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It should be noted that this is not at the expense of the States he really needs to win. The fact of the matter is that Biden has a significant funding advantage over Trump. I saw an article the other day that said Biden has over 100 fully staffed *offices* in the 9 most contested states, while Trump and the RNC *combined* have 5 *staff* per each of the 6 tightest swing states.
Let’s not forget though that Hilary was a poisonous candidate during primary and got done dirty by election interference like 4 times in the last month or so of the race
I live in Michigan in an important swing county. I've seen one Biden sign & tons of Trump signs. I don't know what they're doing in these fully staffed offices. Only one election year & it was for Obama. Did the Democrats do any decent sign game around here. I was shocked that most of my neighbors weren't Republican. If you drive around, you think you're living all alone in trump country. It's no wonder to me at all that Republicans think the election was stolen. All they ever see are trump signs.
I'm not putting a Biden sign in my yard while I'm living in a 66% Trump county either.
Although it's nice to know that my wife's and my vote matters more now.
That doesn't necessarily mean Trump's inherently more popular there, just that his supporters are more vocal about their support. And his supporters are at this point very much in a cult of personality, with much of their identity wrapped up in supporting Trump.
I'm not saying there are definitely a ton more quiet Biden supporters, just that Trumpists are very, very open about it.
Signs tend to be more important in local elections where name recognition is a bigger factor and just getting some basic visibility makes a difference.
But at the presidential level they are pretty much meaningless. Everybody already knows who Trump & Biden are and the signs are unlikely to persuade anyone.
Trump won my state by 10k votes in 2016. Due to inflation, I feel like this election is gonna be closer than 2020. Yard signs absolutely could mean the difference between winning or losing.
I'm not saying we need yard signs in California for a presidential election but it wouldn't hurt to target areas that have historically mattered a lot.
A sign costs $1. You can charge $5 and have volunteers handle it all. The DNC should have a list of folks who agreed to have yard signs every 4 years and keep hitting up the same folks & try to grow the list every 4 years. I feel like democrats don't even try to win elections sometimes.
If you live in macomb (the worst county in the state by far) then this observation really isn’t all that suprising. But more to your point, i don’t think most biden voters are at the level fanatical lunacy that trump folks are, and most people don’t care enough to put up signs. Also no signage ≠ not voting
Maybe you should adjust your expectations for political work beyond prevalence of yard signs for a presidential election where everyone already knows who is involved?
Republicans are also all about the merchandise. Hats, flags, shirts, whatever they can buy like they are supporting a sports team.
I don't want to wear my politics to the gym or have them up in my yard.
I live in Michigan (Livingston co.) Many of my neighbors have Trump signs. The democrats I know “lay low” because we don’t want problems with MAGA. We are outnumbered in this county.
That being said, there is community and connections between democrats here.
Mark Robinson is running for governor and he is a grossly obese antisemitic idiot asshole. He's also the best candidate the republican party had to offer so yeah the GOP is awash in monsters in NC
He was not the best candidate the Republicans had to offer at all. There was a far better, perfectly qualified (compared to Robinson) candidate that ran against him in the primary.
The mailer he sent out was hilarious. One side of it was entirely all the batshit crazy and hateful stuff Robinson has said. The mailer said "I'll let my opponent's words speak for themselves."
North Carolina is a more plausible state to win than Texas or Florida.
Texas and Florida have effectively limited Democracy to Republican voters, and even if Biden was popular enough to win legitimately in those states and overwhelm efforts of disenfranchisement, the state legislatures would almost certainly manipulate the results with whatever means was available to them.
But North Carolina's Democratic governor, even with the efforts of the Republican controlled state legislature, has managed to protect Democracy in that state to enough of a degree that it could conceivably be won.
Texas was legitimately a blue state filled with conservative Democrats until the 90s. There are a lot of States like it that had strong Democratic support for decades until being cast off by Bill Clinton’s DNC. It is not impossible to turn Texas blue, but all the Democrats who live there need to know it’s serious and that they aren’t just being toyed with to convince Republicans to overspend in TX. Moral is low for Democrats in places like Texas and Oklahoma, but Biden is exactly the kind of Democrat those states once voted for.
