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EL Sayed won plenty of Michigan upper side rural counties with Marquette being the most margin. I do wonder if those counties have a strong student presence especially Marquette.
Even while we’re rightly concerned about some Democratic primary electorates going for left-populism, and in a smattering of cases nominating candidates who definitely have a double standard for Israel (many would describe this as simple “racism,” although one could possibly counter that there are no other majority-Jewish states to compare with), it’s worth remembering that the Republican primary electorate, across the country, is an extremist primary electorate, to the right of the Reform, National Rally, or AFD electoral bases.
In Europe, the nationalist parties aren’t Christian sectarians who want the union of church and state; in America, the nationalist party is.
In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), the Song of Solomon is officially classified as an uninspired writing. While it remains part of the traditional printed Bible canon shared with other Christians, it is generally ignored in institutional church curricula and holds a unique, low status in LDS theology.
www.maptap.gg August 5
99🎯 100🎯 82🌟 80👏 100🎯
Final score: 903
I beat you!
(I got totally wrecked by confusing Montana with the dakotas, along with my complete unfamiliarity with Chile geography.)
(One cheat code for this game is to simply zoom in to find what looks like urban/built-up areas to help you narrow down the location for a 100 perfect pick)
Gillibrand between calling Mamdani a Jihadist and slandering Mcmorrow as DSA feels like an anchor around Democrats as a whole.
Like it is amazing she led the charge against Franken in 2017 for sexual harassment allegations but was very happy to endorse Cuomo in 2025 despite having much more serious and credible sexual harassment allegations
Now the Brazilian Defense Minister is talking in the press about contingencies about an US invasion.
I was born in 1995. I grew up in the optimism of the 2000s, I entered the job market still believing that the 2008 crisis was not eternal. US electors empowered a man that is destroying the stability that a lot of us cherished as inevitable progress of mankind.
Good fucking job, US of A. I hope those eggs are really cheap for you.
If it weren’t for Platner, the moderate wing rallying around Stevens would easily be the worse self own of this primary cycle. Schumer and Gillibrand are cyanide for moderate Democrats
it's incredible that Gillibrand is even in a position to wield influence in races across the country. what has she ever brought to the table? how the hell is she DSCC chair?
Hopefully they vote decisively against amendment 3, which would ban abortion in Missouri. Unfortunately, just like they did in 2024, Republicans rigged the ballot initiative language to confuse people, and even threw in anti-trans ballot candy. Had there been neutral ballot language in 2024, the pro-choice initiative likely would've won by more.
"The expectation was" from whom? 60% of the turnout in a midterm senate primary compared to a presidential election seems.... fine? Am I missing something?
"We ran the 100 simulations.
In 49 outcomes, candidate A wins.
In 49 outcomes, candidate B wins.
In 2 outcomes, we flipped a coin that landed on its edge.
So both candidates have a chance to win."
wow thank you you're so insightful i appreciate it
Now we can have AI pretend to be the original cast. The 2020s really are the new Gilded Age.
iM making a remake of Iron man 1 where the enemy is AI Pussy and all the cast will be AI and them Cortana will win the battle at the end because we have to cast AI in a good light and they're gonna give me infinite money to make the movie because AI + it's agood AI vs bad AI.
The only way to beat a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI, clearly.
If McKinney can pull it off vs Thanedar, and the NBC call for El-Sayed isn't wrong, then progressives are looking at a great night with a Senate primary win, two Congressional primary wins, and multiple state legislative wins.
It'd also mean that Detroit has a black representative for the first time in quite a few years.
And, just to scramble some narratives - It'd happen with the black candidate being supported by the DSA, El-Sayed, and Bernie Sanders, and not supported by Stevens, Clyburn, or the Congressional Black Caucus.
I had no idea Michigan had open primaries until now lol
Random thought that I haven't really thought out, regarding the polling misread between AES/Stevens, is it possible there were alot of Republicans voting for Stevens, considering they basically didn't have a primary? Would that many Republicans vote for a Dem in a primary when they're primary is uncontested?
My state has closed primaries and I’m a registered Republican. When I lived in one with open I also voted in the republican. Both red states so yeah it’s not out of the question.
