I've seen a lot of folks praising Stacey Abrams for everything she did to help Democrats win in Georgia. Oddly, I don't see her name on the ballot in either of the state's two Senate races.
In case there's some confusion about what this means, Abrams sat out the Georgia Senate race because she wanted to be Biden's VP. She actively lobbied for it. Had she run for Senate it's not hard to imagine that Democrats would have done better than they did.
And yes I know the argument that Abrams didn't want to run for senate. I'm pretty sure Hickenlooper and Bullock didn't want to run either. But they gave Dems the best chance they had of picking up Senate seats. The same is true of Abrams in Georgia.
And if you want to argue that Abrams did more good by mobilizing Georgia voters than running for the senate ... please stop. She was the best known Democrat in GA who narrowly lost the governor's race in 2018. She should have run and may have cost Dems the senate by sitting out
If you want to use this thread to criticize Beto O'Rourke feel free. Though it's far from clear that he would have won in Texas this cycle. With Abrams, the evidence is more compelling.
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As bad as that Trump statement was, keep in mind that close to 70 million Americans voted for four more years of it
You want to talk about the divide in America? On any every news network, even Fox, pundits and analysts will eviscerate Trump for what he just said. Tens of millions of Americans who voted for him thought it was great.
I said earlier that the issue raised by this election is not that Democrats have a bad message or can't communicate with voters ... it's that tens of millions of voters are ok, even applauding, of the president's lying, corruption, and bats**t insanity. How do you fix that?
So I've seen some people argue that one of the takeaways from the 2020 results is that America is a center-right country ... let's take a look at the numbers THREAD
Since 1988, Democrats have won the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 POTUS elections
Republicans have won more than 47.9 percent of the popular vote one time (50.7 in 2004)
Democrats have won more than 47.9 percent of the vote in every single election, except 1992
Democrats have won more than 50 percent of the vote in presidential elections three times.
Republicans have won the presidency while losing the popular vote twice (2000 and 2016). Assuming Trump loses, two Republican incumbents will have lost their bids for reelection
I've been working on a piece charting the worst indiscretions of Trump's presidency and I'd completely forgotten about the speech he gave to the Boy Scouts Jamboree in which he talked about a friend who had orgies on a boat nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Or the time he pushed the Prime Minister of Montenegro out of his way for a photo op
Over the weekend, I wrote on why the doomsday scenarios about Trump trying to steal the election are largely misplaced. THREAD bostonglobe.com/2020/09/27/opi…
One point, in particular, featured in the recent piece by @bartongellman in the Atlantic, overstates the likelihood that Trump will be ahead on election night because of delays in counting mail-in ballots.
Since mail-in ballots are often reported first it's more likely that Biden Is ahead. There are only two battleground states - Wisconsin and Pennsylvania - where mail-in votes are not processed before Election Day.