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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
No numbers yet (polls close at 7), but...
This'll be updated periodically: Live Updates in the Sixth
As we wait for polls to close, let’s break down what we know about the ballots that were cast ahead of time. Nearly 55,000 people voted early, mostly in-person but some absentee. And whereas early numbers showed Democratic front-runner Jon Ossoff with a notable lead, Republicans appeared to catch up as more early voting sites opened.
The Upshot’s Nate Cohn estimates that at the end of the day, early and absentee voters were “split evenly between the two parties, each at 41 percent, based on whether voters had last participated in a Democratic or Republican primary.” At the same time, he warns that relying on early voting numbers alone is likely misleading. For starters, Republican voters had far more candidates to sift through, so many may have held off on voting until today.
What we do know is that early numbers are good for gouging voter enthusiasm. It’s clear that Democrats are more riled up than they have been in years. As Cohn notes, their numbers are much higher than early voting in the 6th District midterms in 2014. The last time a special election was held in the same congressional district in 1999, it drew more than 79,200 voters.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, has now weighed in on the race for the sixth time in the last three days on Twitter.
- Just learned that Jon @Ossoff, who is running for Congress in Georgia, doesn't even live in the district. Republicans, get out and vote!
Also:Why Kasim Reed is happy to see Jon Ossoff on Donald Trump’s mind
Reed on President Donald Trump’s morning Twitter barrage aimed at the leading Democrat:
“Clearly, Jon Ossoff is on the president’s mind. And we think that’s a good thing….”
On the chances of Ossoff clearing the 50 percent bar and avoiding a June 20 runoff:
“The last trackers we’ve seen in the last 48 hours have him at about 45, 46 (percent) – so with a very strong GOTV turnout, we think it’s within reach. But no matter what, he’s going to win tonight…”
Asked what he meant by that, Reed framed the evening’s argument. Said Reed:
“A typical Republican should be winning this seat by 20, 24 points. And as we stand here now, Jon Ossoff is winning it with 45 to 46 percent of the vote….
“This district isn’t in the 70 most competitive districts in the United States. And right now, Jon Ossoff is winning it. So we’re not going to let the president or Republicans, who spent $4 million attacking Jon Ossoff, turn a win into a loss by raising the standards so high.”
edited 18th Apr '17 2:29:01 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our livesHave we already talked about how Jabba the Trump demanded to be driven around in a gold carriage during his next visit to England?
Disregarding the fact that only the Royal family is ever driven around in the gilded carriages, and even then, only rarely?
edited 18th Apr '17 2:50:57 PM by blkwhtrbbt
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you![]()
He deserves to ride in the carriage that contains manure, rabid wolverines, and rusty nails.
But until such time that the Royal Family decides to get a carriage like that, Trump can shut his big mouth, ride in an ordinary carriage, and like it.
edited 18th Apr '17 3:15:52 PM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's DictionaryAs regards systemic political corruption, Hacker and Pierson's book "Winner Take All Politics"
and Lawrence Lessig's "Republic Lost"
are both worth a read.
Lessig says: "Lessig emphasizes that he believes that individual members of Congress are no more personally corrupt than the average person, but he indicts instead a political system that now allows corrupting influences to distort the legislative process. Due to this systemic corruption, Congress no longer tracks the will of the people."
Hacker and Pierson: "They describe what they call “The Thirty Year War” in which federal policy has been used to ensure that the rewards of economic growth have been hyper-concentrated at the top of the socio-economic scale... Their answer to the “mystery” of why the United States has experienced such a marked concentration of wealth at the very top of the income ladder is the effect that money has had on the American political process."
The ultimate goal is to overturn Buckley vs Valeo and Citizens United, make political contributions transparent, and greatly reduce the influence of money on politics.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Trump's idiotic border wall would leave some Americans on the Mexican side of the border.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/border-wall-could-leave-some-americans-mexican-side-n747141
edited 18th Apr '17 4:05:09 PM by megaeliz
![]()
Seems like books I'd be interested in.
And if anyone wants to read on the going ons within Hillary's campaign, I'd recommend "Shattered". It's by the same people that wrote HRC and have inside connections with Hillary's people.
The New York Times highly recommends it.
Here's the article on it today.
In fact, the portrait of the Clinton campaign that emerges from these pages is that of a Titanic-like disaster: an epic fail made up of a series of perverse and often avoidable missteps by an out-of-touch candidate and her strife-ridden staff that turned “a winnable race” into “another iceberg-seeking campaign ship.”
It’s the story of a wildly dysfunctional and “spirit-crushing” campaign that embraced a flawed strategy (based on flawed data) and that failed, repeatedly, to correct course. A passive-aggressive campaign that neglected to act on warning flares sent up by Democratic operatives on the ground in crucial swing states, and that ignored the advice of the candidate’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and other Democratic Party elders, who argued that the campaign needed to work harder to persuade undecided and ambivalent voters (like working-class whites and millennials), instead of focusing so insistently on turning out core supporters.
The authors aren't anti-Hillary apparently since they wrote her highly sympathetic biopic HRC:
Here are some parts:
Here's an interesting part about Sanders(he wasn't sure about running):
And that's how he eventually landed in a meeting with Obama aide Alyssa Mastromonaco.
"I'm not sure sure about this," Sanders told her in October 2014, about seven months before he announced his candidacy. "A lot of people have told me I should run."
"You should only do it if your heart is in it," Mastromonaco replied. "And you shouldn't do it as an issue candidate."
When he wondered if there was a place for him in the race, she said, "I think there's a place for everybody. I don't think it's good for Democrats if there's no challenge in the primaries."
Here's a better article on it that makes me feel a bit more sympathetic for her.
Among those wounds, the first cut is the deepest. The email stories that began in March 2015 never go away. First, it's Clinton's own private server, then the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the endless email dump stolen from campaign chairman John Podesta. Email becomes the cyber-incubus the campaign cannot shed.
Whether anyone with Trump connections was colluding or complicit in the Wiki Leaks-Russian caper or not, the continual media focus on email issues could scarcely have been more convenient for the Trump campaign.
The authors also see lasting damage inflicted by her Democratic-primary rival Bernie Sanders' challenge from the left. Sanders' rather quixotic campaign not only tested Clinton, it played perfectly into Trump's own critique of "crooked Hillary" and his tactic of tying her to globalism and Wall Street.
"For both sides, Hillary was the perfect symbol of everything that was wrong with America," the authors conclude. "At times, Trump and Sanders would act as the right and left speakers of a stereo blaring a chorus on repeat: Hillary's a corrupt insider who has helped rig the political and economic systems in favor of the powerful."
But in the end, Allen and Parnes contend, the worst blows Clinton suffered were self-inflicted. If the controversies and corruption memes came to define her, they write, it was largely because she never managed to define herself.
The Clinton we see here seems uniquely qualified for the highest office and yet acutely ill-suited to winning it. Something about her nature, at its best and its worst, continually inhibits her. Her struggle to escape her caricature only contributes to it.
You know, as much as I agree that Clinton made a lot of mistakes as the article points out (and honestly, her campaign up until BEFORE the Convention was practically flawless and on cruise control, considering she crushed Bernie with kid gloves and his slander) there is still this subtle, yet unmistakable form of gas lighting from all these postmortems about the 2016 election.
With the exception of a few journalists I can count on two hands, there has been an absolutely disgusting amount of revisionist history, trying to erase Hillary's history, her strengths, her accomplishments, her approval ratings, her knowledge of policy, her focus on intersectionality, her willingness to keep it real and call Trump voters for the pieces of shit that they are.
Not only the above, there also seems to be an effort to not just dismiss the grotesque sexism and double standards but to pretend that they were never a factor at all! Do you know how many of her supporters (myself included) had to stay quiet during the primary because they didn't want to be harassed on social media by bumbling fools who supported both Bernie and Trump? We really have to insist that she's some "shitty" candidate because to do that it keeps the others from admitting fault of having fallen for Russian propaganda, fake news, the meddling of James Comey, and Donald Trump's explicit appeal to white supremacy and racism.
So, instead they keep asking us to ignore the fact that this election the country showed its ass on what it thinks of women and people of color, by electing someone who admitted on tape to sexual assault and has numerous rumors of other sexual misconduct to numerous to name.
They want us to ignore that Trump egged on his supporters at rallies where they wanted to "Lock Her up", or had blatant caricatures of Clinton with sexist overtones. Trump himself called her a "nasty" woman. Then he accused HER of playing the woman card. And the media lapped that shit up.
And speaking of the media, fuck them too. They gave nearly two billion in free advertising to this clown because it was good for ratings and constantly despite him flashing a neon sign saying "Hey, I'm racist! " they still tried to portray them in false equivalence. The moment she lost, all of these mostly white men wrote all these op-eds saying the Democrats need to abandon identity politics, at a time when identity in and of itself is under attack and will be under attack until Trump (and quite frankly the rest of the GOP) is removed from power.
But despite all of that, we're just being asked to accept that she's just a terrible flawed candidate, and Bernie would've won! despite the fact that she won the popular vote and got more votes than any other man NOT named Obama in our history.
That work she did for the C Hildren's Defense Fund? Forgotten.
When she went undercover after graduating college to uncover racist policies by schools? Forget it she's a Goldwater girl after all.
Allowing Trans people to change their Genders on Passports at the State Department? Nah, she didn't endorse Gay Marriage until 2013 so it doesn't count.
The work and phone calls she made to various Senators and Congressman to get the ACA passed DESPITE the fact that she had her hands full around the world? Hillary doesn't want a single payer so she must be against UHC, right?
The OP Ed she wrote for the NYT two years before the financial crisis, showing that the system was in danger of collapsing? She's a Wall Street shill, so I guess it doesn't matter, no?
And there are countless more examples. And they want us to "get over it". Here's what I have to say to that:
Fuck.
You.
From the bottom of my heart.
edited 18th Apr '17 5:03:36 PM by TacticalFox88
New Survey coming this weekend!

The topic of this thread is now this thread
Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you