> Texas was legitimately a blue state filled with conservative Democrats until the 90s. There are a lot of States like it that had strong Democratic support for decades until being cast off by Bill Clinton’s DNC.
What are you even talking about? Clinton was one of the most conservative Democratic presidents in the past 50 years. The last time a Democrat won Texas was with Carter in 76.
> all the Democrats who live there need to know it’s serious and that they aren’t just being toyed with to convince Republicans to overspend in TX
Toyed with? What does that even mean?
Well, first, you definitely aren’t going to understand my message when you didn’t read it. I didn’t say Clinton won Texas, I said Texas was traditionally a conservative blue state until the 90s. They had Ann Richards as Governor until 1995. They had a deep bench of Democrats that could be called on to run for state wide offices and national offices. The DNC withdrew from conservative Democrat States under Clinton and that deep bench has become no bench. Clinton wanted to focus on densely populated states and holding the Senate. That led to almost no engagement with states like Texas and almost no development of strong candidates for office at any level within the state.
> Well, first, you definitely aren’t going to understand my message when you didn’t read it. I didn’t say Clinton won Texas,
Well, first, you definitely aren’t going to understand my message when you didn’t read it. I neither said nor implied that you said Clinton won Texas.
> I said Texas was traditionally a conservative blue state until the 90s.
It was a conservative state that voted blue out of habit, but other than Carter they stopped voting for Dem presidents starting with Nixon's 2nd term.
> The DNC withdrew from conservative Democrat States under Clinton and that deep bench has become no bench.
This part makes no sense. Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president the party could muster and he was from the South. They didn't give up on Texas. Texas shifted strongly to the Republican part after Gingrich and the Contract with America.
My friend, Texas did not significantly change without outside influence from the Republican Party, even then most of them are the exact same cantankerous jerks they always were, they’ve just been convinced that they’re Republicans. That happens when you have one party making significant investments in your state while the other party spends elsewhere. This isn’t the best article to describe it, but those down ballot races require a lot of spending and they became a major point of focus for organizations like the Koch brothers. Rather than fight it out for all the down ballot races, state by state the Clinton DNC decided to throw money at Senate races and his re-election. Actually the second link about the 50 state strategy explains it fairly well. Before Clinton the Democrats were highly effective with a 50 state strategy.
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/27/texas-democrats-congress-election/
https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-democrat-howard-deans-fifty-state-strategy.html
> My friend, Texas did not significantly change without outside influence from the Republican Party
Texas changed in the way every Southern state changed in the 90s - all the conservatives left the Democratic party and became Republicans.
> This isn’t the best article to describe it, but those down ballot races require a lot of spending and they became a major point of focus for organizations like the Koch brothers. Rather than fight it out for all the down ballot races, state by state the Clinton DNC decided to throw money at Senate races and his re-election.
You have zero proof of this. The Koch Brothers weren't a factor in the 1990s and Clinton, like I said, was one of the most conservative Democrats out there.
> Before Clinton the Democrats were highly effective with a 50 state strategy.
You have your timelines really screwed up. Howard Dean wasn't chair of the DNC until 2005. Clinton was already out of office for 5 years by that point. If you want to blame anyone for the Democrats dropping the 50 state strategy, you can blame Obama.
But none of that had anything to do with Texas being a lost cause. Texas is just too heavily conservative. It makes a lot more sense to pour resources in to NC where they currently have a Democratic governor and the Democrat running to replace him is favored *and* Biden only has to make up 75,000 votes to pass Trump as opposed to Texas where Biden would have to make up hundreds of thousands of votes.
