I am keeping an open mind about Harris, as I haven’t seen many specifics from her yet, but I have my eye on Chase Oliver. You might find him more palatable than the alternatives. Opinion | Libertarian Candidates Can Change Presidential Outcomes. What Does the New Nominee Believe?
Nice cheap shot at Fla Dems there. As for not old looking, every 60 yr old balding, white haired chunky guy says thanks.
I'm kind of surprised that Trump didn't choose Pence again as his running mate. I know Trump holds a grudge against him for helping the Democrats steal the election. But just like there has to be a reason why Trump was saved from an assassin's bullet a few weeks ago, there has to be a reason why Pence was saved from a mob lynching on 1/6. It's like they were fated to run again together.
I think by insisting people are "tribal" beings these are the kind of traps or self-fulfilling prophecies that are engendered. I've said before its not a useful way of looking at people. You talk a lot about bias, but it seems like framing human behavior that way, you are going to find it pretty easily in all sorts of places. Isnt any kind of out group that doesnt fit some kind of in-group expectation going to be behaving "tribally?"
One reason that Harris chose Walz is that Minnesota reminds her of Minnehaha, which makes her laugh. In their interview she laughed every time he said "Minnesota."
Likely but not so sure. It’s a pretty close split between the rural communities and the metro/Duluth/Rochester, which host the majority of blue votes. MN Dems were losing patience w Biden where he got a big no confidence vote. Hopefully diff w KH.
What other states are pushing for major welfare expansions? How many are declaring themselves “trans refuge states” and granting the state emergency jurisdiction to make custody decisions for out-of-state minors whose parents won’t consent to gender affirming care? Passing carbon bans? Enshrining a right to abortion with literally no limits at all in it (the literal “to the moment of birth” abortion that Dems always insist Republicans are fear-mongering about)? Minnesota isn’t a state with large Democratic majorities, but it’s one with consistent Democratic majorities and where the coalition that makes up those majorities is much more uniformly to the far-left than the state parties in most of the rest of the country.
I don't understand how Minnesota can simultaneously have "super weird progressive politics" while at the same time being contested by Republicans who considered it winnable in the last 3-4 elections. Its not Vermont, it is more Democratic than Wisconsin but we are talking a few points. Clinton won it by 2 points.
Michigan went blue and repealed right to work, expanded civil rights protections based on gender identity, signed a red flag law/background check/safe storage law. People talk about Pritzker and Whitmer the same way as Walz. Normal Midwest Democrats who aren't actively hostile to progressives, but aren't Bernie Sanders type populists either.
Crazy that Harris didn't take Shapiro. Huge tactical error on her part. Guess they listened to the D's who didn't want a Jewish VP.
The R/D margin isn’t very wide in terms of the number of voters. But the Democrats that are there (and there are more Ds than Rs) happen to be a coalition that puts the DFL much further to the left than state parties in most of the rest of the country. That’s because it is, by and large, a coalition that consists nearly entirely of suburban white liberals with a smattering of Somali refugees. They aren’t having to appeal to farm workers, or rural voters, or non-immigrant black voters to any significant degree (the groups that tend to be the more socially conservative subsets of the Democratic Party tent). Some of the “super progressive” things that they’ve gotten praised for proposing and passing in the last session or two were blocked in prior sessions by rural Democrats. Those rural Democrats have now lost their seats to Republicans, but the DFL kept their majority (and shifted further to the left) because more lilly white suburban districts flipped to electing liberal reps.
Or perhaps they've figured out that they can peal off enough rural voters with Walz-style politics instead of Clinton style neo-liberalism. These seem like pretty standard Midwest politics to me, a little left of Michigan and Wisconsin. Its not California, its not even Colorado.
But that’s objectively not what happened. The DFL used to be a coalition of the Democratic Party (which was mostly urban) and the Farm Labor Party (which was mostly rural), but the party has shifted more and more urban over time. It held rural seats in Minnesota until fairly recently, but they have now lost basically all of them: