Concerning their immigration proposals, those weren't the migration levels I recall hearing of moving to the U.S., but then looking this up, I see that I'd been thinking of the number of refugees the Obama Administration was accepting specifically. Goes to show I'm not the world's greatest expert on immigration and refugee policy. The correction is well-taken. Immigration and refugee policy hasn't been the area of my greatest focus or interest in general because, here in the U.S., immigration tends to have the opposite impact that it does on France: that of lowering the overall rates of social violence while shoring up labor supply rather than making violent crime (murder, rape, child abuse, etc.) more commonplace on a per capita basis and so forth. Most people who move here are coming from Asian and Latin American nations is the difference. The net effect if migration to the U.S., as such, tends to be positive except when it's in the sort of overwhelming numbers we see right now under the current administration's essentially open borders policy. The sheer volume is resulting in a significant influx of fentanyl and human trafficking and resulting in border communities being overrun by passers-through to the point that they often outnumber actual members of those communities. It's flattering that so many people want to live here, but there has to be a process that allows us to know who the hell it is coming in and that's simply not possible without an at least somewhat more restrictive border policy than we presently have. Should that policy involve ICE? I don't know. I'm skeptical of any kind of large-scale deportation scheme or organization that exists to realize that goal. I do think we have to do something differently than we're doing now though with regard to our southern border.

Concerning France being a more liberal place than the U.S. in general, yeah that's true, but my case here is one for those policies, not an evaluation of where France is politically per se. Many of those policies are not the status quo in the U.S. or the prevailing views in the (perhaps ironically) international nationalist movement. What's more, I also named quite a few policy ideas that National Rally supports that haven't been enacted in France which I also find quite appealing, not the least of which would be the nationalization of not just health care, but also several different industries that form key means of production and distribution. I am a socialist and I see National Rally as a socialistic party these days. So do lots of working class French people, which is probably why a number of the party's current strongholds are former Communist Party strongholds.

You're right: Tuesday was a good day for conservatives. They reunited after a divisive Trump era and won many victories while the Democrats were plagued by infighting that's yielded persistent gridlock and a corresponding lack of motivation. Congrats.

To me, choosing to take a positive view of it, it was a better day for moderation and sanity.

I think maybe you give the Republicans even a little too much credit though. For example, you call the victory of Democrat Eric Adams in the NYC mayoral race by a 38-point margin an "indirect Republican win". I'm not sure what that means. I think it just means that we can both recognize Adams to be less dangerously woke and more sane than Bill de Blasio, but I don't see how a 38-point defeat there helps the Republican Party. To me, the political significance of the Adams victory is that, as of the current vote tally (votes are still being counted in that race), it appears that Adams was among the only Democratic candidates in the country -- especially for executive office -- who didn't lose any votes on Tuesday compared to Democratic performances in the preceding races for those same offices. With an estimated 78% of ballots counted, he's currently sitting at 66.5% of the vote, compared to Bill de Blasio's 66.2% vote share in 2017. No lost vote share so far for the Democratic mayoral ticket in NYC. That contrasts very positively with the overall Democratic performance on Tuesday that more generally saw swings of 10, 12, and 14 points in the Republican Party's direction. Maybe the anti-crime Democrat did something right that Terry McAuliffe, Yes 4 Minneapolis, and India Walton didn't.

(Also note: Adams also advocated a paid family leave policy and campaigned on that too, along with expanding access to child care and preschool, while McAuliffe came out against the Build Back Better Act, including, implicitly, those ideas. One of them won, and without losing any votes apparently, while the other went down to defeat. Different voter demography I know, but just saying. Just pointing it out.)

The most telling stories of Tuesday night to me were these two:

1) Steve Sweeney, the president of the New Jersey state senate, who was also an international vice president of the Ironwoker's Union, was defeated by a truck driver who spent just $153 on his campaign. This election to me captured the extent of the gap in thinking between union bosses like Sweeney and actual working people in a way that was also captured in the fact that more than 10,000 John Deere workers on strike voted to reject a contract negotiated by their union and instead continue their strike on the very same day as that vote.

2) In Buffalo, New York, the current Democratic mayor was successfully primaried by a defund-the-police candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Said mayor then decided to continue running for re-election anyway on won some 59% of the vote in a write-in campaign. As in he got nearly 3 out of every 5 votes despite not even being on the ballot! That was the extent of the voters' contempt for wokeness politics. Mostly Democratic voters at that, mind you! The defund-the-police line, candidates, and policies lost by double-digit margins even in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered; ground zero for the movement. The Buffalo outcome is how that line fares in more typical American cities. It's not a coincidence that this happened on the same night that everything from critical race theory to unisex bathrooms went down to defeat in Virginia; a state that chose Biden over Trump by a 10-point margin just a year prior and still views Trump more negatively than Biden even now according to exit polling. This was a rejection of the stupid, pro-crime, anti-white, anti-female, and anti-sanity cultural ideas and policies favored by the far left wokeness mob and now often championed even by the so-called mainstream Democrats (which is getting to be an oxymoron), and it was a rejection thereof that was by no means confined to white people either. Not by a long shot. Not in Virginia. Not in New York. Not in Minneapolis. Not anywhere.

