They’re not equal. You’ve also acquired such a hair trigger for “enlightened centrists” that you’ve started shooting the messenger.

The most important lesson of this last election? The laymen do not give a fuck about how the government functions, or the need to preserve the institution itself for further generations. Erosion of the rule of law? Loyalty tests? Pardoning insurrectionists? Absolutely off their radar.

They care about the hurt on their wallet, and the fact that the incumbent party is telling them “everything is fine”. Do they care that tariffs will put the squeeze on them even more? No, that requires a passing understanding of basic economics.

The larger voting body operates on the status quo. That’s it. If they dislike the status quo, they need an appealing explanation of why they should expect things to change under your stewardship. Controversies used to help swing an election, but we’re so saturated with excuses for outrage that a lot of it no longer registers on the radar.

Realistically we have a party representing stagnation, and a party representing volatility.

• One party positions itself as “just left enough of center” to be stomached by its constituents, but frequently fucks it up because their policy positions can’t risk rocking the boat with its wealthiest donors.
• The other party accelerates the country toward authoritarianism under the promise of sweeping changes.

That first bullet? Pretty fucking important. You seem to want them to win because they value the rule of law. Good on you, so do I. But that party is gonna continue to get black eyes because their priority is on the status quo of the party, not the status quo of their constituents. They consistently fuck it up every time they’re given a choice between the two.

Troll comment, but I’ll bite. It’s a fun opportunity for inappropriate analogies!

Winning with just shy of 50% on the total vote does not grant you a mandate from heaven to assfuck the other 50%+ of constituents. Consent of the governed and all that.

The losers accept a certain degree of non-consensual edging for the sake of getting along. Not how they’d like things, but as long as the pants stay on they can put up with it until the next election. If you start acting like you won the entire continent and the asses of the peasantry belong to you, you’re probably gonna learn why the previous administrations didn’t push the system that far.

I was referring to illegal migrants, so your rebuttal is a bit of a straw man. This was a reference to the legislation pushed by DeSantis and the republican legislature of Florida that was targeted at undocumented workers. If you don’t understand the connection between Florida and migrant workers in the context of the past two years, I think it’s fairly safe to say that you aren’t following this issue at a national level beyond a drip feed of Fox News or similar.

The point is that most Americans are too obtuse and/or callous to recognize the role of undocumented workers in their own economy. You were fast to say the dems see them as slaves, but the entire goddamn economy uses them for cheap labor. My mother is as wound up about border crossings and caravans as it gets but still pays someone to have Hispanic men who can’t understand her mowing her lawn. They’re not “her” undocumented workers.

That was Florida in recent history, not the dems. “uhh can you latinos come back and work for us again?? no one is filling these jobs as you leave due to the recent legislative hatefest”

Conservatives don’t realize they have slaves, let alone rely on them. They pound the table about migrants while paying someone employing them to mow their lawn or renovate their house. Press them about it and they always tell you it’s none of their business how the people they contract keep the prices down.