Democrats win control of the House of Representatives
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Now let’s hope we see some real change (and that isn’t advocating for a lurch left). I have my doubts real change is possible but you have to start somewhere.
Not me, though I do expect this thread may get flagged, because... HN.
> I just want to say that nothing makes me more patriotic than having faith in my fellow citizens.
Same. It is also very heartening to see all of that (mostly Musk) Republican donor money totally lit on fire, and to see what appears to be a lot of black voters in the south coming out to stand up for their voting rights which the Republicans keep trying to strip.
> Now let’s hope we see some real change
Realistically the Democrats won't be able to change much in the next 2 years because of veto power, but just kneecapping Trump into a full lame duck is good enough for now. And they better start passing lots of real legislation that addresses the needs of the American public, EVEN IF THEY KNOW it is going to be vetoed. Make Trump and everyone around him (JD Vance, Rubio) own all the lack of progress directly in the run-up to the 2028 election.
And I expect at least some of the greater Trump orbit fucked up severely in leaving an illegal paper trail, because people new to corruption aren't very good at it. Especially at the cabinet hangers-on level.
Also, the Senate can and should fucking sit on any Trump Supreme Court pick until the next election.
Because fuck McConnell and his party for stalling Garland's nomination for 293 days. Thomas or Alito can be filled by the next president.
Would be nice, but even without that one of the best things about the massive Democrat win is that assuming they don't fuck it up (admittedly a big assumption) there is a very real chance that we're looking at a 10 year window where conservative justices are shut out of contention for nomination and/or confirmation.
And Thomas and Alito are both in their late 70s. Here's to hoping that they stuck around long enough to RBG themselves.
Good.
Well, kudos to you I guess, for having any hope at all. Mine is long lost. Democrat, Republican, it doesn't matter. Real change is a fallacy.
I suppose yesterday shows that the U.S. may have finally sunk low enough. But honestly, I'm not sure. I think there is a larger reckoning still around the corner…
- Obamacare
- ADA
- Prohibition of abortion (and alcohol prohibition, to go old school)
- War in Iran
- PATRIOT Act
- ICE off the leash
- Ukraine policy
- The EPA
None of these were inevitable; all were a consequence of the particular politicians voted into office.
And neither of the two political parties, have been able, or even truly willing, to to fix both. The European Welfare State isn't sustainable, but at least use Georgism to tax land (for healthcare and education), and maybe create a few Co-Ops/New Deals to let the common people work for a livable wage (Distributism is neither Socialism nor Communism).
The house and senate both flipping is encouraging, but pay close attention to what comes next. There is no end to the self-inflicted challenges that the U.S. now faces. Many of them must be dealt with urgently. However, Democrat commentators are already saying that it will be to their advantage in 2028 if a Democrat controlled Congress accomplishes nothing for two years because Trump veto'd everything. This is not acceptable.
The U.S. has destabilized the globe. The conflicts they have both started and exacerbated need to be resolved in less than two years. Don't let your leaders, whichever side they're on, play politics until the next election. The U.S. has started a lot of fires. It needs to put them out promptly before somebody else does. Americans probably won't like it if that happens. That would cement the fall from unchallenged global superpower to just another misbehaving middle power.
Unfortunately, that's almost certainly what's going to happen. They won't have a veto-proof majority.
This is where things might be interesting though. There are 19 republican senate seats up in 2028, some in states that already flipped or almost flipped.
Do they keep kowtowing to Trump after this or do they try and save their seat through bipartisanship. I dont think they will be as afraid of Trumps' maga party trying to primary them as they would to being the reason their state flips. That did not work out too well for republicans in Texas. Now they may lose Mississippi... Mississippi. If that doesnt wake them up to do their job they deserve to be replaced.
It also shows that a good chunk of the population does _not_ know it.
> Damn man, cutting off my leg seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out bad. But a while later, I wasn’t happy with my life, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll cut off the other one too, see what happens. That was bad too! So when my neighbor asked me if I want to burn my prosthetic legs as well, I said - NEVER!
Harris didn't lose because she was a lame duck, she lost because she wanted to appeal to the center and the right more so than the left. The race was close enough that the leftists she alienated by refusing to take a stand against Israel, alone, might have put her over the top.
>Harris had a more leftist voting record in Senate than Sanders https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jul/28/kamala-harr...
and came across as rather dim. I watched her twice saying 300 million Americans died of covid. The figure was 300 k but if you can't do thousand vs million and not realise 300 million dying was unlikely should you be president?
My brother in Christ do you think people voted for Trump because he was the more intelligent choice? He says dumber things than that all the time, and puts them into policy.
