And when there is money it’s often earmarked in ways that severely restrict its use for, e.g., paying for software

Does viable have a different definition for you that doesn’t include winning roughly half of elections?

What’s the difference between MTG and, say, any of the other Republicans that vote pretty much in kock-step with her on any important issue but aren’t as blatantly loud and dumb except worse news bites?

I mean we very obviously do. We have two corporate oligarch parties, but I would much rather have the tech billionaire club that brought us the Gates foundation or the Allen institute and isn’t actively trying to kill a large portion of the country than the one that sees what Israel is doing to Palestine as a good model of how to clean up the riffraff

If you read it Biden’s appointed 214 so far, if he gets all 244 then he’s appointed more than Trump. Clearly this isn’t a sudden rush, it’s a final push to fix and protect as much as possible as he’s been doing for 4 years

To be fair there are a ton of the gravy seals, but you’re absolutely right that there is also smaller but much, much more dangerous core

Absolutely agree with you but as xmunk said, Sinema will do her dumb curtsy thing and bam, now trump gets another supreme court pick on day 1 because the Dems really only have 49 seats for preserving democracy

I for sure think that the DNC aren’t to blame in the same way that a firefighter who uses a garden hose to try to put out a burning house isn’t responsible for the smoking ruins when there are other people throwing molotovs through the windows, slashing the tires of the firetrucks, and getting the neighbors to throw bricks at the firefighters.

That being said, if my house was on fire and it was clear that I couldn’t get the active vandals to stop despite them burning themselves in the process, I think it’s justified to work on replacing or training the firefighters to be more competent and/or rutheless with dealing with the threat.

Make one then coward

Be billionaire and outbid Netanyahu

He’s also not popular with the stable, middle class democratic electorate who make up a plurality of their consistent voters. I think they’d vote for him in the generals if he won the primaries but I don’t think even with media hype he can win those primaries without a massive wave of independents voting in them

As a youngish, college educated white man who voted against Bernie in 2016, his appeal certainly extended beyond that demographic, all my queer POC friends loved him. He polls horribly with the stable, comfortable middle class Democrats who reliably vote for sure, and I doubt he can/could ever make it through a Dem primary, even if the DNC leadership pushed him. But he does do really well with the same groups trump does, the disaffected and marginalized. In an election matchup, Trump wins the extremely bigoted voters, and Bernie wins the leftists and targeted minority groups and drives much higher turnout in them. The moderate Republicans who swung to Biden and Kamala probably vote third party or abstain, the establishment Dems probably hold their nose and vote Bernie. I think it would be very close, and if there were third party centrist candidates they would get more votes than expected, but I think turnout general would be a lot higher than 2016 or 2024

Most countries have deep economic ties to most wealthy countries, we’re in a global economy. Even subsistence farmers in subsaharan Africa buy more of their seeds than you can imagine from Chinese companies that do the bulk of their R&D in the US and western Europe, if US policy becomes extremely isolationist that will affect them.

Also, the US is one of the biggest climate emitors, if that ramps up instead of decreasing the whole world will feel that too.

Best of luck!

I think they meant the moral failure rather than the election failure fwiw

I don’t understand how the rhetoric this time didn’t hurt him there tbh, he didn’t change it really

They hang out here because America is currently one of/the best wealth engines on the planet and they can afford to avoid the shit parts. Once either of those stop they’ll go somewhere else that’s nicer

There is some panicking prompted by the horrible things he’s promised to do but probably can’t, but:

-He got Roe v. Wade overturned, stripping rights from Americans while also being responsible for a 3% increase in infant mortality in the US, the first significant increase in decades

-about as many people died of COVID as voted for Jill Stein, and while Trump isn’t responsible for all their deaths he significantly worsened the problem.

So I’d say beyond shit

I don’t agree that she had no platform other than I’m not Trump, but she certainly shifted right as the race went on and lost more and more support as she did it

I think Harris played it better than anyone had so far with handling Trump. I think her fatal mistep was believing there were hordes of rightwing never trumpers who could be swayed. She had so much momentum when she first stepped in and people thought she’d be further left than Biden, she pivoted further right than him and probably got less votes. Being a POC woman certainly didn’t help either.

I mean, the projected winner maps aren’t the US government’s decision, it’s what whatever news your watching has modelled as settled with an acceptable margin of error based on current information. Realistically they could have called most of the states months ago with that same error, some organizations just veil it more