It looks like that kook Cuccinelli is losing.
Bad news to wake up to: Chris Christie won handily. He’s cocky far-right wing conservative with anger management issues, who yells at teachers. He’s now probably the Republican front-runner for the next presidential election, so we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this blowhard now.
Good news to wake up to: Bill de Blasio is mayor of New York. Our new mayor of Minneapolis is a Democrat, and a woman: Betsy Hodges. Minneapolis also has a new city council member, Abdi Warsame, who is now the highest elected Somali official in the US. By the way, our mayoral election used ranked choice voting, which I rather like, and would love to see in place for our presidential elections, except that our countries religious devotion to a gang of white male slaveholders in the 18th century colonies means we’ll never get out of the 1780s on that issue.
And most importantly, Illinois joins Minnesota in the 21st century by passing legislation to allow gay marriage.
I’ve got a bit of headache and general ickiness this morning, and even though that image kind of sears my eyes, I still like seeing it.
Oh, good! I’ve been afraid to look. When I checked earlier in the evening, Cuccinelli was ahead by one point. I would be horrified but not surprised if he’d been elected. I can never predict how Virginians will vote despite having lived here for almost 40 years.
Give the religious right one thing: they sure do turn out to vote. That’s a huge skew between polling and results, according to that link, though of course that’s not uncommon.
However, I’m really curious to see what stories follow about voter suppression in Virginia. There was a big push to suppress the
DemocraticUn-American vote.The election has actually been called for McAuliffe, even by Fox, though it’s “narrow.” That map says it all: the American divide is urban vs rural. McAuliffe won the cities…little islands of blue in a sea of red, but there aren’t enough votes in the red sea.
And De Blasio won in NYC…first Democrat mayor in NYC in like 20 years. And it’s been touting as a genuine Liberal. Guess we’ll see.
And Christie in New Jersey, of course. 2016 here we come.
Virginia was a nail-biter, although most polls had indicated a solid McAuliffe win. Cuccinelli, however, had fire-breathing supporters who were desperate to install him as their god-anointed leader, sex monitor, and closet-peeker, so they turned out in droves. I also suspect that many of them lied to pollsters because it was embarrassing to admit to third parties that they loved “the Cooch.” Good riddance to bad rubbish. Anyway, Cuccinelli can always get a job as a Fox News “analyst.”
I much prefer Democratic mayor. Using “Democrat” as an adjective is what the GOP does.
More good news, equal marriage in Illinois passed house and senate and the gov is expected to sign it.
@Zeno:
Though I suspect most of them don’t even remember why anymore.
Looks like the results don’t reflect a drop in support for McAuliffe since the polls, but rather a pragmatic shift away from the running-for-the-sake-of-it Libertarian to the Republicant. But the Libertarian is holding on to enough of his trod-upon-angry-white-men contingent to assure McAuliffe’s victory. So, I guess a Libertarian IS capable of helping this country progress, albeit unwittingly.
Perhaps we should train people and have them run as Libertarian candidates in those gerrymander-vulcanized neo-confederate house districts in The South.
The difference between McAuliffe and Cuccinelli is the difference between dog shit and dog shit laced with cyanide. Virginia’s going to have a less shitty term than it would have otherwise, but I’m extremely disappointed that against Cuccinelli we had to field such a dubious candidate.
The race appears closer that it really is. Most of the early reporting districts were heavily red, while all the late reporting districts are heavily blue. McAuliffe’s margin is already up to 3% now and counting. When all is said and done it will be even higher, most likely.
I still have trouble grasping why or how the Democrats chose to nominate McAuliffe. The only thing I can think of is at the time of the nomination they didn’t think the governorship would actually be in play, and so no good candidates were willing to run.
Conversely Chris Christie won New Jersey. HOW! That guy is demented!
And Brooklyn just got rid of DA Charlie “The Baby-Raper’s Best Friend” Hynes.
Hurray for not Cuccinelli. I saw a large margin of Cuccinelli victory when I tuned in, nearly had an aneurysm, then checked the county map: as in 2008 and 2012 (the other two times I’ve looked), Virginia’s red rural counties counted fast, whereas the blue cities counted slowly. Phew!
I highly doubt that.
MacAuliffe is winning… but pretty much every area on that map is red, to a greater or lesser extent :-/ I am confuzzled. Presumably the voting does not work in such a way that whoever has the most areas wins, but whoever gets the most individual votes? But if that is the case, what is the point of that map?
votes are reported at different times by different counties/precincts; also, it’s just an informational thing, to show which counties voted how.
A much closer race than it should have been. Two issues that I have this year:
– One of the choices was a deceptive bag of shit that had no business being put up for any political position. The other choice was Cuccinelli…a deceptive bag of shit that had no business being put up for any political position and whose primary mandates are in support of the christian taliban. The choices are getting worse each election cycle.
– Why the hell were so many people willing to support the christian taliban? I understand that if you ignore the christian taliban aspect, Cuccinelli was actually the better candidate…but you can’t frickin ignore the christian taliban when you vote for these people. The fact that Cuccinelli got more than the roughly 30% of the idiot vote is scary as heck to me.
Is this really the 21st century?
Oh great, now we get a ridiculously corrupt politician instead of a crazy loon. Hoorah.
I’m disappointed Sarvis didn’t get more votes. It’s nice to see third party candidates…
Still waiting on the AG, and it’s likely to go to recount.
unbound at 18- The more than 30% is probably less a case of people ignoring Cuccinelli’s unhinged beliefs (much less agreeing with them) and more one of voters just checking the straight Republican box at the top of the form. They really don’t care who they vote for so long as the right letter is attached to the name.
@doublereed:
Sarvis is a shitty choice, too.
He supports school vouchers, he believes in human-caused global warming but doesn’t want to regulate CO2, he doesn’t support gun-control measures, he doesn’t support the ACA, and he wants to eliminate the income tax (which overwhelmingly hurts the poor).
Seriously, he’s a bad decision.
@unbound, #18
Ummmm. I’m not sure how we would know how much of the idiot vote he got.
Do you mean something more like,
It seems likely this was your intent, and maybe I’m being obtuse in not just assuming you meant that and moving on, but I thought I’d double-check.
@22 Kevin
Oh yea, Sarvis is a 52 cards short of a deck, but still it’s nice to see third party candidates, esp when they take votes away from the republicans. From what I saw, he mostly ran on being against the war on drugs, not as much on his more loony ideas.
@doublereed:
Yea, but is it a good thing to have loonies in third party positions?
@PZ
Preach it, Brother! That’s Gospel there! Ooooooo, Lawd!
Umm–Speaking from Minneapolis, Hodges hasn’t won yet. She has 37% of the vote in the first round of ranked-choice votes, but they won’t be doing the second run until this afternoon. It’s all about the second choices… However, even the next-closest candidate is saying she’s likely to win.
NJ did raise it’s minimum wage.
Christie won because NJ Dems establishment and others love Christie. He can turn on the charm for individuals and people are stupid and think ‘nice to me==ok guy’. He is nice and charming to anyone he needs approval from and a fucking asshole to anyone beneath him.
“I understand that if you ignore the christian taliban aspect, Cuccinelli was actually the better candidate”
That’s a dubious assumption. Cuccinelli is an anti-global warming zealot who used the office of Attorney General to launch legally groundless attacks on the University of Virginia and Michael Mann. He opposes the ACA, and sued to prevent it from being implemented. He has sided with coal companies over the citizens of the Virginia numerous times – including preventing people who own property under which coal deposits and methane gas deposits lie from being able to decide whether they want them to be mined in favor of forcing them to accept coal company demands. He has been implicated in the political influence scandal that is consuming McConnell’s governorship. And so on.
Even if Cuccinelli didn’t want to reintroduce an anti-sodomy law that has already been declared unconstitutional and wasn’t in favor of mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds, he would still be a horrible candidate for governor.
Did he take votes away from the Republicans? They got pretty much the same percentage in the Governor and Lt Governor races. It is possible (and perhaps not even unlikely) that most of the 6% of the people who voted Sarvis in the Governor voted Jackson in Lt Governor, but this didn’t increase his share, because 12% of the population who had voted for Cuccinelli thought that Jackson was too extreme by their standards (or wanted a mixed Governor/Lt Governor” and voted a mixed ticket.
If you ignore his deli sources, Dr. Lecter really is a great cook
@Ingdigo Jump
I know very little about NJ politics and pretty much nothing about the “NJ Dems establishment”, but I do have a couple acquantances back there – one in NY who grew up in NJ and still pays attention, the other in NJ – and I think that they would say “white men among NJ Dems” rather than your phrase.
Maybe fundraising or some such (charming those with power from whom he needs approval to get something available only from a small group of “elites”) was the crucial thing (again, no expertise here), but others seem to think a bro-culture appeal is working with enough average-white-guy Dems to get a good electoral majority.
Sarvis was considered to take votes away from Cuccinelli. The polls I saw generally said that Sarvis would get more (like 8%) and Cuccinelli would get less. It looks to me like many conservatives switched.
I must admit that one of my guilty pleasures is to read the front page of Conservapedia from time to time when I am in the mood for some really hilarious satire. (I always think that these guys must be joking, although I realise that they are dead serious in their nonsense.)
I found it quite funny when I just saw that Christie´s win was mentioned playing the “he is pro-life” card, so “yeah Christie!”, while until now he was normally seem by the people there as basically a liberal traitor RINO who sold out to Obama and should be replaced by a real conservative.
As a European, I am not very familiar with US local politicians but do you think that Christie would be a candidate in 2016 that could appeal to both the radical nutters of the far-right (aka tea party) and the more moderate far-right (the other republicans)?
@Crip Dyke
Except Christie did AMAZINGLY well with Latino and Black votes this time around.
There was a very very weak-sauce campaign against him, the Dems had declared it a loss to begin with.
One cynical suggestion that I’ve heard from some journalists looking in is that a lot of the people who seemed to make the call about how to run against Christie were people who cut deals with him when he was a prosecutor. They owe him for eating their sins
Yes.
other GOP have described him as someone without values. He is a pragmatist that does what it takes to win. He has been courting the Tea Party in measured ways and campaigning heavily to shore up GOP establishment support. He is an old school crook who is exactly what the tea party wants, a bully who will yell and scream at the plebians who dare oppose him.
I teach math courses in which ranked-choice voting (also known as the instant-runoff method, or plurality with elimination) is compared to various other methods of voting. It suffers from more paradoxes than plain plurality but comes off well in terms of attacking the two-party duopoly that tends to arise under plurality (Duverger’s law — either you’re voting for the likely winner or you want to persuade all voters to back a single strong challenger).
The method of pairwise comparisons has the same ballot as ranked-choice but uses a different decision procedure: take all voters’ ballots; take each pair of candidates and see who won that face-off; assign the election to the winner of the most face-offs. It can be rigorously shown to suffer from fewer paradoxes, and I think it’s cleaner, but “we should run our elections like a round-robin tournament” can be a difficult sell, and when there are a lot of candidates it’s possible to tie with greater frequency, requiring a tiebreaker like totaled margins of victory.
Christie did one – count it – one seriously cool thing in his current term, which was to clearly call out the Republicans in Congress for holding up disaster funding after hurricane Sandy. That won him a lot of credit from NJ residents. It also means any chances he has at the 2016 Presidential nomination are dependent on how far the Tea Party has fallen out of favor by then.
@ingdigo jump:
Thanks for the correction/info.
Do you know anything about the dualistic-gender breakdown?
@Myeck
He also made sure the money went to sweet heart deals out of state (economic stimulus HA what’s that!?) and neglected the areas that weren’t touristy
@Crip Dyke
not really but my impression is that NJ politics is a real boys club and the Dems are actually very chummy with the GOP at least on the higher levels.
What’s truly unsettling is that the Republicans’ nutjob candidate for lieutenant governor got almost 45% of the vote. (VA, unlike most states, votes separately for governor and lieutenant governor.) E.W. Jackson made Cuccinelli look marginally rational.
My parents live in NJ, and despite being Democrats they both really like Chris Christie. They’re not alone among their friends and neighbors. A huge part of that is Hurricane Sandy, which really can’t be overemphasized. Hurricane Sandy affected the majority of New Jerseyans, at one point about 2/3 of them didn’t have power. My parents live 20 miles from the shore and didn’t have any flood damage, but they were still without power for 8 days, ,not to mention the power went out once the snowstorm hit immediately after the power came back on. Congress’ inaction was hugely offensive to them and the fact that Christie stood up to Congress and was willing to work with Obama spoke volumes.
There are aspects to Christie they don’t like, such as his dealings with teacher’s unions and vetoing the gay marriage bill, but overall his response to Hurricane Sandy outweighs all of that. All politics are local, and if the 24 hour news media are trying to paint this as some sort of presidential preview or national backlash against the tea party, it isn’t. It’s about Hurricane Sandy.
Christie won entirely on the back of his handling of Hurricane Sandy. He’s been doing a lot of work for storm relief and reconstruction, and plenty of the people directly affected by the storm have gotten a little face time with him. In the post storm period he was seen as a governor fighting to help the state recover, and his tirade after the GOP fucked with the storm relief funding gave him the ‘ol “anti-partisan politics” sheen that so many voters value. Nobody was going to win a race against him this year, he had too much goodwill leftover.
re eamick @ #42:
That was the original method of selecting President and Vice-President. Elected seperately and could be of opposite parties. The Electoral College was invented to deal with the “complexities” of such an election. In some cases it might be better to have an opposing voice in the admin rather than an echo-chamber. But then, they’d never get anything done, always arguing all the time, do we really want the president of the senate to be opposed to the POTUS? The two-party congress has already shown us how NOTHING gets done that way. I think the problem is the “party” concept itself. Whatever happened to just “picking the best
manperson for the job”? Where that person can express all kinds of different opinions regardless of whether they fit the party-line.Whoo Hooo!
I grew up in Illinois, and I’m proud of my home state today!
I’m inclined to agree with #44. Sandy was good for President Obama because it showed that he put the nation above running for re-election and Christie got points for putting politics aside for a while. He won by such a wide margin, there wasn’t anything we can really do. At least he’s not as bad as some other governors. (Yeah the “it could have been worse” isn’t much help for me either.)
@Alverant
Your assessment of Christie is misguided.
Christie is exactly as bad as he can get away with. If he wasn’t in a blue state he would be the tea party candidate.
It’s nice that Christie gets so much good will for doing his fucking job. Our standards sure are high
Christie is going to be frontrunner for the GOP nomination? I’d been assuming that would be Cruz. Or do you think the Teabaggers will nominate their own candidate separately? That would be a nice way to split the wingnut vote. I approve.
So Illinois has sent their equal-marriage bill to the governor, who has promised to sign it.
Hawai’i’s legislature is hard on Illinois’ heels. And the governor of Hawai’i has promised to sign the bill when it lands on his desk.
Hooray for the people of Illinois and Hawai’i!
Hmph. Have to look into the state of the Hawaiian constitution. I understood there to be constitutional barriers, but perhaps they have since been removed.
Go Rainbows!
Read this article on the Illinois bill.
I must hrumph at the categorization of Peoria as “downstate.”
I mean, yes, it is south of I-80, the standard definition of “downstate.”
But, dammit, Peoria is 160 miles south of Chicago and over 300 miles north of Cairo, the southernmost point of the state.
But then, most people in Chicago would be hard-pressed to name anything south of Peoria that isn’t Springfield. That is, if they can identify Springfield.
Esteleth:
Yay for my state!
Even though coming from the Chicago Suburbs, lots of quizbowl happens outside of there–many of the best teams are based in Rockford (not downstate of course), Bloomington, Peoria, Carbondale, and Macomb. And a few other places.
But population centroid-wise, it’d be around I-80.
De Blasio ’16?
Even more unsettling is the fact that gop candidate for Attorney General looks like the winner (pending a recount). Mark Obenshain is every bit as extreme as Cuccinelli, but he manages to sound more reasonable.
BBC categorises Chris Christie as a “moderate Republican”. I gather most American Pharyngulites disagree, but the wikipedia page on him certainly suggests that compared to many of last year’s Presidential primary candidates, he would count as such. Ingdigo Jump, can you give me an alternative source or two for your view of him?
Don’t forget Boston! Sure it’s a liberal city, but they did elect Marty Walsh, a strong liberal and labor supporter. It wasn’t a shoe-in.
Of course getting funding for your local area hit hard by natural disaster is going to be a political win over siding with recalcitrant members of your political party in Congress, at least in places that aren’t complete Republican territory. That was an easy choice for Christie, and yes he gets way too many brownie points for it.
Ingdigo 28
I’d say that the bigger problem is that he pushes Republican policies, for which there is no excuse whatsoever. Supporting even a single plank of the Republican platform is reason enough to want someone driven out of politics (and ideally, the country and the world as well).
futurechemist 43
What, because they think a Democrat wouldn’t have got them distaster relief? The fact that he’s not a total, unmitigated evil scumbag to the point that he can actually do his goddamned job on one single fucking occasion? That’s why people voted for that vile scum-sucking bigoted filth-monger? What a bunch of assholes! Fucking hell.
Nick Gotts 57
There is no such thing as a ‘moderate Republican,’ only ones who are being watched more closely and don’t think they can get away with as much. The Republican platform is composed entirely of theocracy, bigotry, and fascism, none of which are prone to moderating themselves.
@60
So my parents are assholes?…
Their thinking was that Christie was a known quantity. When a crisis arose he showed strong leadership and was willing to fight against his party. Yes, a Democrat probably would have done the same thing, but here’s a guy who actually did do it. Christie isn’t perfect, but he impressed my parents, and a lot of other New Jerseyans on a personal level.
I lived in Buffalo a couple of years ago. My State Senator was Mark Grisanti, a Republican. He was also 1 of the key votes to legalize gay marriage in the NY State Senate and he made a passionate speech about why he changed his mind because it was the right thing to do. I voted for him to be re-elected which he was. In Buffalo. A city where every member of the city council has been Democrat for decades. He made a vote that could potentially hurt him, but allowed me to get married. I returned the favor by voting for him even though I didn’t agree with some of his policies. Am I an asshole for voting for Grisanti?
Thunk, I grew up downstate. Way downstate. And I did quizbowl in high school.
*ponders all of this deeply*
futurechemist #61
Yes to both questions, without hesitation.
To analyze the ethics of a vote for Grisanti, I’d need to know more. Is his vote for marriage equality his only redeeming quality? Or is he otherwise a good guy?
Really, that won’t do: I was asking for substantive information about Christie, not a simplistic soundbite. Are you claiming that John Huntsman is no different in his views from Ted Cruz? Failure to recognise differences among your political enemies is a serious strategic error, because it makes you less able to predict their actions.
Esteleth: Hell, the I-80 definition isn’t even really held to by Chicagoans. We tend to divvy the state into four zones:
1: Chicago: This includes a great number of the immediately-adjacent suburbs, especially on the South and West sides of the city.
2: The ‘Burbs: Everything in Cook that isn’t Chicago, plus segments of the collar counties (basically, any area in the collar counties that isn’t farmland). The ‘burbs go further north and west than south, generally.
3: Downstate: This is pretty much everything else. Yes, by most Chicagoan’s reckoning, Rockford and Galena are also “Downstate”.
4: The Forgotten, aka East St. Louis. We know it’s there, but really, NOBODY talks about it. Even the hardcore Social Justice types focus on the hard-bit Chicago neighborhoods rather than East St. Louis.
These are mostly based on (our perception of) politics. Chicago’s Machine Democrats; the ‘Burbs are mostly Establishment Republican (some poorer ‘Burbs include the last of the pro-union Republicans, too); Downstate is a blend of rural Democrat and theocrat Republicans. East St. Louis is too poor and too small to be politically significant.
Nick Gotts 65
I am saying that there is no meaningful difference in their policies. I don’t give a quarter of a flaming fuck what their ‘views’ are, or what they ‘believe in their deepest heart of hearts’; I care what damage they’re going to do, and the policies they push are functionally indistinguishable in terms of that damage. Both push austerity and trickle-down economics, neither will do anything about carbon emissions (yes, I know Huntsman has said that he totally believes in AGW; I still don’t give a fuck, because he still opposes any reasonable course of action on it.), both push hatred of immigrants and nonwhites. What’s to choose from? Neither bigotry, fascism, nor ignorance are any better from mealy-mouthed fence-sitters than they are from hard-core fanatics, and those who line up behind them are not on any side that I am.