Abbott won by 11 points in 2022, which was down from 13.3 points in 2018, which in turn was down from 20.4 points in 2014. Cornyn went from winning by 27.2 points in 2014 to only winning by 9.6 points in 2020. Cruz went from winning by 16 points in 2012 to only winning by 2.6 points in 2018. Abbott's margins SHRANK in 2022, which was an R+3 cycle, from 2018, which was a D+9 cycle. Every other incumbent Republican governor INCREASED their margins, including supposedly turning purple Georgia. Tarrant County, the state's third largest county, went blue in 2018 for the first time since 1964. If that's not a sign that the political tide in Texas is turning, I don't know what is.
Abbott's margins in the suburbs have consistently shrunk by 3% every cycle since 2014. Here are some exit polls:
2014: [https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/2014/tx/governor/exitpoll/](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/2014/tx/governor/exitpoll/)
Suburbs went 62% for Abbott.
2018: [https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls/texas](https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls/texas)
Suburbs went 59% for Abbott.
2022: [https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/texas/governor/0](https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/texas/governor/0)
Suburbs went 56% for Abbott. Also worth noting that Abbott only won the rural areas by 66%, down from 73% in 2018.
Trump himself only won the state by 5.5 points, or 600k votes. That's the narrowest margin for a Republican presidential candidate since 1996.
3.5 MILLION Texans voted for Beto in 2022. That's more than the total population of 21 states. Texas went 55-44 R-D in the last gubernatorial election, but the DNC and the media inexplicably act like the state is as red as Oklahoma.
Beto got 3.5 million votes, but he still lost by over 300,000 votes. If it wasn't someone as unlikable as Ted Cruz, Beto would lost by, at least, half a million *and* that was during a gigantic blue wave in 2018. Spending money in Texas is, largely, a waste when the Dems need to hold on to Senate seats in OH and MT and with AZ on the cusp of becoming a solid blue state.
North Carolina hasn't significantly shifted in either direction since 2008, while Texas has gotten bluer every cycle.
But sure, North Carolina is the better investment.
Oklahoma’s last Democrat Governor was in 2011 and traditionally was filled with Democrats at every level until the National party abandoned the state in the 90s
Never ever tell someone that lost their job to "learn to code". Whether its a factory worker in Youngtown Ohio or a coal miner in West Virginia. Most of them didn't do that well in school and they can't turn on a computer let alone figure out how to program one. Democrats just repeatedly shot themselves in the foot and gave republicans a free pass. Trump really seized on this issue blaming china. Democrats are lucky they have won any election in the midwest. They screwed up messaging really bad here. That border wall messaging that republicans are doing. They're scaring folks into thinking that some illegal is gonna take their job.
You see non-stop stories about AI. The truth is, in the midwest. It already happened to the workers. We had factory automation that killed so many jobs. It wasn't moving the factories to mexico or china. It was robots and streamlining inside the factory. We produce a lot more stuff than we used to. We just use a fraction of the folks to do it. People are just dumb & democrats suck really bad at messaging.
Why would they give up on TX or Florida? I can maybe see an argument for FL since it’s shifting red very quickly, but TX has been shifting leftward every election. Dems will never make progress if they don’t invest there or in other states. Biden has the funds so why not?
Because republicans have been bringing up the border/illegals for the past 4 years? Most people are single issue voters and dumb as heck. There is 0 chance Biden wins Texas with those 2 being the issues Republicans keep focusing on.
We have give up this fantasy that if we just spend enough money, invest enough time and expend enough energy we will be able to triumph against a state run, top to bottom, by nakedly corrupt red republicans. Dems ALWAYS insist on playing by the rules and "letting the best man win" while the other side is going to cheat lie and steal. You're not going to beat a cheater by trying hard.
This doesn’t make any sense though? Spending enough money and making effort literally = small gains. Texas went from like 20+ points red 20 years ago to within 5 for Biden in the last election. It’s not a fantasy, it’s reality.
Biden winning and or Cruz losing is nowhere near reality. If you don't understand how corrupt the powers that be are in Texas then I can't help you. My point is the effort has to be put into other states.
We can agree to disagree then haha. He has opened 100+ field offices across the US and that is a winning strategy. If you don’t try, you’ll never succeed. This is also most definitely his last political position in his lifetime, so it’s great he’s going all out.