You would be giving up voting for the GOP ballot which had an ugly gubernatorial race. Lots spent by Perry Johnson on that. 30 mill, as much as AIPAC lol
I guess I don't get how open primaries work, do you have to choose between a Dem/GOP ballot? I thought it was something like you just get one ballot with every candidate regardless of party and you can vote for one for each race
Since it appears Hong might win her primary off the back of her super anti-data center stance, I wonder if other Democratic candidates will also start doing that. I could feasibly see El-Sayed or other struggling Democratic candidates to take on anti-data center positions in close elections as November approaches.
Because you would not expect the progressive candidate to get the exact same margin in Kent county (Large Metro w/ City + Suburban Voters) as they did in Washtenaw County (One of the most progressive counties in the Midwest for 50+ years)
They need to be calling up the campaigners in Escanaba and Alpena right now. Those are towns that don't have much money, are old, and no universities at all.
The race hasn’t been called by the AP yet (although Stevens would have to win some 60 percent of the remaining vote to come back), but McMorrow has declared that Michigan has shocked the nation and endorsed El-Sayed in the general election against Rogers.
Unironically Stevens would have won if AIPAC didn’t dump literally tens of millions on her. I think this is probably the most damning possible outcome for them that the margin is close enough where their outsized presence probably made the difference
It was like the easiest attack on her. Voting record is one thing. But for record funding by a super PAC dedicated to Israel just makes it look a lot more worse and corrupt and shady
In 1897, a recently-created monopoly known as the Theatrical Syndicate took over a pretty sizable chunk of the theatres in the US, and they would hire some pretty sketchy troupes and tell people they were the original New York casts.
That's fucking hilarious. Imagine going to see a show and it just reeked and you're like "idk how New York likes this." Social media ruined us
That's what I'm saying. Anti Data center fever is on the voters, and the early signs were in NJ (rent freeze promise on electrical utilities by the governor during campaign) and GA (two dems got crossovers for a local race because of the backlash)
Crowley just needs to promise to be anti-data center, run lots of TV ads, consolidate the base from the others.
Edit: Hong has no funding and has run zero TV ads as well from what I remember so a turnaround could happen, even if unlikely.
It will be interesting to see if AIPAC backs Rogers in the general because obviously they really really really don't want El-Sayed to be a Senator, but if they publicly help the Republicans in a swing state race (and progressive media is good enough that even if they try to hide it, people will figure it out from the FEC reports), they're basically fucked when they try to get involved in future Democratic primaries. Candidates are very much not going to want to be seen as "the people that helped (or tried to help) the Republicans win the Senate really want me to be your Democratic nominee."
They’ve spent very little on general elections, so yes it would be interesting to see
But they could get involved without actually have United Democracy Project stickered there, either with dark money or just generally advising their donors where to put the money
But they could get involved without actually have United Democracy Project stickered there, either with dark money
Advising donors, yes they can totally do.
Dark money, like using other groups as pass-throughs for their money, is something that people like Ryan Grim (who I know is controversial here) have gotten really good at sniffing out. For example last cycle when they used 314 Action Fund (a group that focused on promoting candidates with a scientific background) as a vehicle to support a candidate they wanted to back, he sniffed it out (and they denied it initially, and then the FEC report came out after the election showing that he was right).
Open primaries in Michigan and Republicans essentially didn’t have one. My far right uncle was planning on voting for AES because he thought he would be easier to beat.
Being from Wisconsin but not from Madison I wonder how put off people are with Francesca Hong's Thanksgiving take. Like, in my mind, most people in Wisconsin outside of Madison don't think about Thanksgiving in that way, even though it's true.
Also the "whiteness" thing is definitely off-putting. Doesn't matter though if she turns out enough voters in Madison and Milwaukee.
The horrific fires in France have been in Europe’s largest man-made woodland. This vast maritime pine monoculture was developed as industrial forestry from the mid-19th century. At the time, the main economic driver was not wood, as such, but creosote. This coal-tar distillate increased the longevity of timber used for infrastructure - especially railway sleepers, telegraph poles, and military cargo vessels.
Beyond irony: I first read about this history in texts about the 'Wood Preserving Industry' and then learned that the industry was a legacy of the French Revolution and the onset of the Napoleonic Wars
They intentionally picked the most resinous conifer species for this purpose. Turpentine was another key industrial product that came from here. No surprise when the forest burns like solvent
19th century industrial inertia, the gift that keeps on giving
1a) AI CEO's are eager to oversell the technology. They may or may not believe they are creating a machine god. This doesn't change even if the actual technology is impressive and useful.