“I understand that if you ignore the christian taliban aspect, Cuccinelli was actually the better candidate…”
Yes sure he’s the better candidate, if you ignore the $18,000 he took in bribes and illegal gifts, or his misuse of power in that he had his minions give legal opinions to oil companies in order to avoid paying royalties to property owners. And these same companies donated hundreds of thousands to his campaign.
Yep a better candidate.
I didn’t realise you used preferential voting anywhere in the USA. Good on you! I reckon it’s essential for a proper democracy.
But that Star Tribune article talks about how complicated it is to allow numbering 1-3 across a field of 35 candidates. Ha! In the recent Australian federal election NSW voters had a choice of 110 candidates for the Senate and if you wanted to have your preferences counted (which I did) you had to number all the boxes, no gaps, no mistakes. The ballot paper was a tablecloth and – I kid you not – they provided magnifying glasses.
Plus, working out preferences when you’re voting for a single position is pretty easy. In the NSW Senate election the 110 candidates were competing for 6 positions, so even when your no. 1 candidate makes the quota, your vote continues to flow on according to your preferences (although at a reduced value, based on the number of votes over the quota your candidate achieved). It’s a complicated system.
Years ago I did a stint as returning officer for the student union at university. Ah the good old days.
Ha, again! The results of our senate elections take weeks to finalise. Months, if there is a dispute.
I don’t think I’m doing a good job of selling the preferential system…
@futurechemist
Not asshole, stupid to both questions.
ibeya #70
I’d call it both, me.
@Nick
Well let’s see…
He has campaigned and raised money for some of the worst RW assholes
He has tried to kill gay marriage
He has targeted workers and state workers at every fucking step
He has screamed at teachers and compared them to drug pushers
He has funneled public money to charter school scams
He killed public works projects that would have aided state local transport
He’s not fucking moderate.
Christie plays the media well but again if there’s nothing he has to gain from you and if you stand in his way say good bye to that illusion of “moderate”
The Virginia-governor vote:
–
Democratic Terry McAuliffe 1,064,964 47.9%
Republican Ken Cuccinelli 1,010,119 45.5%
Libertarian Robert Sarvis 146,496 6.6%
–
Libertarians tend to be Republicans who don’t like to be called Republicans, so I estimated the vote that the Republican Party would get if the Libertarian Party candidate was not in the race. If 70% of the LP’s voters voted Republican with the other 30% voted Democratic, that would have helped the Republican win.
This “spoiler problem” is a big problem with first past the post or plurality voting. That’s what causes convergence onto two parties.
inflection #37 mentioned the method of pairwise comparisons. That’s the Condorcet algorithm for preference voting, and it makes a table of how many times that some voter prefers one candidate over another. That’s why it’s sometimes called virtual round robin. If some candidate wins all these virtual pairwise contests, that candidate is the Condorcet winner. Otherwise, one has to use some complicated disambiguation algorithm like Schulze beatpath or Tideman ranked pairs.
But despite their complexity, IRV, Schulze, and Tideman are both spoiler-proof. They are also team-proof, resisting the opposite pathology, where similar candidates help each other rather than hurt each other.
Ingdigo Jump #72&73
This is what I meant when I said there’s no such thing as a moderate Republican. Scratch any ‘moderate’ Republican politician, and you’ll see the same thing under the public face. (or if you actually look at their voting records instead of picking who to vote for based on who can be smarmier on the Teevee; that’s to your address, futurechemist)
Ingdigo Jump@72,
Yes, that’s all true, and make a good case against describing him as a moderate, but on the other hand (all from the wikipedia article):
Which indicates that he does not behave in the same way as a Tea Party zealot would. It may well be that he’s entirely without principle and will act simply for political advantage, but that’s still an important difference from the way Cruz or Santorum would act: he would be a more dangerous Presidential candidate in 2016, for example, but probably a less dangerous President if elected. Both those things are importnat to know. Dallilama’s claim that “they are all the same” is wilfull ignorance.
