US Politics - The Conceit of Not Conceding

[Fez]

14 minutes ago, SFDanny said:

I've a question. Right now I see Biden/Harris have a popular vote of 78,777,614. I trying to figure the likelihood they will reach 80 million votes. California has 634 thousand votes outstanding. If they maintain their statewide advantage around 64% they should get around 400,000 more votes out of California alone. I know there is a lot of NYC that hasn't finished counting their votes as well. I'm figuring 79.5 million is a lock, but does anyone know if the last 500,000 or so is possible? @DMC do you know?

It should be, though it'll mostly depend on just how much of New York is left.

Ohio still needs to count 311,519 ballots, which should net Biden a decent chunk of raw votes. https://liveresults.ohiosos.gov/ And, side note, just imagine if Ohio was the decisive state (and closer) how bad this would be. I don't know if they just didn't feel pressure after seeing how lopsided Trump's win was, or what.

I believe Illinois still has a few hundred thousand votes left as well. New Jersey has at least tens of thousands of votes left. And there's other states that still have some amount left though I dunno how much; Maine is still only at 91% of precincts reporting for instance.

[OnionAhaiReborn]

Two weeks since the election and upward of a million votes still to count. What a country. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

That depends on how afraid he is. Who knows what kind of behind-the-scenes shit he pulled as president. State level crimes are one thing, federal are another.

There’s a basic legal principle that you can’t be your own judge, and granting himself a pardon may be a step too far for the Supreme Court. Hand over the presidency to Pence on the 18th or 19th and keep yourself safe. It may not even ruin Pence’s career.

If he accepts a pardon isn’t he admitting to commiting a felony?  Doesn’t that present a problem if he wants re-election to non consecutive terms?

[Larry of the Lawn]

10 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

If he accepts a pardon isn’t he admitting to commiting a felony?  Doesn’t that present a problem if he wants re-election to non consecutive terms?

he's not going to run again.  he might say he is for awhile but come 2024 he's not going to run

[Fragile Bird]

8 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

If he accepts a pardon isn’t he admitting to commiting a felony?  Doesn’t that present a problem if he wants re-election to non consecutive terms?

I have never seriously thought he would run again. His ego could not take the idea of losing. Besides, his presidency was the greatest in the history of the US, how could he top that?

But...I guess he won't pardon his kids after all, if what you say means they couldn't run for president. This could get interesting.

[Maithanet]

27 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

If he accepts a pardon isn’t he admitting to commiting a felony?  Doesn’t that present a problem if he wants re-election to non consecutive terms?

Why would that be a problem?  He'd just say he was protecting himself and his family from a witch hunt because he's smart.  You think after all that Republicans have seen of Trump that accepting a pardon is going to make him unelectable?

[Fragile Bird]

3 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

Why would that be a problem?  He'd just say he was protecting himself and his family from a witch hunt because he's smart.  You think after all that Republicans have seen of Trump that accepting a pardon is going to make him unelectable?

Can someone run for President if they admit to committing a felony? Or is this a loophole, you have to be convicted?

eta: just checked, it’s not a problem. Nothing about felony convictions or admissions.

[DMC]

3 hours ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

Buttigieg was polling higher in certain polls, though apparently not all the ones RCP has.

...And Harris and Warren polled higher than him in certain polls, thoroughly demonstrating your assertion was wrong.  Get over it.

3 hours ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

Indicators from Clinton's election indicates that women do not specifically turn out for women. Indications from the primary do not indicate that women specifically turned out for Warren, either. Indications for Harris did not indicate black people in any way turned out all that much for her. 

