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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Beto is the best shot. He won’t win, but his actual scandals are a drunk driving charge that got dismissed under funny circumstances. He’s a normal white guy who at least tries to talk to proles, so he won’t come off as DEI, and the dems are enthralled enough with his lackluster political performance to bypass those concerns. He’s too dumb to try anything overly clever and willing to play towards the middle. He can at least get dem normies to show up well enough so he doesn’t throw Virginia and Colorado and lose senate races that should go dem.

I donno. He has a habit of confidently blundering onto third rails as though the entire rest of the country consist of his political consultants. Instead of mealy mouthed lies about "common sense gun control" that might at least fool enough people who care to win, he just goes all in with "Hell yes we're coming for your guns!" for example.

As bad as the "coming for your guns" is, it's nothing compared to "we should tax religions I don't like." Beto has been one of my go-to examples for why the Culture War is terminal, and the counter-argument previously was that Beto was a minor, dead-end presidential contender of no consequence. I was assured that his naked appeal to intolerance, for which his audience cheered and which the press responded to by stroking their chins thoughtfully, should not be taken as representative of Blue Tribe generally. Charitably, we shouldn't see him floated as a serious candidate now, because of course Blues wouldn't rally behind such an obviously unfit candidate.

Sure, but at this point actually winning the election is a tall order, it’s about giving normie dems and dem leaning independents someone they wouldn’t be ashamed to vote for so trump doesn’t win blue states and Kari Lake stays out of the senate.

Yeah, I have heard some of that talk. Replace Biden not to win the presidency, but rescue the down ballot races. Breaking Points keeps covering polls indicating that down ballot dems are doing fantastic even when Biden is polling horrendously, the theory being there might be significant ticket splitting. Personally I think it's more likely people just stay home.

I just struggle with the notion that run of the mill liberals could get excited about anyone nakedly appointed by a cabal of donors and party insiders. But then again I'm not a liberal, so what do I know? The same thing more or less happened with Biden, and I'm expected to believe he got the most votes of anyone any in history.

‘Willing to vote for’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘excited’.