I make TikTok-styled succinct comments for those of you who like to cut to the chase right away.
As requested by some viewers, I’m pasting the transcript here:
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People ask me why I never talked about the primaries.
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So much drama was going on.
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Well, I don’t really care about who won the primaries.
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Here’s why.
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Democrats may look much different from each other,
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and Republicans may look much different from each other.
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But when it comes to the voting record, lawmakers within each party are roughly the same.
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These are the progressive scores of US senators based on their voting records.
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Obviously, the most conservative Democrat is John Fetterman.
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He has a score of 76, way lower than other Democrats, right?
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The others are all in the 80s and 90s.
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But look at the least conservative Republican, Susan Collins.
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She’s definitely less conservative than All the other knuckleheads, right?
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But if you look at her score based on her voting record, guess how much?
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16.
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Fetterman is 76 and Collins is 16.
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So when it comes to how they vote,
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The most conservative Democrat is still five times as progressive as
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the least conservative Republican.
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In other words, a senator’s partisanship is the single best indicator of their voting intention.
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The House is about the same.
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Their personality still matters, of course.
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John Fetterman and Elizabeth Warren probably don’t like each other very much.
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But the way they vote is still roughly the same.
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That’s why I don’t quite pay attention to who wins the primaries,
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but I’m nervous as fuck about how many D’s and R’s will eventually get in Congress.
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There was a time when Congress had a lot of cross voting,
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like Democrats vote with Republicans and Republicans vote with Democrats.
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But that ship has sailed.
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In the last 50 years, the two parties became way more distinct and way more polarized over time.
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Trump is probably the last nail of the coffin.
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He made it nearly impossible for Democrats to vote with him
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and also made it nearly impossible for Republicans to vote against him.
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Everyone is either his minion or his enemy.
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There’s no legislative middle ground with this guy.
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So there’s a mountain of political science literature trying to explain
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the polarization in American politics.
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I’ve only read maybe less than 1% of it.
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So feel free to search for articles on Google Scholar and quench your curiosity.
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I will not attempt to explain it.
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But I can say that the pattern is unquestionable.
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Every Democrat in Congress,
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regardless of factions,
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will try to block most of Trump’s policies, let alone his coup.
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And every Republican in Congress will try to advance his agenda.
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They have to behave in a partisan way because that’s what their voters demand of them.
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So I’d say don’t worry too much about who won the primaries.
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We need to be extremely careful about which party wins the actual midterms.
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Because the D’s and R’s behind the lawmakers’ names will decide how they vote.
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Governors are a little harder to measure than lawmakers.
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because they don’t sit in the same room and vote on the same bills.
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But the anecdotal evidence is still pretty clear that in a swing state,
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having a Democratic governor, regardless of their personality, will be very different from having a Republican governor.
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Abortions, Healthcare, Cooperation with ICE, Public Education.
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Basically everything will be done differently based on their party labels alone.
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So here I have to mention Hassan Piker again.
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Sorry I talked about this guy too much.
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He was very involved in the primaries, attacking some Democrats with all his might.
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And most of his endorsed candidates did win.
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But when one of them lost, he literally had a meltdown.
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So when Piker read the report about Wisconsin voters switching from Francesco Hong,
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the person he endorsed, to David Crowley, he was mad.
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He was like,
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“I want to put boomers in the machine,
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in the contraption, and not just boomers, like anyone that says that.”
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What?
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Sorry I don’t know what a contraption is, but it doesn’t sound good.
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This kind of attitude is very unsettling.
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Apparently,
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Piker is not planning to help David Crowley or any Democrats he doesn’t like during the midterms.
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Based on his resentment,
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he may even sabotage them by saying something like,
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“you know, they’re worse than Republicans.”
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I just want to warn you guys about that.
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Piker behaves like that because he’s not a trained researcher.
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He doesn’t understand that there’s a significant policy difference
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between any Democrat and any Republican.
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He doesn’t understand or maybe doesn’t care that the American institutions,
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let alone many people’s lives, can be destroyed by a Republican victory.
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So please keep that in mind guys.
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