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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Democrats are the majority in certain states. In other states, they are not the majority. And no party is ever really the majority in swing states. In those states you have people who vote one cycle for Obama, the next for Trump. Who's the majority there?

Also, moderate Democrats and Progressives are not in the same party. Nor are pocketbook Republicans and Trumpers.

The party umbrellas are hopeless, 30,000 ft. high labels that are increasingly irrelevant as people are atomized by our new forms of media and connectivity. People are only stuck within those tents against their wills, captive to a two party system that's increasingly defective.

This is what you get when a society bases what it does on competitions, zero sum games. Do you believe that the team that wins the basketball game is always the better one? No. Of course not. You see one team crush another for the entire game and then lose because it plays three lousy minutes near the end, or suffers a few bad calls. Is a defendant guilty exclusively because a judge or jury found him so? Sometimes. But in close cases, he's only guilty because his counsel chose a strategy that didn't work. If he'd chosen another strategy, the defendant would have been acquitted.

Contests where a 51% win, or success in any adversarial conflict which can be gamed, are highly entertaining. From the Roman gladiators to the NCAA tournament, that shit's always been fun to watch. But is it really a way to run a fucking government? A way to decide who does and doesn't go to jail? I realize that using competition is seen as the imperfect but only fair way of doing certain things. But this obsession with making important decisions via adversarial contests only worked when smart people cooperated a bit to avoid having the contests become bloodsport (like when the old school moderate Republicans avoided appointing SCOTUS judges who'd actually try to flip Roe).

There was a time when a Republican could wink and say, "Well, we can't really fiddle with Roe. Only the crazies want that, so we tell them we will, take their votes, and then appoint people like Souter."

Sadly, those days are over. Now it's pure gladiator matches, scorched earth. And yes -- this is more the GOP's fault.

You're being obtuse. Democrats are the majority, nationally. Republicans have won the popular vote in exactly one presidential election since Mike Dukakis was the Democratic Candidate. Their voters are losing, demographically. Republicans know this, which is why they think every election now is a Flight 93 election.