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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Tiny margins, though. Cook Political Report says 209 solid seats for the Republicans, meaning they only need to win 9 races in the "lean Republican" (26 seats) or "pure tossup" (only 16 seats!) category to get a majority.
Although this reflects how tenuous their hold is, reinforced by gerrymandering. If Democrats won solid state-level majorities in Pennsylvania and Virginia and theoretically gerrymandered everything up their way, that would put them back in the running. The important margins are places where the Democrats could/should be competitive at the state level, but presently are not.
Edit:
I want to say that the so called "white liberals" who would actually be turned off by the Democrats tackling anything too racial have already walked off, except within the infrastructure of the party itself. In terms of voter base, Obama more or less scared off anyone who was "liberal unless it's going to benefit darkies."
Edit II: and there are also non-economic means of addressing problems disproportionately impacting minorities that white liberals and even white moderates and some conservatives are on board with, such as decriminalizing weed (or even decriminalizing possession of harder drugs). There are other non-radical fixes that could be made which would not destroy the problem, but alleviate it significantly.
edited 23rd Jul '15 11:13:39 AM by Ogodei
Police should vote Democrat because unions and Republican because of social conservatism. It's a tug of war.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Rand Paul can't understand why there are Iraqi refugees
Jeb Bush wants to get rid of Medicare
Ben Carson says prisons are too comfy
Marco Rubio disses Obama and compares him to Trump
A whole slew of crazy statements from GOP contenders today. The Trump is really driving the clown car off the fucking cliff....
edited 23rd Jul '15 2:31:39 PM by nightwyrm_zero
Closest thing is Christie (who might be looking at corruption charges in a few months), Walker (who is scarily effective at playing the moderate while doing shit like union busting) and maybe Jeb Bush (who has hired his brother's/father's foreign policy team and wants to ice Medicare).
There really isn't an obvious analogue to sane guys like Huntsman or even Romney this time around.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.WELL HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO NOTICE EDITS RABBLE RABBLE
I am almost jealous. You guys get all the idiocies publicized to hell and back and you have way more idiots. The most my country gets is that one leaked dirty talking sex video of a former head of department of culture and then that one hyper evangelical legislator who was found with prostitutes.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes@Rational Insanity: Bobby Jindal, I suppose.
And Rand Paul has a Protection from Trump spell pre-cast, but he's even more of a nonentity than his father and he's his own brand of monster raving loony.
Actually, while an old school arch conservative, just getting started with his campaign, and a nobody as far as name recognition goes to the general public, John Kasich is probably putting himself out as the sane one thus far.
For example, he recently tried to put the fear mongering about ISIS killing and enslaving all Americans (or whatever the fear mongers sell about ISIS) in its place
.
Kasich's position is not one that's going to earn him a lot of airtime on CNN. It is not red meat to the Republican base (or the Democratic base, for that matter). It is not a position that's very popular with voters or with donors. But it's an important point, and one that politicians don't make nearly enough: The threats to Americans, while real, are overhyped.
"It was sort of a bolt from the blue for me," Justin Logan, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, says. "I had never heard Kasich say things like this before."
Here's the governor:
We pick up the paper, it's Chattanooga, it's Fort Hood, it's ISIS. Are we safe? Are we going to be safe to go to the mall or safe to leave our homes?
These are the worries that many Americans have, but I have to tell you as serious as these are — and they are very serious — we've had a lot worse, much worse in this country. Think about it. The Civil War, do you remember reading about it? It's not just neighbors fighting against neighbors, but it was even family members—kin fighting against one another and killing one another on a battlefield right in America.
Kasich is pushing against the conventional wisdom that American is facing more threats than ever before. Everyone from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey to Sen. John Mc Cain has said it; presidential candidates such as Marco Rubio have made it a central premise.
But the hype can be out of step with the reality. Terrorism, often cited as the greatest threat to America today, kills about as many Americans as furniture. Obviously that number is so low in part because we take the threat of terrorism so seriously, but it also goes to show that maybe the danger is not as existential as it sometimes feels.
Admitting this is politically difficult: It requires telling voters something they don't want to hear, and inviting fights with other politicians who depend on threat inflation to look tough. But it's important. Exaggerating threats doesn't just scare people, it makes the country more likely to counterproductively lash out against phantom threats — as it did, for example, in Iraq.
Now as the article goes on to point out, this is at least somewhat at odds with Kasich's policy, as he's been calling for a boots on the ground fight with ISIS since February, (although wanting to wipe them out and saying that they're in no way, shape, or form a threat to the existence of the US aren't actually opposites) but it's a little something, and it runs counter to the standard Republican mantra of "Everyone's out to get out, the world is scary, scary, scary!!! That's why you need to elect me and my hawk friends so we can deal with the only way that works: guns and bombs!"
edited 23rd Jul '15 6:44:36 PM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Kasich doesn't sound very... Republican.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The Democrats also have the issue of Netroots Nation and addressing racial injustice outside of being solved by an economic solution, as young African Americans allied with the group are demanding for answers of how the Democrats plan to fix the structural issues of the justice system being Middle Class Whites. So the Democrats aren't in some magical golden road.
The party needs to deal with the racial injustice issue or it'll find itself in the cold. However, dealing with the racial injustice issue makes white liberal voters get cold feet. So...
(DailyKos) "Republicans fantasize about how to block Donald Trump from the debates"
One idea that came up was to urge three leading candidates — Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor; Mr. Walker; and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — to band together and state that they would not participate in any debate in which Mr. Trump was present, using his refusal to rule out a third-party bid as a pretext for taking such a hard line.