Dr. Strangelove

I hope Ervin rebounds well from injury, but he didn't exactly light it up. He averaged 3.2 ypc in his 4 games before injury. 2 of those 4 games were against Furman and Buffalo... Hopefully the new additions help improve the talent level in the RB room.

I'll give the staff credit. I think they absolutely did the best they possibility could with landing players from the portal. I don't think they could've reasonably done better. Will that be good enough? I personally don't think so. Without improved OLine play, it doesn't matter what talent we have at receiver or QB. If our starting QB is running for his life every 3rd passing attempt, we're going to struggle.

Northwestern - W North Dakota - W Georgia Southern - W Oklahoma - L Indiana - W (it's a tossup) Rutgers - W (another tossup) Purdue - L Illinois - L Minnesota - L Michigan - L Wisconsin - L (this will mean we've gone a decade since beating them) Iowa - L I have them going 5-7. They could easily implode once again and hit a floor of 3-9. The ceiling is 7-5. Frost won't be fired even though it's painfully obvious this experiment had been running several years too long.

Absolutely. Trying to appeal to these voters is a hopeless endeavor for Democrats. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try, it just means they won't yield any political benefits for passing measures like the child tax credit family's have collected for the past year. That program benefitted those voters as much or more than the Urban base of the Democratic Party. Will it yield any political benefits? No. America's Democracy is tumbling hopelessly downhill. The further we go, the more politically toxic it will be. If anybody thinks politics are toxic now, wait another 12 years.

No, Democrats have their own infighting. Currently trying to push a Senator in an R+30 state to the left, rejecting his 1.8T offer. They should've just asked him what he wanted 5 months ago and passed it, now they get nothing. What I am disagreeing with is the idea that Democrats can go into Red states and campaign on large government expansion to better the lives of the individuals living there. I think that's dubious, and a lot of research going back decades says that it won't work.

Yes, and Republicans are so great they've decided not to even put forward a policy agenda for the 2nd election cycle in a row.

Countless Political Science papers - as well as what we can see and observe with our own eyes - tells us otherwise. I've provided you with a Political Science essay written in the 1960s detailing how the right-wing appeal to conspiratory thinking and anger is more persuasive than Econmic messaging from the left. This powerful essay, popular in the field of Political Science, was expanded upon numerous times. I cited Thomas Frank's book to detail how Republican messaging - appealing to the Paranoid Style documented decades earlier - wins the day when put up against the Democratic economic messaging of bettering their lives. It's a real problem that is difficult to grapple with. You're saying Democrats need to get down and dirty, campaign and put fourth a tremendous effort to sell a massive expansion of the federal government in their lives by visiting those areas and selling the pitch face to face with the people who would benefit from it. This won't work due to the research cited above.

I disagree. If Democrats thought they could win 60 Senate seats based and the proposals described - ones I would support in a heart beat - they would do so. The problem is it wouldn't lead them to victory, but instead a likely massive defeat. All the messaging about economic issues is simply countered by Abortion, Immigration, or it being labeled socialism as you noted above.

Bingo.

See my above post concerning coal mining. They've tried, it's in the story. The voters rejected it. As for the rest of your post, I agree with all those proposals! If Democrats thought that would be a winning message, they would do it immediately. The point Im trying to make is that the money and effort it takes to campaign in those areas is extreme. Secondly, it's not effective. Decades of political science research tells us that all that positive messaging about attempting to improve their lives via Public-Private partnerships is simply countered when a Republican says "Mexicans are Rapists and Murderers, and they took your jobs". Those voters will only be won over via culture war issues. Nothing else matters.

A huge part of this is economic. Rural states are becoming more and more Red because young people are moving to cities for opportunities. Democrats are gaining more raw voters, so their tent is actually growing. But, because people are overwhelmingly moving to just a small handful of cities, our electoral systems punish their vote while amplifying rural states. Democrats try to win them over. Consider the story about an Obama Era jobs retraining program. The goal was to retrain workers in dying industries to give them skills to land better jobs and lure industries to their communities. The jobs retraining program - opposed by Republicans because it's government spending - saw participation rates as low as 20% in some places. Some coal minors decided to take a course on... coal mining, believing that Trump would bring coal back. (Link Here). They tried to improve those communities. The voters didn't participate and decided to elect Trump who simply promised them the impossible.

Well, the entire point of this discussion is that Democrats try to appeal to those voters by proposing increased government spending to help blighted areas. It gets rejected by those voters. Competing for their vote on social issues is difficult, and arguably is best not to do so. As Richard Hofstadter wrote about in the 1960s in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (found Here), people on the extreme right wing are motivated more by anger, conspiratory fantasy, etc. Thomas Frank expanded on this decades later in his book - which you've dismissed without reading - by explaing how Republicans pushed the Paranoid Style from the extreme right into the mainstream. Therefore, your solution is that Democrats need to battle in this arena. They should out crazy Republicans. My answer is, your not wrong. That probably is how Democrats could win in rural areas, but it's objectively bad to do so.

When it comes to state legislatures, Democrats simply can't win them, it's impossible. State legislatures in swing states are so gerrymandered they cannot be won. In Ohio, for example, the state legislature is ~75% Republican. This is despite only an 8% Republican voting edge in the 2020 election, 53.2-45.2. What should be a minor Republican advantage is gerrymandered into a massive super majority. Or consider Wisconsin, a state where Democrats got more votes in 2020. The legislature is dominated by Republicans, 61-38. Swing state legislatures would require massive (i.e. impossible) margins of victory to capture a bare majority.

