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Or, you could try to chase an imaginary center. And not only lose the ~980k, who are not in fact some secret "politically homeless moderate wing," But also kill the excitement your base had to vote for you. Convince more of them to stay home, since "my vote doesn't matter. They're all the same."

Because that will not only potentially sway the 980k. It's got a pretty good chance of motivating the base, as well. It's got a pretty good chance of making the 660k excited to get out and vote for you.

The thing for Democrats to keep in mind, then, is this: You *could* try to bend over backwards to get the ~660k registered Dems who didn't vote to get to the polls. Or... you could do things - propose things and have a record of following through on them - that make the ~980k's lives better.

My reasoning for that is that if you're registered independent *in order to vote in either primary*, you are almost certainly politically engaged enough to have picked a side in the 2024 election. So the folks who just didn't know or care enough to pick a party are what's left.

That *million* unaffiliated non-voting registered voters is not some magical middle, that you can reach by just being moderate enough. They're people who don't engage with politics, who don't think their vote matters, or who don't think it affects their lives. That's Group A.

North Carolina has open primaries, so there's an incentive to register as independent and vote in either (as I did), even if you're pretty solidly in one camp. So it's with that context that you need to consider that there were ~2,965,000 unaffiliated voters, ~981,000 of whom didn't vote.

That means that there were ~2,458,000 registered Democrats, ~660,000 of which didn't vote, more than three and a half times the margin of victory.

Most of politics isn't trying to win voters, but to engage the base. My home state, North Carolina, went for Trump 2,898,423 to 2,715,375 in 2024. A difference of 183,048 votes. According to the NC state board of elections, Democrats had 73.1% turnout, with 1,797,064 registered Democrats voting.

Then you got a check for a good chunk of money with Donald Trump's name on it, and that was a good thing for you. That's the bar. It needs to be that clear.

B and C are the ones who are engaged enough to have made a party part of their identity, and that's a hard hill to get over. And the way you move Group A is by doing things that make their lives better, and making sure they know you did that. If you're the lowest information voter in the US?

I strongly suspect that at least half the country is in groups A and B, and that two thirds of people are in A B or C. The only ones who seem to be reachable are, weirdly, group A.

So the question is not who they'll vote for, but if they'll vote. Group C is people who interact with policy *at all*. Folks who have a thing they know and care about, and vote for the people within their party who are strong on that policy for them. There's no way to know the exact numbers, but /

Group B is people who are politically engaged, but only to the degree that politics is a Team Sport. Their team is good, the other team is bad. They know that, because they wouldn't root for the bad team, obviously. They're good people. They're engaged, or engageable, only to that extent.

Those people - I've met them, talked to them, they can be intelligent, considerate, thoughtful people - may not (to take one example from one conversation) know the words "liberal" and "conservative," because they just think of things in terms of party names. That's group A.

people, that bad things should happen to bad people, and that the categories of "good" and "bad" people are obvious, with clear lines. They think they're electing someone to do the obviously good things, and stop the obviously bad things.

So let's ignore for a moment the nonsense of the source, and talk about why this isn't actually an issue: The overwhelming majority of people are politically disengaged. They think of politics as a thing that happens once every four years, at best. They think good things should happen to good /

"Let me give you some advice on leftism" said the centrist on the Nazi app as reported by a Republican rag.

Looking for someone to take a hotel room #DragonCon off our hands. It's in the Omni Atlanta at Centennial Park, and since Alyc and I aren't going after all, we'd love to transfer this to someone who will use it. Any takers?

CAN’T! HAVE! SHIT!

It's crazy how so many Americans think 25% of the country is Jewish and also say that they've never met a Jew. You think 1 in 4 people are Jewish and I'm the first one you've met?