They overturned Roe just because they felt like it. “Settled law” is now utterly meaningless. You just need the right justices.

Me and Ilhan Omar

Ilhan Omar and I

Vote-suppression micro-targeting is more effective and harder to differentiate than traditional negative or positive messaging around candidates. They particularly target minorities who they know are unlikely to be swayed to one side, so the most effective strategy is to convince them not to vote. They often rely on the idea that not voting will “send a message” to those in power. In reality, it just makes the targeted demographics appear unreachable.

A team led by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recruited more than 10,000 people across the United States — a group representative of the country’s voting population — to install an app that captured every ad they viewed for the six weeks leading up to the November election in 2016.

The study participants who saw the ads with vote-suppressing messages on Facebook were 1.9 percent less likely to actually vote in the election than people who did not see the ads…

“In fact, those minority users got the vote-suppression messages nearly 10 times more often than white people in white-majority counties in non-battleground states,” says Young Mie Kim, UW–Madison professor of journalism and mass communication and the lead author of the study…

While a 1.9 percent shift in the behavior of some voters is small, the researchers say, so were the margins of victory in many states in 2016. And, compared to white voters in white-majority counties in non-battleground states, nonwhites in nonwhite-majority counties in states with tight presidential races were about 14 percent less likely to vote. Extrapolated across the country for the 2016 election, the effect of the ads may have kept about 4.7 million people from voting.

Even a good politician whose goal is to help people can’t help people if they don’t have any power. That means winning elections. If one group votes at 2x the rate of another group, then enacting policy that pleases that group is 2x as effective at retaining the power needed to help all of the people when you can. That’s why the groups with the highest voting rates are held as sacred across parties. You can never enact policy changes that will negatively impact them because you will lose power.

reinstating Affordable Care Act tax breaks, reversing Republican Medicaid cuts, holding votes against the Iran war and undoing President Donald Trump’s tariff regime.

I just lost my job to AI after 20 years. Losing Affordable Care Act coverage would limit my ability to study for the exam I need to pass to get a better job in the same field. It sounds pretty damn good from here.

The NCAA, the WNBA, etc. are private organizations. There aren’t any state or federal government-operated sports associations that I know of. Democrats fighting in deep red states like this should just turn the limited government argument on their opponents.

If you attack the electricity and carbon sides of data centers, you might at least be able to divert some of the money tied up in AI towards the construction of renewable energy. Those are also stronger arguments than the water usage argument. Arguing from your most defensible position(s) is generally ideal.

EV charging stations should start putting up gas station style boards showing the current price per kWh. Not that a kWh of electrons gets you as far as a gallon of gas, but a substantial chunk of the population will see the smaller number and start thinking about switching.

But either way, these folks aren’t the ones who ultimately get chosen in the primary because they’re never extreme enough.

I think this is primarily due to the fact that the practice hasn’t caught on or been promoted effectively in deep red states. If you had a movement to get people voting in the only election that matters in their state to the point where moderates started winning, you’d permanently start to shift the policy positions of candidates. Nikki Haley didn’t win the primary but she was only able to hang on as long as she did due to this strategy.

That horse snuck up on Mr. Hands and did that to him without his consent.

I live in a state with partially open primaries that goes red 90% of the time. In order to maximize the effectiveness of my vote and thereby maximize my voice, I registered as an independent and generally request a Republican primary ballot.

I then have to sift through each list of candidates looking for someone who doesn’t mention Trump and has a stated policy goal that isn’t evil. There’s usually one candidate who mentions their focus as being healthcare or education. This is a fairly laborious process and there are plenty of races where the least-worst option is still a horrible person. However, given the winner of the Republican primary has a 90% chance of winning the general AND voter turnout for the primary is generally under 10%, I know that this is effective.

Anyway, doing all this because it is the most logical course of action where I live and then seeing people cry about only agreeing with 87% of one candidate’s policy goals always annoys the hell out of me.

I don’t see why the legislature shouldn’t comply with their request for the industry to be regulated. What’s the objection to that?

Every major news outlet that reported on this said Driscoll resigned due to conflict with Hegseth. Don’t believe random tweets just because they start with “NEW:” or “BREAKING:”

There’s a very fine line between being able to connect the dots to make a breakthrough and connecting dots that aren’t actually connected.