mtutiger

Assuming Jersey widens out to be around 4 points when the final votes are cast, you are looking at roughly the same gap between Biden's performance and national approval in both NJ and VA. I dont think there's much that isn't concerning about what happened on Tuesday. I just think it's largely a reflection of what the national polling average has been telling us for the past few weeks now.

Looks like TB is about to get canceled for expressing his opinion lol

They were largely accurate in 2018 and on Tuesday. Outside of New Jersey anyway. The big takeaway for me from Tuesday is less about the accuracy of state level polling data - it's more about how Biden's national job approval (-10 to-12 on average), with a couple of exceptions (such as the PA Supreme Court race), lines up remarkably well with the final results. In a -10 to -12 environment nationally for Biden, it makes sense that Dems would lose VA (which Biden won by 11) by 2 points and only win NJ (which Biden won by 16) by ~3-4 points. In that context, nothing that happened should be that surprising.

I've seen a lot of stupid Twitter controversies, but this one may take the cake

Looks like the talking points were sent out...

Hes gonna reject that, one would think

Lol

I mean, he's not wrong...

Imagine getting this worked up over an infrastructure bill. JFC

Infrastructure week only lasted five years!

Probably not, but it sure as shit is a waste of time for me or anyone else wanting to engage that.... I'm not going to convince someone who accuses anyone stating a basic fact (such as "no schools in DFW have CRT as part of the curriculum) of gaslighting. Disagreements in politics and on policy are fine, but it's different when neither side of the political debate can agree on verifiable facts.

There's an op-ed writer for the local paper (a good paper, but with a highly slanted conservative op-ed page) who tweeted out last night after the election results came in that Dems should "stop gaslighting" by saying that CRT isn't being taught in our schools. I have no idea what that means given that I'm not aware of any schools in our local area that actually have CRT as part of their curriculum. I'm guessing that this is the case everywhere in the United States as well. That's the big problem I have with this whole debate - you either engage the debate in terms of how it is framed by conservative media, or you get accused of 'gaslighting.' Just a big waste of time and energy IMO

I'd be curious to hear Buddha's take, but my layman interpretation is that they're pretty hostile to the enforcement mechanism in the Texas law (for good reason). Archie is correct in that the Mississippi law is probably the big game in town.

Really really good value on that trade.... makes one less thing to worry about before free agency hits!

He has an option, I guess

That was fast

One thing I'd love to know is how, given all that transpired here, how did Gavin Newsom basically match his 2018 numbers in the California Recall Election.... Biden's #s weren't quite as bad in September, but they weren't exactly good either. Could just be the fact that Larry Elder was that bad of a face for the recall effort, but who knows.

Everyone has a take on what this means and it'd probably be wise to hold off until Catalist or some other group does a post-mortem on these elections. But my gut tells me that is that all the other stuff - Critical Race Theory, Insurrection, Abortion, etc. - is noise to most people. What it comes down to is that you have a President that is anywhere from 10-12 points underwater on average, and candidates that stood for the Ds last night in the two big races (McAuliffe, Murphy) are going to do around 10-12 points worse than the President did in 2020. It's a more nationalized environment, and it shouldn't be surprising that his unpopularity at the moment is having an impact on fortunes for his fellow Dems. And I suspect that unpopularity comes down a combination of economic pressures (such as inflation), concern that COVID isn't behind us and/or some fatigue with COVID restrictions, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan (not so much for the withdrawal - but rather that how it played out didn't reflect well on how the President campaigned on competence). The formula is pretty simple on paper but hard in practice.... if Ds want to at least reduce their losses next cycle, Biden's approval rating is going to have to go up. I think it's possible depending on whether inflationary pressures subside and if COVID increasingly becomes a distant memory in 2022 (I'm more confident in the latter than the former), but who knows. Everything they collectively do as a party though should be done with that in mind. And Biden himself should probably adjust how he is doing his job accordingly as well.

The sample size in-division is pretty large (ie. 18 games per team per year). But you may be right.

Teams inside the division as well. Have to beat your peers in order to make the next step

New Jersey isn't a toss up, most of the remaining vote is mail and big Dem areas. Murphy will probably gain most of the remaining votes. Still a terrible result, but he's gonna win by 2-4% in the end. In terms of why this happened, its pretty simple: President's party generally takes it in the chin during off year and Midterm elections. It happened to Trump, it happened to Obama, with the exception of Bush I first term, it generally happens to all of them.

No doubt. I'd almost argue New Jersey is a more alarming result than VA even if Murphy pulls it out, depending on where the margin lies when the dust settles.

Yeah, he'll survive