So Nvidia was engineering the crisis all along...

 So...yeah, Jensen Huang couldn't keep his leather jacket on and apparently fell for a Chinese spy. We all know that. And then another affair came out. And another.

Now, i don't care what the guy does with his peepee. That's his own business. The thing that is pissing ME off as a gamer is that now it's coming out that he basically was engineering a shortage of GPUs in order to drive up prices and profit massively off of it. It's like, he had a taste of that COVID era crypto profit and wanted to create that again. And now it costs $400 for a fricking 5050. Seriously, everyone boo this man. Like, really, I hate this AI crap so much. And not because I hate AI itself. I hate the industry. I hate the business model. I hate that so many rich people are making decisions with massive ramifications for the entire economy and they affect the rest of us negatively. 

I hope that this bubble pops, and prices drop like crazy. When they do I'm probably gonna finally upgrade if there's a suitable GPU at the right price. And hopefully we won't have THIS happen again and computer hardware prices can be NORMAL for a while again.  

The state of the model, 2026 edition

 So....let's discuss how my models did for the election cycle. 

Senate

 

First, the senate. Of the 18 races I actively predicted (the rest were deemed "safe"), I got 2 wrong. That's normal for an election cycle. Iowa was tied, but I presumed all ties would go democrat because that's where the energy was. 

A lot of people were like "how could you have guessed the exact map we got?" And we couldn't have. My model is linear in the sense that it assumes a wave uniformly washes over the country one way or another. But here, we lost Louisiana but won south carolina, we lost Nebraska, but won Mississippi. We couldn't have guessed that. No one could have. And while my model could have, I literally did an experiment where I had to have it go 523 times before it finally spat out the right map, and after 500 I applied a D+3 bias to tilt the scale a bit. So no, you couldn't have reasonably predicted the exact map. 

Still, if we look at history, these maps are NEVER perfect, they're close, but 1-2 wrong is par. 

Of the tossups, there were 2 of them, I got both right. That's 100%.

Of the leans, there were 7, I got 5 right. That's 71%.

Of the likelies, there were 6, I got all 6 right, that's 100%. That's a pretty good cycle all things considered.

 Of the safe seats, i guessed 3 and got 3 right, that's 100%. 

Governors

I'm doing governors yet because it's easier than doing the house. I am gonna be doing the house somewhat separate as that was...a mess. 

With the governors, I guessed 21 different races and only got 1 wrong, that being Hinojosa winning in Texas. I thought Hot Wheels (Abbott) would hold into it, but alas, the blue wave was so massive he didn't. Again, oregon I assumed would go blue, because again, all 0 point races were estimated to go blue, and it is normally a blue state anyway. 

Of the 4 tossups, I got all 4 right, that's 100%. 

Of the 3 leans, i got 2 right, that's 67%. 

Of the 8 likelies, I got 8 right, that's 100%. 

Of the 6 safes, I got all 6 right, that's 100%. 

House

Oof, here's where it gets painful.

 

So it should be noted not all races are formally called, but we know enough where some are projecting the outcomes and we have an idea where they're going. Here I guessed 88 races and got 23 wrong. I also got an additional wrong, TN-04, which experts said wasn't in play. 

Most of the incorrect races were red leaning districts that went blue. 4 of my errors were democratic races, and 19 were republican ones. 20 if you include TN-04.

Of the 4 tossups, I got only 1 right, that's 25%. (target: 50-60%)

Of the 19 lean races, I got only 9 correct. That's 47%. (target: 61-84%)

Of the 23 likely races, I got 16 right, that's 70%. (target: 85-98%)

Of the 41 safe races, I got 37 right, that's 90%. (target: 98%+)

Why did I get so much wrong? Well, at first I thought it was my model. I made A LOT of assumptions with it and it was VERY experimental. I didn't have a lot of data to go by, and I basically shifted 2024 results a uniform amount, which was difficult given that so many districts were redistrcted for this race. 

But...it looks like my model performed on par with everyone else's. Nate silver, for example, made 21 errors in his forecast. I guess it happens. When I'm performing similarly to Nate Silver, i can't complain. That IS the benchmark I aspire to. but MAN this was a slaughterfest, and I should maybe use a larger margin of error with future house races if I'm gonna bomb this badly.

Total

 Of 10 tossups, I got 7 right. That's 70% accuracy, above what I would expect.

