In 2025 SC was the most popular state to migrate to and this was a list SC has been at the top of for 6 years in a row. I’m going to remain hopeful for Andrews. I’m going to stay focused on at least turning SC purple because that’s the energy we need.
The SC election will be decided by low information voters using the sign at their local gas station to power their decision. Gas is up $1 from a year ago and diesel is up $2. Diesel powers the farm economy in SC and is a powerful motivator. And diesel went up 30 cents yesterday, likely to be $8-10 per gallon by Election Day. So yes, Andrews is likely to win.
I try to remain positive at my own local level. I'm in the bright red part of California I call Calibama. We haven't elected a Democratic Representative since I've been here, well over 50 years. With our dum(b) top two primary elections, many elections we don't even get a Dem on the ballot. The two times we have, I've emptied my pockets for them and done a minimal amount of campaign related stuff, knowing my time and money are going nowhere. It's comforting to be surrounded by more sane districts and with the supermajority in state government, we're in pretty good hands.
But from this distance? Yeah. Darline is a shoe-in.
If Dr. Annie Andrews was Dr. Andy Andrews with the same great looks and political skills, then he'd have a shot against nepo baby Darlene. But Republican voters will only reluctantly vote for a woman for statewide office, and never for a Dem woman. And there are a lot more registered R's than D's in SC. The only way Andrews could squeak through is if a wide swath of Republican voters forget about the election or are so disgusted with what's going on nationally that they decide to not vote. (And that's a stretch because SC Republicans are more MAGA than most).
Fer cryin' out loud, there was some whackjob who wanted to have South Carolina leave the US to become an independent Christian theocracy back in the early '00s. I suspect the choice of state was not a coincidence.
I begin all of my reflections on why people behave the ways we do, collectively, with the notion that we are just monkeys with math. We barely stumble through as a species. We always have, always will. There is no grand plan, no inevitable progression toward a better world. We're just good at adaptive behaviors after the fact. Monkeys w math.
All that said, american conservatives seem particularly insistent on dragging us back to the early Oligocene.
Well might as well just vote and see what happens. I know some folks like to decry Dems for cheerleading facially longshot candidates but at the same time excoriate Dems for not running candidates in hostile areas. At least making the effort is something.
After all, power—especially unreconstructed power—never concedes.
I don't disagree with you-no seat should be uncontested. I just think people have gotten cynical about the mass hyping of candidates who really don't have much of a shot but (and this to me is the kicker) show up endlessly in your texts and emails begging for money "because we are within THREE POINTS and need a boost to put us over the top!" Democrats' #1 ask is ALWAYS for more dough.
In the last Florida gubernatorial election, Charlie Crist released polls that showed him tied with DeSantis. Crist lost by more than 20 points. I made one donation to Andrews because of something she did. But I have a limited set of donation funds and hope to direct them where they'll prove useful.
I know lots of people are upset about those kind of things. We don't seem to have a lot of richie rich sugar daddies and mamas to put money where it counts; like media infrastructure. So I will always tell people, don't send money if it annoys you but you need to do the votes.
Which is fine, but my feeling about it is that this approach suppresses votes more than anything else. The same thing for post-Citizens’ United ad buys.
It’s part of the grift complex that’s always looking for donations. The problem is they get so unrealistic with expectations that it makes people more cynical, not less.
Two things are true: 1) Dems do need to run everywhere and more importantly build their party everywhere, both during campaigns and in off years. Can’t just wait until campaign season to jump in and then get surprised when the results are meager. 2) Get out the vote for candidates like Andrews but don’t blow smoke up people’s asses about your candidate being able to win because she’s got a 41-41 tie in the reddest state in the country. There’s giving it your best in every race, bad there’s hopium and we don’t need hopium. It just makes people more cynical with every Amy McGrath.
Yeah. Last I saw in Texas it was Abbot 50 percent and Hinajosa 49 percent . I won’t hold my breath though. I’ve seen to many losses in Texas when we thought we had a chance .
Genuinely contesting the seats in states like SC will require candidates who don’t fit a national party profile. A Ted Cruz could never win in Oregon, even if I were the Dem nominee.