JFC..I can't tell if you're deliberately being this slow or just arguing in bad faith, but this is getting absurd and tired.  First of all, the entire point of this conversation was predicated on assuming Clinton's failures extend to all women is dumb, because it is.  Second of all, the whole exercise of the hypothetical is what if another candidate was the nominee in this election instead of Biden.  It's completely pointless to have that hypothetical argument if all you're going to draw on boils down to "Biden would have done better in the general because he won the primary and the other candidates lost."  Third of all, Harris dropped out before any elections took place.  Citing her as an example of how voters turned out for her in the primary if fucking idiotic and through the looking glass.  Fourth of all, Warren performed in the primaries about where the polls said at the time she would.  Did she have a lead in the fall?  Sure, but that was long gone by the time anyone actually voted.  Citing this as evidence of anything is like saying Giuliani, Cain, Gingrich, and numerous other candidates failed to turn out their voters in the 2012 GOP primary because they enjoyed a national lead for a brief period of time well before voting started.  Fifth of all, Klobuchar actually outperformed polls in the early primaries.  Is that evidence women turned out more than expected for female candidates?  No, but it would be under your dumbass standards here.  Sixth of all, circling back to Clinton, where the hell is the indication that women didn't turn out for her?  She lost ground among white men, not among women.  

3 hours ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

We have lots of other data indicating that women do not get as many votes as men do. Do you have anything that contradicts that other than wishful thinking?

I don't! but I do have lots of data indicating women have a harder time of it across the board in the US. 

And your suggestion is to not use research and data and...use your gut? From you? That's super rich. In any case, if you're entirely pulling things out of your ass might I suggest you listen to other women when they talk about the difficulties of reaching higher levels in organizations and understand that it would have been harder, period. And it doesn't take it to be much harder for someone to have lost - only 67k votes.

Alright, I'm gonna do this once because maybe you don't realize how ridiculously stupid you sound when you talk out your ass about research you don't understand.  The research on female representation in elected offices is obviously broad and accordingly nuanced.  One large strain in this subfield is observing how women can achieve equal representation within legislatures.  This demonstrates the difficulties female and minority candidates and officeholders have in achieving equal representation, but it has nothing to do with a woman running for president.  Instead, the obstacle is what's been dubbed a "diversity paradox:"

Quote

They call this the 'diversity paradox': In fact, representative institutions such as legislatures face a 'diversity paradox': when the size of a minority group increases beyond mere 'tokenism' in representative institutions such as legislatures, it tends to create an unintended backlash toward the minority group's members that emanates from both majority and fellow minority group members.

Further, much of the bias that women candidates encounter - and what most researchers that study female representation for a living emphasize - occurs well before the general election.  Not only is there a bias against them at the recruitment level, as shown here, but female candidates are more likely to receive primary challenges.  Moreover, experimental research has found potential female office-seekers are less likely to even go through with the difficulties of running due to their perceived (and, of course, real) bias against running a campaign as a woman. 

I'm mentioning all of this because all of these aspects are important and make up a lot (if not most) of the research within field you're describing, and none of it has anything to do with vote share for female candidates.  Most scholars that specialize in this field would emphasize that the challenges encountered by female candidates occur before the general election, or even before the primary election.  This is why your depiction of such research is incredibly vapid as well as wholly reliant on a classic ecological fallacy that applies very broad and rich research to one specific individual case.  This is dangerous to do when misinterpreting the aggregate and consensus findings of such research, as you are plainly doing here.

In addition, a lot of research that does show female bias in vote share should never be applied to a female nominee of a major party in a US presidential contest.  For example, this paper's findings does support your assertion that female candidates encounter bias at the ballot box.  However, the dataset is on the Australian House of Representatives from 1903 to 2004.  Applying that to the 2020 US presidential election is obviously ludicrous (not to mention the fact their findings show the bias is narrowing in recent contests).