Of 29 leans I got 16 right. That's 55% accuracy, below what I would expect (reversing tossup and lean numbers would be about on par though strangely enough). 

Of 37 likely races, I got 30 right. That's 81% accuracy, slightly below my desired accuracy range.

Of 50 safe races, i got 46 right, that's 92% accuracy. If I subtract 1 for the one wrong not even counted race, that's 45/50, or 90%. I'll go with that to keep myself honest.

With that said, the model in 2026 underperformed expectations, precisely due to the house model. I wasn't even gonna count the house numbers, but I decided to last minute. Mainly because even if my model took a beating, I didn't really perform any worse on average than experts seemed to. My predictions were mostly in line with theirs. We just happened to have a REALLY HISTORIC blue wave that screwed up the model, and no one really got it right. So...I'm gonna count it. The model did what it was expected roughly, the data was just really that crazy. 

Combining with historical data

Now we have a total of 53 tossups, with 35 correct guesses. That's a 66% success rate (50-60% par expected). 

We have a total of 114 leans, with me getting 80 right. That's a 70% success rate (61-84% expected)

We have 109 likely races, with me getting 97 right. That's a 89% success rate (85-98% expected). 

Like always I wont bother counting solids. While my success rate is trash here, I'm also not excluding the hundreds of literally safe races i got right that didn't even make it on the map because they weren't in place. I mean, think about it, if I got 24 races wrong in the house, I still got 411 right, which is a 94% success rate (and some people are framing Nate Silver's success rate in those terms). 

All things considered, the model still LARGELY performs within expectations. it took a beating this year due to the house, but it seems like everyone took their lumps this year because of the house. It truly was a historical wave election where democrats just vastly underperformed expectations.

And yeah. That's how I performed.  

2028 is gonna suck, isnt it?

 *sigh*, yeah, I'm dooming. We just had a massive win last week, but I'm already dooming about 2028. And here's why. The reason we won by such an overwhelming margin was because democrats has presidential year level turnout, while republicans had normal midterm year turnout. Polling is shaping up in such a way for 2028 where the race is already projected to be FAR narrower. And we just got a new poll today from Impact Research. Im having trouble finding the original link, so here's a reddit link with a screenshot of the poll. 

*sigh*...okay so let's unpack this. First, AOC is the worst of all the candidates polled. AGAIN. The one candidate I'm close to, and they're dead even. And that's a GOOD poll for AOC, as discussed before most polls have her in the negatives. 

Harris and Newsom, our frontrunners, aren't much better. D+1 and D+2. In a way this is good for AOC, but also bad for the party in general. The brand is just...fundamentally unpopular. Just because people rejected MAGA last week doesn't mean voters like democrats. Even worse, they don't seem to even like the one democrat who stands out from the rest on policy. 

All of these other candidates are the same crap. And sure, they poll higher, but they also have lower name recognition, meaning voters haven't found enough reason to hate them yet. As they get to know them, I'd expect them to end up about the same.

Of the candidates who ARE viable with current primary polling, it's Buttigieg and Ossoff, meaning this is feeling like 2004 again with the likes of Howard Dean, John Edwards, and John kerry, all milquetoast white males. Ossoff scores the best at D+9. WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE LIKE THIS GUY!?

And that's another rant of mine. I keep hearing Ossoff should run for president. Omg isn't he so dreamy? He can give a good speech. he sounds like Obama? SO FRICKING WHAT?! HE'S JUST ANOTHER BORING CENTRIST! 

And that's my deep frustration with this cycle in a nutshell. All of these candidates, other than AOC, might as well be Joe Biden to me. They have the same ideology, the same policies, and presumably, the same lack of willingness to deliver for the American people. If I threw them all in my presidential metric, they'd all score...about the same. Sure, Ossoff is more charismatic, in the way Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were charismatic, but that doesn't mean anything to me. Even if they win, they're not gonna get in and make our lives better. They're gonna lose this massive congress we just got. And then we're gonna get MAGA back. When will we learn? The American people want change. But then, it seems like, when you're the person who offers change, it's like "no, not like that!"

