With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
It will be interesting on how this plays out in internal democratic party politics over the next few years.
This election has definitely shown the limits and the breakdown of the Obama wing of the party. I forget who first made the comparison of Obama's having a Chicago political machine approach to national politics, but this election had so many of the tropes of a machine-led political campaign. Starting from the efforts to build a controlled-opposition via Cheney's wing in the 2021, to the organized lawfare campaigns, to the heavy media influence efforts, to the Democratic candidate switch and even harder narrative efforts. Even these last few weeks of polling and polling coverage have been weird- not just the outliers, and what I now suspect were attempts to paper over / prevent a despair spiral, but coverage of topics not actually matching to voter sentiment. It was a political machine trying to do what a political machine does.
It's also clearly broken down without Obama's star power to drive it, and Obama's technocratic wing of the party always hinged on the argument of 'we're the best at winning.' It's kind of clearly not, a lot of the Democratic old guard is on the way our if not already done so, and so a lot of the party is going to be up for competition going forward.
One thing that is going to matter, though- and one of the things that keeps a political machine working as a machine and is why the Democratic Party is one of the oldest political parties in the world- is the role of loyalty to the machine. The muslim wing voting as a block made a point about power, but it also made a point about reliability. That, specifically, will not be resolved so easily as some accommodation, especially when the anti-Israeli opinion is still a minority position for most of the American electorate.
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