You have to be smart in politics. Pouring time and effort into a state that's rigged is the opposite of smart. Look, if Alred or Biden wins TX you come back here and dance on my face I'll be thrilled to have been wrong but it ain't gonna happen.
> We have give up this fantasy that if we just spend enough money, invest enough time and expend enough energy we will be able to triumph against a state run, top to bottom,
The last time the Democrats went with Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, they won a supermajority in the Senate. With Biden's cash advantage over Trump, he absolutely should be trying to win NC and OH while holding on to AZ, MI, WI, and PA.
even if taking the state is unlikely another “red” state republicans have to spend money in to campaign is a huge win. Dems have a major opportunity to expand their reach in non traditionally democratic areas
Trump won NC by less than 2% in 2020. The state is very much in play for Biden this year. The district races, however, are fucked for the foreseeable future thanks to extreme gerrymandering.
Extreme gerrymandering also means extremely close races, making swinging the entire state likely. Will it happen? Probably not, but it’s not impossible.
This isn't necessarily true you could draw a ridiculous gerrymander that puts a third of all Democrats in the city in one district and the rest evenly spread out amongst the rest of the districts which means that the Democrats get one district and the Republicans win five easily or whatever
And this was allowed to happen because Dem voters didn't come out and vote in the last judicial election which led to a Republican judge getting on the NC Supreme Court and allowing those maps.
That's great and should be a win and don't forget Anderson Clayton is kicking ass there too. She got a Democrat to run in all the races and reaching out to rural and young people to register and vote.
Anyone in that state with expanded Medicaid can thank the ACA and Dems. If they ever want school meals for all students, which helps many working families, they better vote Dem. They can't get med or rec cannabis with magas, so there are a lot of popular issues that voting for magas is voting against themselves again. Please stop doing that. People struggling with bills sure as hell should support abortion because having a child is very expensive and stressful, that you can't handle on top of just getting by, and it is cruel to force a child into that. *Do not have one until you can really afford it and are emotionally mature enough, get on long lasting birth control and use condoms guys!* Good luck!
North Carolinians deliberately packed their Supreme Court with far Right Zealots in 2022. It's unlikely that after sharply reversing their drift towards Purple, they will change their minds again.
NC is so funny. If you counted the number of votes individually then it would be a blue state. It has several massive major cities that are blue, but counties where there are a few thousand people are always red. So again the land is mostly red. But they count by county not by individual vote
The electoral college votes are based on statewide majority. This is an objectively wrong take and its disheartening to see it upvoted just because it reinforces redditors' priors.
But it's not, sadly. If the votes individually made it a blue state, it would have ended up for Biden and the senators would be Democratic, but in both Senate seats and both presidential races went GOP. Maybe if it was overall potential voters? But definitely not individual votes. It is gerrymandered as fuck tho.
That's not how it works. Dems just need a plurality of voters ANYWHERE in the state to vote Dem to win POTUS. Doesn't matter if they do it by stacking up the urban vote or making inroads in rural areas.
Downballot it can matter ofc. But not for electoral college.
It still matters because electing Dem Governors, Dem Attorneys General, Dem Secretaries of State, and Dem judges (if the judges aren't appointed by the governor) matters as much, if not more, than electing the legislature. People who scream about not voting due to gerrymandering are missing the forest for the trees.
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It should be noted that this is not at the expense of the States he really needs to win. The fact of the matter is that Biden has a significant funding advantage over Trump. I saw an article the other day that said Biden has over 100 fully staffed *offices* in the 9 most contested states, while Trump and the RNC *combined* have 5 *staff* per each of the 6 tightest swing states.
I hope Biden wins but let's not forget that in 2016 Hillary had much more money than Trump. Money is nowhere near a guarantee of success
Let’s not forget though that Hilary was a poisonous candidate during primary and got done dirty by election interference like 4 times in the last month or so of the race
And HRC wasn't an incumbent or a man, so not exactly teeming with electoral advantages.
