Algorithms can slant the news we see, in favor of what we want to see.
My RL community cannot give me informed, nor intelligent, feedback.
So–
Any input that is objective is appreciated.
Free form, people.
Ask again next week. Until then, we’re all just guessing.
All I can say for sure is that Americans will get exactly what they deserve.
I’m not even sure Democrats know what they want, except to foil Trump as much as possible. Even if they take the House (which is likely), but not the Senate (which is also likely), there is only so much they can do to change things. They can try passing bills, but those bills won’t make it through a Republican controlled Senate, and even if they did, they likely wouldn’t have enough votes to override Trump’s veto. They can probably slow down any legislation Trump is pushing, but he can always create an executive order and bypass the House and Senate, as he has demonstrated. In other words, no matter what happens as a result of the mid-term election, don’t expect any major change in how the US is going to be run over the next two years. If somehow the Dems take both the House and Senate, Trump will be considered a lame duck, but he will still retain all the powers of the presidency until the end of his term.
The answer to all that, after Election Night, will most likely be “Yes, some success, but not as much as you’d like.” It might be an Israel-like outcome.
The polls I have seen in the states Democrats must win to win the Senate are all too close to call - that is, within the statistical margin of error.
Even the pollsters.
Exactly this. A qualified “yes” to some degree.
I don’t know what many of us have done to deserve what is happening.
…good and hard.
Not really succeeding, no. We have rallies, but sadly that doesn’t really affect policy.
We won’t know until next week.
On the plus side, a big part of why Trump won in 2024 is gen Z and latinos came out heavily for him. Trump had about a 50% approval rating among latinos and Gen Z when he came into office in 2025. Those numbers are now down to about 25% approval. So his approval among those groups is cut in half.
Young people generally don’t vote much in midterms, but hopefully the turnout among Gen Z and latinos goes back to being more democratic
Its probably an illusion. Trump didn’t come to power in a military coup. He got 77 million votes despite how badly he fucked up in his first term. No matter how bad the GOP fucks up, they are guaranteed a basement of 50-55 million votes in the midterm. Democrats would need 65+ million votes for a blue wave.
America is a very culturally sick nation and its not going to get better anytime soon. The election of a black president undermined white nationalist narratives, and now they are struggling to reestablish the US as a white nationalist, christian patriarchy.
Sadly America probably won’t culturally be a healthier nation until both the boomers and Gen X are mostly all dead. And this assumes Gen Z and Gen alpha don’t vote fascist because they got sucked into the manosphere. Then again people said demographics would doom the GOP after 2008 and that was almost 20 years ago. About 20-25% of voters from 2008 are dead now and replaced by younger voters, and we’re still all fucked up.
That would be nice, but probably not. Truly standing up to fascism and plutocracy would be nice, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
If democrats win congress they’ll have hearings that lead nowhere. No prosecutions, no release of the epstein files. That also applies to whether the democrats win the presidency in 2028. No prosecutions, no release of the epstein files, no real meaningful action to protect democracy.
Yes but not in leadership positions. It’ll take decades before a bolder generation shows up in leadership positions.
Hey! What did we (Gen X) do? It seems to me that the Boomers never actually left us room to do much of anything. Have we even had national political leaders from Gen X?
im basing it off of blood lead levels. levels peaked among preschoolers around 1970 and started to decline.
my assumption is that as Gen X gets older and their/our brains get more fragile with age that the damage from lead poisoning will get worse. so when Gen X are elderly they’ll probably be mean, fearful, selfish people due to the lead poisoning. political views will reflect that.
thats my concern. Hopefully medical care can compensate for the damage better by then.
Pretty much this. The last blue wave did nothing except get Trump reelected. The sitting Democrats are spineless lame ducks more beholden to their corporate sponsors than the elctorate. They have to die en masse before any real change can happen.
Honestly, as long as we keep the two party system, the country is fucked. And neither party wants to get rid of the two party system.
