I voted for Biden and for Democrats in 2020 in spite of major ideological differences I have with that party.

The GOP messaging is that if Dems control the Senate, America will swing hard to the left.

Let me explain why I don't believe the GOP's scare talk. With numbers.
GovTrack puts out every year a list of the members of Congress by ideology. Here's the one for the most recent year they completed, 2019. It ranks the members of each chamber from most conservative to most liberal.

govtrack.us/congress/membe…
If Ossoff and Warnock beat Perdue and Loeffler, the Senate will be evenly divided with 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans with VP Harris having the tiebreaking vote. Control would go to the Democrats. But the most moderate members of both parties would have the most influence.
So I took the GovTrack rankings for 2019 and took out the rankings for the members who will definitely not be Senators in the next Congress (Alexander, Enzi, Gardner, Harris, Jones, Roberts and Udall).
And then I assumed the GOP's supposed "America-turns-socialist" scenario - assumed that neither Perdue or Loeffler will be in the Senate either.

McSally is already gone.

That leaves 90 Senators whose ideology was ranked in 2019 by GovTrack who will still be in the Senate.
Which Senators would constitute the known and measured ideological center of this new Senate in which there are 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans and the Democrats have control?

Here is what the list of the 20 most moderate Senators in such a Senate would look like.
Of the 50 Democratic Senators, one of them, Sinema, is ranked to the right of 7 different Republicans.

Another Democrat, Manchin, is ranked to the right of 3 Republicans.

A third, Tester, is ranked almost exactly the same as Murkowski.
The 20 most moderate Senators in this supposed GOP "Doomsday" scenario would include 11 Republicans and 9 Democrats.

And that horde of 50 Democrats would include 2 members who are ranked to the right of some of the 50 Republicans.
In this Senate that the GOP warns us about, the known and measured ideological center of the Senate, from right to left, would be Joe Manchin and Susan Collins. In THAT ORDER.
The President-Elect of the United States, Joe Biden, is probably the most moderate of the more than two dozen Democrats who ran for the Presidency in 2020.

The House has a VERY slim Dem majority.

And if the Senate is evenly split w/Dems holding the gavel, the world won't end.

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More from @TheValuesVoter

8 Dec
There are now only SIX states in the country where Trump's MARGIN (the number of people who voted for him versus the number of people who voted for his opponent) GOT BETTER FOR HIM than in 2016. It got worse in 44 states.

cookpolitical.com/2020-national-…
(Click "Swing vs 2016 Margin")
Those states are:

Arkansas
California
Florida
Hawaii
Illinois
Utah

Trump still lost California, Hawaii and Illinois. He just lost by less than he lost them in 2016. The only states where he improved on 2016 and won in 2020 are Arkansas, Florida and Utah.

In the WHOLE COUNTRY.
In 2016, about 136,753,936 people voted for President. And Trump got about 46.1% of those votes. Just under 63 million.

In 2020, about 158,402,125 people voted for President. Trump got 46.9%. 74.2 million.

electproject.org/2016g
cookpolitical.com/2020-national-…
Read 5 tweets
7 Dec
The GOP says that the country will flip hard left unless Perdue and Loeffler win the Senate (which, by the way, is an indirect acknowledgement from them that Joe Biden won the Presidency).

I have concluded that this is a false claim. With numbers.
Also, they’re blowing smoke when they simultaneously claim that Joe Biden is not President-Elect BUT that the fate of the Senate will be decided in Georgia.

Those things can’t BOTH be true at the same time.
If Trump had really won the election, it WOULDN’T MATTER who won in Georgia. Because even if Perdue and Loeffler both lost and the Senate were 50-50, Pence would have the tie-breaking vote.

By them saying that they need to save the Senate, they’re acknowledging that Biden won.
Read 4 tweets
6 Dec
I’m sorry to break this to people who voted for Trump because they were told he was some alternative to socialism, but ...

Trump IS America’s version of Castro.
Trump IS our version of Maduro.

He’s trying to do as much of what they did that he can get away with.
#TraitorTrump
Right around the election, I was joking with a buddy from an East African nation that it Trump somehow won, I would immigrate to his own country.

His response: “we’ve got OUR OWN Trump in power there.”

Trump is every authoritarian strongman we’ve seen in other lands.
Trump is the dictatorial leader we used to condemn in foreign, faraway lands. But with a New York accent. Who is, this time Thank God, limited by a US Constitution that is still strong enough to resist him and just enough truly patriotic people in his party to still obey it.
Read 5 tweets
6 Dec
#MAGA/#KAGA and other #FightForTrump folks:

We know you love yourselves some Trump. We don’t know why, but we know that you do. What you need to understand is that the majority of Americans never did.

Most Presidents who are as unpopular as Trump don’t win re-election. Image
Trump has the LOWEST AVERAGE approval rating (41% if you average all his Gallup ratings over the course of his term so far) of any President in the history of Gallup polling. Look it up.

news.gallup.com/interactives/1…
And Trump’s highest approval rating ever in the Gallup polls is 49%. Which is the lowest of any President in Gallup history.



news.gallup.com/interactives/1…
Read 4 tweets
1 Dec
For all the Election Conspiracy folks out there AND to your tin-foil hats:

One of the reasons that people think something funny happened with the election is because some states which Trump was leading ended up flipping over to Biden.

Let me explain something.
It's called counting votes. And there are two things you should know:

1) Both Biden and Trump had the exact same number of states that had the other guy winning when only half the vote was in but which they ultimately won - five.
2) The states that Biden was leading when only half of the vote was counted but that Trump ended up winning are worth MORE ELECTORAL VOTES than the states in which Trump was leading at the halfway point but which Biden ended up winning.

The Trumpsters don't complain about that.
Read 18 tweets
1 Dec
A lot of Trump supporters seem to be especially suspicious at the fact that Joe Biden won Arizona and Georgia by very slim margins. Despite the fact that they recounted Georgia BY HAND and found the results to be consistent with the machine results.

Which got me thinking.
Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes and won Georgia by 12,670 votes.

I started wondering how many times in recent elections have states been closer than this?

To my surprise, it's happened a lot.
In the 2016 election, Clinton won New Hampshire by 2,736 votes. And Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. Both smaller in raw vote margin than Biden's 12,670 vote win in Georgia.

In 2008, McCain won Missouri by 3,903 votes and won Montana by 11,096 votes.
Read 7 tweets

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