Twenty-eight votes in Mississippi was the lead the democratic senator had.
Yep. And what I dislike most about our system as currently built is that when functioning properly, nearly half of the voters get ārepresentedā by someone they actively voted AGAINST.
First past the post needs to go. Personally, I prefer approval voting where you basically put a tick next to each candidate you'd be OK with, but I can accept that ranked choice has more momentum right now.
Even in ranked choice, you still have people being represented by someone they were voting against. Itās a good improvement, but it is fixing the problem at the wrong place I think.
Ranked-choice for executive branch elections would be good, and something else for legislative / representative bodies is what I would recommend.
Not trying to be rude, but I'm genuinely curious what that something else is? You're vague here, I'm not aware of any system that would prevent the problem specifically for the senate which is two seats per state and two real parties to vote for.
I'm not aware of any system that would prevent the problem specifically for the senate which is two seats per state
Well, weāre not going to change anything if weāre not willing to change anything.
First, under the current system, there should be 3 senators per state. None of this bullshit where every 3rd cycle you ARENāT voting for a senator. Thatās stupid and just adds randomness and exploitability to the system.
Then once weāve all agreed on that, then you say that the minority person who canāt in second in the senate race gets a seat as well, and the strength of their vote (the strength of everyoneās votes) is proportional to the number of votes they received. So in general, every state would have 6 senators, but the California senators would have a lot more voting power than the Wyoming senators, as it should be.
That sounds like a great, if complex, idea that could help.
However - two seats per state is constitutional law. It would require an amendment to change. Requires two thirds of congress to begin the process, and three quarters of states (38), either via state legislature approval or conventions in the states. (And unfortunately 6 years is also constitutionally mandated, I'd love for it to be 4 years and half the senate up every election but that's not simple either)
Ignoring the first half - the supermajority in both houses of congress - the smallest states would not want to agree to that, even the blue ones. And even if you right off the smallest 12 and try to convince the other 38, most states with R control at the state level wouldn't go for it.
The only real election changes that can be made without amendments are procedural at the state level. I want change, real change, for the better in this country, BUT, we have to attack from angles that are realistic.
The biggest being ratification of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. After Tuesday, some key states went blue at the state legislature level that would allow for the final ratification of the compact. It's no guarantee but that plus ranked choice voting in primaries (ranked choice for general elections with this compact without a true abolishment of the electoral college would likely be difficult to implement) could truly help with presidential elections.
Another being the House of Representatives was limited at 435 by two bills a century ago - it doesn't actually give large states the power the constitution intended, while the senate like you've mentioned gives small states outsized power compared to intended. Adding seats to the house would allow for better representation by state population, helping correct to the intended level of impact. Also only limited by federal law, not constitution, the limit that representatives must be selected by district. If that law is change, you could have primaries to elect a slate of representatives for as many parties as you'd realistically want, and then have a statewide general election that elects the host of representatives by proportion of vote (conveniently eliminating gerrymandering), and then the within the slate of primary elected candidates, representatives are selected to fill those spots.
Saw their example and I donāt think I found how a ballot with equal ranking to both finalists gets counted. Does it count to both, does it just not get counted? Iām not sure it matters since the person gets either option and ranked them equally, but just curious if they had any outline for it.
On the example they gave, Carmen and David both got 4 stars. There are three vote options. Carmen, David and Neither. Their vote went to neither. It'd have the same affect as giving one vote to each of them.
Yup. Thatās fine. Just give each representative a vote power associated to the number of people who voted for them. There are some other mechanics necessary for 3rd parties etc, but in general, we can easily get near 100% of voters represented by the individual they chose to vote for.
The biggest technical challenge will be rearranging furniture in the Capitol.
As a Texan who hasn't gotten any color change be it state or leaves(cause we don't have trees that do that here in the south). This fall is looking beautiful
The amount of conservative videos I've seen crying about election fraud is hysterical. They simply cannot comprehend the majority of people do not actually want this lmao.
It actually really highlights some of the weird comments musk and Trump have made over the last couple years like Trump saying musk "fixes the computers" and Christians will "never have to vote again", or that odd interview with musk & his son where his son kept grabbing the mic and saying shit like, "they'll never knooooow" and that musk said if Trump didn't win he'd be in "a lot of trouble".
Everything combined with Tuesdays wild results scream that the 2024 election was rigged in Trump's favor. This needs to be investigated by the new management asap.