Yep—of course it’s no guarantee that a candidate better tailored to the state/district will win (voters tend to associate a candidate with their feelings about the party nationally) but it’s pretty much a given that a candidate who appeals to northern suburban liberals is going to be slaughtered in the Deep South.
And if you do run in Oregon I may have to travel out there to volunteer for the campaign!
That's why I tell people (especially the ones who like to post about "blargh Democrats ask for money all the time") to just do the vote. Don't even need to send money, just do the vote. But they also ought to be sharing social media posts too.
The problem is unreconstructed territory has to be clawed back; there are simply not enough free areas due to the way the United States is organized. So people should at least try.
That territory can't be clawed back though. You can't turn a tumor back into healthy tissue.
At this point I don't think the US is fixable at all, if it ever really was. Not in any realistic scenario. It would require millions upon millions of Republicans dying out all at once all across the country, or democratic supermajorities in all branches of government that would be willing to basically rewrite the entire body of laws to make it impossible for Republicans to ever get a voice in politics again, and I genuinely don't know which one of those scenarios is less likely.
Certainly they should vote, it’s just infuriating when the establishment (by which I mean the party organizations, well-funded campaigns, fundraising apparatuses, etc) just keeps plugging the grift, while doing nothing to do the unsexy work of creating new commutations networks, local offices and neighborhood organizations and local campaigns to get the party on a footing where it could seriously challenge the GOP in red states. Their emails and posts aren’t even made to persuade, just rack up more donations. No wonder even liberals hate them.
Another good reason to abolish the Senate. Or make it proportionate to population. Why should these South Carolina Republicans have as much say in government as all of New York, if they’re as hopeless as you say?
Republicans shouldn't have a say at all. They don't want a government. They want to destroy it from the top down. Giving them votes is like an oncologist giving a malignant tumor veto power over its own chemotherapy regimen.
I agree it’s silly to pretend that “tied at 41 percent” means this is truly a dead heat—the question is where the remaining 18 percent will break, and we saw this crap before in Kentucky where hey look, his constituents hated him but McConnell got re-elected by double digits again. Some liberal pollsters and pundits just love to torch their credibility with needless copium.
The issue for Democrats is to figure out why they’re so unpopular among noncollege voters (particularly white ones, but they’re losing ground even among nonwhite noncollege voters). Enough of this smug “they’re all just racist, even the nonwhite ones, apparently you need a college degree to not be racist” cope. Figure out how you lost so much ground over the decades, how despite Trump’s unpopularity your party still polls like jock itch, and what you can do about it. I have my pet theories (the party has failed to establish any direct communication networks with the public, sees itself as weak and projects that weakness, and consequently fails to even talk like normal people) but you’d think those with resources could put them towards figuring this out—it is their job after all—rather than tricking donors into thinking an educated liberal who codes as an urban professional is going to win South Carolina.
It's hard to disagree, because you're correct, but here's the problem. As long as Republicans can run successfully against a handful of trans women athletes and a handful of illegal votes (mostly Republican), and that's their entire campaign, where do we go from there?
That’s the rub, but it may not be as unfixabke as it seems. A lot of it isn’t so much what our side says, but how we say it, how we frame the issues, and more importantly that we are reaching our target audience where they are. A lot of the time they don’t hear from us at all, and we’re certainly not a regular trusted presence in their lives, and what they hear of us gets filtered through our enemies. Got to change that fir a start.
Ugh! I hate seeing posts and videos with "BREAKING" in the title, because, while it may be true at the time it's posted, after five minutes, it ain't true. Sometimes it's not even true when posted, so my deduction is that it's click bait.
I am hoping that Dr. Andrews wins, but I'm not holding my breath. I live in SC, in Spartanburg, Greenville's neighbor. It's sad to see many otherwise intelligent, rational people get all worked up over cultural war issues that the Republicans scream about, just so that they (the Republicans) can be elected to make life worse for everybody. These people think that they are voting in their own best interest, but are not. They don't blame the politicians that they vote for, however. They blame the folks out of power - those that the Republicans are screaming about. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I disagree with the "voting against their own best interest" idea. They *are* voting in their best interest. They just decided that white supremacy and Christian fascism are their best interest.
