Cause race isn’t over yet

damn Abrams didnt get the white vote even when she wanted to give like 100m to the police LOL

AK is guaranteed R, that's already R+1
WI is 99% reporting with a 1% lead by R, virtually impossible for it to flip, so that's R+2

AZ is a tossup state but based on projections I think it's likely to go D. There is a rare possibility it goes R during counts but I doubt it given what populations are left to count votes from. Most remaining votes are from urban areas which are likely to vote D and keep the current lead. That's D+1

NV is a tossup but my guess is R based similarly on vote counts.

That leaves GA as the real tossup race based on the run-off.

I also get this, but the republican party at large really isn't ready to distance themselves from Trump yet and that's gonna shoot themselves in the foot in '24 as the party begins splitting between MAGA and culture war sects of the party.

DeSantis is gonna be their next national star but by the time that he's running for prezi and getting nominated in national elections even more zoomers will be eligible and pissed off enough to vote so as long as republicans continue their current anti-LGBT culture war message. That's really a message that really only speaks to boomers and evangelicals (who are sizable but not sizable enough to determine elections, especially not by '28 when the older boomer republican voter base will be dying off at a greater frequency due to age).

If republicans were smart they'd get Trump to back down in '24 and just run DeSantis since in the national eye Trump is becoming spoiled milk but they definitely also realize how that would hurt a LARGE swath their base who are mainly in it for Trump so DeSantis will probably get primary'd out at best in 2024.
CRT as a concept and anti-trans propaganda are probably gonna be the next points to get ripped apart and scoffed at by dems over the next few years, like election fraud and Trump before it, now that those issues are (thankfully) leaving the national spotlight.

As an aside, thank GOD we're still ideally a few years out from a big national DeSantis push, Trump is dangerous but he's a dumbass, DeSantis is a monster and he's smart about how he packages his horrible views, which is way scarier in the context of an election, especially when you have a voter base that's as gullible and malleable as conservative evangelicals.

what were voter turnout %'s compared to past midterms?

Florida had a huge dem turnout problem compared to other places. The media onslaught really affects Florida compared to any other state.

more so referring to the house and senate races.

To most rural white Georgians she looked like an average elitist dem which is not an aesthetic that'll fly there under really any circumstance

she is a s*** candidate.

I mean yeah that too abrams is trash but aesthetics are a big determining factor too to a lot of rural repubs, they like relatable and simple, and she didn't present herself like that

beto getting floored is funny. need all these like 2016 dem primary characters to fade into obscurity cause wow mostly all of them are losers.

I agree with you much of the party isn't ready to move past Trump, and it's a complicated issue for GOP. They know Trump cult voters will never swing back D, BUT it's an internal power structure between Trumpists in the party who want him just because they like him (and opportnists running on such), and R strategists who realize they want to move past him - DeSantis voters included. However, candidate-wise, the real thing they're battling with is engaging GOP voter turn out rather than voter siding; they know (most of) their voters won't vote D, but the question is can a non-Trump candidate drive engagement in most states. That question is up in the air because it really depends on the state; in VA, the answer was yes, but the referendum was less about party and more about specific cultural issues. However, not every state is like that. Forcing a referendum like that requires the right candidates, which the GOP is very much short of.

I honestly disagree zoomers will make a difference. I also think you're more likely to see a split about zoomer voting populations than you would think. I'm not saying zoomers are hardcore rightists or anything, but there is an enthusiasm for rw talking points about them, particularly white, asian, and indian men statistically - so the argument about zoomers ends up being more about women and urban liberal men; the problem there is these people all live in areas that already predisposed to voting D, they are not in areas which otherwise are key swing states more than not.

I agree however that yeah, the GOP is not smart. However I do think you will start to see more DeSantis, Masters, JD Vance style rhetoric bolstering within the GOP as an opposition to arbitrary Trump rhetoric. There's not many other directions they can go, they just need to pick their battle. Abortion was not a smart battle to doubledown on. Trans stuff? Polling is not in liberal favor.

For sure. Would love to see a third party come to relevancy at some point in my life.

Im so confused by states that vote in governors and sentors from different parties

half-jokingly expecting some political op-ed about how the Supreme Court actually were covertly/blatantly trying to help Dems with their abortion ruling leading to high Dem voter turnout for midterms.

governors tend to be more pragmatic on issues whereas voting for house/senate isnt about the person its about adding a yes/no vote to a party platform's side

Yeah but I assumed that most voters dont look beyond party. Clearly not

Also NC barely avoided a R supermajority in the state legislature

Abortion still gonna be legal here

while thats crazy, there is a huge chance if Dobbs decision never hit the SC, then the GOP would have performed better. I don't think it's a mistake that many states which had abortion legalization on the ballot passed such with flying colors alongside democrat candidate victories. That said it can't be discounted just how badly Trump rhetoric and poorly picked candidates (see: Oz) influenced the election.

their best bet is to keep railing about the economy

yeah that's definitely true. the issue i think republicans have is they basically are the anti-policy party. Even with cultural issues, they aren't "alternatives", they're just nullifiers.

LGBT issues? Vote for us and we'll stop policy from passing.
Abortion? Vote for us and we'll stop policy from passing.
CRT? Vote for us and we'll stop policy from passing.

They know they can get away with campaigning on the economy...until someone asks them what they will actually do to fix it. Then it comes back to the same thing voters have heard since the 90s - we're gonna cut taxes for small businesses and reduce government spending.

in which races do you think trump rhetoric hurt the R candidate? I am surrounded by many R voters in my area, and im not so sure people are off trump just yet.

Pretty much all election deniers/Stop The Steal fanatics lost

imo it hurt swing voters & independent voters more than it hurt republicans - most trump voters are vote red no matter what, so there the only thing which is effected is voter engagement. However just as in 2020, when you parade around that all elections are stolen and your vote doesn't matter, then yeah, that reduces voter enthusiasm.

Senate & Gov races (among others) which were objectively hurt in performance by Trump rhetoric were PA, AZ, GA, OR, NY - even some rust belt states if you look at senate/house vs Wi. One thing to note is virtually every candidate who espoused election fraud rhetoric got destroyed, the only exception basically being Kari Lake in AZ.

I will note though you really need to look at individual districts. Many prior R+ districts swapped to D+ or split R/D. There are few districts which swapped D+ to R+ (despite this being predicted based on 2021 elections + post-21 polls) but many which went from R+ to balanced splits.

Definitely see this too, zoomers are gonna be a toss-up, especially the younger ones who casually espouse really right winged rhetoric in really casual ways (though I'm sure many of us, myself included, did this too before actually growing up and maturing outside of the bubbles we were surrounded by as kids).

If nothing else, the 2020s are gonna be an incredibly transformative decade for America, they already have been, and it'll be interesting to see how this internal power struggle plays out for the GOP. Religious sects will probably keep cycling them back around to abortion as a contentious talking point through 2024, especially post-Roe as deeper red states attempt to tighten down abortion laws to appease these bases.

Trans stuff will ideally begin swinging in the national eye during the mid-2020s like views on gay marriage did during the late 2000s as trans visibility increases, that said I have so little faith in this country as a whole on social issues like that that it's really too early to say with the current messaging. It wasn't more than 2 decades ago that trans issues were still incredibly taboo to talk about tho, so progress is definitely there, and more is certainly possible going forward.