No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
The Republicans gained Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Montana, and with them a majority in the senate.
Maybe I'm missing something, but they don't seem to be struggling all that much to me.
GOP ran behind its numbers in the swing states. That’s what OP is talking about. Your list of states is all solid or deep red except for PA.
But they all flipped from Democrat to Republican senators, while all the states listed by OP were held by Democrats already and remained in the hands of Democrats?
I mean, sure, somebody gave them the label swing states, but it seems they were not really all that important.
That's not how this works. If a state that's R+20 elects a Republican, but the final results are 55-45, that's a problem for the GOP in the state and likely nationally. All of the partisan elections in the country are correlated and when a race or class of races falls outside the statistical expectation for that correlation it bears examination. Also, "swing states" isn't just a marketing buzzword, it's a term used to describe states that meet a specific criteria.
The November election had an interesting set of results where swing states actually ran left of the national race. That is how you get Michigan and Wisconsin being decided by less than their partisan lean. It's a result of strong rightward movement in solid blue states, but that's just an observation of how those numbers come to be, not why.
The actual data on exit polls is starting to come in and soon we'll have Pew's final numbers, it's impossible to draw good conclusions without that data. However, it appears that the electorate was more comfortable voting Republican as a whole than the specific electorates were in more closely contested states. There are many reasons this could be true and the actual truth is likely a mix of all of them, but it's interesting and both parties will be looking for answers.
I understand swing states and how they are important to follow in presidential elections, but Montana has had a Democratic senator since 2007 and he only lost his position at this election. So even though Montana is deeply red, in a Senate sense it did swing this election - it changed colour.
Thinking of swing states is a useful shortcut when trying to predict the outcomes of presidential elections. I don't think it should be generalized to Senate elections.