Finally, do I have data that contradicts the notion that women do not get as many votes as men do?  Why yes, there is plenty, as anyone who isn't ignorant of the field would readily know.  In fact, it's decidedly a consensus within the field based on decades of findings that the bias female candidates encounter is not seen at the ballot box -- and indeed on the contrary they perform just as well as male candidates once reaching the general election:

Quote

Because women tend to win elections at comparable rates as men (Fox 2006; Lawless and Pearson 2008; Plutzer and Zipp 1996; Seltzer, Newman, and Leighton 1997; Thompson and Steckenrider 1997), we often overlook the fact that the playing field that produces gender parity in outcomes is not level. We also often fail to acknowledge that, as a nation, we are not ready to discuss why sexism still exists, the extent to which cultural norms have evolved, or how we can eradicate it. Rather, we focus on how female candidates can and do succeed within its confines. If 2008 can teach us anything, it should be that any discussion of campaigns and elections that fails to account for the sexist terrain candidates often navigate falls short of fully assessing gender’s role in American politics and women’s place in society.

Emphasis mine.  Again, if you weren't clearly ignorant of the research in the field, you would know that the focus of research is on demonstrating the bias women encounter before getting to the ballot box, not during it.  In fact, there's even research showing that Democratic female candidates who face GOP men strongly benefit from Republican women voters’ crossover support.  Overall, Jennifer Lawless, who is one of the most prominent researchers in this field, summarized the findings in a 2016 Annual Review of the literature like this:

Quote

Studies of fundraising and vote totals corroborate the public opinion data: Women who run for state and federal office fare just as well as their male counterparts (Fox 2010, Seltzer et al. 1997, Smith & Fox 2001). This is true not only in general elections but also in congressional primaries (Burrell 1992, Lawless & Pearson 2008). Of course, even if we observe no gender disparities in election outcomes, that does not mean the electoral process is as gender neutral as it is commonly described. If the women who run for office are more qualified than the men against whom they compete, or if party leaders and other electoral gatekeepers encourage only the most qualified women, then the apparent absence of voter bias against female candidates might reflect the higher average quality of female candidates as compared to men.

I have close professional relationships with a handful of scholars that specialize in this field, including my advisor.  I have contributed to and reviewed some of their research.  I know for a certainty they would be quite offended that somebody is cherrypicking a few findings from their life's work to argue women inherently do worse than men when it comes to vote share.  Not only is the depiction that such findings characterize results of the entire field completely pulled out of your ass, but such a flagrantly inaccurate contention is corrosive to encouraging more female candidates in the future.  They would especially find it insultingly preposterous that you're applying such findings to argue Warren and Harris wouldn't have had a chance as compared to Biden in this election.  In the case of my advisor, she would specifically have quite the choice words for your arguments here and would not have the patience to explain what I just did.  And I'm just about spent on mine as well.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

...And Harris and Warren polled higher than him in certain polls, thoroughly demonstrating your assertion was wrong.  Get over it.

I shant. Another way to say it is that a mayor of a shitty Indiana town polled as well as two women with many years of big government and federal experience, and this somehow means sexism isn't that bad.

1 minute ago, DMC said:

JFC..I can't tell if you're deliberately being this slow or just arguing in bad faith, but this is getting absurd and tired.  First of all, the entire point of this conversation was predicated on assuming Clinton's failures extend to all women is dumb, because it is.

Except I didn't make that claim. So...yay? Clinton is one data point, but it's not like she's the only one in the US who has ever run for high office.

1 minute ago, DMC said:

  Second of all, the whole exercise of the hypothetical is what if another candidate was the nominee in this election instead of Biden.  It's completely pointless to have that hypothetical argument if all you're going to draw on boils down to "Biden would have done better in the general because he won the primary and the other candidates lost."  Third of all, Harris dropped out before any elections took place.  Citing her as an example of how voters turned out for her in the primary if fucking idiotic and through the looking glass.  Fourth of all, Warren performed in the primaries about where the polls said at the time she would.  Did she have a lead in the fall?  Sure, but that was long gone by the time anyone actually voted.  Citing this as evidence of anything is like saying Giuliani, Cain, Gingrich, and numerous other candidates failed to turn out their voters in the 2012 GOP primary because they enjoyed a national lead for a brief period of time well before voting started.  Fifth of all, Klobuchar actually outperformed polls in the early primaries.  Is that evidence women turned out more than expected for female candidates?  No, but it would be under your dumbass standards here.  Sixth of all, circling back to Clinton, where the hell is the indication that women didn't turn out for her?  She lost ground among white men, not among women.  

