Might be cool if there were proof of the contention that Democrats can govern effectively for a majority of the voters, like a few more functioning cities, perhaps the bold acknowledgement that crime should be criminalized. But even the abundance agenda just seems like attempted to distract and trick from the social transformation agenda and socialism,rather than actually governing as a majoritarian party.
Eyy my question about Michigan got answered after all! I'm worried about Abdul El Sayed's general election prospects, but Michigan's gonna be so far from the tipping point that it's hard for me to imagine his politics making a difference for the overall majority
I think Matt's posts on this cycle have consistently over-estimated Susan Collins, who has several things going against her:
1) Collins's win in 2020 was by a much smaller margin than it appears, when considering that Maine has ranked choice voting, and the 3rd place candidate was a progressive who encouraged her voters to choose the Democrat as their 2nd choice. The actual Collins margin of victory was probably closer to 3 points, not 8.
2) Every election cycle, partisan polarization increases. Which, in a Biden/Harris state, is good for Democrats.
3) Collins may have won in 2020, but did not have to face voters in 2018. It's well established that current electoral coalitions lead to an electorate that is more left-leaning in non-presidential elections. Quite likely, Collins was pulled over the top in 2020 by Trump's coattails, bringing some MAGA voters to the polls who might not bother to show up in a midterm.
4) Every election cycle, Collins is 6 years older than the previous one, and voters are tired of electing 80-year-olds.
5) If you believe the numbers, Collins is polling worse than she did 6 years ago.
In any case, I do like the outsider choice of a candidate, rather than the 77-year-old governor. The big advantage of a governor running for Senate is name recognition. But, such a critical race like this will have so much money pouring into it, the Democratic nominee is going to have plenty of name recognition by election day, no matter who it is. So, it's better to go with someone less old and less establishment.
I don't know but looks like they already have a generous child care program in place and they are simply making it universal which is a benefit mostly for wealthier families but in exchange for some supply side measures. We have to see how it works out.
Nobody deserves to be shot. But if you’re going to argue that mass shootings are worth it as long as we get to sell guns to the mentally ill and violent felons, on some level I’d hope you’ve factored in the possibility that it might be you and not random other people on TV.
Mitch McConnell almost pulled the ripcord when he felt personally threatened in early 2021. Shame he didn’t, and we’re still hurtling towards Earth at terminal velocity, but them’s the breaks
They don't need much justification for anything but we have already seen too many political shootings in the last 15 years to think this shooting will lead to a qualitative change of some type in voters' minds.
My understanding is that if you ask people who have made 1m+ on prediction markets who frequently trade elections, not a single one would say Collins is favored. That's not a guarantee of anything, obviously, but I don't understand why you aren't engaging more seriously with this skepticism.
Talarico and Platner seem to be attempting the failed 2024 Tim Walz strategy of running on "I can run on a standard progressive platform and win because moderates/conservatives will listen to me because I'm like them and can talk like them". Of course, people do see through this stuff because every candidate that has ever run for office attempts to emphasize how relatable and down-to-earth they are.
A persuadable, median voter in Texas is going to ask "I don't like Trump or Ken Paxton, but I dislike Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and AOC even more, so how do I know you won't just be a party-line vote for their priorities?" It's less of a heavy lift in Maine, but if Mainers wanted an extra Democratic party-line vote, they would've just voted for Sara Gideon in 2020 instead of reelecting Susan Collins. In either case, I don't really see either Platner or Talarico having a satifisfactory answer to that question on the campaign trail.
Tim Walz was running for VP and wasn't even on the top of the ticket.
I am sure Split-Ticket will calculate the WAR score for Talarico and Planter after the election, so we will see if they have a positive or negative WAR.
I'd prefer Democrats run good candidates instead of waiting until November 2026 to be proven right about bad candidates.
Kinda like how in 2022, I would've preferred that Democrats run Sarah Godlewski in Wisconsin instead of left-wing progressive Mandela Barnes from the beginning even though I was proven right in the end as he choked away a winnable race that now makes a Senate majority after 2026 farther away.
