gehringer_2

that's why you have to win big enough in the quadrennials to be able to take the 'inevitable' mid-term attrition. 😉

not what I'm saying - of course you make it about Trump if people are moving away from Trump and that's going to work for you. That's what I mean about '28 - after anti-trump do you have a story to tell Iowa, Tx, Fla, even Maine - states that should be flippable but that have failed to flip over several cycles, that can win without an unpopular incumbent there to run against?

LOL - so other party's have done better recently. This thread reminds me of the Wings thread. When you are faced with the need to do better - really better, as in better than the other guy, that's the metric that matters. We just had an example this Sunday of what doing better actually looks like. Skin of the teeth margins gained against some of the worse policy and corruption in 125 years should be embarrassing. Wisconsin looks wonderful, but Wisconsin was always going to be in play. Progress will be winning in places where it's actually a surprise.

what you run on and what the voters are voting about may or may not have anything in common.

If he had a contagion of financial backers bailing, thats all the longer it takes. FWIW, the Politico back story about him said his political roots in CA were shallow - he didn't have a core of in state support to loyal to him to fall back on.

I'm not dismissing it, but the I strongly believe the Dems have been whistling past the graveyard for several cycles about their approval with the wider public. Anti-Trumpism is great to see, but if that is all we are seeing, and right now there is no way to know the difference, it doesn't really represent the Democratic party's ability the take control of the basic political agenda from the right wing, and while that may put a brake on Trump's power in at the end of the year, it doesn't create the conditions for the change needed to prevent another Trump from emerging from one side or the other.

my money would be that Swalwells exit was indeed Gonzales' ticket to getting out himself so his ethics report would not go public.

what McGonigle is doing is probably more sustainable than what Delauter is. He's a 1HR/25-30AB MiBL guy who has hit 5 in his first 50. That's more likely to be noise in the signal than McGonigle's BB/K ratio and OBP, but TBH, neither has that high a probability of continuing the rates they are on now.

OK - yes - all true. So why is that more true on the left than on the right? That's all the take I posted about was trying to get to - the argument is that today's right is more united by a common culture that transcends issue positions - at least to some degree (it may be a toxic culture but that's beside the point!). That used to be truer on the left as well, but today we have all these single issue groups who otherwise don't share any common identity with each other so when their pet issue doesn't win the day across the party, they want to take their ball and go home. So the writer's position was the party could be more successful if it spent more energy trying to establish/identify some kind of common community to be the representative first, of that would help soften the edges on the competing issue agendas within a broad party. It's a little pie in the sky in the sense of how do you do it, but I think the analysis is probably correct that the Dems will continue to have the problem of issue fracturing until they identify - or stumble onto - some broader unifying principles for the membership of the party to coalesce around that go beyond everyone grinding their own axe. Or maybe just wait for their own demagogic leftest.....😟

they might have gotten to 50 last season if they had had Ausar full time.

Chateau Le Moran

Is all hopium until Nov3rd. If they can't swing the Senate to stop more Scotus and Pentagon appointments the country is probably toast. That's the only criteria for 'doing well' that matters.

'Over performed' a pessimistic forecast because of fundamental weakness in so many parts of the country they aren't considered to be on the table? In the Bush admin Gerson coined the phase 'the soft bigotry of low expectations'. Seems to apply. You can't seriously call yourself a governing party if you consider being completely out of power as doing well. Are things looking up, well yes, if they weren't it would be political malpractice of the highest order. Now go win something in DC.

That's why destruction of government documents also has to be crime.

If you want to keep calling not having power wining, go for it. They lost the House in 22, then lost the Senate in 24. Control of no parts of the government on Jan 2025 is zero momentum from the opportunity of having gotten Trump out of the presidency for 4 yrs.

That's sort of my point though - Until '28 every election is still going to be dominated by the Trump/Anti-Trump split, and if the Dems can't win that easily after the disaster that is Trump's 2nd term, then all you can say is that the US general electorate is an irredeemable lost cause and look for some place to emigrate. But when Trump exits the stage, will Democratic strength dissolve again just like it did between 2020 and 2024? I think to a large degree, both parties are ideologically/programmatically exhausted and both are too captured by corporate money. That left the 'mainstream' GOP open to capture by the Trump Cult of Personality in '16. It's just left the Dems arguing with each other whenever they don't have Trump to keep their minds focused.

When the Dems prove they can win on more than just NOT Trump, then tell their critics to shove off. Till then I would say any good advice is in play.

a deep thinker who thinks a tax reduction gets her closer to medical care than an actual health plan would.

Yeah - that shoe had to drop eventually. It was a different matter as long as it was Iran blocking shipping, even if we were the proximate cause of them doing it, but once we block shipping directly, we become the agent in violation of all the rules based order we pushed on everyone else for 250yrs. Another example of this admin acting reflexively instead of thinking strategically - or thinking at all.

I read a piece recently that argues that one of the Dem's problems is that in recent years they have tried to build party from policy, instead of building party with a cultural framework, general governing philosophy and letting specific policy flow as a more secondary set of concerns rising from more organically from a wider general constituency. While that is a bit of an idealization there is a core of truth in it. At one time you were Democrat because of who you were, a member of a labor union, or a teacher, or an urban minority. At that time Democratic policy grew up out of the concerns of people who already shared some level of a polity. Today they are trying to stitch together constituencies by adopting interest group program objectives, but the problem with being program first is that program is always a double edged sword, even in your own party there are going to be a lot people that don't like the program pushed by this or that sub-sect. The depth to which the Israeli/Arab question splits Dems being an example. It's understandable how this happened because as the demographics of the Democratic Party have shifted from the working class to the educated class, it was inevitable the older identifications would be lost, but they have not been replaced by anything as durable. I don't know how to put that more communitarian kind of social structure back together on the left - but it is what the right does have around cultural issues that is part of its recent success. Trumpers share a cultural ID that makes Trumps policy faux pas less damaging to him than the internal arguments over policy on the left seem to be because it's hard to build cohesion that can withstand policy disagreement when there is no unifying ethos beyond policy.

The Wings front office is the sales room in GlenGary GlennRoss. The question is who is going to give them the Alec Baldwin speech.

Susan Wiles move.

Burns is doing a little click bait here. If you read the article, he's not saying that Orban's defeat is bad for the Dems at all; all he is saying is the same thing everyone and their brother who has looked at the Democratic party Post Obama has said and continues to say, which is that the current national Democratic party is still a mess and can increase its chances substantially if they can do a little of what Magyar has done, which is persuade the public that they aren't same tired old group the public has disliked about as much as they are coming to dislike the GOP. BTW, is " Magyar" running in Hungary is a like a guy named English running for PM in England. Almost too cute, but it is apparently his real name.

then again, after seeing him go to 2 probowls and get a SB ring maybe they'd be less inclined to make the same decision again.....🤷‍♂️

As per BR. a guy named Charles Thomas played 36 games in the 91-92 season and wore 14. Became a college asst coach.