Heck, let's make it bipartisan - Obama once said he campaigned in "all 57 states." Minor gaffes like this don't actually matter, they happen all the time. What matters is platform and policy, and the only people I've seen who had an opinion on Kamala Harris' platform were Democrats. The Republicans she wanted to court were never going to vote for her on principle, and the fence-sitters were too disillusioned and cynical to bother showing up.
I followed democratic strategist James Carville a bit and he said when Biden proved gaga that they should have a townhall for prospective candidates and choose the best and it was unamerican to just anoint some insider. If they had actually done that I think they would have found someone competent and won, but no and we have the current nightmare.
I think there needs to be a return to selecting people who are honest competent and represent the majority.
Indeed. One of the few people to know there’s a “b” in “dumb.”
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I hear all the time the corrupt DCCC/DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders at every turn because big donors/uniparty yadaydayada...
If I could summarize the state of political debate in the USA it would be "incoherent".
I think the idea of qualified is correct, I think what's wrong is that Americans don't care about the quality of the people they elect.
When elitist people people throw qualification as an administrative CV measuring contest, the regular people are correct to teach a lesson and bring them down from their clouds to the earth.
The elitist idea of qualification is wrong. That's the beauty of democracy, it's the greatest educator. But elitists are not capable of learning, they'll only see what they want to see and blame "the regular people".
(I was raised feminist by my feminist mom and while I miss her terribly, some days I am happy she's no longer here to be depressed about what a horror show the U.S. has become.)
Harris got a ton of votes despite being unelected (remember she didn't win a primary) and unpopular. This woman excuse is a cope and borderline sexist. Look how many women won their races yesterday.
Everyone (including me) would prefer it to be about their pet issue, but at the end of the day people across the world pushed the "Things cost too much, let's try someone else" button in 2024. Things cost significantly more now, so they pushed then "someone else" button even harder.
If Trump didn't start the Iran war, Texas, South Carolina would still be red.
Ordinary people only voted blue because gas prices were hurting their bottom line.
Trump oversaw the US succumbing to COVID pandemic. People still voted for him second term. Biden led one of the most remarkable economic recovery in modern times. People still were convinced by endless propaganda that economy was in the shitter and voted him out.
Due to all the tribalism created by social media, US government has become like any other third world nation where every election cycle people just vote the opposition into power.
But you are right that real change is needed Democrats have taken just the first step in earning true victory they gotta pass stuff and get stuff done. That said the left basicaly have an undersized responsibltiy for this shift its mostly the moderates dems carrying in my opinion. Troy and Abdul are up +7 shift but are barely moving the needle when compared to Kamala's performance. Moderates though shift ruby red mage country over 25+ points in Texas, NC (especially), SC, and several other places.
I think the one exception is strangely enough florida Left candidates performed well but I think generally florida was kind of ignored this election. The money that went to Michigan probably could have won senate + governor in florida but hine sight :) I think the party actually came together more than it divided into leftist verse liberal
breaking the western alliance may prove to be
edit, rephrase: breaking all of the international institutions and norms that the US set up in the post-WW2 era, including severely straining NATO, may prove to be enduring.
There is no way to pretend that this development will not affect tech. If nothing, the carte blanche from the federal govt that the crypto and AI companies will be gone. To say nothing of the investigations from Congress.
@dang we really need to unflag this.
But it can help define the fringe better than most.
If properly used, the data could represent one of the most accurate calibration points when it comes to over-flagrant flagging.
IOW whatever combined flagging efforts amounted to across-the-board, algorithmically or by individual attention or collective action, it should not have been enough to raise a flag on this particular article.
Maybe just barely, but a revised judgment mechanism does seem long overdue if there is going to be a successful drift back toward neutrality in the face of a landscape that is modernizing faster than can be kept up with.
I think the real limitation is that there's too many other things to keep up with and you can't really expect perfection, especially not overnight.
How do you feel about having a single containment zone-style submission to channel everyone's nervous energies into?
> On the other hand, why aren’t we just building all this shit in the vast emptiness in the middle of the country anyway? Hmm.
Exactly. You have a power-hungry asset that needs few humans to operate, causes severe noise pollution, and can effectively be located anywhere in CONUS with minimal latency impact.
Imho, what federal and state governments should be doing is fast-tracking power and network infra to agreed locations in the mid and southwest, ideally in areas suited to solar and wind.
Pre-zone the land around for the desired mix of power + datacenter, then let private industry build what they want.
There's entirely too much empty land to make building in {small town} make any goddamn sense.
Garland would have launched the Epstein case if there were proof. It is possible an investigation started and did not reach the threshold required, we'll never know. If they cannot prosecute, the DoJ does not publicly attack people.
It wasn't a time for following the facts "where ever they may lead", as he loved to say. The facts as they stood when Garland was sworn in already showed it was Trump who was responsible -- the impeachment record had collected enough evidence against Trump at that point to warrant a SC on day one of the Biden admin. Instead Garland waited almost half his term!
