mtutiger

I mean, he's not wrong...

Imagine getting this worked up over an infrastructure bill. JFC

Infrastructure week only lasted five years!

Probably not, but it sure as shit is a waste of time for me or anyone else wanting to engage that.... I'm not going to convince someone who accuses anyone stating a basic fact (such as "no schools in DFW have CRT as part of the curriculum) of gaslighting. Disagreements in politics and on policy are fine, but it's different when neither side of the political debate can agree on verifiable facts.

There's an op-ed writer for the local paper (a good paper, but with a highly slanted conservative op-ed page) who tweeted out last night after the election results came in that Dems should "stop gaslighting" by saying that CRT isn't being taught in our schools. I have no idea what that means given that I'm not aware of any schools in our local area that actually have CRT as part of their curriculum. I'm guessing that this is the case everywhere in the United States as well. That's the big problem I have with this whole debate - you either engage the debate in terms of how it is framed by conservative media, or you get accused of 'gaslighting.' Just a big waste of time and energy IMO

I'd be curious to hear Buddha's take, but my layman interpretation is that they're pretty hostile to the enforcement mechanism in the Texas law (for good reason). Archie is correct in that the Mississippi law is probably the big game in town.

Really really good value on that trade.... makes one less thing to worry about before free agency hits!

He has an option, I guess

That was fast

One thing I'd love to know is how, given all that transpired here, how did Gavin Newsom basically match his 2018 numbers in the California Recall Election.... Biden's #s weren't quite as bad in September, but they weren't exactly good either. Could just be the fact that Larry Elder was that bad of a face for the recall effort, but who knows.

Everyone has a take on what this means and it'd probably be wise to hold off until Catalist or some other group does a post-mortem on these elections. But my gut tells me that is that all the other stuff - Critical Race Theory, Insurrection, Abortion, etc. - is noise to most people. What it comes down to is that you have a President that is anywhere from 10-12 points underwater on average, and candidates that stood for the Ds last night in the two big races (McAuliffe, Murphy) are going to do around 10-12 points worse than the President did in 2020. It's a more nationalized environment, and it shouldn't be surprising that his unpopularity at the moment is having an impact on fortunes for his fellow Dems. And I suspect that unpopularity comes down a combination of economic pressures (such as inflation), concern that COVID isn't behind us and/or some fatigue with COVID restrictions, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan (not so much for the withdrawal - but rather that how it played out didn't reflect well on how the President campaigned on competence). The formula is pretty simple on paper but hard in practice.... if Ds want to at least reduce their losses next cycle, Biden's approval rating is going to have to go up. I think it's possible depending on whether inflationary pressures subside and if COVID increasingly becomes a distant memory in 2022 (I'm more confident in the latter than the former), but who knows. Everything they collectively do as a party though should be done with that in mind. And Biden himself should probably adjust how he is doing his job accordingly as well.

The sample size in-division is pretty large (ie. 18 games per team per year). But you may be right.

Teams inside the division as well. Have to beat your peers in order to make the next step

New Jersey isn't a toss up, most of the remaining vote is mail and big Dem areas. Murphy will probably gain most of the remaining votes. Still a terrible result, but he's gonna win by 2-4% in the end. In terms of why this happened, its pretty simple: President's party generally takes it in the chin during off year and Midterm elections. It happened to Trump, it happened to Obama, with the exception of Bush I first term, it generally happens to all of them.

No doubt. I'd almost argue New Jersey is a more alarming result than VA even if Murphy pulls it out, depending on where the margin lies when the dust settles.

Yeah, he'll survive

In other news, it appears the Dems somehow forced a draw in the VA House if Delegates

Nate Cohn is suggesting a lot of Dem leaning mail ballots out. The fact that NJ is this close makes all the hot takes about VA moot... this is just a terrible environment for the Ds.

Right, but that would be a smaller swing than what happened in Virginia over 2020. Again, it's an imperfect comparison to qualify how much candidate quality may have impacted Virginia.

Re. New Jersey

The lead will widen out some from where it is at the moment. They are two different races, and its flawed, but I am curious to see a comparison to tell how much of what happened in VA was national environment and how much was candidate quality.

It was mostly persuasion. The fact that the swing was largely uniform in all parts of the state kinda has me convinced on that

Probably not. I am curious to see what kinda swings we see in New Jersey now... does Murphy do a little better than McCauliffe relative to the states lean?

I wouldn't entirely trust the exit polls, tbh.