Which...brings me to yet another frustration with the American public. Look. I'm an ex conservative. I've been there. I touched the stove in 2010 with the tea party, I learned that fire is hot, and not to touch the stove again. I then completely abandoned conservative ideology and became a full on progressive. I looked at the issues that impact us with the economy, from income inequality, a lack of economic or job security, and hell, in the 2020s, even inflation. And it all goes back to one thing for me: Reaganomics. We have this idea that if we just trust the market, that the best outcomes will be served. But....if we leave the markets to their natural mechanisms, we get...exactly the problems we get. The economy between employers and employees is this. The rich "job creators" dont wanna create jobs, they dont want the wealth to trickle down, they treat you as disposible cogs in their machines, and that's why they wanna automate your jobs away with AI. Because they don't want to pay you. They wanna use you for all you got, and then throw you away. This is how we got the income inequality and economic conditions from 2008 on where it seemed like we never had enough jobs and we always needed to create more. 

But then once we get to the other side of the phillips curve, we get inflation. And a lot of inflation in the 2020s is due to the same incentive structure. When looking at the markets between consumers and sellers, the sellers wanna sell the least amount of stuff for the most amount of money, or otherwise produce as much as they can to get as much money as they can. However, with income inequality becoming so extreme, the businesses are straight up looking at the typical American consumer and saying "you don't have any money, so you no longer matter." We see it most plainly with Nvidia and the AI bubble. Computer part producers are giving a massive middle finger at normal PC builders while locking in deals with billionaires for all their AI data center crap that no one wants. But it's also everything else. Housing is like this, it's why housing is so expensive. They arent building more housing for you and me, they're building it for rich ####s with 6+ figure incomes because that's where the money is. That's also why vacations are so expensive. We used to be able to get $60 hotel rooms a decade ago, and they'd be CLEAN. Now you're spending $100+, often $120+ just to avoid something roach infested or without other obvious problems. Restaurants are getting ridiculously expensive. Even fast food is expensive. It's like the wealthy decided past COVID to collectively take the public for all that its worth, and it decided going after fewer people who have more money is more profitable than appealing to the masses.

The result is an economy that works very well for the top 20%, but feels awful for everyone else. We're being pushed down into a slave class where we just work all day to produce for rich people while getting subsistence wages and living in constant fear of losing our jobs, while all that wealth goes to the rich and a handful of people who control society with their massive wealth. And normally the middle class is the buffer, but a lot of that middle class is going down, while others are going up. "K shaped economy", it's basically income inequality.

There are obvious solutions for ALL of these interconnected problems, but you gotta move left. You gotta embrace progressive candidates. I ain't saying you gotta do MY program specifically, i go into an explicitly anti work direction that would probably alienate some of the consumer classes itself (remember the cardinal rule?). But at the same time, the democratic socialist types are basically offering a more traditional jobist/consumerist vision of progressive politics and PEOPLE ARE REJECTING THEM!!! WHY?! 

I swear, the median American voter is like a chicken with their heads cut off. They recognize problems, they want solutions, but when solutions, they go "no, not like that" and vote for MAGA or some centrist crapbag who won't do anything instead. And in 2028, it's all, OMG Jon Ossoff, isn't he so dreamy? No, he's not. He's just Joe Biden again. Which is...Barack Obama again. And that seems to be what they're going for, Obama, the charismatic guy who offered performative change, but didnt actually improve the core socioeconomic situation long term. 

And it just gets worse from there. Buttigieg, another boring centrist. Newsom and Harris, just, oh god no to both of them. AOC....well, at least she's the more jobist/consumerist vision for progressivism, but then she polls HORRIBLY and probably cant win against FREAKING JD VANCE AND MARCO RUBIO. Like, WTF?! 

Anyway, this is why I can't get excited for 2028. We're just gonna get force fed centrist slop, probably only narrowly avoid defeat because for some reason half the country seems to be into the current brand of republican cruelty, religious zealotry, white ethnonationalism, and authoritarianism. SERIOUSLY, YOU REALIZE THAT THESE MINDSETS ARE WHAT GAVE RISE TO THE LITERAL NAZIS, RIGHT?! And then as the country sours on the democrats, because once again, they don't wanna actually DO ANYTHING with their power, they're gonna lose from 2030 on and we're just gonna elect an even more radical republican party here. 

Seriously, if you want change, support an actual change candidate. Otherwise wtf are we doing here? Ossoff aint gonna do anything worth a darn unless he's PULLED left by US, the progressives who you guys seem to revile so much. It's frustrating. This whole thing is frustrating. I'm dreading 2028 at this rate because despite whatever wins we got last night, I doubt they'll carry forward. Of course, it's early, and we'll see where things go. But right now, looking at where things are going is painful to me.  

