reps did a lousy job explaining Sherrill is really just the sensible shoe version of AOC, if AOC had pocketed $7 million dollars in legal, but offensive insider trading.
Perhaps most disconcerting, there exists virtually no daylight between Spanberger's, Sherrill's and AOC's House voting records. Both Abagail and Mikey will continue to expand government, champion child social engineering, and chase Green fantasies. Both will quietly cheer open borders for any world resident, that is not a violent convicted felon, no valid asylum claim needed. In short, if voters enjoyed Biden's policies, they will love their continuation in NJ and VA.
Mamdani is an entirely different situation. Americans have just self sorted as never before in US history. We shall see if Mamdani's election prompts more.
If Reps learn anything, it should be they cannot allow Dems with Progressive voting records to continue to label themselves "Moderate", without a better Rep response. Reps should also give real thought to drastically increasing the incentive for migrants to self deport, while better explaining welfare and healthcare costs to voters.
Voters knew that Jay Jones wanted to kill children. Voters knew that Mikey Sherrill got rich in Congress, that she wanted to continue green energy policy and open borders, that she cheated, and that she got both her daughters into the Naval Academy. If voters want that, no republican should even bother running.
College educated women in general are wealthier than average. The biggest real problem with the Democrats in NJ is the affect their green policies are having on electricity prices. The economy in NJ is quite strong with lots of houses being built. I guess educated white women's distaste of President Trump is greater than their discomfort over electricity prices.
So Kamala Harris lost because of racism and misogyny but Earle-Sears lost because she was a bad candidate with flawed policies. Got it.
As I've said elsewhere, while it's true that the party out of power tends to overperform in special and midterm elections, it's also true that we usually don't see this scale of turnout differential. Usually the overperformance takes place just outside the boundaries of polling. By contrast, the polling misses here were *massive*--Atlas Intel (the most accurate pollster of the 2024 election) had Sherill winning by maybe a point or two. Others had her winning by five or six. If she had won by those margins, or even at 7 points above, that would have been in line with historical norms of 'overperformance'--but she looks set to win by over double digits. That is a historically abnormal overperformance.
That underscores one thing that is mentioned but not given heavy stress here (understandably, because TLP's focus is mostly on Democrats), which is that anti-coalitional politics cuts both ways. It doesn't uniquely afflict Democrats, and leave Republicans unaffected. If the future of the Republican party is Trumpism, and Trumpism looks like what we've seen since January, the Republican coalition is not going to broaden beyond its current boundaries, and Democratic turnout is going to remain highly elevated. That is not a recipe for a 'permanent Republican majority' or electoral success, any more than pursuing a strategy that narrows your coalition solely to middle-to-upper class white college-educated voters is. Both are, instead, a recipe for a constant ping-ponging back and forth between the party in power, and a continuing broader rise in voter distaste for both parties, which is what we're seeing. (and I fear something that's going to persist, given that the forces of polarization are more technological and economic outgrowths than 'secular' political phenomena)
All that being said, it's still 'the economy, stupid'. Even with a broad coalition, any party in power that is blamed by the public for a stagflationary economy is unlikely to win elections. Despite the ructions of the sixties, the Democrats still had a fairly broad coalition in the seventies--and the memory of Nixon's improprieties to aid them. Stagflation still crushed Carter. And we all know Trump is unlikely to drop his present stagflationary policies. Democrats should use it as an opportunity.
> "If the future of the Republican party is Trumpism, and Trumpism looks like what we've seen since January, the Republican coalition is not going to broaden beyond its current boundaries, and Democratic turnout is going to remain highly elevated. That is not a recipe for a 'permanent Republican majority' or electoral success"
I think leftists live in an alternate reality where blue states are affordable and well-run. Ezra Klein points out in Abundance that Florida offers better quality social services than New York but at about half the tax burden. He also points out that homelessness is much higher in blue states because housing is so expensive in blue states. And forget Larry's voter registration data, every year hundreds of thousands of people leave blue states for red states. The bluer the state, the faster they leave. If these "grab-bag of goodies", AKA Fabian socialism, actually worked, net migration would be from red to blue.
