He hasn’t announced or anything. Neither of them have. The pollsters just provided some hypothetical names to compare; I don’t know who other than Vance or Jr, but if I had to guess I’d say probably people like Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ted Cruz.

All models are wrong. Some models are useful.

True, and I guess I’m not sure which one is more prevalent, but this one is the one I hear most often.

Correct. Gerrymandering means several different specific ways to cheat by drawing the districts, but one way is taking a district that’s going to be a blowout for you—say, you’re expected to reliably get 88% of the vote—and sharing that 88% with a nearby district, where you’re expected to get maybe 37%. If you draw the lines right, you can get two districts where you win with 66% of the vote, instead of winning one and losing one.

But why stop there? 88% is a huge lead, and in first past the post it doesn’t matter how much of the vote you get, so long as you get more than the next most popular candidate. It may require some truly unhinged district drawing, but what if you could get, say, five districts where you’re going to win with 46% of the vote, due to a strong (but not strong enough) third party spoiler candidate? Now you’ve spread out the voters in that 88% area and used them to bolster four other districts that you were going to lose (or were going to be competitive) into solid and reliable wins, or at least turn solid victory for the opposition into a competitive contest.

Except, oops, the guy at the top of the ticket is a literal supervillain except without any superpowers, and now it’s starting to weaken that original 88%. Now, instead of one blowout district, and instead of five solid wins, you’ve got, maybe, two competitive contests and three solid losses. If you’d left well enough alone, you might’ve still been able to win that blowout district with 58%, but because you got greedy you’ve lost everything.

Took me a minute, too.

Honestly, I hadn’t even processed that because it’s such boilerplate fluff, but you’re right. Biden did indeed inherit an economy on the brink, and he deserves some amount of credit for the “soft landing,” but he definitely didn’t do enough to materially help low and middle income folks as he implies in that speech.

Still, he wasn’t telling voters that the problems were over. He was telling other rich people (Congress), and for them the economy was (and still is) pretty good. If you were to ask him, I wonder if he wouldn’t say that that’s the difference.

I still think the worst failure of Biden’s presidency was not prosecuting Trump, though.

When did they say “the economy is good?” I remember Harris talking during her campaign about how they did a lot of work and made a lot of progress, but there was still a long way to go. True, they didn’t make a huge deal out of it like Mamdani did, but I can’t find any evidence of them saying “nah man, everything is ok.”

The Democrats act lazy, but in reality, they want the same thing that the GOP wants: Their donors to be happy. They only pretend to fight, until they can get the votes to keep their seats.

Let’s be clear: every employee is responsible for doing what their employer wants. Elected representatives made it into office through a convoluted hiring process, and so the people who got them into office are their employers. I’m not oblivious to that at all. When I say “the Democrats are lazy,” it’s reductive in the same way that “the people elect the president” is reductive. Actually, the people vote for electors and the electoral college elects the president. And so no, the Democrats aren’t actually lazy; a less-reductive way to say it would be “the people that the Democrats see as their employers aren’t telling them to fix the affordability crisis.”

That may seem cynical, but the reason that this is notable is that, up until fairly recently in historical terms, the Democrats and Republicans alike treated their constituents as their employers, in at least some capacity. In some cases they weren’t their only employers, maybe some particularly corrupt ones in safe districts didn’t need to worry about the voters’ opinions at all, but for most of them the “other employers” (that is, the donors) also wanted them to keep the voters happy because they wanted us to keep buying their stuff, and a happy population is a consumptive population.

Now, though, almost none of the elected officials in Congress consider their constituents to be their employers.

The Republicans consider Trump to be the one signing their paycheck; even though their money is still coming from their donors, Trump has (or at least had) such an outsized impact on their electoral chances, and therefore their lobbyist money, that he commanded essentially all of their obedience.

And the Democrats have decided that just not being MAGA is good enough for their constituents to keep electing them (and in fairness, if they were up against the opposition they had in 1998, it would’ve been), so they don’t actually need to work that hard at following through as long as they just stay not-MAGA; so they’ve decided to put more effort into making their donors happy, and since their donors also supported Trump, their marching orders are just to not kick up too much of a fuss.

In the meantime, all of the donors have decided they’re okay with all of us being too poor to buy their stuff now for some reason (my personal theory is that it’s a really stupid game of chicken or some twisted prisoner’s dilemma thing), so that part of the historical backpressure is gone too.

The way that ends up working itself out is the Republicans saying whatever Trump says, even if it’s a lie, because he’s their employer; and the Democrats being lazy, because their employers say to be.

So no, I don’t think that Democrats are actually lying. They’ve just decided that they don’t work for us anymore. Which means we need to fire them (primary each and every one of them who isn’t doing what we want) to show them that, actually, they do; because if we hire the other guys, we already know who they’re going to be working for.

They were lied to, yes. And I see the correlation you’re making. I don’t think you’re super off-base, but I also don’t think you’re quite right.

