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Just more evidence that '24 was one of the most winnable elections of all time, an opportunity just thrown into the trash by abwd/ people who didn't want to hear about accountability when it comes to Democrats..
Or, or or, and hear me out: Trump being in office for another year and a half has served as a stark reminder of how shitty Republicans actually are, and even Republicans are angry about it. American voters as a collective are fickle, stupid, incurious, and confoundingly forgetful. The district is considered a swing seat roughly mirroring Michigan statewide, and we've seen a consistent trend across the country of Democrats overperforming after Trump took office and somehow displayed even worse leadership than in his first term. Democrats did considerably better in 2026 than they did in 2022 despite having the same district map, and Harris narrowly won the 35th in 2024. The much larger margin clearly reflects anti-Trump sentiment caused by his time in office.
Or, or or, and hear me out: The Harris and Biden campaigns chose to ignore the clear signal the Michigan voters told them with regard to their position of Israel and Gaza. You know. They thing the voters fucking told the campaign, at the fucking time. Not some post-hoc interpretation. You know, what actually happened.
And like, lets just work with what you've given.
'22: +13
'24: -14
'26: +22
We can interpret this as The Biden Harris position on Israel Gaza representing a net negative of 27 points. Farrrr more than sufficient for Michigan to have gone to Harris. Trumps behavior then accounts for 8 points of the swing.
So the choice was clearly to elect someone who was on the record talking about flattening gaza and rebuilding it as a luxury resort?
So you're using figures from a 2026 Michigan Senate election to extrapolate about how Michigan was so winnable in 2024 thanks to Israel–Palestine instead of the obvious "Trump fucking sucks and people are angry". This district swung about 5 points just from the 2022 race when Israeli apartheid was well in effect but before most Americans were concerned about it as a primary issue.
You can make the argument that Israel–Palestine mattered at the margins in Michigan in 2024 (which wouldn't even have decided the election); trying to argue it was "one of the most winnable elections of all time" (even if hyperbolically) at all let alone based on those 35th District figures is so obviously asinine that I don't even feel I need to explain it. I will offer that the 35th Senate District has effectively fuck-all in the way of a Muslim vote and that you don't magically get an approximately 9-point swing when you take Israel–Palestine out.
Edit: So you edited your comment to:
And then... What fucking numbers that I gave are you talking about? Seriously, where did you pull these numbers from? I didn't even have let alone offer exact figures for 2024 for the 35th Senate District; it just said "narrowly", so I assumed a sub-1% margin.
Where on Earth does "net negative of 27 points" come into this? Net negative what points? +13 what in 2022? I feel like I just dropped midazolam while I'm reading this. Nothing you've said is substantiated or makes any sense.
Jesus fucking christ, Michigan voters literally told Democrats they didn't want to support the campaigns positions on Israel-Palestine in the primary. No gymnastics necessary. They wrote it onto their ballots.
You are calling 11.7% of voters in this county/ district "fuck all". That's the proportion that told the campaign exactly what was necessary, and you are saying this 11% of voters aren't worth considering. This is precisely why Democrats lost the election.
Edit to the edit of the edit: I'm using district level & county level results for this specific district, which is why are numbers might disagree. We don't actually get district level results for national offices, so we have to interpolate between county/ district.
Where the fuck on Earth are you pulling this from? You just dropped a bunch of random-ass numbers in your above edit, and now you're just like "11.7% of voters". There is not an 11.7% Muslim vote in the 35th; are you on fucking meth?
Edit: "why are [sic] numbers might disagree. We don't actually get district level results for national offices,"
Buddy, it's in the article I linked when saying that. It literally says Harris "narrowly won" within the 35th overall in 2024. That's not double-digit percentage points; that's a percentage point or two between her and Trump at most. "Are" numbers differ because you appear to be pulling them out of fucking thin air.
11.7 was the "undecided" portion of Democratic primary votes in this county. You know. That campaign that happened specifically in Michigan where voters used "undecided" in an effort to move the campaigns away from their un-electable positions on Israel/ Gaza. Also, its like, pretty implicitly racist to imply that only Muslim voters were voting against genocide in Gaza. Its an aside, but its pretty glaring and you need to be called out for it. Many Michganders understood the importance of supporting their neighbors and community, both at home and globally, by opposing Biden and Harris's support for genocide, even if you didn't.
Oh, okay, so you just decided:
This is pigeon chess. You're trying lazy numerical sleight-of-hand assuming people won't actually question what you're saying if you say it authoritatively enough. Steve Bannon would be proud of your ability to flood the zone by throwing mountains of bullshit out and hoping people get disoriented enough that they stop bothering to check.