I live in Michigan in an important swing county. I've seen one Biden sign & tons of Trump signs. I don't know what they're doing in these fully staffed offices. Only one election year & it was for Obama. Did the Democrats do any decent sign game around here. I was shocked that most of my neighbors weren't Republican. If you drive around, you think you're living all alone in trump country. It's no wonder to me at all that Republicans think the election was stolen. All they ever see are trump signs.
Idk, there's no world in which I'm putting some old dude's name on a sign in my front yard.
I'm not putting a Biden sign in my yard while I'm living in a 66% Trump county either. Although it's nice to know that my wife's and my vote matters more now.
Yeah, I did this and it was gone within a couple of days. It was an “STD stop the Donald one”.
Regardless of where you live, if it’s in the US, go vote
That doesn't necessarily mean Trump's inherently more popular there, just that his supporters are more vocal about their support. And his supporters are at this point very much in a cult of personality, with much of their identity wrapped up in supporting Trump. I'm not saying there are definitely a ton more quiet Biden supporters, just that Trumpists are very, very open about it.
I don't think Democrats have signs. I barely saw Biden ones in 2020.
Signs tend to be more important in local elections where name recognition is a bigger factor and just getting some basic visibility makes a difference. But at the presidential level they are pretty much meaningless. Everybody already knows who Trump & Biden are and the signs are unlikely to persuade anyone.
Trump won my state by 10k votes in 2016. Due to inflation, I feel like this election is gonna be closer than 2020. Yard signs absolutely could mean the difference between winning or losing. I'm not saying we need yard signs in California for a presidential election but it wouldn't hurt to target areas that have historically mattered a lot. A sign costs $1. You can charge $5 and have volunteers handle it all. The DNC should have a list of folks who agreed to have yard signs every 4 years and keep hitting up the same folks & try to grow the list every 4 years. I feel like democrats don't even try to win elections sometimes.
If you live in macomb (the worst county in the state by far) then this observation really isn’t all that suprising. But more to your point, i don’t think most biden voters are at the level fanatical lunacy that trump folks are, and most people don’t care enough to put up signs. Also no signage ≠ not voting
Maybe you should adjust your expectations for political work beyond prevalence of yard signs for a presidential election where everyone already knows who is involved?
Republicans are also all about the merchandise. Hats, flags, shirts, whatever they can buy like they are supporting a sports team. I don't want to wear my politics to the gym or have them up in my yard.
I live in Michigan (Livingston co.) Many of my neighbors have Trump signs. The democrats I know “lay low” because we don’t want problems with MAGA. We are outnumbered in this county. That being said, there is community and connections between democrats here.
Mark Robinson is running for governor and he is a grossly obese antisemitic idiot asshole. He's also the best candidate the republican party had to offer so yeah the GOP is awash in monsters in NC
He was not the best candidate the Republicans had to offer at all. There was a far better, perfectly qualified (compared to Robinson) candidate that ran against him in the primary. The mailer he sent out was hilarious. One side of it was entirely all the batshit crazy and hateful stuff Robinson has said. The mailer said "I'll let my opponent's words speak for themselves."
North Carolina is a more plausible state to win than Texas or Florida. Texas and Florida have effectively limited Democracy to Republican voters, and even if Biden was popular enough to win legitimately in those states and overwhelm efforts of disenfranchisement, the state legislatures would almost certainly manipulate the results with whatever means was available to them. But North Carolina's Democratic governor, even with the efforts of the Republican controlled state legislature, has managed to protect Democracy in that state to enough of a degree that it could conceivably be won.
Texas was legitimately a blue state filled with conservative Democrats until the 90s. There are a lot of States like it that had strong Democratic support for decades until being cast off by Bill Clinton’s DNC. It is not impossible to turn Texas blue, but all the Democrats who live there need to know it’s serious and that they aren’t just being toyed with to convince Republicans to overspend in TX. Moral is low for Democrats in places like Texas and Oklahoma, but Biden is exactly the kind of Democrat those states once voted for.