Discussing the ripple effects of 2026 and the interstate compact

 So...there is another possible path to the 7th party system that doesn't DIRECTLY rely on the south. And that is the "interstate compact." It's been getting attention lately because with state legislatures and governorships flipping and giving several states legislative trifectas, we might be seeing more states join this compact  But what does it do? Basically, it nukes the electoral college. We can't really abolish it directly, but if we get enough states to get 270+ electoral votes to join it, and all of those states agree to give their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, it basically renders the entire system obsolete. If most states just give their votes to the winner of the popular vote, then it's the popular vote that elects presidents. 

The ramifications of this could be party realigning in and of themselves. It could functionally destroy the republican party. The electoral college has been one of the only things keeping them relevant in the modern era. It's what gave Bush the 2000 election, and Trump 2016. Heck, since 1992, republicans have only won the popular vote twice. Once in 2004, when Bush was still riding some of that post 9/11 high, and in 2024 where inflation under Biden caused the republicans to narrowly win the popular vote as well. By normally, in a normal election cycle, democrats win that. This itself could destroy the republican party in its current form. And with democrats winning legislatures in states like pennsylvania and even texas, well....we might hit that 270 number. 

See, the republicans rely on the outsized influence of the rural vote and mechanisms like the electoral college to keep power. THey love to play these arguments about how we're not a democracy, we're a republic, and how the people cant be trusted to make the right decisions so we need...some weird complex institution our founders made to protect us from the will of the people. it's always been BS. As the legaleagle video pointed out, the electoral college was a half baked compromise that never worked well. It's been used by the south to cement their own power, which is why it's been so instrumental over the years. First, we had the confederacy and Jim crow, then they became the base of the republican party. If the interstate compact goes into effect, suddenly many of those states become less important, because people should vote, not land. And for all the arguments that the system gives all states representation, it really doesn't. Many states are taken for granted and we end up campaigning in like 7 states overwhelmingly, while large states full of people like NY, Texas, and California are largely ignored. There is talk of texas becoming a swing state, but imagine how horrible that would be in the context of the article I wrote right before this. It's 40 electoral votes, it would be THE state everyone caters to, and it would DOMINATE our politics. The whole country would have to put up with the whims of texan voters, which would actually make our politics more conservative. 

BUT....if we get rid of the electoral college in effect, the states that matter most would simply be the states where voters live. 50 state strategies might be viable. At the very least, the swing states would be where people live. Sure, Texas IS the second biggest state in the union. but California, Florida, and New York are rather large too. beyond that, there's lots of mid sized states like pennsylvania, ohio, georgia, north carolina, michigan, and illinois. We'd get a good mix of states, really. No one region of the country would dominate. Maybe the interior west would lose a bit but no one is going there anyway. The point is, doing away with the electoral college could functionally change our democracy where just doing THAT could create a realignment. it would literally change the whole calculus toward electing presidents, and, if anything, weaken the republican party in net because they rarely win the popular vote in the modern era. it literally took the post COVID economic environment to break the democrats' lock on the electoral college, because that itself touched on that cardinal rule of politics of not messing with peoples' living standards. Other than that, the republicans have been toast for a while, they literally needed the electoral college and its broken math to actually win elections mostly. So you wanna bring about the 7th party system, you an change the rules of the game, and the 2026 victories might do that. 

We also might see these blue states gerrymander the fudge out of themselves to preserve their power. I quite frankly think we should uncap the house, but barring that, the way I see it, the republicans started a gerrymandering war, and the democrats can finish it. While state legislatures rush to gerrymander the crap out of blue states, congress could offer a truce with the republicans by...banning gerrymandering altogether. Either we beat the republicans at their own game...or we ban the negative practice they decided to revive in a poor attempt to maintain power. And then we simply have fairer congressional maps. I personally would like to get rid of the reapportionment act and shrink the size of districts, but no one is touching that yet, but it's on the table.

Some democrats are also discussing things like court packing, term limits, age limits, etc, to break up SCOTUS's outsized conservative influence. I support at least some of these measures, like term limits. ANd if we hold the senate long enough we can pick up seats like alito's or thomas's. The point is, we might be seeing the ripple effects of 2026 in such a way that this political earthquake causes ripple effects that COULD usher in the 7th party system, not because it has permanent staying power, but simply because it breaks the rules that republicans currently rely on to keep relevance even as their coalition has been in decline for decades. 

