Marc Singer
theothermarcsinger.bsky.social
Marc Singer
@theothermarcsinger.bsky.social
66 followers 46 following 270 posts
Not that one. Not that one, either. Writer and English professor at Howard University in Washington DC. Author of Breaking the Frames (2018) and Grant Morrison (2012).
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Even if we can get to 50 or 51, we still need a caucus willing to nuke the filibuster and reform the SC or we won't have a governing majority. Probably need 53 or more for that.

We need a real plan to win in southern, rural, rust belt states. Pretending it will fix itself doesn't get us there.
Come on. You started by dismissing Dem losses in rural states that have given Reps a durable Senate/EC advantage, and now your comeback plan depends on winning seats we haven't held in decades. Even your list of 50 depends on seats we struggle with (ME, WI, 2 in NC).

Whistling past the graveyard.
I don't do doomerism. But I would prefer the answer to doomerism be something more actionable than cherrypicking and wishcasting.

If your model for future Democratic control of the Senate rests on Kansas, you'd better have a plan to win Kansas.
I don't like the Nichols/Yglesias solution of moving the party to the right (and I doubt it would work - our problem is rural emptying + media/information system collapse), but at least they admit we have a problem.
We can't count on Maine (ME hasn't had 2 Dem senators since 1980) or Wisconsin. IA hasn't elected a Dem senator since 2008, SC since 1998, TX since 1988, KS since *1932*.

This is not a formula for winning the Senate. It's a recipe for permanent loss.
And you don't have to go back to 1978 to see the decline. We held the Senate for two congresses since 2014 and those were both by the skin of our teeth, with majorities dependent on Manchin/Sinema/Fetterman. We won't have a governing coalition unless we can figure out how to win in the Plains again.
The Plains (and rural states generally) going solid R is the whole story because those states are overrepresented in the Senate and the electoral college. That's what took us from hitting 60 senators in a stretch year to struggling to reach 50.

That's not an advantage for Democrats.
*IL was a loss and regain, NV should be in the gain column, some of those wins and a lot of those losses are doubles. Overall trend is still down since 2007 and way down since 2009.
You can pick good or bad years, but the overall trend for Dems in the Senate is bad. We can't cope our way out of this.
If you start at 2007, we gained AZ, GA, MN, NH, NM, OR, VA.

We gained and lost AK, AL, IN, MO, NC.

We lost AR, FL, IA, IN, LA, MT, ND, NE, OH, PA, SD, WI, WV.

Gained, lost and regained CO, IL, and PA (but the regain is Fetterman, so...)
United in their common conviction that the Democratic base, who they hate, should put them in charge of the party.
To be fair, a lot of the folks defending Nazi tattoo guy are people who identify as hating Democrats while also assuming they are entitled to run the party.
Royal who Cheated on Wife with Consenting Adult Looking Pretty Good Now, Huh?

by King Charles
Breaking News: Andrew, the younger brother of King Charles III, is being stripped of his title as prince, Buckingham Palace said. nyti.ms/4oQeykJ
And instructors didn't have to go along with it, but precarious employment left many feeling like they have no choice.

(tbf my tenured and tenure-track colleagues have no such excuse)
This is part of it, but not all of it (and not even a big part at this point). Covid didn't make university administrators cater to students and parents, soaring tuitions did that.
Same with activists/"the groups." It's true that Dem electeds weren't saying "abolish the police," but the loudest activists on social media were and the public took note of Democratic silence. You have to distance yourself from toxic positions perceived as coming from your side.
I'm not sure how this argument helps to get funding back for SNAP or to protect people who are about to lose the benefits.
This was a great weekend for Chris Murphy to send me a fundraising email, inasmuch as it was also a great weekend to make sure I never receive a fundraising email from Chris Murphy again.
Chris Murphy on Platner's Totenkopf tattoo: "He sounds like a human being to me. A human being who made mistakes, recognizes them, and is very open about it."
The Washington Post is not a newspaper anymore, not to its owner. It's the lobbying arm for Amazon.
This isn't over when he is out of office. It isn't over when he is in prison. It's over when we have removed him from the public memory as anything but a source of national shame.
Back in the first term I thought a lot about his face showing up on those wall charts of the US presidents you see in classrooms.

Now I think a lot about that Venetian doge who tried to overthrow the Republic. His portrait is preserved but forever covered by a black cloth.
I will vote for whatever candidate promises to tear down his gilded ballroom, rebuild the White House, abolish ICE, undo everything he has accomplished, restore everything he has wrecked, and send every last one of these people to prison.
Left: White House last month.

Right: White House today.

Via ABC News.

abcnews.go.com/Politics/new...
The left really, really needs to come up with better candidate selection criteria than "he seems working class and he hates the people I hate."
So Graham Platner has an SS-Totenkopf tattoo.
chat it doesn't look good
Reposted by Marc Singer
I mean this is viscerally upsetting because it's really genuinely him treating the white house like it's his own personal property; he's the king and it's his palace. No other president ever thought like this, even if they were a fucking horrible person, because it goes against our founding creed
I'm not a West Wing obsessed lib or anything but the more I see pictures of this the more fucked up I think it is. It's like he cut off one of the hands of the Lincoln memorial with an angle grinder so he could add a big gun to it.
The Treasury Department instructed employees not to share to share photos of the demolition of parts of the White House’s East Wing