Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
How did Trump ruin everything? (Genuine question)
Admittedly I'm not following the midterms super closely but I'd like to consider myself slightly better informed than the average voter.
In this year's primary, he endorsed Masters, Walker and Oz -- three neophyte politicians with manifest weaknesses -- over their more experienced competitors. All three prevailed in the primary, and all three seem to be headed for defeat tonight. All three races should have been eminently winnable.
In 2020, he made delusional claims that the election was stolen from him, and he publicly pressured Pence to basically abuse his power as VP to steal the election for Trump. This occurred before the two senate runoff races in Georgia, both of which should have gone GOP (based on fundamentals and based on the expectation that thermostatic turnout would favor the GOP as being energized to oppose Biden's recent win), but both of which ended up going to the Dems, giving Biden control of the Senate.
Thank you for the explanation!
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The degree to which this is "delusional" is one of the key points of disagreement between the Laptop Class and everyone else. The sentiment that "not only do we need to win but we need to beat the margin of the steal" has been bog standard mainstream GOP sentiment since at least 2010 when Obama and Barbara Boxer "joked" about accidentally misplacing ballot boxes from red leaning districts and siccing the IRS on anyone donating to the Tea-Party
Some of the specific claims Trump - in particular the Dominion voting machine conspiracy theory - almost certainly qualify as delusional, and the main reason why they might not is that Trump could have known they were false all along, making them dishonest rather than delusional. IIRC Trump made various claims to have won a landslide, which would also count as delusional - the plausible Trump win scenarios were squeakers.
The "bog standard mainstream GOP" claim that the normal run of petty incompetence that we see in American elections represents co-ordinated fraud by Democrats on a large enough scale to flip multiple states with 5-figure leads (which is what would have been needed to steal the 2020 presidential election) is clearly false and clearly sincerely held by significant numbers of sane people, so whether or not it is "delusional" is a boring argument about the meaning of words.
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