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Will Stancil Profile picture
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2 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
reality is that, despite incredible geographic luck and an extremely unlikely spate of last-minute good fortune, trump barely, BARELY won in 2016 against an unpopular opponent. not a single thing has changed to his benefit and much has changed to his detriment
most people vote the same election after election (this is a big part of why trump won: a lot of his votes were just baked-in romney/mccain/bush voters) and it's unclear to me where trump would be getting many new votes, but pretty clear where biden would be
this basic logic - "trump has almost no ground to lose, and it's hard to see where he could have gained ground" - has held true for years. but now we're right up to the election and the polls are bearing it out too: trump has backslid almost everywhere
so while there are real risks here - election interference, covid-related shifts in voting patterns and times, and in particular, the GOP consolidating around trump more firmly than last time - I feel much calmer, all things considered, than 2016

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More from @whstancil

Will Stancil Profile picture
5 Nov
Democrats, to each other: "Trump is so awful, so crooked, so racist. How could anyone vote for him?"

Democrats, to regular voters: "I'm not here to talk about Trump. I'm here to talk about health care."
The overriding assumption appears to have been that Trump's badness was completely self-evident in all its particulars to everyone, and thus that anyone who ignored that badness was a moral monster completely immune to any appeal not rooted in racism or financial self-interest.
Seems like, if your opponent is a racist impeached twenty-times-accused sexual assaulter who self-deals with government resources and is too dumb to speak in complete sentences or understand basic government, you should... say so! Just say so out loud! Point it out, constantly!
Read 5 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
28 Oct
Here's what political media needs to understand about the catastrophe of 2016: it's not bad luck that led it to absorb and propagate right-wing talking points.

It was real incentives and social pressures - all of which CONTINUE TO EXIST TODAY. crooked.com/articles/2020-…
As long as political media remains a tightly-knit circle of elite insiders whose professional advancement depends chiefly on the approval of each other, there will be strong pressure to revert back to the failed practices of the past.
It doesn't help, either, that political media circles are connected to a large number of GOP partisans who remain part of the social scene, regardless of how unreliable they have proven. And it REALLY doesn't help that white men, and their fixations and biases, predominate.
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
27 Oct
No, evaluating your party’s leaders as doing a poor job, and being willing to say so, does not actually indicate mental health conditions.

However, it connects to something else I’ve thought about a lot: how mentally draining it is to not trust leaders.
I’ve wondered if this is the root of the low-level panic a lot of Democrats feel, the constant attention suck that is Trump and politics, the doomscrolling: it feels like nobody is in charge and if we don’t pay close attention to every problem, every problem will get worse.
I’ve said this before but it’s simply exhausting - truly, physically exhausting - to know that not only will all manner of horrors occur between now and next week, every single week, but that even the people in government purportedly on our side will likely do nothing about them.
Read 8 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
27 Oct
It's true: the election is in seven days. What, exactly, has Pelosi done to slow Trump down?
Did she help ferret out his misdeeds? Did she outmaneuver him at the negotiating table, achieving Dem priorities? Did she hold his cronies accountable or uncover corruption at the agencies? Did she ever use any of the "arrows in her quiver" that she wasn't going to talk about?
Or was she, at best, a mildly irksome presence for Trump in the House, someone who insulted him time to time while holding her own caucus at bay and suppressing any movement within it to impose consequences or accountability on the administration?
Read 5 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
26 Oct
best way to barbecue chicken
this man is not from my city
barbecue: a helpful guide
Read 7 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
26 Oct
The irony is that the kind of government Jamelle is describing - one in which the branches act to protect their own governing prerogatives - is much more reflective of the ideas of the US constitutions than the mechanistic process envisioned by his critics
A lot of people have this 5th-grade view of "checks and balances" where it means rules built into the system - veto, judicial review, confirmations. But it's broader than that: it's the idea that a hypertrophied branch will be cut back down to size when it endangers the other two
"Checks and balances" is a principle to be upheld and expressed in government, not an invitation to comb over the rules until - oops! - you find the trump-card rule that can't be checked or balanced, and use it to secure permanent control in defiance of electoral majorities
Read 4 tweets

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