Bruh stfu. You can go look up any electoral map to confirm the numbers. Politico, ballotopedia, CNN. Go pick one. You the one pushing pieces off the table once bringing numbers up became inconvenient to your narrative. You the lazy sloppo because you don't even know the basic underlying results of any of these campaigns to be able to back up what you are saying, ALONG WITH complete and total historical revisionism.
I don't owe you the labor of chewing up basic facts about the election and spitting them into your mouth like a mamma bird because you are too ignorant or lazy to do so yourself. If you don't know things about elections, then maybe you shouldnt have a fucking opinion.
You literally just threw out numbers without any context and expected everyone to understand what you meant. You've since explained what you meant, but it's still only partially relevant to this specific district, and you didn't cite anything. Providing numbers without sources and presenting them as fact means what you said has no validity. The onus is on you to support your claims. If you can't do that, then maybe you shouldn't share your fucking opinion.
You're right, the Democrats chose to ignore what the Michigan voters were telling them. And in response, Michigan voters didn't vote for Democrats, and the world got objectively worse as a result, because Trump was elected to office.
Democrats failed their constituents. And the constituents who didn't vote out of protest allowed Trump to become president and make the world worse--even knowing that he was the worse option. Both of these things are true. We don't have to pretend like it's one or the other.
You can blame voters till the cows come home.
But blaming voters doesn't translate into a credible electoral strategy. You can't "move" voters in the course of a campaign. You can only adapt to where voters are at. Thats literally what a campaign is.
I just.. Its exasperating constantly trying to explain to people that their resentment towards voters doesn't add up to a process which can win an election. Blue MAGA not wanting voters to behave how they actually behave in the real world, its truly a mental disorder, and it doesn't do anything to further Democrats ability to win elections. It does the exact opposite.
No matter how hard people dig their heels in regarding how voters should vote, it doesn't matter, because thats not how voters do voting. And if you base your premise on how you think things should be instead of how things actually are, well, thats how you hand two very easily winnable elections to Trump. Want to keep losing elections? Keep blaming voters and expecting different results.
what's "abwd/" mean?
Every time. Just be happy the Democrats can get more control and stop or slow down the Trump shit show. Just because they aren't going to enact your ideal political and economic system doesn't mean it's not what we badly need right now.
If Democrats continue to ignore developing a deep understanding of why voters behave the way they do, similar to your obtuse, misguided, and obviously bad faith understanding of voting, they'll continue to struggle against Trump, Republicans, and whatever comes next.
Michigan told the both the Biden and Harris campaigns what policy changes were required to get their votes. The campaigns chose to ignore the information they were given. Michigan voters told the campaign where they were at and why, the campaigns chose to ignore that information, and you are apologizing for that by blaming the voters for not wanting a candidate who supports genocide.
And its quite literally disgusting that you take this bad faith interpretation. It truly leaves me with the understanding that you are an apologist for genocide: because what else could you be?
Commenters who regularly come to these conversations with the shitlib/ third way/ Blue MAGA victim complex that voters need to just do what they are told: They're wreckers. They kept the Biden campaign and later the Harris campaign in support of genocide. They've not one clue of what it takes to win elections. They're literally working constantly to lose further elections with their unwillingness to develop a basic understanding of how elections work.
If stopping Trump is their true goal, they should keep as far away from the conversation around "what we should do" as possible. They handed the country to fascism twice.
I don't think 24 was highly winnable for Democrats. It was a coin toss year that they fumbled by pretending Biden was remotely ok to be a candidate.
It being a coin toss is the result of their fumbling. Long before his decline was obvious, and across many races, Democrats were underperforming.
It's definitely due to their planning/messaging. Obama won with huge margins on both presidential campaigns, running on a message people believed in. No one since has come close, either in messaging or results.
Obama won in one of the best years for a Democrat candidate in probably 40 years. Hillary probably could have won then as well.
It was not remotely close, and Michigan is a very bad state for you to pick this fight, because it was at the heart of the "undecided" movement, where we have clear data that exactly what was needed for Democrats to win the election was explicitly left on the table by both Democratic campaigns.
You need to see 2024 as an unforced error, an intentional loss on the part of Democrats, because there has never been a more clear path to victory than what was given to the Biden and Harris campaigns. At least, when the text books are written, this is what they'll say. The uncommitted movement was clear about a specific policy which needed to change, and what it would take to get those votes. Its literally unprecedented, as in, this had never happened in a US election before. Books will be written and studies will be made about this phenomena.
Literally all the campaign needed to do was to listen to its voters.
Michigan was the only state where Palestine was a major factor in people not voting Democrat. Trump still won all the other swing states. There were more people that were surprised Biden wasn't on the ballot than there were people not voting for Harris because of genocide nationally. That's 100% the fault of Democrats not doing a primary and falling back to the candidate no one actually wanted.