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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I mean, the president's party almost always loses seats during the mid-terms. It'd take something 9/11-esque to stop that. The question is whether or not they'll lose enough seats to cost them the majority. And honestly, I feel like they have a better chance of holding on to their majority with Trump than without him- Trump is notably unpopular, but the GOP congress is even less popular, because they're disliked by the anti-estabilisment Trump supporters as well as everyone who dislikes Trump.
Pence and Ryan don't have the same cult of personality guaranteeing them a certain baseline of support, y'know? And being an unelected president is always gonna be a dicey situation.
edited 14th May '17 1:22:14 PM by Gilphon
The Cultish fanaticism we see in Trump Supporters scares me. How much the've bought into the "Only I can fix it" thing he always says.
If you look in that article about how completely miserable Trump is, one of the things it mentions,
He literally can not function without constant adoration.
edited 14th May '17 1:35:00 PM by megaeliz
The cult following bothers me as well. These people need help, but Trump won't be the one to help them.
Why did Trump choose Pence, anyway? Did Pence prove his ~loyalty~? I've wondered if Pence will be The Starscream in all of this.
edited 14th May '17 1:44:58 PM by BearyScary
Do not obey in advance.Polar Phantom and others, on the subject of the echo chamber:
We as a community try to engage with anyone who is able to come across as remotely reasonable until they go completely out of bounds, and the mods give such people a hell of a lot of rope before deciding that they're breaking Rule #1. And many of us as users do our best to call out this thread's most prominent and active mod (Fighteer) when he does get itchy trigger fingers (which he does).
That said, this tolerance doesn't trump said rule. Trump's Presidency, from day 1, has been defined by Trump being a dick, and his base are enthusiastically backing his dickery or else bashing him for not being enough of a dick. So yeah, rejecting that kind of mentality does make for an echo chamber excluding a significant proportion of the population, but it's the best we can do.
edited 14th May '17 1:41:51 PM by Ramidel
Both Pence and Ryan have severe charisma problems. Pence has a habit of saying or doing things that only appeal to really fundamentalist evangelicals, but which creep everyone else out, and he's actually pretty bad at convincing people who don't agree with him. Indiana hates him, most because of his awful agenda, but the rest because Pence sucks at actually getting his agenda implemented.
Ryan, on the other hand, has no real charisma. He does things that he thinks are cool, but he completely fails to pull it off. He exercises, he does archery and so on. He's trying to be a "man" while not understanding what being a man even means.
But the thing that really hurts both of them compared to Trump is that, regardless of all his flaws, Trump is a showman. Not a very good one, in my opinion, but he has at least some of the razzle-dazzle down. Pence can't do that and Ryan sucks at it. The other thing is that Trump is so vague and incoherent that you can project pretty much anything on him. Pence and Ryan are both really specific. Pence hates anyone who isn't a straight WASP and wants everyone else gone. Ryan thinks anyone who gets help from anyone ever is a horrible mooch. Those platforms, especially the second one, are kind of hard to make pretty to a majority.
I guess what it boils down to is that Pence is incapable of making anyone excited about him, and Ryan is incredibly fake. He seriously comes off like that clip from 30 Rock of Steve Buscemi undercover at a high school.
edited 14th May '17 1:42:39 PM by Zendervai
This
may be of interest to those who are still mind-boggled about why there's so much hatred for Obamacare among the general public.
Ryan is also smart enough not to even try for the Presidency. He sat out 2016 because in 2015, Clinton was revered across the spectrum and seen as the rightful heir, and going against someone like that was an invitation to crash and burn before Trump broke all the rules.
Something positive, albeit 3 months old, that I just discovered: New Jersey has effectively abolished cash bail, and other states seem to be considering the same.
This is a damn fine step in the right direction (and bail bond companies that are being driven out of business can suck it; they're part of the prison-industrial complex as far as I'm concerned).
I hope that this policy also incidentally leads to increased refusal on the part of defendants to plea-bargain. Keeping accused-but-not-convicted criminals in jail until their trial is part of the system that fuels the plea-bargain machine.
edited 14th May '17 1:56:45 PM by Ramidel
The Montana special election: the mythical independent voter in its native habitat
. Also, the Republican candidate is apparently a carpetbagger who has made it obvious he doesn't understand Montana values.
Which he didn't need to as someone wised up and sent a lawn crew to fix the issue.
And just a heads up, both articles are behind paywalls.
edited 14th May '17 3:18:20 PM by tclittle
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."

Kim the Fat, Assad the Butcher, and Sultan Erdogan might make moves to.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.