Lakshya Jain
software + ai engineer. cal alum + instructor. I do elections stuff at Split Ticket (https://www.split-ticket.org)
✉️ lakshya@splitticket.org
- This is a good question. Republicans not moderating post-2020 cost them badly. It meant that they flopped hard in 2022 and failed to flip the Senate, because they pursued the most extreme abortion agendas possible and ran repellant J6 challengers in battlegrounds. Politics never only works one way.
- @lauren-egan.bsky.social @lakshya.splitticket.org Wondering why there's so much ink spilled on how and why Democrats should moderate but when Republicans were in the minority post-2020, there was little (no?) such writing about the GOP. Is the GOP free from the need to moderate? Why?
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- fwiw although i disagree with your conclusion, this is the most coherent case i've seen laid out for the case "against" moderation. it's also what reagan did. the problem for me is that given the senate's bias, "not moderating" isn't an option, though you can argue that it's different for candidates
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- perhaps, but the *challengers* also have a similar track record observed; if you look at the blue dog-endorsed candidates, for instance, they consistently outperform the progressive challengers like mcleod-skinner, eastman, etc.
- People really don’t understand just how jokerified the Dem primary electorate has become. The emerging view is that after 8 years of “playing by the rules and going high”, it might be time to throw the rules out the window and do what the other side does.
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- Democrats consistently field higher quality candidates, yes.
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- they sort of did in 2022, but the big reason is that the story of 2020 as written was that the democrats blew it by not winning by more. trump nearly winning came as a shock to everyone.
- If 2024 was a football (soccer) match, the Democrats basically played 2024 down a man, 11v10, given the macro conditions and how badly Biden crippled the party. They still nearly flipped the House despite Trump carrying 230 districts.
- Trump still convinced a lot of voters he was "more moderate" than Harris, especially because he triangulated on abortion and Medicare/Medicaid, which helped with lower-propensity voters who were furious at Biden/Harris. But he had his own baggage — data suggests another R would likely do better.
- The Democrats spill a lot of ink on electability and spend a lot of time wailing over their failures, but as a result, they also consistently picked the more electable candidates, especially in swing states and swing seats. Polls suggest Trump won by way less in 2024 than folks like Haley would have
- I really wish we would ask "who does this help?" before undertaking an endeavor. Does this help any impoverished Black children? Does this make *anything* better for anyone? Why are we requiring this? And even if it doesn't take "hundreds of hours", *who is being helped by this requirement*?
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- This is pretty easily checkable. The city's own response and guidelines confirm that this requirement exists, though the city says no group has been denied funding because of it (which is not the contention the tweet is making, only that it causes delays) www.chicagotribune.com/2025/05/13/b...
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- It's quoted here. The city's response seems to confirm that it is a requirement. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/05/13/b...
- I wish we would be honest with ourselves here. Who are we trying to help? This helps nobody, and makes everyone dumber across the income and educational spectrums alike.
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- What? I am extremely upset that Texas did this and I think it is a terrible law that will meaningfully hurt a lot of students.
- Feels like it's worth repeating that the Trump administration's hawking of a crypto memecoin is one of the most blatantly obvious vectors of corruption that any US official has ever opened.
- TODAY the NYT publishes an investigation into the Trump memecoin $TRUMP and how it has turned into a extraordinary venue for foreign influence campaigns. What we are seeing is potentially corrupt attempts to change US policy by paying the Trump family money. This is no "Russian Hoax" nyti.ms/4kkv7D7
- Trump finally hired someone who's very good at their job (lobbying for Qatar) and liberals cannot stand it.
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- I blocked them and I think bluesky doesn't show replies from blocked users.
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- oh hi! i didn't know you were on here too :)
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- sigh
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- man...what in the world?
- OH MY GOD BLUESKY LEARN TO TAKE A FUCKING JOKE.
- We are making everyone stupider in the name of "equity" because parts of the anti-intellectual left decided that the way to address inequity in society is to take away high-achievement pathways, which flies in the face of all the data available. Hooray!
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- well I've said very clearly that Cuomo should *not* be tolerated and that a Democratic Party more concerned about scandals (like they were in 2019) probably wouldn't have tolerated his return, instead of now saying "well, everyone does it".