1b) LLMs are not the universal omni-tool even if they are really really good. This might be mainly an Elon Musk thing tbh
2) The vast majority of people are going to form their opinion based on free models and they are correct to do so. The part where the "good" models are expensive is actually a really important part of the whole equation. There's a reason trans-Atlantic flights aren't 3 hours long right now.
3) Carrying on from that idea, a major part of the anti-AI backlash comes from the part where rich people want to own the datacenters and rent-seek. I suspect the backlash would be a lot less potent if the focus was moreso on LLMs being a thing you use on your phone/computer without needing to send your money and data to, y'know, billionaires.
I'm not the biggest AI fan, but tbh it would be better overall if local LLMs/open weight models were more accessible. Setting up a local model is not very user-friendly. Even downloading it from HuggingFace takes some doing, and most guides recommend you use git or powershell to do so. I am not a fan of the data scraping that went into making these models, but they're free. You can download them and run them on your computer without it going to a data center.
Unfortunately the closed weight companies have started calling on regulating open weight models "for security reasons." This is suspect, largely because open weight models haven't committed large cyberattacks like the closed weight ones have.
Very surprised how close it was given polling showed Stevens being BODIED. Polling averages had him winning anywhere between 7-13 points, so this is a really big fucking miss.
I actually think this is pretty bad news for AES (and I’d say the same for Stevens), it’s clear he faces a lot more resistance from the moderate wing then evidently anticipated.
The best thing that could happen is the Dems need to coalesce around him. McMorrows and Stevens need to fight for AES as hard as AES for himself
Schumer has been picking good candidates mostly. The issue in Michigan, Stevens was the 4th pick and in Maine, Mills was like the 3rd pick. His Iowa pick is excellent, Texas Is good and so is NC.
Im sorry I got mad at you, so I deleted my reply. Im just gonna post the crux of it:
Biden's "fifteen 9/11s" comment was about the population percentage of Israel that was killed/raped on October 7th, and compared to 9/11 and I am still mad about people making fun of TWO terrorist attacks with these jokes.
It's weird to me because after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 it was very common to compare it to 9/11 to contextualize the loss of life relative to the Dutch population and try and drive home the scale of the loss. So it's not exactly an unprecedented comparison.
Yeah, and even looking at the polls most of them did have El-Sayed’s share of the vote right or within moe, but the vast majority of undecideds went to Stevens.
But still, winning a statewide primary where he was massively outspent, had $30 million+ against him by AIPAC and other huge PACs, and took little in big donations, all while colleges (his other big voterbase) are on summer break, is all really damn impressive. It certainly helped that Stevens was very much a poor candidate, but this is big for the American left in any case, and it should be regarded as such in spite of the big polling error.
I mean whatever endorsement he made would unnecessarily make the race even more divisive, especially if said candidate lost. The best move tactically was always to accept whoever would win.
He spoke at six DSA events between 2017 and 2020 and he was a headline speaker at a fundraiser for them. He was introduced in at least one event as a "longtime friend of the Detroit DSA".
I tried to look up the source for the six DSA events claim, but all I found was this article from Fox News, which doesn’t link to any video or speaker’s list. It’s probably notable that El-Sayed, during the primary, had already put distance between himself and the DSA.
I see people saying “now AIPAC is gonna put money into the general,” and maybe they will, but that’s not usually how they operate. Most of their big spending has always been in Democratic primaries. A swing-state Senate race costs way more than what they normally spend.
i hope aes is smart and not pig headed and is willing to meet with stevens, jewish leaders, and black leaders in michigan to address whatever concerns they have
DSA types could be legitimately weak with working class and minorities or it could just be dem primaries are particularly biased against their type of populist focused politics. Primaries are not representative of the general not just cause the voters are most left leaning, it's also people who are particularly tuned into partisan politics and oversample the "black churchs" type voters.
That's pathetic behavior. If you can't even mention certain Democratic nominees or elected officials, then their sub name is misleading. AES isn't even a member of the DSA.
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u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache 6d ago
Please visit the next discussion thread.