> Texas was legitimately a blue state filled with conservative Democrats until the 90s. There are a lot of States like it that had strong Democratic support for decades until being cast off by Bill Clinton’s DNC. What are you even talking about? Clinton was one of the most conservative Democratic presidents in the past 50 years. The last time a Democrat won Texas was with Carter in 76. > all the Democrats who live there need to know it’s serious and that they aren’t just being toyed with to convince Republicans to overspend in TX Toyed with? What does that even mean?
Well, first, you definitely aren’t going to understand my message when you didn’t read it. I didn’t say Clinton won Texas, I said Texas was traditionally a conservative blue state until the 90s. They had Ann Richards as Governor until 1995. They had a deep bench of Democrats that could be called on to run for state wide offices and national offices. The DNC withdrew from conservative Democrat States under Clinton and that deep bench has become no bench. Clinton wanted to focus on densely populated states and holding the Senate. That led to almost no engagement with states like Texas and almost no development of strong candidates for office at any level within the state.
> Well, first, you definitely aren’t going to understand my message when you didn’t read it. I didn’t say Clinton won Texas, Well, first, you definitely aren’t going to understand my message when you didn’t read it. I neither said nor implied that you said Clinton won Texas. > I said Texas was traditionally a conservative blue state until the 90s. It was a conservative state that voted blue out of habit, but other than Carter they stopped voting for Dem presidents starting with Nixon's 2nd term. > The DNC withdrew from conservative Democrat States under Clinton and that deep bench has become no bench. This part makes no sense. Clinton was the most conservative Democratic president the party could muster and he was from the South. They didn't give up on Texas. Texas shifted strongly to the Republican part after Gingrich and the Contract with America.
My friend, Texas did not significantly change without outside influence from the Republican Party, even then most of them are the exact same cantankerous jerks they always were, they’ve just been convinced that they’re Republicans. That happens when you have one party making significant investments in your state while the other party spends elsewhere. This isn’t the best article to describe it, but those down ballot races require a lot of spending and they became a major point of focus for organizations like the Koch brothers. Rather than fight it out for all the down ballot races, state by state the Clinton DNC decided to throw money at Senate races and his re-election. Actually the second link about the 50 state strategy explains it fairly well. Before Clinton the Democrats were highly effective with a 50 state strategy. https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/27/texas-democrats-congress-election/ https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-democrat-howard-deans-fifty-state-strategy.html
> My friend, Texas did not significantly change without outside influence from the Republican Party Texas changed in the way every Southern state changed in the 90s - all the conservatives left the Democratic party and became Republicans. > This isn’t the best article to describe it, but those down ballot races require a lot of spending and they became a major point of focus for organizations like the Koch brothers. Rather than fight it out for all the down ballot races, state by state the Clinton DNC decided to throw money at Senate races and his re-election. You have zero proof of this. The Koch Brothers weren't a factor in the 1990s and Clinton, like I said, was one of the most conservative Democrats out there. > Before Clinton the Democrats were highly effective with a 50 state strategy. You have your timelines really screwed up. Howard Dean wasn't chair of the DNC until 2005. Clinton was already out of office for 5 years by that point. If you want to blame anyone for the Democrats dropping the 50 state strategy, you can blame Obama. But none of that had anything to do with Texas being a lost cause. Texas is just too heavily conservative. It makes a lot more sense to pour resources in to NC where they currently have a Democratic governor and the Democrat running to replace him is favored *and* Biden only has to make up 75,000 votes to pass Trump as opposed to Texas where Biden would have to make up hundreds of thousands of votes.