It became clear Garland really dropped the ball when the Congressional J6 Committee's investigation actually outpaced the Justice Department's investigation, which is a pretty sad indictment of that DOJ when Congress can get its shit together but the DOJ can't.
Has anyone this high profile been prosecuted for treason in modern times? They could not have kept him in jail pre-trial for four years for a complex treason trial.
*An inevitable outcome, slowed by the immunity ruling and Aileen Canon, that could only be permanently derailed by the unthinkable scenario where voters re-elect him.
It will be interesting to see if the prosecution resumes after Trump leaves office and if the immunity ruling will get him off the hook, then: "This case would have determined whether then-president Donald Trump and others engaged in election interference during the 2020 election, including events during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol."
Is that really that hard to understand??
OTOH he could run for VP. Then were the new president to resigned or die then Trump could serve a third (un-elected) term as president! Rinse, repeat!8-))
No, he can't. The elected VP also has to be eligible to be elected as president.
The 12th Amendment says:
> But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
Paired with the 22nd which restricts Presidential eligibility, Trump cannot be elected as VP. He could potentially (this would go through the courts, it is a gray area) be nominated to VP, but he cannot be elected as President or VP again.
Melania is not a natural born US citizen so that would be impossible
What if he runs in 2028 and the Supreme Court declines to rule on anything other than preventing the states from banning him from the ballot like they did in Colorado?
Edit: or in light of Trump v. Anderson
We should ponder whether they'll fix the filibuster that has laid them low so many times. Whether they'll come up with a coherent and air-tight strategy for curbing executive overreach, both now and for the future. Whether they'll cripple America's position in AI and rocketry/orbital stuff. Whether they'll figure out how to fix the immigration issues and backlog. Whether they'll do anything meaningful about the military adventurism abroad.
But my colleagues--that is tomorrow.
Tonight--tonight, we can enjoy that there is still enough of a vestige of an animating spirit in the body politic to rise up and cause change and make the bastards sit up and take notice that election results are not forgone conclusions, that buffoonery and trickery have their limits when set against a people sufficiently animated by despair and distress and frustration and justice.
Tonight we can enjoy things.
I know that HN owners are far-right, but it just proves time and time again that considerable amount of HN users are too.
Anything that is against current US administration policy is flagged fast and deemed as "too political for this forum" in the comment section.
Politics are always interested in you. Especially US elections, that impact not only US citizens, but essentially whole world. Tech sector included.
As is the Democrat takeover of Texas (along with what that means for all the tech companies hailing Texas as the greatest place on Earth).
Texas went from almost entirely Republican cabinet to almost entirely Democrat basically overnight (in the "spending ten years to become an overnight success" kind).
Republicans in that state lost --- by very wide margins --- _every single key seat_ after a 30-year run. Nobody expected that.
Okay, fine; too political. Consider that the Railroad Commissioner, who is responsible for oil and gas policy in the state, also switched parties today and that Texas is a key state for AI datacenter and EV development.
Or that "reigning in AI" is a lynchpin of the Democrat strategy...and they now control both the House and the Senate.
Or that Kansas became a Democrat-run state for the first time in NINETY FOUR years.
Or that Mississippi, a state that everyone assumed was a Republican stronghold, STILL hasn't been called because the race is too close to call by like 50 votes.
The man has absolutely bit the dog here. This is Boston Tea Party levels of historic in my opinion.
It would not surprise me one bit if more left-leaning users got shadowbanned from flagging than right-leaning ones.
This site desperately needs a public moderation log.
Yet when I flag something that I evidently shouldn’t have, I get flagging privileges revoked.
Hope Elon has a great day.
shit's so funny. until you forget it and get the stupids again.
MAGAGA!
To be clear, I'd love it to be true, but I don't think we should be reporting things as fact without a mathematical certainty or a concession.
Democrats win control of the House of Representatives, with a vow to combat Trump
NBC News projects that Democrats will take control of the House next year, giving them the power to investigate Trump and advance legislation to check his policies.News outlets are, in general, extremely conservative when calling races. The usual standard is somewhere between "there are not enough outstanding votes to change the outcome" and "the uncounted votes have to be insanely different to anything likely based on previous elections". More [1].
Changing a projection has happened but it's incredibly rare.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/how-us-news-o...
NBC's last two projection errors were 2000 (Bush v Gore presidential race in Florida, which was universally just a fucked race) and 1960.
It is a given at this point that Democrats have, in fact, won control of the House for 2027 (as long as there isn't any Trump shitfuckery, which I think the win this year is going to be way too big for him to even try it).
The former wasn't an error. So they've made one, 60 years ago.
Like, it's an extremely weird system, but it is how it has always worked. If you refuse to use it, you won't have a result for weeks.