In our system, a "good" candidate is someone talented enough to win both the primary and the general. No one gets to whine after losing the primary that they would have won the general, an unprovable counterfactual.
If you cannot win the primary you are a bad candidate. We can't even compute your WAR score.
I don't know. You seem to have confidence in someone who's never won a primary even though you insist we can't know how good of a candidate they are if they've never won a primary.
As for Godlewski, she did win a Democratic primary for Treasurer and then also won statewide in a key swing state. That's more than Platner can say.
Sure, I would also prefer people not running as Democrats at all and using the independent label instead just like Osborne. The median voter knows little about policy and goes mostly based on identity vibes. Osborne is a populist but not woke. It works for him only because he is independent and his WAR score would be lower if he ran as a Dem.
As an Ohioan: I am depressed that Brown is running for Senate. He is unlikely to win, and he is not even running for a full term. He'll have to win again in 2028, where he is even less likely to win (even as an incumbent). Instead he should have ran for governor where he could influence the House map. He is both more likely to win, and will have a better impact for the country going forward.
And: If Sharrod Brown wins next year he’ll be age 73 when he takes office in early 2027 and 75 when he runs for reelection in 2028. Ohio Dems should take it as a very bad sign that they’re having to rely on a retirement age pol as their best chance at taking back a Senate seat.
Brown would actually take office sooner than that because he's filling out the remainder of the term. Mark Kelly was sworn in on December 2, 2020 after winning a special election.
I don't think Brown's age is that big of an issue. There are numerous cases of parties relying on old politicians. Susan Collins is in her 70s, for instance. The more important issue for Democrats is they have no bench (which is an issue regardless of how old Brown is), and I think their bench would get better if Brown was Governor, not Senator.
My second sentence strongly implied what you say here explicitly, that Ohio Dems (along with Dems everywhere) had better be serious about developing a deeper bench. Point taken about Brown probably being a better fit as governor than senator—potentially. Aside from his influence on house redistricting, would he be dedicated to rebuilding the Democratic Party statewide?
I’ll revise your second paragraph/first sentence this way: “I don’t think Joe Biden’s age is that big of an issue.” Age isn’t an issue—until it is, and we simply can’t know when that will be for any individual. It seems like the better part of wisdom not to elect advanced-age politicians* with the high potential to cognitively disappear before our eyes.
Here in Ohio, I'm hoping the Rs and their gerrymandered supermajority have finally stepped in it. They eliminated the top income tax rate but did jack squat to address our property tax crisis, which is crushing the working poor and people on fixed incomes. The gubernatorial candidate is scammer Vivek Ramaswamy, who wants to eliminate the income tax entirely.
I think it's a bad hand for them, but I don't know if we'll be able to get the word out.
Interview Mallory McMorrow and be a skeptic if you'd like. I expect she'll do fine with your skeptical views of her being a viable option for Senate.
Might be cool if there were proof of the contention that Democrats can govern effectively for a majority of the voters, like a few more functioning cities, perhaps the bold acknowledgement that crime should be criminalized. But even the abundance agenda just seems like attempted to distract and trick from the social transformation agenda and socialism,rather than actually governing as a majoritarian party.
Eyy my question about Michigan got answered after all! I'm worried about Abdul El Sayed's general election prospects, but Michigan's gonna be so far from the tipping point that it's hard for me to imagine his politics making a difference for the overall majority
As a lifelong Mainer, I can say with some assurance that anyone who thinks the oyster farmer will even be the nominee here is mistaken.
I think Matt's posts on this cycle have consistently over-estimated Susan Collins, who has several things going against her:
1) Collins's win in 2020 was by a much smaller margin than it appears, when considering that Maine has ranked choice voting, and the 3rd place candidate was a progressive who encouraged her voters to choose the Democrat as their 2nd choice. The actual Collins margin of victory was probably closer to 3 points, not 8.