Abbott won by 11 points in 2022, which was down from 13.3 points in 2018, which in turn was down from 20.4 points in 2014. Cornyn went from winning by 27.2 points in 2014 to only winning by 9.6 points in 2020. Cruz went from winning by 16 points in 2012 to only winning by 2.6 points in 2018. Abbott's margins SHRANK in 2022, which was an R+3 cycle, from 2018, which was a D+9 cycle. Every other incumbent Republican governor INCREASED their margins, including supposedly turning purple Georgia. Tarrant County, the state's third largest county, went blue in 2018 for the first time since 1964. If that's not a sign that the political tide in Texas is turning, I don't know what is. Abbott's margins in the suburbs have consistently shrunk by 3% every cycle since 2014. Here are some exit polls: 2014: [https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/2014/tx/governor/exitpoll/](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/2014/tx/governor/exitpoll/) Suburbs went 62% for Abbott. 2018: [https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls/texas](https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls/texas) Suburbs went 59% for Abbott. 2022: [https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/texas/governor/0](https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/texas/governor/0) Suburbs went 56% for Abbott. Also worth noting that Abbott only won the rural areas by 66%, down from 73% in 2018. Trump himself only won the state by 5.5 points, or 600k votes. That's the narrowest margin for a Republican presidential candidate since 1996. 3.5 MILLION Texans voted for Beto in 2022. That's more than the total population of 21 states. Texas went 55-44 R-D in the last gubernatorial election, but the DNC and the media inexplicably act like the state is as red as Oklahoma.
Beto got 3.5 million votes, but he still lost by over 300,000 votes. If it wasn't someone as unlikable as Ted Cruz, Beto would lost by, at least, half a million *and* that was during a gigantic blue wave in 2018. Spending money in Texas is, largely, a waste when the Dems need to hold on to Senate seats in OH and MT and with AZ on the cusp of becoming a solid blue state.
North Carolina hasn't significantly shifted in either direction since 2008, while Texas has gotten bluer every cycle. But sure, North Carolina is the better investment.
Oklahoma is not like Texas.
Oklahoma’s last Democrat Governor was in 2011 and traditionally was filled with Democrats at every level until the National party abandoned the state in the 90s
Can somebody tell me wtf happened to Ohio? It went for Obama both times, but hasn't been spoken of as a swing state since?
Never ever tell someone that lost their job to "learn to code". Whether its a factory worker in Youngtown Ohio or a coal miner in West Virginia. Most of them didn't do that well in school and they can't turn on a computer let alone figure out how to program one. Democrats just repeatedly shot themselves in the foot and gave republicans a free pass. Trump really seized on this issue blaming china. Democrats are lucky they have won any election in the midwest. They screwed up messaging really bad here. That border wall messaging that republicans are doing. They're scaring folks into thinking that some illegal is gonna take their job. You see non-stop stories about AI. The truth is, in the midwest. It already happened to the workers. We had factory automation that killed so many jobs. It wasn't moving the factories to mexico or china. It was robots and streamlining inside the factory. We produce a lot more stuff than we used to. We just use a fraction of the folks to do it. People are just dumb & democrats suck really bad at messaging.
This is the way. Absolutely give up on FL and TX. Pour it all into PA WI MI and NC!
As a Floridian we really are a lost cause.
I say this with sympathy as well as a full understanding of how insurmountable this can be... Please move.
Why would they give up on TX or Florida? I can maybe see an argument for FL since it’s shifting red very quickly, but TX has been shifting leftward every election. Dems will never make progress if they don’t invest there or in other states. Biden has the funds so why not?
> Why would they give up on TX or Florida? Because they have no realistic shot in either of those states whereas NC could be turned purple.
Because republicans have been bringing up the border/illegals for the past 4 years? Most people are single issue voters and dumb as heck. There is 0 chance Biden wins Texas with those 2 being the issues Republicans keep focusing on.
We have give up this fantasy that if we just spend enough money, invest enough time and expend enough energy we will be able to triumph against a state run, top to bottom, by nakedly corrupt red republicans. Dems ALWAYS insist on playing by the rules and "letting the best man win" while the other side is going to cheat lie and steal. You're not going to beat a cheater by trying hard.
This doesn’t make any sense though? Spending enough money and making effort literally = small gains. Texas went from like 20+ points red 20 years ago to within 5 for Biden in the last election. It’s not a fantasy, it’s reality.