I know: a fact based book written by somebody with a PhD accurately predicting that white voters care more about culture wars than their own economic interests 15 years before it went mainstream is certainly something a person like yourself (A denier that climate change is caused by human activity) probably would reject.

The GOP is beyond parody at this point. At least the destruction of America is sort of funny.

This conversation between you two has been interesting. But I tend to agree with Knapplc on this. White rural voters voting against their own interests (they tend to reject spending pushed by Democrats that would help their communities) is one of the most well documented aspects of Political Science. Thomas Frank wrote about this phenomenon in the early 2000s when he wrote "What's the Matter with Kansas?" He found that rural voters are much more inclined to be persuaded by culture war issues, even when it comes at their own self destruction. The plight of the white rural voter is mostly caused by irreversible economics. There aren't opportunities for growth to lead to a larger tax base. They also vote in ways that ensure their demise. The white rural voter is already a tax liability - rural counties already get more than they pay. In order to win them over, Democrats would have to endulge their culture war fantasies more than Republicans, I'm not sure that's good for the country if they do.

Perhaps, but Trump would only need 40k voters in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia to change their minds in order to win. That's even before trends of states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania becoming more and more Republican with each election cycle.

Yes, however, the electoral college mitigates this. The share of democratic votes is overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of states. In your example, Trump running again would likely motivate a huge turnout in states like California... but winning that state by 5 million votes instead of 2.5 million if Trump doesn't run doesn't gain them much. You're winning the 54 electoral votes there regardless. (In fact, the entirety of Bidens national popular vote win in 2020 came from California and New York) The millions of votes gained in Dem dominated areas like California are completely mitigated if 50k rural white voters in Pennsylvania show up motivated by Trump. This is a bit of an extreme example of course, but hopefully the point is clear: running up the margin of victory in areas they already win doesn't help Democrats electoral chances.

Unfortunately, Urbanization is a phenomenon that has been going on for decades. This is not just an American problem, it's something happening worldwide. It's simple: cities offer more job opportunities, which generates wealth, leading to ever more job opportunities. It's a positive feedback loop that seems unstoppable. Back to elections, the view of most political scientists and people who keep tabs on elections is that Democrats are screwed, mostly because of the Senate. They may compete well in the House, but they face disadvantages in the Electoral College and the Senate has a massive rural bias they simply can't compete with.

It depends, I think if Trump runs it would be 50/50. A non-Trump candidate probably has a mich higher chance of winning. The issue, again, is not about popularity or politics. The fact is, elections are much more difficult for Democrats to win than Republicans given the institutions and the systemic rural biases they have. Using PVI as an example (Partisan Voting Index), in order to win the Presidency in 2016, Hillary Clinton needed to win the national popular vote by ~2.3%. She won by only 2.1%, as a result Democrats lost the Presidency. In 2020, the electorate grew more conservative. The PVI number Joe Biden needed to win by grew from 2.3% to 4.3%. He won by 4.4%, and as a result barely won the electoral college. This trend is continuing to grow. By 2028, the amount of votes Democrats need to win by is going to grow to a point where it simply may not be possible for them to win. It's not impossible that they win the national popular vote by 5.5%, translating into 10 million votes, and they lose all 3 branches of Congress in the process. Just for fun, consider other facts that illustrate the systemic problems within our elections and why Democrats are more or less doomed. In the 2020 election, assuming an exact 50/50 split of votes for Democrat and Republican Senators, Republicans would've won 62 seats, a super majority. Another fun number of why Democrats can kiss the Senate goodbye for the foreseeable future, by the year 2040, 30% of Americans will elect 68% of Senators.

You're not wrong, however, the coming GOP dominance has little to do with policy, economics, or anything like that. They're going to win because of massive systemic advantages built into the electoral system, there isn't much Democrats can do about it. There are a lot of reasons for this: educational polarization, urbanization and the decline of rural America, demographic shifts, etc. All of it adds up to a situation in which Democrats win the popular vote in elections by larger and larger amounts over time, but they will lose control of Congress, the Presidency, and the ability to nominate judges to the Judiciary as a result. An example of policy not mattering anymore is the fact that Republicans haven't even bothered to run a policy platform in 2020 nor do they plan on having one in 2022. They don't need anything other than white grievance to win elections.

I apologize, my complaints against opt-outs was not at all directed at you. I sort of meant it in general, towards a crowd like Steve Sipple or ESPN. That being said, I completely agree. College Football needs to find a way to address opt-outs. But, my opinion is that interest in the game isn't dwindling because of opt-outs, but because of the extreme dominance by the top 6 teams. The sport is boring and lacks drama in the biggest games.

A big part of why the sport is declining is that College Football isn't all that exciting anymore. Don't get me wrong, individual games are often very exciting. But the march to the Playoff, who gets in, and the end result is entirely predictable. The sport has extreme talent consolidation where 6 or so schools get all of the talent. It's not fun and it's growing more and more stale by the year. As far as opt-outs, they absolutely do not bother me. The players are doing what they do mostly for free. Most now get small NIL deals and scholarships to state schools - although most of these players would qualify for a Pell grant to attend their state's flagship University anyway - these players don't owe us anything. If you want to complain, give them a share of the revenue they generate.

Unfortunately, this is not correct. The GOP is extremely likely to dominate elections in the future, particularly in the Senate. They can stay on the crazy train, alt-right path and still win. We're a country that's going to be dominated by minority rule for the next two decades. That's the scary part.

They can't exactly edit a tweet assuming they don't agree with everything in it. I'm not going to assume a poster does since it's not their words directly. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Interesting how that works.