I love underdog stories like these two regardless of whether I agree with everything the victors may champion because they're an oft-necessary and frankly intrinsically satisfying rebuke to excesses, entitlement mentality, and entrenched power elites, as applicable.

I may start a separate thread on this topic (the recent off-year elections) sometime because I feel it merits special attention and shouldn't be so casually dismissed the way Machiavellian in particular has done or reduced to like the Democrats having just a single shortcoming -- lack of sufficient ideological purity -- like Rab often seems to suggest. This outcome is way more serious than the former believes. The marquee election of the night was the Virginia governorship race, which saw a 12-point swing in the Republican Party's direction compared to last year's presidential election, and most other races saw comparable swings in that same direction. If anything like a 12-point swing in the GOP's direction were to be seen nationwide in 2024, the result would be the biggest Republican victory since 1988, with the Republicans not only winning back the House, the Senate, and presidency, but also every last swing state plus blue Minnesota (a state that hasn't voted to elect a Republican president since 1972). And the implications are also definitely more complicated than fits the latter's simplistic activist posture. The Democrats on Tuesday accomplished two feats that are difficult to achieve simultaneously, but which the party nonetheless seems to frequently pull off whenever it gets this much power: it managed to anger conservatives without energizing progressives. Both of those things are political problems, not just one or the other. To that end, it's my view that the Democrats need to inspire younger, more left wing voters to show up by fulfilling their most defining campaign promises (as in...pass the Build Back Better Act already for fuck's sake!), but also lower the temperature in the room by making those sorts of things -- efforts to improve people's lives -- their core focus rather than, you know, trying to get Abraham Lincoln's name removed from school buildings because he was white, this sort of stuff. Embrace populism, reject wokeness. That's the path to victory in my view.

The infrastructure bill has now passed the House and goes on to become law...without the Build Back Better Act. At President Biden's insistence. 13 Republicans voted in favor of passage, which proved sufficient to overcome the opposition of 6 progressive Democrats.

There is now no guarantee that the BBB Act will even pass the House of Representatives, let alone the Senate where Joe Manchin is still very publicly vowing to vote it down. The Blue Dogs consistently move the bar on the Build Back Better Act and as much reveals that they are clearly negotiating in bad faith with full intent to scuttle the bill entirely. Now they insist the BBB Act must be first scored by the Congressional Budget Office to make sure it's fully paid for before they're willing to vote on it one way or the other; a process that takes a minimum of ten days and could take two or three weeks. They're delaying until the December debt ceiling date arrives to end negotiations very transparently.

I think this outcome sums up the message Democrats have internalized from Tuesday's elections, which is that progressives are always wrong. About everything. It's the wrong message. Progressives are NOT wrong about everything. They are wrong about replacing police officers with social workers rather than adding more social workers into our emergency response systems. They are wrong about race essentialism, like about there being "white ideas" and black ideas. They are wrong about the supposed reactionary character of the American Revolution and of the Civil War (I am, of course, referencing the New York Times' 1619 Project) and in their concurrent belief that the American flag is a white supremacist hate symbol. (At this point, I assume that all ideological progressive share all of these opinions unless otherwise stated, as lots of these reactionary views seem to be annoyingly uniform anymore.) They are wrong about a lot of things these days, but they are NOT wrong about the Build Back Better Act, which I think we can now safely call a progressive bill, being as it's now abundantly clear that the president's support for it was never especially sincere (perhaps why it was crafted as a separate bill in the first place and de-prioritized from the outset). They are NOT wrong about the merits of social reform, including racial justice, or about the importance of, you know, saving the planet, or about the merits of state intervention to address human needs and prevent needless hunger and suffering. I feel that Democrats are learning some of the wrong lessons from this election and will pay a heavy price next year if they are not unlearned fast.

I'm all for this infrastructure bill and am amused by the desperation of its Republican opponents to demonize the tiny handful of their members who voted in favor of its passage. Naturally, for example, Marjorie Taylor Greene posted the names of the 13 GOP Representatives who voted in favor and characterized them as "communist" slaves of President Biden. One of them, Adam Kinzinger, satisfyingly fired back on Twitter: "Infrastructure=communism is a new one. Eisenhower's interstate system should be torn up or else the commies will be able to conveniently drive! Red Dawn in real life." His reply, notably, got nearly three times as many up-votes. But the more essential point for our purposes here is that this bill in reality is no National Highway Act. In fact it doesn't even propose half the rate of infrastructure investment seen in the Obama-era Recovery Act that proved insufficient to even lower the unemployment rate for more than a year! (Talk about a "communist takeover of America".) It will not transform the landscape of this country and indeed is so small that it's impact probably won't even be noticed by the majority of Americans. No wonder a few scant Republicans here and there feel safe in supporting it! The Build Back Better Act contains the social reforms that will be more noticeable to the public, such as free preschool, four weeks (we're back up to FOUR, wow!) of paid family leave, another year of the expanded child tax credit, the option to enroll for free in ACA plans in the seven states that, like mine, refused to expand Medicaid access under the Affordable Care Act, and more. These programs and reforms will definitely be noticed and popular. They already are popular to the extent that people are aware of their inclusion in the BBB Act. Well I'm just worried that the main initiative here is being sacrificed for a quick but emptier legislative victory.

