IDK about this as a bellwether for the following year.
Is there any research on how well-correlated "nonpartisan in name only" elections tend to be with partisan ones?
Actually when is the last time the D-aligned candidate did NOT win Wisconsin Superintendent Of Public Instruction? (It looks to me like Herbert Glover, John Benson, Elizabeth Burmaster, and of course Tony Evers were the "Dane County" candidates...)
IDK about before that. But if, so, man, talk about "issue ownership".
Democrats should try to get non-partisan positions on issues where they have issue ownership everywhere possible...sort of like how Republicans have uh, district attorneys?
Here's another question, why the hell did voters turn out the incumbent superintendent of public education in 1981. Google is not promising...
Look--nobody just wakes up one day and decides to run for Senate and has slick videos and such. Everyone from every faction is recruited by some network or other. That's an interesting process to me but I don't think it abrogates any particular candidacy.
That woman who went viral for being "just a normal mom with some questions" was probably licking envelopes with her best friend the State Senator five years ago, or drawing signs for the Whatever March, blah blah. How these things work.
Again it is a process I find interesting. With any candidate you can ask, you know, how did they build their network, when did it start, what was the impetus...like what happened to Ralph between 2004 and 2007.
It's funny that (different) people make basically mutually exclusive complaints about Discord/WhatsApp/Telegram ("people being radicalized in secret echo chambers") and about Instagram/Twitter ("we're not meant to all be in one big chat room").
Like if your problem is "the algorithms" then you should like Discord, I don't think there's anything algorithmic about it at all.
For years and years people on big social media sites were bemoaning the loss of little walled garden forums for niche topics, and now that's back, and I guess it's just as bad as everything else.
Well, what does "conservative" mean. Nathan Lane was afraid of coming out in the 90s. You didn't have literal card-carrying socialists winning political office in cities all over the country. You didn't have hundreds of legal marijuana stores all over Michigan.
Yes this was happening all the time at the BET awards in the less-conservative 80s and 90s.
I'm a big fan of Matt Baume, all of his videos are like, "here's the months of painstaking negotiation that it took to have a gay character on a sitcom in 1995". Now there's a trans star on "Jeopardy" (median viewing age, roughly 157).
Hm maybe Democrats could walk some picket lines, funnel a ton of money into infrastructure, put some aggressive antitrust regulators into the FTC, oversee tight labor markets and income growth concentrated in the bottom quartiles, that should fix it.
Plus finally running on legal weed, pic unrelated.
I don't have an answer, IDK if there is an answer other than "wait for something bad to happen under Trump and run on that, again", which is also what Trump did to Biden/Harris, but you know...
One thing I think people don't realize is how relatively new the highly-focused-Electoral-College campaign is. In 1976 for example, 20 states were within five points.
So obviously if 20 states are within five points, you have to basically run almost a de facto national campaign. Even in 1996, Bob Dole made a great show out of hitting up 21 states in person at the end of the campaign.
That both campaigns would more or less agree on what the fewer than ten "tipping point states" are and focus their campaign activity overwhelmingly on those, I feel like that's basically a post-2000 thing. Maybe I'm wrong.