And while some might see what we're proposing as evil and dictatorial, on the contrary, that's what THEY want. They want a system where we rely on BS broken institutions to maintain power. The whole goal of the Trumpian political project was to prepare American democracy for permanent minority rule. They dont want people voting, they want less people voting. That's why they fear monger about voter fraud and make up all this BS about a great replacement their side is obsessed with. They need their voter based obsessed with it to keep them voting for their side, and to also disenfranchise the other side. They broke up the voting right act starting the gerrymandering war to destroy black voting power in the south. They called for voter ID in the name of fake "voter fraud" to disenfranchise people. They use the arguments of "we're a republic" and go on about how we should fear democracy because...they dont benefit from it. They dont want people to vote, they want fewer people voting because that tends to benefit them. More extreme people in the republican party want to disenfranchise women, they want to disenfranchise minorities. They dont want demographics that dont generally vote for them, to vote period. For all of the faults of the left, our political project is different. We want MORE democracy. We want more people voting. We want more "one person, one vote." And if we can just straight up change the rules to make the system more democratic, then that's good not just for them, but for ALL of us. I'm not saying the democrats are perfect. They're not. They tend to be corrupt themselves, and they tend to want to limit, for example, the ability to vote third party, because it threatens their power. But....if we can pass reforms like mentioned here, that would radically change our democracy making it more representative of the people, and put the nail in the coffin of the current republican coalition, making it unviable for years to come, and perhaps radically changing our national politics in ways that we can't even fully understand yet. It WOULD benefit democrats initially, but republicans would have to find a way to change their entire strategy to claw back power. It would literally upend the entire 6th party system as we know it.

With that said, I'd rather do this than to adopt a strategy of trying to win the south more directly. Maybe for the house and senate we will continue to need to in some ways. But ultimately, I'd rather enact rules that break the republican party by doing away with the institutional advantages they rely on to win and maintain power relatively undemocratically.  That itself would trigger a realignment that forces the country as a whole to realign around a new set of politics centered around the will of the people, instead of giving an outsized influence to a handful of states that might be out of sync with the rest of the country.  

Discussing the south and how much the democrats should appeal to them

 So...with the 2026 midterms turning half of the south blue, there's debate in the democratic party about how much it should appeal to the south. Scott Colom, who recently won in Mississippi, basically said that the democratic party doesn't believe that they can win in the south and the party doesn't even try. He believes we should change that. Quite frankly, i disagree.

Don't get me wrong, I respect the crap out of Scott Colom for winning. However, let's be blunt. Colom's win only happened because 2026 was an insane election year with crazy levels of turnout for democrats. This was not a normal cycle. This was a political earthquake, brought on by the fact that Trump and the republicans did not respect the cardinal rule of American politics: don't #### with the American peoples' living standards. So when Cindy Hyde Smith told them to "pick another protein" in response to high beef prices, they picked another senator instead. 

However, this is basically a high water mark for democrats. Kind of like those signs that show how high the water got during hurricane Agnes here in PA, which was one of those one in a hundred year floods. It COULD be an early sign of a shift to the seventh party system, but let's look at it relative to 2024 again.

 

 This is a rough 15.4 point shift from 2024, which is about what we got with the generic congressional vote going from R+2.7 to D+12.7. Put onto an electoral college map with 2024's voter data, that amounts to basically a 400+ electoral vote landslide. This is a massive BLOWOUT for democrats. And again, sure, this could be an early sign of a shift to the 7th party system, that full on realignment I've been gunning for since 2016, it's unclear if it will stuck. We'll have to see how the democrats continue to hold up over subsequent elections. It's very possible that this amount of support quickly evaporates as democrats fail to perform and make peoples' lives meaningfully better. I mean, 2006 and 2008 were HUGE wins for democrats, but then the tea party wave of 2010 took the wind out of our sails and the enthusiasm and energy we had basically....died. 