Feel free to open a new topic, if you believe I think the Dems have a single shortcoming you probably never really paid any real attention to what I have stated.  My stance is that the Dem party has way to many heads.  Way to many Progressives or way to many moderates or way to many centrist.  There is no group that truly leads the party and thus as a whole they are weak instead of strong.  

This still shows a very naïve view of the political process.  Just because progressives dropped a wish list doesn't mean it ever had a chance to actually getting through congress, especially the Senate.  You make these sweeping statements as if there was never a Manchin or Sinema who was always going to get in the way of any huge spending package.  That is why Dems cannot get things done.  It was known way before, during and after Biden won.  It was known when the Dems lucked up and got a slim majority in the Senate but as we have seen not really a majority at all. Nothing has changed politically with these 2 Senators and as far as the Republicans well its business as usually.  Trump made a whole lot of promises and did not get them done, the difference is that the GOP blame the Dems.  On the other hand Biden made a whole bunch of promises that he will not be able to get done and the Dems blame themselves.  The build back better policy is a wish list but it never had a chance of getting over the finish line in its original form.

This is the reason Republicans do not waste time with talking about policies and campaign promises that require passing through both house and Senate, instead they go for the culture war because that is what motivate their electorate.  The silly belief that you can campaign on issue that require more than 50 votes in the Senate is a waste of time.  It always plays to people who continue to not understand the current environment. Who do not understand the political process and who only really show up for the Presidential election but cannot muster themselves for state elections.

You can only rent young voters because you actually have to continue to campaign on stuff you probably cannot actually do.  You basically tell them a sweet story about how if you had majority in both house and Senate that you can make magic happen and when you cannot succeed, well they go south because their vote isn't consistent. Their ignorance of the political system and environment means they get disenfranchised quickly.

If the young truly understood how powerful their vote is, they would not need Dems to specifically campaign to them on empty promises, instead they could come out in force and effect real change but that is a story for another time.

Progressives probably could be much stronger if they could concentrate on one specific item that effect live immediately and work to get it done instead of tossing around huge spending packages with their wish list while closing their eyes and wishing someone like Manchin would go away.

The fact that the House got enough GOP members to vote on the infrastructure bill should be a wake up call for them.  Even the GOP is willing to cross the isle to send them defeats and that speaks alot.

Dems good. Republicans bad.
Progressives good. Conservatives bad.
Still the same theme in this echo chamber thread I see.

Trolling good. Conversation bad.
Generalizing good. Reading before you respond bad.
Still the same theme in your retarded drive-by posts I see.

Seriously though, while it's fair enough to suggest that Democrats are the prevailing group on this particular thread, speaking for myself, I'm pretty fucking sure I offer way more nuanced arguments than you suggest and if ya actually bothered to read any of them you'd know that damn good and well. You might even find some opinions you agree with.

Light good. Dark bad.
Woke good. Sleep bad.
Still calling out to the comprehensive convocation I see.
The appeals of true worth are to be touched to be fully understood.

I'm glad the House finally voted on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. They've been holding on to that bill for too long. Should've been voted on as soon as the Senate passed the bill.

It was the only leverage the Progressives had.  The actual dynamic of getting 12 GOP votes considering how much they have pretty much stonewalled any bill no matter if it helps their constituents really make me wonder what shift has changed within the party.  Outside of your usual batshit crazy people like Greene and Boebert, you really are not getting any push back from actual GOP leaders which to me sounds like this was something that was given approval silently.  Maybe Virginia was a wake up call for the GOP in that they feel they can actually win without Trump.  Hmm, the dynamics of this move will need to be looked at closely.

I am looking more towards how Virginia played out and what was most important to voters who actually voted.  I also looked at Youngkin political stance which when you look into most of what he stood for leans more left then right. Yeah, he ran with the culture war but his general polices still have more left then right lean.  So why the big political swing, its definitely not because GOP voters was invoked concerning Trump but instead Terry McAuliffe running a race that actually focused to much on Trump and not enough on what he is going to achieve.  Terry lost the woman vote because he made strategic mistakes in forgetting that Parents really do not want their kids home and Youngkin invoked CRT which is the new crazy drug in town.

I am looking into each Republican who voted for the Infrastructure bill to see if their political careers are married to Trump popularity and I bet you its not.  Now this is just my view of course but I am sure GOP leadership pick these specific members because they really wanted this Infrastructure deal done but they still need to walk the tightrope of Trump and his base.  They have been trying to walk this tight rope for a while but if they get more wins that doesn't require his base, well it would be interesting to see how the party goes.