OK, how do we know we’re “beating fascism” and can back off? What stops Democratic leadership from arguing that the most boring ass middle of the road fiscal conservative Republican on the planet is “Trump 2.0” and must be stopped?

I don’t disagree on what you said at all, but so much of this is a war of messaging and marketing. If an amorphous “leadership” just keeps arguing the Republicans are all fascists regardless of what their actions/deeds/etc…actually suggest, how then do we push back on that narrative without being called a Russian plant or Republican sympathizer? In an age of clickbait, outrage manufacturing and people isolating in their own news spheres, it’s super easy for those with power to just lie and stay in power.

So so so many people keep pointing at Trump and saying “But he’s the worst/we’re all doomed/holy shit you need to vote blue no matter who” and comments about “perfect being the enemy of the good” so we should hold our nose and support Democrats.

I feel like I’m the only person who remembers how hyperbolic we all were about Mitt Romney or John McCain being existential threats to democracy. South Park literally made fun of everybody at the time pointing at how running such a divisive campaign let them distract the public from their real goal of stealing the Hope Diamond (obviously). How many of us would BEG for Romney at the top of the Republican ticket at this point?

So sure, Trump is the threat now. When are we supposed to stop rewarding mediocre neoliberalism then? If it wasn’t 2016 or 2020 or 2024 then when? Trump will eventually die and some new Republican will take his place as the leader of the party. EVERY Republican will be the next existential threat and we’ll be scolded and told to hold our nose yet again and vote for the Democrat. If someone can tell me the “end date” where I don’t have to choose between the lesser of two evils, I’d love to know when that is.

I don’t blame other citizens for voting how they do. Everyone has to decide for themselves their red lines for support and in the privacy of the voting booth who they want to support. I do blame Democratic leadership for not learning a single lesson from 2016 about hand picking candidates and browbeating everyone into thinking that’s OK.

It’s a periodic thing here in Illinois where loud conservative voices want to secede because Chicago is a hell pit, a drain on resources, and they can’t stand how much the Democrats control in the state. This is all basically bluster though because Chicago and the surrounding areas tend to basically fund any and everything downstate (the metric escapes me but it’s something like the “blue” areas lose a dollar for every dollar spent but the “red” areas basically gain a dollar for every one spent). So if Chicago was suddenly its own state, they’d all be left with basically nothing.

As with so many right wing things, it’s a grift/manufactured outrage to distract from the fact that those leaders don’t know what the heck they’re doing or are actively making it worse and scapegoating the liberals.

I mean, words could be said about Kyrsten Sinema but I think this is far more appropriate of a summary of her time as a politician…

Link because the embed didn’t work

The best part of it too was for Wi-Fi calling, if it was off, couldn’t be turned on since it relied on AT&T’s website/capabilities to approve and authenticate. That was at least my experience as well as my family’s.

So if you hadn’t already enabled it before the outage, you literally couldn’t turn it on.

I thought this article from Vox did a good job laying out how it could fall in Trump’s favor.

Taking Trump out of the equation for a moment, I do find resonance with the argument that a state shouldn’t be able to disqualify someone from a national election and that a decision like that should sit at the federal level. I’ll also echo circularfish in that I don’t trust Republican states to fairly apply this standard. It seems like something Democrat-controlled states might do because they believe in rules/institutions so they’ll only do it when pressured, if even then. Republican-controlled states will do to score points on Fox/OAN against anyone from Joe Manchin and leftwards on the political spectrum.

Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line.

It’s reductive, but look at the Christian Right and Trump. Trump is nowhere close to the picture of a Christian. It’s astounding he can safely cross the threshold of a church. But he promises to make sure abortion is illegal and men can’t pretend to be women to steal kids, so they vote for him. Replace the abortion issue with guns and you get another set of voters who will vote Republican regardless of what they might personally feel.

Meanwhile and to your point on the left, each candidate’s worst flaws are held as some kind of uncrossable line by people who are terminally online (which isn’t helpful) and the Democratic Party does what they can to feed this and make sure they don’t have to enact meaningful change. They just want to maintain the status quo but they get to do it with a pride flag waving behind them. If the Party establishment would just stop putting a thumb on the scale (not just against Bernie but ANYONE remotely progressive/left of the neoliberal center) and let the primary process shake out the most popular candidate, they might actually find themselves winning elections.