- Yes, because Democrats are locked out of power and have an R+5 Senate bias to overcome. Win more often and you can do what you want. Until then, getting angry on the phone doesn’t do anything to stop anyone.
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- I was among the first "data guys" to say Democrats would actually be fine fighting about the unjustness of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's removal, so let's please stick to reality here. Big difference between "let's give Jared Golden space to do what he wants" and "let's back suspending Habeas Corpus"
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- Gallego has backed 19 of 60 Trump nominations. www.azcentral.com/story/news/p...
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- but nonlinearities are built into models *way* more than you would expect.
- eh, if Democrats had 250 House seats like they did in 2008, they could get a lot more aggressive while also giving members in the reddest areas room to specifically break from the party (yes, you'd have more purple seat members, but it'd be easy to get some to play along at any given time).
- you can't pull the card of a mandate when you only win 222 house seats in a D+2 popular vote. big reason that the 2019 House caucus could afford to be that aggressive was that they washed into office on a D+7 wave.
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- that link has *absolutely nothing* to do with elections in even an abstract sense, and all of the hard election/ideological evidence suggests otherwise as well.
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- are we disagreeing on this? Both of us think Cuomo is a terrible candidate in many ways. I’m disagreeing with OP who is saying that they should stop caring about scandals like his because the Rs don’t either — though I’m making a broader point about it beyond just Cuomo.
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- I don’t think we’re disagreeing…? I said Cuomo is a pretty terrible candidate!
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- I would agree with that — but the initial statement was about democrats picking candidates that may not be as electable as they were in the past, and I really was speaking about battlegrounds there. (I don’t particularly care who they pick in Vermont, for example.)
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- I mean, yes lol (Gallego is a better model than Sinema is)
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- Democrats have had a big turnout advantage since Trump assumed office, so I don’t think this is factually correct.
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- That would be something, but at no point in the last four cycles has this been an especially reliable strategy. Harris’ numbers slid when she pivoted her ads to “character”. Democrats who overperform really tend to highlight policy and bipartisanship.
- What do people think is the best way to “fight fascism”? We have enough evidence that getting angry about Trump doesn’t win elections in the same way that running annoyingly heterodox and bipartisan-appealing candidates in purple seats does. Win and strip the power from Trump. Then do what you want.
- Thing that Trump has figured out and is using to full advantage is that when you make the rules and the public clearly doesn’t care, you can kind of do whatever you want.
- I think he meant to say “worse than Jan 6”, mixed up the events because he’s a genuine idiot, and then doubled down to avoid admitting it, which leads to the post looking hilariously unhinged even for the GOP base.
- Given that the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case has mostly faded from the news, I do expect Trump's ratings on immigration to slightly improve — which is, again, reflective of a point: when presidents get a lot of attention for taking drastic actions, the public actually usually moves *against* them.
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- lower salience. the garcia case was front page news for a while. it is going to be tough to get those to hit the same levels unless/until he actually manages to arrest and imprison notable elected officials.
- (For the love of God, please read what this post is saying before tossing your "fascist collaborator" replies here)
- Somehow *this* has sparked death threats, and my only conclusion is that you guys seriously need to seek professional help for mental health.
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- don't bother lol i'm blocking. there is no good that will ever come out of that interaction
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- but he didn’t
- My concern is that we may soon see Democrats lose some of the candidate quality edges we have enjoyed, at least among new challengers, if we are not careful about it. But the elites have actually mostly resisted this phenomenon, so upstart candidates may still struggle a lot more without backing.
- Cuomo is a great example of an absolutely repulsive candidate who would never have sniffed a recovery if this was six years ago. As it is, he’s likely to be the next mayor of NYC
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- Yeah you might be right lol
- I’m sorry but I genuinely don’t think the median Bluesky user is much better than the median X user if you guys can’t take a joke and start sending death threats to people over movies. thankfully unlike X, the block button is nuclear and makes this platform very pleasant.
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- I am not a progressive and I think Trump coming back is, in part, a direct result of Biden's mistakes and selfishness. The policy means nothing if it'll be rolled back or never implemented because Trump returned.