Framing things as them voting against their best interest falls apart considering how long the pattern of behavior has gone on, and it also makes them seem like they're just ill-informed or confused instead of actively fucking evil, which is what they actually are.
I don't think this country can be fixed, but if there is a way it has to start by acknowledging the fact that Republicans aren't lost sheep or ill-informed but well meaning. They're enemy combatants in a slaveholder rebellion that never really stopped. They're not neighbors that need to be rehabilitated, they're obstacles to be removed.
Yes, I have long argued that no one ever votes against their best interests and the liberal argument that anyone does so is condescending. It’s OK to say, “This is what those voters wanted and it’s not something we’d ever want to give them.”
My problem with it isn't the condescension (Republicans deserve much worse), it's the wishcasting. It goes beyond Trump's famous “I could shoot someone on fifth avenue” thing.
I mean, for fucks sake, house and Senate Republicans could go on a countrywide mass shooting tour like Vance Boelter, post the videos to Twitter, ger the raucous applause of every single Republican voter in the goddamn nation and I guarantee the next fucking day we'd get Schumer or Jeffries asking when their Republican friends across the aisle were finally going to stand up to trump.
I wish they'd stop desperately insisting that people who openly, gleefully threw aside their humanity are actually decent people deep down. They're fucking not. They're Nazi foot soldiers for fucks sake.
The fact Linsday Graham kept getting reelected, even if South Carolina voters didn't really like him, tells you exactly what you need to know about the state's core voters.
As this drags on, it’s become very clear to me at least that this isn’t about (not totally, anyway) pure racism or civic ignorance. There is a deep seated pathology in this country that was closely tended on a bipartisan basis for many, many years-extending beyond the memories of any of us here-but started to sprout and weed after Reagan and caught fire after Obama’s election. It’s grievance based and frankly there is a shit ton of reason for grievance in the US, which neither party has been interested in attending to and why the shrill exortations to “vote blue!” continue to fall on many deaf ears. Many people have had crap lives no matter who was president or in charge of Congress. They had hopes for retribution raised and dashed with Trump-although it has probably been fun for them to watch James Comey on the hot seat or USAID gutted, they are still materially much worse off. I don’t see how this ends with a country that looks much like what I grew up with, and I don’t think that’s even a bad thing. The process of change is incredibly painful, though.
As long as voters are angry at immigrants, LGBTQ people, Democrats, or whatever the cultural-war target of the moment happens to be, they aren't asking why their wages aren't keeping up, why healthcare is unaffordable, or why the people they've repeatedly elected aren't making their lives better.
And the politicians responsible never have to answer for any of it. They just find a new enemy and start the whole thing over again. It's Muslims in the darker corners right now. Everything old is new again.
It's amazing to me how poorly Democrats are received in many, many parts of the country, and frankly not without reason-their inability to make significant inroads despite two terms of malevolence, incompetence and in your face corruption says more about *them* than it does Republicans (if you are going to argue it's all just racism and stupidity I'm going to say right now I disagree). Annie Andrews is unlikely to win in South Carolina any more than the much-hyped Jamie Harrison did, or Amy McGrath in Kentucky. We can blame Fox News blah blah all we want but they have been around three decades now and Democrats have never had any real answer for it except to whine about it.
As I have said since Reagan, Republicans are maniacal but Democrats are wussy and voters will prefer crazy to timid every time.
Weak is the number 1 term I hear thrown around when people complain about Democrats. It's certainly fair to say they were blindsided by Trump and over a decade have blatantly failed to confront the ongoing threat he and his minions represent, the fecklessnees of which reached it's pinnacle during the Biden administration.
In 2025 SC was the most popular state to migrate to and this was a list SC has been at the top of for 6 years in a row. I’m going to remain hopeful for Andrews. I’m going to stay focused on at least turning SC purple because that’s the energy we need.
The SC election will be decided by low information voters using the sign at their local gas station to power their decision. Gas is up $1 from a year ago and diesel is up $2. Diesel powers the farm economy in SC and is a powerful motivator. And diesel went up 30 cents yesterday, likely to be $8-10 per gallon by Election Day. So yes, Andrews is likely to win.