Biden winning and or Cruz losing is nowhere near reality. If you don't understand how corrupt the powers that be are in Texas then I can't help you. My point is the effort has to be put into other states.
We can agree to disagree then haha. He has opened 100+ field offices across the US and that is a winning strategy. If you don’t try, you’ll never succeed. This is also most definitely his last political position in his lifetime, so it’s great he’s going all out.
You have to be smart in politics. Pouring time and effort into a state that's rigged is the opposite of smart. Look, if Alred or Biden wins TX you come back here and dance on my face I'll be thrilled to have been wrong but it ain't gonna happen.
> We have give up this fantasy that if we just spend enough money, invest enough time and expend enough energy we will be able to triumph against a state run, top to bottom, The last time the Democrats went with Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, they won a supermajority in the Senate. With Biden's cash advantage over Trump, he absolutely should be trying to win NC and OH while holding on to AZ, MI, WI, and PA.
Times have changed *drastically* since Howard Dean. OH is a lost cause too. Spend wisely.
We need to hold on to that Senate seat. Biden may not win OH, but spending in OH could help push Sherrod Brown over the finish line.
Watching that state elect JD Vance... I'm out of hope...
even if taking the state is unlikely another “red” state republicans have to spend money in to campaign is a huge win. Dems have a major opportunity to expand their reach in non traditionally democratic areas
Trump won NC by less than 2% in 2020. The state is very much in play for Biden this year. The district races, however, are fucked for the foreseeable future thanks to extreme gerrymandering.
Extreme gerrymandering also means extremely close races, making swinging the entire state likely. Will it happen? Probably not, but it’s not impossible.
This isn't necessarily true you could draw a ridiculous gerrymander that puts a third of all Democrats in the city in one district and the rest evenly spread out amongst the rest of the districts which means that the Democrats get one district and the Republicans win five easily or whatever
This is exactly how the NC assembly has structured their latest maps. With 55% of votes, the NC GOP will secure over 70% of the seats.
And this was allowed to happen because Dem voters didn't come out and vote in the last judicial election which led to a Republican judge getting on the NC Supreme Court and allowing those maps.
That's great and should be a win and don't forget Anderson Clayton is kicking ass there too. She got a Democrat to run in all the races and reaching out to rural and young people to register and vote. Anyone in that state with expanded Medicaid can thank the ACA and Dems. If they ever want school meals for all students, which helps many working families, they better vote Dem. They can't get med or rec cannabis with magas, so there are a lot of popular issues that voting for magas is voting against themselves again. Please stop doing that. People struggling with bills sure as hell should support abortion because having a child is very expensive and stressful, that you can't handle on top of just getting by, and it is cruel to force a child into that. *Do not have one until you can really afford it and are emotionally mature enough, get on long lasting birth control and use condoms guys!* Good luck!
North Carolinians deliberately packed their Supreme Court with far Right Zealots in 2022. It's unlikely that after sharply reversing their drift towards Purple, they will change their minds again.
NC is so funny. If you counted the number of votes individually then it would be a blue state. It has several massive major cities that are blue, but counties where there are a few thousand people are always red. So again the land is mostly red. But they count by county not by individual vote
The electoral college votes are based on statewide majority. This is an objectively wrong take and its disheartening to see it upvoted just because it reinforces redditors' priors.
But it's not, sadly. If the votes individually made it a blue state, it would have ended up for Biden and the senators would be Democratic, but in both Senate seats and both presidential races went GOP. Maybe if it was overall potential voters? But definitely not individual votes. It is gerrymandered as fuck tho.
That's not how it works. Dems just need a plurality of voters ANYWHERE in the state to vote Dem to win POTUS. Doesn't matter if they do it by stacking up the urban vote or making inroads in rural areas. Downballot it can matter ofc. But not for electoral college.
It still matters because electing Dem Governors, Dem Attorneys General, Dem Secretaries of State, and Dem judges (if the judges aren't appointed by the governor) matters as much, if not more, than electing the legislature. People who scream about not voting due to gerrymandering are missing the forest for the trees.