alt Hacker News#3 is not a given. That money is poison. If Mississippi can go blue then new york can go red. We're just entering a less polarized era of politics. Things have been trending in that direction every election this decade.
One of the things that Americans broadly agree on right now is data centers can go to hell and data centers are just a proxy for tech. Democrats won in primaries and the general by being outspent. Not while being outspent. By being outspent. Just accepting particular categories of donor money sunk primary campaigns and the general in e.g. Texas turned into a referendum on the donors.
Politicians' driving motivation is getting re elected. If that money is toxic they're not touching it. If democrats turned around in Ohio and Texas and accepted data center money after rage against them was specifically the one thing that got them into office, you think they have a snowballs chance in hell of keeping those seats? The GOP just ran that experiment. They betrayed the like specific things said they'd do, and got rewarded with a comical amount of donor money, and fricking Blansas Blexas Blississippi because it turned out voters were like no but we were serious about that tho
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#3 was probably more true in 2024 than it is today. Not realizing populism is becoming a bigger factor in both parties is a pretty big miscalculation though. Also media and tech were both common axe grinds in the first Trump term. So maybe they thought they would get ahead of the retribution which they probably did but at the cost of losing the other side. They also miscalculated that Trump will just do stuff even if you thought you paid him off, eg tariffs.
If the democrats don't deliver anything after this I think you'll see a wild swing backwards to whoever on the right promises to solve problems but won't solve the problems, and after that I think all bets are off in terms of what happens.
People will have had no rational reason whatsoever to believe that they have any say in the running of the country or whats being done to their lives families and communities. Democracies that don't respond to voters die and absolutely nobody running a company in silicon valley or SF understands the level of utter rage simmering among people.