Congressional staff say the mood inside the Capitol is tense, stifling and bewildering as members brush off their constituents’ outrage.

111 points

Let’s see how the strategy of ignoring calls from your base a year before a contested election that your opponent polls higher in key states works out for them. It feels like the DNC is trying to lose in 2024 right now.

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79 points
*

It feels like the DNC is trying to lose in 2024 right now.

And this is new, how? It feels like they’re trying to throw every election. They never even bother to call out Republicans on their shenanigans and they spend a lot of time being like “We know the fascists passed these very fascist laws, but everything falls apart if we don’t take the obviously fascist laws they passed with the seriousness they deserve by enforcing those fascist laws. We have to play by these rules they’ve set that benefit them and harm us, because if we did that, it would be unfair and undemocratic.” (Conveniently ignores Republicans being unfair and undemocratic.)

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7 points

That’s fair. The DNC loves to rig things because they think they know better than the voters they rely on…

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2 points
*

Ehh. It’s more like… what other choice do you have? Don’t gotta outrun the bear…just the GOP.

This is why we need ranked choice voting.
Anyone who’s even brushed the surface of game theory knows fptp is the easiest to manipulate and a race to the bottom.

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4 points

Controlled opposition!
The democrats indeed find the Republicans very useful for moderating Democrat policies without taking the blame.

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26 points

Lose to who? The republicans?

Sweetie, we’ve already established the gridlock of ‘lesser evil.’ All democrats have to do to win is be slightly less worse than the republicans, which is incredibly easy.

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22 points

Which works every time, unless it doesn’t work.Like when Hillary Clinton lost against Donald Trump.

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20 points

Yeah… hillary clinton wasn’t a good nominee.

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13 points

Don’t forget her campaign literally centered Trump in her “pied piper” strategy.

She built her own political demise.

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5 points

Except that right now Trump polls higher than Biden nearly across the board in the battleground states. You’d like to think it should be an easy victory against someone with multiple ongoing criminal court cases, but Biden is just that bad of a candidate.

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-2 points

The poll ur referring to is landline calls, bro… No one under 40 has a landline.

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18 points

If true, we peons pay the price for that, not them.

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-7 points

Let’s see how the strategy of ignoring calls from your base a year before a contested election that your opponent polls higher in key states works out for them. It feels like the DNC is trying to lose in 2024 right now.

the “vote for the lesser evil” crowd are an overwhelming majority and, they not only don’t care that dems don’t deserve your vote; but will use that overwhelming majority voice to blame you for enabling trump.

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5 points

Okay, but the fact is there are only two viable choices and every vote that isn’t for Biden supports and enables Trump. That is true despite Biden being terrible. And he’s nowhere near as terrible as Trump. Read about Project 2025. People need to know about it. That is what Trump wants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

It is vital that be stopped. And that means voting for Biden.

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1 point

This election there actually could be 3 viable candidates. Both major parties have such awful candidates that RFK Jr is polling the highest a 3rd party candidate has in a very long time. They show Biden and Trump both in the 30s percentile wise and RFK Jr at 24%. The “protest vote” seems to get stronger and stronger.

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5 points

I think the crowd of apathetic voters is much larger than the “lesser evil” crowd. But the lesser evil crowd sends their hate towards third party voters rather than the apathetic.

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5 points

The cold, hard truth is that with a winner take all system, it will always be a lesser of two evils situation. Just like they want it to be.

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77 points

Congressional staff say the mood inside the Capitol is tense, stifling and bewildering as members brush off their constituents’ outrage.

Why would this be any different than every other issue about which they’re ignoring their constituents?

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43 points
*

Just send out a form letter response, geeze! How hard is it really to ignore your constituents effectively? I’ve been receiving form letter responses for decades now, it’s not hard guys! You don’t even have to functionally address any points made by your constituents, just shit out a form letter with a loose connection to the ideas presented and you’re good.

