Like how I (as a Republican) voted for Harris?
Good point.
Woodrow Wilson would like a word with you.
LOL, yep.
No he didn’t. That was his father.
I refer to them as Bush the Elder, and Bush the Younger.
Oops, my bad. How time flies.
It doesn’t really matter. This country is held hostage by the stupidest, laziest 20 million voters this country can cough up. The people who barely bother to show up and can barely tell the difference between the 2 parties.
The last 30 years have basically been the pattern of electing a president and giving him a trifecta. Then 2 years into the administration, handing congress over to the opposition party.
94 with Clinton
04 with Bush (02 was an outlier due to 9/11)
10 with Obama
18 with Trump
22 with Biden
I’m assuming 26 will see the dems win the house, and maybe the senate too. And we will probably get a democratic president along with a democratic house and senate in 2028. And hopefully the democrats will pass bills that reverse the damage of the bullshit bill Trump is passing.
Then in 2030, the American idiots will hand congress back to republicans. And the process will repeat all over.
I’m not making that prediction on the basis of conservatism or liberalism.
I think the erosion of certain demographics that Harris faced in 2024 (losing the poor vote and eroding black and Hispanic men) are concerning. The Democrats are increasingly becoming a party of the college educated. With Harris I felt the Dem coalition become less diverse, and there’s a concern for complacency there, that the Dems have settled into groupthink and positive feedback loops (who hasn’t in 2025.)
I don’t think the Dems can win without a dynamic person at the head of the ticket. I think that bar is lower for the Republicans. Trump, I think, was unusually exciting for a Republican candidate, kind of an outlier, but I think that given the history of the party they’re still more likely to fall in line than the Democrats.
There a danger, still, that the Dems will still be running against Trump in 2028. Assuming a step aside by Trump, typical exit, they can’t do that. They need to let it go. Run against Trump’s policies, sure. Find something there. But Trump himself, need to let it go. I think some of the smug assumptions by the Dems that they are on the right side of history need to be let go as well. People don’t care. The Dems need to earn their vote. I felt in 2008 that energy was there, that they did that, Obama went to Iowa and all that, there was a reaching out. I think that’s more important than appeasing the college educated progressives. But given the recent party history, that may not happen.
Typically on the Rep side one would expect a falloff from the sitting prez to any VP candidate. But the Republicans have historically been better at this sort of handoff than the Democrats. The Democrats can’t take anything for granted, they need to run like it’s 2008.
Also that it wasn’t mentioned in the June 1887 issue of The Gentlemen’s Magazine, similar to something Justice Alito wrote about abortion rights leading up to the Dobbs ruling.
This is a reasonable position, but I think the psychology is likely to work in the opposite direction: since Trump was “unusually exciting,” not having that excitement–that drug, in effect–could cause a lot of people to stay home in 2028.
We’ll know, eventually from polling* and the election results, but how many MAGAs are real Republicans in the first place? I’m sure a significant percentage are not; they’re just mean-dumb people who love Trump. I.e., true Deplorables.
*I’m sure polling on this already exists, but I haven’t heard it holisitically discussed.
I wonder if we’d get better turnout with shorter election cycles? Surely some people stay home out of fatigue, especially since each candidate will be between 45 and 49% in the polls for the duration.
We definitely have longer cycles than most countries. It is fatiguing to be sure.
I really doubt that stabbing their base in the back in yet another futile attempt to pander to the Right will help them.
That after all is one of the most common reasons for people who otherwise oppose the Republicans to not vote Democrat; the belief that both parties are the same, and that the Democrats can’t be trusted. And it never attracts anyone, if somebody wants to elect a bigot they can just keep voting Republican.
It’s a double edged sword. I consider “woke” to be basic human decency, and I would not be able to vote for any candidate who would deliberately forsake that principle.
It has never been about policies or stances for me. It has always been about 1) who has the most integrity and 2) who has the best interests of the country as a whole in mind.
It actually shocked me to learn, about ten years ago, that so many people vote for their own self-interests rather than the interests of society as a whole. I don’t think our nation can survive with that mentality, but I think that’s what a lot of this is about.
Indeed, “woke” has become basically a slur hurled at liberals to make social conservatives feel better about their own lack of common decency.
Exactly.
Exactly. The right direction is to adapt the terminology of the Right and try to become weak-ass copies of them?
No, exactly what Red_Wiggler said.
It’s also conveniently vague. It can both be used to mean anything, and lets them slam something as “woke” without actually have to openly admit they mean something like “it isn’t racist enough for me” or the like.
I don’t know if there is any way to sugar coat this, but using the term “woke” in a derogatory fashion is about as racist as you can get. It is, after all, a culturally appropriated word that has roots in African American history.