Yeah here in Georgia we have two Democratic senators but our House delegation is 9R-5D. That ain't an accident.

Reporter: What do you make of Republicans saying that Virginia—

AOC: Wah wah wah.

We have asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no.

What they’re just mad at is that they have been accustomed to a Democratic Party that rolls over.

They think you're stupid.

If there was a tension Taylor Sheridan won because the bad guy delivers a cool monologue about how cool and necessary it is for him to exist after effectively and efficiently killing a drug lord. the ambiguity of the plan to consolidate drug traffic to Colombia is there but it’s squashed by the rest

I mean, it’s important not to let internet weirdos derange you for sure but we keep underestimating them

Idk I think these people tend to do more than just sit out. They spend a disproportionate amount of their time telling everyone that participating in electoral politics is a waste of time. Flooding the zone with cynicism produces some effect.

Dawg I think posting every 5 minutes might be harming your ability to make money

This is basically how every conversation on every topic goes nowadays. “Yeah, sure, republicans *want* to destroy this thing but they won’t end up doing it so it’ll be fine BUT what about when the Dems did (something untrue I have a vague recollection of through a game of internet telephone)?”

Is this some proxy for other discourse? What is happening. Why are people fighting about missing flights?

Obama gave them all broadband and subsidized healthcare and they responded by going insane forever

Rural voters don't vote for who gives them goodies. They vote because of culture.

If a Dem does something that increases welfare, or builds a park, or whatever, they will decry it as socialism and stealing their money _even if they are the impoverished recipients_ of it.

Watching the commentary on reels makes me think a lot of people can’t handle this. People were calling Robby a misogynist and creating a villain out of him almost reflexively. TV needs to train this out of its audience.

What's great about the Pitt is that it *doesn't* neatly resolve anything. Trauma is not neatly cured; people do not neatly find forgiveness. I mean, that scene on the roof, watching the fireworks, is just *laden* with ambiguity & mixed meanings. Nothing is tidy. That's why it's good! But ...

Nothing will kill a work of art faster than trying to be "responsive" to fans -- or just listening to them at all. It killed Star Wars, it killed Ted Lasso, it killed Game of Thrones, I personally think it killed Hacks. Don't listen to fans.

‘Robby Has Never Been Your Daddy’ On the set of The Pitt finale, the acclaimed series zooms in on its main character.

Love the Pitt, love reading articles about the Pitt, and have two very strong takes on the Pitt:
1) The bravest thing the show has done is to allow Robby to be a genuine asshole. Trauma does not make people saints!
2) The worst thing the show runners & writers could do is listen to fans.

The fact that Mamdani just seems like a cheerful normal guy who's policies are things like "we're going to tax second homes to fund pothole repairs" or whatever and yet this generates panicked responses like "This is basically Stalin's great purge turned up to eleven" is... telling. It tells things.

I think you can have an outlook that acknowledges people respond to media and mass signaling without being nihilistic. There is a democratic path forward that involves using those tools proactively rather than assuming your policy preferences are simply popular on their own merits.

I think they imagine there is genuine potential for a silent majority of revolutionaries to rise up and end all of this any day now if the libs would simply stop pointing at graphs. Accepting that your neighbors have incoherent politics all on their own and very little we say matters is not fun.

Voter behavior as it relates to the economy does not clearly map onto metrics like GDP, wages, gas and prices, housing, inflation etc. Voters often have perceptions of the economy that are very different from what the math says. So, vibes (media driven ideas)determine how people see the economy

I came here to mock you but these are some pretty good watches

Problem with this is people will rate themselves as doing quite well but rate the state of the economy as poor.

I don’t think the goal is to get Dems to run on “your life is great actually”. It’s more to diagnose the problem in the media environment because perpetual cynicism and the belief that things are worse than 1950 by every metric benefits conservatives and fascists

Viktor Orban accomplished so much of what the Trump movement wants to accomplish here

he ruled for 16 years and rewrote the rules in his favor

and still, they threw him out

and you know what? they did it by voting

don’t let anyone tell you voting doesn’t matter

this is a boring take but if we want this from a Dem President in 2029 we need to deliver the type of huge legislative majority Magyar just achieved and not the razor-thin one that Biden was forced to work with.

it’s really hard to differentiate between “things aren’t that bad yet” and “the US media lives inside an absurdly rosy bubble of artificial normality, unable to identify pending disasters for fear of implying the president might be bad”

Nobody responds great to being told they have some level of privilege and security or that they aren’t struggling. Inequality has gotten worse but it’s probably just easier now than ever to access information about that inequality. I can see every nepo baby on instagram and every medical gofundme

I don’t understand what pisses people off so much about this. Americans are relatively wealthy, we adjust our spending to match our income and go into credit card debt to maintain expected consumption habits. We have bad wealthy inequality so we perceive more hardship than the class above us.

I don’t think rural conservative voters are motivated by policy interests as much as culture war grievances. We could certainly try, but rural broadband, infrastructure investments, farm subsidies…all Dem policies that never produce gains with this demo.

Fair enough, I’ve just been burned by this population before

but there is powerlessness under the Trump admin that wasn’t as present under Biden. There’s definitely a type of leftist more inclined to get mad at Dems but idk if they’re fully explanatory here.