I try to remain positive at my own local level. I'm in the bright red part of California I call Calibama. We haven't elected a Democratic Representative since I've been here, well over 50 years. With our dum(b) top two primary elections, many elections we don't even get a Dem on the ballot. The two times we have, I've emptied my pockets for them and done a minimal amount of campaign related stuff, knowing my time and money are going nowhere. It's comforting to be surrounded by more sane districts and with the supermajority in state government, we're in pretty good hands.
But from this distance? Yeah. Darline is a shoe-in.
You're probably correct.
If Dr. Annie Andrews was Dr. Andy Andrews with the same great looks and political skills, then he'd have a shot against nepo baby Darlene. But Republican voters will only reluctantly vote for a woman for statewide office, and never for a Dem woman. And there are a lot more registered R's than D's in SC. The only way Andrews could squeak through is if a wide swath of Republican voters forget about the election or are so disgusted with what's going on nationally that they decide to not vote. (And that's a stretch because SC Republicans are more MAGA than most).
All Republicans are MAGA, the only difference from one to another is how open they are about it.
Fer cryin' out loud, there was some whackjob who wanted to have South Carolina leave the US to become an independent Christian theocracy back in the early '00s. I suspect the choice of state was not a coincidence.
I begin all of my reflections on why people behave the ways we do, collectively, with the notion that we are just monkeys with math. We barely stumble through as a species. We always have, always will. There is no grand plan, no inevitable progression toward a better world. We're just good at adaptive behaviors after the fact. Monkeys w math.
All that said, american conservatives seem particularly insistent on dragging us back to the early Oligocene.
Disappointing, but obvious, no argument.
“just barely meets the qualifications for sentience“ Chefs kiss for this description.
Andrews wants Darline to debate her. Ms Darline needs to do a lot of studying for this next one if she does accept the challenge.
We all know Andrews is better. We also know that this is SC.
Well might as well just vote and see what happens. I know some folks like to decry Dems for cheerleading facially longshot candidates but at the same time excoriate Dems for not running candidates in hostile areas. At least making the effort is something.
After all, power—especially unreconstructed power—never concedes.
I don't disagree with you-no seat should be uncontested. I just think people have gotten cynical about the mass hyping of candidates who really don't have much of a shot but (and this to me is the kicker) show up endlessly in your texts and emails begging for money "because we are within THREE POINTS and need a boost to put us over the top!" Democrats' #1 ask is ALWAYS for more dough.
In the last Florida gubernatorial election, Charlie Crist released polls that showed him tied with DeSantis. Crist lost by more than 20 points. I made one donation to Andrews because of something she did. But I have a limited set of donation funds and hope to direct them where they'll prove useful.
I know lots of people are upset about those kind of things. We don't seem to have a lot of richie rich sugar daddies and mamas to put money where it counts; like media infrastructure. So I will always tell people, don't send money if it annoys you but you need to do the votes.
Which is fine, but my feeling about it is that this approach suppresses votes more than anything else. The same thing for post-Citizens’ United ad buys.
It’s part of the grift complex that’s always looking for donations. The problem is they get so unrealistic with expectations that it makes people more cynical, not less.
Two things are true: 1) Dems do need to run everywhere and more importantly build their party everywhere, both during campaigns and in off years. Can’t just wait until campaign season to jump in and then get surprised when the results are meager. 2) Get out the vote for candidates like Andrews but don’t blow smoke up people’s asses about your candidate being able to win because she’s got a 41-41 tie in the reddest state in the country. There’s giving it your best in every race, bad there’s hopium and we don’t need hopium. It just makes people more cynical with every Amy McGrath.
Yeah. Last I saw in Texas it was Abbot 50 percent and Hinajosa 49 percent . I won’t hold my breath though. I’ve seen to many losses in Texas when we thought we had a chance .
Genuinely contesting the seats in states like SC will require candidates who don’t fit a national party profile. A Ted Cruz could never win in Oregon, even if I were the Dem nominee.
Yep—of course it’s no guarantee that a candidate better tailored to the state/district will win (voters tend to associate a candidate with their feelings about the party nationally) but it’s pretty much a given that a candidate who appeals to northern suburban liberals is going to be slaughtered in the Deep South.
And if you do run in Oregon I may have to travel out there to volunteer for the campaign!