The number of times an elected official has made it clear that my opinions mean fuck-all to them is extremely high.

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8 points

Would help if we didn’t cap the house of reps.

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-22 points
*

Politicians have armies of statistics and pollsters to study people’s opinions and feedback.

They carefully choose a demographic groups they choose to appeal to, and they pick issues that will allow them to capture enough people who will begrudgingly support them as possible.

They don’t need the 1500th phone call saying the exact same thing as the last 1400 to understand who they’re representing and what their opinions are.

There are times contacting your representative in this way is important. When your road is fucked up or your local company is doing something they shouldn’t and nobody in the media or on the internet is talking about it.

Or sending a letter, answering a poll, so that their data people can sit and count them to figure out what they need to do in the next election cycle.

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16 points

There are times contacting your representative in this way is important. When your road is fucked up or your local company is doing something they shouldn’t and nobody in the media or on the internet is talking about it.

But not literal genocide?

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-13 points

The representative is very well aware of what’s going on in Israel and is very aware of the protests and the opinions people have about it. You’re not informing them, and you’re not actually contributing anything by spamming them with phone calls about it.

And if you want to see literal genocide, let the Palestinians rule “from the river to the sea”. What they do to the Jews will make isis look like children in terms of their cruelty.

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46 points
*

On the one hand, congressmen know that if they don’t back Israel unconditionally, they will be accused of being antisemitic, in league with Nazis.

On the other hand, Israel routinely violates human rights, it conducts an apartheid regime in the West Bank, it sponsors settlers whose actions clearly violate international law, and its conduct in Gaza looks more like genocide than it doesn’t. And it does all of that with US backing, despite US law forbidding the US from giving military aid to countries that …violate human rights.

So, if you recognize any of that, you’re a Nazi?

It’s so frustrating to know that our elected leaders are made to not recognize actual human rights violations, for fear of being accused of antisemitism even though Israel’s government is not the same thing as the Jewish people.

My social media is full of Jews pointing out that Israel’s actions goes against their faith, that they experience pain and shame knowing that Israel claims to do them in the name of Judaism.

Just once I wish American congresspeople had it in them to exhibit anything like moral courage.

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7 points

Didn’t Biden already call for a cease-fire not long ago? The best he could do is pulling funding at this stage, putting boots on the ground would be an attack on the spiritual holy land of a variety of religious fanatics and against Zionist beliefs that gentiles should know their place, unless of course Ben himself called on Biden for some imaginary reason 🤔

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9 points

No. He called for a pause, and that’s what we got. Now there’s a short pause every day while they reload.

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6 points

President can’t “pull funding”. They can only veto a bill.

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2 points
*

A distinction without difference since he isn’t even asking Congress to pull funding nor is he even calling on anyone to just stop killing people.

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7 points

It’s so crazy because I’m seeing the exact opposite. A bunch of Jewish folks in my extended family being vehemently pro Israel. It’s wild.

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36 points

Oh no, they’re inconvenienced by people telling the U.S. not to support the bombing of civilians in Gaza. How terrible…

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16 points

They aren’t actually inconvenienced.

Probably enjoying a nice lobster brunch right now.

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22 points

You know how many people actually complained about Janet Jackson’s boob reveal at the Superbowl?

25

It’s just that they each called 1,000 times.

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16 points
*

I don’t understand why it’s not considered harassment of an elected official when they are doing that.

Calling a few times, sure no big deal, but a thousand times for each person? That’s fully in the territory of harassment and abuse.

You shouldn’t be rewarded for that behavior by fucking giving in to it.

Especially when rewarding them is saying “Okay, because you harassed us so much we’ve decided your opinion matters and we’ll actually do something about this issue.”

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6 points

Before they figured out what went on they did reward them. The FCC fined the broadcasters millions of dollars.

Point is that phone calls aren’t a good Guage of public opinion. Non form letter e-mails or letters are much better.

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