Speaking from my own community, if the community knows who you are you’ve basically nearly won. One of our politicians started their career owning a real estate business where they posted their face on every billboard in the area. They were big with the center of commerce crew, but were* also antithetical to the views of a mostly young and highly educated and progressive city. They won anyways, because the opponent wasn’t already burned into the minds of everyone who drives around here.

I do like the idea of smaller meaning that you may actually know the person and have an opportunity to talk to them person to person, I just have a jaded view because of what I’ve seen happen with human fallacies controlling the results.

Sorry for the edit after your post. I think buying races isn’t harder when there’s more of them, but organizing for them might be. I’d be open to change on that opinion, but eventually wouldn’t you hit a point of diminishing budget for a small candidate that they can’t afford a single commercial whereas the corporate candidate could afford multiple?

Edit: Eventually the resolution of targeted ads starts to fail too relative to the district borders.

I’m not necessarily sold on the idea that reps of a given state should only be responsible for a very small subsection of people who are likely poorly informed. Just thinking of my own representative, who won against a progressive based entirely on name recognition rather than policy, it seems abundantly clear that money can easily touch all races whereas educated voters and advocacy may not exist in enough districts to be meaningful. Money can, and in quantities above the median income with ease.

After reading the article, I think there’s a inherent assumption that more means harder to gerrymander, but every republican gerrymandering recently released is computer generated. What would prevent them from arguing the districts of densely black areas thinly sliced from urban areas and then expanded out to suburbs is legal? When computer modeling and accurate voter information is supplied the possibilities of gerrymandering are not remotely hampered by increased resolution of the electoral maps. The districting will come to head with the notion that the same district even be contiguous. Do you trust SCOTUS to affirm it needs to be?

Probably a strong asterisk for “depending on what country.” Recitivism tends to be less desired in countries which outsource their prison systems either to other countries or corporations.

Doesn’t really need to be alleged when it was recorded by a prominent Israeli politician and posted to social media.

Local NAS

He sounds even dumber through text some how.

They’re competing with the couch, not just Republicans. Couch sitters basically always have higher standards of Democrats than they do of Republicans. In fact, the entire electorate and media infrastructure have higher standards for Democrats. It’s fine to disagree, but I feel like that’s just being purposely obtuse for why it’s not in the report. Ken Martin and Ken Martin’s “friend” fucked this up royally and even liberals are pointing that out. Why the cope?

Also couldn’t let this slip by either: Ken Martin commissioned the report, NOT his predecessors.

I would buy that it’s just an out of touch loser’s opinion, but what kinda screws that up for me is that they didn’t even discuss Biden’s age or* cognitive issues being a significant factor. Anyone alive and* paying attention during the time, even someone who only watched morning Joe, would have mentioned that.

Edit: phone typos

I seriously doubt this was prepared during the time they claim it was. It seems like a bunch of nothing words with a strict no mention of anything the left has been talking about being the issue. It’s like what you’d get if you asked a chat bot to prepare an almost 200 page document about why it wasn’t any of these things while being careful not to mention any of those things.

Unfortunately I feel like the writing was on the wall as early as Roy Moore. He’s quite literally just an obvious pedophile but because Trump endorsed him he won anyways.

It couldn’t happen to worse people.

Wouldn’t a full fledged abandonment of electoralism, the kind that would be required to look at AOC as an enemy, just be excellerationism? I guess if your loyalties are always strictly dismantling* US stability then you’d just view it as starving the beast. In this way you’d be pretty well aligned with incompetent fascists, since the US is in a spiraling decline that will now inevitably result in us losing our authority on the world stage. Just for different reasons than they would use I guess.

In that way, how can leftists take MLs seriously, when their world view is largely agreement, but their actions and attacks are directly opposed to democratic socialists a lot of the time. You also have to couple in that while you may attack fascists too, any division amongst the left is multiplied by 100x over divisions in the center or right since billionaires hold the microphone.

It’s not really arbitrary when those you agree most with are also in your crosshairs on actions of substance. It’s also very telling that most situation here on Lemmy that at least I see ML presence it’s on these edge cases, rather than things like Rick Scott almost single handedly showing a failure of electoral politics when he created the nations biggest organized Medicaid fraud ring, something people being polled seem to care about, and then was elected into office anyways as an equal to Bernie Sanders. Is this a blind spot on my part or do you feel calling out the best representatives as more impact for your message that the system sucks? What we see is us working and you complaining.

Edit: word missing.

I see a lot of agreement, not “the opposite” in this post. You talk a lot about nuance but didn’t cite an example when you’d use it to navigate a difficult subject to grasp, or what that might look like. You also lean into the America bad trope without showing you can do any different. If it is opposite then make that point, not the word salad of how hard it is to be a ML and be right all the time, btw on topics the left very broadly agrees about as your examples.

Cuba’s embargo is not supported by the left. If you’d like to expand more on my points, then what good does attacking AOC as AOCIA bring to the cause of Cuba’s starvation?

It seems to me like they take the wrong lesson from leftism, which is that the US is usually the bad guy in most situations and they represent oligarchy interests by default, then extrapolate that to other countries opposed to the US being the good guys by default. Nuance and taking the facts at face value for every situation is much harder to explain to others as an ideology.

They’ve also been infected with a cynicism that makes them open to grifts similar to the right. Our best fighters can’t be perfect, so they try and rip support off of them. Jimmy Dore, the Aussie green party, Jackson Hinkel, the Caleb sex pest dude, they all have criticism of everyone else while providing no real ideas of their own and how to get there. They’re just propped up as a distraction rather than a movement.

I think it’s also pretty clear there’s been a reshuffling of financial resources for the grifters. Whether that’s because the results have shown a collapse of Republican enthusiasm, because Israel is hated by a big chunk of both parties, or because they can’t funnel it through Orban, I’m not sure, but Russian money seems to have slowed down to the right. Maybe because the writing on the wall for tipping our global influence is already well established and it’s just a matter of time. If I were a Russian propaganda coordinator I’d have pivoted to Chinese grifters like Epoch Times by now.

If you wanna ensure a good loaf name it inflation.

When one party plays by the rules and the other party doesn’t, the moral victory only works when that same cheating party’s entire existence isn’t based on vice signaling. Since it is, maybe it’s time to start showing them where their vice gets them in the real world.

Wowzer, booking.com fucking sucks I guess

I kinda treat him like I do Bill Mahr. If he’s agreeing with me it means the establishment is running out of options and if he disagrees with me it means I’m definitely right. He’s always been a bit of a canary in the coalmine where he starts doubting the party right before a tone change.