Republican policies are a durable platform for electoral success. One that Bill Clinton, the last good president before Trump, supported across the board:
- closed borders, so higher paying jobs and cheaper housing
- law and order. White liberals live in safe upper-middle class neighborhoods, the rest of society lives in the bottom rung of a two-tier sci-fi dystopian society is not appealing.
- Apropos of the above, for legal immigrants, living in a law-abiding society *is* the American dream
- cheap energy from an "all of the above" energy policy versus expensive green energy graft
- business-friendly laws that both build and attract business and promote job creation
Those policies have appeal, no doubt, but the nature of their implementation matters. If they are paired with economically illiterate and highly volatile use of inflationary policy tools, and siege-warfare style politics where you're sending the army into your opponents' cities over the objections of state officials, bypassing Congress and ruling by de facto executive fiat, legally subduing your critics in the press, siccing the DOJ on law firms and former public officials you dislike, deporting people for writing editorials that criticize you (See: Rumeysa Ozturk), and engaging in massive acts of corruption to enrich your family to the tune of billions of dollars while the job market sours and prices stay elevated, among 100 other similarly destructive things...
Well, you're going to undermine that positive policy programme. None of those things are necessary to solve issues of employment, law and order, and affordability--all they do is distract from anything you're doing on that front, and provide a powerful incentive for your opponents to turn out in droves.
Durable coalitions are cooperative affairs; they aren't created by imperial means. It's not enough to subdue opponents--you must win them over. And if Trumpism remains imperial in implementation, as it has been since January, then the Republicans shouldn't count on a lasting governing coalition any more than the Democrats.
Inflation is a real issue, but it's a loser for Democrats, not Republicans. It's worth noting that Larry Summers, a Democrat who was one of Obama's economic advisors, predicted that Biden's polices were inflationary and was laughed out of the room by the left. The left has been free-falling from reality ever since 2008.
Inflation rate by year
---------------------
2020: 1.4%
2021: 7.0%
2022: 6.5%
2023: 3.4%
2024: 2.9%
2025: 3.0%
The rest is just leftist grievances that most voters don't care about. The National Guard has gone into cities for two reasons. First, uninvited, because there have been numerous assassination attempts on ICE agents. The Democrats have reverted to their 1950s form of defying the Federal government and getting a similar response. The second case is at the invitation of governors to stop the crime in cities that leftists are unwilling to stop.
The leftist theory of crime actually predates Rousseau and Marx, and goes back to Thomas Moore's Utopia: "For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them. "
That's wonderful for virtue-signaling white liberals who live in a low-crime neighborhoods. Its terrible for the overwhelming majority of law-abiding minority and working class citizens.
No, the pretext for sending in the National Guard was that Trump 'felt' like there was mass disorder on the ground--i.e., that Chicago and Portland were 'war-zones'--yet no proof of such was provided, and this characterization was rebuffed by the chiefs of police in LA, Portland and Chicago. That is why his deployments are running afoul of the courts--in judgements rendered by people *he* appointed: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71481149/134/state-of-oregon-v-trump/
If the whims of the president are sufficient to send troops into cities over the objections of their elected officials, there is no reason the president couldn't deploy troops anywhere he wanted. The next Democratic president could just declare rural, red America a 'warzone' and occupy it with military battalions.
Are you seriously making the argument that that's *okay*?
re: Inflation, perhaps check back more than just five years--the two-party system existed well before then. You'll see both parties have had periods where they've overseen inflation, and neither is really better about it than the other. Go look at the inflation rates Nixon presided over--they were far worse than anything we've dealt with since 2020. At any rate, Trump campaigned on ending it magically on 'day one' *while* slapping tariffs on everything, with no particular explanation as to how. And, as anyone who was seriously paying attention knew, he's had to break that promise.
If we define inflation as the debasement of a currency, of course, Trump and the MAGA Republicans' record is waaaaay worse than Biden's. The dollar remained relatively strong all throughout Obama and Biden's presidency. It ended the Biden presidency more valuable than it was four years prior. It has plummeted in value since Trump re-took office, and declined in value over the course of his first term as well.
No one is occupying cities. National Guard members stand on the street protecting federal property and preventing mobs from, assaulting ICE agents and anyone else. Guardsmen have no police powers, their presence is the deterrent. They are allowed to protect themselves and others, and federal property, that is it.
Had the news on folding laundry the other day when a middle aged Black woman was asked about the Guard in Memphis. She was so broken up she could barely speak. For the first time in their entire lives her kids were safely playing outside. No worries about drive-bys, a dope deal gone wrong or a wayward bullet. If only the Guard could stay forever. By the end I was sobbing, and I imagine most others with a modicum of empathy were also.
The lack of concern on the Left is mind boggling. Women like the Mother being interviewed, spend their lives in war zones, on US soil, for the sin of being poor. Parents hold their breath every time a child exits the house, hoping the kid somehow survives until adulthood. Decades of uninterrupted Dem rule and wasted trillions, and her kids get a month of safely playing outside, in the manner the spoiled brats in Georgetown and Palo Alto, spend their lives.
Dems are entirely comfortable with a child's life determined by the birth canal they exit. The feeling of superiority has ended whatever sympathy may have once existed. It is the reason the SV valley wealthy step over the homeless on their way to world class meals, and no longer notice anymore. It is the reason people who have never experienced crime in their lives whine about the National Guard occupying cities, as they allow kids to play safely outdoors for a few days.
> "Had the news on folding laundry the other day when a middle aged Black woman was asked about the Guard in Memphis. She was so broken up she could barely speak. For the first time in their entire lives her kids were safely playing outside. No worries about drive-bys, a dope deal gone wrong or a wayward bullet. If only the Guard could stay forever. By the end I was sobbing, and I imagine most others with a modicum of empathy were also."
I've seen a ton of these on TikTok. Trump has much better political instincts than I do. I would have said to let these neighborhoods suffer until they vote out the Democrats. But the urban residents have been gaslit by Democrats for so long they don't realize that crime is a choice that cities make.
> "The lack of concern on the Left is mind boggling. Women like the Mother being interviewed, spend their lives in war zones, on US soil, for the sin of being poor. Parents hold their breath every time a child exits the house, hoping the kid somehow survives until adulthood."
100%
Yes, they are. The National Guard is performing functions that are meant to be performed by local police--and that is what militarized police states do. They supplant local law enforcement functions with military functions. They remove the very important and necessary firewall that exists between the police department and the army.
How comfortable are you with President Joe Democrat federalizing your state's National Guard and having them supplant your town's local law enforcement? How comfortable do you think your chief of police is with president Joe Democrat's troops constantly present in his jurisdiction, doing what his officer corps is supposed to be doing? Is "But they're here to help!" really all you need to accept all that?
And if crime does indeed get suppressed by this military build-up, what praytell, do you expect to happen to crime when the military withdraws? If crime increases upon withdrawal--as it highly likely to--would that not then require us to invite the military back in again? Do you not see what the end result of that is? Why are you making arguments for the implementation of a militarized police state in the 21st century? Have you looked at how they all turned out in the 20th?
Thank the establishment Republicans still in power in Congress for failing to pass legislation needed to support more of the MAGA agenda, including the requirement that all elections require voter-ID. Instead they bypass those needed actions to protect their wussy political identity and rely on Trump to take all the heat.
The Biden Democrats caused the massive inflation and jacked up the deficit and debt. Trump only in office less than a year is blamed for not fixing the problems... problems caused by decades of Democrat and establishment Republican failures and mistakes.
We have so many truly uniformed, media gaslit voters that this country might very well be doomed.
Meanwhile Democrats elect the most dirty, incompetent and immoral people that will do nothing to fix any of these problems, but will certainly cause more.
An upset would have been big news, lack of an upset less so. Mamdani is interesting because he is quite a bit more extreme than the D party nationally. He reminds me of AOC more than Sanders.
I'd wish for accurate exit polling especially amongst Hispanic voters, but if wishes were horses we all would ride.
Midterms are half a year away, primaries even sooner.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe "the economy" was also the #1 reason given by Trump voters exiting polls in 2024. This suggests that voters are looking anywhere for economic improvement - affordable housing and medical care, living wages - and don't really care if they get this from Brand X or Brand Y. Maybe Democrats and Republicans should both keep this in mind - stay focused on the economic issues that ALL of us care about and dial way back on divisive issues like identity politics, open borders, AND trans-bigotry since none of these help poor people pay their bills.
