I guess so (unless we manage to cook hard enough for Maine not to matter...James Talarico and Sherrod Brown I'm lookin at you).

Still, this by a hare...

And affordability isn't *really* an issue because of inequality. It's an issue because we have laws (which serve interest groups like homeowners) which exist to limit available supply of good. With housing, these are zoning regulations being pushed by haves (homeowners) at the expense of have-nots.

It's just people's preferences on that issue are far from economic. Harris had better affordability policies than Trump (and there are real abundance-style policies that the Dems would do better to implement to fix that), but people only cared because Trump shouted "eggs".

This wasn't rational.

So, real wages being stagnant does not entail things getting worse. Especially if things have been consistent for a while, that doesn't explain why now there's this sudden lurch to a candidate that honestly doesn't address any of this at all.

I'll grant you that affordability is a salient.

Those two things aren't contradictory...

MAGA will (unfortunately) survive Trump. If pedophilia, as opposed to, like, Jan 6 is what'll do Trump in, then there's certainly a political constituency (at least for a while) that's open to voting for MAGA positions under a different candidate...

But people's lives weren't getting worse! Like, people were a lot better off in 2024 economically. They just were. This isn't 2008 or 2020 where people being worse off was a clear part of Trump getting elected.

Like, more inequality is not the same thing as people being worse off.

I mean, I’m kinda attached to the label “shitlib”. But yeah, we support the good.

I’m sorry, I don’t see the line here between economic populism and voting for the billionaire Trump. I do see the line between racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. and voting for Trump.

I mean, the populace has shown itself to (at best) grade Dems a lot more toughly than Repubs for reasons called bigotry.

Still, it doesn't do us any good to give them Platner...

new york democrats shouldn't be let anywhere near power. the ideal democratic leader is a guy who won by 2 percent and actually thinks of the GOP, rather than other Democrats, as the enemy.

Honestly Fetterman is probably an optimistic scenario for what he ends up as. I don't like him, but he at least isn't a walking endorsement of the idea that "the Dems are all Nazis".

Platner, from a PR perspective, would be a nightmare for the Democrats if he was elected to the Senate.

I don't think the status quo is perfect, but damn I wouldn't point to it (economically) to explain why people are fascists right now.

I don't think it was income inequality that did that. You can blame Obama and Biden (and Harris) for many things, but not being economically populist is not one of them. And having Trump be the beneficiary of this makes it even harder to believe.

Politics rn is just people refusing to listen to shitlibs, suffering the consequences, and then blaming the shitlibs for it.

As a shitlib, it’s exhausting…

I wish I were joking, and to some extent I’m exaggerating a little, but the reason he won the primaries and the general comes down to the fact that people wanted him. It’s cringe and evil, but it isn’t fabricated by money. Part of this country just seems to want this, which sucks…

Trump didn’t win because of donors. He got outspent by Harris.

Trump won because there’s a chunk of this country that is on board with fascism for some godforsaken reason (which I guarantee isn’t economics) and another chunk that’ll keep making excuses for it so they won’t have to vote for a woman…

I’d want nothing more than for them to elect like some charismatic state legislator who’s solidly Democrat and then have that seat in the bag.

But no. Apparently the primary voters seem more interested in doing this. I don’t know what’d be worse: him fumbling the bag or him becoming a Senator.