She lost ground with white women too, at least compared to Obama.

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Alright, I'm gonna do this once because maybe you don't realize how ridiculously stupid you sound when you talk out your ass about research you don't understand.  The research on female representation in elected offices is obviously broad and accordingly nuanced.  One large strain in this subfield is observing how women can achieve equal representation within legislatures.  This demonstrates the difficulties female and minority candidates and officeholders have in achieving equal representation, but it has nothing to do with a woman running for president.  Instead, the obstacle is what's been dubbed a "diversity paradox:" 

Further, much of the bias that women candidates encounter - and what most researchers that study female representation for a living emphasize - occurs well before the general election.  Not only is there a bias against them at the recruitment level, as shown here, but female candidates are more likely to receive primary challenges.  Moreover, experimental research has found potential female office-seekers are less likely to even go through with the difficulties of running due to their perceived (and, of course, real) bias against running a campaign as a woman. 

 

1 minute ago, DMC said:

I'm mentioning all of this because all of these aspects are important and make up a lot (if not most) of the research within field you're describing, and none of it has anything to do with vote share for female candidates.  Most scholars that specialize in this field would emphasize that the challenges encountered by female candidates occur before the general election, or even before the primary election.  This is why your depiction of such research is incredibly vapid as well as wholly reliant on a classic ecological fallacy that applies very broad and rich research to one specific individual case.  This is dangerous to do when misinterpreting the aggregate and consensus findings of such research, as you are plainly doing here.

The research isn't just about women in legislatures - it's women across the board in almost every leadership position you can look at. The result is a very real set of biases and difficulties. Ignoring those and encouraging people to just overcome them is bullshit.

1 minute ago, DMC said:

In addition, a lot of research that does show female bias in vote share should never be applied to a female nominee of a major party in a US presidential contest.  For example, this paper's findings does support your assertion that female candidates encounter bias at the ballot box.  However, the dataset is on the Australian House of Representatives from 1903 to 2004.  Applying that to the 2020 US presidential election is obviously ludicrous (not to mention the fact their findings show the bias is narrowing in recent contests). 

Instead of...not using the data?

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Finally, do I have data that contradicts the notion that women do not get as many votes as men do?  Why yes, there is plenty, as anyone who isn't ignorant of the field would readily know.  In fact, it's decidedly a consensus within the field based on decades of findings that the bias female candidates encounter is not seen at the ballot box -- and indeed on the contrary they perform just as well as male candidates once reaching the general election:

Survivorship bias. The women who run at that point are some of the best candidates that could possibly exist. And they still lose at higher rates. Again, talk to women about this if you don't believe me. Or read the research on the kinds of women who do go for leadership and how overqualified they have to be to get them. Or how they're penalized for being high achieving in the first place.

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Emphasis mine.  Again, if you weren't clearly ignorant of the research in the field, you would know that the focus of research is on demonstrating the bias women encounter before getting to the ballot box, not during it.  In fact, there's even research showing that Democratic female candidates who face GOP men strongly benefit from Republican women voters’ crossover support.  Overall, Jennifer Lawless, who is one of the most prominent researchers in this field, summarized the findings in a 2016 Annual Review of the literature like this:

So basically your summation is that if Warren or Harris were good enough to overcome the sexism that they did face they would have won, but because they couldn't they wouldn't have run at all? I can agree with that.

That said, they weren't good enough to overcome the sexism they did face. 

1 minute ago, DMC said:

I have close professional relationships with a handful of scholars that specialize in this field, including my advisor.  I have contributed to and reviewed some of their research.  I know for a certainty they would be quite offended that somebody is cherrypicking a few findings from their life's work to argue women inherently do worse than men when it comes to vote share.  Not only is the depiction that such findings characterize results of the entire field completely pulled out of your ass, but such a flagrantly inaccurate contention is corrosive to encouraging more female candidates in the future.  They would especially find it insultingly preposterous that you're applying such findings to argue Warren and Harris wouldn't have had a chance as compared to Biden in this election.  In the case of my advisor, she would specifically have quite the choice words for your arguments here and would not have the patience to explain what I just did.  And I'm just about spent on mine as well.

Warren and Harris didn't have a chance on this election. We have actual data on that. Like, there literally was an election they were part of and that they didn't win. We're talking about hypotheticals here - what if Harris or Warren magically did get the nod - but that bypasses the way that they were already rejected, and that was via sexism. I'm not claiming that Random Woman couldn't have won - I'm claiming that if you somehow inserted Warren into the general election exactly as she was, she would have lost - and we have reasonable evidence to back that up.

Now, you've made some claims here - things like women will come out more and vote for women. Or black people will vote for black women. This should be easily provable. But...it doesn't happen that way, at least in the US. 

[Kalbear]

Here's another way to say the above, more succinctly. Warren did well with college educated voters - who turned out pretty heavily for Biden too. But she did badly with non-college educated women, whereas Biden did a bit better than Clinton (at least in the little data we do have). And she did way worse with non-college educated men. 

Is that perfect data? Nope! But It's certainly a reasonable indication that she wouldn't have had the same kinds of turnout Biden did. 

[Lollygag]

Perfect timing. DeWine's getting primaried from a wacko way further right.

This is what I was talking about how Republicans are using the primaries + the shrinking more radicalized party to keep their members controlled by the cult and how it becomes a downward spiral as the party excludes more and becomes more radicalized.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/526114-trump-says-ohio-governors-race-will-be-hotly-contested-after-dewine

Quote

President Trump on Monday swiped at Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) after DeWine recognized Joe Biden as president-elect and said it was time for a transition to the next administration to begin.

"Who will be running for Governor of the Great State of Ohio? Will be hotly contested!" Trump tweeted.

 

Who will be running for Governor of the Great State of Ohio? Will be hotly contested!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 16, 2020

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

15 minutes ago, Lollygag said:

Perfect timing. DeWine's getting primaried from a wacko way further right.

This is what I was talking about how Republicans are using the primaries + the shrinking more radicalized party to keep their members controlled by the cult and how it becomes a downward spiral as the party excludes more and becomes more radicalized.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/526114-trump-says-ohio-governors-race-will-be-hotly-contested-after-dewine

 

Isn't Ohio an open primary state?

also, per your link, Trump is just asking for someone to primary DeWine, and while he may very well get primaried from the right, I'm not so sure a Trump tweet should be used as evidence of this.

Plus, Dewine is a pretty moderate republican, there can't even be that many GOP people to the left of him, so even if you picked 100 random GOP people to primary him, 95 of them will be to the right of him.  And he's way more liberal than Kasich, if your theory worked then why wasn't Kasich's succesor even more rightwing than Kasich?

[DMC]

25 minutes ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

The research isn't just about women in legislatures - it's women across the board in almost every leadership position you can look at. The result is a very real set of biases and difficulties. Ignoring those and encouraging people to just overcome them is bullshit

Instead of...not using the data?

I just gave you links and quotes identifying literally dozens of sources that directly contradict your assertion that female nominees get less of the vote share than male nominees in general elections, ceteris paribus.  All of that research is obviously based on data, and it is based on women candidates "across the board in almost every leadership position."  Your unwillingness to accept this broad consensus within the field - like your unwillingness to admit you were simply wrong when you said Buttigieg outpolled Warren and Harris - is simply pathetic trolling at this point.  Enjoy yourself.