Why no mention of Latino swing to Ds in Passaic County? LP has been going on and on about Ds losing Latino votes
We will have plenty more analysis in the weeks ahead, including about this.
I think it's definitely worth watching, but the off-year electorate is completely different from the general electorate, and during realignments, voters in much more in play than before and after.
TLP should have noted the Latino vote and the huge polling miss in NJ by Atlas. Clearly, the level of enthusiasm was missed and remember Ciatarelli ran heavily on Trump endorsement. A lot more of Trump’s low information Latino voters than predicted must have come out to vote, for Sherrill. They’ll likely come out again (normalize) in 2026 and will not support the lunatic Vance in 2028.
I wouldn't read too much into an off-year election. It seems implausible that Hispanic realignment progressed through the first four years of Trump's presidency, but then reversed itself in the fifty year.
What might be worth reading into is that the Dems can't even get 50% of college-educated white males in a high-turnout off-year election. That percentage is only going to drop in the general. You can't win elections on college-educated white women.
The facts that the Democratic party has no popular message and does promote unpopular social issues, has not prevented their sweep of these off-year elections. Personally, I don't think this has much to do with Donald Trump. We shall see.
Both Sherrill and Spanberger won by wider margins than I expected. But given the ongoing class gap, I would have been happier if they had each aligned more closely with labor in a couple of ways.
The NJ AFL-CIO and most of its unions (blue and white collar alike) backed Sherrill, but the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 825, one of the most influential unions in the state, backed Ciattarelli. They cited his strong support for natural gas, which they contrasted with Sherrill's support for solar. While Sherrill is not against gas (and she supports more nuclear as well as more solar), the identification of Democrats with all things green is still something the party needs to confront.
Spanberger got significant labor support (including, encouragingly, the Virginia Police Benevolent Association), but the VA AFL-CIO did not endorse her because she did not support full repeal of the state's right to work law. While her stance of wanting to change the law is better than Earle-Sears wanting to keep the law as is, it's discouraging that Spanberger couldn't take that one extra step. Unions don't always make their best argument on this issue (calling non-union workers "freeloaders" is needlessly rude), but right to work is a bad law for workers.
The state legislature of New York responded to New York City's financial debacle in 1975 by imposing financial controls on the city government. Mamdani will need the consent of Gov. Hochul and the legislature to implement measures such as new corporate and personal city income taxes. Democracy requires that the voters get what they voted for. Yet, if Mamdani runs the city deep into unaffordable debt, it is almost guaranteed that he will ask the state for a bailout and confidently expects to get it.
I've been puzzling for a long time on leanings in my cohort of college educated voters and white women voters in particular. I would like to see more analysis on these trends. It feels like a most unhealthy form of magical thinking, a total disconnect from reality, an abandonment of historical patterns, for good reasons, to vote in a more conservative direction, especially on fiscal matters. It feels dangerous, irresponsible, and like a form of Morning Show extreme and irrelevant vanity.
"It’s not all that surprising that a president who campaigned on tackling inflation but has done little to tame it"
While inflation is a little higher than what is desired, it has been brought down to a level where its not causing shocking pain. 3% is very much closer to 2%-2.5% than is 9%. The 9% number was caused by the massive amount of printed money the Fed injected into the economy. They injected that money to payoff everyone the Democrats promised money in exchange for thwarting President Trump in the 2020 election. President Trump put an immediate stop to the printing of too much money. I would say that he was largely successful in his fight against inflation.
https://youtu.be/akVL7QY0S8A?si=-whc1Tr3SI8_p-0f I suggest that this may be Senator Warren's more accurate forecast re the Middle Class.
Curious how dems voted because of the government shut down when it was the dems who caused this to begin with. What am I missing? Personally, the more educated the more republican people should vote. Sorry...not dissing on dems (entirely), but standing for SOMETHING is better than falling for anything, which is what they are doing. No guardrails on anything! JMan2819, I'm a PhD educated female and you couldn't pay me to vote democratic. I guess I'm an outlier.