2) Every election cycle, partisan polarization increases. Which, in a Biden/Harris state, is good for Democrats.
3) Collins may have won in 2020, but did not have to face voters in 2018. It's well established that current electoral coalitions lead to an electorate that is more left-leaning in non-presidential elections. Quite likely, Collins was pulled over the top in 2020 by Trump's coattails, bringing some MAGA voters to the polls who might not bother to show up in a midterm.
4) Every election cycle, Collins is 6 years older than the previous one, and voters are tired of electing 80-year-olds.
5) If you believe the numbers, Collins is polling worse than she did 6 years ago.
In any case, I do like the outsider choice of a candidate, rather than the 77-year-old governor. The big advantage of a governor running for Senate is name recognition. But, such a critical race like this will have so much money pouring into it, the Democratic nominee is going to have plenty of name recognition by election day, no matter who it is. So, it's better to go with someone less old and less establishment.
Who is the person in the photo?
Please don't follow the example of The New York Times, which routinely runs captionless photos over its opinion pieces now.
Nothing on GA? Did I miss it?
NYT reports Charlie Kirk was killed by a shooter while speaking at an event in Utah!
Between this and the killing of the Ukranian Refugee in Charlotte, things have taken a bad turn over the past few days.
Wow. Horrible. I heard he was shot, not that he died.
Yes, they just updated the reporting in the NYT
So apparently New Mexico is offering free universal child care without creating any panic over communism.
https://www.krqe.com/news/politics-government/governor-announces-new-mexico-will-now-provide-free-universal-child-care/
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/new-mexico-1st-state-offer-universal-child-care/story?id=125411997
How can they afford this? NM is not a rich state in any sense
I don't know but looks like they already have a generous child care program in place and they are simply making it universal which is a benefit mostly for wealthier families but in exchange for some supply side measures. We have to see how it works out.
> Donald Trump has lost a lot of cases in court, which is typically what happens when you do a lot of illegal shit.
I dunno man! I think that most of the time when someone does a lot of illegal shit, they lose exactly once in court.
It's only the privileged who get to lose many cases.
I'm surprised not to see any comments about the Charlie Kirk incident!
Nobody deserves to be shot. But if you’re going to argue that mass shootings are worth it as long as we get to sell guns to the mentally ill and violent felons, on some level I’d hope you’ve factored in the possibility that it might be you and not random other people on TV.
As Jon Snow said, "Everything before the word 'but" is horseshit."
Yeah, what bad shit is the regime going to use the incident to justify?
Hopefully gun control…
You sweet summer child.
Mitch McConnell almost pulled the ripcord when he felt personally threatened in early 2021. Shame he didn’t, and we’re still hurtling towards Earth at terminal velocity, but them’s the breaks
Only for the trans...
They don't need much justification for anything but we have already seen too many political shootings in the last 15 years to think this shooting will lead to a qualitative change of some type in voters' minds.
It is worrisome that we could be going back into another 1960’s-70’s, 1890’s-1910’s….
What happened is clearly bad and no one in politics should be shot at.
My understanding is that if you ask people who have made 1m+ on prediction markets who frequently trade elections, not a single one would say Collins is favored. That's not a guarantee of anything, obviously, but I don't understand why you aren't engaging more seriously with this skepticism.
Why is Mallory McMorrow overrated? It seems like charism and media savvy is the kind of stuff Dems need
Talarico and Platner seem to be attempting the failed 2024 Tim Walz strategy of running on "I can run on a standard progressive platform and win because moderates/conservatives will listen to me because I'm like them and can talk like them". Of course, people do see through this stuff because every candidate that has ever run for office attempts to emphasize how relatable and down-to-earth they are.
A persuadable, median voter in Texas is going to ask "I don't like Trump or Ken Paxton, but I dislike Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and AOC even more, so how do I know you won't just be a party-line vote for their priorities?" It's less of a heavy lift in Maine, but if Mainers wanted an extra Democratic party-line vote, they would've just voted for Sara Gideon in 2020 instead of reelecting Susan Collins. In either case, I don't really see either Platner or Talarico having a satifisfactory answer to that question on the campaign trail.