[Kalbear]

Just now, DMC said:

I just gave you links and quotes identifying literally dozens of sources that directly contradict your assertion that female nominees get less of the vote share than male nominees in general elections, ceteris paribus. 

That wasn't my only assertion, so again - yay for lack of reading

Just now, DMC said:

All of that research is obviously based on data, and it is based on women candidates "across the board in almost every leadership position." 

Unless most business women get voted on or most scientists get voted on, I don't really think it is. 

Just now, DMC said:

Your unwillingness to accept this broad consensus within the field - like your unwillingness to admit you were simply wrong when you said Buttigieg outpolled Warren and Harris - is simply pathetic trolling at this point.  Enjoy yourself.

Your unwillingness to accept sexism as a genuine problem is remarkable given your position. 

[DMC]

2 hours ago, SFDanny said:

I'm figuring 79.5 million is a lock, but does anyone know if the last 500,000 or so is possible? @DMC do you know?

I don't know, but like Fez said there's still a good amount of votes to count in NY, NJ, IL, and Ohio, and they all should be quite favorable to Biden.  The general estimates are still that turnout will be ~160 million.  Based on how much Biden is winning by, how much the remaining votes favor him, and how little percentage are going to 3rd parties, if that number is anywhere close to accurate he should definitely get over 80 million.

[Ormond]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

It depends on the policy. Some of them, like a minimum wage increase, are generally extremely popular. However, for voters who don't want to vote Democratic, it hasn't been enough to get their support. And, in fairness, sometimes they don't even need to in order to get the policy into place. Florida just voted to increase its minimum wage to $15 (by 2026), and it got 60% of the vote. Why vote for the party you hate when you can take the one thing you like about them and just vote for it at the ballot box?

It's the same reason why, though I do think the Democratic party should embrace marijuana legalization, I'm not sure it'll actually help them that much. Legalization has been progressing rapidly the past few years already, and I think the prospective of someone who supports legalization but dislikes Democrats would be that the incentives to vote Democratic even if they fully go pro-legalization aren't good enough.

It's no mystery why minimum wage increases can win with blue collar people who otherwise vote Republican. One of the most important reasons why blue collar people are susceptible to Trump and the Republicans is because of their false belief that there are millions of people out there (mostly non-White and/or immigrants) that are living off welfare and getting benefits they don't deserve. Resentment against the "underserving" getting good things is one of their chief motivating principles.

The minimum wage by definition only goes to people who ARE working. That makes them "deserving" in the eyes of Trump voters. The would never vote to increase "welfare" but are quite happy to increase wages for "workers."

And marijuana legalization may seem more "liberal" at the moment in our political culture, but to my mind it is really much more "libertarian" than "liberal" and seems to lead to a triumph for capitalists where it's been implemented. It appeals to a different part of the Republican base than minimum wage increases do, but I think it's a part of their base that's even less likely to support "socialist" or social democratic ideals. 

[Lollygag]

18 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Isn't Ohio an open primary state?

also, per your link, Trump is just asking for someone to primary DeWine, and while he may very well get primaried from the right, I'm not so sure a Trump tweet should be used as evidence of this.

Plus, Dewine is a pretty moderate republican, there can't even be that many GOP people to the left of him, so even if you picked 100 random GOP people to primary him, 95 of them will be to the right of him.  And he's way more liberal than Kasich, if your theory worked then why wasn't Kasich's succesor even more rightwing than Kasich?

No. We have no party affiliation and whichever primary we vote in is the party we get dumped into. If we skip a primary, we get dumped back into non-affiliated. Independents like me are often independent on principle, so dumping us in a party is a punishment and deters those who prefer non-affiliation from participating. Or this was the case last I was told.

Incumbents in Ohio never have any real primary challenge. I don't remember anything like this happening before.