That's why I tell people (especially the ones who like to post about "blargh Democrats ask for money all the time") to just do the vote. Don't even need to send money, just do the vote. But they also ought to be sharing social media posts too.
The problem is unreconstructed territory has to be clawed back; there are simply not enough free areas due to the way the United States is organized. So people should at least try.
That territory can't be clawed back though. You can't turn a tumor back into healthy tissue.
At this point I don't think the US is fixable at all, if it ever really was. Not in any realistic scenario. It would require millions upon millions of Republicans dying out all at once all across the country, or democratic supermajorities in all branches of government that would be willing to basically rewrite the entire body of laws to make it impossible for Republicans to ever get a voice in politics again, and I genuinely don't know which one of those scenarios is less likely.
Certainly they should vote, it’s just infuriating when the establishment (by which I mean the party organizations, well-funded campaigns, fundraising apparatuses, etc) just keeps plugging the grift, while doing nothing to do the unsexy work of creating new commutations networks, local offices and neighborhood organizations and local campaigns to get the party on a footing where it could seriously challenge the GOP in red states. Their emails and posts aren’t even made to persuade, just rack up more donations. No wonder even liberals hate them.
I particularly hate the “We keep trying to reach you! Don’t you CARE?”, communiques from the superpacs.
The dream of a blue Texas is enough fantasy for now, thanks.
Ah, the blue Texas pipe dream. Arguably the best example of the Charlie Brown and the football dynamic in American politics.
I have more hope that Talarico will win than Andrews.
Lindsay's dumb lapdog sis: I'm an unqualified idiot, but those libs want to chop kids' genitals!
SC voters: shut up and take my vote!
Another good reason to abolish the Senate. Or make it proportionate to population. Why should these South Carolina Republicans have as much say in government as all of New York, if they’re as hopeless as you say?
Republicans shouldn't have a say at all. They don't want a government. They want to destroy it from the top down. Giving them votes is like an oncologist giving a malignant tumor veto power over its own chemotherapy regimen.
To be fair, that works both ways. Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware and Hawaii all have disproportionate representation as well.
I agree it’s silly to pretend that “tied at 41 percent” means this is truly a dead heat—the question is where the remaining 18 percent will break, and we saw this crap before in Kentucky where hey look, his constituents hated him but McConnell got re-elected by double digits again. Some liberal pollsters and pundits just love to torch their credibility with needless copium.
The issue for Democrats is to figure out why they’re so unpopular among noncollege voters (particularly white ones, but they’re losing ground even among nonwhite noncollege voters). Enough of this smug “they’re all just racist, even the nonwhite ones, apparently you need a college degree to not be racist” cope. Figure out how you lost so much ground over the decades, how despite Trump’s unpopularity your party still polls like jock itch, and what you can do about it. I have my pet theories (the party has failed to establish any direct communication networks with the public, sees itself as weak and projects that weakness, and consequently fails to even talk like normal people) but you’d think those with resources could put them towards figuring this out—it is their job after all—rather than tricking donors into thinking an educated liberal who codes as an urban professional is going to win South Carolina.
It's hard to disagree, because you're correct, but here's the problem. As long as Republicans can run successfully against a handful of trans women athletes and a handful of illegal votes (mostly Republican), and that's their entire campaign, where do we go from there?
That’s the rub, but it may not be as unfixabke as it seems. A lot of it isn’t so much what our side says, but how we say it, how we frame the issues, and more importantly that we are reaching our target audience where they are. A lot of the time they don’t hear from us at all, and we’re certainly not a regular trusted presence in their lives, and what they hear of us gets filtered through our enemies. Got to change that fir a start.
If you don’t change what you’re selling, spending money advertising it is like Domino’s running ads 24/7. I’m just less inclined to eat there now.
When you figure out how - as Democratic consultants have been overpaid millions of dollars and have not - you let me know how to reach them.
Ugh! I hate seeing posts and videos with "BREAKING" in the title, because, while it may be true at the time it's posted, after five minutes, it ain't true. Sometimes it's not even true when posted, so my deduction is that it's click bait.