And again, what does a normal year look like? Well, not this. More like this:

This is basically what a tied generic vote map looks like. Democrats win, but outside of Georgia, which is rapidly moving left due to Atlanta basically turning it into the illinois of the south, it's not really reliable. Texas is still solid red here. Arizona and North Carolina are moving left but arent reliable. Mississippi, forget it. Quite frankly, by the time you can reliably turn much of the south blue as we did just last week, you need to literally have an environment that in a normal cycle is unthinkable. Again, it happened because Trump and the republicans F-ed up on such a monumental level that it literally broke my model. I literally had to remake the version above showing states that are like R+16 and above because my normal maps literally wouldnt allow shifts that far. It's like breaking a scale because you put something so heavy on it the numbers just dont go up that high. I highly doubt that that's reliable. Like last year, I was thinking flipping the senate was gonna be difficult to impossible. Even if we saw a shift from 2024, I expected maybe a 4-8 point shift from 2024...leading to a generic congressional vote between like D+1 and D+5. What map would that produce? Something like this:

Like, once you get past the seven swing states, there's a HUGE CLIFF before we get to the next wave of states. The senate victories somehow cleared THOSE and then started flipping stuff beyond that like South Carolina and Mississippi. When that happens, it's beyond over. Again, not a normal cycle. It happened because Trump F-ed up so badly that it seems to be pushing the country toward a possible full on realignment. We saw this happen before. The carter years caused the Reagan revolution, where the political conditions allowed a shift, and the republican party was able to capitalize on it to shift the map in their favor. Even then, the democrats eventually won again, and Bill Clinton did win the south, but that showed itself to be temporary, as it then went red with George W. Bush and has only started showing the first signs of shifting back in the 2020s. 

Which brings me to my perspective. I understand by this point, I'm a bit older but my own politics are mostly informed by the Obama map and the spirit of the great recession and the 2012 election. For me, the south and the interior west states are the two regions of the country that are mostly a lost cause. We can win the west. We can win the northeast. We can win the rust belt. But the south is just...off limits. It's conservative. It's full of religious nuts and racists. It's literally the backbone of the republican party. And some are saying, with this realignment, we can break that backbone. And sure, maybe, but here's something I also keep having to ask. But why would I want to? As I see it, the culture of the south is fundamentally different than my own. I'm a liberal secular humanist. My own politics are informed by atheism. Why should I wanna appeal to traditionalism? it seems like this obsession with the south is centrist democrats who think if they can flip the south, they can not only screw the republicans, but also create a power base that keeps the democrats conservative. And that's my own kind of moral opposition to this strategy here. This up and coming coalition...I'm not sure I have a place in it. I'm not sure the progressive left has a place in it. Yes, it's populist in a way, until you start talking about solutions, then that's socialism and all the suburbanites say "don't raise MY taxes." And then you got the black vote, which we've discussed before. A lot of black voters in the south are very...churchy. They are conservative. They have low standards, which is why democrats love them, they'll "vote blue no matter who", and the centrist wing can weaponize those voters against the progressive left, accusing us of being overeducated and out of touch, and going on about how we just don't get them. There's a lot of animus between conservative black voters and white social democrats, with the first group not trusting the second because FDR's new deal coalition was in with the racists. And that's how the democrats in the centrist wing frame it. They say if we want social democracy again, we gotta throw black voters under the bus, and they pick a fight between us on the progressive left and these voters. This causes the opposite effect, driving me to be skeptical of a coalition that relies too much on the south. Nothing against black voters in particular btw. But if they're gonna be weird over us wanting things like universal healthcare and UBI, and the centrist wing is gonna try to turn us into pariahs and use these voters to undermine OUR interests, I'm skeptical of a coalition where they're a central part of it. Because im skeptical of centrists.

And if anything, that's what makes me leery about this 2026 democratic coalition. As I said, this isn't necessarily a coalition centered around my priorities. Southern democrats ARE more moderate. They are gonna be a bit more finnicky and hostile to my own political goals. Is Scott Colom gonna be for universal healthcare? is he gonna be for UBI? What about James Talarico?

Heck, I've discussed talarico before. And while yes, he's more progressive than i often give him credit for, he CODES conservative. Every word out of his mouth is about Jesus and it puts me off massively given my own secularism. I guess that's what you gotta do to win texas, and he sure did win and i wanna give him credit for that, but yeah....it's just like "is this what the future of the democrats looks like?" 

Again, as a white, northern, secular, yankee type I just find a lot of this to be offputting. And as some may have noticed, as I process this election cycle, I feel like I AM having to back off of my ambitions a bit because i recognize this new energy in the party is, quite frankly, more conservative than I'd like. And I'm NOT gonna get everything that I want. But I still want it. Dont get me wrong, I still want my priorities met. But the problem is, will the moderate candidates a southern coalition will generate deliver? Probably not. With the south being a central part of the democratic party, you can say goodbye to medicare for all. You can say goodbye to UBI. Any major change can be written off as alienating the more conservative "blue dog" parts of this new coalition. 

