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General politics thread (was: General U.S. politics thread)
Comments
I have autism and it wasn't from vaccines, you dumbass.
Except he's not. They're leading the Senate.
I wouldn't be so sure until we've actually seen it play out, because a lot of polling involves various forms of estimation, such as estimating the turnout from different groups of people.
Also, here's an example of the pessimism that I and others criticize you for: when current polls predict a Dem Senate majority, there's little word about it but when current polls predict a Repub Senate majority, you point out how they're leading. And not only that, you basically just stop there. No requests for donations, no qualifying comments, no suggestions for what candidates should do, no commentary on trends, not even citing the poll numbers themselves. (Only reason I know what you're talking about is because I saw the stuff on electoral-vote.com this morning. A bunch of Marist College polls.)
In Florida, Rubio is better known than Murphy, and that helps Rubio. If both of those states stay Republican, it's gonna be hard to flip the Senate. His lead is in the single digits, compared to Portman's double digits, but you only need one point to win in FPTP.
Well. Yeah.
For Delaware's at-large House seat, Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) won her primary convincingly and is considered the favorite in the general election. Her most notable thing is that she's both black and female, and IIRC Delaware is one of very few states that haven't had a woman represent them in Congress before. So, yeah, kinda a boring affair for the moment as far as electoral interestingness goes.
In Rhode Island, a number of progressives challenged incumbent Democrats in the State House of Representatives, and this resulted so far in 7 victories for challengers, including one over State House Majority Leader John DeSimone.
New Hampshire's first U.S. House seat has seen an extremely tight Republican primary between scandal-tarred incumbent Frank Guinta, a former mayor of Manchester, and businessman Rich Ashooh, with three lesser-known candidates rounding out the field. Last I've heard, Guinta is leading by a few hundred votes. The winner will take on challenger and former incumbent Carol Shea-Porter (D) in the general election. Shea-Porter won this seat in 2006, 2008, and 2012, while Guinta won it in 2010 and 2014.
New Hampshire's gubernatorial Republican primary is a race has five candidates of which the top three were relatively close. Seems it's being won by another member of the Sununu political family. I don't know much about this race, or the less-close Democratic primary.
New York's State Senate District 31, currently represented by Adriano Espaillat -- who earlier ran and won a primary to replace longtime Rep. Charlie Rangel in the U.S. House -- saw several candidates pile in. In this heavily blue district, an IDC candidate seems to have won the Dem primary by a few hundred votes (about 2% margin). This is important because the IDC -- which stands for "Independent Democratic Conference" -- is a bloc of a few Dem state senators who decided to caucus with the Republicans to give the Republicans a majority coalition in the State Senate, despite being the minority party. (Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is also very much friends with the Republicans in the State Senate, so he didn't exactly help his party either.) For reference, Espaillat is not a member of the IDC.
Also, with 100% of precincts reporting, Frank Guinta appears to have beaten Rich Ashooh (excuse me!) by 649 votes. The raw numbers are:
Frank Guinta 26,229 | 46%
Rich Ashooh (excuse me!) 25,580 | 45%
Michael Calis 2,230 | 4%
Robert Risley 1,373 | 2%
Jamieson Gradert 1,031 | 2%
It seems Guinta has been saved by the clown car!
Guinta, whose campaign has been rocked with campaign finance violations, was actually once left for dead by New Hampshire Republicans due to his scandals. But, hey. On the other hand, Carol Shea-Porter might be enjoying this turn of events. That said, wealthy businessman and former Democrat Shawn O'Connor is running as an independent, after having some sort of spitting contest with local Dems, so the race remains hard to predict.
("Clown car" is political slang for a race, especially a primary election, that has a large number of candidates. When a bunch of people all run against a scandal-ridden incumbent, this "clown car effect" can frequently save said incumbent, in part due to the US's near-ubiquitous use of first-past-the-post voting systems, because the challengers all split the anti-incumbent voters amongst themselves and end up all losing.)
I prefer this mental picture.
(Even though I get the point.)
Remember what Trump said back in the primary? "Knock the crap out of them!" The violence keeps happening and is now spilling into the general election.
So accepted Syrian refugees would number 110,000 if successful. This comes after Hillary said she wanted the refugee number to be 65,000 per year rather than 10,000 per year as was the original idea.
Other emails show that Powell and Leeds both say Hillary thinks Obama doesn't want her to succeed him, which contributes to the bad blood. They don't go into the business of speculating who Obama "actually" wants as his successor, though.
(For the record, I also know it's awful.)
More seriously (the "epsilon bigger than zero" kind of "more", but still), our favourite amphibian strikes back. You've probably heard of it anyway, but still, dutifully do I report it: