Not to worry, your point was clear. However, I feel that mine was not.

I'm not saying that Us vs. Them doesn't happen in other countries. But there seems to be a fundamental difference. It seems that, in America, Policy A is seen as Bad because The Other Party Supports It And They Are Bad. In other words, the narrative starts with The Other Party Is Bad and then continues And Therefore Their Policy Is Bad.

While here - and presumably in other places - there is still Us vs. Them, but the narrative is reversed. The narrative starts with Policy A Is Bad and then continues with And Therefore Any Party Which Supports Policy A Is A Bad Party.

This can actually be seen very clearly in your Canadian helicopter scenario. Your first party - the one that started buying the replacement helicopters - said that replacement helicopters were needed. It was therefore a Good Idea to buy replacement helicopters. Then the other party turns up, and says that no, buying replacement helicopters is a Bad Idea. Not just because it was the other party supporting it, no - they had to come up with some other reason (that it was a 'Cadillac' purchase). So, their narrative started with "That Is A Bad Policy" and then went from there to "And Therefore The Party In Power Is Bad - Vote Us In Instead". And it worked. They got voted in instead and stopped the purchase.

Now, that doesn't say that they did the right thing, or even that they did what they thought was the right thing. It's just saying that they were claiming to do the right thing, and that their reasons were more than just "because the other party wanted to do the opposite".

Maybe I'm wrong about this. But it looks like American politics are extremely My Tribe vs. The Other Tribe at the moment.

This upcoming election is a mid-term election. Only the hardest of hardcore voters generally go to the polls when the president isn't up for election, and generally speaking that shifts the electorate older, more Caucasian, more conservative in a big way. Anyone expecting the Dems to have a big surge in 2018 because of Trump is probably very mistaken. 2020, on the other hand...

CCC, I like your "My Tribe vs Their Tribe" analogy. It has the correct feel I think - amoral tribalism vs rational democracy. It says it stronger than "party over country" which seems like the right analogy.

Usually mid-term elections are dominated by conservative-leaning elderly voters with nothing better do to, but anger can boost turnout in the side that doesn't normally vote as much. I've seen it happen in our elections. So probably the worst thing that could happen for the Democrats is for some piece of news or some liberal celebrity saying some inflammatory thing that will make Republicans want to leap to the defence of Donald Trump. And probably the best thing that could happen is for Trump to tweet something colossally embarrassing or self-incriminating 2 days before the election.

I think the Dems will take back some seats, but whether it will enough to flip Congress - I don't know. They have a habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And they'll have to find better candidates to run than a folk singer with financial problems, or a random unemployed person. The courts are slowly chipping away at gerrymandering, which is an encouraging sign. But crappy voter suppression laws are still all over the place - New Hampshire just banned students from voting using their school addresses, which effectively disenfranchises all out-of-state students and those who live too far from their parents' house to go home to vote on election day.

In other news, Comey's testimony! He definitely had some dirt on Jeff Sessions.

The Democrats have a tiny chance to tie up the Senate (about equal to the Republican chance to gain more than one seat at this point). Taking the House is in the realm of possible, especially if the less reactionary Republicans in the Senate are strong-armed into signing off on their own version of the Anti-Health Care Act which merely slows down the rate at which tens of millions of their base lose coverage. The Democrats already have a huge advantage in getting their base fired up, and that would just make it more pronounced.

Mind you, this is the election where the Republicans are supposed to make some pretty significant gains in the Senate; and barring a miracle of some kind that's just not going to happen. If the Trump show gets even uglier the chance of the Dems taking it starts to rise from the swamp; at which point the House is very much in play. So we'll have to see.

Oh, yes. There's a reason it's considered dangerous to fire the head of the FBI. Let's see how much Trump enjoys Comey's response to the accusation that he perjured himself.

This is another "Obama had my phones tapped!" (Trumpspeak for "Look, squirrel!")

Last time he succeeded in giving his base a talking point to wield (which they are still wielding) and sending Congressional Intelligence Committee on a snipe hunt.

Comey is neither going to be actually charged with perjury, nor will Donald Trump ever be compelled to actually testify in Congress under oath. So unless Comey has even more incriminating notes up his sleeve what could he do?