I am hoping that Dr. Andrews wins, but I'm not holding my breath. I live in SC, in Spartanburg, Greenville's neighbor. It's sad to see many otherwise intelligent, rational people get all worked up over cultural war issues that the Republicans scream about, just so that they (the Republicans) can be elected to make life worse for everybody. These people think that they are voting in their own best interest, but are not. They don't blame the politicians that they vote for, however. They blame the folks out of power - those that the Republicans are screaming about. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I disagree with the "voting against their own best interest" idea. They *are* voting in their best interest. They just decided that white supremacy and Christian fascism are their best interest.
Framing things as them voting against their best interest falls apart considering how long the pattern of behavior has gone on, and it also makes them seem like they're just ill-informed or confused instead of actively fucking evil, which is what they actually are.
I don't think this country can be fixed, but if there is a way it has to start by acknowledging the fact that Republicans aren't lost sheep or ill-informed but well meaning. They're enemy combatants in a slaveholder rebellion that never really stopped. They're not neighbors that need to be rehabilitated, they're obstacles to be removed.
Yes, I have long argued that no one ever votes against their best interests and the liberal argument that anyone does so is condescending. It’s OK to say, “This is what those voters wanted and it’s not something we’d ever want to give them.”
My problem with it isn't the condescension (Republicans deserve much worse), it's the wishcasting. It goes beyond Trump's famous “I could shoot someone on fifth avenue” thing.
I mean, for fucks sake, house and Senate Republicans could go on a countrywide mass shooting tour like Vance Boelter, post the videos to Twitter, ger the raucous applause of every single Republican voter in the goddamn nation and I guarantee the next fucking day we'd get Schumer or Jeffries asking when their Republican friends across the aisle were finally going to stand up to trump.
I wish they'd stop desperately insisting that people who openly, gleefully threw aside their humanity are actually decent people deep down. They're fucking not. They're Nazi foot soldiers for fucks sake.
The fact Linsday Graham kept getting reelected, even if South Carolina voters didn't really like him, tells you exactly what you need to know about the state's core voters.
I think what it really tells you is how the state's core voters view Democrats.
Agree.
As this drags on, it’s become very clear to me at least that this isn’t about (not totally, anyway) pure racism or civic ignorance. There is a deep seated pathology in this country that was closely tended on a bipartisan basis for many, many years-extending beyond the memories of any of us here-but started to sprout and weed after Reagan and caught fire after Obama’s election. It’s grievance based and frankly there is a shit ton of reason for grievance in the US, which neither party has been interested in attending to and why the shrill exortations to “vote blue!” continue to fall on many deaf ears. Many people have had crap lives no matter who was president or in charge of Congress. They had hopes for retribution raised and dashed with Trump-although it has probably been fun for them to watch James Comey on the hot seat or USAID gutted, they are still materially much worse off. I don’t see how this ends with a country that looks much like what I grew up with, and I don’t think that’s even a bad thing. The process of change is incredibly painful, though.
As long as voters are angry at immigrants, LGBTQ people, Democrats, or whatever the cultural-war target of the moment happens to be, they aren't asking why their wages aren't keeping up, why healthcare is unaffordable, or why the people they've repeatedly elected aren't making their lives better.
And the politicians responsible never have to answer for any of it. They just find a new enemy and start the whole thing over again. It's Muslims in the darker corners right now. Everything old is new again.
It's amazing to me how poorly Democrats are received in many, many parts of the country, and frankly not without reason-their inability to make significant inroads despite two terms of malevolence, incompetence and in your face corruption says more about *them* than it does Republicans (if you are going to argue it's all just racism and stupidity I'm going to say right now I disagree). Annie Andrews is unlikely to win in South Carolina any more than the much-hyped Jamie Harrison did, or Amy McGrath in Kentucky. We can blame Fox News blah blah all we want but they have been around three decades now and Democrats have never had any real answer for it except to whine about it.
As I have said since Reagan, Republicans are maniacal but Democrats are wussy and voters will prefer crazy to timid every time.
Because crazy and powerful, you can hope might be useful in your favor, while weak is useful to no one.
Weak is the number 1 term I hear thrown around when people complain about Democrats. It's certainly fair to say they were blindsided by Trump and over a decade have blatantly failed to confront the ongoing threat he and his minions represent, the fecklessnees of which reached it's pinnacle during the Biden administration.