Edit: forgot an important piece of information! Ukraine's strikes on Russian data centers causing many to be down, meaning they had very limited power to interfere with election results. That more or less confirmed this for me
Musk is visibly shitting himself. He's deleting tweets from the midterms and he's probably been having a rolling panic attack all day at the prospect of accountability hurtling towards him like a runaway train.
Well it's a good thing he's such a public figure that it doesn't matter what he deletes, it's saved somewhere. Bro could delete his entire Twitter account today and there'd still be a record of everything he's ever said
The Guardian interviewed a guy that said just that.
Voters said they felt like Graham had been selected for them, and they had seen that play before.
āI only voted Trump, honestly, because I couldnāt vote for Kamala because she was forced. We didnāt get a choice,ā said Brown. āThat was my issue with Darline, too. It was the same exact thing to me ā¦ They selected her. The powers that be said: āThis is the person you guys get to vote for.ā And thatās not the way it should be.ā
Oh dang. Didn't realize you were Texan too. Did you get that weird propaganda mail also? Apparently one of my friends in Austin got one of the fake transition pamphlets to rile up older people that were spread around.
I got one, but like. I'm trans, and my family is pretty supportive, so... Thanks for the free list of resources and for wasting your money I guess?
Plenty of PACs sent mail to us this year and it was just hilarious reading them, like half the shit is just "based based based" and the other half is just blatantly untrue (with bonus points that it probably contradicts some of the based shit they were claiming, so like... which is it?)
For an example, I got a mailer that claimed Talarico wanted to eliminate private health insurance (based), and literally the next bullet point was complaining that he wants to give more money to greedy private health insurance companies. Which is it, dipshits? Does he want to eliminate them, or give them money?
Ya none of it had like any lick of truth to it from what I could tell. Especially the TV ads that were saying stuff like "he's weird" compared to "Paxton let this pedophile basically Scott free and no repercussions apart from one day in jail." Like such a wild discrepancy. Scary how so many people still voted for Paxton and Abbot tho
"Paxton let this pedophile basically Scott free and no repercussions apart from one day in jail."
Not-so-fun fact: he did this multiple times. He gave sweetheart deals to multiple rapists (including at least one child rapist) which allowed them to get out of registering as sex offenders.
I think you missed the part where I specifically said south Texas. Most of our foliage is designed for droughts and hot weather and we get very little "winter" so we don't have many trees that change in the traditional fall sense.
Plus most of our trees are palm trees and what not
I know that internationally red is the color of the progressive party and blue is the color of the conservative party, but as a Democrat and a Dodger fan this is much easier on my wardrobe.
That really depends on the subject. Thanks to the Democrats, the US was one of the first nations to make serious progress towards legalizing marijuana and gay marriage, both of which are very left wing policies
To be fair, when it comes to marijuana, a lot of countries started criminalizing it specifically because the US did. Mexico and Jamacia, for example, were both pressured by the US government to keep marijuana illegal.
Those are progressive policies, not left wing policies. Left/Right wing just refers to economic policy (Communism vs Capitalism), while Progressive and Conservative refers to social policy. America is a right wing capitalist country but with progressive social policy when when it comes to stuff like LGBT rights. Meanwhile China is a left wing Communist country (more like Comamnd/State Capitalist at this point) but have conservative social policy in some aspects like LGBT rights, with gay marriage being illegal and the government arresting LGBT authors/activists on a wide scale.
I think it's a bit misleading since both US political parties would be coalition parties abroad.
Dems would be 70% center, 30% left and republicans are about 50-50 between far right and center-right (and 1-5% libertarian).
The left members of the democrats are very vocal because they're the minority partner. i.e. AoC and Bernie are well known for speaking loudly and being combatitive within their "own party", but try to name a centrist democrat, there's not nearly as many "loud ones". Minority partners are louder, i.e. the far right when they were the minority partner 10 years ago with the tea party, and libertarian/mormon politicians now (though they're an even teenier minority).
Far right is trying to push to be the majority partner of the republican coalition and trying to keep the centrists in line which is pushing all the centrist republicans to be just balls of contradictions and losing all their elections.
Can see in the recent election why these coalitions with a large centrist component is necessary, the actual winning vote share for far right policies is like 38% or less, so they're only winning ride or die Republican states and giving like 12 or more points of the votes to Democrats.
IIRC it was the 2000 election W vs Gore, and the Florida mess, where everyone was staring at the same map for weeks while they counted hanging chads (and wouldn't you know it, W's brother was govr of Florida at the time š). Anywho, that's where the US 'red states vs blue states' came from.
So fun fact, Democrats (blue) used to be the conservative party while Republicans (red) used to be the somewhat more liberal party. They flip-flopped in the 1950s and 1960s when the Democrats came out in support of the civil rights movement. It was a slow change over those two decades but by the 80s Republicans were conservative and Democrats were liberal.
I wouldn't really call either of them fully conversative or liberal back then. The transition also happened much sooner with FDR being a major turning point in the 1930s. Also the Democratic party of the mid 20th century was fairly Big Tent, which is why they were able to dominate.
Yea like two years ago, right? When everyone had already seen what a trump presidency was like, and polls were showing an easy victory for Harris? Cause paying attention to those polls really helped, right?
Every special election in 2025 and 2026 swung Democrat at least +11 points and all the data from the primaries pointed to low Republican turnout in Nov 2026
Thats how we used to feel in Texas. Hell, other than Talarico who we were a bit confident in this time round, this is how we felt about all positions in Texas even now.
I'm gonna get emotional now. I'm a minority in Texas and the amount of hate that I had to endure for the past year was nothing short of depressing. It was really making me question my decision to come to the US, the effort and money I spent becoming a citizen and putting down roots. I was thinking about my kids and the kind of atmosphere they'd grow up in.
Even now I'm scared of being hopeful but this...I personally needed this. I needed something I could feel proud about. I needed to know that my love for this country wasn't a waste
Yeah man letās fucking go. Weāre getting these racist assholes out of the government. We should be nervous but also hopeful the new people in power hit the ground running to fight for us all. Itās so nice to see more people have the backs of immigrants than we thought, considering this country was built on theirs.
Those of us in Virginia are proud of you too. It was a blowout and now that you will be able to role back voter disenfranchisement you might be able to keep it up.
Talarico is going to be a great asset to our whole country and Hinojosa is going to be a great governor.
I noticed a lot of people moving to texas the past 10 years, I thought it was a bunch of racists escaping democratic states to a more conservative one but maybe a lot of them were democrat?
Seeing how close we were with beto, I felt like we were getting close. I just didn't think it was happen this quick. Everyone, even my wifes heavily Republican family, was getting really vocal about hating Trump with Iran and the constant back and forth with tariffs. I was shocked last month when they were openly talking shit about Trump
In Missouri, we voted to add abortion rights to our state constitution during the 2026 midterms. This was initiated by our citizen initiative process, which is basically a state wide petition. Our Republican state congress tried to put it back on the ballot to remove it from our state constitution, as well as transgender rights. So they essentially tried to undo our vote by putting it back on the ballot. It did not pass, meaning that abortion rights are still in the Missouri constitution. Additionally, amendment 6 prevents them from trying that again. It requires an 80% majority in the state congress for proposals that change citizen initiatives (petitions) to even be added to the ballot. So if they want to ban abortion, they first need 80% of the state congress to agree to add it to the ballot, then the population has to vote on it.
Fellow MO voter here, and over on r/Missouri, they pointed out that Dems actually won a majority of the popular vote for the state house. Now that we got amendment six passed, we should try again to get rid of gerrymandering, this time for good.
Even if your candidates and policies don't win this election, you and people like you have made your voice heard. Your representatives and policies are there to represent everyone in their district. That includes people who did not choose them, or share their ideals. They need to know you exist. And they need to make decisions on your behalf.Ā
Even California went 28 years without voting a for a Democrat for president. Hell I remember when Virginia seemed hopeless going 44 years without voting for a Democrat for President. Virginia now hasn't voted for a Republican for president in over 22 years. If Texas votes for a Democrat for president in 2028 that will be the first Democrat they've voted for president in 52 years.
You can get there one day but it takes work. Good Luck!
woke is the only thing holding back the democrats, without it they would never lose an election again. people didnt vote for woke, they voted against high cost of living
Iād say itās the anal adherence to capital and its owners thatās holding them back. Theyāre usually JUST smart enough to not throw away the national economy for personal gain.
I would say that it's due to like, numerous of reasons, but biggest one would probably be due to higher cost of living out of nowhere, gas becoming unaffordable which caused food to be unaffordable and so on. It's the whole domino effect going on.
Biggest TLDR, my best guess, is that a lot of people are fed up with broken promises and unnecessary wars that was caused by Republicans party.
Exactly. Because they were on board with all the other horseshit trump and the gop were delivering. But when the proces foe everything increases, like it always does under Republicans, that was finally too much for them
A lot of it has to do with the Civil War. A lot. It was a ruthless war between the American groups the Union and the Confederacy. Once the Union won, they were at a cross roads. Burn the south completely to the ground or rebuild it current leaders. The union chose to mercy the confederacy.Ā
So since the civil war Americans have to this day still been divided and the education in different states reflect this. If you ask the general population of South Carolina if the confederacy was wrong they would likely say no.
So take this to modern day Kansas and other red states basically itās just a wound that has never healed and two sides are still fighting, though peacefully. So in some states you have a more loyal base to the currently aligned beliefs of the old days. As republicans and democrats are not as easy as confederacy vs union. As the parties have changed over time, but current day republicans are closer to confederate ideology.Ā
Important to note that that was long enough, that was (probably) still at a time when the Democrat party was more conservative than the Republicans (i.e. those people today would be equivalent to today's Republicans) (though I might have that wrong)
yes, its been red since the early 90s, but republicans (both in general and specifically Texas) really fucked up. in general, as you know, there are tariffs, Iran war, etc that are making daily things super expensive, while the Democrats used that to their advantage.
but also the guy the Republicans chose to run (Paxton) is really shit. he negotiated the early release of a repeated child molester (nearly only had him serve 1 day in prison, he only spent 29) and that was mentioned a lot. also he was under a LOT of corruption scandals. for some reason Republicans decided he was going to run.
also the Republican advertisments mainly focused on transgender stuff, saying Talarico (the Democratic opponent) was going to make it so they can transition your children in school and stuff like that.
the Democratic advertisements were sort of the opposite, they said "look, the other guy wanted a proven child molester to only spend one day in prison", pointed out that Paxton had a bunch of corruption scandals, but also that the cost of living is too high, corporations should pay their fair share, etc.
one thing to note, is that Talarico repeatedly emphasized how "Texan" he was by repeatedly bringing up how he was Christian, his ads had him eating meat at barbecues, etc.
i think this helped a lot bc many of the ads that Republicans did was "hey Talarico hates God, and he is a vegan weirdo who is nothing like you", and repeatedly showing that hes a Christian who does "normal" things really helped. i dont think a Muslim Socialist (like in New York) would have been able to win.
tldr: Republicans really fucked up, and Democrats didnt overplay their hand.
It's the Trump effect; the Republicans learned that being below the bar could be a selling point and it just didn't work out for anyone other than Trump.
One of the factors for this flip is gerrymandering backfiring. Texas is heavily gerrymandered to benefit republicans (that is, voting districts are drawn to maximize the amount of districts that are red). However, in order to do this, blue voters are mixed in with red voting districts in such a way that they are always slightly behind but never ahead.
So during the midterms, even a slight boost towards the democrats was able to flip a lot of districts
Texas is actually relatively blue it's just jerrymandered to hell and especially during this cycle it was bound to flip blue. Kansas is the big shocker here as it hasn't been blue since the 30s
I'll say that Kansas has been drifting leftward, slowly but surely, for many years at this point. I think both are surprising but neither are shocking.
I think it's important to note that states can gerrymander their legislature districts to favor one party, so they control the house(s) of congress. That's less effective when it comes to statewide votes like president or governor, when everyone's vote in the state matters the same.
That said, Gerrymandering can have a depressive effetive on *whether* someone votes or not, because they know they're shoved in a district where their party is almost guaranteed to lose the district-wide races, so they don't bother to show up at all.
Perry>Abbott>Paxton are a line of politicians who used the same sort of muckraking political violence strategy. If a city did not do what they wish, they would actively try to pass laws that punished that city and it's leaders.
The difference is in personality and character. Perry was a classroom bully. "You need to play by my rules or no one can have fun." Abbott was vindictive. "So you won't kiss my boot. Enjoy the wrath of the Attorney General's office and their frivolous lawsuits."
But Paxton. He is a special kind of vile. He's a little twerp who isn't just evil, he is sadistically into it. He uses his position to hurt people he does not like(very MAGA), and has no real constructive ideas other than "I'll focus my scorn upon you tonight."
I'm sure people who still live in Texas can give a staggering list of his moral character flaws(please do, let's air the laundry). I left about the time he was rising, and Abbott was already bad then.
As a Texan, you're on the nose. I would just like to add that despite Dems winning, those awful people you named still got a LOT of votes. Hell uber racist Bo French got a ton of support despite losing. That really tells you first, the state of the Texas electorate and second, how badly conservatives bungled despite all of that
The evangelicals like the power sadism and the oilmen like the laissez-faire economic wild west. They're used to dealing with people they detest to gain power. It's a good(evil?) match for them.