As to that, Trump is hardly the only one in his administration (or on the Hill) who is vulnerable. It would be particularly interesting to see what would happen if Flynn came under the hammer, being the one person he doesn't want to date that Trump is being overtly loyal to and all. For that matter, Mueller could find himself rather free if his direct supervisor somehow became ensnared in this mess. Not that Comey would release the information, oh, no. Well, not that he'd get caught.

Uh oh. The Senate Republicans are getting very close to working out an Obamacare repeal. They are willing to push through something none of them like in order to rush on to tax cuts before the Trump show implodes.

They're also fine with tipping the Obamacare exchanges into collapse before that happens, all the better to blame the Democrats.

Aaaaand bummer. Another Democratic close-but-no-cigar. Jon Ossoff lost his special election. It was a very heavily Republican district, but also a very anti-Trump one which Hillary Clinton came close to winning last year. "We think Trump is a national embarrassment" was not enough to get enough Republicans to abandon their candidate in the face of petty attacks like "He's immature because he did Star Wars comedy sketches in college" and "He's not one of us because he lives just outside the district boundary". The Democrats also need to have more of a message than "Trump Sucks". It was still pretty close, but they're going to have to do better than a coin toss in competitive districts.

On the plus side, the Supreme Court is about to hear a landmark gerrymandering case. Hope Kennedy changes his mind.

Ossoff wasn't running anti-Trump ads, though. He decided to take the high road on this one and run against the Republicans in the House (which is already drawing fire from the Sanders crowd). Of course the GOP dropped 30 million dollars on a +9 district and went from 51 to 49 all the way to 52 to 48, so it's not the greatest of news for them either. They can't begin to afford that in a general election, and it's also the best performance they've had in these elections in absolutely safe seats; the South Carolina +19 seat went to them by 3 last night, which is pretty typical. I think the average shift is 14-15 away from the GOP right now, which is not happy news looking forward to 2018.

Kennedy may be interesting; he's already said he'd vote against a partisan gerrymander if an objective test of what one was could be created. They've got one in Wisconsin, so we shall see.

This is the crazy thing - everyone who didn't know better (and some who did) assumed that Ossoff was running an anti-Trump race. He's a super-attention magnet, that aligns the perception of all conversations to be about him, whether or not they are.

I read that he was generally trying to be inoffensive so that nothing he said could be used against him, while riding on the unspoken assumption that of course people who are against Trump would vote for him. He didn't have to say it; everyone was saying it for him. Running in a red, red district, he probably assumed that rallying his tiny base wouldn't help him without alienating Republican Trump-sceptics. Didn't work.

Anyway. Watch out, the Senate is going to ram through their tax-cuts-disguised-as-a-health-care bill soon. Since they can't agree on policy details, they have agreed to close their eyes and not care about policy at all. They just want to get some rubbish over and done with so that they can move on to their real priority, bigger tax cuts.

I am sure that they have written it so that the painful provisions do not kick in until after 2018. Arsewipes.

The Senate bill isn't likely to be all that important. They can not pass a bill defunding Planned Parenthood, and the House can not pass a bill which doesn't. I think the point is pretending that the Senate Republicans acted so they can move on, not actually acting.

According to the leaked version, the Senate bill defunds Planned Parenthood.

Next?

Three of them have already said that they'd vote against a bill that does that, so let's wait and see what comes to pass.

Seems like democrats underperform their expectations whereever they are expected to have a chance to win, but overperform their expections, when it looks like a sure loss anyway.

Brainstorming about why that could be:

* There are republican voters, who have no desire to support Trump, but still want to prevent democrats from winning. If the race is close they come, if it isn't they stay home.

* Voters want a generic anti-Trump option, but the more they learn about democratic candidates, the less they like them, so when there is less campaining, they are more likely to vote for a Schrödinger-democrat.

* Democrats have the wrong campain strategy (i suspected the "don't offend anyone" strategy to be flawed for quite a while), likely due to a "fight the last war" syndrome or similiar, and the more intensive they campain, the worse their results.

Don't know enough about the details of the races, to guess which is correct.

But it would apeal to my sense of narrative irony, if the strategy that would make a democratic victory in the midterms most likely would be to present the message "The republicans are going to keep their majority anyway, we just put up a token resistance for the sake of honour".