The Democrats are too divided under a Big Tent model to ever get anything done. Republicans just fall in line behind MAGA and a corrupt Executive plus coopted Supreme Court means it doesn’t really matter what Congress does. The law doesn’t matter anymore. The Right has unity, guns, violence, immunity to prosecution, a lack of ethics, voting machine companies, media companies, internet companies, tech companies, and every law enforcement agency at their beck and call. There are no checks and balances. They’re gonna keep raping kids and raping the country and we’re gonna fill in our little bubbles and pretend like everything will get better.
It won’t.
One hears Mencken quotes so rarely these days…
Here’s the thing though; the Left may want and be voting for change, but the people who are going to be the swing voters are almost certainly not. They’re voting for a return to the status quo ante Trump.
And I differ in that I don’t think it was so much Biden’s refusal to go hard into progressive style change that doomed him, but rather that he inherited a pandemic and ended up with a bunch of (foreseable) economic disruption in its wake. It was all about the price of eggs if I recall.
People who are going to vote against the sitting administration about the price of eggs and beef aren’t pushing hard for universal healthcare or better social safety nets. They just want things to go back to normal. People want rid of Hegseth, Patel, Blanche, Lutnick, et al. They’re tired of hearing about DOGE, or how the Federal government is strong-arming the Boy Scouts, or how the Dept. of the Interior is selling off pieces of national parks and removing conservation protections. They want to quit hearing how the DOJ is attacking political opponents. Or any of the myriad other insane and harmful nonsense this administration is engaging in.
In no way does any of that translate into wanting better trans rights, universal healthcare, or even unfortunately, climate change legislation.
Generations are kinda arbitrary and Gen X will never be the voting force of those before or after it but the Xers have contributed to the nation’s decline by voting for Trump by the largest margins of anyone else.
I could go on and on about this but won’t right now. I’ll limit my observation to saying that we are on the verge of a generational and demographic turnover that will determine the country’s direction for most of the remaining century.
If you mean good government in 2027 and 2028, yes.
Some Democrats who are more progressive than most have recently been, and will again be, elected. But that has no impact on governance so long as the country in question has a dictator and the Supreme Court rarely limits his actions.
Also, Democratic candidates in normally GOP states are usually moderate. So if there is a strong blue wave next week, you’ll see a new generation of farther left/bolder Democrats, and also a new generation of moderates.
The twin facts that it takes time for the effect of policies to be felt and that people do not get this keep us locked in a cycle: people blame the current leader for current conditions, and usually they’re wrong. Not this time, because Trump broke things bigger and faster, but usually. If a Democrat is elected in 2028, he or she will be in office when the currently hatching chickens come home to roost, and we’ll punish them accordingly.
I recall a chart from college political science class that showed where the Democrat/liberal and Republican/conservative politicians’ positions were across the spectrum from conservative states to liberal states.
Back then anyway (this was the early 90s), the liberal Democrats from highly conservative states were actually more conservative than most of the Republicans from liberal states.
Absolutely. But the mainstream Democrats don’t care about those “back to normal” people either. Going back to the policies of decades past isn’t going to bring things back to “normal”; they can’t, when the world is changing around them. Inflation and wage stagnation and the post-COVID bubbles (housing, etc.) alone are going to be rough enough, even without AI and climate and the rise of China and US tariffs and decreased exports, etc. To say nothing of the actual progressive agenda.
The basic US society is circling the drain, and the Democrats have no realistic vision for addressing it. At least MAGA wants the clarity of fascism; the Democrats just want to bring back some weird liberal trickle-down economy headed by charitable billionaires who know to stay in their lane and throw the public the occasional bone. It just… doesn’t work anymore.
I don’t think either Trump nor the progressives are their real opponents. They’re their own worst enemies. That Newsom is even a viable contender shows just how out of touch they are…
TLDR: The working class is suffering. Nobody in power actually cares. MAGA at least promises “us vs them”, if you’re lucky enough to be “us”. Democrats are just like “it’ll be fine”, and nobody believes them anymore.