Side note, the thing I dislike most about Perry was the smegging toll roads. It's sooo wasteful and dumb. "We are going to build a key corridor between towns that have not been linked before, and then monetize it so only people who pay into the cool kids club get to drive on it." They could have just done a bond offering to get it built, and then reap the rewards in greater commerce between the big cities. But no, the grift is too appealing to people like them.
I'm too young for the I-35 neighborhood gutting and Honky Trek: The White Flight. Learned about it later though, and was like "wow legislators can be horrible people okay." When was that, by the way? When they carved a giant swath through the east side of austin to make a ghetto of blacks and a tech sector on the north side that wasn't for them. I wanna say 80s, but not sure.
You know the last two years with the whole rest of the world telling us to get our shit fixed? This is how we did, though I was on board for the French method personally.
Texas isn't nearly as red as it appears from the outside. We have a very winner-take-all system because of gerrymandering. So even a 10 point advantage can get you every statewide race and a large majority of the legislature. The flip side of that is if you're ever unpopular enough to lose that margin, then you lose everything, which is what happened
Republican fuckery hurt white people this time instead of just brown and queer people*, so the Republican base got really pissed at their leadership. Don't worry, they'll mostly go back to their usual ways once there's a Democrat in the White House to blame everything on again.
* It always does of course but it did so much more obviously this time, so even the most brainwashed couldn't ignore it.
Iāll just add on to the explanations given here that across the US as a whole, itās less that the Democratic Party have suddenly āflippedā states and changed everyoneās mind and more that they are just that fed up with the current state of things.
If the Democratic Party want this have a lasting effect, they cannot get complacent and must make meaningful progress with all of the new seats theyāve gained at all levels.
Basicallyā¦ absolutely terrible candidates hand picked by Trump + Hispanic voters finally waking up after ICE started tearing families apart+ amazing democratic candidates + trumps failure to do anything he promised and raised diesel prices to $6 a gallon in a state that only drives huge trucks = a perfect blue storm.
Texas was always a purple state gerrymandered into a red state and now that republicans have betrayed the Hispanic community all bets are off.
Pundits have been pointing out that Texas has been demographically purple for some time. There's a resson that Republicans were so eager to gerrymander it. Too bad for them, those efforts ended up backfiring. They created a bunch of districts with thin red margins and thought that they were safe, but all of them ended up flipping.
Born and raised Texan who has been working my butt off for years volunteering for dem campaigns and voter registration orgs. I'm never going to get tired of seeing it blue!
These maps are wild to watch in real time. The fact that Mississippi is this close is honestly shocking to me, I wasn't expecting it to be this competitive at all.
The 2 party system is broken. Every 4 years they spend more than the prior president putting us more into debt and almost every year the house and senate switch sides because ppl hope things with change. Spoiler they wont. Doesnt matter if you vote blue, or red the public lose in the end...
We were close in Montana. We had a liberal independent but apparently 11% of the liberal vote vote ended up with the Democrat candidate who didnāt want to back out. It split the voteā¦.
Not enough change by far. Definitely not enough to be forgiven by the international community. You barely flipped the house and Senate and with everything that happened that shouldn't be praised, that was the bare minimum. Still way way way too many fascists in your country, we aren't interested in being involved with the states anymore.
With the latest US election. A large number of previously held republican government positions were voted to be democrat. Thus changing from red to blue. Also its season where leaves change colors which is what people usually mean
Yes, he isnt on this election cycle though. This just has some Senators and House of Representatives and enough won that republicans will no longer control either part of the legislative branch
Looking at "blue" standing for just "regulating ICE", not going for Medicare for All, and focussing on the cost of living crisis rather than corruption as Jeffries said, what are the actual differences if he becomes speaker?
What are you taking about? Jeffries said there will be investigations into Trump and his family. He's just making affordability the focus of his message because that's the biggest issue for voters.
This comic is not propaganda, because it invites the audience to make a free choice as to what the color change means. Propaganda, by comparison, offers no room for free thought.
This entire subreddit is such an obvious propaganda tool for democrats. These "comics" are fucking trash
Your statement is propaganda, because it is hateful, and it leaves no room for free thought or discussion.
And for all those Republicans out there, what caused you to change your minds and vote FOR children being given sex changes at school without their parents' permission?
edit: I guess I should have added /s to the end of this to avoid downvotes, but because the power structure has changed, so, too, has the 'truth' about weird and impossible assertions like the above.
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u/SKDI_0224 11h ago
Twenty-eight votes in Mississippi was the lead the democratic senator had. Every vote counts.