The thing is, Trump in particular and the GOP in general are both lying about the problem. They’re saying that the problem with people’s bank accounts being empty is that the “illegals” are “taking stuff” (jobs, aid, low-cost housing) that “real americans deserve.” They then proceed to follow up on the attack against what they (maliciously) claimed the problem was.

On the other hand, Democrats are by-and-large truthful (or simply silent) about the causes of the affordability crisis. They then are stymied by a terrorist majority-GOP congress (or minority GOP wielding the filibuster) into inaction, or make token bipartisan progress without addressing the root of the issue. Then, as re-election rolls around, they spin the tiny gains they’ve made as bigger than they actually are.

We saw this in the Harris campaign. Her plans were almost entirely about encouraging and supporting small businesses–which is, indeed, a valid way to push down prices, and likely to pass muster with Republicans! But it’s not nearly enough, and voters recognized that (and, in fairness, they were also lied to about the fact that she had a plan at all by the conservative media).

In short, I think that while the GOP lies, the Democrats are just lazy. They think it’s still 1998, and they can just figure it all out over drinks if given the chance.

I’m not sure if that really makes it better. But I do think it’s different.

Well, we knew at the time that was just a lie to get out of being fixed to buy the company.

Yes. It was shortsighted and naive of them, but while there are some people who voted for mass deportations because they hate immigrants, far more people voted for mass deportations because he told them that they are the reason for the affordability crisis.

No. They’re part of our country, and the only reason that they’re “dead weight” is that the GOP lied to and propagandized their citizens for long enough to extract essentially all the capital out of the land and the people. Now they don’t have enough to keep going on their own, and they’re only as good to the Republicans as their electoral votes.

We have to keep them—that was part of the deal from the beginning, and it’s the right thing to do—but we have to fight back against the propaganda so that the citizens can see what they could be without the GOP.

He keeps trying to pass himself off as a smart man, and there’s just no way to keep up that act if you’ve got an actually smart man talking to you.

Yep, agreed. If that specific company is so critical that we as a society can’t operate without its survival, it should be a government function anyway.

Criminals don’t typically announce their motives, no.

Loomer figured it out? Loomer?! This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts.

Sure, and we don’t have any receipt to support that the Five Guys gave me a cheeseburger yesterday because I paid them to do so.

That may well be suspected, but to claim it as fact is propaganda.

/s. Yes, post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy. But consider the timeline: the Trump organization had made some deals about projects in Riyadh and Jeddah, but the big new development in Diryah, owned by the Saudi government, was still not on the table even after Trump toured it and expressed interest back in May. Now, suddenly, the deal is going through and the Saudis are getting the planes they want in the same week?

Honestly, if you don’t believe this, what kind of evidence are you looking for?

Hypocrisy is one thing, but the ability to actually print stuff is another entirely. They are, fortunately, still bound by the laws of physics.

Sounds like Indiana doesn’t have the votes for redistricting, for now. Cheeto Mussolini is big mad about that. He posted on Tr*th Social and got one of the Republicans opposing it swatted.

Pritzker in Illinois was going to push forward a redistricting for that state, too, if Indiana went ahead. The map looked hilarious and would’ve essentially shut the GOP out of politics in Illinois altogether.

No. It is so simple that I do not need to read beyond your first sentence.

Ok. Then I won’t read beyond yours either.

Eh, yes but no. Just because there’s no legal action doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be societal pressure to not be a creep and a weirdo. It should be unpopular to have a romantic relationship with anyone with whom you have a power imbalance (and age is definitely a power imbalance): dealing with the raised eyebrows and looks of concern can help keep misguided but well-meaning people from becoming creeps, and it can help the victims of predatory relationships realize when they aren’t in a good situation.

The previous commenter was right: there’s no magic switch that flips in your brain on your 18th birthday that makes you suddenly able to make adult decisions. Some people are ready, some aren’t. Biologically it’s uncommon for anyone to be truly grown before they’re in their late 20s, but our society decided we were going to set the bar super low; so for people who have trouble clearing even that bar, the societal pressure is a good thing.

I say this as a man who’s four years older than my wife, whom I met when I was 21 and she was 17. I knew I wasn’t going to date her until she turned 18, but even still, having the push-back of people who are smart and thoughtful, and who said, “hey, you need to recognize what is going on here, and how you’re going to mature before she does, and the potential for it to turn predatory even if you don’t mean for it to”—in hindsight I really value that warning, and it helped us to keep it really simple and light for the first several years while she figured out who she is and decided whether she even wanted to be with me.

Obviously we still ended up together, and now at 40 and 36 nobody bats an eye at our age difference. But when I think about the hurdles we faced even with only a 4-year difference, and imagine an age gap more than five times that size? I don’t think I could ever be in that situation, but even if I could, I’d want those smart and thoughtful people to check me.

The societal pressure doesn’t necessarily do the same things as the legal pressure, but it still helps.