Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian.
“Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.”
His was a complaint I heard often as I traveled across the midwest to cover a host of contested Democratic primaries. So I called him up.
Leeland’s list of frustrations is long: grifters, liars, the two-party system, money influencing elections, the US’s standing in the world, the growing national debt and a fixation on cultural issues, not just the larger problems that plague the country.
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Every two or four year the socials are ablaze with the blue wave stuff. And every year it turns out to be a nothing burger.
Reddit, lemmy and other social media are piss poor ways of judging election out comes. Too much of an echo chamber.
And nothing I’ve seen or heard locally is changing maga into democrats. They are still 100% behind the great orange beast.
Wait, what? We had a massive blue wave in '18 and '20.
More whether they decide to show up or not.
In 2020 congressional incumbents won 96% of their races. The “massive blue wave” flipped 2 senators to D and 13 representatives to R.
You’re ignoring that Congress people often resign before they can lose. You always get a wave of resignations preceding a wave year. Politicians see the writing on the wall and quit so they don’t have to suffer the career setback of losing a race. If you think you’re likely to lose, you’re better off resigning before the election to “focus on your family.” Then a few years later, if the political winds shift again, you can run again without the smell of a loser on you.
That’s why I included the seat flip, too. In the supposed “massive blue wave” of 2020, Democrats lost 13 seats in the House.
The 2020 presidential election enjoyed the highest turnout rate for any national election since 1900. Democrats turnout out 8% more voters than Republicans overall. But, obviously, this matters less in a segmented wta election system.
Nevertheless, this was historic Dem turnout.
It was also historic GOP turnout.
Had either flagged, it would have been a landslide for the other party.
I also don’t like the framing of this being just trump and not the whole republican party and AIPAC dems
Exactly, I’ll believe it when I see it, Americans need to feel a hell of a lot more pain before they’ll vote responsibly.