With that said, not only am I not necessarily convinced that we CAN win in the south, but even if we could, I'm not really in favor of moving that way. I fear that doing so would be counter to my own interests in the democratic party and my own liberalism. When I left the republican party, I did it as a rejection of conservatism. I didn't leave to watch the other side become conservative as those voters flee the mess they created without changing their minds. If the south comes to us, and I believe some parts of it slowly are due to demographic changes, fine, but I'm not necessarily on board to us coming to them, as doing so sacrifices what draws me to the democrats over the republicans in the first place. 

Right now, im going along with the democrats because I believe stopping the republicans is essential for the future health of our democracy and the country. BUT, that doesn't mean I want us to become conservative. And that's my fear. These guys are too conservative, and integrating them into the coalition will make US more conservative, hamstringing any solid progressive legislation that I support. Keep in mind, my own vision for the country IS closer to AOC than, say, John Ossoff. But...Im not convinced the people want that any more. 10 years ago when bernie ran, they did. But that zeitgeist seems gone, and the energy of the modern environment is different. Sure, there's populist anti billionaire style energy. But it's a much more moderate energy that rejects actual progressive solutions and is, if anything, quite hostile to them. 

And yeah, that's just how I see it. Maybe I'm wrong, idk, we'll have to see how this plays out, and there IS more at play here than just a southern shift. We could see the 7th party system happen simply because of the interstate compact that is being discussed. This political wave might lead to a 7th party system simply because the wave is big enough to lead to long term political changes that completely F the future of the republican party over.  

It seems like republicans forgot the cardinal rule of US politics

 DON'T #### WITH THE AMERICAN PEOPLES' LIVING STANDARDS!!!!!

 So yeah, as Kyle covered here, Rick Santorum decided to say that Americans should sacrifice for Donald Trump's war in the middle east. 

 

...Should I say it again?

 

 Seriously though. You don't F with the American' peoples' living standards. These are the guys who when Carter told the American people in the 1970s to turn the heat down and wear sweaters the last time we had an Iran induced oil crisis, they rewarded him by throwing him out of office in a monumental landslide and electing Reagan twice, and then Bush. And that's how we got the modern era of conservative rule that started with Reagan. The american people were so traumatized by Carter that they were still invoking him in the 2000s when I was a teenager. The republicans held an iron grip on our politics basically until the great recession and Obama being elected in 2008, because, once again, you don't F with the American peoples' living standards. And when Obama didn't do enough because he was a rather milquetoast centrist democrat, Clinton was thrown out when she showed up with her "it's my turn" crap, leading to current guy to get elected to his first term, because you don't F with the american peoples' living standards. And when he messed up during COVID, he lost. Because you don't F with the American peoples' living standards. And when Biden happened to get caught with post COVID inflation, we threw him out for Trump again, because you don't F with the American peoples' living standards. And now, Trump suffered the biggest mid term defeat in the past 50 years, because you don't F with the American peoples' living standards. 

 

So yeah. i think I'm gonna say it again, loud and clear:

 DON'T #### WITH THE AMERICAN PEOPLES' LIVING STANDARDS!!!!!

Americans will tolerate a lot of crap. They'll tolerate de facto enslavement and everything else, but the second you touch their actual living standards in a noticeable way that ISNT a frog in a boiling pot, they will go BALLISTIC. And that's why even Mississippi picked another senator.  

I mean...do you know how badly you have to F up as a republican, for MISSISSIPPI to go blue? It's like that moment from Die Hard where the FBI cuts the power and inadvertantly opens the vault the bad guys wanted to steal the stuff from. It's that level of incompetence. And then these guys in the face of doubling down are like..."gee, you know what? the American people are selfish, they should SACRIFICE for this iran war." I mean, F off. Or don't. You're actually doing the democrats a favor here. Like seriously the democrats are inept at making their own case half the time. But you know what's making the case for them? Castigating them for not sacrificing for Donald Trump's war in Iran. 