Tim Walz was running for VP and wasn't even on the top of the ticket.
I am sure Split-Ticket will calculate the WAR score for Talarico and Planter after the election, so we will see if they have a positive or negative WAR.
I'd prefer Democrats run good candidates instead of waiting until November 2026 to be proven right about bad candidates.
Kinda like how in 2022, I would've preferred that Democrats run Sarah Godlewski in Wisconsin instead of left-wing progressive Mandela Barnes from the beginning even though I was proven right in the end as he choked away a winnable race that now makes a Senate majority after 2026 farther away.
In our system, a "good" candidate is someone talented enough to win both the primary and the general. No one gets to whine after losing the primary that they would have won the general, an unprovable counterfactual.
If you cannot win the primary you are a bad candidate. We can't even compute your WAR score.
"If you cannot win the primary you are a bad candidate"
Platner has never won a primary
Well he is a first time candidate running in the primary. How was he supposed to win a primary if he never ran for office before?
If he loses the primary, then he will not be the nominee and he would thus be a bad candidate.
I don't know. You seem to have confidence in someone who's never won a primary even though you insist we can't know how good of a candidate they are if they've never won a primary.
As for Godlewski, she did win a Democratic primary for Treasurer and then also won statewide in a key swing state. That's more than Platner can say.
Dan Osborne had a stellar WAR score in Nebraska in 2024 another blue-collar white guy running as a left-populist, but as an independent.
Osoborn ran as a moderate. If Talarico and Platner run more like Osborn and less like Elizabeth Warren, then sure I'll believe they have a chance.
Sure, I would also prefer people not running as Democrats at all and using the independent label instead just like Osborne. The median voter knows little about policy and goes mostly based on identity vibes. Osborne is a populist but not woke. It works for him only because he is independent and his WAR score would be lower if he ran as a Dem.
As an Ohioan: I am depressed that Brown is running for Senate. He is unlikely to win, and he is not even running for a full term. He'll have to win again in 2028, where he is even less likely to win (even as an incumbent). Instead he should have ran for governor where he could influence the House map. He is both more likely to win, and will have a better impact for the country going forward.
And: If Sharrod Brown wins next year he’ll be age 73 when he takes office in early 2027 and 75 when he runs for reelection in 2028. Ohio Dems should take it as a very bad sign that they’re having to rely on a retirement age pol as their best chance at taking back a Senate seat.
Brown would actually take office sooner than that because he's filling out the remainder of the term. Mark Kelly was sworn in on December 2, 2020 after winning a special election.
I don't think Brown's age is that big of an issue. There are numerous cases of parties relying on old politicians. Susan Collins is in her 70s, for instance. The more important issue for Democrats is they have no bench (which is an issue regardless of how old Brown is), and I think their bench would get better if Brown was Governor, not Senator.
My second sentence strongly implied what you say here explicitly, that Ohio Dems (along with Dems everywhere) had better be serious about developing a deeper bench. Point taken about Brown probably being a better fit as governor than senator—potentially. Aside from his influence on house redistricting, would he be dedicated to rebuilding the Democratic Party statewide?
I’ll revise your second paragraph/first sentence this way: “I don’t think Joe Biden’s age is that big of an issue.” Age isn’t an issue—until it is, and we simply can’t know when that will be for any individual. It seems like the better part of wisdom not to elect advanced-age politicians* with the high potential to cognitively disappear before our eyes.
*people who make incredibly high-stakes decisions
Here in Ohio, I'm hoping the Rs and their gerrymandered supermajority have finally stepped in it. They eliminated the top income tax rate but did jack squat to address our property tax crisis, which is crushing the working poor and people on fixed incomes. The gubernatorial candidate is scammer Vivek Ramaswamy, who wants to eliminate the income tax entirely.
I think it's a bad hand for them, but I don't know if we'll be able to get the word out.