It's a way to game the system through an unintended loophole which is Trump's life-long M.O. This is the most recent example. The reason why Romney has shown some independence is that Mormons don't like Trump so he's safe in his primary. Murkowski has shown independence because she's won by write-in. Graham's wtf calculations have been attributed to a primary challenge. Flake retired because he was getting primaried and wouldn't win so couldn't even make it to a general which he could have competitive in. There have been record retirements. They were just saying on the news today about how the right lives in fear of the Trump tweet. They say it all the time.

I'm pretty touchy about the whole primary/party situation because it's chafed since I first started voting. Obviously I've dropped something new here. Just keep watching the news and see how Trumpists use primary challenges to keep his own in line. Look for the line between their choices and how that might weigh with an increasingly Trumpist base.

Lankford was determined to step in on intelligence briefings and suddenly backed off. He's gearing up for a primary and reelection in 2022. Coincidence as far as we can tell, but when the pattern is this consistent and it explains the illogical, it has to be given more consideration. And Trump just like literally did it with DeWine. He doesn't just want someone further right, he wants a sycophant, willing or otherwise.

[IheartIheartTesla]

Looks like the Wisconsin recount will end up costing the Trump campaign ~$7.9 M. Feel sorry for some of his supporters, those who cant afford it, but are on the hook for his continued delusion (I mean, how difficult is it for him to pay for it himself?).

Also, it appears as if Raffensperger is unloading on his Republican colleagues. He just gave an interview to WaPo, where he stated that Graham was one of many people pressuring him to toss out legal ballots. Also, he called Collins a liar and a charlatan (and depressingly, he and his wife received death threats as well)

[Larry of the Lawn]

12 minutes ago, Lollygag said:

No. We have no party affiliation and whichever primary we vote in is the party we get dumped into. If we skip a primary, we get dumped back into non-affiliated. Independents like me are often independent on principle, so dumping us in a party is a punishment and deters those who prefer non-affiliation from participating. Or this was the case last I was told.

Incumbents in Ohio never have any real primary challenge. I don't remember anything like this happening before.

It's a way to game the system through an unintended loophole which is Trump's life-long M.O. This is the most recent example. The reason why Romney has shown some independence is that Mormons don't like Trump so he's safe in his primary. Murkowski has shown independence because she's won by write-in. Graham's wtf calculations have been attributed to a primary challenge. Flake retired because he was getting primaried and wouldn't win so couldn't even make it to a general which he could have competitive in. There have been record retirements. They were just saying on the news today about how the right lives in fear of the Trump tweet. They say it all the time.

I'm pretty touchy about the whole primary/party situation because it's chafed since I first started voting. Obviously I've dropped something new here. Just keep watching the news and see how Trumpists use primary challenges to keep his own in line. Look for the line between their choices and how that might weigh with an increasingly Trumpist base.

Lankford was determined to step in on intelligence briefings and suddenly backed off. He's gearing up for a primary and reelection in 2022. Coincidence as far as we can tell, but when the pattern is this consistent and it explains the illogical, it has to be given more consideration. And Trump just like literally did it with DeWine. He doesn't just want someone further right, he wants a sycophant, willing or otherwise.

I'm not sure I understand OH's primary system - say you voted in the Dem primary one year, can you vote in the GOP one the next?

 

Also, if an incumbent never gets a primary challenge, isn't that inherently undemocratic?  Why shouldn't your party be allowed to offer multiple candidates each election?  Because otherwise, if someone is elected, the only way there could be a democratic alternative is to vote for the opposite party.  This seems undesireable.

You were arguing the other day, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that closed primaries breed extremist candidates.  You were saying that leads to decreasd participation from moderates.   Is this true though?  Are more people abandoning parties to be independent or nonaffiliated?  It sounds like in Ohio that it's easy for independents, or unaffilated voters, or moderates to vote in either primary, and also sounds like, from what you say, that incumbents don't really get primaried.  Is your system too closed?  Or too open?

[Mindwalker]

So there were these R senators who promised to step in if Biden didn't get access to intelligence briefings by last Friday. That means he's getting these briefings now, right?