@Jadehawk #17
Thanks for the info; and sorry for the late reply!
So the map is purely to show which areas have been counted and which way they voted, and it is left to the observer to know how big those areas are and how much that will count for overall?
Which is obviously false – see #76 for a start, and futurechemist on Grisanti@61. Or look at the voting records of Republican senators and congresspersons. They don’t all vote the same way, contrary to what you imply @75.
So you deliberately refuse to inform yourself about what your enemies are likely to do. That’s simply foolish.
Well someone is certainly behaving like an asshole here, but I don’t think it’s futurechemist.
well, you have the state-totals listed at the top, so you don’t have to figure it out yourself.
In many ways, reporting it this way is just tradition. For some elections these segmented maps matter (Congressional races for example, or elections to state legislatures), so I think people are just used to them even in elections where they don’t. Plus, like I said, this is how the results are reported in: the precincts send the info, so the precincts are what is displayed.
On another note, these maps also feature strongly in the stories of voter suppression; the bluer the county/precinct, the more likely it usually is that there have been attempts at keeping people from voting.
Nick Gotts
Look at Ingdigo’s #72 and other posts. Look at what actually fucking happenedwhen he nominated Harris, who was wildly unqualified, and appears to have been nominated largely so that Christie could score points off the Democrats who voted him down on that basis. Christie fought same-sex marriage tooth and nail, which is a better indicator of his policies than an appointment that never went anywhere. A-2647 and A-3371 both appear to have had enough votes to pass will-he, nil-he, so the fact that he didn’t try to veto them is once again simply a move to avoid losing political capital, not a matter of Christie’s policy. Grisanti voted to slash the public pension fund, voted to let school properties be used as places of religious worship, cut taxes to the detriment of infrastructure… Look at his voting record sometime, and then tell me why I should give half a fuck that he claims he’s seen the light about a single aspect of a single issue. Color me way the fuck unimpressed.
Not every time, but often enough that it’s always the way to bet. And for many of the votes in question once is far, far too many.
Wrong. I judge their likely future actions by examining their past actions. Their stated ‘veiws’ are meaningless gibberish and doubletalk, and cannot be used to adequately predict their actions. Their voting records and policy decisions usually can, though.
Maybe you see it that way because it’s not the country you live in that he’s voting to destroy.
Dalillama@80,
No you don’t, to judge by what you’ve said here. Your own points about Christie show that he’s an opportunist rather than a pure ideologue, and the difference is important.
Crap. First, I agree with you that both futurechemist and their parents were wrong to vote the way they did, but calling people assholes simply because they have done something you disapprove of, without regard to their motives, is behaving like an asshole. Second, you’re just showing another form of American exceptionalism: I’m currently living under a govenrment that is doing its best to dismantle the welfare state and universal health care system, attacking asylum seekers, unemployed people and people with disabilities, trying to suppress Snowden’s revelations about UK surveillance, backpedalling on climate change… So if I were like you, I’d be calling everyone who voted for them an arsehole, and refusing to recognise differences within the government parties that it is strategically important to understand. But I’m not.
Nick
His being an amoral opportunist doesn’t make him any more fit for government than a frothing ideologue, and the fact that he saw his opportunity there says that he sympathizes with their cause at least a little. At this point, there are exactly zero valid reasons to vote for anyone with an R after their name, and I have no tolerance left for the bullshit attempts at justification spewed by people trying to justify their decision to accelerate this country’s slide towards total catastrophe by voting for these assholes. You can treat your own country’s fascist sympathizers however you like, but I’m going to call out the ones in mine.
That’s not obviously true, but in any case, the difference is important if you want to oppose him effectively.
And deluding yourself that everyone who votes Republican is a “fascist sympathiser” will also impede effective political action.
Nick Gotts
The Republican party is openly fascistic at this point in time. Voting for the Republican party is therefore contributing to the rise of fascism. People who voluntarily contribute to the rise of fascism are definitionally fascist sympathisers, and I have zero patience for them.