 

And...idk, I KINDA have mixed thoughts so hear me out. yes, the American people are selfish, and it frustrates me too. I think they did Carter dirty in the 1980 election. I mean, it wasn't his fault. And when in an oil constrained environment, I guess its hard to tolerate, but yeah, I mean, what else was carter supposed to say, consume as much oil as you want so we all run out and prices get higher? And then we have COVID. Trump deserved to be thrown out on his butt for sheer incompetence and actively mismanaging the pandemic, but watching how selfish the american people were when the economy reopened and they were like I WANT MY CREATURE COMFORTS NOW seriously rubbed me the wrong way. We do lack the civic spirit of past generations in a way when dealing with a legitimate crisis. For as much as we make martyrs of ourselves with work ethic and wrap that crap up in the American flag, we are ridiculously intolerant of any restrictions on our consumption habits. Oh, we're supposed to not eat out and stuff because a deadly disease is killing millions of us? Lets sacrifice millions for the sake of the economy. Oh, and let's nor forget the whole "you should be forced to work to provide me entertainment and cheap creature comforts" attitude of the early 2020s, which rubbed me the wrong way given my anti work indepentarian tendencies. 

But at the same time...with Iran? Yeah, that's totally self inflicted. let's never forget that Trump started this war to distract from the fact that he's a pedo piece of crap as described in the epstein files. Remember those? Yeah. And Iran...wasnt even a threat. He did that to himself, and to all of us. 

The fact is, normally, I dont blame presidents for the economy. But Trump is making so many unforced errors I cant help but blame him for the current problems. For as much crap as Biden put up with, he left the economy in a relatively stable state. But then TRUMP was the one who did the tariffs. He's the one who invaded Iran when any expert could've told him it was a horrible idea because they'd close the strait of hormuz and oil would reach the prices we're at now. He's the one who is cozying up to the AI industry and Nvidia and refusing to regulate them. And apparently through all of these things, the American people are just supposed to suffer. Oh well, I guess we gotta suffer for Trump's war. I guess we gotta suffer with AI data centers and an insane electronics market because we need AI for some reason. It's bull####, it really is. And the American people said NO to this. And you know what? In this case, they're 100% right. 

 

It's one thing to need to sacrifice when putting up with some sort of crisis that happened that wasn't anyone's fault, at least no one's fault in our own country. It's another for comically incompetent presidents like Trump to CREATE these crises, and then lecture the American people about how they need to suffer for them. But hey, if that's the game Trump wants to play, I say let him F around and find out. We really are probably gonna get our version of the Reagan revolution if things keep going like this. I just hope the democrats don't F this up as well, because as you can imagine, I don't really trust them either. Especially with current leadership.  

No, Jeffries didn't screw up the Hegseth impeachment

 Okay, now that I said what I really think of Jeffries and Schumer, I'm also gonna defend them on something again. Recently, Thomas Massie, the disgruntled libertarian republican from Kentucky who got the mob boss treatment from Trump, spent his last days in congress filing impeachment charges against Pete Hegseth for his crimes against humanity as secretary of defense war. He talked explicitly about Trump bombing that little girl's school in Iran, which is a very clear and flagrant violation of international law. I know the US is often criticized for bombing civilians on accident, but in defense to former presidents, it was by accident, typically, and such behavior was simply collaterial damage. The obvious goal of the president was NOT to kill civilians, but to kill terrorists, with some civilians happening to get in the way. However, with Trump's war in Iran, the cruelty is the point, and it's obvious Trump and his officials like hegseth are explicitly targetting civilians and explicitly dont seem to care if they commit war crimes. Holding such actors responsible is the right thing to do, and I wanna see more of this.

However, the impeachment measure failed. It fell short by a few votes because we still have the old republican congress there, and apparently, Massie did not coordinate this effort with democrats at all. He just did it, and several democrats who could have voted for it were out of the building at the time and couldnt get back in time to vote for it, causing the measure to narrowly fail. And for some reason, this is Hakeem Jeffries' fault? Look, I think Jeffries is useless. But he's not actually incompetent, his incompetence is  more of the "weaponized" variety. I'm in the camp of wanting to replace him. However, I like to keep things real and keep our discussions to substantive criticism here. And in this regard, I dont blame Jeffries at all. he and other democrats in leadership were apparently caught off guard and weren't in any position to actually do anything useful. They also promise to take up the topic again when democrats control congress next year. So apparently this pressure to oust jeffries after his original timid statement about not doing impeachments and moving forward is resonating, where even if we dont remove him, we could at least pressure him to actually get stuff done. But yeah, I'd lay off him on this specific topic. This is just a republican chucking a spear at Xerxes to show that a god king can bleed on his way out the door (300 reference). Just a completely random thing that the democrats were clearly unprepared for, and that's why it failed (and in all fairness if republicans were equally prepared it would've failed anyway as they'd get their people in to vote against it).